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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Don Brind sticks his neck out and argues that the leadershi
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Don Brind sticks his neck out and argues that the leadership race is now “too close to call”
There’s an unmistakeable mood of triumphalism in the Corbyn camp after their victory in the High court over allowing all new members to use their vote and a slew of results which have been widely interpreted as showing Jeremy Corbyn really does have momentum.
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(an hereditary one, no less!)
Interesting piece by Don:would like his analysis to be correct but can't see it happening.
This whole article reads like a promotion on behalf of the latest ‘Lets dump Corbyn as Leader’ campaign, in this case, ‘Saving Labour’. – Can’t say I’m entirely convinced by the spiel on their site, or of it succeeding, however, as with Ed Miliband’s defeat of his brother in an earlier Labour Leadership, the Union’s do have a chequered history of manipulating LL contests for a desired outcome.
“This contest is too close to call.” Isn’t that just an ad hoc way of saying ‘our figures are dire, but we don’t want to admit it’ ?
(BTW Don, your link to SavingLabour.Com is down.)
This is all just a revisionist bourgeois smokescreen to try to hide the inevitable fact that the degenerate Owenist-Smithist-Blairite-Kinnockite-Ramsaymacdonaldist clique is directly responsible for the Olympic diving pool turning green. The day is soon coming when the oppressed peasants, workers, soldiers, proletarians, dilettantes, hipsters and scumsters of the Bright New Shining Corbyn Long March Momentous Movement will rise up, cast off their shackles, drink coffee, eat cake, and smash these decadent thought-traitors into the dust.
https://www.savinglabour.com/
Haven't tuned into a single event so far, and it's just passing me by bar clips floating about on Twitter.
Jashvina Shah
I mean come on look at the opening to Raisman's floor routine. Insane #olympics #USA https://t.co/SQsPGSitzx
It might be worth laying Corbyn at 1.14 if you think there's something in it but, personally, I don't and I can't see his price drifting out that much.
Varney
@KatrinaPierson: Trump could sneeze and CNN would run headlines for weeks on how he attacked the environment https://t.co/rq0FzAAKkY
CANADA: A suspect is dead after Canadian police force thwarted an alleged suicide bomb plot - AP
https://t.co/1WvAEVGSW4
Finding the jingoistic BBC commentators quite cringe worthy though.
Less tongue in cheek - the problem is not the leadership, but that Labour MPs no longer represent their core demographic. Amazing how many previous non voters, Lib Dems (but not obsessed by Europe) and WWC have volunteered to me in recent weeks that they'll be voting for Mrs May.
Although I'm not quite as pro-Labour as Mr. Brind, I have been wondering if this might be rather closer than is commonly assumed. Regardless of voting numbers, getting the GMB on-side is an undoubted and significant plus for Smith.
They really need to get somebody with NBA broadcasting experience for the basketball, though, it's virtually unwatchable for anyone who knows the sport. Though maybe judo and equestrian fans would say the same.
If Owen Smith leads them to failure why should he be replaced by someone electable? Why not a female leader or someone with the views of Dianne Abbot? If Jeremy Corbyn leads them to failure, what will be left?
The Labour party is not structured in the same way as the Conservative party, so there is no reason for it to follow the same trajectory of leader types.
Emotionally the Labour and Conservative parties are very different, which is another reason why the courses they follow are likely to be divergent.
If Don is right then BF is way off beam. It gives a 11% chance of Smith win. I assume he is piling in at these odds.
I find your comments, Mortimer, supportive of this view.
Labour's specific problem is, as you imply, that race (including nationality) has replaced class as the principle source of political cleavage. As soon as that happens, representative democracy is a dying animal.
David Scane @DavidScane 10h10 hours ago
@DPJHodges one Corbyn supporter at my CLP tonight said bookies had him as favourite to win the next Gen Elec to wild applause!
Post-truth politics even reaching betting circles. Where will it end?
Lots of people with plenty of cash, mostly based in London, skew the markets.
Which raises an interesting question: how closely did the Betfair prices for those two political events tally with the actual result in London?
Where the GMB's position does matter is on the Labour NEC, where its two representatives can be expected to be swing votes at the very least in the pro/anti-Corbyn battle.
The Tories were on 38 per cent, down 4 percentage points, with Labour on 31 per cent, up 3, Ukip on 13, up 1, and the Lib Dems unchanged on 8 per cent.
Mr Cameron was rated a “good or great” prime minister by 32 per cent of voters, higher than Tony Blair on 20 per cent, John Major on 14 per cent and Gordon Brown on 9 per cent. He was only outstripped by Mrs Thatcher, who was popular with 43 per cent of voters.
But I don't believe that Smith is in the race. The constituency nominations are running nearly 7:1 for Corbyn and while the FPTP effect exaggerates Corbyn's lead (Smith is consistently picking up much more of the votes within the CLPs than the 12.7% of the 213 Associations that he's won - and there are also quite a few that have declined to make nominations), it's hard to argue that Corbyn isn't some way clear among active members. In fact, Corbyn's nominations lead has grown considerably in the last few days - he was running at 5:1 for the first hundred or so.
Is that more than offset by passive members: those who don't turn up to meetings but will cast a vote anyway? It seems unlikely. Labour's membership is now massively skewed to its post-2015 base. From the figures Mike posted the other day, at least 60% have joined since the election simply based on the increase in membership. Given that some pre-2015 members will have resigned in protest and that others will have left for other reasons, that has to give Corbyn an enormous structural advantage, even is some - seemingly like Don - have seen the light since last September.
In my opinion, the best that Smith can hope for is to restrict Corbyn to less than the 59.5% he won last year. Given that that was a four-way contest (i.e. had the votes been redistributed to '2 person preferred', Corbyn would undoubtedly have ended up well over 60%), to keep him below that level in a two-way one would represent progress of a sort - although the upping of the membership fee goes against that argument given Corbyn's utter landslide in the Supporters' section. Will he? My guess is that it'll be close on that score, but not on the headline.
https://twitter.com/MSmithsonPB/status/763634857830473729
https://twitter.com/steveakehurst/status/763461523419369472
https://twitter.com/steveakehurst/status/763462998321197056
For the EU question, the remain side tried to present the EU as diet Coke, but the problem was that the EU was scummy, bacteria infested sparkling sewage water that looked like Coke but tasted rancid. Enough people thought better of it and went for the only other option.
Edited extra bit: Miss Plato, bit on Twitter suggests the chap intended to plant and detonate an IED in a major city.
That's an alarming turn of events.
While the Conservatives have had three women finish second or higher in a leadership contest, Labour's best showing by any woman was third in 1994 when Margaret Beckett got 18.87% of the vote. Beckett was also leader of the party at the time, of course, but had inherited that position rather than won it. (It is also interesting although not very relevant to note that in every leadership election where a woman has been a candidate, they have either withdrawn (2016) or been placed last (2015, 2010, 1994).)
They have had two women deputy leaders, of course, both of whom have been acting leader at least once (Beckett in 1994, Harman in 2010 and 2015). But overall, it's a pretty unimpressive record.
This from a party which also has by far the highest proportion of active female politicians - e.g. despite having 98 fewer MPs than the Conservatives overall, they have 99 female MPs (42%) to the Conservatives' 68 (20.5%). In Wales, for another example, 15 of 29 Labour assembly members are women, but not only is their leader (all three to date) a man, but just three of eight cabinet ministers are women (one of those being Kirsty Williams of the Liberal Democrats) - if we include junior ministers, it is a grand record of five (four) out of twelve. So their record is actually even more dismal than it appears on the surface.
I have sometimes wondered if all-women shortlists are to blame. I might be being harsh, but I have noticed that in both parties women selected via such shortlists tend to be rather arrogant and complacent, and also to be very bad at campaigning. For example, in 2015 only 31 out of 77 candidates selected via AWS were actually elected, despite some eminently winnable seats on the list (it seems quite possible that a poor candidate cost Labour the 28 votes they needed in Gower, for example). Cameron's A-list seemed to have a similar negative impact (it gave us Louise Bagshawe/Mensch and Zac Goldsmith. Nuff said). However, Yvette Cooper and Angela Eagle were both selected without them, so while that may be an issue there is clearly a wider problem somewhere.
Personally, I am a firm believer in meritocracy and implacably opposed to sexual or racial tokenism. But at the same time it seems very strange indeed that apparently not one of nearly half of Labour's MPs is considered fit to be leader, and two-thirds of their Welsh ministers are drawn from less than half the party, and clearly a sign that something is wrong somewhere.
One wonders what would move that.
But the election will be a test of PB's Labour pundits, including me. My prediction at the moment - Corbyn by 57-43.
The YouGov is I think essentially a correction to the previous poll. 38-31 feels about right at the moment, which is honeymoon time for May and dominated by internal feuding in Labour. In fact I'd say it reflects the strength of the Labour brand that it's back over 30 in these circs.
Everything points to a clear Corbyn victory and he is likely to emerge fom this election the stonger,strategic incompetence of the worst kind by the leaders of the Chicken Coup.
Next psychodrama, the deputy leadership.
"China General Nuclear Power (CGN), a state-owned energy giant, is accused of leading a conspiracy to steal American power industry secrets to speed up the development and production of Chinese reactor technology. Szuhsiung Ho, a senior adviser to CGN, is due in court next week accused of recruiting American experts to obtain sensitive nuclear technology for China in a plot that threatened US security."
The real reason why May has backed out of the Hinkley deal?
They were acting in a strange manner - hopping about and generally looking most agitated. I went over to help - and discovered their very happy little white fluffy bundle was smothered in it. And they were trying to work out how to get him back home in the car without ruining the upholstery/their own coats.
Thankfully, I walked mine the whole way so never had this problem - but I could feel their horror. He probably ate Caesar on a cushion at home.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/10/theresa-may-follows-in-margaret-thatchers-footsteps-as-she-takes/
Next to that, Cameron perhaps seems unexciting but also rather normal.
Incidentally, I agree with Don that the court judgment today won't make a huge difference either way.
Nothing Orwell said many decades ago has changed and, in fact, it's got worse.