My gut says Goldsmith is going to walk this. Affluent tory voters will support Goldsmith, they will turn up to vote. Hardcore opposition to Brexit is going to be a minority issue, may swing a few votes from tory to lib dem but hardly definitive. Labour have a strong candidate in Woolmar, he will poll well, thus splitting the anti Goldsmith vote. Think I will back Goldsmith if the odds are good enough.
Andrew Rawnsley is worried: consoling ourselves that Trump is a liar is no consolation. And that the Uk's mid-pond alternative to Europe will be an illusion.
Rawnsley -> Public School -> Head Boy -> Oxbridge -> Varsity and the Cambridge Union -> BBC -> Blair -> Big North London House -> Observer -> Guardian
So, the worst possible commentator to provide any insight into what we are facing.
He's an excellent commentator, one of the best in the media. And judging from the polls his hostility to Trump seems in line with the electorate. Neither was he a Blair-toady. He wrote two pretty critical books about new labour.
The first working class person Rawnsley met was probably his bedder at Sidney Sussex College.
If you want insights into New Labour, Rawnsley is very good. Myself & right now, I don't need any more insights into the doings of war criminals. I need them put in a jail cell.
Rawnsley is the last person in the world to help us understand the phenomenon of Faragism or Trumpism.
Neither was he a Blair-toady. He wrote two pretty critical books about new labour.
I like Rawnsley, but I have to disagree there. His books, even when he was chastising Blair over Iraq and Dubya, showed how dazzled he was by Blair's own myths. His fawning, shallow and totally inaccurate assessment of Blair's disastrous education policies, which took manifest falsehoods put out by the Labour Party press office (e.g. about the quality of the French state education system) at face value, was excruciating.
When it came to Brown, then he was very much more direct.
A few disconnected thoughts this fine Sunday morning (at least it is in the Labour heartland of East London):
1) The American media aren't the BBC - are they obliged to be balanced ? Fox claims to be balanced and I'm sure CBS, NBC, ABC and the rest would claim the same. There are two options - either be balanced or have a series of echo chambers.
Is the problem with some people's obsession with media bias they only want to hear their point of view or they don't want to hear conflicting viewpoints ?
2) Corbyn always interviews well on Marr - I can understand why a lot of politicians like going on Marr - he's not aggressive and shouty like Neil and some others. Perhaps there's something to be said for that.
3) I'd like to think any plan to join NAFTA would be properly scrutinised and put to a referendum.
4) England on course for a comfortable win against India - who'd have thunk it ?
5) The glaring deficiencies in Trump's populism become more apparent - are we seriously going to emulate him ? At what point do we realise infrastructural investment and tax cuts have to be paid for or shall we just keep on borrowing ? The fact that some Conservatives seem anxious to adopt this reflationary nonsense speaks volumes.
Why worry about a mad left-wing tax and spend Government ? Instead we've got a mad right-wing spend and borrow Government.
To be fair, Hammond won't want to go that far but reflation seems to be the new game in town though that's not a pain or risk free option.
Andrew Rawnsley is worried: consoling ourselves that Trump is a liar is no consolation. And that the Uk's mid-pond alternative to Europe will be an illusion.
Rawnsley -> Public School -> Head Boy -> Oxbridge -> Varsity and the Cambridge Union -> BBC -> Blair -> Big North London House -> Observer -> Guardian
So, the worst possible commentator to provide any insight into what we are facing.
He's an excellent commentator, one of the best in the media. And judging from the polls his hostility to Trump seems in line with the electorate. Neither was he a Blair-toady. He wrote two pretty critical books about new labour.
Comres also has most voters thinking it will be easier to do a trade deal with Trump even if they dislike him
Very interesting piece, thanks for sharing. I thought this bit was particularly good:
"Nothing that happens outside the city matters!" they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you'd barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage.
But who cares about those people, right? What's newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.
Epitome of the straw man argument. As a liberal metropolitan who moves in liberal metropolitan circles, I have never heard anyone say such a palpably stupid thing as 'Nothing that happens outside the city matters!'.
Actually, I have heard American academics say only the East and West Coasts matter, and we fly over the other states.
Just a few weeks ago in Princeton.
Well, perhaps they might be rethinking that now. And the last time I looked at a map Florida was on the East Coast.
I imagine he ( & Princeton ) are melting down over what has happened.
Elderly academics in the NE Universities often have holiday homes in Florida, so they can escape the worst of the rigours of the US winter.
They know where Florida is, just like wealthy lawyers know where Hungary is. They just don't think the views of the inhabitants are worth paying attention to.
On the subject of nothing mattering outside of the city - according to the BBC we had bad weather yesterday. No we fecking well didn't - rain in London does not matter to the majority of us - it was sunny and pleasant up here in Yorkshire.
Agree that Rawnsley isn't the right person to understand Trumpism - you need someone from a northern working class community who still has their family and old friends there to appreciate the reality.
Morning - I'm probably late posting on this but I can't stop laughing seeing the local press worrying about the sensitivities of Nige meeting Trump in the context of TM. Can you imagine how whatsisname in Brussels is feeling? Can you imagine what Nige is feeling about what whatisname is feeling? I'm no fan of Nige or Trump but they have hugely brightened up my day. I'll worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.
@Speedy I'm pleased we've got to the Golden Lift picture. Leave were extremely careful to keep Farage in his box during the referendum and wisely so. He is now out of his box. Brexiters are also keen to deny Trump and Brexit are linked. It's extremely helpful and considerate of Farage to helpfully tweet an iconic image showing that Brexit/Trumpism are interlinked projects of the transatlantic right. One to keep handy.
And, as we know, where Farage goes Theresa May and the Tory right will follow. Brexit is inevtiably all about cuddling up to anyone out there who will give us a hearing. The problem with Trump, though (apart from all the obvious ones) is that he wants less free trade, not more.
Donald is going to have the cleanest butt in Christendom.
Miss Plato, it's a lot of tangled web stuff. There is some sexism in videogames (Naughty Dog had to fight to put Ellie on the cover (along with Joel) of The Last of Us, and she's integral to the plot) but then you have muppets like Anita Sarkeesian who go completely over the top, so any sensible and legitimate complaints get lost in her banshee-shrieking.
Gamergate is so much more than Plato mentions below. IMO the main feature of it was to highlight online threats and harassment, even when it intrudes into real life. Wiki has a reasonably good summary of what was a complex and multi-faceted event.
Tim has his personal information posted on here, a move *almost?* all posters on here condemned, and I think the perpetrator now regrets. Gamergate's harassment of multiple individuals was much greater.
In the end the harassment became so much of the story that the original causes of it became nebulous at best, and in many ways redundant. It was a hate-fest, with some individuals on many (there were not just two) sides trying to get their five minutes' of fame from it.
Few people came out of it well, but the harassers should just crawl under the rock whence they came.
Saying "Sarkeesian" is banshee-shrieking is bit OTT given the abuse she was subjected to.
First, although Richmond Park feels less of a big deal given the past week
Arguably it's now an even bigger deal. We need a realignment more than ever. I've donated to the Lib Dem By-election fund in my first act of support for the party since I left over 4 years ago. The Lib Dems don't deserve to win so early in their long recovery arc but needs must. The twin pillars of Human well-being , liberty and ecology, deserve a Lib Dem win so clothes peg time.
Liberty is absolutely something which is critical - but which the LibDems have failed to serve, They put the state above the individual
Ecology - stewardship and dominion - is at the core of human existence: but the LibDems have made it a false god to be worshiped. Careful husbanding of the world's resources doesn't mean crushing the aspirations of millions of impoverished people in emerging markets, nor does it mean causing our own to suffer by transporting jobs overseas.
The Lib Dems might have the right questions, but they sure as heck don't have the answers.
The right questions is a start. The Tories these days don't even have enquiring minds to offer us; merely absurd, dimwitted non-entities like Liam Fox.
Still significantly better than what sits opposite them in the Commons.
When, in your opinion, was that last not so?
You mean you disagree with me? I was just winding up SO (who I genuinely feel sorry for), that no matter how rubbish the Tories are, there is no danger of them losing power at the next election.
Just like there was no danger of Clinton losing to Trump?
I didn't hear Corbyn on Marr, but I did hear him yesterday talking about wake up calls. It's a rare time when I agree with him, but I think he is right and clear parallels can be drawn with Britain. However, being Corbyn and therefore rather dim - one of the few people ever to fail polytechnic diploma* - he drew the wrong parallels.
Trump = Farage. The wealthy guy whose blokeish exterior and penchant for needling a lot of unpleasant lefties gives him the wholly undeserved reputation of being a straight-talker who understands normal people.
Clinton = May. The middle-class girl who made it big and rose to the top because all the others were considerably more sh1t than she was, which says a lot about them. Will dominate the popular vote but can they hang on in their old core areas against the insurgents?
Corbyn = Stein. The rambling idiot nobody has heard of or cares about, who inspires fanatical devotion among the faithful who believe that compulsory gender studies classes are what the country really needs right now and will definitely vote for - and if they don't, who cares because it's about the message not about winning power and having to do actual things which are sometimes a bit messy.
Therefore the parallel and the glaring difference are both obvious. Farage has the appeal but not the necessary backing, organisation or political clout to exploit it. Corbyn has the latter but not the former. Between them the opposition is hopelessly divided leaving Theresa May to sweep the field.
If Farage were leading Labour, now would be a good moment for all Tories to panic. As he isn't, the threat to them is minimal.
This will not of course stop much ink from being spilled on the parallels between Trump and Corbyn - racism, sexism and the backing of a bunch of murderers being some of the more obvious ones - but it does make the political reality fundamentally different.
*This was sort of the equivalent of being told by Mao Zedong that you don't understand agriculture.
On the subject of nothing mattering outside of the city - according to the BBC we had bad weather yesterday. No we fecking well didn't - rain in London does not matter to the majority of us - it was sunny and pleasant up here in Yorkshire.
Agree that Rawnsley isn't the right person to understand Trumpism - you need someone from a northern working class community who still has their family and old friends there to appreciate the reality.
I would suggest there was lots of weather around the UK yesterday - is the BBC to describe all weather everywhere in the interests of "balance" ? Clearly not.
The problem with "Trumpism" is that it's all about the anger and the sense of being left behind and I get all of that. What I don't get is the complete lack of understanding that there is absolutely nothing in Trump's populist rhetoric that will help those left behind or angry.
Once you've had your euphoria at "beating the establishment" and once you've done gloating at the "liberal metropolitan elite", what then ?
Once you realise the only people benefiting from Trump will be the very wealthy and once you realise the jobs aren't coming back and it's not going to get any better, what then ?
2) Corbyn always interviews well on Marr - I can understand why a lot of politicians like going on Marr - he's not aggressive and shouty like Neil and some others. Perhaps there's something to be said for that.
Politicians need to be challenged even aggressively sometimes, but to my mind there are two issues. One, some interviewers are not good at aggressive, and just constantly interrupt, which isn't the same thing, and the other is that particularly among the newer breeds of politician, they overcompensate in expectation of aggression and respond preemptively with aggression and petulance. While at the top levels the politicians skirt the issue by not interviewing at all if they can help it, or stick to the softies.
A lot of what Le Pen is saying on Marr is very seductive.
I don't speak/understand French so I can't make a real judgement, but as you say she does seem to have quite a seductive tone. One thing that I have noticed is that FN looks like a professional outfit, unlike Ukip.
When she went around saying, "Brexit is Brexit and we'll make it a success" she presumably thought it was going to be a success. She hasn't said that for a while but that's when she appointed Liam Fox. Maybe she would appoint differently now. Safe pairs of hands would be more attractive I suspect.
My canvass reports are all anecdotal and should be treated as non-scientific, but FWIW I'm picking up some respect for May even among classic Labour voters - they are reserving judgment on what she actually does, but they like a cautious tone in these difficult times. I think that yesterday's poll reflects that - people feel that a boring PM and a boring Chancellor are rather welcome just now, exactly because they're seen as a safe pair of hands. The honeymoon is continuing and will last until events force her hand on Brexit and other matters.
The other things I'm picking up are continuing dislike of the LibDems among people who voted for them in the past, two-way movement on Corbyn (some attracted for the first time, some defecting for the first time), a degree of exasperation among UKIP voters who still want to vote for them but feel they're just a mess, and above all a lot of people who don't think much about politics and are just planning to vote as they usually do.
On the subject of nothing mattering outside of the city - according to the BBC we had bad weather yesterday. No we fecking well didn't - rain in London does not matter to the majority of us - it was sunny and pleasant up here in Yorkshire.
Agree that Rawnsley isn't the right person to understand Trumpism - you need someone from a northern working class community who still has their family and old friends there to appreciate the reality.
I would suggest there was lots of weather around the UK yesterday - is the BBC to describe all weather everywhere in the interests of "balance" ? Clearly not.
The problem with "Trumpism" is that it's all about the anger and the sense of being left behind and I get all of that. What I don't get is the complete lack of understanding that there is absolutely nothing in Trump's populist rhetoric that will help those left behind or angry.
Once you've had your euphoria at "beating the establishment" and once you've done gloating at the "liberal metropolitan elite", what then ?
Once you realise the only people benefiting from Trump will be the very wealthy and once you realise the jobs aren't coming back and it's not going to get any better, what then ?
Yes there was lots of weather but you wouldn't know that from Marr et al - rain everywhere, or at least rain everywhere that matters.
On the subject of nothing mattering outside of the city - according to the BBC we had bad weather yesterday. No we fecking well didn't - rain in London does not matter to the majority of us - it was sunny and pleasant up here in Yorkshire.
Agree that Rawnsley isn't the right person to understand Trumpism - you need someone from a northern working class community who still has their family and old friends there to appreciate the reality.
I would suggest there was lots of weather around the UK yesterday - is the BBC to describe all weather everywhere in the interests of "balance" ? Clearly not.
The problem with "Trumpism" is that it's all about the anger and the sense of being left behind and I get all of that. What I don't get is the complete lack of understanding that there is absolutely nothing in Trump's populist rhetoric that will help those left behind or angry.
Once you've had your euphoria at "beating the establishment" and once you've done gloating at the "liberal metropolitan elite", what then ?
Once you realise the only people benefiting from Trump will be the very wealthy and once you realise the jobs aren't coming back and it's not going to get any better, what then ?
Yes there was lots of weather but you wouldn't know that from Marr et al - rain everywhere, or at least rain everywhere that matters.
*Grits teeth, makes huge effort to be fair to the Beeb*
It rained in Cannock too, very hard and for a long time.
Very interesting piece, thanks for sharing. I thought this bit was particularly good:
"Nothing that happens outside the city matters!" they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you'd barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage.
But who cares about those people, right? What's newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.
Epitome of the straw man argument. As a liberal metropolitan who moves in liberal metropolitan circles, I have never heard anyone say such a palpably stupid thing as 'Nothing that happens outside the city matters!'.
The writer is a liberal though, who believes liberal changes have been good. An exaggerated example of the undoubted cultural focus on cities to illustrate their point about the relative failure of liberalism re this election is surely a small sin.
Very interesting piece, thanks for sharing. I thought this bit was particularly good:
"Nothing that happens outside the city matters!" they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you'd barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage.
But who cares about those people, right? What's newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.
Epitome of the straw man argument. As a liberal metropolitan who moves in liberal metropolitan circles, I have never heard anyone say such a palpably stupid thing as 'Nothing that happens outside the city matters!'.
Actually, I have heard American academics say only the East and West Coasts matter, and we fly over the other states.
Just a few weeks ago in Princeton.
Well, perhaps they might be rethinking that now. And the last time I looked at a map Florida was on the East Coast.
I imagine he ( & Princeton ) are melting down over what has happened.
Elderly academics in the NE Universities often have holiday homes in Florida, so they can escape the worst of the rigours of the US winter.
They know where Florida is, just like wealthy lawyers know where Hungary is. They just don't think the views of the inhabitants are worth paying attention to.
First, although Richmond Park feels less of a big deal given the past week
Arguably it's now an even bigger deal. We need a realignment more than ever. I've donated to the Lib Dem By-election fund in my first act of support for the party since I left over 4 years ago. The Lib Dems don't deserve to win so early in their long recovery arc but needs must. The twin pillars of Human well-being , liberty and ecology, deserve a Lib Dem win so clothes peg time.
Liberty is absolutely something which is critical - but which the LibDems have failed to serve, They put the state above the individual
Ecology - stewardship and dominion - is at the core of human existence: but the LibDems have made it a false god to be worshiped. Careful husbanding of the world's resources doesn't mean crushing the aspirations of millions of impoverished people in emerging markets, nor does it mean causing our own to suffer by transporting jobs overseas.
The Lib Dems might have the right questions, but they sure as heck don't have the answers.
The right questions is a start. The Tories these days don't even have enquiring minds to offer us; merely absurd, dimwitted non-entities like Liam Fox.
Still significantly better than what sits opposite them in the Commons.
When, in your opinion, was that last not so?
You mean you disagree with me? I was just winding up SO (who I genuinely feel sorry for), that no matter how rubbish the Tories are, there is no danger of them losing power at the next election.
Just like there was no danger of Clinton losing to Trump?
Unless Labour can ditch Corbyn/McDonnell, then the Tories will win the next election. Even then I'm struggling to see who could win for Labour.
Miss Plato, not that into the politics of videogames, but was amused when there was an outcry from bedwetters about killing women in an FPS (first person shooter) some months ago. Because all the men killed are a-ok. And people had complained about a lack of female characters beforehand.
Some people just like whining.
As an aside, one reason I'm not getting Mass Effect Andromeda (as well as disliking the DLC approach of Bioware) is that one of the people working on it has posted anti-white stuff, which seems bizarrely acceptable to some people.
I didn't understand the soup of GamerGate until this week. It's a load of whiny identity politics about games that supposedly make men more sexist. Seriously - who are these saddos?
There's plenty of sexism and harassment going on out there, the problem was extrapolating that out into attacking an entire medium people enjoy with the implication if they didn't think the highlighted problems were endemic or the worst thing evarr, that they were just as bad as genuine harassers or otherwise neanderthals.
@Speedy I'm pleased we've got to the Golden Lift picture. Leave were extremely careful to keep Farage in his box during the referendum and wisely so. He is now out of his box. Brexiters are also keen to deny Trump and Brexit are linked. It's extremely helpful and considerate of Farage to helpfully tweet an iconic image showing that Brexit/Trumpism are interlinked projects of the transatlantic right. One to keep handy.
And, as we know, where Farage goes Theresa May and the Tory right will follow. Brexit is inevtiably all about cuddling up to anyone out there who will give us a hearing. The problem with Trump, though (apart from all the obvious ones) is that he wants less free trade, not more.
Donald is going to have the cleanest butt in Christendom.
First, although Richmond Park feels less of a big deal given the past week
Arguably it's now an even bigger deal. We need a realignment more than ever. I've donated to the Lib Dem By-election fund in my first act of support for the party since I left over 4 years ago. The Lib Dems don't deserve to win so early in their long recovery arc but needs must. The twin pillars of Human well-being , liberty and ecology, deserve a Lib Dem win so clothes peg time.
Liberty is absolutely something which is critical - but which the LibDems have failed to serve, They put the state above the individual
Ecology - stewardship and dominion - is at the core of human existence: but the LibDems have made it a false god to be worshiped. Careful husbanding of the world's resources doesn't mean crushing the aspirations of millions of impoverished people in emerging markets, nor does it mean causing our own to suffer by transporting jobs overseas.
The Lib Dems might have the right questions, but they sure as heck don't have the answers.
The right questions is a start. The Tories these days don't even have enquiring minds to offer us; merely absurd, dimwitted non-entities like Liam Fox.
Still significantly better than what sits opposite them in the Commons.
When, in your opinion, was that last not so?
You mean you disagree with me? I was just winding up SO (who I genuinely feel sorry for), that no matter how rubbish the Tories are, there is no danger of them losing power at the next election.
Just like there was no danger of Clinton losing to Trump?
Unless Labour can ditch Corbyn/McDonnell, then the Tories will win the next election. Even then I'm struggling to see who could win for Labour.
It's hard to see presently, but it depends how things go the next few years - we were always set for more economic pain in any case, and we've taken a huge risk which could work our or could go very badly, and in such a situation even an awful candidate might capture the mood. I don't expect it, but never forget millions upon millions would and will vote for Corbynite Labour regardless, and if they can, other people might too, in the right circumstances. Are those circumstances likely? Probably not, but never say never.
2) Corbyn always interviews well on Marr - I can understand why a lot of politicians like going on Marr - he's not aggressive and shouty like Neil and some others. Perhaps there's something to be said for that.
Politicians need to be challenged even aggressively sometimes, but to my mind there are two issues. One, some interviewers are not good at aggressive, and just constantly interrupt, which isn't the same thing, and the other is that particularly among the newer breeds of politician, they overcompensate in expectation of aggression and respond preemptively with aggression and petulance. While at the top levels the politicians skirt the issue by not interviewing at all if they can help it, or stick to the softies.
"Politicians need to be challenged even aggressively sometimes,"
A good post. However there's a third issue aside from the two you mention: the interviewers often pick the wrong topic to aggressively question. This sometimes seems to be because they want to create a headline, rather than ascertain a truth.
Andrew Neil, as ever, seems to do this right more often than not.
@Speedy I'm pleased we've got to the Golden Lift picture. Leave were extremely careful to keep Farage in his box during the referendum and wisely so. He is now out of his box. Brexiters are also keen to deny Trump and Brexit are linked. It's extremely helpful and considerate of Farage to helpfully tweet an iconic image showing that Brexit/Trumpism are interlinked projects of the transatlantic right. One to keep handy.
And, as we know, where Farage goes Theresa May and the Tory right will follow. Brexit is inevtiably all about cuddling up to anyone out there who will give us a hearing. The problem with Trump, though (apart from all the obvious ones) is that he wants less free trade, not more.
Donald is going to have the cleanest butt in Christendom.
Mr. Jessop, you're right, it was an omission (one of forgetfulness) not to mention that Sarkeesian, whilst getting much deserved criticism, also got a lot of hateful abuse.
But then, so did a CoD developer who altered by minuscule amounts the reload times for weapons in a patch. He got death threats, and his family likewise, but people tend not to raise that because it doesn't fit the Evil Male Sexist Gamers Vs Feminist Warriors For Justice narrative some people think is reality.
On the subject of nothing mattering outside of the city - according to the BBC we had bad weather yesterday. No we fecking well didn't - rain in London does not matter to the majority of us - it was sunny and pleasant up here in Yorkshire.
Agree that Rawnsley isn't the right person to understand Trumpism - you need someone from a northern working class community who still has their family and old friends there to appreciate the reality.
The problem with "Trumpism" is that it's all about the anger and the sense of being left behind and I get all of that. What I don't get is the complete lack of understanding that there is absolutely nothing in Trump's populist rhetoric that will help those left behind or angry.
Once you've had your euphoria at "beating the establishment" and once you've done gloating at the "liberal metropolitan elite", what then ?
A lot of what Le Pen is saying on Marr is very seductive.
I don't speak/understand French so I can't make a real judgement, but as you say she does seem to have quite a seductive tone. One thing that I have noticed is that FN looks like a professional outfit, unlike Ukip.
Do the FN still suffer in head to heads though? IIRC they were leading comfortably in many regions at the last locals, but come the second rounds the other lot still had enough to rally against them to beat them.
Very interesting piece, thanks for sharing. I thought this bit was particularly good:
"Nothing that happens outside the city matters!" they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you'd barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage.
But who cares about those people, right? What's newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.
Epitome of the straw man argument. As a liberal metropolitan who moves in liberal metropolitan circles, I have never heard anyone say such a palpably stupid thing as 'Nothing that happens outside the city matters!'.
The writer is a liberal though, who believes liberal changes have been good. An exaggerated example of the undoubted cultural focus on cities to illustrate their point about the relative failure of liberalism re this election is surely a small sin.
Sorry, it's a big sin in my book. The writer loses credibility when he comes out with such nonsense, so even were it to be followed by actual insight I am going to miss it because I stopped reading. This is really important because what has happened this year is a challenge that us liberals have to face up to. It needs serious and objective analysis.
2) Corbyn always interviews well on Marr - I can understand why a lot of politicians like going on Marr - he's not aggressive and shouty like Neil and some others. Perhaps there's something to be said for that.
Politicians need to be challenged even aggressively sometimes, but to my mind there are two issues. One, some interviewers are not good at aggressive, and just constantly interrupt, which isn't the same thing, and the other is that particularly among the newer breeds of politician, they overcompensate in expectation of aggression and respond preemptively with aggression and petulance. While at the top levels the politicians skirt the issue by not interviewing at all if they can help it, or stick to the softies.
"Politicians need to be challenged even aggressively sometimes,"
A good post. However there's a third issue aside from the two you mention: the interviewers often pick the wrong topic to aggressively question. This sometimes seems to be because they want to create a headline, rather than ascertain a truth.
Andrew Neil, as ever, seems to do this right more often than not.
From those I've seen he seems to strike the best balance - he generally seems cordial but tough, pinning people down on a point without being rude. (Contrast with Paxman, who could be excellent and aggressive, but could also just be an idiot - see his question to Galloway about beating one of the few black women in parliament, as if he should be upset with himself for winning an election)
On the subject of nothing mattering outside of the city - according to the BBC we had bad weather yesterday. No we fecking well didn't - rain in London does not matter to the majority of us - it was sunny and pleasant up here in Yorkshire.
Agree that Rawnsley isn't the right person to understand Trumpism - you need someone from a northern working class community who still has their family and old friends there to appreciate the reality.
I would suggest there was lots of weather around the UK yesterday - is the BBC to describe all weather everywhere in the interests of "balance" ? Clearly not.
The problem with "Trumpism" is that it's all about the anger and the sense of being left behind and I get all of that. What I don't get is the complete lack of understanding that there is absolutely nothing in Trump's populist rhetoric that will help those left behind or angry.
Once you've had your euphoria at "beating the establishment" and once you've done gloating at the "liberal metropolitan elite", what then ?
Once you realise the only people benefiting from Trump will be the very wealthy and once you realise the jobs aren't coming back and it's not going to get any better, what then ?
There's a contradiction in their thinking. I guess most of us suffer from contradictions in our thinking. I am talking about the relatively small number of unionised working class voters that switched from Democrat or no vote, to Trump. The voters that, just, tipped the election to Trump. The overwhelming part of Trump's vote were those that always vote Republicans.
On the one hand these Trumpists think all politicians are the same. All politicians are on the make, have dubious ethics, are there for the rich and ignore the ordinary people. They are under no illusion about Trump on that score. But at the same time they think he is different. He talks differently. He's not a product of the Washington machine. They want change (actually a return to the status quo ante that gave them highly paid jobs with little education requirement) and Trump sounds like change. How you get from A to B isn't something they understand or have much interest in.
Mr. Jessop, you're right, it was an omission (one of forgetfulness) not to mention that Sarkeesian, whilst getting much deserved criticism, also got a lot of hateful abuse.
But then, so did a CoD developer who altered by minuscule amounts the reload times for weapons in a patch. He got death threats, and his family likewise, but people tend not to raise that because it doesn't fit the Evil Male Sexist Gamers Vs Feminist Warriors For Justice narrative some people think is reality.
Gamergate was on a whole different level though. I might mention a game called Star Citizen, and the abuse and muck that is being thrown around about that. There's an entire subreddit directed at the irascible Derek Smart, for instance. Smart can be just as bad: he revealed certain videos (ahem) about one of the participants of the other side.
Or No Mans Sky, where the developers got death threats just for announcing a delay of a few months. Those threats were rather well publicised and got lots of deserved criticism.
The thing about gamergate IMO is the abuse directed at the participants reinforced the complaints that the (generally) women had. Online death threats are bad enough; attempting to call out SWAT teams against them is quite another. It received so much publicity because it was so atrocious.
Some people like being bullies. Anonymity on the Internet allows them to do so with very little chance of recourse, even if they deny anonymity to others.
(As I say below, the abuse was not all one-sided).
6 down, 6 overs to go. Did England declare too late? Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Whatever the result, Adil Rashid has done himself no harm in his quest to be a regular, especially given his less than stellar performance in Bangladesh. Outbowling the world's best spinner and both your teammates is quite an achievement.
On the subject of nothing mattering outside of the city - according to the BBC we had bad weather yesterday. No we fecking well didn't - rain in London does not matter to the majority of us - it was sunny and pleasant up here in Yorkshire.
Agree that Rawnsley isn't the right person to understand Trumpism - you need someone from a northern working class community who still has their family and old friends there to appreciate the reality.
The problem with "Trumpism" is that it's all about the anger and the sense of being left behind and I get all of that. What I don't get is the complete lack of understanding that there is absolutely nothing in Trump's populist rhetoric that will help those left behind or angry.
Once you've had your euphoria at "beating the establishment" and once you've done gloating at the "liberal metropolitan elite", what then ?
A lot of what Le Pen is saying on Marr is very seductive.
I don't speak/understand French so I can't make a real judgement, but as you say she does seem to have quite a seductive tone. One thing that I have noticed is that FN looks like a professional outfit, unlike Ukip.
Do the FN still suffer in head to heads though? IIRC they were leading comfortably in many regions at the last locals, but come the second rounds the other lot still had enough to rally against them to beat them.
The FN are very, very professional as a political party. Their appeal has regional limits though. In addition, they will always lose (barring extraordinary events - and I mean *extraordinary*) presidential elections due to the anyone-but-but-the-fascist tactical voting in the last round.
To put it in a UK context - what can happen (the anti FN tactical vote) in the last round would be comparable to the Labour party voting en bloc for the Conservative candidate. With Momentum giving speeches/campaigning for it.
6 down, 6 overs to go. Did England declare too late? Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Whatever the result, Adil Rashid has done himself no harm in his quest to be a regular, especially given his less than stellar performance in Bangladesh. Outbowling the world's best spinner and both your teammates is quite an achievement.
Agreed. He has had an excellent game. Ali was obviously fabulous with the bat but has been a bit more ordinary with the ball.
Sorry, it's a big sin in my book. The writer loses credibility when he comes out with such nonsense, so even were it to be followed by actual insight I am going to miss it because I stopped reading. This is really important because what has happened this year is a challenge that us liberals have to face up to. It needs serious and objective analysis.
Forgive me, but if you so easily dismiss the serious and objective analysis that is there (inasmuch as exists in any comedic article) on the basis of a single exaggerated metaphor, it doesn't seem like you are working that hard to face up to the challenge, you're choosing to ignore what may be potential good points because of what you regard as poor expression of a single point, no different than dismissing the concerns of rural people because one of their concerns might be seen as racist. That might be so, but it doesn't make the other stuff not relevant or potentially true.
I would contest that as the writer's point was all to do with how liberal urban areas have willfully ignored situations and truths elsewhere because they found them unpalatable, they will have felt it necessary to strike such a tone in order to gain attention. There's a reason invective and exaggeration are part of political debates, of satire, because they can help reveal underlying truths, help us take on arguments we otherwise would skirt around.
Is that always the case and is it the case with that piece? That will come down to personal opinion of course, but if you are going to ignore potentially serious points out of hand because of a single exaggeration, then are you really doing any serious or objective analysis yourself?. As you said, you stopped reading - you didn't like what was said, so you didn't even bother to see if there was something worthwhile, the very point they were making.
Further, how does one have such an objective analysis of such emotive topics? If you're a robot, maybe, but for most of us our own subjective analyses is the best that can be managed. And politics is very emotive. I've always been struck by a legal judgement quote regarding free expression stating 'the exclusion of all emotive, non-rational expression from the coverage of the principle would be a mistake...it would often be hard to disentangle such expression from rational discourse because the most opprobrious insult may form part of an otherwise serious criticism'.
Now that was about not restricting speech more than anything else, but I personally feel it has a corollary in not automatically dismissing arguments because of tone or style. It would be one thing if, accepting the exaggeration as valid or not, you did not find the presented argument convincing, but as you admitted, it was automatic that you dismissed it, hardly serious analysis.
2) Corbyn always interviews well on Marr - I can understand why a lot of politicians like going on Marr - he's not aggressive and shouty like Neil and some others. Perhaps there's something to be said for that.
Politicians need to be challenged even aggressively sometimes, but to my mind there are two issues. One, some interviewers are not good at aggressive, and just constantly interrupt, which isn't the same thing, and the other is that particularly among the newer breeds of politician, they overcompensate in expectation of aggression and respond preemptively with aggression and petulance. While at the top levels the politicians skirt the issue by not interviewing at all if they can help it, or stick to the softies.
I think interviewer aggression rarely works well. In fact I don't think Andrew Neil is as good an interviewer as some think. With him the challenge becomes the objective so that he and the politician end up arguing about relative trivial points when the politician may have something more interesting to say. The point of the interview is to get the politician to talk and let viewers make up their own minds whether he is talking sense or nonsense or whether he is avoiding the question.
Not really. 10-15 overs more for them to bat, with fewer runs to get, and maybe that time the batsmen do a better job and people condemn Cook for not putting the game beyond India.
2) Corbyn always interviews well on Marr - I can understand why a lot of politicians like going on Marr - he's not aggressive and shouty like Neil and some others. Perhaps there's something to be said for that.
Politicians need to be challenged even aggressively sometimes, but to my mind there are two issues. One, some interviewers are not good at aggressive, and just constantly interrupt, which isn't the same thing, and the other is that particularly among the newer breeds of politician, they overcompensate in expectation of aggression and respond preemptively with aggression and petulance. While at the top levels the politicians skirt the issue by not interviewing at all if they can help it, or stick to the softies.
"Politicians need to be challenged even aggressively sometimes,"
A good post. However there's a third issue aside from the two you mention: the interviewers often pick the wrong topic to aggressively question. This sometimes seems to be because they want to create a headline, rather than ascertain a truth.
Andrew Neil, as ever, seems to do this right more often than not.
I think it was in the 1980s, perhaps as a result of the SDP creation or defection from Labour, that political interviewers became obsessed with splits, by which they meant any microscopic difference in phrasing from the official party line. Until then it had been (iirc which I might not) accepted that politicians had different views -- that, after all, is why we have collective responsibility: if ministers always agreed, it would be redundant. In reaction, politicians became defensive and determinedly "on message".
On the subject of nothing mattering outside of the city - according to the BBC we had bad weather yesterday. No we fecking well didn't - rain in London does not matter to the majority of us - it was sunny and pleasant up here in Yorkshire.
Agree that Rawnsley isn't the right person to understand Trumpism - you need someone from a northern working class community who still has their family and old friends there to appreciate the reality.
The problem with "Trumpism" is that it's all about the anger and the sense of being left behind and I get all of that. What I don't get is the complete lack of understanding that there is absolutely nothing in Trump's populist rhetoric that will help those left behind or angry.
Once you've had your euphoria at "beating the establishment" and once you've done gloating at the "liberal metropolitan elite", what then ?
A lot of what Le Pen is saying on Marr is very seductive.
I don't speak/understand French so I can't make a real judgement, but as you say she does seem to have quite a seductive tone. One thing that I have noticed is that FN looks like a professional outfit, unlike Ukip.
Do the FN still suffer in head to heads though? IIRC they were leading comfortably in many regions at the last locals, but come the second rounds the other lot still had enough to rally against them to beat them.
The FN are very, very professional as a political party. Their appeal has regional limits though. In addition, they will always lose (barring extraordinary events - and I mean *extraordinary*) presidential elections due to the anyone-but-but-the-fascist tactical voting in the last round.
To put it in a UK context - what can happen (the anti FN tactical vote) in the last round would be comparable to the Labour party voting en bloc for the Conservative candidate. With Momentum giving speeches/campaigning for it.
The FN was scoring 28-33% in the opinion polls prior to the elections. (As they are now.)
In the actual election they underperformed in the first round markedly. In the second, they had a disastrous time, picking up a total of just 62 councillors out of several thousand. They picked up virtually no transfer votes, even compared to (say) the Communist Party which ended up with 163 seats.
This is why I think the expectations for Le Pen to beat Juppe are off base.
Edit to add: as an analogy, that is Conservative voters plumping for Momentum to keep UKIP out.
Not really. 10-15 overs more for them to bat, with fewer runs to get, and maybe that time the batsmen do a better job and people condemn Cook for not putting the game beyond India.
Its a tough call and as I said hindsight is easy. I think England have done well to press India this hard. I think these 2 will see India home though.
The problem about 'free trade' is not the trade, it is the globalisation policies of large companies that they can set up the CREATION of wealth where they wish. The inevitable consequence of free selection of places to make goods is that companies will always (given the legality) select places where wages are lowest to create goods and select places where prices are highest to sell goods.
The consequence is that this will continue until labour costs in both trading countries are similar. e.g. manual workers in the USA can only obtain jobs via corporate investment if they work for the same wages as those in China which, given the relative cost of living, is absolute poverty.
Had there been no rewards for companies chosing one country over another then they would have stayed in their original country (as transfer costs are significant) and there would be no real problem. Free trade in Europe (as the original Common Market), makes sense in that there were minimal incentives for companies to relocate between countries where the actual manufacturing costs were similar. With the opening up of Eastern Europe, however, there is a great incentive for companies (someone mentioned a betting company recently) to switch over to the countries with lower costs. (The corollory of course is that people in the Eastern countries will want to move to countries where they can earn more money. Again, like equalisation of potentials, this will only stop when there is no incentive to move - which will only happen when wages in Eastern and Western Europe equalise - which means a substantial drop in wages in the UK.)
Thus the wealthier countries (those with a high standard of living) cannot afford to engage in free movement of the creation of goods as their citizens will be adversly affected. The 'liberal elite' do not engage in this - they live in their own 'bubble economy' and are thus insulated from the effects. What has happened in America is that those 'liberal elites' have suddenly found that they face concerted opposition from those who have been adversly affected by globailisation.
At the moment there is no real political party in the UK to seize on this disaffection. Labour have lost their raison d'etre and UKIP do not have the political base (yet) in this country. The conservatives are currently perceived as the 'least worst' option, not the best option. The Liberal Democrats are currently perceived as the 'worst' option.
If UKIP set themselves up as a protectionist party (having 'won' the brexit vote') then there is serious potential for increasing support. No doubt 'protectionism' will be protrayed as neo-nazism or Trumpism in the press - but that is the way that politics will eventually go in the UK.
2) Corbyn always interviews well on Marr - I can understand why a lot of politicians like going on Marr - he's not aggressive and shouty like Neil and some others. Perhaps there's something to be said for that.
Politicians need to be challenged even aggressively sometimes, but to my mind there are two issues. One, some interviewers are not good at aggressive, and just constantly interrupt, which isn't the same thing, and the other is that particularly among the newer breeds of politician, they overcompensate in expectation of aggression and respond preemptively with aggression and petulance. While at the top levels the politicians skirt the issue by not interviewing at all if they can help it, or stick to the softies.
I think interviewer aggression rarely works well. In fact I don't think Andrew Neil is as good an interviewer as some think. With him the challenge becomes the objective so that he and the politician end up arguing about relative trivial points when the politician may have something more interesting to say. The point of the interview is to get the politician to talk and let viewers make up their own minds whether he is talking sense or nonsense or whether he is avoiding the question.
We don't have a problem with getting politicians to talk. If that was the goal and then for us to make up our minds, we wouldn't need interviewers at all, we should just let them talk to camera. An interviewer might end up focusing on a trivial point, as far as we believe, but I would maintain the experience of being challenged even on a trivial point is essential for politicians. Many are very charismatic and smooth talkers, I have no doubt they could convince most people of almost anything in the absence of questioning, but if they cannot answer an interviewers questions, or explain why the question is stupid convincingly, it hardly speaks well of them on the point they want to focus on.
The issue is that living in the information age no-one has the time to read everything that has been written on any subject in which they might be interested. Given that, establishing credibility is hugely important. And if a writer you don't know is recommended you'll want to assess as quickly as possible whether it's going to be worth the time you'll have to expend reading the whole article. Say something stupid in your first paragraph and you've lost me for good. I value my time too highly.
On the subject of nothing mattering outside of the city - according to the BBC we had bad weather yesterday. No we fecking well didn't - rain in London does not matter to the majority of us - it was sunny and pleasant up here in Yorkshire.
Agree that Rawnsley isn't the right person to understand Trumpism - you need someone from a northern working class community who still has their family and old friends there to appreciate the reality.
The problem with "Trumpism" is that it's all about the anger and the sense of being left behind and
A lot of what Le Pen is saying on Marr is very seductive.
I don't speak/understand French so I can't make a real judgement, but as you say she does seem to have quite a seductive tone. One thing that I have noticed is that FN looks like a professional outfit, unlike Ukip.
Do the FN still suffer in head to heads though? IIRC they were leading comfortably in many regions at the last locals, but come the second rounds the other lot still had enough to rally against them to beat them.
The FN are very, very professional as a political party. Their appeal has regional limits though. In addition, they will always lose (barring extraordinary events - and I mean *extraordinary*) presidential elections due to the anyone-but-but-the-fascist tactical voting in the last round.
To put it in a UK context - what can happen (the anti FN tactical vote) in the last round would be comparable to the Labour party voting en bloc for the Conservative candidate. With Momentum giving speeches/campaigning for it.
The FN was scoring 28-33% in the opinion polls prior to the elections. (As they are now.)
In the actual election they underperformed in the first round markedly. In the second, they had a disastrous time, picking up a total of just 62 councillors out of several thousand. They picked up virtually no transfer votes, even compared to (say) the Communist Party which ended up with 163 seats.
This is why I think the expectations for Le Pen to beat Juppe are off base.
Edit to add: as an analogy, that is Conservative voters plumping for Momentum to keep UKIP out.
It does seem that, unlike other recent shocks, the circumstances still do not favour them, but the problem will be if you say that others will draw equivalency with Trump and Brexit etc and say we are doing the same dismissing.
The problem about 'free trade' is not the trade, it is the globalisation policies of large companies that they can set up the CREATION of wealth where they wish. The inevitable consequence of free selection of places to make goods is that companies will always (given the legality) select places where wages are lowest to create goods and select places where prices are highest to sell goods.
The problem is that we were rich because we had a monopoly of knowledge. And we imported raw materials from the developing world and exported services and manufactured product.
What will we export, in a protectionist world, to get the oil, iron ore, natural gas, copper, etc., that we need?
The problem about 'free trade' is not the trade, it is the globalisation policies of large companies that they can set up the CREATION of wealth where they wish. The inevitable consequence of free selection of places to make goods is that companies will always (given the legality) select places where wages are lowest to create goods and select places where prices are highest to sell goods.
The problem is that we were rich because we had a monopoly of knowledge. And we imported raw materials from the developing world and exported services and manufactured product.
What will we export, in a protectionist world, to get the oil, iron ore, natural gas, copper, etc., that we need?
Services such as education, finance, insurance and banking. And prestige products like Jaguars and JCBs.
On the subject of nothing mattering outside of the city - according to the BBC we had bad weather yesterday. No we fecking well didn't - rain in London does not matter to the majority of us - it was sunny and pleasant up here in Yorkshire.
Agree that Rawnsley isn't the right person to understand Trumpism - you need someone from a northern working class community who still has their family and old friends there to appreciate the reality.
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There was a post UK Civil War Royalist pamphlet I say many years ago, that on the death of Cromwell celebrated the rise of Richard - "When in hell, a change of usurpation...."
Very interesting piece, thanks for sharing. I thought this bit was particularly good:
"Nothing that happens outside the city matters!" they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you'd barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage.
But who cares about those people, right? What's newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.
Epitome of the straw man argument. As a liberal metropolitan who moves in liberal metropolitan circles, I have never heard anyone say such a palpably stupid thing as 'Nothing that happens outside the city matters!'.
Actually, I have heard American academics say only the East and West Coasts matter, and we fly over the other states.
Just a few weeks ago in Princeton.
Most of the time people with such a mindset simply ignore the existence of the "other". They only insult it when it intrudes...
Think of it in politically correct terms - the elaborate speech codes created to avoid offending minorities... You are going to have to learn the same kind of rules for the WWC. Or learn to live with Trump, and worse than Trump.
It will hurt and there will be casualties - a searing article, in the New Yorker, concerning a humanities professor who lost his career for one drunken joke about trailer parks A singer who loses her contract for using the word "Cracker" while not being WWC....
A lot of what Le Pen is saying on Marr is very seductive.
I don't speak/understand French so I can't make a real judgement, but as you say she does seem to have quite a seductive tone. One thing that I have noticed is that FN looks like a professional outfit, unlike Ukip.
Oh, too true. One of the main reasons I left UKIP last year, was that they remained an infantile and unprofessional outfit, rather than a political party ready for growth and expansion.
While there is some truth in what you say, it is a rather simplistic analysis that fails to recognise that many wealthy countries with high wages maintain significant trade surpluses. Notable examples being found throughout the EU, and also Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
Cost of labour is only one factor, alongside a well educated and productive workforce, a commitment to quality and innovation, and protection of the rule of law and absence of political corruption.
The problem about 'free trade' is not the trade, it is the globalisation policies of large companies that they can set up the CREATION of wealth where they wish. The inevitable consequence of free selection of places to make goods is that companies will always (given the legality) select places where wages are lowest to create goods and select places where prices are highest to sell goods.
The problem is that we were rich because we had a monopoly of knowledge. And we imported raw materials from the developing world and exported services and manufactured product.
What will we export, in a protectionist world, to get the oil, iron ore, natural gas, copper, etc., that we need?
Services such as education, finance, insurance and banking. And prestige products like Jaguars and JCBs.
Finance insurance and banking! Having you been living in the last 10 years. Sectors that have clearly grown too big and overleveraged. So yes we can still sell them but I can't see it as a growing sector.
It does seem that, unlike other recent shocks, the circumstances still do not favour them, but the problem will be if you say that others will draw equivalency with Trump and Brexit etc and say we are doing the same dismissing.
There is a huge difference, though. There were plenty of polls showing Brexit leading, and Donald Trump was scoring close to Hilary. (And, indeed she beat him in popular vote.)
Let Pen loses more than 2:1 to Juppe in every poll that has been taken.
This feels a little bit like saying "well, Mussolini won in Italy, and Hitler in Germany, therefore Moseley is certain to win here."
It does seem that, unlike other recent shocks, the circumstances still do not favour them, but the problem will be if you say that others will draw equivalency with Trump and Brexit etc and say we are doing the same dismissing.
There is a huge difference, though. There were plenty of polls showing Brexit leading, and Donald Trump was scoring close to Hilary. (And, indeed she beat him in popular vote.)
Let Pen loses more than 2:1 to Juppe in every poll that has been taken.
This feels a little bit like saying "well, Mussolini won in Italy, and Hitler in Germany, therefore Moseley is certain to win here."
I agree, but that is what people will say when the difference is pointed out.
The problem about 'free trade' is not the trade, it is the globalisation policies of large companies that they can set up the CREATION of wealth where they wish. The inevitable consequence of free selection of places to make goods is that companies will always (given the legality) select places where wages are lowest to create goods and select places where prices are highest to sell goods.
The problem is that we were rich because we had a monopoly of knowledge. And we imported raw materials from the developing world and exported services and manufactured product.
What will we export, in a protectionist world, to get the oil, iron ore, natural gas, copper, etc., that we need?
Services such as education, finance, insurance and banking. And prestige products like Jaguars and JCBs.
The trouble with relying on services is that increasingly they too are vulnerable to automation and offshoring.
The problem about 'free trade' is not the trade, it is the globalisation policies of large companies that they can set up the CREATION of wealth where they wish. The inevitable consequence of free selection of places to make goods is that companies will always (given the legality) select places where wages are lowest to create goods and select places where prices are highest to sell goods.
The problem is that we were rich because we had a monopoly of knowledge. And we imported raw materials from the developing world and exported services and manufactured product.
What will we export, in a protectionist world, to get the oil, iron ore, natural gas, copper, etc., that we need?
Services such as education, finance, insurance and banking. And prestige products like Jaguars and JCBs.
So we're going to hike up tariffs on the exports of - say China or Brazil - but expect them to open their insurance markets to us?
The problem about 'free trade' is not the trade, it is the globalisation policies of large companies that they can set up the CREATION of wealth where they wish. The inevitable consequence of free selection of places to make goods is that companies will always (given the legality) select places where wages are lowest to create goods and select places where prices are highest to sell goods.
The consequence is that this will continue until labour costs in both trading countries are similar. e.g. manual workers in the USA can only obtain jobs via corporate investment if they work for the same wages as those in China which, given the relative cost of living, is absolute poverty.
Had there been no rewards for companies chosing one country over another then they would have stayed in their original country (as transfer costs are significant) and there would be no real problem. Free trade in Europe (as the original Common Market), makes sense in that there were minimal incentives for companies to relocate between countries where the actual manufacturing costs were similar. With the opening up of Eastern Europe, however, there is a great incentive for companies (someone mentioned a betting company recently) to switch over to the countries with lower costs. (The corollory of course is that people in the Eastern countries will want to move to countries where they can earn more money. Again, like equalisation of potentials, this will only stop when there is no incentive to move - which will only happen when wages in Eastern and Western Europe equalise - which means a substantial drop in wages in the UK.)
Protectionism isnt the answer to this, globalisation is a two edged sword and we should use it thus.
There are two types of companies that relocate. Those that genuinely need to do so to compete in their product space and those that choose to do so because they increase their profit margin but the product they make would still be profitable if made in the higher wage labour market.
The answer in my view is to tell companies they can choose to use globalisation if they wish to bring labour costs down but that means that those goods will not be protected when it comes to where they are purchased from.
Set up a rule whereby x% of the manufacture has to be in a country within y% of your local median wage to be protected as in the case above.
Then companies that genuinely need to relocate can, the others can choose between paying lower wages but having people able to buy at the lowest world cost or paying higher wages and regionalisation of prices is protected
It seems to me that France has a long term problem. Yes, it is highly unlikely that FN would ever win the Presidency. But it also seems impossible to see them not making the final round for the foreseeable future. At some point they will have a favourable opponent - as Trump had with Hillary Clinton - they only have to get lucky once.
Morning - I'm probably late posting on this but I can't stop laughing seeing the local press worrying about the sensitivities of Nige meeting Trump in the context of TM. Can you imagine how whatsisname in Brussels is feeling? Can you imagine what Nige is feeling about what whatisname is feeling? I'm no fan of Nige or Trump but they have hugely brightened up my day. I'll worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.
I laughed a lot at this show - we'd never see anything like this here
What odds for a Le Pen victory if there is another major terrorist incident between now and the elections next Spring?
There have been many terrorist incidents in France in the last 18 months, and Mme Le Pen's vote share has remained marooned at c. 30%.
30% is enough to win round 1, probably more given shy Le Pens, in round two she then goes hard for normally Socialist and Melenchon workers in declining industrial areas
The problem about 'free trade' is not the trade, it is the globalisation policies of large companies that they can set up the CREATION of wealth where they wish. The inevitable consequence of free selection of places to make goods is that companies will always (given the legality) select places where wages are lowest to create goods and select places where prices are highest to sell goods.
The consequence is that this will continue until labour costs in both trading countries are similar. e.g. manual workers in the USA can only obtain jobs via corporate investment if they work for the same wages as those in China which, given the relative cost of living, is absolute poverty.
This last sentence is where both Left and Right go wrong, in my opinion.
The issue is productivity. At this point in time, for example, in a number of industries it is a toss-up whether to go with China or a factory in US. This is not because there are parts of the US that are paying Chinese wages - partly it is due to higher automation levels, but there is more to it than this.
It is is an iron law that productivity is a function of education, civil society & the social spending of the country. Quite simply, the NHS raises productivity compared to, say, India. As does road building, power stations, the rule of law that isn't quite so... er... flexible etc etc
I have (in the world of software) seen multiple attempts to outsource/best shore/etc etc software development. Each time, the alleged savings failed to occur - because the number of people required to do the same work elsewhere was large enough to nearly eliminate the differential in cost.
If it takes 100 developers in India to do the job of 15 in the UK, the fact that it *costs* (not pay, cost) 4 times less to employ the Indians isn't going to help your bosses.
At this point some jerk always starts going on about racism - but if you take the same Indian developer and bring him to the UK on a long contract, his productivity rises to match the UK levels.
This same thing is true in many, many industries - when you multiply out the cost/productivity factors, the difference between onshore and offshore is not as dramatic as you might think. It is the kind of number that good management/structures can easily reverse.
In fact it is quite rational and to be expected - wages rising to match the value of the work.
Which is where we come to immigration. Bring people into the country, and they will become as productive as the locals - more rapidly than their demands for similar wages. Bring in {foreign cheap country} coders, fire them once they get ideas (like having a liveable wage), get some more.... and you can keep the wages down. And the locals out. What could possibly go wrong?
There are of course, industries where this doesn't happen - textiles are a good example. Low skill required by the workers, simple machinery to tend...
Good story in the ST saying scientists in Edinburgh have discovered a poverty gene in genetic variations which "explain 21% of the variation in social deprivation and 11% of the variation in household incomes." It is caused by single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs for short.
It seems to me that France has a long term problem. Yes, it is highly unlikely that FN would ever win the Presidency. But it also seems impossible to see them not making the final round for the foreseeable future. At some point they will have a favourable opponent - as Trump had with Hillary Clinton - they only have to get lucky once.
I think the effect of FN is more likely to be similar to the kippers here, dragging other parties onto their ground. We see that with significant moves as well as absurdities like last summers burkini furore.
We see it in reverse too, with the kippers coming round to gay marriage and supporting increased NHS spending. In the battle of ideas politicians are adept at stealing each others clothes!
It does seem that, unlike other recent shocks, the circumstances still do not favour them, but the problem will be if you say that others will draw equivalency with Trump and Brexit etc and say we are doing the same dismissing.
There is a huge difference, though. There were plenty of polls showing Brexit leading, and Donald Trump was scoring close to Hilary. (And, indeed she beat him in popular vote.)
Let Pen loses more than 2:1 to Juppe in every poll that has been taken.
This feels a little bit like saying "well, Mussolini won in Italy, and Hitler in Germany, therefore Moseley is certain to win here."
rcs is way too optimistic (much like at 11.00pm on Tuesday night).
The NF is close to tipping point.
When the Left didn't withdraw (as they did in the NFs two best regions), we got results like
Bourgogne: Right (32.4 %), Left (35.4 %), NF (32.4 %) Val de Loire: Right (34.6 %), Left (35.4 %), NF (30 %).
These will tip next time, if France is in the same mess as it is now.
In any case, as Farage as shown, you don't have to win to get your own way.
The Presidential election is going to be run on the NF's territory, and the whole country will be inexorably dragged rightwards and Eurosceptic. The role of the Eu will be questioned as never before in France.
In fact the withdrawal of the Left's candidate in Hauts de France and Provence is just a very visible manifestation of what is happening. To stop the NF, more candidates will have to withdraw next time, and that just drags the whole country rightwards.
It does seem that, unlike other recent shocks, the circumstances still do not favour them, but the problem will be if you say that others will draw equivalency with Trump and Brexit etc and say we are doing the same dismissing.
There is a huge difference, though. There were plenty of polls showing Brexit leading, and Donald Trump was scoring close to Hilary. (And, indeed she beat him in popular vote.)
Let Pen loses more than 2:1 to Juppe in every poll that has been taken.
This feels a little bit like saying "well, Mussolini won in Italy, and Hitler in Germany, therefore Moseley is certain to win here."
rcs is way too optimistic (much like at 11.00pm on Tuesday night).
The NF is close to tipping point.
When the Left didn't withdraw (as they did in the NFs two best regions), we got results like
Bourgogne: Right (32.4 %), Left (35.4 %), NF (32.4 %) Val de Loire: Right (34.6 %), Left (35.4 %), NF (30 %).
These will tip next time, if France is in the same mess as it is now.
In any case, as Farage as shown, you don't have to win to get your own way.
The Presidential election is going to be run on the NF's territory, and the whole country will be inexorably dragged rightwards and Eurosceptic. The role of the Eu will be questioned as never before in France.
In fact the withdrawal of the Left's candidate in Hauts de France and Provence is just a very visible manifestation of what is happening. To stop the NF, more candidates will have to withdraw next time, and that just drags the whole country rightwards.
Personally I have a few quid on Sarkozy. Seems to a value bet here at the moment at 8. This will crash if he makes it through the primaries, which he may well not, but is a good campaigner and may be seen as more effective against the inevitable run-off with LePen as he is a fighter and will throw some red meat to french nationalists. Macron also is worth a couple of quid at 26, given that we are 2016 and weird things keep happening. He plans to run as a new party. As ever DYOR.
What odds for a Le Pen victory if there is another major terrorist incident between now and the elections next Spring?
There have been many terrorist incidents in France in the last 18 months, and Mme Le Pen's vote share has remained marooned at c. 30%.
30% is enough to win round 1, probably more given shy Le Pens, in round two she then goes hard for normally Socialist and Melenchon workers in declining industrial areas
Sure, she may well win round one, especially if the "establishment" vote is split between Macron, Juppe and AN Other.
But if Macron and Bayrou do not stand, I think Juppe is north of 35% in round one.
Btw, that poll you posted last week is still not up on the Kantor .
Good story in the ST saying scientists in Edinburgh have discovered a poverty gene in genetic variations which "explain 21% of the variation in social deprivation and 11% of the variation in household incomes." It is caused by single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs for short.
Colour me surprised.
A single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP, pronounced snip) is a DNA sequence variation occurring when a single nucleotide adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), or guanine (G]) in the genome (or other shared sequence) differs between members of a species or paired chromosomes in an individual.
Comments
Affluent tory voters will support Goldsmith, they will turn up to vote.
Hardcore opposition to Brexit is going to be a minority issue, may swing a few votes from tory to lib dem but hardly definitive.
Labour have a strong candidate in Woolmar, he will poll well, thus splitting the anti Goldsmith vote.
Think I will back Goldsmith if the odds are good enough.
If you want insights into New Labour, Rawnsley is very good. Myself & right now, I don't need any more insights into the doings of war criminals. I need them put in a jail cell.
Rawnsley is the last person in the world to help us understand the phenomenon of Faragism or Trumpism.
When it came to Brown, then he was very much more direct.
A few disconnected thoughts this fine Sunday morning (at least it is in the Labour heartland of East London):
1) The American media aren't the BBC - are they obliged to be balanced ? Fox claims to be balanced and I'm sure CBS, NBC, ABC and the rest would claim the same. There are two options - either be balanced or have a series of echo chambers.
Is the problem with some people's obsession with media bias they only want to hear their point of view or they don't want to hear conflicting viewpoints ?
2) Corbyn always interviews well on Marr - I can understand why a lot of politicians like going on Marr - he's not aggressive and shouty like Neil and some others. Perhaps there's something to be said for that.
3) I'd like to think any plan to join NAFTA would be properly scrutinised and put to a referendum.
4) England on course for a comfortable win against India - who'd have thunk it ?
5) The glaring deficiencies in Trump's populism become more apparent - are we seriously going to emulate him ? At what point do we realise infrastructural investment and tax cuts have to be paid for or shall we just keep on borrowing ? The fact that some Conservatives seem anxious to adopt this reflationary nonsense speaks volumes.
Why worry about a mad left-wing tax and spend Government ? Instead we've got a mad right-wing spend and borrow Government.
To be fair, Hammond won't want to go that far but reflation seems to be the new game in town though that's not a pain or risk free option.
Betting PostF1: suffering a twisted spine due to enlarged wallet syndrome? Get pain relief today with two of Morris Dancer's wallet-lightening tips:
http://enormo-haddock.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/brazil-pre-race-2016.html
SkyNews
Over 10 million poppies are handmade each year by the Poppy Factory, which employs ex-servicemen facing adversity https://t.co/GIpkODqQgt
Elderly academics in the NE Universities often have holiday homes in Florida, so they can escape the worst of the rigours of the US winter.
They know where Florida is, just like wealthy lawyers know where Hungary is. They just don't think the views of the inhabitants are worth paying attention to.
Agree that Rawnsley isn't the right person to understand Trumpism - you need someone from a northern working class community who still has their family and old friends there to appreciate the reality.
https://twitter.com/JeanneBartram/status/797609873139765248
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy
Tim has his personal information posted on here, a move *almost?* all posters on here condemned, and I think the perpetrator now regrets. Gamergate's harassment of multiple individuals was much greater.
In the end the harassment became so much of the story that the original causes of it became nebulous at best, and in many ways redundant. It was a hate-fest, with some individuals on many (there were not just two) sides trying to get their five minutes' of fame from it.
Few people came out of it well, but the harassers should just crawl under the rock whence they came.
Saying "Sarkeesian" is banshee-shrieking is bit OTT given the abuse she was subjected to.
Trump = Farage. The wealthy guy whose blokeish exterior and penchant for needling a lot of unpleasant lefties gives him the wholly undeserved reputation of being a straight-talker who understands normal people.
Clinton = May. The middle-class girl who made it big and rose to the top because all the others were considerably more sh1t than she was, which says a lot about them. Will dominate the popular vote but can they hang on in their old core areas against the insurgents?
Corbyn = Stein. The rambling idiot nobody has heard of or cares about, who inspires fanatical devotion among the faithful who believe that compulsory gender studies classes are what the country really needs right now and will definitely vote for - and if they don't, who cares because it's about the message not about winning power and having to do actual things which are sometimes a bit messy.
Therefore the parallel and the glaring difference are both obvious. Farage has the appeal but not the necessary backing, organisation or political clout to exploit it. Corbyn has the latter but not the former. Between them the opposition is hopelessly divided leaving Theresa May to sweep the field.
If Farage were leading Labour, now would be a good moment for all Tories to panic. As he isn't, the threat to them is minimal.
This will not of course stop much ink from being spilled on the parallels between Trump and Corbyn - racism, sexism and the backing of a bunch of murderers being some of the more obvious ones - but it does make the political reality fundamentally different.
*This was sort of the equivalent of being told by Mao Zedong that you don't understand agriculture.
The problem with "Trumpism" is that it's all about the anger and the sense of being left behind and I get all of that. What I don't get is the complete lack of understanding that there is absolutely nothing in Trump's populist rhetoric that will help those left behind or angry.
Once you've had your euphoria at "beating the establishment" and once you've done gloating at the "liberal metropolitan elite", what then ?
Once you realise the only people benefiting from Trump will be the very wealthy and once you realise the jobs aren't coming back and it's not going to get any better, what then ?
It rained in Cannock too, very hard and for a long time.
*Relaxes*
https://twitter.com/johnharris1969/status/797746309688160256
And if they end nine down, how much stick will Cook get for that delayed declaration?
A good post. However there's a third issue aside from the two you mention: the interviewers often pick the wrong topic to aggressively question. This sometimes seems to be because they want to create a headline, rather than ascertain a truth.
Andrew Neil, as ever, seems to do this right more often than not.
But then, so did a CoD developer who altered by minuscule amounts the reload times for weapons in a patch. He got death threats, and his family likewise, but people tend not to raise that because it doesn't fit the Evil Male Sexist Gamers Vs Feminist Warriors For Justice narrative some people think is reality.
On the one hand these Trumpists think all politicians are the same. All politicians are on the make, have dubious ethics, are there for the rich and ignore the ordinary people. They are under no illusion about Trump on that score. But at the same time they think he is different. He talks differently. He's not a product of the Washington machine. They want change (actually a return to the status quo ante that gave them highly paid jobs with little education requirement) and Trump sounds like change. How you get from A to B isn't something they understand or have much interest in.
Or No Mans Sky, where the developers got death threats just for announcing a delay of a few months. Those threats were rather well publicised and got lots of deserved criticism.
The thing about gamergate IMO is the abuse directed at the participants reinforced the complaints that the (generally) women had. Online death threats are bad enough; attempting to call out SWAT teams against them is quite another. It received so much publicity because it was so atrocious.
Some people like being bullies. Anonymity on the Internet allows them to do so with very little chance of recourse, even if they deny anonymity to others.
(As I say below, the abuse was not all one-sided).
To put it in a UK context - what can happen (the anti FN tactical vote) in the last round would be comparable to the Labour party voting en bloc for the Conservative candidate. With Momentum giving speeches/campaigning for it.
I would contest that as the writer's point was all to do with how liberal urban areas have willfully ignored situations and truths elsewhere because they found them unpalatable, they will have felt it necessary to strike such a tone in order to gain attention. There's a reason invective and exaggeration are part of political debates, of satire, because they can help reveal underlying truths, help us take on arguments we otherwise would skirt around.
Is that always the case and is it the case with that piece? That will come down to personal opinion of course, but if you are going to ignore potentially serious points out of hand because of a single exaggeration, then are you really doing any serious or objective analysis yourself?. As you said, you stopped reading - you didn't like what was said, so you didn't even bother to see if there was something worthwhile, the very point they were making.
Further, how does one have such an objective analysis of such emotive topics? If you're a robot, maybe, but for most of us our own subjective analyses is the best that can be managed. And politics is very emotive. I've always been struck by a legal judgement quote regarding free expression stating 'the exclusion of all emotive, non-rational expression from the coverage of the principle would be a mistake...it would often be hard to disentangle such expression from rational discourse because the most opprobrious insult may form part of an otherwise serious criticism'.
Now that was about not restricting speech more than anything else, but I personally feel it has a corollary in not automatically dismissing arguments because of tone or style. It would be one thing if, accepting the exaggeration as valid or not, you did not find the presented argument convincing, but as you admitted, it was automatic that you dismissed it, hardly serious analysis.
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/international/weed-legalised-in-america-because-they-fking-need-it-20161110116895
The FN was scoring 28-33% in the opinion polls prior to the elections. (As they are now.)
In the actual election they underperformed in the first round markedly.
In the second, they had a disastrous time, picking up a total of just 62 councillors out of several thousand. They picked up virtually no transfer votes, even compared to (say) the Communist Party which ended up with 163 seats.
This is why I think the expectations for Le Pen to beat Juppe are off base.
Edit to add: as an analogy, that is Conservative voters plumping for Momentum to keep UKIP out.
The consequence is that this will continue until labour costs in both trading countries are similar. e.g. manual workers in the USA can only obtain jobs via corporate investment if they work for the same wages as those in China which, given the relative cost of living, is absolute poverty.
Had there been no rewards for companies chosing one country over another then they would have stayed in their original country (as transfer costs are significant) and there would be no real problem. Free trade in Europe (as the original Common Market), makes sense in that there were minimal incentives for companies to relocate between countries where the actual manufacturing costs were similar. With the opening up of Eastern Europe, however, there is a great incentive for companies (someone mentioned a betting company recently) to switch over to the countries with lower costs. (The corollory of course is that people in the Eastern countries will want to move to countries where they can earn more money. Again, like equalisation of potentials, this will only stop when there is no incentive to move - which will only happen when wages in Eastern and Western Europe equalise - which means a substantial drop in wages in the UK.)
Thus the wealthier countries (those with a high standard of living) cannot afford to engage in free movement of the creation of goods as their citizens will be adversly affected. The 'liberal elite' do not engage in this - they live in their own 'bubble economy' and are thus insulated from the effects. What has happened in America is that those 'liberal elites' have suddenly found that they face concerted opposition from those who have been adversly affected by globailisation.
At the moment there is no real political party in the UK to seize on this disaffection. Labour have lost their raison d'etre and UKIP do not have the political base (yet) in this country. The conservatives are currently perceived as the 'least worst' option, not the best option. The Liberal Democrats are currently perceived as the 'worst' option.
If UKIP set themselves up as a protectionist party (having 'won' the brexit vote') then there is serious potential for increasing support. No doubt 'protectionism' will be protrayed as neo-nazism or Trumpism in the press - but that is the way that politics will eventually go in the UK.
The issue is that living in the information age no-one has the time to read everything that has been written on any subject in which they might be interested. Given that, establishing credibility is hugely important. And if a writer you don't know is recommended you'll want to assess as quickly as possible whether it's going to be worth the time you'll have to expend reading the whole article. Say something stupid in your first paragraph and you've lost me for good. I value my time too highly.
What will we export, in a protectionist world, to get the oil, iron ore, natural gas, copper, etc., that we need?
Think of it in politically correct terms - the elaborate speech codes created to avoid offending minorities... You are going to have to learn the same kind of rules for the WWC. Or learn to live with Trump, and worse than Trump.
It will hurt and there will be casualties - a searing article, in the New Yorker, concerning a humanities professor who lost his career for one drunken joke about trailer parks A singer who loses her contract for using the word "Cracker" while not being WWC....
While there is some truth in what you say, it is a rather simplistic analysis that fails to recognise that many wealthy countries with high wages maintain significant trade surpluses. Notable examples being found throughout the EU, and also Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
Cost of labour is only one factor, alongside a well educated and productive workforce, a commitment to quality and innovation, and protection of the rule of law and absence of political corruption.
Let Pen loses more than 2:1 to Juppe in every poll that has been taken.
This feels a little bit like saying "well, Mussolini won in Italy, and Hitler in Germany, therefore Moseley is certain to win here."
There are two types of companies that relocate. Those that genuinely need to do so to compete in their product space and those that choose to do so because they increase their profit margin but the product they make would still be profitable if made in the higher wage labour market.
The answer in my view is to tell companies they can choose to use globalisation if they wish to bring labour costs down but that means that those goods will not be protected when it comes to where they are purchased from.
This case is an example
http://www.scotsman.com/news/levi-wins-cheap-jeans-battle-against-tesco-1-927943
Set up a rule whereby x% of the manufacture has to be in a country within y% of your local median wage to be protected as in the case above.
Then companies that genuinely need to relocate can, the others can choose between paying lower wages but having people able to buy at the lowest world cost or paying higher wages and regionalisation of prices is protected
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75HTrjn-4S0
Don't forget the race starts at 4pm, and my rambling drunken witterings are up here: http://enormo-haddock.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/brazil-pre-race-2016.html
The issue is productivity. At this point in time, for example, in a number of industries it is a toss-up whether to go with China or a factory in US. This is not because there are parts of the US that are paying Chinese wages - partly it is due to higher automation levels, but there is more to it than this.
It is is an iron law that productivity is a function of education, civil society & the social spending of the country. Quite simply, the NHS raises productivity compared to, say, India. As does road building, power stations, the rule of law that isn't quite so... er... flexible etc etc
I have (in the world of software) seen multiple attempts to outsource/best shore/etc etc software development. Each time, the alleged savings failed to occur - because the number of people required to do the same work elsewhere was large enough to nearly eliminate the differential in cost.
If it takes 100 developers in India to do the job of 15 in the UK, the fact that it *costs* (not pay, cost) 4 times less to employ the Indians isn't going to help your bosses.
At this point some jerk always starts going on about racism - but if you take the same Indian developer and bring him to the UK on a long contract, his productivity rises to match the UK levels.
This same thing is true in many, many industries - when you multiply out the cost/productivity factors, the difference between onshore and offshore is not as dramatic as you might think. It is the kind of number that good management/structures can easily reverse.
In fact it is quite rational and to be expected - wages rising to match the value of the work.
Which is where we come to immigration. Bring people into the country, and they will become as productive as the locals - more rapidly than their demands for similar wages. Bring in {foreign cheap country} coders, fire them once they get ideas (like having a liveable wage), get some more.... and you can keep the wages down. And the locals out. What could possibly go wrong?
There are of course, industries where this doesn't happen - textiles are a good example. Low skill required by the workers, simple machinery to tend...
Colour me surprised.
Then we will continue to remain in the EU and UKIP will have even more MEPs at the next EU election than they do now.
We see it in reverse too, with the kippers coming round to gay marriage and supporting increased NHS spending. In the battle of ideas politicians are adept at stealing each others clothes!
The NF is close to tipping point.
When the Left didn't withdraw (as they did in the NFs two best regions), we got results like
Bourgogne: Right (32.4 %), Left (35.4 %), NF (32.4 %)
Val de Loire: Right (34.6 %), Left (35.4 %), NF (30 %).
These will tip next time, if France is in the same mess as it is now.
In any case, as Farage as shown, you don't have to win to get your own way.
The Presidential election is going to be run on the NF's territory, and the whole country will be inexorably dragged rightwards and Eurosceptic. The role of the Eu will be questioned as never before in France.
In fact the withdrawal of the Left's candidate in Hauts de France and Provence is just a very visible manifestation of what is happening. To stop the NF, more candidates will have to withdraw next time, and that just drags the whole country rightwards.
But if Macron and Bayrou do not stand, I think Juppe is north of 35% in round one.
Btw, that poll you posted last week is still not up on the Kantor .