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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » It is 16-1 that this man will win South Shields and become Ukip’s first elected MP
A poster for UKIP’s Richard Elvin from Middlesbrough by election.He’s tobe candidate in #SouthShields twitter.com/MSmithsonPB/st…
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They can re-use posters from Middlesbrough.
Meanwhile the military wing of the Labour Party are stirring again.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22057721
A Labour loss would be a political earthquake and would certainly spell the end of Balls's career, though Chuka, who's being groomed to take over the Shadow Chancellorship should Balls fail his probation, might not be too upset. However, I can't envisage it happening. What's curious is that most of the voters in these Labour strongholds don't particularly adore the party. The one's I've met view all politicians with a weary contempt. The thought is that if you must vote it may as well be for the Labour bloke vote out of respect for tradition. A bit depressing really.
"He’s Richard Elvin who lives just 14 miles away so is not too far off being a local."
Round here live a mile away and you might as well be from another planet.
It's a nightmare, an absolute nightmare! I blame Balls for this. Going around, apparently claiming that Mick Philpott should be exempt from criticism, was always going to be a high-risk strategy. Now Harman is left clearing up Balls's mess in a desperate attempt to shift the media narrative. I feel so sorry for her, I really do!
I hope they make an issue of it though, it'd be great to see one of those leaflets pointing out just how far away he lives, which in general terms would be right next door.
I mean, we cannot afford the current system so how on earth do we ensure that those who have paid in get more out? Have they applied their mind as to how this pyramid scheme works at all? Unless the vast majority pay in more than they get out there is no money for the disabled (remember them, so cruelly done to by the "bedroom tax"?) the long term unemployed; the unemployable, the young, those with young familes, those in education, I mean where do you start?
Maybe they are planning to abolish income support, that might help. Or let a lot of people starve. Or are just telling even more ridiculous lies than usual. I know which one I am on.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danhodges/100210874/labour-is-panicking-over-welfare-its-flying-by-the-seat-of-ed-milibands-pants-except-ed-isnt-wearing-any/
Precisely.......the blank sheet of paper ain't going to win the election. Labour are in turmoil and utter panic. Have to pin their hopes on the military wings general strike then I suppose.
True. But that is HM Chancellor of the Exchequer's solution as well.
Labour have lost the debate, you're quite right. However noone has told the masses.
There is a really big political problem in communication. The vast bulk of the electorate simply doesn't interest itself in news, much less political news. I think that matters would be helped slightly, but perhaps significantly if from time-to-time politicians did say that they had been won round by their opponents views. I doubt that there is a politician so thick that he fails to see some merit in this.
I think you're set to UTC (co-ordinated universal time) which doesn't observe DST.
Edit: Not sure because there doesn't seem to be a preference for it either.
. Meanwhile the most accurate part is here
"It’s a joke. Labour doesn’t have a plan or a strategy. It’s flying by the seat of its leader’s pants. Except its leader isn’t wearing any pants. Labour’s Emperor doesn’t have a stitch on. And yet his activists and his MPs and even some commentators catch a glimpse of a 10-point opinion poll lead and gush, “My, my, isn’t young master Miliband fashionably attired.”
Indeed ...indeed.
Hopefully the Lib Dems will make gain off the Tories. What chance the Lib Dems over taking the Tories and pushing them into third party status.
And I don't think you really want Conservatives as a third party. The left needs a bogeyman, and lacking a viable and powerful one on the right, you'll just start splitting into various factions and going left vs left, and the hatred would only be more intense because of the 'betrayal' from those you'd expect to toe the line.
Don't you Tories get it?
This welfare nastiness isn't helping your electoral prospects. It's doing the opposite.
FPT: IOS said:
"The reason why UKIP is growing is because the Tories keep on banging on about Europe/Immigration/Welfare!
All it does is confirm to those UKIP inclined people they are right and the world is going to hell in a handcart. The Tories won't change this fact so why vote Tory. And all the time they lose the center ground.
The Tories should focus on cost of living issues and low wages. But they won't cos Osborne and Crosby are idiots."
You may be right re Europe, but the reason the Tories bang on about immigration and welfare is because they know there are Labour votes to be lost in those areas.
Basing a strategy on the belief that this is idiotic might not be entirely productive.
But the Tories can't stop immigration and the Mail will always have its odd examples.
All it does is make right wing voters realise the Tories are in effectual. So they vote UKIP.
In your own time....
If the Tories become the third placed party then there will be no issue. They will probably fold and just join UKIP.
At least UKIP might be able to win a majority. Unlike the Tories.
When's there's such irrational hatred for a political party (and hatred at the level we often see, is irrational, even if some level of it is not) , I think it very likely if the focus of that hatred goes, some new force would become the focus of that ire.
Yes, I'm just speculating again. The reason I didn't delve into the Tories' problems originally was because that was not my focus on that post, not because I was ignoring it. Not every post has to be about the horrors facing the or inflicted by the Tories.
@JohnRentoul: I agree with George Osborne that the welfare system in Britain is broken: 66% ComRes http://www.comres.co.uk/polls/The_People_Bedroom_Tax_Poll_April_2013.pdf Even if Chancellor's name used
Oh, wait...
The unease in the Labour ranks over the party's tactics was highlighted by the MP Simon Danczuk who said the Tories were playing his party "like a fiddle". He tweeted: "It's as though the Tories are playing Labour like a fiddle in this welfare reform debate. Need to acknowledge some people choose not to." He also tweeted: "Simply complaining about cuts to benefits is easy, comfy, cosy politics which doesn't help anyone. Need to be much smarter, more challenging"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/07/osborne-philpott-welfare-benefits-reform
If you hate the tories IoS,your going to have real problems with ukip - lol
you will have more chance winning a majority if you can admit yourself that under the current approach the Tories can not win a majority.
What you would likely see is an uber-Blairite labour party with the lib dems reacting against the coalition and returning to a more left of centre position. That process would be messy.
While some ego's will be bruised, the policies will live on, with wailing and gnashing of teeth from the PB Lefties.
Net 'agree':
Con: +84
Lab: +12
LibD: +58
Other: +48
Even including the 'toxic' Osborne name still has Labour voters agreeing with the proposition.....
Very funny. If the Tories keep on going the way they are the Lib Dems could really over take the Tories as UKIP move on up to 20%.
If the Tories revert to or merge with UKIP, who are perceived to be ToryHard (where LDs are Labour-lite), the distinctions will be greater and the hatred less beset by complications.
The polling suggests the Tories are getting no thanks, and indeed retoxifying, because they look like they are enjoying cutting benefits of those who genuinely need help.
We'll see in the May locals just how wise a master strategy that is.
The Bedroom Tax shows how out of touch the Government are with the lives of real people
Agree 55%
What matters is the policy, and Labour are becoming increasingly like the Tories on their line on immigration, Europe and now Welfare.
After all, no-one on the Labour side has pledged to reverse any of the coalition welfare policies, signalling that they will indeed continue them.
He who laughs last, laughs longest
I could see precisely the same kind of thing between labour and the lib dems should there be a realignment. Think back to the kind of vehement hatred between New Labour and the lib dems over Iraq and multiply it. That would likely have consequences for tactical voting.
"The survey of 1,002 people in Scotland shows that around three-fifths (58%) agree that consideration of a fairer and more equal society is more important than whether they will be slightly richer or poorer."
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/fairer-society-more-important-than-personal-wealth-indyref-poll-finds.1365321991
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/politics/article4877069.ece
Mirror,mirror on the wall,who am I this week,the man is a walking laugh a minute.
It's all beginning to come unstuck for little Ed, the real fun will start when he has to address the electorate in the debates.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/07/osborne-philpott-welfare-benefits-reform
Sounds as if Labour are drawing up an 'approved vocation' list for which people will allowed a council house. 'People who work and contribute to the community'? I take it that's code for council employee. Councils will be putting their own at the top of the housing lists, and those who work for the private sector will be stuffed. This will be cronyism on a massive scale.
"Reducing the amount of housing benefit people in social housing receive if they are considered to have more bedrooms than they need (e.g. a couple are regarded as needing one bedroom, a couple with a child two bedrooms)?"
The interesting question is why so much is emerging about Chuka Umunna right now? Who has most interest in damaging him?
@MrHarryCole: Chuka dumps on a mythical aide over wiki changes: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/9977305/Labour-star-Chuka-Umunna-admits-his-aides-probably-set-up-and-edited-his-own-Wikipedia-page.html So he he had staff before was selected eh? Course guv.
Otherwise I'm actually stumped why anyone would go after him like this at this moment.
In exactly the same way as it is bad for Labour that they are uncompetitive in large parts of the South ex London.
If you don't have MPs from an area, whether you are in government or opposition, it is a lot harder to understand the local/regional concerns that the voters have.
Probably Balls or his acolytes. Rumour has it that Miliband was furious will Balls's abysmal response to the Autumn Statement and told him to up his game or be sacked. Chuka meanwhile is being groomed for the post should Balls fail again. It sounds as if the 'dogs of hell' are out to damage Chuka. (Remember how jealous Balls was of Darling when he got the economics brief. And where did the rumour that ended Alan Johnson's tenure originate?)
The question is what will Ed Milliband and Chuka do about it? Probably nothing. After all there are more supporters of Balls than Milliband in Milliband's cabinet. Chance or planning?
That they are unlikely to have any MPs after 2015 either is not the point. The tory voteshare getting happily eaten into by the kippers is. Particularly in marginals as some tory MPs will be all too keenly aware. They will not stay silent for very much longer should this continue.
The H.P Lovecraft stories got to me when i was younger. The one about demons coming through sharp corners had me sanding down the corners in my room.
I'd have needed to learn grammar etc to finish them but i started writing scary stories twice in the past and went with trying to write whatever scared the crap out of me and it worked so i had to stop writing it. I still don't like even thinking about them.
So maybe that's the trick - writing something that scares the crap out of you personally but carrying on regardless.
Drink might help - or make it worse, dunno.
A good point on our chukka/harrison
Conservative MP Nigel Adams said: “Comrade Chuka’s not doing his credibility much good this week. Like most champagne socialists, they talk a good game about standing up for the working man but are as transparent as a Gucci shop window.”
Why do you think "fairer and more equal society," means everyone would be poorer?
Chuka’s Wiki’d act Since this one's hit The Sun, as a Wikipedia editor, I think I should explain. The Sun is wrong to talk of "posing as one of the online encyclopaedia’s editors" since the term "editor" is purely descriptive. Anyone can edit Wikipedia (though practically speaking you'd need to have a basic understanding of how to), so if he's edited it then he is an editor, rather than posing as one. Similarly it says "the fake name Socialdemocrat" but there's nothing wrong about a pseudonym, like mine. The only point is about editing under a conflict of interest (editing the article about yourself or something connected with you) below.
Politicians, if you're reading, we'd love you to contribute to your own articles (since only about five are even close to good enough) but in the right way. I'd say the biggest things to remember is that Wikipedia is there to host encyclopedic content, not magazine-esque interviews. I find it helpful to think about what they might write about the subject in fifty or a hundred years. The second is to manage the fact you are writing about yourself and you probably take a different view of yourself to history.
If you can, be open about who you are and I recommend using the talk page (you can find this by clicking the "Talk" tab). If you're not prepared to be open about who you are (whether your username is your real name or not), then definitely stick to the talk page. There are probably lots of good things you can point out are wrong or missing (although you'd still need to point to a source confirming they are wrong, but a constituency page would be good enough mostly and I'm guessing current politicians can get that sort of thing uploaded).
Lastly realise that ensuring neutrality is likely to be your biggest hurdle and it's best if you can talk the talk on that. Neutrality is, in short, ensuring that the article has the same balance of pro and anti- views on a given topic as the material in the public domain on a given topic, particularly academic or reflective writing. Obviously I can't say every possible thing about editing, not least actually how to. I can be contacted here.
@SkyNews: DAILY TELEGRAPH FRONT PAGE: "Labour split puts Miliband on back foot over benefits" #skypapers http://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/321001178517352448/photo/1
PB Leftards, don't you just love 'em
The polling suggests the Tories are on the right lines in identifying issues that hurt Labour.
Issues that set Labour in opposition to the resident working classes.
If the Tories are sensible, they'll hit Labour hard as the party that deliberately fuelled immigration and deliberately created a mad benefits system.
If Labour are smart, they'll shimmy out of it by u-turning in a credible but also aggressive fashion. I think Byrne has the right idea, though it all sounds too back-of-the-envelope to add to the Labour poll lead at this stage.
Behind both of them, UKIP; fishing in precisely the same waters, and with the advantage of novelty.
This is not the time for narrow-minded tribalism.
So if they want to maximize the 20% (?) or so of the electorate who have already seceded from the political class then they want to keep getting 20-ish% in all different seats. It might not even take that much effort to get that.
"An analysis conducted by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found evidence of thousands of edits to Wikipedia originating from within the British Houses of Parliament. The edits were found through tracking the contributions of two IP addresses, 194.60.38.198 (talk · contribs · WHOIS) and 194.60.38.10 (talk · contribs · WHOIS), which route the traffic from users of the Parliamentary network. Among the findings were that the articles on almost one out of every six Members of Parliament (MPs) had been edited by users of the network, and that in many cases, these changes were attempts at ameliorating negative biographical content concerning the 2009 United Kingdom parliamentary expenses scandal. The Bureau singled out the entry on Joan Ryan (a parliamentarian who resigned in the wake of the affair) as having been successfully scrubbed of any mention of expenses-related wrongdoing; Wikipedians have since updated it with details of both the scandal and the attempted cover-up. The Bureau also found plenty of innocuous edits, including the listing of a sitting MP as a notable DJ, finessing of a passage discussing the relative merits of characterising Pringles as crisps or cakes, and the correction of a misstatement of the full name of a former Mayor of London as "Kenneth Robert Livingstone Twatface". "(Source|CC-BY-SA)
See also:
British politicians accused of WP cover-ups
The 2010 “Editing Wikipedia From Inside Parliament” Awards
Wikipedia Edits from Parliament Airbrush Dorries Sex Abuse Row
... ad nauseam.
In all seriousness, opposition front benchers would not typically have that large a profile with the public anyway, but for political wonks like ourselves I've still yet to see evidence of him being particularly able apart from being reasonably slick in style, which any number of MPs are (although not as many as people think, funnily enough)
http://www.itv.com/news/2013-04-07/facebook-to-charge-10-to-users-to-send-messages-to-celebrities/
If you didn't understand the longer term polling implications then I'm only to happy to help you. There has been no significant narrowing.
Guys, you're off-message. Since this morning, Labour's policy is that the needy should be shoved into the dirt and that ex-bankers, who will have put more in, should get more out. All that Brownian stuff about ending 'child poverty', is dead. If the unmarried teenage mothers haven't paid anything in, that's tough; they and their kids (unless, presumably the kids are of independent means and so have put something in themselves) get nothing.
Of course, it might well be that this policy won't last till the morning, I imagine the Guardian will be incandescent with rage at the idea that benefits should depend on the premium you've paid.
"Worst part about being single is coming from a party/night out horny as f*** and having to sleep alone." said Paris from her new desk at Kent CID.
But the Tories can't stop immigration and the Mail will always have its odd examples.
All it does is make right wing voters realise the Tories are in effectual. So they vote UKIP.
http://www.politicshome.com/uk/article/75906/the_daily_telegraph_monday_8th_april_2013.html
http://www.politicshome.com/uk/article/75907/the_daily_mail_monday_8th_april_2013.html
Immigration has been number two on the list for years while the political class ignored it and hoped it would go away. Leaving the EU, among all the other benefits, or at least scrapping the free movement of labour part or at least restricting the free movement of labour to say that Lab/Lib/Con MPs have to be Bulgarian is one very obvious way of reducing the problem.
That pool of voters has been there for years waiting for someone to get past the first tipping point.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/07/jerome-cahuzac-swiss-bank-account
Of course the anger is misplaced. The French should worry more about what the socialists are doing to their economy, not a routine bit of hypocrisy of the left.
Last 6 months has a transfer from Tory to UKIP of 10%; it's dramatic but not that significant in election terms; it may pad out Ed majority by 20 - 30, but as long as Labour is tracking above 40% it wins big anyway
How Miliband's French fancy lost its appeal
AT first the two men formed a warm bond but of late a certain froideur has crept into the political kinship between Ed Miliband and Francois Hollande. When they met just over a year ago the Labour leader declared his socialist colleague would “tilt” Europe away from austerity and “create a Europe of growth and jobs”.
http://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/389944/How-Miliband-s-French-fancy-lost-its-appeal
It's unclear what relevance that has to the point I was making, but, since you raise it, so what? If our EU friends don't want to address the problems, that's fine. Cameron will give British voters an opportunity to vote on whether we should take the hint and leave.
As with any negotiation, if the terms aren't favourable, we might choose to walk away.
Do you have a problem with this?