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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The boundary review is so favourable to CON because Cam/Os
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The boundary review is so favourable to CON because Cam/Osbo defied the Electoral Commission to fix it that way
There’ve been two major changes to the electoral system that the Tories have brought which have combined together to make the boundary review so favourable to them.
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Silver medal?Bronze
Off topic, green light for Hinkley:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/14/theresa-may-jeremy-corbyn-pmqs-hinkley-point-live/
Heaven forbid we have equal sized constituencies! I can hear the screams of gerrymandering already.
What probability would you assign to the boundaries going through at 600 seats and in [or close to - some tinkering is inevitable] the current proposed form?
I'd say 20% right now. Majority is insufficient, and Tory MPs will be queuing up to kick the gift horse's teeth out.
If Cameron and Osborne had had the foresight to know the 2m extra voters would not be helpful, they would've had the foresight to realise their campaign approach was rubbish. It's certainly helpful for May, in removing a pro-Labour bias.
FPT: on emotive news, the worst example was Libya just as things kicked off. The Government got an undeserved kicking for not magically evacuating thousands of people from the middle of a desert, in a war zone, who had chosen to remain when the countries either side had both erupted into revolutions immediately beforehand.
The best option for Labour on this, other than the squawking, is to suggest a regular timetable and parameters so that we're not using 2000 boundaries and data in 2025 and beyond. Be calm, don't throw emotive nonsense like Gerrymandering around, try to act like grown-ups on the whole thing.
Individual voter registration replaced the anachronistic Head of household, twas a good thing.
Now any problems with Hinkley will be Mays fault whereas previously she could just have blamed Osborne.
"Another 6 Golds for Team GB in Paralympics. It feels like them doing even better than 4 years ago is getting overshadowed this time around. "
In 2008, Team GB got 102 medals, 42 gold. In 2004, 94 medals, 35 gold and in 2000, 131 medals with 41 gold.
2012, for all the hype, was a bit down on some of the previous Paralympics. They're doing better than 2012, but you'd want to look at Sydney, I think, for record totals. Which, in turn, is why that's not getting mentioned.
There are 530 odd medal events and we're just past 290 medals awarded ...
FWIW, this is a good, expected thing as many, many, many more countries can compete now.
The activities of Prof G. Mander are pretty universal across all parties.
But Mike nixed it.
I would have loved to do a thread headlined Jeremy Corbyn gets Tbagged at PMQs
What marks this out as a new low is the overt political motivation.
My conclusion is simply that FPTP is utterly broken.
Blair will go down in history for Iraq (which, for the Left, was his greatest crime) but for the Right a lot of the insidious effects of his policies go all the way back to 1997: his asymmetric devolution settlement, the 1998 Human Rights Act, the changes in immigration law including scrapping primary purpose in 1998 (long predating the eastward expansion of the EU in 2004) the enthusiastic and unquestioning signatures to European treaty after treaty, promoting further integration, the vindictive approach to rural affairs, including the Hunting Act, failing to properly fund the armed forces, an increasing obsession with identity politics, including the Reglious Hatred and Equality Act, and the encouragement of chipping away at respect for British institutions - in pursuit of Cool Britannia - which the BBC very enthusiastically and quickly picked up on.
It is for this reason that so many people, particularly in England, were looking forward to the return of a Conservative Government and so disappointed when Modernisers seemed to pay them nothing more than lip service concluding, incorrectly, in my view, that Blair was on the right side of history and that ditching such pledges were necessary because they were an electoral millstone. In truth, they were objectionable only to a certain sort of middle/upper-middle class metropolitan voter but those were the sort dominating the modernisers social circles.
That's why Cameron ended up with the Heir to Blair moniker ringing true.
I am grateful he did.
There are alternate technologies which probably have as good a chance of working, but which would produce cheaper power and represent smaller financial gambles.
Sounds a bit like Danegeld to me.
I expect Cameron/Osborne are regretting it now.
http://m.huffpost.com/uk/entry/uk_57d838f2e4b0a32e2f6d00d4
Corbyn Campaign Threaten To Pull Out Of Sky News Debate Over Audience Balance ‘Concerns’
Pollsters and TV firm insist they’re scrupulously fair
Also Hinkley is expensive but it generates alot of jobs and keeps the UK in the nuclear R&d sector
I asked how come Labour didn't block it in the crucial second Lords vote, and was told that some Labour Lords hesitated at defeating the Government on what seemed to be an important Government priority - they felt that sending a warning shot with the first vote was sufficient and it would be improper for the unelected chamber to push it to defeat. Naturally, the Government simply ignored the warning shot once they'd got it through anyway.
I wasn't happy about PC or immigration or the West Lothian Question by early 00s - and it just got worse and worse.
Feel rather guilty, I’ve watched almost nothing of it, other than a few catch-up videos.
Not that I think these are gerrymandered, though of course parties always want to maximise their advantage.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/08/20/edf-to-make-return-on-hinkley-point-even-if-costs-soar-by-25pc/
But the four other plants they are building aren't yet working, so were are taking quite a substantial one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Taishan_1_.26_2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Taishan_1_.26_2
we have committed not to leave the ECHR; if we are going to rewrite the HRA it would be curious if we didn't incorporate the ECHR into it or why not just leave?
Unless we leave out certain ECHR provisions in the new BoR and then wait for a ECtHR judgement which we subsequently ignore.
That's a) complicated and b) not the gold-plating UK I know and love.
Hope it's not an omen for our Brexit negotiation...
May was in the cabinet for 6 years in a central role as Home Sec over most of these policies, and before that party Chair.
Either she bought into the Cameron modernising agenda, or she is the most shamelessly hypocritical careerist politician in recent history. My money is on the latter.
This is what has happened to the other 'Hinkley Points':
"EDF and Areva have been facing 'lengthy delays and steep cost overruns'[75] on EPRs being built at Flamanville Nuclear Power Plant in France and at Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant in Finland.[76][77][78] In October 2013, George Monbiot, a supporter of nuclear power, said that "the clunky third-generation power station chosen for Hinkley C already looks outdated, beside the promise of integral fast reactors and liquid fluoride thorium reactors. While other power stations are consuming nuclear waste (spent fuel), Hinkley will be producing it."[79] In February 2015, France's energy minister said that 'an overhaul of the country’s state-controlled nuclear energy industry was imminent'.[75] On 13 June 2016, the Fédération Nationale des Cadres Supérieurs[80] unveiled a series of problems with the EPR design, including that the French nuclear safety authority (ASN) may not give the green light to the EPR being constructed at Flamanville due to various anomalies, there may be “identical flaws” in the Areva EPR being built at Taishan 1 in China, falsification of parts from Areva’s Le Creusot plant that potentially put safety checks at risk, and multibillion-euro litigation between Areva and the Finnish energy group TVO over delays to the EPR scheme at Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant remains unsettled.[81]"
On Libya, some of us did anticipate exactly what's happened, and deplored Labour's support for the intervention with no clear Government/Allied plan for what would happen next. It was a contributory reason for Corbyn's success that many of us felt that the former leadership had simply shrugged off Iraq and was continuing with interventionism as normal.
It was particularly bad since we'd previously wooed Gaddafi and persuaded him to give up WMD that he really did have - the message that if you're a wicked dictator but decide to play nice with the West we'll knife you anyway when we get the chance was wrong at multiple levels.
If we disagree, we should return it to public ownership or pending that possibly to a structure like Welsh Water (no shareholders, co. limited by guarantee, profits formerly going to shareholders appear as a credit on your bill.)
Worst case is that it never works, and we end up investigating alternatives in 5 or 10 years' time...
By the time Hinkley is operational power technology will have moved on and the idea of building further massive pressurised reactors will seem as daft as building coal fired stations. We will have also thrown away our chance to re-build a nuclear industry of our own based on molten salt reactors of the type the UK company Moltex has has been working on and are now trying to get through the regulation hurdles.
Hinkley is going to a massively expensive white elephant that will artificially inflate the price of electricity for thirty years with the French and the Chinese being the beneficiaries. Madness.
I would have voted for him in 97 but wasn't registered. afterwards, I was glad I could say I hadn't
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant
Surely this is a better idea than buying in something unproven? If we're going to do something unproven we should be developing it ourselves so as to benefit from selling it elsewhere in the future.
The unemployment rate was 4.9%, down from 5.5% for a year earlier. The last time it was lower was for July to September 2005, says the @ONS
The result is that EDF et al can just name whatever silly Strike Price they want, knowing that the government has little option but to agree, as they plead with the generators to build more capacity.
The Oxburgh report points at a public sector approach to clean fossil generation. Let's see if the government can shed its ideological baggage and do the right thing to keep the lights on and cut CO2 emissions.
Hinckley looks to be overly expensive at best, and to be utterly worthless, whilst very costly, at worst.
Number of people working in the NHS
June 2010 1,596,000
June 2016 1,619,000
#SaveOurNHS from Tory cuts
Her capitulating to threats from the Chinese doesn't bode well.
Where's he 5.9?
Edited extra bit: ah, Betfair.
That's clear value. Red Bull may be as good or better than Mercedes, but that's still a four horse race, and Rosberg's had a good run.
No wonder Tory cuts have ruined NHS Performance and Finances
#SaveOurNHS from Tory cuts
You would have thought PBTories understood supply and demand
May is wanting to have quotas for poorer children to have preferential access to her new schools.
Doffs cap and is grateful
FFS
Following on from our conversation recently on how awful Paris is!