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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The Tory YouGov mini-surge seems to be over
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The Tory YouGov mini-surge seems to be over
Almost no change in today's YouGov Sun poll
CON 32
LAB 40
LD 9
UKIP 13
For the 3rd consecutive day the LDs in single figures
0
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It is a bit like the Dan Hodges syndrome. He only talks about the opinion polls when the Labour lead reduces to say 5%. Once it goes above that figure they either strangely seem to fall off his radar, says he doesn't believe them or are not representative of what he has been told by an unamed Labour insider (always unamed).
Building 1.2 million houses for £100,000 each.
Chortle. You really don't have a clue.
Below is a list of countries that have recently
joined the European Union, are applying to join,
have applied to join in the past, or have been
discussed as possible future members. In each
case please say whether you think they should
or should not be allowed to join the European
Union?
Croatia (+4) - Lab +15; LD +26
Serbia: (-15) - LD +5
Turkey; (-31)
Albania: (-33)
Ukraine (-21)
Kazakhstan: (-44)
Russia: (-32)
Morocco: (-42)
Israel: (-38)
Iceland: (+24)
Should not imagine Iceland wanting to enter a common fishing agreement.
"They choose to get elections spectacularly wrong instead, that's a full time job."
Labour have an 8% ish lead in mid-term. As the only major government party.
Lab maj nailed on Tim?
Or is 8% not all that perhaps?
Cameron: 96
Miliband: 61
Maj Con - 31(-) remains most popular option, ahead of Maj Lab: 28(-1), both significantly ahead of coalitions (Lab/Lib: 13, Lab/Con: 8). Maj Con most popular among UKIP: 38
http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/j3rc2i92w0/YG-Archive-Pol-Sun-results-030713.pdf
The full impact of mass immigration on British life was laid bare last night by a Home Office report.
It said that half the population lives in a town or city which has experienced high levels of immigration over the past decade.
Ministers said this ‘uncontrolled’ flow had caused a number of problems for wider society, ranging from pressure on maternity services, high rates of infectious diseases and a squeeze on school places, to disproportionate levels of some types of crime, inflated rents and immigrants living in ‘beds in sheds’.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2355208/Toll-mass-migration-UK-life-Half-Britons-suffer-strain-places-schools-police-NHS-housing.html#ixzz2Y3Rkv9AJ
"Just over a month ago Uncut reported that angry members in Falkirk West were considering reporting Unite to the Information Commissioner because of a breach of their data protection rights.
Under the terms of the Act, each individual must have agreed before their personal details are passed to a different organisation.
At the point where Unite members’ personal details were registered with the Labour party, without their consent being first granted, the law will have been broken.
Then, yesterday Uncut reported on the likelihood of a breach of the Fraud Act. Whoever completed the bogus applications and validated them would have contravened section 2 of the Act under the terms of “false misrepresentation”
Submitting completed forms to the Labour party, without the new members’ consent, would have constituted false misrepresentation.
Two laws, two breaches. One to do with peoples’ rights over their personal information, the other with the act of someone deliberately falsifying membership forms...." http://labour-uncut.co.uk/
All of that may be true.
And despite all of that, the opposition's Poll lead is only 8%.
Which is, historically, pretty low.
http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/userpoll.html
The answer, technically, is probably about UKIP 60%, Con 40%, oth 0, but that would require perfect distribution of the Con vote to maximise their seat numbers.
More practically, one would have to assume a Lab figure of at least 35%, LD 10%, oth 5%, so Con+UKIP only have 50% to play with.
Electoral Calculus gives you the option of checking for UKIP
IMHO one should only chortle when clasping a 5 pound note and going off for a "slap up meal".
Bah!
Also, you need facilities and services as well as housing; roads, power,phone,sewerage etc, shops, employment, leisure facilities. These cost a great deal extra.
So let us get the figures you want. A 1-bedroom flat in my village, above a shop, costs £129,000, whilst a 1-bedroom retirement flat is £95,000.
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-41522852.html
But not everyone wants to live in a retirement flat. Some need more space. So here is the price list for new builds in the village, at £224,000 to £320,000
http://www.bovishomes.co.uk/new-homes-at-cambourne/the-green/
Okay, that is in a high-demand area. Let us take the northeast; I chose Newcastle at random.
http://www.smartnewhomes.com/browse/development/United_Kingdom/North/North-East/Tyne-And-Wear/Newcastle/page1.aspx
Not many for £100,000 there, are there? And the low-priced ones are all help-to-buy.
How about London? I picked Croydon. Oh dear, £500,000 for a two-bedroom flat.
http://www.primelocation.com/new-homes/property/london/croydon/
So you can get houses (mostly flats) for less than £100,000 in some places with difficulty. But that is at the low end. Labour seem to think that every child needs a bedroom, and say that the average family sixe is four people, which means you need three bedrooms.
Show me where you can get a new-build three-bedroom house for £100,000. There are probably a few, but they will be the exception.
You are wrong. As usual. For the second time in a day you saw a tweet, jizzed yourself up and spammed it onto the site without thinking.
From memory, it is unprecedented for a governing party to have such a vast lead mid-term. Governing parties usually don't have any lead whatsoever mid-term. So why the odd pattern in Scotland?
Why is Salmond's government flourishing mid-term while Cameron's flounders?
The government report itself - based on information obtained from local authorities - is worth reading. Rather more nuanced than the headlines but less starry-eyed than some commentators about the benefits and costs of immigration.
"Labour has been accused of hanging a whistleblower out to dry as a row over trade union power engulfs the party. Linda Gow, a candidate in the race for selection in the seat of Falkirk, passed on concerns about misconduct by Unite to Labour officials. She was later subjected to a thinly veiled attack by the union after it was granted access to the secret investigation into claims of a selection “stitch-up”.
Last night she questioned how the union came to identify her as a source. Labour declined to comment... A leaked Unite report revealed that the union has supported prospective candidates in 41 seats, claiming 50 per cent success in getting its preferred candidates selected; Labour admitted 500 people had benefited from union schemes to pay for the membership of new recruits to the party over the past year;
And it was claimed MPs have been threatened with losing Unite funding if they fail to promote the union’s agenda http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/politics/article3807561.ece
So a democratically but useless elected leader, albeit with a very narrow mandate, bites the dust in a coup.
Was it Ed or Morsi ??
Ah Morsi this time ....
Keep your friends close Ed .... but Len closer.
Waterbeach Barracks to the north of Cambridge is about to be redeveloped for housing; they are going to build 12,500 new homes on it over the next few years (probably 20 before it is all finished). These are not exactly going to be low-density housing. Neither will they be selling for £100,000.
http://andrewlainton.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/12500-home-new-town-at-waterbeach-barracks-cambridge-part-of-government-brownfield-land-releases-nppf/
Northstowe is going to be built on the site of the old Oakington Barracks and airfield. This is going to have 10,000 homes.
http://www.northstowe.uk.com/
Both of these have the advantage of being within a few miles of an area of high demand, Cambridge. You would need to find 100 such sites, all in areas where people want to live and have good transport links to areas of employment. There are not that many.
What you would need to do is get the construction companies to either use or lose their land banks. Miliband has actually talked about this. However I doubt you would get the land cheaply, even when misusing a CPO in this way.
http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/development/miliband-targets-land-banking-in-building-drive/6527446.article
Average lead seems fairly stable, but it's worth recollecting a daily poll has a fair amount of statistical noise anyway.
Indeed. Sadly, you will not be able to build massed housing to a decent quality for £100,000 average. Remember, it needs to be decent housing, and therefore up to date with all the latest legislation. It would also be interesting to see if they increase the minimum room size, which has been creeping down for years and are the smallest in Europe.
I'd love someone to show me the figures for this. It appears to have been plucked out of someone's posterior.
Also worth noting that 52% of CURRENT LibDems would prefer a Lab-Lib government (vs 31% who want the current coalition). So the proportion of 2010 Libdems who want to see Clegg do it again is a derisory 1 in 7.
"I suspect these are two polls at the lower end of the normal margin of error and the underlying average will still turn out to be a six or seven point lead, but all the same, the lead appears to be falling."
Take two "current" observations to negate the previous set. Given the volatility amongst the super-set it must take some courage to state that the "surge" is over when a) it may not have existed in the first place, or b) the current set is the out-lier.
Must be a quiet day. Obviously; given how quiet yesterday was....
Falkirk may seem minor, but for Labour it really matters
The Unite union's tactics in the selection of parliamentary candidates are a direct challenge to Ed Miliband's leadership
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/04/falkirk-labour-unite-challenge-miliband
I have provided figures that indicate that a new-build family home for £100,000 is unachievable by a large extent in most parts of the country.
You claim it can be done. May I suggest you provide figures showing that it can be done? After all, according to you it'll be the core of Labour's economic policy. Provide the figures. You seem to think it is possible, so you must have some evidence.
Or is it just blind wishful thinking?
Also remember that the last time a massed housing program was tried after the Second World War, many mistakes were made. We need to learn the lessons of those mistakes and build decent housing that will last, and ones that will be designed to increase social cohesiveness and access to employment. We do not want sink estates.
Merthyr Tydfil and Rhondda Cynon Taf have the highest number of overweight children, while the Vale of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire have the least.
The problem in Wales is worse than England and Scotland.
Health experts said the figures were "worrying" but children still had time to adopt a healthier lifestyle.
The heights and weights of 29,400 reception age children were collected across Wales in the 2011-12 academic year as part of Public Health Wales' first Child Measurement Programme report.
The results showed that seven out of ten children aged four to five had a healthy weight but 28% were classed as overweight or obese.
The report said the figures were "significantly higher" than in every region in England, where on average 23% of children were overweight, with 9.5% classed as being obese.
They were also higher than in Scotland, where 21% of children were overweight, of which 9.8% were obese - although children in Scotland were measured close to their sixth birthday.
"Take a look at any school photograph from the 1970s and you would hardly see any child who is overweight," said Dr Nadim Haboubi, an obesity doctor who is also chair of the National Obesity Forum for Wales.
"Now it's not unusual to have quite a few in each class picture.
"It's also revealing that in the 70s a 10-year-old child was about 10kg lighter than the kids today.
"So I'm not surprised by these results, sadly. And it's down to a combination of many things.
"Most important is the sedentary lifestyle. They are far less active - many parents drive them everywhere and are worried about their safety when they let them go out to play.
"Another factor is the availability of junk food and fizzy drinks - you go into a shop or garage and the availability of chocolates and sweets is shocking.
"And of course, there is the fact that overweight kids are more likely to have obese parents and they are more likely to carry on being overweight until adulthood.
The report also pointed to a "clear association between deprivation and obesity among four to five-year-olds in Wales".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-23168523
Overweight children are not deprived (of food) - just visit Africa to see deprivation.
However they are deprived as they have parents who set bad dietary examples, who buy ready meals rather then cooking with good ingredients, who are too lazy to do physical activity with their children and are probably too ill-educated to understand the whole problem.
Since this conversation generates more heat than light. RIBA estimate the average UK house size at 1033 sq ft. here's some older construction costs (p14) slap a bit of inflation on and it's not far out. This excludes land acquisition and civil infrastructure, and you can't build houses without either. In any case the risk of using averages is they tell you very little it all comes down to the specifics of the project.
http://www.publicarchitecture.co.uk/knowledge-base/files/indicative_building_costs.pdf
so for £100k a unit you'd need to build lots of smaller flats or just not build in the South or have all your required infrastructure already built.
It's over-eating/lack of exercise that's the prime cause. A real problem, as I mentioned a day or two ago, is that feeding kids too much means they produce more fat cells, which raises the baseline for their level of fat on a permanent basis (these cells are created during childhood and basically hang around forever).
He has promised a 're-negotiation' with the EU, while admitting that he will recommend staying in whatever. Thus, he adopts a totally unbelievable approach to the EU. Then he is disappointed and hurt when nobody believes him.
Cameron's problem with UKIP supporters is partly that they don't like him, partly that they don't trust him, but the killer emotion is that they don't respect him.
Of course I particularly liked Spinster Weekly :^ )
http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2013/07/03/poke-challenge-made-up-magazines/
Doesn't anyone in the Labour Party worry about the implications for post-2015?
"For the purposes of this section a representation may be regarded as made if it (or anything implying it) is submitted in any form to any system or device designed to receive, convey or respond to communications (with or without human intervention)."
If the submission occurred in London then the offence might have occurred there. I don't know how Labour process their new membership applications but I would have thought that they would have been submitted in Falkirk.
Of course, from Labour's point of view, that's great for winning elections, or at least it's great for winning the next election, but it's not great for governing. In the event of a 2015 Labour-led government, where is that irrational hatred going to go next, given that the two Eds will be forced to make exactly the same kinds of compromise which the coalition has to make?
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/35?view=extent
There is a strong argument to cut the welfare bill by building more social housing. However putting this into an eye grabbing headline is just soviet 5 year planning to build for building' sake. Personally I'd start with a budget and then pareto building to where housing benefit cost is highest. It might be better to build fewer houses in the South but relieve housing budget pressure and slow down inflationary private sector rents. Likewise there are other things can be done. Instead of rebuilding big chuncks of housing in Northern England it would make more sense to refurbish the housing stock, this is both cheaper as an existing infrrasturcture is largely in place and probably better for communities. The recent refurb scheme in Stoke looked worth replicating if it works.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2184334/Empty-houses-sale-1-Britains-cheapest-street.html
So for me it's forget house numbers, rather set a budget and work out the best return on it to the public purse.
It really is a hostage to fortune, which is going to make it very hard to govern, especially in the event of a hung parliament or small majority.
@RichardNabavi
How depressing. No-one positively wants to vote for you, they're either indifferent or motivated by revenge, the most negative of all emotions.
Didn't anyone in the Scottish Conservative & Unionist Party worry about the implications for post-1979?
'Morsi's mistake was to focus his attention on Islam, rather than making the reforms necessary to improve the economic well being of his country. Consequently his rule has ended. One wonders when the eurocretins will be removed as their "European dream" takes precedence over the economic well-being of Club Med.'
Yup.
But rather than just ideologically fixating on new build, we should also be having a three-pronged drive:
1) To renovate and make more attractive existing housing stock (the opposite of the Pathfinder scheme)
2) To make areas of low house desirability more desirable. Spend the money to try and get businesses and employment into areas, or give them good and cheap transport links to areas of employment. Have a drive to reduce crime, including long-term measures. Ask residents what they need and provide it.
3) High-quality new-build social housing, not rock-bottom, cheap social housing on new sink estates.
Whenever I've mentioned new housing on here, I've talked about facilities, transport, jobs and services. A new house - and especially new houses - are part of a complete package that needs careful consideration. To be socially cohesive it needs a range of properties, both in style and appeal. From cheap one-bedroom flats to new starter homes, from pensioner flats with duty manager to five bedroom places for large families. It needs leisure facilities and parking. It needs access to shops and green spaces.
But if you want to see what happens when such a grand scheme is proposed, look no further than Prescott's ludicrous Pathfinder scheme.
Tory/UKIP 45
Labour 40
"Thousands of secular state schools could be run by the Church of England after the Government agreed a deal to expand its role in education. Bishops will be given the power to appoint governors at the schools, in a change to academies policy negotiated by church leaders.
The Church will be legally obliged to preserve the character of non-faith schools, but the decision still provoked outrage among secular groups. They cast doubt on the safeguards, saying that the decision would extend religious influence over state schools hugely and irreversibly.
“This will surreptitiously bring the education system under religious control,” Keith Porteous Wood, of the National Secular Society, said. “It will lead to the further alienation of school children who are from non-religious or religiously unconcerned families. Despite now being the majority, they are becoming increasingly disadvantaged in admissions and by the growing religionisation of publicly-funded schools. Once schools have been taken over by religious interests, it will be almost impossible to ever bring them back under community control.”
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/education/article3807588.ece
To start the debate, here's a question tim:
If a company pays £2,500 ERs NI this year, how much will they save next year? Remember, if you think the answer is £2,000, you are "stupid" by your own measure.
Kirsty Buchanan @KirstyBuchanan4 2m
Clegg says it is "not healthy to have a party at the beck and call" of unions and tells Miliband to move Labour into 21st C #callclegg
The Euro in the period 1999 to 2007 allowed the Club Med countries to build up extremely large imbalances. Leaving the Euro would not make those imbalances go away - Greece would still have large debts, a bloated public sector and major tax avoidance, for example.
Now, dropping austerity and leaving the Euro (not that leaving the Euro would automatically stop the austerity; we're not in the Euro, and we have austerity) would certainly make things feel better in the short-term. But it would almost certainly come at the expense of the reforms that we did in the early 1980s under Mrs Thatcher and which Germany did in the 1990s.
There's something else worth remembering: should Italy, for example, leave the Euro, it would almost certainly go through a period of high inflation as the government effectively printed money to balance the budget. This is just like taxation, only invisible: the wealth of Italian savers would be deliberately destroyed.
There is no organisation called either Scottish Labour or Scottish Labour Party registered with the Electoral Commission:
https://pefonline.electoralcommission.org.uk/Search/EntitySearch.aspx
So which Fraud Act is this a breach of?
"Scottish Labour Party
290 Bath Street
Glasgow
G2 4RE"
http://www.scottishlabour.org.uk/page/s/contact-us
Labour and low cost housing, a John Prescott special.
Good luck with your £100,000 fantasy houses.
'Ten developments got the go-ahead under the Design for Manufacture scheme, as it became known - but two of them have failed to materialise at all.
One development that did is Oxley Woods, in Milton Keynes - an estate of 115 modern, eco-friendly homes which stand out strikingly from the town's other, more traditional, brick-built developments.
But first-time buyer Gillian Parker says she has not heard of anyone buying a house there for £60,000.
Her own three-bedroom house was originally advertised for sale at £225,000 when it was put on the market in 2008.
"When the valuer came round, he said it wasn't worth that. It was worth £210,000," she says. "Within 24 hours, the builders had dropped their asking price to match the lower valuation.
"Not having any experience in this, I didn't have any expectations, but I was told by people that were helping that that was rather quick of them to lower so swiftly."
Gillian's is one of 56 homes at Oxley Woods that were projected to cost £60,000 to build.
But the final construction cost was actually around £85,000, according to the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), the national housing and regeneration agency for England.
.
'BBC News - Low-cost housing plan for first-time home-buyers falls flat
www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14410589
Aug 11, 2011 - Low-cost housing plan for first-time home-buyers falls flat. Alvin Hall By Alvin Hall Poorer Than Their Parents, BBC Radio 4. John Prescott ...
A few not-well connected thoughts to start the day. The Telegraph report on the impact of migration read as though the author had been standing In East Ham High Street. The older Romanian men sit either outside the Magasin Romansec or stand in groups outside the various bookies such as Hills and Paddy Power.
Do they drink? No, not too much though there's plenty of early drinkers about if you know where to look. Every time I go to the Doctor's, there's always someone trying to register. The Romanian and Bulgarian families have moved in to any spare flat or house available - the price of houses going through the Savill's auction two weeks ago was very informative with a run-down two-bed terrace with an asking price of £175k going for £215k.
The younger migrant men tend to head for drugs rather than drink while the wealthier men (status measured by size of leather jacket) buy and sell cars in the street or any piece of waste ground. I suspect it's the same all over.
On housing, it's hard to argue with those who advocate a more planned provision. Section 106 agreements mean developers either have to provide funding for a community facility, build the facility themselves or give away a percentage of their development for rented housing which of course reduces the potential profit.
Yet one facility alone does not a community make - we need to be creating local hubs with the new health centre, the new primary school, the new community centre, the new library etc can all co-exist. There is a huge pressure on land in the south-east but while we talk about re-balancing the economy, there seems no mechanism to stop the southeastward migration of that wealth. Perhaps have the north and midlands pay lower rates of tax might be a start.