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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Wiping out the Lib Dems might have been Cameron’s greatest
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Wiping out the Lib Dems might have been Cameron’s greatest strategic mistake as Prime Minister
When David Cameron reflects on his earlier than anticipated departure as Prime Minister I wonder if in hindsight he’ll regret his and Sir Lynton’s Crosby targeting of the Lib Dem held seats at the last general election.
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In any case, it was always highly likely that if the LDs had any choice they would choose to go with Labour - for the simple reason that they needed to even it up at 1-1 having gone with the Conservatives before.
Back in the real world.......
The French strengthen the border "inwards" between the UK and France. Great!! Way to go... Hey that will stop whatever Madame and Messieurs consider a threat from anywhere else...... Except on the most protected border in tout country?
Meanwhile their tourist industry gets utterly f**ked from UK.
Oh well......... *shakes head*
Soooooo."..Infringement of said rules means you get the pole position*
*However as long as you do not change a computer hard disc or an IPad password in Which case you go to 10th on the thread.
PS sorry MikeL but rules is rules.....
Given a second chance in 2015, I doubt the Lib Dems would have opted to continue in coalition, also they were always going to be clobbered at the general election, there’s no telling how few would have remained, irrespective of Crosby’s intervention. Anyhows, that's enough with the whatifery.
The biggest,mistake they made was not claim the benefit of the. Years 2010 -15. Yes there were punch ups but it worked well. They really should have gone in shoulder to shoulder and won seats on the back of what they did.
To distance themselves 6 months before just let them be targets and scapegoats.
edit - I am not a lib dem
If Cameron had wanted to stay on as Prime Minister then he should have campaigned for a Leave vote.
Leave would have won a thumping victory & Cameron would have been a national hero.
In older news..
Guardian - Karie Murphy fails to make Labour candidate shortlist for key Halifax seat
If MrsMay eliminates FoM she will walk the next GE.
Lib & Lab will be for open borders.
UKIP will not stand against (successful) brexiteers.
We saw on June24th what 4 weeks of campaigning on immigration does to electability..
Theresa May won't suffer the same problems because she'll win a landslide at the next election.
Maybe.
Or maybe Britons seeing recent foreigners being allowed to vote might have thought that the "Leave" campaign's contention that the UK was rapidly losing its sovereignty was very valid.
Maybe people seeing a swifty like that would think that the Lib-Dems were a bunch of tosspots capable of selling out their country in order to obtain a short-term victory.
http://m.huffpost.com/uk/entry/uk_5790bae5e4b0e3583c789316?edition=uk
Permanently disenfranchised? And she calls herself a political reporter....
About 4 weeks too late........
As a scientist I really should aim for zeroth!
The issue with the Lib Dems was that they spent decades building up a two-faced "all things to everybody" party, claiming to be "Not Tories" to left-leaning voters and "Not Labour" to right-leaning voters. The problem with this is that once forced to make a stand they lost the left-leaning voters by entering the coalition and they lost the right-leaning voters by disowning it. So they ended up with who precisely?
If they want a hint, they're looking at the wrong border for the source of their problem.
Another was why Cameron's negotiations were so half-hearted. It is not that Cameron threw away his best card but that he did not seem to be asking for anything in particular, so long as he got something.
A third is why Cameron did not follow Harold Wilson in remaining neutral.
It does seem pretty clear the referendum pledge was intended to be thrown away during negotiations for a new coalition (which implies that even if Conservative private polling was as good as we were since told, no-one believed it). Cameron had not even attempted to sign up Sir Lynton Crosby before the referendum was called.
Another known known is that Cameron took too much comfort from the Scottish IndyRef -- yes, he'd won by a thoroughly negative campaign, but he apparently forgot it was a damn close-run thing with only Gordon Brown's last minute intervention saving the union.
As Southam Observer reminds us, there was a rush to register voters previously disenfranchised in another of Osborne's backfiring wheezes.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/how-david-cameron-plan-to-screw-labour-cost-him-the-eu-referendum_uk_5790bae5e4b0e3583c789316?edition=uk
hidden within the cache of information dumped on the government website before ministers went to recess, was a clue as to what went wrong: a written statement by Gary Streeter, a spokesperson for the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission, which showed a full nine percentage point drop between 10th June 2014 and 1st December 2015 in the number of 18-19 year olds registered to vote.
The early part? You mean, the first 16 years or so of a 17 year war?
Entertaining but devoid of realism. With the LDs in tow, the Coalition would have been even more Eurocentric. No deal at all - like it or lump it.
Back in the real world, I always suspected we'd have delays with a chance for project fear to continue (plus a handy alibi for any blips in the economy). A temporary stop to FOM will be cobbled together (with the other Governments complaining bitterly to show what a good and special deal it is for us).
Then a new referendum on this superb, enhanced revitalised EU.
I'd still vote against (as FOM wasn't a big issue for me) but I'll be outvoted. And I will accept it (hope I'm not virtue-signalling).
Curses ... we'd have had freedom if it wasn't for those pesky politicians.
Surely we can regulate how many traffic jams they cause? Lane rental to the French Embassy?
https://www.betfair.com/sport/motor-sport
I tipped it (only evens, Ladbrokes) in my pre-race piece:
http://enormo-haddock.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/hungary-pre-race-2016.html
When the result is not in doubt it's easy to take the noble path and sit it out. When it was set to be a no holds barred blood fest, of course he felt he had to participate.
The alternate explanation, that Cameron is so arrogant he thinks he walks on water and apparently thought stirring up internal party trouble was a great idea, doesn't seem anywhere like as plausible. Someone who was PM for 6 years and only had the referendum as he had no choice, would I think not have acted in that way unless he felt he had no choice.
He may have been wrong in that. But it makes sense.
(Not to belittle the deaths of hundreds of thousands or anything)
The idea that you would use it as the blueprint where your starting lead is vastly smaller was bizarre.
But in any case I think the referendum was lost long before then because no-one was making a positive case for the EU - either as it is or as it is developing. It's all very well talking about co-operation but then we saw one country unilaterally and at a moment's notice open its borders to a million people. What co-operation and consultation was happening then?
The way Clegg was monstered by Farage should have given the pro-EU side pause for thought. And the fact that Cameron looked as if he had to go round the capitals of Europe begging for some changes didn't help either. The optics were dreadful. If France wanted something they didn't behave like that. Ditto Germany. Any yet Britain looked and behaved like a mendicant nation with no strategy.
I worked it out once (sadly didn't make a note of the figures) but the death toll he inflicted upon the Romans would've been the equivalent, I think, of fighting London and knocking off about four Prime Ministers, over 200 MPs and over a million people.
At almost any points in history, any other nation (or even Rome itself at another time) would've sued for peace.
In the long-term the absence of a serious rival [Carthage] led to political factions building up and politics becoming more about serving oneself than the state, weakening the Republic which had been so strong. But, at the time, the Romans were impressively nuts. They sold the field Hannibal encamped upon after Cannae for the full market price (after he'd annihilated the largest army in Roman history, four times larger than a regular consular army).
That's why sound institutions matter more than brilliant individuals. Institutions and political structures have far greater longevity and, whilst less interesting, are better for good governance than systems that focus power on individuals. It's one of the reasons Labour's fiefdom devolution idiocy was so obviously flawed, and why we need an English Parliament.
In any case a problem with sindyref was not enough positive emotional appeals about the union, and that was less of an option in the eu ref - many of the things that might be used in a positive case are not actually seen as positive by many of the public. Bless her heart Ruth Davidson actually tried for a positive case, claiming we make the rules work for us, but it was less effective than other tactics and basically a one off.
Sky's reports aren't making much sense.
The LibDems should also -- even if only for cynical reasons -- have made a greater show of talking to Labour.
That all said, registration drives are always welcome in advance of a vote - the record absolute turnout of over 33.5m for the referendum was very welcome.
Mr. kle4, there were still hundreds of thousands in Rome. Whilst a crisis, their system was incredibly resilient, and most of their allies stuck with them even after Cannae.
And the loss at Cannae followed a massive loss at Trasimene (smaller ones at Trebia and Ticinus). It would be interesting to see an alternate history where Quintus Fabius Maximus was never dictator. Without his example of frustrating Hannibal, I wonder if the Romans might have surrendered, or tried confrontation again (and lost).
Chest of Drawers .. Chess Draw .. Chester Drawl .. Chester Drawbridge .. Chester Drawing .. Chester Drawstring .. F*ck Chester .. Chester B*llocks ..
Time will tell ....
Rather like Monaco, the No Safety Car tip is great if it doesn't rain, my only concern would be a repeat of Lewis' accident from Friday which required a couple of heavy trucks to repair the tyre barrier afterwards.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/24/jeremy-corbyn-labour-leadership-mutiny-desperation
I had no idea the 107% rule was still in place. I remember it being quite prominent back in the minardi days, but I hadn't heard about it for years.
I see no reason to doubt the polls on this one.
Mr. Sandpit, one hopes Mrs. Sandpit keeps you suitably entertained.
They should have remained silent until the possibility of a coalition between the two parties ahead of them had been ruled out. There were 200 or so MPs from each of those larger parties who could have readily formed a 400 strong majority.
Most of those were, and are, more hostile to the Lib Dems than they were to each other.
Restaurants and pubs pay to become homes for Pokemon Go monsters to attract gaming customers https://t.co/8VkNNOLoWo https://t.co/Loog6e8QtF
The tuition fee pledge was a critical mistake, both in the making and the abandonment. However the essentials of Coalition, something the LibDems had argued for many a decade decades remained the same - stable, effective government in the national interest and the need for compromise on the respective manifestos.
Previously there were several badly funded teams (Minardi, Simtek etc) that would do things like sit out Friday because they couldn't afford to run the cars or fix them if they broke, the 107% rule ensures they have to make more than a token effort if they want to participate in F1.
I do like the chart online showing Nintendo, specifically with Pokemon, trying to encourage social interaction, with trading Pokemon in games to battling them in public, culminating in Pokemon go and the message 'go outside for f!?!'s sake'!