@RochdalePioneers You can back Leave right now on Betfair at 2.92 (15/8). Since it has a clear lead in almost all the polls conducted in the last week, this price assumes either (a) that almost all the polls are wrong or (b) that there will be a very sharp move to Remain in the final days.
This may happen but it hardly looks like a slam dunk.
I would have thought that the suspending of campaigning would largely benefit the side that was ahead in the polls - it gives Remain less time to close the gap.
Alistair- I have posted a couple of times...and venturing into conspiracy theories......I've been studying the betfair market. When the remain price eases out, a major amount of money is hoovering it back. Someone clearly thinks there is value backing leave at anything unto circa 2-1 which you are right is completely of kilter with the polls.
My theory is that there are the public polls and the private polls- the same private polls that were telling people that the Tories were considerably ahead in 2015 (backed up the betting markets), are telling them that remain is still in the lead- maybe not quite as much as it was a few weeks ago, but still sufficiently ahead to make 2-1 on value.
I'm afraid leave will still win. The only thing this tragedy means for the campaign is remain has less time to catch up. The whole campaign from Remain has been based on a general election winning strategy that is focused on winning over the usual 5-10% of swing voters who are motivated by economic arguments and strong leadership. The problem with this strategy is that it forgets underneath that 5-10% is the 60% or so of voters on right and left who vote a way regardless of the economic or leadership merits of whats on offer. These people vote consistently for the same party for a range of reasons but they seem to be immune to arguments that are used effectively in a contest when you only need to win just 5% more than your core vote. It is clear that Osborne and Cameron think their 2015 winning formula as the key to this referendum also, sadly I think they have missed the fact they need more than swing voters this time.
Well spotted on the Mail "correction" on immigration. If we have any interest at all in more rational politics might it be possible to collectively banish this evil and amoral rag to the outer darkness where it belongs.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I am. I think Leave will win. I don't think the murder yesterday will affect anything and neither should it. I'd like to think the vile Farage poster will get some people thinking, but I imagine minds are mostly made up now. We're voting to pull out.
It will shut down the immigration debate completely, at least for the next week. And Leave are a one-trick pony with little else to campaign on that resonates with the public. A good 10-20% of the voters remain undecided. Of course it'll have an effect.
How does it shut down the immigration debate?
The BBC will bring up Jo Cox's death every time it is mentioned
Dangerous game for anyone on the Remain side to play, could easily backfire on them.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I am. I think Leave will win. I don't think the murder yesterday will affect anything and neither should it. I'd like to think the vile Farage poster will get some people thinking, but I imagine minds are mostly made up now. We're voting to pull out.
It will shut down the immigration debate completely, at least for the next week. And Leave are a one-trick pony with little else to campaign on that resonates with the public. A good 10-20% of the voters remain undecided. Of course it'll have an effect.
For those of us who care deeply about controlling our own Parliament, laws, borders et al - it doesn't change anything. Leave is a broad campaign. I think you're underestimating it.
Of course it doesn't change anything for you, or any of the committed Leave voters. But Leave needs to win over a fair few undecideds to win.
Undecideds this close to election day are far more likely not to bother voting.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I'm still expecting a Leave win.
I think the events of yesterday will have two effects on the referendum:
1) A partial shutdown of campaigning that will last over the weekend, maybe all the way to polling day. As Leave is almost certainly currently ahead this favours Leave imo.
2) *Some* degree of tainting of Leave by association. I don't think this will extend to swing voters though. I think it will further fire up committed Remainers, but that will have only a slight effect as they would be a high turnout group anyway.
So I think it's no worse than neutral for Leave, which is currently winning.
Farage and Trump will fuck it up for us next week, plus some OTT 'market falls' stories in the last 48 hours.
Whilst I felt it was tasteless to dive right into this yesterday, I would have to agree with posters on both sides who say this is inextricably linked to the referendum.
And whilst this will be met with a chorus of disapproval, I cannot dismiss out of hand the possibility that this was a false flag attack. Yokel, who seems respected by many here, told us that the intelligence services simply would not wear a Leave result. For my own part, I have consistently stated that Britain being embedded within the EU structure is vital to US geostrategic interests, and I would be surprised if we were simply allowed as an electorate to walk out of the door. I very much hope this is wrong.
If this is right, and I am not alleging it, then homework will have been done, and we will see drip drip drip of this man's right wingery come to light.
There was a strange report of a schoolgirl who saw a man in a black hoodie with binoculars hiding in the graveyard. That does not match the description of Mair, who was wearing a T-shirt and a white baseball cap.
However, she could be a fantasist or mistaken. Or it was an unrelated peeping tom or something. Or perhaps post-event undercover surveillance of an address.
An odd report, nevertheless.
I like conspiracy theorists. Italy is full of them- Italians distrust everything that they're told.
Cicero's " cui bono " question is in Italian mothers' milk. They're remarkable in combining total scepticism without being at all cynical.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I am. I think Leave will win. I don't think the murder yesterday will affect anything and neither should it. I'd like to think the vile Farage poster will get some people thinking, but I imagine minds are mostly made up now. We're voting to pull out.
It will shut down the immigration debate completely, at least for the next week. And Leave are a one-trick pony with little else to campaign on that resonates with the public. A good 10-20% of the voters remain undecided. Of course it'll have an effect.
How does it shut down the immigration debate?
The BBC will bring up Jo Cox's death every time it is mentioned
Dangerous game for anyone on the Remain side to play, could easily backfire on them.
It's "hands up" from Ferguson all over again...even after the official report compiled by speaking to 100s of people that found no eye witness saw this & it was all 2nd hand, some media still refer to this.
Not listened to it myself (trying to work) but LBC's James O'Brien has, according to (very divided) Twitter, been making, er, controversial political comments about the reasons behind yesterday's events.
Miss C, I still think Remain will win. However, it may prove, for Cameron/Osborne, Pyrrhic.
I'm not sure how much difference it'll make to the result - I remember durin......!
I'm not expecting it to change much of anything, bar giving the campaigners a short rest. Many have looked knackered. To be honest, this reminds me very much of the Stephen Timms attack - shocking on a WTF level, but that's about it.......... Why would this change my vote? Or my concerns about the UK's future governance? I've been really quite revolted by those who've sought to weaponise her death for their own ends. Twitter was beyond awful - and far too many professional commentators have joined in. The lady was barely cold.
.... early hours of Friday morning whether the UK is still trying to remain a tolerant and liberal country despite all the turbulence in the word, or are we going to take a lurch rightwards into the politics of division, fear and hatred.
I cannot see how that Farage poster yesterday is doing anything other than pandering to racism and xenophobia. And given that the Tory Leave camp know that Turkey is a long, long way from becoming an EU member state, I don't see how their warnings of the country's impending membership is any different.
The vast majority of people voting Leave are not racists or xenophobes, but it is pretty clear that the Leave campaigns think there is mileage in appealing to those who are.
One poster from the unoffical side campaign for LEAVE, which is then heavily advertised for free by REMAIN folk with the media. It generates lots of outrage and adds more publicity to the immigration issue. Do please consider the possibility that it is a monumental mistake of REMAIN people to keep looking and pointing saying "oh look at the anti immigration poster from Farage that's rascist". All they are doing is reminding voters about immigration, another own goal for REMAIN. But as Napoleon said , why interrupt opponents when making mistakes...
Anecdota. Talked to my Mum this morning. For a 79 year old who's only voted by rote (Labour. Labour. Labour) until very recently, she's well into the referendum.
She thinks Farage's poster just shows how many people are queuing up to come into the country. For her, there's no Nazi symbolism and she grew up during WWII. I wonder if we're overthinking this? I'll own my first thought was that it was some kind of pastiche of the famous Saatchi & Saatchi ad, rather than any kind of arbeit macht frei connotation.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I'm still expecting a Leave win.
I think the events of yesterday will have two effects on the referendum:
1) A partial shutdown of campaigning that will last over the weekend, maybe all the way to polling day. As Leave is almost certainly currently ahead this favours Leave imo.
2) *Some* degree of tainting of Leave by association. I don't think this will extend to swing voters though. I think it will further fire up committed Remainers, but that will have only a slight effect as they would be a high turnout group anyway.
So I think it's no worse than neutral for Leave, which is currently winning.
Farage and Trump will fuck it up for us next week, plus some OTT 'market falls' stories in the last 48 hours.
The dream scenario for both Farage and Boris is a narrow Remain win, whereas a Leave win would give them both some serious challenges - so let's see what they each get up to next week....
@RochdalePioneers You can back Leave right now on Betfair at 2.92 (15/8). Since it has a clear lead in almost all the polls conducted in the last week, this price assumes either (a) that almost all the polls are wrong or (b) that there will be a very sharp move to Remain in the final days.
This may happen but it hardly looks like a slam dunk.
I would have thought that the suspending of campaigning would largely benefit the side that was ahead in the polls - it gives Remain less time to close the gap.
Alistair- I have posted a couple of times...and venturing into conspiracy theories......I've been studying the betfair market. When the remain price eases out, a major amount of money is hoovering it back. Someone clearly thinks there is value backing leave at anything unto circa 2-1 which you are right is completely of kilter with the polls.
My theory is that there are the public polls and the private polls- the same private polls that were telling people that the Tories were considerably ahead in 2015 (backed up the betting markets), are telling them that remain is still in the lead- maybe not quite as much as it was a few weeks ago, but still sufficiently ahead to make 2-1 on value.
How does private polling methodology differ from that of public polling? Does it somehow factor in differential turnout*
*P.S. I think turnout will be very high among London AB. Lots of people down here are scared to death of a Leave win who are not otherwise very politically interested.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I'm still expecting a Leave win.
I think the events of yesterday will have two effects on the referendum:
1) A partial shutdown of campaigning that will last over the weekend, maybe all the way to polling day. As Leave is almost certainly currently ahead this favours Leave imo.
2) *Some* degree of tainting of Leave by association. I don't think this will extend to swing voters though. I think it will further fire up committed Remainers, but that will have only a slight effect as they would be a high turnout group anyway.
So I think it's no worse than neutral for Leave, which is currently winning.
Farage and Trump will fuck it up for us next week, plus some OTT 'market falls' stories in the last 48 hours.
The dream scenario for both Farage and Boris is a narrow Remain win, whereas a Leave win would give them both some serious challenges - so let's see what they each get up to next week....
If Remain win, even narrowly, the europhiles will make it their lives' work to destroy Boris for his treachery.
I cannot see how that Farage poster yesterday is doing anything other than pandering to racism and xenophobia. And given that the Tory Leave camp know that Turkey is a long, long way from becoming an EU member state, I don't see how their warnings of the country's impending membership is any different.
The vast majority of people voting Leave are not racists or xenophobes, but it is pretty clear that the Leave campaigns think there is mileage in appealing to those who are.
The Turkey issue has been one of the stranger things about this referendum. I was surprised when I saw it mentioned by Leave as I thought it was off the table. What I hadn't anticipated was for the Remain campaign to handle it so badly. Why hasn't Cameron come out and said "as long as I'm PM, Turkey will not be joining the EU"? During his interview with Andrew Neil, George Osborne looked decidedly shifty when asked about Turkey. I wonder if some of the Leavers have got an idea of what's coming up over the next few months and know that Cameron and Osborne aren't in a position to make firm commitments.
Cameron has said precisely that to the extent that he is able to diplomatically. The Tory Leave ministers know what the situation is. Gove said explicitly on the TV earlier this week that he did not think the government would veto Turkish EU membership. That is just a lie. But it is a lie with a purpose. And that purpose is to scare people into thinking that millions of Turks will soon be flooding into the country. It's more subtle than Farage's open racism, but it has exactly the same aim.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I'm still expecting a Leave win.
I think the events of yesterday will have two effects on the referendum:
1) A partial shutdown of campaigning that will last over the weekend, maybe all the way to polling day. As Leave is almost certainly currently ahead this favours Leave imo.
2) *Some* degree of tainting of Leave by association. I don't think this will extend to swing voters though. I think it will further fire up committed Remainers, but that will have only a slight effect as they would be a high turnout group anyway.
So I think it's no worse than neutral for Leave, which is currently winning.
The momentum of the anti-establishment LEAVE campaign has been halted.
The change in tone of the campaign means that some people will rethink their anti-establishment position.
This means a few percentage points swing from LEAVE to REMAIN.
We have to wait for polls next week to see what percentage revert to the conventional status quo.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I'm still expecting a Leave win.
I think the events of yesterday will have two effects on the referendum:
1) A partial shutdown of campaigning that will last over the weekend, maybe all the way to polling day. As Leave is almost certainly currently ahead this favours Leave imo.
2) *Some* degree of tainting of Leave by association. I don't think this will extend to swing voters though. I think it will further fire up committed Remainers, but that will have only a slight effect as they would be a high turnout group anyway.
So I think it's no worse than neutral for Leave, which is currently winning.
Farage and Trump will fuck it up for us next week, plus some OTT 'market falls' stories in the last 48 hours.
The dream scenario for both Farage and Boris is a narrow Remain win, whereas a Leave win would give them both some serious challenges - so let's see what they each get up to next week....
If Remain win, even narrowly, the europhiles will make it their lives' work to destroy Boris for his treachery.
Boris, Nigel et al are indestructible. Both will continue to make plenty of money irrespective of the result. Boris might have to leave politics, sure. Big whoop.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I am. I think Leave will win. I don't think the murder yesterday will affect anything and neither should it. I'd like to think the vile Farage poster will get some people thinking, but I imagine minds are mostly made up now. We're voting to pull out.
It will shut down the immigration debate completely, at least for the next week. And Leave are a one-trick pony with little else to campaign on that resonates with the public. A good 10-20% of the voters remain undecided. Of course it'll have an effect.
For those of us who care deeply about controlling our own Parliament, laws, borders et al - it doesn't change anything. Leave is a broad campaign. I think you're underestimating it.
Of course it doesn't change anything for you, or any of the committed Leave voters. But Leave needs to win over a fair few undecideds to win.
Trying to put myself in an undecided's shoes I think it may reduce my likelihood to turn up and vote.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I'm still expecting a Leave win.
I think the events of yesterday will have two effects on the referendum:
1) A partial shutdown of campaigning that will last over the weekend, maybe all the way to polling day. As Leave is almost certainly currently ahead this favours Leave imo.
2) *Some* degree of tainting of Leave by association. I don't think this will extend to swing voters though. I think it will further fire up committed Remainers, but that will have only a slight effect as they would be a high turnout group anyway.
So I think it's no worse than neutral for Leave, which is currently winning.
Farage and Trump will fuck it up for us next week, plus some OTT 'market falls' stories in the last 48 hours.
The dream scenario for both Farage and Boris is a narrow Remain win, whereas a Leave win would give them both some serious challenges - so let's see what they each get up to next week....
If Remain win, even narrowly, the europhiles will make it their lives' work to destroy Boris for his treachery.
Agreed. Anything other than a Leave victory and Boris' political career is over. I'll happily rejoin the Tory party to vote against him in the leadership contest, presuming I'm not already too late.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I am. I think Leave will win. I don't think the murder yesterday will affect anything and neither should it. I'd like to think the vile Farage poster will get some people thinking, but I imagine minds are mostly made up now. We're voting to pull out.
I agree with you insofar as, unlike a number of PBers, I don't believe yesterday's events will have a major impact, perhaps 1% or thereabouts maximum - as you say most people have already made up their minds and millions, like me, have already voted. What sways me towards a REMAIN outcome is the simple fact that the betting fraternity en masse very seldom get things wrong and they are going for a small but virtually unanimous win for REMAIN. Who can remember when the bookies were last wrong to this extent? ........ Oh, wait ......
The bookies were not wrong in 2015, 2010, or even 1992. They all called the direction of travel- that the Tories would be the largest party, although they got the extent wrong.
That is what got me interested in political betting in the early 90's- I realised that the betting markets were a much more reliable indicator of what was going to happen than the polls. I was absolutely gutted in 1992 because I was convinced those polls were right- but the bookies were on the Tories. The polls were wrong....and so now I follow the money to avoid that sense of disappointment and frustration of false hope.
So, you can imagine my pleasure when Mike Smithson set up an internet site dedicated to this. I've been hooked since 2004.
For the leave campaign to win we would be in the very real, unchartered territory of all the bookies calling the direction of travel wrong.
Rochdale Pioneers said yesterday that he thought the ad was right for its intended audience.
And it was. Not because the poster is correct. But because so many people THINK it is correct. Look at the Daily Blackshirt yesterday - "We're from Europe" say the people from the lorry. Today they correct it, and they're from Iraq. Not migrants. Refugees.
But for so many people there is no difference. They don't care if its economic migration within the EU or without. Or if they're refugees fleeing for their lives. They just don't want them here under any circumstances. A combination of our broken economy, our broken polity and scum press has played on people's fears to the point where they say no to rescuing children.
The poster is for them. Farage got it spot on. Don't blame Farage, blame all of us. We did this.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I am. I think Leave will win. I don't think the murder yesterday will affect anything and neither should it. I'd like to think the vile Farage poster will get some people thinking, but I imagine minds are mostly made up now. We're voting to pull out.
It will shut down the immigration debate completely, at least for the next week. And Leave are a one-trick pony with little else to campaign on that resonates with the public. A good 10-20% of the voters remain undecided. Of course it'll have an effect.
F1: the Baku circuit sounds (in relative terms) unsafe.
May well be looking at the not classified and total number of unclassified markets. Suspect the safety car odds will be too short to tempt.
Weather should be dry throughout, I think.
Watching it now. Safety car is value at any price, the end of lap 1 as the cars come off a very long straight to a 90 left with almost no runoff is going to be, um, interesting. There's also a really narrow section through turns 8&9 which is no narrow that a car stuck there will bring a red flag, even in the race.
I see you can't leave the scramongering alone. No-doubt the independent Scotland would have considered that it probably couldn't afford under present circumstances to pay for a share of Trident renewal or the coming financial black hole of Hinkley Point, or HS2 or the Heathrow subsidy and would be getting on with building a balanced modern European economy.
Of course if her major trading partner were about to commit an act of national madness and leave Europe then the Scottish Government would be setting up an entire Department to cope with the stampede of companies moving north from London for secure and confirmed access to the marketplace of 500 million people.
Of course, in the real world, the Scottish government would have billions less of whatever currency they'd be using and millions of Scots would be suffering as a result. Sometimes hope = lies, and the experts are actually right. The Scottish independence referendum was one such example. I hope that I am proved wrong and that this referendum is not another similar case.
If that turns out to be true this could be another Madrid for politics.
It's seems totally unclear, unlike say the nutter in the tube where he was on cctv, mobile phone footage & loads of witnesses confirmed his rantings about for Syria etc. Even there the you ain't Muslim bruv story wasn't quite accurate.
I'm afraid leave will still win. The only thing this tragedy means for the campaign is remain has less time to catch up.
The whole campaign from Remain has been based on a general election winning strategy that is focused on winning over the usual 5-10% of swing voters who are motivated by economic arguments and strong leadership. The problem with this strategy is that it forgets underneath that 5-10% is the 60% or so of voters on right and left who vote a way regardless of the economic or leadership merits of whats on offer. These people vote consistently for the same party for a range of reasons but they seem to be immune to arguments that are used effectively in a contest when you only need to win just 5% more than your core vote.
It is clear that Osborne and Cameron think their 2015 winning formula as the key to this referendum also, sadly I think they have missed the fact they need more than swing voters this time.
Yep. I think you are slightly ambitious in calling it for leave already but I agree that the endless focus on a small number of 'swing voters' does distort the political discussion and a referendum changes that. Now there are some who say that referenda are a bad idea and that PR would be too. But is that so democratic?
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I'm still expecting a Leave win.
I think the events of yesterday will have two effects on the referendum:
1) A partial shutdown of campaigning that will last over the weekend, maybe all the way to polling day. As Leave is almost certainly currently ahead this favours Leave imo.
2) *Some* degree of tainting of Leave by association. I don't think this will extend to swing voters though. I think it will further fire up committed Remainers, but that will have only a slight effect as they would be a high turnout group anyway.
So I think it's no worse than neutral for Leave, which is currently winning.
Farage and Trump will fuck it up for us next week, plus some OTT 'market falls' stories in the last 48 hours.
The dream scenario for both Farage and Boris is a narrow Remain win, whereas a Leave win would give them both some serious challenges - so let's see what they each get up to next week....
No. Boris wants a Leave win. He thinks he'd then become Prime Minister.
I think he'd want to use it as a mandate for a further round of negotiations of our EU membership.
A poll of Northern Ireland voters suggests there has been a significant move towards a Leave vote in next week's EU referendum.
The survey, carried out by market research agency Millward Brown, showed 48% of people in Northern Ireland who intend to vote will choose to remain. Almost one third (32%) want to leave with 20% still undecided. The last Millward Brown poll, published in May, showed 55% in favour of Remain and 23% for Leave.
Stripping out "Don't knows" yields 60-40, a change from the 70-30 result earlier in the year so consistent with a broad swing to "leave".
I'm going to assume GE turnout here - a rising tide tends to float all boats so the relative effect of NI should remain constant in any case.
GE voting Electorate: 30,697,835 NI voting Electorate: 705,509 The polls don't poll Northern Ireland so we have 29,992,326 polled voters in the errm polls.
Current "best guess" for leave % 51.7 (Just over) from the pool of almost 30 million 'mainland' voters.
Working through assuming 60-40 Remain/leave in NI means that the leave % of 51.7 heads south to 51.47%.
I cannot see how that Farage poster yesterday is doing anything other than pandering to racism and xenophobia. And given that the Tory Leave camp know that Turkey is a long, long way from becoming an EU member state, I don't see how their warnings of the country's impending membership is any different.
The vast majority of people voting Leave are not racists or xenophobes, but it is pretty clear that the Leave campaigns think there is mileage in appealing to those who are.
The Turkey issue has been one of the stranger things about this referendum. I was surprised when I saw it mentioned by Leave as I thought it was off the table. What I hadn't anticipated was for the Remain campaign to handle it so badly. Why hasn't Cameron come out and said "as long as I'm PM, Turkey will not be joining the EU"? During his interview with Andrew Neil, George Osborne looked decidedly shifty when asked about Turkey. I wonder if some of the Leavers have got an idea of what's coming up over the next few months and know that Cameron and Osborne aren't in a position to make firm commitments.
Cameron has said precisely that to the extent that he is able to diplomatically. The Tory Leave ministers know what the situation is. Gove said explicitly on the TV earlier this week that he did not think the government would veto Turkish EU membership. That is just a lie. But it is a lie with a purpose. And that purpose is to scare people into thinking that millions of Turks will soon be flooding into the country. It's more subtle than Farage's open racism, but it has exactly the same aim.
What I'd like to know is, what does Erdogan have over Cameron? F*** diplomacy, Cameron has a referendum to win, and if telling people what they want to hear (not the mealy mouthed "someone else will do it") is what is needed, why won't he do it?
I cannot see how that Farage poster yesterday is doing anything other than pandering to racism and xenophobia. And given that the Tory Leave camp know that Turkey is a long, long way from becoming an EU member state, I don't see how their warnings of the country's impending membership is any different.
The vast majority of people voting Leave are not racists or xenophobes, but it is pretty clear that the Leave campaigns think there is mileage in appealing to those who are.
The Turkey issue has been one of the stranger things about this referendum. I was surprised when I saw it mentioned by Leave as I thought it was off the table. What I hadn't anticipated was for the Remain campaign to handle it so badly. Why hasn't Cameron come out and said "as long as I'm PM, Turkey will not be joining the EU"? During his interview with Andrew Neil, George Osborne looked decidedly shifty when asked about Turkey. I wonder if some of the Leavers have got an idea of what's coming up over the next few months and know that Cameron and Osborne aren't in a position to make firm commitments.
Cameron has said precisely that to the extent that he is able to diplomatically. The Tory Leave ministers know what the situation is. Gove said explicitly on the TV earlier this week that he did not think the government would veto Turkish EU membership. That is just a lie. But it is a lie with a purpose. And that purpose is to scare people into thinking that millions of Turks will soon be flooding into the country. It's more subtle than Farage's open racism, but it has exactly the same aim.
What I'd like to know is, what does Erdogan have over Cameron? F*** diplomacy, Cameron has a referendum to win, and if telling people what they want to hear (not the mealy mouthed "someone else will do it") is what is needed, why won't he do it?
Probably because he doesn't want videos of his previous support of EU membership for Turkey being replayed ad nauseum.
@RochdalePioneers You can back Leave right now on Betfair at 2.92 (15/8). Since it has a clear lead in almost all the polls conducted in the last week, this price assumes either (a) that almost all the polls are wrong or (b) that there will be a very sharp move to Remain in the final days.
This may happen but it hardly looks like a slam dunk.
I would have thought that the suspending of campaigning would largely benefit the side that was ahead in the polls - it gives Remain less time to close the gap.
Alistair- I have posted a couple of times...and venturing into conspiracy theories......I've been studying the betfair market. When the remain price eases out, a major amount of money is hoovering it back. Someone clearly thinks there is value backing leave at anything unto circa 2-1 which you are right is completely of kilter with the polls.
My theory is that there are the public polls and the private polls- the same private polls that were telling people that the Tories were considerably ahead in 2015 (backed up the betting markets), are telling them that remain is still in the lead- maybe not quite as much as it was a few weeks ago, but still sufficiently ahead to make 2-1 on value.
How does private polling methodology differ from that of public polling? Does it somehow factor in differential turnout*
*P.S. I think turnout will be very high among London AB. Lots of people down here are scared to death of a Leave win who are not otherwise very politically interested.
Private polling uses the same methodologies. But I might be wrong here, some polling costs more...they spend much more on ensuring that they have a representative sample.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I am. I think Leave will win. I don't think the murder yesterday will affect anything and neither should it. I'd like to think the vile Farage poster will get some people thinking, but I imagine minds are mostly made up now. We're voting to pull out.
It will shut down the immigration debate completely, at least for the next week. And Leave are a one-trick pony with little else to campaign on that resonates with the public. A good 10-20% of the voters remain undecided. Of course it'll have an effect.
How does it shut down the immigration debate?
It will be claimed it is inciting hatred.
I think anyone trying that line of attack is stretching.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I am. I think Leave will win. I don't think the murder yesterday will affect anything and neither should it. I'd like to think the vile Farage poster will get some people thinking, but I imagine minds are mostly made up now. We're voting to pull out.
It will shut down the immigration debate completely, at least for the next week. And Leave are a one-trick pony with little else to campaign on that resonates with the public. A good 10-20% of the voters remain undecided. Of course it'll have an effect.
How does it shut down the immigration debate?
It will be claimed it is inciting hatred.
I think anyone trying that line of attack is stretching.
Unfortunately a labour mp has already gone with his line.
I thought it was a brilliant poster. A clear visual reference to the " Labour isn't working " classic and moving towards closing the deal. The deal being that the migrant crisis is what this is really all about. If the poster had been used 3 months ago people would have wretched. But now the campaign has been successfully framed around immigration it can be used without outright rejection. Why are Leave taking about hypothetical Turks rather than real Poles ? Because Turks are Muslims. What have we all seen on TV over the last 2 years ? About 2 million largely Muslim and entirely unplanned immigrants who appeared to have just ' walked in '. It seems to me finally mentioning on a poster what this is all about 7 days from polling day is just like a good composer coming towards the end of a symphony. As for it being Farage... well it offers Leave plausible deniability with no real reduction in press coverage for it. I'm not convinced it's a mistake for Leave at all. It seems completely consistent with their strategy. The polls say the strategy is working so far.
It's not that that odd when you consider that what the EU is trying to do fundamentally challenges the concept of a universal right to asylum as previously conceived.
Merkel deserves much more credit than she's given for having foresight on the migration issue and trying to address things with a long-term strategy in mind.
Rochdale Pioneers said yesterday that he thought the ad was right for its intended audience.
And it was. Not because the poster is correct. But because so many people THINK it is correct. Look at the Daily Blackshirt yesterday - "We're from Europe" say the people from the lorry. Today they correct it, and they're from Iraq. Not migrants. Refugees.
But for so many people there is no difference. They don't care if its economic migration within the EU or without. Or if they're refugees fleeing for their lives. They just don't want them here under any circumstances. A combination of our broken economy, our broken polity and scum press has played on people's fears to the point where they say no to rescuing children.
The poster is for them. Farage got it spot on. Don't blame Farage, blame all of us. We did this.
Yep, we do all have some blame. We helped to create the situation in which Farage standing in front of racist posters and Tory Leave ministers telling lies about Turks coming to overrun us are seen as vote winners for the campaigns they are running. The metropolitan left has ignored and then scorned Labour's working class base; the right has driven it into the ground.
I'm not sure how much difference it'll make to the result - I remember durin......!
I'm not expecting it to change much of anything, bar giving the campaigners a short rest. Many have looked knackered. To be honest, this reminds me very much of the Stephen Timms attack - shocking on a WTF level, but that's about it.......... Why would this change my vote? Or my concerns about the UK's future governance? I've been really quite revolted by those who've sought to weaponise her death for their own ends. Twitter was beyond awful - and far too many professional commentators have joined in. The lady was barely cold.
One poster from the unoffical side campaign for LEAVE, which is then heavily advertised for free by REMAIN folk with the media. It generates lots of outrage and adds more publicity to the immigration issue. Do please consider the possibility that it is a monumental mistake of REMAIN people to keep looking and pointing saying "oh look at the anti immigration poster from Farage that's rascist". All they are doing is reminding voters about immigration, another own goal for REMAIN. But as Napoleon said , why interrupt opponents when making mistakes...
Anecdota. Talked to my Mum this morning. For a 79 year old who's only voted by rote (Labour. Labour. Labour) until very recently, she's well into the referendum.
She thinks Farage's poster just shows how many people are queuing up to come into the country. For her, there's no Nazi symbolism and she grew up during WWII. I wonder if we're overthinking this? I'll own my first thought was that it was some kind of pastiche of the famous Saatchi & Saatchi ad, rather than any kind of arbeit macht frei connotation.
I've got no idea what this Nazi stuff is about. I saw a rather simplistic device of a big queue full of what appears to be ME young men AKA those Merkel's associated with. The Saatchi OBV see-saw one was far worse.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I am. I think Leave will win. I don't think the murder yesterday will affect anything and neither should it. I'd like to think the vile Farage poster will get some people thinking, but I imagine minds are mostly made up now. We're voting to pull out.
It will shut down the immigration debate completely, at least for the next week. And Leave are a one-trick pony with little else to campaign on that resonates with the public. A good 10-20% of the voters remain undecided. Of course it'll have an effect.
How does it shut down the immigration debate?
It will be claimed it is inciting hatred.
With respect, that's a very middle class view of what might happen. One of the reasons that metropolitan Labour has such a challenge is that a large chunk of their base are pretty rough and ready. They tell sick jokes. They take the piss out of everything, all the time. They're quite coarse and enjoy getting pissed and thowing up and getting tats. Some of them go to football tournaments and chant "Fuck off Europe, we're voting out."
If that turns out to be true this could be another Madrid for politics.
They guy in question had already made it clear he wasn't there.
'Aamir Tahir, of the Dry Clean Centre, said the gunman was heard shouting "Britain first".
He said: "The lady I work with heard two loud bangs but I wasn't there, I was stuck in traffic at the time. I wish I was there because I would have tried to stop him.
I think people who work in the third sector just live on a different planet. They seem to measure virtue by the degree to which one is prepared to accept unlimited numbers of migrants and refugees.
The only way to sort this (humanely) is to work to stabilise and develop the countries of origin and provide aid assistance to those too weak, or poor to avoid people smugglers.
We can then take sensible quotas of the most vulnerable.
No. Boris wants a Leave win. He thinks he'd then become Prime Minister.
I think he'd want to use it as a mandate for a further round of negotiations of our EU membership.
Exactly this - he thinks (and I agree) that a Vote Leave would kick of an existential crisis in the EU prompting some significant rethinking of how they operate. And apart from the EU Happy Clappers and the libertarian sovereignty group, I think most people on both sides believe that a rethink is needed, the debate is how we get there.
I don't think he needs a Leave vote to become PM though. A narrow remain win remains their best case scenario. And whilst yesterday has forced a pause for thought, the civil war in the Tory party has torn them apart and both sides still want to defeat the other. There is no gluing this back together, I don't see how Cameron is PM for longer than a few months after this.
I see you can't leave the scramongering alone. No-doubt the independent Scotland would have considered that it probably couldn't afford under present circumstances to pay for a share of Trident renewal or the coming financial black hole of Hinkley Point, or HS2 or the Heathrow subsidy and would be getting on with building a balanced modern European economy.
Of course if her major trading partner were about to commit an act of national madness and leave Europe then the Scottish Government would be setting up an entire Department to cope with the stampede of companies moving north from London for secure and confirmed access to the marketplace of 500 million people.
Of course, in the real world, the Scottish government would have billions less of whatever currency they'd be using and millions of Scots would be suffering as a result. Sometimes hope = lies, and the experts are actually right. The Scottish independence referendum was one such example. I hope that I am proved wrong and that this referendum is not another similar case.
I think she makes a reasonable point that if Scotland were independent they would have benefited hugely from an exodus of financial institutions and other sectors moving out of England.
Whilst I felt it was tasteless to dive right into this yesterday, I would have to agree with posters on both sides who say this is inextricably linked to the referendum.
And whilst this will be met with a chorus of disapproval, I cannot dismiss out of hand the possibility that this was a false flag attack. Yokel, who seems respected by many here, told us that the intelligence services simply would not wear a Leave result. For my own part, I have consistently stated that Britain being embedded within the EU structure is vital to US geostrategic interests, and I would be surprised if we were simply allowed as an electorate to walk out of the door. I very much hope this is wrong.
If this is right, and I am not alleging it, then homework will have been done, and we will see drip drip drip of this man's right wingery come to light.
There was a strange report of a schoolgirl who saw a man in a black hoodie with binoculars hiding in the graveyard. That does not match the description of Mair, who was wearing a T-shirt and a white baseball cap.
However, she could be a fantasist or mistaken. Or it was an unrelated peeping tom or something. Or perhaps post-event undercover surveillance of an address.
An odd report, nevertheless.
I like conspiracy theorists. Italy is full of them- Italians distrust everything that they're told.
Probably the suspect? In the photo of his arrest he has what looks like a grey hoodie, he was seen to walk slowly away from the scene so won't have got far and wasn't in a panic, he was later arrested nearby.
If you could go back to 1946 and tell someone about the world of 2016 they probably would think you mad. We try to master change, to control it but change ends up controlling us and we are swept downstream like flotsam by its power.
...
We perpetuate it here by the slanging, sneering and jibing - we all do it, I've done it. I'm not proud of it. You've done it, I hope you're not proud either.
Taking the second point first, much is often made of individual motives for people posting here.
There are some (fewer and fewer over time) who want to discuss betting, post tips, find value in markets. These posts are by their very nature literal and factual, and unlikely to cause offence or misunderstanding.
Others discuss politics. These are by their very nature speculative, confrontational or ambiguous.
Then there is the "rolling news" nature of this site. I read PB for the same reason I read Twitter, for a view of what is happening in the World from people I believe to be informed, with opinions I want to be aware of and issues I want to understand. The breadth of knowledge and experience is unsurpassed by any other social group I have come across.
I post things from Twitter that I think are interesting (might prompt discussion), relevant (add the discussion currently under-way), amusing or breaking news.
When I engage with individual posts or posters, I do it for the thrill of discourse. Debating with people is fun, especially with people who disagree with you. And yes, that includes slanging, sneering and jibing. I can't say I am proud of it, but I can't say I regret much of it either. If I go too far I can only apologise.
What I don't expect to do is change people's minds necessarily or imagine that anything anyone posts here impacts much of anything in the Real World, OGH posting polls excepted.
To your first point, somebody sent me a link to this. It's a blog by someone else. I agree with the sentiments, and I post it here so others can read it and judge for themselves. I don't expect to shift any votes. If you went back in time 200 years and told people living in Britain that not only would we not be at war with either France or Germany or Spain in 2016 but they would actually be our allies, they would be amazed.
I understand that for some older people the idea of going back to the 1950s appeals.
But part of the reason the 1950s appeal is that you were young then, and it’s always better when you are young. And the 1950s were always going to look better because of what came before – rationing, bombs falling onto your neighbourhoods, a war in Europe.
I thought it was a brilliant poster. A clear visual reference to the " Labour isn't working " classic and moving towards closing the deal. The deal being that the migrant crisis is what this is really all about. If the poster had been used 3 months ago people would have wretched. But now the campaign has been successfully framed around immigration it can be used without outright rejection. Why are Leave taking about hypothetical Turks rather than real Poles ? Because Turks are Muslims. What have we all seen on TV over the last 2 years ? About 2 million largely Muslim and entirely unplanned immigrants who appeared to have just ' walked in '. It seems to me finally mentioning on a poster what this is all about 7 days from polling day is just like a good composer coming towards the end of a symphony. As for it being Farage... well it offers Leave plausible deniability with no real reduction in press coverage for it. I'm not convinced it's a mistake for Leave at all. It seems completely consistent with their strategy. The polls say the strategy is working so far.
Of course it's not a mistake in terms of winning the campaign. It's exactly what you say. It's the Moslems are coming to get us if we don't vote Leave.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I am. I think Leave will win. I don't think the murder yesterday will affect anything and neither should it. I'd like to think the vile Farage poster will get some people thinking, but I imagine minds are mostly made up now. We're voting to pull out.
I agree with you insofar as, unlike a number of PBers, I don't believe yesterday's events will have a major impact, perhaps 1% or thereabouts maximum - as you say most people have already made up their minds and millions, like me, have already voted. What sways me towards a REMAIN outcome is the simple fact that the betting fraternity en masse very seldom get things wrong and they are going for a small but virtually unanimous win for REMAIN. Who can remember when the bookies were last wrong to this extent? ........ Oh, wait ......
The bookies were not wrong in 2015, 2010, or even 1992. They all called the direction of travel- that the Tories would be the largest party, although they got the extent wrong.
That is what got me interested in political betting in the early 90's- I realised that the betting markets were a much more reliable indicator of what was going to happen than the polls. I was absolutely gutted in 1992 because I was convinced those polls were right- but the bookies were on the Tories. The polls were wrong....and so now I follow the money to avoid that sense of disappointment and frustration of false hope.
So, you can imagine my pleasure when Mike Smithson set up an internet site dedicated to this. I've been hooked since 2004.
For the leave campaign to win we would be in the very real, unchartered territory of all the bookies calling the direction of travel wrong.
Following the market as a gamblers guide is a route to poverty.
It's not that that odd when you consider that what the EU is trying to do fundamentally challenges the concept of a universal right to asylum as previously conceived.
Merkel deserves much more credit than she's given for having foresight on the migration issue and trying to address things with a long-term strategy in mind.
In spite of what has happened over the past 24 hours and completely separate from the referendum issue I will repeat what I have said on here before. Merkel is directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people who have been encouraged to attempt dangerous crossings of the Mediterranean by her promise to give them asylum.
Cameron's far more practical and far safer policy should have been the blueprint for the European response to the refugee crisis and he is the one European leader who has come out of this whole episode with his reputation enhanced in my view. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, Merkel has built a motorway.
Mr. Crosby, thanks for posting that quote. If the quote about 'Britain First' is withdrawn or disputed (which is the minimum, as an eyewitness said he never heard it) then the MSM ought to make that plain.
I cannot see how that Farage poster yesterday is doing anything other than pandering to racism and xenophobia. And given that the Tory Leave camp know that Turkey is a long, long way from becoming an EU member state, I don't see how their warnings of the country's impending membership is any different.
The vast majority of people voting Leave are not racists or xenophobes, but it is pretty clear that the Leave campaigns think there is mileage in appealing to those who are.
The Turkey issue has been one of the stranger things about this referendum. I was surprised when I saw it mentioned by Leave as I thought it was off the table. What I hadn't anticipated was for the Remain campaign to handle it so badly. Why hasn't Cameron come out and said "as long as I'm PM, Turkey will not be joining the EU"? During his interview with Andrew Neil, George Osborne looked decidedly shifty when asked about Turkey. I wonder if some of the Leavers have got an idea of what's coming up over the next few months and know that Cameron and Osborne aren't in a position to make firm commitments.
Yes true. It probably comes from a lack of joined up thinking from the EU campaign planning of Osborne. In essence Hammond and the FO were subsumed into Osborne's empire on european matters. Osborne set the negotiating strategy with the EU but was clearly unaware of all the individual policy positions at the FO and with Cameron's past statements. All due to having Osbone as a part timer when it needed a peron focused 100% on the EU.
Rochdale I agree with a lot of what you say. I think part of the problem is that true (laissez-faire) capitalism has been replaced by crony capitalism. In the 19th century entrepreneurs would often make a fortune and lose it again. Now it is heads I win, tails I get bailed out. I think the key error was bailing out the banks. If you look at Iceland their banks were too big to bail out so they let them fail. This caused a serious recession but within a few years Iceland was growing again. On the contrary we haven't fixed our problems and just seem to be putting sticking plasters on them.
I know how bad "the north" is suffering as my grandmother lives in one of the Welsh Valleys and the high street seems to be becoming sadder and sadder each time I visit. In the south, we have different problems around the cost of living. My partner and I rent a 2 bed flat in Maidenhead and the cost to buy this flat would be nearly 300k. Crazy money.
If we vote to remain, nothing will change. That is why a leave vote is the only sign of hope for some people.
There are some 50 countires in the world with major oil and gas reserves. In Scotland's case the latest opened gas fields will meet double Scottish domestic requirements for the next quarter of a century. When oil prices are high or low these countires still have a huge asset as Cameron inadvertently admitted recently during this debate when he said that being outside the EU was all right for Norway because it is a small country with lots of oil!
And by the way Scotland has a few other things as well including a huge food and drink industry, world class universities, a beautiful country, top quality engineering exporters, higher exports per head than the UK and a much better trade balance, improving industrial productivity compared to the UK and higher GDP per head.
Oh and an indpendent Scotland would not be having this intensely damaging introspection about whether or not it is a genuinely European country.
No. Boris wants a Leave win. He thinks he'd then become Prime Minister.
I think he'd want to use it as a mandate for a further round of negotiations of our EU membership.
Exactly this - he thinks (and I agree) that a Vote Leave would kick of an existential crisis in the EU prompting some significant rethinking of how they operate. And apart from the EU Happy Clappers and the libertarian sovereignty group, I think most people on both sides believe that a rethink is needed, the debate is how we get there.
I don't think he needs a Leave vote to become PM though. A narrow remain win remains their best case scenario. And whilst yesterday has forced a pause for thought, the civil war in the Tory party has torn them apart and both sides still want to defeat the other. There is no gluing this back together, I don't see how Cameron is PM for longer than a few months after this.
Lots to digest there but I don't agree on the Tories apart thing.
I still feel an affinity with the likes of Richard Nabavi, Big G, JohnO and Topping (even though they all are royally annoying me by voting Remain!) and can see us working together afterwards.
I think Osborne needs to go for the good of the body politik. He is a disgrace.
Whilst I felt it was tasteless to dive right into this yesterday, I would have to agree with posters on both sides who say this is inextricably linked to the referendum.
And whilst this will be met with a chorus of disapproval, I cannot dismiss out of hand the possibility that this was a false flag attack. Yokel, who seems respected by many here, told us that the intelligence services simply would not wear a Leave result. For my own part, I have consistently stated that Britain being embedded within the EU structure is vital to US geostrategic interests, and I would be surprised if we were simply allowed as an electorate to walk out of the door. I very much hope this is wrong.
If this is right, and I am not alleging it, then homework will have been done, and we will see drip drip drip of this man's right wingery come to light.
There was a strange report of a schoolgirl who saw a man in a black hoodie with binoculars hiding in the graveyard. That does not match the description of Mair, who was wearing a T-shirt and a white baseball cap.
However, she could be a fantasist or mistaken. Or it was an unrelated peeping tom or something. Or perhaps post-event undercover surveillance of an address.
An odd report, nevertheless.
I like conspiracy theorists. Italy is full of them- Italians distrust everything that they're told.
Probably the suspect? In the photo of his arrest he has what looks like a grey hoodie, he was seen to walk slowly away from the scene so won't have got far and wasn't in a panic, he was later arrested nearby.
The graveyard is on the other side of the town from where Mair was arrested...
A poll of Northern Ireland voters suggests there has been a significant move towards a Leave vote in next week's EU referendum.
The survey, carried out by market research agency Millward Brown, showed 48% of people in Northern Ireland who intend to vote will choose to remain. Almost one third (32%) want to leave with 20% still undecided. The last Millward Brown poll, published in May, showed 55% in favour of Remain and 23% for Leave.
Stripping out "Don't knows" yields 60-40, a change from the 70-30 result earlier in the year so consistent with a broad swing to "leave".
I'm going to assume GE turnout here - a rising tide tends to float all boats so the relative effect of NI should remain constant in any case.
GE voting Electorate: 30,697,835 NI voting Electorate: 705,509 The polls don't poll Northern Ireland so we have 29,992,326 polled voters in the errm polls.
Current "best guess" for leave % 51.7 (Just over) from the pool of almost 30 million 'mainland' voters.
Working through assuming 60-40 Remain/leave in NI means that the leave % of 51.7 heads south to 51.47%.
That's an interesting piece of arithmetic. I must admit that I hadn't previously realised that pollsters do not ellicit opinions in N.I. Why not? ..... Presumably on account of the expense. One would have expected them to make some kind of assessment of voting inclination in the province so as to produce an overall result which was as accurate as possible.
I thought it was a brilliant poster. A clear visual reference to the " Labour isn't working " classic and moving towards closing the deal. The deal being that the migrant crisis is what this is really all about. If the poster had been used 3 months ago people would have wretched. But now the campaign has been successfully framed around immigration it can be used without outright rejection. Why are Leave taking about hypothetical Turks rather than real Poles ? Because Turks are Muslims. What have we all seen on TV over the last 2 years ? About 2 million largely Muslim and entirely unplanned immigrants who appeared to have just ' walked in '. It seems to me finally mentioning on a poster what this is all about 7 days from polling day is just like a good composer coming towards the end of a symphony. As for it being Farage... well it offers Leave plausible deniability with no real reduction in press coverage for it. I'm not convinced it's a mistake for Leave at all. It seems completely consistent with their strategy. The polls say the strategy is working so far.
I think you are wrong. I think the Out campaign up to now has successfully exploited our innate racism. It is in us all.....we are tribal mammals. It is in our DNA to occupy a space and then protect it from others taking it from us. Farage's comment that he would prefer his next door house to be occupied by christian whites rather than Roma resonates too- we can accept people better who look like us.
But this poster, the iconography of the 30's, Farage's megalomania at the centre, is just too much. It is so obviously racist- it'll make people baulk at who they are associating with, and make them feel bad about themselves about supporting this cause.
I thought it was a brilliant poster. A clear visual reference to the " Labour isn't working " classic and moving towards closing the deal....
It may have been brilliant in theory (though I don't really agree). In practice, though, it's a bit of a nightmare for Farage.
The narrative over the next few days is going to be that, while there isn't a soul in public life who is anything other than horrified by what happened yesterday, we've got to take a long, hard look at ourselves and our rhetoric. Are we inadvertently encouraging disturbed and suggestible people to do awful things?
Farage isn't unique in this at all but he happened to be the man left standing up in front of a "BREAKING POINT" poster when the music stopped, and that simply isn't a comfortable place to be.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I'm still expecting a Leave win.
I think the events of yesterday will have two effects on the referendum:
1) A partial shutdown of campaigning that will last over the weekend, maybe all the way to polling day. As Leave is almost certainly currently ahead this favours Leave imo.
2) *Some* degree of tainting of Leave by association. I don't think this will extend to swing voters though. I think it will further fire up committed Remainers, but that will have only a slight effect as they would be a high turnout group anyway.
So I think it's no worse than neutral for Leave, which is currently winning.
Farage and Trump will fuck it up for us next week, plus some OTT 'market falls' stories in the last 48 hours.
The dream scenario for both Farage and Boris is a narrow Remain win, whereas a Leave win would give them both some serious challenges - so let's see what they each get up to next week....
No. Boris wants a Leave win. He thinks he'd then become Prime Minister.
I think he'd want to use it as a mandate for a further round of negotiations of our EU membership.
Well I agree with you that he doesn't actually want to leave - he said as much at the start of the campaign, before he got kicked under the table. But surely he has as good a chance of becoming PM with a narrow "we woz robbed" Remain win? That way is a lot less hassle and hard work than having to manage the fallout of a Leave win, particularly a narrow one, with parliament being overwhelmingly Remain. Boris's political track record doesn't show much sign of a liking for the hard graft of politics...
@Pulpstar there's another northern Irish poll in the field for Lucid Talk, I believe.
I'll have to take an average of the two . I'm totally intrigued as to how TSE gets a 1.2% change to the result from ex pats + NI though ^^;
Wishful thinking?
He must be assuming something like a 70-30 'remain' vote from all 1.3 million ex pats or some such. It seems to be too favourable a view to "remain" for me.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I'm still expecting a Leave win.
I think the events of yesterday will have two effects on the referendum:
1) A partial shutdown of campaigning that will last over the weekend, maybe all the way to polling day. As Leave is almost certainly currently ahead this favours Leave imo.
2) *Some* degree of tainting of Leave by association. I don't think this will extend to swing voters though. I think it will further fire up committed Remainers, but that will have only a slight effect as they would be a high turnout group anyway.
So I think it's no worse than neutral for Leave, which is currently winning.
Farage and Trump will fuck it up for us next week, plus some OTT 'market falls' stories in the last 48 hours.
The dream scenario for both Farage and Boris is a narrow Remain win, whereas a Leave win would give them both some serious challenges - so let's see what they each get up to next week....
If Remain win, even narrowly, the europhiles will make it their lives' work to destroy Boris for his treachery.
I wonder if you're ascribing your own behavioural standards to, in the widest sense of the phrase, pragmatic Europhiles. Nothing that I've seen in their behaviour suggests that they're the mirror images of, for example, Duncan-Smith or similar. If you have specific fact-based examples, it would be interesting to hear them.
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I'm still expecting a Leave win.
I think the events of yesterday will have two effects on the referendum:
1) A partial shutdown of campaigning that will last over the weekend, maybe all the way to polling day. As Leave is almost certainly currently ahead this favours Leave imo.
2) *Some* degree of tainting of Leave by association. I don't think this will extend to swing voters though. I think it will further fire up committed Remainers, but that will have only a slight effect as they would be a high turnout group anyway.
So I think it's no worse than neutral for Leave, which is currently winning.
Farage and Trump will fuck it up for us next week, plus some OTT 'market falls' stories in the last 48 hours.
The dream scenario for both Farage and Boris is a narrow Remain win, whereas a Leave win would give them both some serious challenges - so let's see what they each get up to next week....
No. Boris wants a Leave win. He thinks he'd then become Prime Minister.
I think he'd want to use it as a mandate for a further round of negotiations of our EU membership.
Well I agree with you that he doesn't actually want to leave - he said as much at the start of the campaign, before he got kicked under the table. But surely he has as good a chance of becoming PM with a narrow "we was robbed" Remain win? That way is a lot less hassle and hard work than having to manage the fallout of a Leave win, particularly a narrow one, with parliament being overwhelmingly Remain. Boris's political track record doesn't show much sign of a liking for the hard graft of politics...
Not on my watch he isn't. He couldn't negotiate a tin of beans onto his plate.
There are some 50 countires in the world with major oil and gas reserves. In Scotland's case the latest opened gas fields will meet double Scottish domestic requirements for the next quarter of a century. When oil prices are high or low these countires still have a huge asset as Cameron inadvertently admitted recently during this debate when he said that being outside the EU was all right for Norway because it is a small country with lots of oil!
And by the way Scotland has a few other things as well including a huge food and drink industry, world class universities, a beautiful country, top quality engineering exporters, higher exports per head than the UK and a much better trade balance, improving industrial productivity compared to the UK and higher GDP per head.
Oh and an indpendent Scotland would not be having this intensely damaging introspection about whether or not it is a genuinely European country.
Scotland would be generating now, today, much less than it needs to cover its costs. And it would either be using sterling, so having its fiscal policy dictated by the Bank of England; or it would be using its own currency and so at the mercy of the international markets. And it would not be an EU member state either. I don't expect a true believer to accept any of that, but I am afraid it is true. The SNP sought to lie their way to independence and to smear the experts who called them out on it. Luckily for the Scots enough of the did not buy the snake oil. Sadly, it seems like history will not repeat itself.
I thought it was a brilliant poster. A clear visual reference to the " Labour isn't working " classic and moving towards closing the deal. The deal being that the migrant crisis is what this is really all about. If the poster had been used 3 months ago people would have wretched. But now the campaign has been successfully framed around immigration it can be used without outright rejection. Why are Leave taking about hypothetical Turks rather than real Poles ? Because Turks are Muslims. What have we all seen on TV over the last 2 years ? About 2 million largely Muslim and entirely unplanned immigrants who appeared to have just ' walked in '. It seems to me finally mentioning on a poster what this is all about 7 days from polling day is just like a good composer coming towards the end of a symphony. As for it being Farage... well it offers Leave plausible deniability with no real reduction in press coverage for it. I'm not convinced it's a mistake for Leave at all. It seems completely consistent with their strategy. The polls say the strategy is working so far.
Of course it's not a mistake in terms of winning the campaign. It's exactly what you say. It's the Moslems are coming to get us if we don't vote Leave.
Yes, but, for the very first time it made LEAVERS like me pause and go, Ugh.
I've calculated the difference to a sub 1% change. Individual polls simply aren't that accurate - so it makes sense for them not to bother changing 'just this once' as normal VI doesn't apply to NI anyway.
It's not that that odd when you consider that what the EU is trying to do fundamentally challenges the concept of a universal right to asylum as previously conceived.
Merkel deserves much more credit than she's given for having foresight on the migration issue and trying to address things with a long-term strategy in mind.
In spite of what has happened over the past 24 hours and completely separate from the referendum issue I will repeat what I have said on here before. Merkel is directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people who have been encouraged to attempt dangerous crossings of the Mediterranean by her promise to give them asylum.
Cameron's far more practical and far safer policy should have been the blueprint for the European response to the refugee crisis and he is the one European leader who has come out of this whole episode with his reputation enhanced in my view. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, Merkel has built a motorway.
That doesn't make sense. These people knew they risked their lives and those of their families by trying to flee. That tells you that their lives there must have been so precarious that they thought the risk worth taking. If that was the case humanity and the laws of asylum demanded that she behaved as she did.
Three witnesses have claimed he said a phrase containing the words "Britain First". Pulling my hazmat suit on I ventured onto the Britain First website itself and their own line is that he said "Put Britain First" rather than screaming the name of their party. The Indy is also reporting that he was a subscriber to a South African far right newsletter. So there is credible evidence he had right wing beliefs that would tend towards the sharply Eurosceptic.
There is also credible evidence he was mentally ill. So it would not be unreasonable to speculate (and all we have is speculation) that this was a right-winger with mental health problems. The Farage poster, although only released that morning was the last in a series of dog-whistles. Then Brexit mad dog hears the whistle. Then do you blame the sick individual or those blowing the whistle? I go with the latter but it's entirely up to you.
Reason for posting / viewing here...come on we all know the answer to that...the monty Hall problem!!!!!
Completely wrong! I'm just loitering here waiting for the long-promised AV thread, after which I can beam back up to the mothership and we can resume our journey.
@RochdalePioneers You can back Leave right now on Betfair at 2.92 (15/8). Since it has a clear lead in almost all the polls conducted in the last week, this price assumes either (a) that almost all the polls are wrong or (b) that there will be a very sharp move to Remain in the final days.
This may happen but it hardly looks like a slam dunk.
I would have thought that the suspending of campaigning would largely benefit the side that was ahead in the polls - it gives Remain less time to close the gap.
Alistair- I have posted a couple of times...and venturing into conspiracy theories......I've been studying the betfair market. When the remain price eases out, a major amount of money is hoovering it back. Someone clearly thinks there is value backing leave at anything unto circa 2-1 which you are right is completely of kilter with the polls.
My theory is that there are the public polls and the private polls- the same private polls that were telling people that the Tories were considerably ahead in 2015 (backed up the betting markets), are telling them that remain is still in the lead- maybe not quite as much as it was a few weeks ago, but still sufficiently ahead to make 2-1 on value.
How does private polling methodology differ from that of public polling? Does it somehow factor in differential turnout*
*P.S. I think turnout will be very high among London AB. Lots of people down here are scared to death of a Leave win who are not otherwise very politically interested.
It is like tumbleweed in Scotland, hard to see many bothering to turn out. I voted Leave because of the scare stories, I don't like evil Tory millionaires trying to take me for a mug by lying through their teeth.
Er, thousands of people have already voted by post?
So we count them and use the Duckworth-Lewis method to declare the result?
No, we've come this far we've got to see it through and allow every person the opportunity to have their say.
This has been the most bitter and nastiest few weeks I can remember in the country. The only we way we have any hope of moving on is through the democratic process... Allowing people to cast their ballot, have their vote counted and then hopefully, whatever the result, start the process of coming back together again.
Cancelling the referendum will just cause the sore to fester.
Whilst I felt it was tasteless to dive right into this yesterday, I would have to agree with posters on both sides who say this is inextricably linked to the referendum.
And whilst this will be met with a chorus of disapproval, I cannot dismiss out of hand the possibility that this was a false flag attack. Yokel, who seems respected by many here, told us that the intelligence services simply would not wear a Leave result. For my own part, I have consistently stated that Britain being embedded within the EU structure is vital to US geostrategic interests, and I would be surprised if we were simply allowed as an electorate to walk out of the door. I very much hope this is wrong.
If this is right, and I am not alleging it, then homework will have been done, and we will see drip drip drip of this man's right wingery come to light.
There was a strange report of a schoolgirl who saw a man in a black hoodie with binoculars hiding in the graveyard. That does not match the description of Mair, who was wearing a T-shirt and a white baseball cap.
However, she could be a fantasist or mistaken. Or it was an unrelated peeping tom or something. Or perhaps post-event undercover surveillance of an address.
An odd report, nevertheless.
I like conspiracy theorists. Italy is full of them- Italians distrust everything that they're told.
Probably the suspect? In the photo of his arrest he has what looks like a grey hoodie, he was seen to walk slowly away from the scene so won't have got far and wasn't in a panic, he was later arrested nearby.
The graveyard is on the other side of the town from where Mair was arrested...
The timings in the Mirror article would give him 20 minutes to get there. And the fact that the very next line in the article refers to a man's arrest suggests that the paper thinks it may be him?
I thought it was a brilliant poster. A clear visual reference to the " Labour isn't working " classic and moving towards closing the deal. The deal being that the migrant crisis is what this is really all about. If the poster had been used 3 months ago people would have wretched. But now the campaign has been successfully framed around immigration it can be used without outright rejection. Why are Leave taking about hypothetical Turks rather than real Poles ? Because Turks are Muslims. What have we all seen on TV over the last 2 years ? About 2 million largely Muslim and entirely unplanned immigrants who appeared to have just ' walked in '. It seems to me finally mentioning on a poster what this is all about 7 days from polling day is just like a good composer coming towards the end of a symphony. As for it being Farage... well it offers Leave plausible deniability with no real reduction in press coverage for it. I'm not convinced it's a mistake for Leave at all. It seems completely consistent with their strategy. The polls say the strategy is working so far.
Of course it's not a mistake in terms of winning the campaign. It's exactly what you say. It's the Moslems are coming to get us if we don't vote Leave.
Yes, but, for the very first time it made LEAVERS like me pause and go, Ugh.
They could seal the deal with the WWC (but haven't they done that already?) - yet lose liberal LEAVERS like me (they probably won't, but- hmmm)
That's what he WANTS you to do.
I'm *not* going to let our campaign to restore democratic control to Britain to be defined by Farage and let him win, so he can continue to be front and centre of our politics and suck at the teat of Brussels.
Vote Leave. Let the sensible leavers like Gove, Leadsom and sceptical Remainers like May take over. Kill off Farage for good.
No. Boris wants a Leave win. He thinks he'd then become Prime Minister.
I think that was true when the campaign started, but I'm not so sure now.
Tory MPs will, under the rules, choose two candidates to go to the membership. One will be a loyalist (perhaps Osborne, though I personally think Osborne will do a deal with someone). Another will be a Brexiteer. A few months ago, that would certainly have been Boris, but he's been perceived to have had a poor campaign personally and now it's probably Gove.
If Remain win, Cameron continues and Boris may be able to regroup. As it stands, I'm not sure a Leave win is great for him.
Taking the second point first, much is often made of individual motives for people posting here.
There are some (fewer and fewer over time) who want to discuss betting, post tips, find value in markets. These posts are by their very nature literal and factual, and unlikely to cause offence or misunderstanding.
Others discuss politics. These are by their very nature speculative, confrontational or ambiguous.
Then there is the "rolling news" nature of this site. I read PB for the same reason I read Twitter, for a view of what is happening in the World from people I believe to be informed, with opinions I want to be aware of and issues I want to understand. The breadth of knowledge and experience is unsurpassed by any other social group I have come across.
I post things from Twitter that I think are interesting (might prompt discussion), relevant (add the discussion currently under-way), amusing or breaking news.
When I engage with individual posts or posters, I do it for the thrill of discourse. Debating with people is fun, especially with people who disagree with you. And yes, that includes slanging, sneering and jibing. I can't say I am proud of it, but I can't say I regret much of it either. If I go too far I can only apologise.
What I don't expect to do is change people's minds necessarily or imagine that anything anyone posts here impacts much of anything in the Real World, OGH posting polls excepted.
To your first point, somebody sent me a link to this. It's a blog by someone else. I agree with the sentiments, and I post it here so others can read it and judge for themselves. I don't expect to shift any votes. If you went back in time 200 years and told people living in Britain that not only would we not be at war with either France or Germany or Spain in 2016 but they would actually be our allies, they would be amazed.
I understand that for some older people the idea of going back to the 1950s appeals.
But part of the reason the 1950s appeal is that you were young then, and it’s always better when you are young. And the 1950s were always going to look better because of what came before – rationing, bombs falling onto your neighbourhoods, a war in Europe.
Unfortunately the claim about war with our continental neighbours is rather misleading. It is 71 years since we were at war with Germany.
But if, as your posting mentions, one went back 200 years that would put you to 1816. That is one year into a 99 year long period where we were not at war with France, Germany or Spain. So really the attempt to describe our current lack of war with our neighbours as exceptional and further to equate it with our EU membership fails even on the most basic historical level.
Other than the huge pamphlet from the government I've had very little through the post. However we did get a small leaflet yesterday with a map of Europe on it and 4 Balkan countries highlighted as well as the big one Turkey....
Why is this so potent? Well the obvious reasons - Islam, middle east civil wars, too many immigrants in general but I think politicians will struggle to counteract it. They're not trusted, not least on the issue of Europe and particularly by the older generation who feel they were duped in 1975. It's hard to argue they're wrong on that.
I thought it was a brilliant poster. A clear visual reference to the " Labour isn't working " classic and moving towards closing the deal....
It may have been brilliant in theory (though I don't really agree). In practice, though, it's a bit of a nightmare for Farage.
The narrative over the next few days is going to be that, while there isn't a soul in public life who is anything other than horrified by what happened yesterday, we've got to take a long, hard look at ourselves and our rhetoric. Are we inadvertently encouraging disturbed and suggestible people to do awful things?
Farage isn't unique in this at all but he happened to be the man left standing up in front of a "BREAKING POINT" poster when the music stopped, and that simply isn't a comfortable place to be.
It's unfortunate timing for Farage/UKIP but I think that perhaps the target audience is materially different to those opining on here. It may not be liked here, but that's immaterial.
Er, thousands of people have already voted by post?
So we count them and use the Duckworth-Lewis method to declare the result?
No, we've come this far we've got to see it through and allow every person the opportunity to have their say.
This has been the most bitter and nastiest few weeks I can remember in the country. The only we way we have any hope of moving on is through the democratic process... Allowing people to cast their ballot, have their vote counted and then hopefully, whatever the result, start the process of coming back together again.
Cancelling the referendum will just cause the sore to fester.
It can't be cancelled now, we're in the middle of it already - postal votes have already been returned.
I cannot see how that Farage poster yesterday is doing anything other than pandering to racism and xenophobia. And given that the Tory Leave camp know that Turkey is a long, long way from becoming an EU member state, I don't see how their warnings of the country's impending membership is any different.
The vast majority of people voting Leave are not racists or xenophobes, but it is pretty clear that the Leave campaigns think there is mileage in appealing to those who are.
The Turkey issue has been one of the stranger things about this referendum. I was surprised when I saw it mentioned by Leave as I thought it was off the table. What I hadn't anticipated was for the Remain campaign to handle it so badly. Why hasn't Cameron come out and said "as long as I'm PM, Turkey will not be joining the EU"? During his interview with Andrew Neil, George Osborne looked decidedly shifty when asked about Turkey. I wonder if some of the Leavers have got an idea of what's coming up over the next few months and know that Cameron and Osborne aren't in a position to make firm commitments.
Cameron has said precisely that to the extent that he is able to diplomatically. The Tory Leave ministers know what the situation is. Gove said explicitly on the TV earlier this week that he did not think the government would veto Turkish EU membership. That is just a lie. But it is a lie with a purpose. And that purpose is to scare people into thinking that millions of Turks will soon be flooding into the country. It's more subtle than Farage's open racism, but it has exactly the same aim.
Why would we veto Turkish membership if we didn't veto Romanian & Bulgarian membership? Their GDPs are pretty similar. Of course they first need to meet the admission criteria, which is a lot further off than Leave imply.
Rochdale I agree with a lot of what you say. I think part of the problem is that true (laissez-faire) capitalism has been replaced by crony capitalism. In the 19th century entrepreneurs would often make a fortune and lose it again. Now it is heads I win, tails I get bailed out. I think the key error was bailing out the banks. If you look at Iceland their banks were too big to bail out so they let them fail. This caused a serious recession but within a few years Iceland was growing again. On the contrary we haven't fixed our problems and just seem to be putting sticking plasters on them.
I know how bad "the north" is suffering as my grandmother lives in one of the Welsh Valleys and the high street seems to be becoming sadder and sadder each time I visit. In the south, we have different problems around the cost of living. My partner and I rent a 2 bed flat in Maidenhead and the cost to buy this flat would be nearly 300k. Crazy money.
If we vote to remain, nothing will change. That is why a leave vote is the only sign of hope for some people.
I am both a socialist and a capitalist. I've made a very good career and comfy living from directly generating profits for the businesses I have represented. Profit from commerce is a good thing, an important thing - we want to create well paid secure jobs and that means profit. Where my red streak comes in is the recognition that capitalism is a caged beast and we need to properly maintain the cage.
A large part of the problem we have now is that capitalism has sold its cage for scrap. On one hand we try and commercialise things that shouldn't be commercial. It is immoral to make a profit from providing palliative care for dying children at the lowest possible cost. On the other hand we have scrapped capitalism and replaced it with bankism. No risk. No return. No investment - gamble today, take the profit tomorrow no concern for next week never mind the long term.
Reason for posting / viewing here...come on we all know the answer to that...the monty Hall problem!!!!!
Completely wrong! I'm just loitering here waiting for the long-promised AV thread, after which I can beam back up to the mothership and we can resume our journey.
I suggest you message your mothership that one maybe a while...
Very few predicting a LEAVE win on here this morning, in fact absolutely no one, despite all that recent polling evidence.
I am. I think Leave will win. I don't think the murder yesterday will affect anything and neither should it. I'd like to think the vile Farage poster will get some people thinking, but I imagine minds are mostly made up now. We're voting to pull out.
I agree with you insofar as, unlike a number of PBers, I don't believe yesterday's events will have a major impact, perhaps 1% or thereabouts maximum - as you say most people have already made up their minds and millions, like me, have already voted. What sways me towards a REMAIN outcome is the simple fact that the betting fraternity en masse very seldom get things wrong and they are going for a small but virtually unanimous win for REMAIN. Who can remember when the bookies were last wrong to this extent? ........ Oh, wait ......
The bookies were not wrong in 2015, 2010, or even 1992. They all called the direction of travel- that the Tories would be the largest party, although they got the extent wrong.
That is what got me interested in political betting in the early 90's- I realised that the betting markets were a much more reliable indicator of what was going to happen than the polls. I was absolutely gutted in 1992 because I was convinced those polls were right- but the bookies were on the Tories. The polls were wrong....and so now I follow the money to avoid that sense of disappointment and frustration of false hope.
So, you can imagine my pleasure when Mike Smithson set up an internet site dedicated to this. I've been hooked since 2004.
For the leave campaign to win we would be in the very real, unchartered territory of all the bookies calling the direction of travel wrong.
Following the market as a gamblers guide is a route to poverty.
That's true by and large, but with the exception of political betting. Most sports, however well informed you are, have some large element of chance.
The only time I've lost money on political betting is when I've gone against the prevailing mood of markets....in 2008 I got carried away on Obama and lost a fair whack on some long shot states. I also lost heavily on Oxford and Abingdon West in 2010 thinking that the seat was a shoe in for Evan Harris- little did I realise that they had changed the boundaries.
I think the closest political betting gets is to insiders on the X factor who know week by week the exact vote tallies.
What is driving this drift? I haven't seen any new polling.
That was supposed to be a poll out at 1am, which they delayed because of the tragedy yesterday...perhaps somebody has had that info lying around and decided to make use of it...I believe it will now be published at 1am Saturday.
Comments
My theory is that there are the public polls and the private polls- the same private polls that were telling people that the Tories were considerably ahead in 2015 (backed up the betting markets), are telling them that remain is still in the lead- maybe not quite as much as it was a few weeks ago, but still sufficiently ahead to make 2-1 on value.
Well spotted on the Mail "correction" on immigration. If we have any interest at all in more rational politics might it be possible to collectively banish this evil and amoral rag to the outer darkness where it belongs.
Rochdale Pioneers said yesterday that he thought the ad was right for its intended audience.
Not listened to it myself (trying to work) but LBC's James O'Brien has, according to (very divided) Twitter, been making, er, controversial political comments about the reasons behind yesterday's events.
Miss C, I still think Remain will win. However, it may prove, for Cameron/Osborne, Pyrrhic.
She thinks Farage's poster just shows how many people are queuing up to come into the country. For her, there's no Nazi symbolism and she grew up during WWII. I wonder if we're overthinking this? I'll own my first thought was that it was some kind of pastiche of the famous Saatchi & Saatchi ad, rather than any kind of arbeit macht frei connotation.
*P.S. I think turnout will be very high among London AB. Lots of people down here are scared to death of a Leave win who are not otherwise very politically interested.
The momentum of the anti-establishment LEAVE campaign has been halted.
The change in tone of the campaign means that some people will rethink their anti-establishment position.
This means a few percentage points swing from LEAVE to REMAIN.
We have to wait for polls next week to see what percentage revert to the conventional status quo.
That is what got me interested in political betting in the early 90's- I realised that the betting markets were a much more reliable indicator of what was going to happen than the polls. I was absolutely gutted in 1992 because I was convinced those polls were right- but the bookies were on the Tories. The polls were wrong....and so now I follow the money to avoid that sense of disappointment and frustration of false hope.
So, you can imagine my pleasure when Mike Smithson set up an internet site dedicated to this. I've been hooked since 2004.
For the leave campaign to win we would be in the very real, unchartered territory of all the bookies calling the direction of travel wrong.
But for so many people there is no difference. They don't care if its economic migration within the EU or without. Or if they're refugees fleeing for their lives. They just don't want them here under any circumstances. A combination of our broken economy, our broken polity and scum press has played on people's fears to the point where they say no to rescuing children.
The poster is for them. Farage got it spot on. Don't blame Farage, blame all of us. We did this.
It will be claimed it is inciting hatred.
I think he'd want to use it as a mandate for a further round of negotiations of our EU membership.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-36553552
A poll of Northern Ireland voters suggests there has been a significant move towards a Leave vote in next week's EU referendum.
The survey, carried out by market research agency Millward Brown, showed 48% of people in Northern Ireland who intend to vote will choose to remain.
Almost one third (32%) want to leave with 20% still undecided.
The last Millward Brown poll, published in May, showed 55% in favour of Remain and 23% for Leave.
Stripping out "Don't knows" yields 60-40, a change from the 70-30 result earlier in the year so consistent with a broad swing to "leave".
I'm going to assume GE turnout here - a rising tide tends to float all boats so the relative effect of NI should remain constant in any case.
GE voting Electorate: 30,697,835
NI voting Electorate: 705,509
The polls don't poll Northern Ireland so we have 29,992,326 polled voters in the errm polls.
Current "best guess" for leave % 51.7 (Just over) from the pool of almost 30 million 'mainland' voters.
Working through assuming 60-40 Remain/leave in NI means that the leave % of 51.7 heads south to 51.47%.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36558694
It sounds like a stupid place for a race, beyond the standard tedium of street circuits.
Merkel deserves much more credit than she's given for having foresight on the migration issue and trying to address things with a long-term strategy in mind.
Inciting hatred? You're havin' a laugh.
'Aamir Tahir, of the Dry Clean Centre, said the gunman was heard shouting "Britain first".
He said: "The lady I work with heard two loud bangs but I wasn't there, I was stuck in traffic at the time. I wish I was there because I would have tried to stop him.
"The whole street thinks it was me but it wasn't. Apparently the guy who did it shouted 'Britain first' and if I had been there I would have tackled him."'
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/jo-cox-shooting-man-who-shot-labour-mp-shouted-says-eyewitness-a7085656.html
Why a leftist paper would bother to press ahead and publish irresponsible and irrelevant hearsay is anyones' guess...
The only way to sort this (humanely) is to work to stabilise and develop the countries of origin and provide aid assistance to those too weak, or poor to avoid people smugglers.
We can then take sensible quotas of the most vulnerable.
I don't think he needs a Leave vote to become PM though. A narrow remain win remains their best case scenario. And whilst yesterday has forced a pause for thought, the civil war in the Tory party has torn them apart and both sides still want to defeat the other. There is no gluing this back together, I don't see how Cameron is PM for longer than a few months after this.
Some of us come here to discuss F1, the genetic engineering of fish, and the Second Punic War.
Miss Plato, I wonder if it's like Little England again, with different sides seeing something wildly differently.
There are some (fewer and fewer over time) who want to discuss betting, post tips, find value in markets. These posts are by their very nature literal and factual, and unlikely to cause offence or misunderstanding.
Others discuss politics. These are by their very nature speculative, confrontational or ambiguous.
Then there is the "rolling news" nature of this site. I read PB for the same reason I read Twitter, for a view of what is happening in the World from people I believe to be informed, with opinions I want to be aware of and issues I want to understand. The breadth of knowledge and experience is unsurpassed by any other social group I have come across.
I post things from Twitter that I think are interesting (might prompt discussion), relevant (add the discussion currently under-way), amusing or breaking news.
When I engage with individual posts or posters, I do it for the thrill of discourse. Debating with people is fun, especially with people who disagree with you. And yes, that includes slanging, sneering and jibing. I can't say I am proud of it, but I can't say I regret much of it either. If I go too far I can only apologise.
What I don't expect to do is change people's minds necessarily or imagine that anything anyone posts here impacts much of anything in the Real World, OGH posting polls excepted.
To your first point, somebody sent me a link to this. It's a blog by someone else. I agree with the sentiments, and I post it here so others can read it and judge for themselves. I don't expect to shift any votes.
If you went back in time 200 years and told people living in Britain that not only would we not be at war with either France or Germany or Spain in 2016 but they would actually be our allies, they would be amazed.
I understand that for some older people the idea of going back to the 1950s appeals.
But part of the reason the 1950s appeal is that you were young then, and it’s always better when you are young. And the 1950s were always going to look better because of what came before – rationing, bombs falling onto your neighbourhoods, a war in Europe.
https://garybainbridge.com/2016/06/08/column-june-9-2016/
Cameron's far more practical and far safer policy should have been the blueprint for the European response to the refugee crisis and he is the one European leader who has come out of this whole episode with his reputation enhanced in my view. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, Merkel has built a motorway.
I know how bad "the north" is suffering as my grandmother lives in one of the Welsh Valleys and the high street seems to be becoming sadder and sadder each time I visit. In the south, we have different problems around the cost of living. My partner and I rent a 2 bed flat in Maidenhead and the cost to buy this flat would be nearly 300k. Crazy money.
If we vote to remain, nothing will change. That is why a leave vote is the only sign of hope for some people.
There are some 50 countires in the world with major oil and gas reserves. In Scotland's case the latest opened gas fields will meet double Scottish domestic requirements for the next quarter of a century. When oil prices are high or low these countires still have a huge asset as Cameron inadvertently admitted recently during this debate when he said that being outside the EU was all right for Norway because it is a small country with lots of oil!
And by the way Scotland has a few other things as well including a huge food and drink industry, world class universities, a beautiful country, top quality engineering exporters, higher exports per head than the UK and a much better trade balance, improving industrial productivity compared to the UK and higher GDP per head.
Oh and an indpendent Scotland would not be having this intensely damaging introspection about whether or not it is a genuinely European country.
I still feel an affinity with the likes of Richard Nabavi, Big G, JohnO and Topping (even though they all are royally annoying me by voting Remain!) and can see us working together afterwards.
I think Osborne needs to go for the good of the body politik. He is a disgrace.
I think you are wrong. I think the Out campaign up to now has successfully exploited our innate racism. It is in us all.....we are tribal mammals. It is in our DNA to occupy a space and then protect it from others taking it from us. Farage's comment that he would prefer his next door house to be occupied by christian whites rather than Roma resonates too- we can accept people better who look like us.
But this poster, the iconography of the 30's, Farage's megalomania at the centre, is just too much. It is so obviously racist- it'll make people baulk at who they are associating with, and make them feel bad about themselves about supporting this cause.
The narrative over the next few days is going to be that, while there isn't a soul in public life who is anything other than horrified by what happened yesterday, we've got to take a long, hard look at ourselves and our rhetoric. Are we inadvertently encouraging disturbed and suggestible people to do awful things?
Farage isn't unique in this at all but he happened to be the man left standing up in front of a "BREAKING POINT" poster when the music stopped, and that simply isn't a comfortable place to be.
I want Andrea Leadsom. She is fantastic.
I've calculated the difference to a sub 1% change. Individual polls simply aren't that accurate - so it makes sense for them not to bother changing 'just this once' as normal VI doesn't apply to NI anyway.
There is also credible evidence he was mentally ill. So it would not be unreasonable to speculate (and all we have is speculation) that this was a right-winger with mental health problems. The Farage poster, although only released that morning was the last in a series of dog-whistles. Then Brexit mad dog hears the whistle. Then do you blame the sick individual or those blowing the whistle? I go with the latter but it's entirely up to you.
This has been the most bitter and nastiest few weeks I can remember in the country. The only we way we have any hope of moving on is through the democratic process... Allowing people to cast their ballot, have their vote counted and then hopefully, whatever the result, start the process of coming back together again.
Cancelling the referendum will just cause the sore to fester.
I agree - he's finished anyway. Six years at the Treasury was at least one year too long, as we've seen in the past.
I'm *not* going to let our campaign to restore democratic control to Britain to be defined by Farage and let him win, so he can continue to be front and centre of our politics and suck at the teat of Brussels.
Vote Leave. Let the sensible leavers like Gove, Leadsom and sceptical Remainers like May take over. Kill off Farage for good.
Tory MPs will, under the rules, choose two candidates to go to the membership. One will be a loyalist (perhaps Osborne, though I personally think Osborne will do a deal with someone). Another will be a Brexiteer. A few months ago, that would certainly have been Boris, but he's been perceived to have had a poor campaign personally and now it's probably Gove.
If Remain win, Cameron continues and Boris may be able to regroup. As it stands, I'm not sure a Leave win is great for him.
But if, as your posting mentions, one went back 200 years that would put you to 1816. That is one year into a 99 year long period where we were not at war with France, Germany or Spain. So really the attempt to describe our current lack of war with our neighbours as exceptional and further to equate it with our EU membership fails even on the most basic historical level.
Why is this so potent? Well the obvious reasons - Islam, middle east civil wars, too many immigrants in general but I think politicians will struggle to counteract it. They're not trusted, not least on the issue of Europe and particularly by the older generation who feel they were duped in 1975. It's hard to argue they're wrong on that.
A large part of the problem we have now is that capitalism has sold its cage for scrap. On one hand we try and commercialise things that shouldn't be commercial. It is immoral to make a profit from providing palliative care for dying children at the lowest possible cost. On the other hand we have scrapped capitalism and replaced it with bankism. No risk. No return. No investment - gamble today, take the profit tomorrow no concern for next week never mind the long term.
What is driving this drift? I haven't seen any new polling.
That's true by and large, but with the exception of political betting. Most sports, however well informed you are, have some large element of chance.
The only time I've lost money on political betting is when I've gone against the prevailing mood of markets....in 2008 I got carried away on Obama and lost a fair whack on some long shot states. I also lost heavily on Oxford and Abingdon West in 2010 thinking that the seat was a shoe in for Evan Harris- little did I realise that they had changed the boundaries.
I think the closest political betting gets is to insiders on the X factor who know week by week the exact vote tallies.