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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Why there’ll always be a reason why the time’s not ripe to deposed Theresa
Like many observers, I have the clear impression that most Conservative MPs feel that a change of leadership is needed before the next election. As many have observed, challengers are mainly inhibited by the sense that whoever challenges may not win, and the potential leaders would rather have May than a possibly successful alternative blocking their own chance at the top. At any moment, there could be a deal between two of the factions sufficient to trigger a leadership challenge – all the main contenders could rustle up 50 letters to achieve that if they worked at it.
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I suspect the wing of the Tory party that tumescent over Brexit might have 48 names if we have a transitional deal.
The 22 and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury might have to knee cap a few people.
Lets just all be grateful we didn't get lumbered with George. Tories would be 20 points behind at the moment with him at the top, I imagine....
The big advantage of her making such an announcement in 2019 is that she can stay on as caretaker leader whilst a full leadership contest takes place, which wouldn't be practical before we leave the EU, and that it gives enough time for the new leader to establish a new direction ready for a GE. That is a window of opportunity which isn't very long: March 2019 for around a year.
Under George, the Tories would have campaigned on the economy and wiped the floor with Corbyn.
Mrs May shamefully didn't fight on the economy all because she wanted to sack Hammond.
I think May is a terrible option for the party and for the country. She has shown consistently bad judgment, pettiness, indecisiveness followed by impulsivity, an inability to either form or make use of her team and that she is one of the worst campaigners of modern times. I fear that the Tories will pay a terrible price for allowing her to remain (no doubt Nick's interest in keeping her there is entirely disinterested) but given Brexit we simply cannot have a government that is even more unstable than the one she has created.
So a very bad option but not necessarily the worst one. Faint praise indeed.
I was showing off my French
As are many voters, incidentally. Her popularity is clear - more votes (in pure vote terms or vote share) than any Tory leader for a long time. What I missed was how much she also motivated the opposition. Didn't expect that.
If it goes really well she might fancy her chances of staying on...
The other point is cabinet positions in the meantime will be key. Rudd and Johnson won't want potential challengers to be elevated... So I suspect we may see little on the reshuffle front.
Your second point is an important one, it may limit the pool of potential successors.
"As many have observed, challengers are mainly inhibited by the sense that whoever challenges may not win"
There is no need for a challenger. As he himself points out further down in his piece, new candidates only enter the fray once the old leader has been disposed with. The first round would be "May vs not May". Only if "not May" wins, need others come forward - and they could be loyalists just as much as plotters.
Yet still the mechanisms of the Major and late Thatcher eras keep being trotted out, a couple of decades after they became obsolete.
Labour were in part successful for the same reasons why Osborne's warnings of economic catastrophe if we voted to leave the EU failed to secure a majority for remain.
I think in both EUref2016 and GE2017 a significant section of the population said "f**k it, the economy isn't working for me, I have seen my living standards decline significantly and I will vote for change if change is on the menu, whatever that may be." Enough people simply felt they had nothing left to lose.
The type of people who were going to vote for Corbyn were never going to vote for Osborne. If anything, their "it's austerity for you, tax cuts for the rich" may have worked even better.
May ran a crap campaign, but the one thing she had going for her was her profile was so low she was hardly tainted at all by the Cameron/Osborne years, hence why she enjoyed a honeymoon pre GE2017. It was only her crap campaign/crap manifesto that saw her stock plummet.
Though you could argue Osborne would have been starting from such a low position in the polls he never would have called an election in the first place...
And we shouldn't forget that the MPs never know how many letters are in - whether their letter could be the one to trigger a contest. Unless otherwise specified, these letters remain on the books. While the Party would undoubtedly identify better and worse times of the year to hold a leadership contest, if the numbers are close to threshold, it might only take one or two MPs angered by an answer at PMQs to submit letters when their blood's up for a VoNC to be triggered at what might be a most inopportune moment.
Nick rightly identifies the EU as a potentially critical trigger issue. He's right. In fact, the failure / fudge question might well be the one. With Cameron having already come back with something inadequate and having lost a vote and his leadership off the back of it, MPs might well refuse to back another deal that delivered very little.
Brexit means Brexit. She'll be held to that.
My guess would be that MPs didn't do it in the aftermath of the election in part because it would have looked undemocratic to change so soon after a win (and it might have been a bad win but ending in No 10 is still a win), and partly because although the processes of ditching and electing are procedurally separate, they remain politically tied: there's no point dumping the leader unless the replacement is going to be sufficiently better to justify the risk and the upheaval. That criterion is not yet met: too few alternatives (any?) are obviously better and there are enough who would probably be worse but who might appeal to the membership to create a substantial downside risk to opening the can of worms.
The difference is, of course, the other ways in which society has polarised - between those on the property ladder and those who aren't, those in steady, well paying jobs and those with little to no security on zero hours contracts, the ever growing regional imbalance between London and, well, just about everywhere else, and so on.
The prevailing narrative is very much one of the people who did well out of the last 7 years and the people who felt left behind for whatever reason. And Osborne was the very last man in the Tory party who was going to reach them. May, for all her obvious failings, did at least appear to try.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/unite-the-union-election-campaign-powered-the-corbyn-surge-leaked-report-shows_uk_597128f3e4b0e79ec1983c23?cm
Today, I've been learning about catastrophe bonds.
Does anybody on here know if there's a way for a retail investor to short them? Like an inverse ETF or something?
I'm new to investing.
People will look back on this time and shudder. A directionless govt with a PM without authority trying to negotiate the biggest UK Foreign policy challenge for 70 years.
What a difference a real leader would make.
I take the point that the system doesn't really need a challenger. But it probably does in practice, as others have said - not many MPs will do it on autopilot.
There is a perfectly good past tense of the verb 'to crown'.
Come on, start our own diesel emissions tests on imports. Did I hear that diesels are killing 6,000 a year in this country?
A perfect parable for Brexit. The British leave Europe in the most shambolic way imaginable. Nolan's a 'Remainer'
I think May might go of her own accord after we leave the EU, during the (potential) transition period.
If she stays, and then loses to Corbyn, she'd feel absolutely terrible. 'Winning' an election but losing seats having had persistent double digit leads is one thing. Losing an election and letting in a far left, unilateralist friend of Hamas is quite another.
And now I'm advertising it in the hope that I can equally profitably do the reverse sooner rather than later.
Graph: https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/sites/default/files/styles/620/public/How has inequality changed to 2015-16 IFS.jpg?itok=Ox3AKeqc
For income, see the ONS statistical bulletin (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/householddisposableincomeandinequality/financialyearending2016). Figure 2 is what you want to look at, which shows that - in income terms at least - the top quintile has done least well in the last eight years, and the bottom quintile the best.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-emissions-cartel-idUSKBN1A61G9
If you are new to investing you should stay away from inverse catastrophe bonds.
Invest in something more straight forward and spread your risk until you have been through two crashes. The way to make money investing is to avoid losses.
Those with a lot of assets have done well since 2008 because bank interest rates have been kept low by central banks and bond yields have been kept low by Quantitative Easing.
Low interest rate and low bond yields equals high asset prices.
Beware when interest rtaes and yields start to rise. However, this might still be some way off and they may well not rise back to previous normal levels.
Whilst few people read the Conservative or Labour manifestos, the public still judged the Conservative one poor and the Labour one good.
I want to pay the people picking up pennies and bet on the steamroller - if the odds are wrong enough.
If that's possible. I don't think it is though. At least not via my isa.
Oh well.
I only won on the Grand National because my dad wanted me to place a bet for him and I would've been bloody annoyed if he'd made money through my account and I hadn't, so I slipped on a fiver
Take the Sunday Times Rich List. Robert Maxwell was pretty near the top of the list. But it actually turned out that he had rather less than nothing. Quite a lot of people who appear very rich are hugely leveraged to small changes in asset prices: if you own £1.1billion in property, but owe the bank £1bn, then you're worth £100m. Until property prices fall 10%, and then you're worth nothing.
Lots of people's wealth is ephemeral for a different reason. If you own 10% of an internet startup valued at $500m, then you're very rich. Except that you aren't actually allowed to sell any of the shares, and the terms at which you took money from venture capitalists are such that they get first money out. If you sell the business for $400m, you might actually end up with nothing.
His book, "Capital" is packed full of tables and figures on this kind of thing. Don't know whether any of it is on Internet and his data tends to be a few years old.
I cannot believe she would voluntarily give up. Why would she ? After going through fire. She has actually gone through her most difficult period. She is almost unique [ apart from Heath ], who called an election which she did not have to [ they had an adequate majority ] and then lost her majority. She has survived that, it seems.
If she delivers Brexit, I don't think the Tory party will say it was a bad Brexit. So she will get the credit for delivering it from a Tory point of view.
If she loses the next GE, she will be out, like anyone else.
More seriously, the ONS believes that the top 1% own 13% of the wealth in the UK. I think there is a tendency to assiduously count assets and not count liabilities. Piketty has probably correctly counted the assets of the wealthy without measuring their liabilities.
Hope they can fix their brake problems.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/21/nhs-ban-homeopathy-herbal-medicine-misuse-resources/
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/adhocs/007203distributionoftotalhouseholdwealthbypercentilepointstotalfinancialwealthnettotalpropertywealthnettotalphysicalwealthandtotalprivatepensionwealthgreatbritainjuly2012tojune2014
Punchy stuff.
PS it's possible the two verbs are semantically different with coronate implying a stress on the process rather than the transformation.
I very much doubt that May would walk away in that manner but there is always the risk (as with any leader) of health issues intervening, which would produce the same imperative to appoint someone with little or no warning.
The bonds are sold to asset owners and heavily promoted as being 'uncorrelated to stock markets' which investment consultants think is a good thing.
Going back to Pong's question, I doubt you could short the bonds - nowhere near enough liquidity.
On a related note, they are much like the MBS securitisations in that you need to look at the underlying properties you are exposed to via the bond before you can make an informed investment decision on any particular cat bond.