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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Don Brind says there’s no solid evidence for making Corbyn
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Don Brind says there’s no solid evidence for making Corbyn odds on favourite. He could lose.
Back in 2007 I emailed Mike Smithson: “You should advise your readers: ‘don’t bet on an election unless you understand the voting system’” At the time the pollsters and the bookies were making Alan Johnson favourite to become Labour deputy leader.
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The last thread treats American politics as if it were a parliamentary system, without once mentioning the requirements for impeachment. American Presidents can only be impeached, according to the Constitution if there is evidence that they have committed "Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors", not because a majority of Representatives, and a super-majority of Senators, don't like them. Congressmen have to take these seriously - see the failure of the nakedly political Johnson impeachment process in 1868. Indeed, the prospect that the grounds for impeachment might become too broad was why Madison objected to Mason's proposal for "maladministration" as grounds for impeachment in 1787. He thought it could be so broad that Congress could object to any President on those grounds, and America would therefore effectively be a Parliamentary system.
The meaning of Treason is very closely defined under the US Constitution, and there is no evidence whatsoever that either Trump or Clinton is a traitor. Bribery - well, evidence might come out about Trump's business affairs, but it's the same as far as I know. So they'd have to be impeached for "other High Crimes and Misdemeanours", a very vague phrase derived from 14th century English law on impeachment. There was abundant testimony during the Nixon and Clinton hearings on what constituted oHCM, so I won't cover that here. Tax evasion doesn't seem to, since the House refused to impeach Nixon on those grounds, but perjury apparently can. But without any evidence that either possible President has committed either crime, it seems unlikely that they can be impeached, even if disastrously unpopular.
But we cannot ignore the bits of evidence we do have. Nothing suggests that Owen Smith is ahead. The straws we have suggest that Jeremy Corbyn will win. He is justly favourite, though probably just a bit too short priced given the uncertainties of extrapolating from those straws.
Seen one, seen them all.
Corbyn will win for the same reason as last time - Labour apparently isn't interested in winning power. But virtue signallers and clicktivists want sometime to make them feel better.
Few here seem to have understood that now, more than ever, elections are about feelings. My generation and an awful lot of the public sector have been mollycodled.
From a betting point of view, I think he's saying there might be some value in backing Smith, he's currently at 6.6, which has tightened a lot in the last few days.
What do we reckon? I've stayed out of this one so far, can't read it at all and there's clearly large organised groups trying to swing the contest one way or the other.
http://politicalodds.bet/labour-leadership-2016
The Theresa May Grammar Schools party would apparently be an good rebranding of the Tory party. Cameron rode that horse for too long and did the brand damage, moving too much towards the liberal rather than economic centre. Metropolitans triumphed why the party of the shires and strivers was diminished. Beginning to think Osborne might have been moved just in time...
IMO Smith could win, but I go no further. Smith is still very unknown.
At that point, as Don's article implies, betting becomes a bit dangerous because it's impossible to understand the forces at play. Which is why I was advising yesterday that a more sensible bet is on Corbyn leaving before the next election.
'Mrs Tweady, the chickens are revolting!'
'Finally, something we agree on.'
- the criminal conduct before the office would have to be truly egregious to justify impeachment, otherwise normal criminal processes would be adequate (though, in America, statutes of limitation are much stricter than in Britain for most crimes except murder. Also, as the President is the nation's highest law enforcement officer, a Special Prosecutor would have to be appointed by the DoJ). And there is no evidence that Trump or Clinton are serial killers or anything of the sort.
- to use impeachment, it would have to be some form of abuse of office, or other inappropriate conduct whilst in office. Those are the common themes in any of the 18 impeachments carried out in the US in the past 240 years and the British impeachments before then. Clinton is clearly more vulnerable here, as she has actually held office, but repeated probing by the Republican-held Congress has failed to uncover any evidence of such conduct.
Clinton 42 .. Trump 37
https://twitter.com/GravisMarketing
National - Morning Consult
Clinton 44 .. Trump 37
https://morningconsult.com/2016/08/14/poll-trump-arrests-slide-but-favorability-reaches-new-depths/
A BBC tennis commentator has been slammed for his coverage of Andy Murray's incredible Olympic win - after claiming that supporters in Scotland kits and 'See You Jimmy' hats were English.
Simon Reed, commentating on the men's final in Rio, said that after the match an emotional Murray was 'heading over to a small band of English fans ... he must have saw them earlier'.
Give that man the sack.
Nobody who treats the past tense so unkindly should be allowed to speak at all.
Hmm. I do think Corbyn's rightly favourite, but a Smith win is not impossible.
I'd still start it with something not too obvious though, like the reversal of benefit in kind tax arrangements for employer-provided insurance in the Budget, rather than the NHS (Privatisation) Act 2017.
I have a small wager on Smith as an outsider. Why not at 5 or 6 when it's a 2 horse race? Something might happen.
I see that some people are saying that Trump camapign manager Manafort has documented ties to corrupt Ukrainian and Russian payments. That's what some people say
t: https://twitter.com/CLewandowski_/status/764989713149267968?s=09
Far more likely to continue the slow erosion of provision that Smith has highlighted today.
I prefer a Dutch system - government backed health insurance with premiums based on ability to pay and everyone treated equally.
Bevan had the option of such a system but rejected it in favour of this model. He later admitted it was to justify confiscatory taxes on the rich and was not done for any clinical benefits.
Thanks Nye for making sure the rich could get treated efficiently and the rest of us can't.
Would ensure proper funding and better standards of care, given those who pay for a service generally expect better results.
I noted last night that we now have golds in nine sports (and sailing will make it ten tomorrow). In 2012 we actually managed 11 which was the best in the modern era (Olympics before about 1920 were different enough to not really count so I didn't go back that far). I'd forgotten our gold in taekwando - and how could I forget a sport whose governing body had to change its name because of its abbreviation?
Yes, there *might* be an anti-Corbyn majority in the sign-ups but it's telling that both pro- and anti-Corbyn factions viewed the decision to allow new members to vote as being beneficial to him. They might both have miscalculated on that score but it seems unlikely to me.
And yes, the CLP nominations do represent a small number of members but are these skewing it to Corbyn, and if so, by how much? CLP nominations have been a decent guide in the past, though obviously the law of reversing causality applies: as soon as you put a disproportionate effort into winning CLP nominations, the relationship between that and the end outcome breaks down.
But there is other evidence. We know that the two biggest unions have backed Corbyn again and we know that union patronage matters in Labour elections. We know from the YouGov poll that the membership has moved to the left since 2015 so the playing field is much more favourable to him than last year; Smith is swimming against the tide. We know that the left won the NEC elections and that those who voted them in not only acted in a fairly consistent way but turned out in big numbers (it is true that Smith is also of the left but simply challenging Corbyn will be seen as a betrayal by many).
The simple fact is that there *is* quite a bit of evidence out there, though it is all circumstantial. Still, circumstantial evidence is often all we have to go on. The problem with it is twofold. Firstly, interpreting it is always a much bigger matter of judgement than when presented with hard evidence (by contrast, we can dispute how accurate polls are or how meaningful local by-elections are but we can't dismiss that they're relevant at some level). And secondly, it's much easier to cherry-pick anecdotal data that supports the result we'd like because it's so much easier to dismiss that which we don't like.
I disagree that there's no solid evidence to make Corbyn favourite - and strong odds-on favourite at that. There's certainly reason to believe that he's not had things all his own way by any means and that after re-election, life will continue to be made difficult for him by his opponents but that's a very different matter from stating that they point to a defeat.
Above all, the key question is how reliable Don's assertion is about the 120,000 new members. Saving Labour, in their 28 July press release said "We estimate that, of the registered supporters that signed up between the 18th and 20th July, about half joined to elect a new leader. This compares very favourably to the 84% of registered supporters who voted for Jeremy Corbyn in 2015." it certainly would compare favourably but firstly, it's only their own estimate (based on what?) and secondly, half-and-half wouldn't change the underlying maths.
On that basis a D grade in History GCSE compares very favourably to an A grade.
However, I don't see how a partial insurance model would work. To use a recent example which I am familiar with, all London serious head injuries are dealt with at the Royal London as a single centre of excellence. There is no private option and if there were it would be inferior. I suspect the same is true of many emergency treatments. Should wealthy people be obliged to get inferior healthcare? If the wealthy are expected to pay more in such cases, why is that not just dealt with through general taxation?
The bulk of NHS spending is on the elderly. A partial compulsory insurance model would result in the rich elderly paying eye-popping sums without noticeably improving the NHS. Any solution to the impending funding crisis needs to be far more wide reaching.
But they do spend somewhat more than 9-10% of GDP on it. There's zero evidence that you can run a modern health service on 7-8% as the UK has tried to do since 2009.
The US system you clearly admire spends 17% and some people are still uninsured. Their treatment is paid for by the government if they're destitute. Remarkably, the US spends more public money on healthcare than the UK does. This is thanks to their private system being so inefficient.
So if you want to waste resources, by all means privatise the NHS.
Hopefully the directors and partners will end up struck off or in jail, and we might see some serious reform of both human rights laws and the legal aid system that allowed PIL to do what they did for so long.
But to answer the serious point, if an opponent has laid a charge consistently and the public has heard and rejected the claim, then that does give the government something of a mandate to take the course of action in question - though it does depend on the degree of vehemence in rejecting the said claims.
That's...that's not how graphs work https://t.co/cw1sjjAMjX
Sleep patterns are a bit buggered with these Olympics.
Has anyone calculated what Brexit does to the combined EU medal totals? I'm thinking it might be a good measure of how we might just punch above our weight...
What I woudl like is a real British Corporation that provides a £330M service or a Scottish one. I do not want Scotland funding England as per normal.
If you look at the numbers we have supplied a surplus to England over the last 40 years , despite the lies of the Little Englanders and halfwits who pretend otherwise. Ireland gets the EBC output for £21M , why do we pay £330M for teh biased pap they transmit.
DYOR blah, blah...
Clinton 45.6 .. Trump 42.0
http://www.latimes.com/politics/
Here's a linkie to the World Bank data comparing UK vs OECD spending as a % of GDP.
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS?locations=OE-GB
This is a more convenient way to show ONS data:
https://twitter.com/mcdonnelljp/status/765102011301957632
I don't know how we address NHS issues (it employs over a million people, so complexity reigns). However, the Tories need to put country before party and start upping contributions for those who a) use the service more b) can afford it.
Medical costs are the number 1 cause of medical bankruptcy in the US.
I think there was a marked change in the national outlook after London 2012 which has fed into Brexit. Dave was right to hold the vote before the Olympics, I can imagine if he held it after Rio it would have resulted in an even wider victory for Leave. Seeing Team GB in second place on the table far ahead of the other major European nations, hearing the French whine about our dominant track cyclists and Germans bitch about our rowers beating them in the eights has been glorious. I may be coming over all SeanT here, but I think many have underestimated just how important sports has been to the restoration our national pride and international standing. Previously it was a source of national embarrassment, today it is a source of strength our outlook has changed because of that.
Now 50% of 120,000 associates may vote for Smith. At the same time, Labour membership, leaving aside the unions, has almost doubled from 201,000 to 388,000. Admittedly many of these had joined prior to August, but it still seems reasonable to assume that many of these are the roughly 85,000 associates who voted for Corbyn last time.
So to win Smith needs to be doing much better among a slightly larger pool than Corbyn did. In fact, he may well need around 120% of them to vote for him, which seems a little improbable unless Brown (with his amazing ability to count everything four times) or Lutfur Rahmann, is managing his campaign, and he's stuck on 50%.
I say again, the figure compares very unfavourably.
I'm not saying people who change appointments at the last minute because they can't keep track of their own damned paperwork should be shot, but they should be flung from a trebuchet into the North Sea.
[Please note, any bed-wetting safe space MPs reading this, that's not a death threat. I'm using hyperbolic rage in a sarcastic way].
It is not just major head injuries that private insurance will not cover, it will not cover obstertrics or psychiatry, dialysis, any condition requiring intensive care acutely, or any condition requiring long term treatment. For all these and more, the insurance companies shunt their customers to the NHS. Insurance works for elective surgery and the worried well, apart from pre-existing conditions. Try to get insurance if you are a diabetic for example, and indeed in the USA diabetes complications are worse than here largely because of this issue.
That's partly because of Smith's lack of national profile up to now, but also the sense that although he says he agrees with most of Corbyn's platform, he can't be said to have been a prominent adherent of it up to now. And if we're going to have a Corbyn platform, surely it's more sensible to have Corbyn putting it forward than someone relatively unknown whose heart may or may not be in it?
One factor thatr's difficult to assess is the "quiet life" vote. Lots of members don't care that much about the two individuals, but they want the party to focus on the Tories when the leadership election is over. It's possible to argue that either way. If Corbyn wins there will be some defections - not in my view very many, but enough to make a splash, and it's difficult to see a period where Corbyn gets enough peace and quiet to get the programme a fair hearing. If Smith wins there will be a sense among many members that it was achieved illegitimately, by the failed attempt to keep Corbyn off the ballot and then the disenfranching of over 20% of the membership. With the balance on the NEC now changed, it's a formula for prolonged unrest.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/37082165
Massa perhaps leaving Williams is merely another echo to the reverberations about this. It'd be more of a surprise if he stayed.
The more interesting line is Force India reckoning the top three teams are gaining an advantage by testing the 2017 tyres.
Clinton 89.2 .. Trump 10.8 - Polls Only
Clinton 78.6 .. Trump 21.3 - Polls Plus
Clinton 90.5 .. Trump 9.5 - Nowcast
http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/#now
Health Care is free at the point of delivery, and adding any caveats if you want to get the rich, old or any other group to contribute extra you outline those additional charges.
You then define what healthcare or medical procedure is covered. For example fertility, sex change and cosmetic interventions are some of the areas that traditionally cause angst. Is Mental Health moved to a different budget? How about long term care of the sick elderly? However, you end up with a clear definition of what is in the Health Care system and what is out and therefore funded elsewhere (by the individual, council, insurance or central govt.).
You then spend the budget to provide the best care possible. This is the really hard bit which prevents improvements in the NHS. With our irrational attachment to systems, institutions and methods of the last century we seem to be unwilling to accept changes that would improve the system. The GP system is broken. The A&E system is broken. These may be linked. The pay structure is broken. Agency fees are too high and drugs cost too much. PFI hurts and admin is between medium and average. Usage of facilities is sub optimal. The type of Nurse training is debatable. As long as we persist in running a 1960s based system with 2010s technology and requirements we are stuffed. We, the population need to accept changes to our 'loved' institutions, be it closures, losing our GP link or anything else. The medical profession need to accept changes to their working methodologies. It is called progress.
There is certainly a debate to be had as to the efficacy the concept of a National Health Service. It may well be better to break it up and have 8 or 10 Regional Health Services, that may or may not compete, depending on how you set it up. It may well be best to farm out all the easy low cost routine care and surgery to the private sector and just keep the complex and difficult in the NHS. It may be best for Private and NHS to share buildings, infrstructure and a whole lot more.
Needless to say, I have no idea, but to suggest where we are is the best and alternatives are bad is a great way to accelerate decline in Health Care.
Marcus Dysch
.@JewishLabour Movement balloted members on preference for Labour leadership - 92% voted for Owen Smith; 4% voted Jeremy Corbyn.
The older you are, the more satisfying it is. Decades of watching the TV hoping for the odd crumb of a bronze or silver here and there sharpens the appetite.
Other nations (particularly the old communist block), cottoned on to how important a showcase the Olympics is far earlier than us.
That said, the second week looks a bit quieter than the first, medals wise. There will still be plenty to celebrate, though.
The campaign will be a bloodbath. And even if Labour did win, the leader couldn't be guaranteed to pass legislation.
Might I suggest instead abolishing the pensioner exemption from NI (perhaps at a reduced rate to reflect they are no longer contributing to a state pension) as an alternative?
He's very swarthy and sported a large beard.