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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Losses for the LDs and Tories in latest local elections plus preview of one more contest tonight
Bollington on Cheshire East (Con defence, resignation of sitting member) Result: Bollington First 939 (51% +14%), Conservative 319 (17% -14%), Labour 239 (13% -8%), Liberal Democrat 198 (11% unchanged), Green 162 (9%, no candidate at last election) Bollington First GAIN from Conservative with a majority of 620 (33%) on a swing of 14% from Conservative to Bolington First
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RIP Collateral Damage Iraqi's
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/nov/29/uk.september111
Blair and Sturgeon lighting their fires.
Seems like he agrees with John McDonnell that Corbyn is crap and on his way out.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/39005063
So, he'll only have four days in the Sauber prior to the season's first race weekend.
As the Remainer audience slowly departed from the windowless room in the bowels of Bloomberg, it was worth remembering that this was an impressively glitzy City bunker. But a bunker nevertheless.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/tony-blair-brexit-warning-bloomberg-analysis-of-comeback-tour-guitar-solo_uk_58a71c21e4b045cd34c0fbba?
hustled by that old fraud Chirac
He would probably poll worse than Corbyn.
Straw poll at my Cambridge trade fair today: not a single person in 40 spoke up for Blair. Generally centre-left or centre right, Observer or STimes reeaders. Middle class, well educated.
The only people seduced by him now are those too stubborn to admit they were wrong the first time.
I think the Iraq war was one of the big mistakes in post second world war Britain. HOWEVER, IDS LETS REMEMBER UNDER PRIVY COUNCIL ACCESS CONDITIONS ENDOURSED THE IRAQ WAR. He saw the same information/ intelligence that Blair did and advocated publically and voted in the House of Commons accordingly.
IDS was ousted some time later becoming the first Tory leader ever to not have fought a General Election. For some reason Tony Blair should be ignored whilst people like IDS should be listened too. Both are as bad as each other but Tony Blair can never be described as an extremist whereas IDS has always been clearly right wing.
Another interesting thing is the Tories are proposing a Brexit which is a complete break with government policy since the 1970s. Why is this anymore extreme than the alternative economic policy the Labour party currently advocates? One could argue if Tory Brexit is a virtue of being optimistic about the UKs future then why not optimism in Labour's policy?
I think the Tories are skating on thin ice and people will eventually wake up to the kamikaze ideas that have taken hold in the government. It could well be the case Brexit opens up the way to a very left wing government and everything the Tories oppose.
https://twitter.com/whatukthinks/status/832659540067782656
https://twitter.com/whatukthinks/status/832661513743716352
Because more people voted for Brexit than have ever voted for anything in this country.
Personally, I think the timing is no accident. Blair knows full well how unpopular he is and how his interventions can hinder, rather than help.
Which leads me to think that this intervention is for his benefit, not ours: he wants to clear his conscience by getting his views on the record before the whole thing kicks off, without taking the risk of it being counterproductive.
He has nothing to lose now.
Blair's language on Scottish independence is indicative he'd rather the UK fail outside the EU than he be proved wrong.
FPT. "Obviously you are capable of being very relaxed about the murder of six figure numbers of brown people. Many of us are not, and it rather colours our response to anything Blair says about anything"
He only did what the Tories were egging him on to do and what they would have done were they in office. People on here are very happy to say Theresa May has no choice but to do whatever Trump or the US administration demands to maintain our special relationship yet when Blair did just that he became a pariah.
This is all about the TB Vanity Project now - I suppose if people hate him for talking tripe about Brexit that might be more conscionable to him than hating him for taking us into an awful and unjustified war.
Europe obviously, Constitutional reform was a disaster, his economic policy gave us the biggest bust in our lives, infrastructure decayed, education went backwards and then there was the Dome
He was fortunate in reaping the headlines and then walking off to create the next disaster while his colleagues picked up the pieces.
He became a pariah because he took us into a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, if not more.
Mrs May held Trump's hand down a banister.
You can't see the difference?
There is some truth in what you say in your first two sentences and it is also the case that some of what Blair said today in his speech has merit, even if some people are unlikely to listen to him precisely because he has in their eyes so comprehensively trashed his brand.
But I think that he became a pariah not just because he got involved in Bush's intervention in Iraq but because of the way that he did so - the dishonesty in what he told Parliament and the country, the way that he suborned and bullied those agencies which should have been a break on his wishes e.g. the intelligence agencies and the Government's legal advisor and because he broke the trust which we are entitled to have in a PM when he or she tells us that war is necessary.
It's not just what he did. It's the way that he did it. There was a fundamental dishonesty at the heart of him - for all his political skills - that in the end has trashed his legacy and which has trashed to some extent New Labour's legacy. That and a lack of political courage. There might well have been a case to be made for intervention in Iraq. But he wasn't prepared to make it. So he came up with the WMD garbage. It was wrong; it did damage to the reputation of the intelligence services; the whole war damaged the British Army's reputation; and it damaged our trust in politicians on a matter as important as life and death. Even if you think that politicians are natural liars I think most of us would expect them not to lie on something as important as this.
He was and is a narcissistic weasel. He may be intelligent and he may be right on some aspects of Brexit. But he has proved himself to be untrustworthy. And that colours how people view him. Sometimes - if you have a difficult but necessary argument to make - you also need to find the right person to make it, someone who will be listened to by those you are seeking to persuade. Not those who agree with you already.
Well/Badly
4/1/17: 26 : 74
10/1/17: 28 : 72
18/1/17: 42 : 58
31/1/17: 42 : 58
13/2/17: 46 : 55
http://whatukthinks.org/eu/questions/how-well-or-badly-do-you-the-government-are-doing-at-negotiating-britains-exit-from-the-eu/?removed=removed&groups[0][0]=Very+well&groups[0][1]=Fairly+well&groups[1][2]=Fairly+badly&groups[1][3]=Very+badly
We have had people who have spent an eternity claiming that they wanted a 'fair voting system' spending months on end trying to subvert the outcome of a fair vote.
One person, one vote. Each vote counts equally.
That would be a serious achievement...
The only thing that was possibly attractive about Brexit was an end to mass immigration. Yet the immigrants are still going to be given the red carpet, the best thing being the European immigrants of Christian origin will be replaced by people who may not integrate at all and may well have completely different ideas of how society should be governed. Brexit is a Con trick and just like the £350 million a week for the heath service the end of mass immigration will never materialise either.
We heard recently Tony Blair pledge to "do whatever it takes to help Ed Miliband win". But what would be help most, visible support or keeping out of the way? For Red Box, YouGov asked the nation: "Thinking about retired politicians playing a role in the current election, do you think getting support from the following politicians would be an asset or a liability for today's politicians?"
The overall greatest asset is considered to be John Major, who scores net zero among the general public, although he is +21 among Conservatives supporters. The second greatest asset, only a whisker behind Major, is Paddy Ashdown on net -1, and net +45 among Liberal Democrats. Bottom of the league is Tony Blair, at net -47, and even among Labour supporters he scores net -22.
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/02/18/blair-election-liability-and-major-asset-say-voter/
But you wouldn't mind that if your hobby horse federal dream was kept alive, eh?
https://twitter.com/itvnews/status/832663481950334976
Blair certainly isn't short of skeletons but for those of us who care about the way things are going any lifeline will do.
A new ICM poll for Change Britain confirms Tony Blair’s delusion. 68% of voters want the government to “get on with implementing the result of the referendum”, compared to just 15% who disagree. Even more Remain voters (42%) agree with the statement than disagree (33%). When this question was last polled in December, 26% of Remainers wanted the government to get on with the job compared to 40% who disagreed.
If Cameron, who remained reasonably credible and popular, could not persuade the UK public last June, then it's hard to imagine that Blair would do better.
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/02/tony-blair-right-brexit/
Might not have got the same reception at a Lockheed plant, of course.
However, I'm not sure that the public would have believed Blair, irrespective of any claimed deal.
Responsibility for going to war remains with the Crown.
What Blair did was to poison the body politic such that we now expect governments to ask for "permission" from the House of Commons to go to war, and therefore to forewarn the enemy and forego any element of surprise.
But I think that Blair did great damage to our system of government and to our trust in politicians. Pretty much everything he touched turned, in the end, to ashes. His failure to understand what the EU was about and his failure to carve out a sensible immigration policy ultimately led to Brexit.
People might well have been far more relaxed about FoM from the EU had it not come on top of a pretty much open borders policy to the rest of the world with a lamentable failure on the part of Blair to control it or to deal effectively with asylum claims, whether bogus or not, or to deport those with no right to be here.
And Blair - like many another pro-EU politician before him - never made the case for the EU. He assumed that it was a good and assumed that everyone else would agree with him. If you think something is worthwhile then you need to make the case for it continually not simply assume it.
What was the saying in The Leopard? "Everything must change so that nothing changes."
The pro-EU side have been complacent for years. In the end their complacency cost them.
Incidentally, if the people do change their mind about Brexit and a different decision is taken, fine. And it's also fine for politicians to respond to such a change and even to campaign for it. But what they can't really do is say that they should ignore a decision when there is no evidence of just such a change of mind just because they don't like it. They need to answer the question: "Why are you proposing to do this?" The answer: "I disagree with the answer given" is not, I think, good enough.
And post Iraq, no one believes a word he says anyway.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/17/will-say-leaving-inevitable-isnt-tony-blairs-brexit-speech-full/
His article was excellent but of no use now that we've voted to Leave.
He still believes that he did the right thing in Iraq but sadly history, the grim reality of the death toll, and indeed I think otherwise.