I think the local byelection previews on Britain Elects are just wonderful. Andrew Teale goes deep into each ward that is up for election, describing its geography, demographic make up, the candidates and election history. A true labour of love.
I think the local byelection previews on Britain Elects are just wonderful. Andrew Teale goes deep into each ward that is up for election, describing its geography, demographic make up, the candidates and election history. A true labour of love.
I knew EM was very WWC in a clasic postwar council estate, but only via Britain Elects who Eyres Monsell was. Impressive!
Golly, reading this thread is upsetting. I did not realise when I voted for Brexit that I was voting for my wife and son to go hungry.
Starvation, planes grounded, deep recession, collapsed pound, food banks for all, and third world status at the very least according to the remain camp
I’m going to stock up with some montagnolo just in case. And maybe some Chablis to go with it. Otherwise I think we’ll be fine.
Maybe a pistol as well just in case
The crescendo of remain noise just now is astonishing and maybe the panic relates to the next few days when TM gives her ultimatum as she is in a win win with it. EU accepts and progress to trade talks or TM leaves with the backing of the majority of the Country
It has been rather shrill of late, perhaps for the reasons you outline.
There's also been a curious lack of pasted tweets regarding car production and retail sales recently.
Golly, reading this thread is upsetting. I did not realise when I voted for Brexit that I was voting for my wife and son to go hungry.
Starvation, planes grounded, deep recession, collapsed pound, food banks for all, and third world status at the very least according to the remain camp
I’m going to stock up with some montagnolo just in case. And maybe some Chablis to go with it. Otherwise I think we’ll be fine.
Maybe a pistol as well just in case
The crescendo of remain noise just now is astonishing and maybe the panic relates to the next few days when TM gives her ultimatum as she is in a win win with it. EU accepts and progress to trade talks or TM leaves with the backing of the majority of the Country
It has been rather shrill of late, perhaps for the reasons you outline.
There's also been a curious lack of pasted tweets regarding car production and retail sales recently.
I think the local byelection previews on Britain Elects are just wonderful. Andrew Teale goes deep into each ward that is up for election, describing its geography, demographic make up, the candidates and election history. A true labour of love.
I knew EM was very WWC in a clasic postwar council estate, but only via Britain Elects who Eyres Monsell was. Impressive!
Golly, reading this thread is upsetting. I did not realise when I voted for Brexit that I was voting for my wife and son to go hungry.
Starvation, planes grounded, deep recession, collapsed pound, food banks for all, and third world status at the very least according to the remain camp
I’m going to stock up with some montagnolo just in case. And maybe some Chablis to go with it. Otherwise I think we’ll be fine.
Maybe a pistol as well just in case
The crescendo of remain noise just now is astonishing and maybe the panic relates to the next few days when TM gives her ultimatum as she is in a win win with it. EU accepts and progress to trade talks or TM leaves with the backing of the majority of the Country
It has been rather shrill of late, perhaps for the reasons you outline.
There's also been a curious lack of pasted tweets regarding car production and retail sales recently.
Booming German industry is helping our manufacturing exports. Good news for us unless we do something that puts up new borders...
But we're not going to be putting up borders to exports.
I'm still yet to be convinced that many of those who rail against Brexit understand the detail of:
- our trade deficit with Europe - the detail of customs duties (i.e. who pays them) - how export markets work - and that they're different to importing
I'm also glad I was raised by parents who view debt as the eighth deadliest sin.
Me too. I am relieved that I can ride out Brexit with impunity, and have sorted my offspring as well, and sorted my finance. Are we at tipping point yet re Brexit? I am a remainer, and the self inflicted damage we are receiving will only grow. Yes I am old, a northerner, time to come out and declare.
Not tipping point yet.
Leavers knew there'd be job losses once Brexit happens but they still voted for it.
I suspect tipping point will be a long post Brexit slump (and the rest of the EU is booming), people will think they know what the causation is.
The problem is laziness and complacency in most European countries, regardless of whether they're in the EU or the Euro. That's why productivity is not increasing. But most people prefer to blame their governments rather than themselves.
It's not laziness or complacency. It's just the rest of the world finally catching up with the West, and enjoying all the techno and industrial advantages we take for granted. A Bangladeshi metal basher is just as good as a Birkenhead metal basher, there is no difference. So why should the latter earn ten times the former?!
Read across for any number of professions/vocations.
The rest of the world has caught up with the West. We are no longer an army of muskets facing tribes with spears. So our growth slows as theirs powers ahead. Note that America now has a predicted growth rate of about 1.8% per annum. Barely better than the UK.
This sounds bad for us, but it is great for humanity as a whole: global poverty levels are plummeting. We should stop whingeing. We aren't exactly starving, and across Asia and parts of Africa BILLIONS are being lifted from desperate poverty. At last.
Spot on.
(But don't forget we're also getting f*cked by demographics.)
And so surely not the time to be cutting ourselves adrift from leading a large trading bloc that will move forward in this new paradigm.
Or surely the.perfect time to embrace free trade with the billions that are growing fast rather than hide behind a protectionist curtain of yesterday's nations.
Can't really be a "swing" if they don't stand though? More accurately, the Tories didn't pick up many Kippers, and lost some of their own voters.
Kippers didn't stand in our byelection either. Well, the party didn't. The Tory candidate was a Kipper until very recently. From our perspective turnout was up, and we took 67% of the increased vote.
I'm also glad I was raised by parents who view debt as the eighth deadliest sin.
Me too. I am relieved that I can ride out Brexit with impunity, and have sorted my offspring as well, and sorted my finance. Are we at tipping point yet re Brexit? I am a remainer, and the self inflicted damage we are receiving will only grow. Yes I am old, a northerner, time to come out and declare.
Not tipping point yet.
Leavers knew there'd be job losses once Brexit happens but they still voted for it.
I suspect tipping point will be a long post Brexit slump (and the rest of the EU is booming), people will think they know what the causation is.
The problem is laziness and complacency in most European countries, regardless of whether they're in the EU or the Euro. That's why productivity is not increasing. But most people prefer to blame their governments rather than themselves.
It's not laziness or complacency. It's just the rest of the world finally catching up with the West, and enjoying all the techno and industrial advantages we take for granted. A Bangladeshi metal basher is just as good as a Birkenhead metal basher, there is no difference. So why should the latter earn ten times the former?!
Read across for any number of professions/vocations.
The rest of the world has caught up with the West. We are no longer an army of muskets facing tribes with spears. So our growth slows as theirs powers ahead. Note that America now has a predicted growth rate of about 1.8% per annum. Barely better than the UK.
This sounds bad for us, but it is great for humanity as a whole: global poverty levels are plummeting. We should stop whingeing. We aren't exactly starving, and across Asia and parts of Africa BILLIONS are being lifted from desperate poverty. At last.
Spot on.
(But don't forget we're also getting f*cked by demographics.)
And so surely not the time to be cutting ourselves adrift from leading a large trading bloc that will move forward in this new paradigm.
Or surely the.perfect time to embrace free trade with the billions that are growing fast rather than hide behind a protectionist curtain of yesterday's nations.
Golly, reading this thread is upsetting. I did not realise when I voted for Brexit that I was voting for my wife and son to go hungry.
Starvation, planes grounded, deep recession, collapsed pound, food banks for all, and third world status at the very least according to the remain camp
I’m going to stock up with some montagnolo just in case. And maybe some Chablis to go with it. Otherwise I think we’ll be fine.
Maybe a pistol as well just in case
The crescendo of remain noise just now is astonishing and maybe the panic relates to the next few days when TM gives her ultimatum as she is in a win win with it. EU accepts and progress to trade talks or TM leaves with the backing of the majority of the Country
It has been rather shrill of late, perhaps for the reasons you outline.
There's also been a curious lack of pasted tweets regarding car production and retail sales recently.
Booming German industry is helping our manufacturing exports. Good news for us unless we do something that puts up new borders...
But we're not going to be putting up borders to exports.
Who knows? Brexit means Brexit, WTO means WTO...
Its the country which is importing which puts up the barriers.
And whatever the trading terms if a country wants to restrict imports it will find a few ways of doing so.
In my experience while the French are supposed to be good at such restrictions they're actually pretty fair but the Germans can be difficult with typical teutonic efficiency when it suits them.
I don't doubt that our friend Alanbrooke can tell tales on this subject.
Golly, reading this thread is upsetting. I did not realise when I voted for Brexit that I was voting for my wife and son to go hungry.
Starvation, planes grounded, deep recession, collapsed pound, food banks for all, and third world status at the very least according to the remain camp
I’m going to stock up with some montagnolo just in case. And maybe some Chablis to go with it. Otherwise I think we’ll be fine.
Maybe a pistol as well just in case
The crescendo of remain noise just now is astonishing and maybe the panic relates to the next few days when TM gives her ultimatum as she is in a win win with it. EU accepts and progress to trade talks or TM leaves with the backing of the majority of the Country
It has been rather shrill of late, perhaps for the reasons you outline.
There's also been a curious lack of pasted tweets regarding car production and retail sales recently.
Booming German industry is helping our manufacturing exports. Good news for us unless we do something that puts up new borders...
But we're not going to be putting up borders to exports.
Who knows? Brexit means Brexit, WTO means WTO...
Its the country which is importing which puts up the barriers.
And whatever the trading terms if a country wants to restrict imports it will find a few ways of doing so.
In my experience while the French are supposed to be good at such restrictions they're actually pretty fair but the Germans can be difficult with typical teutonic efficiency when it suits them.
I don't doubt that our friend Alanbrooke can tell tales on this subject.
If we are on WTO terms with the EU27, then the Germans are obligated to apply WTO terms to us, as for any third country.
I worked in IT in the 90's (and arguably the noughties and teens, but let's not go there: it's painful) and did two Y2K contracts, so I may be able to explain.
From about the 60's to very approximately the 90's, the majority of the world's code[1] was written and located on mainframes, large white wardrobes in a Freon-protected room in the company basement, on operating systems such as IBM's MVS/XA and Unix. The programs were written and accumulated with little documentation, formal or otherwise.People stayed in post for two-three years then moved into management, so code accumulated. Bear in mind that banks and insurance societies keep customers for decades and records for centuries. Numerical data on such systems were held in formats[2] such as COMP-3 or packed decimal, where the numbers were held not as bytes but in the bits within bytes.
As the decade wore on, it became obvious that these formats would not easily cope with dates moving from two-numbers to four numbers, and in cases where it would - COMP-3 would hold a two digit date across two bytes as three nibbles (a nibble is 4bits) and a sign, hence '098C' - it would behave counterintuitively. So people had to go thru each line of ~~billions of lines of code and work out ways of handling it. Ways were worked out (eg "if date < 30 then newdate = date+2000 else newdate = date+1900") and automated code correction software written but it took time.
Y2K contracts started being issued ~1992 and peaked ~1996, but by 1998 they tailed off and by early 1999 it was over.
But journalists and the general public interpreted "computers" as the white box on their office desk or weird things like "War Games", and interpreted "expensive and important" as some big bad things that take place instantaneously (plane crashes, nuclear meltdowns) instead of many small bad things over a longer period, and the gossip and headlines reflected this. So when Y2K came and went with no explosions, it was taken as a sign of fraud, rather than their misconception.
Technology changed: mainframes were supplanted by servers were supplanted by cloud computing, relational by noSQL, Assembler by Cobol by C by VB by C++ by Java by R, but it in the end it's always the same: some schmuck wading thru lines of code whilst drinking cold coffee.
I assume Brexit will go the same way: everybody is expecting explosions, food shortages, wrath of God (and given the short notice, not impossible) but its true cost will be lots of things getting a bit worse for longer. Drive a plane into a building and kill three thousand people and you warp politics for a decade, but kill 200 more people in car crashes per week and nobody notices, even though it's a lot deadlier. People find it very difficult to conceptualise risk and cost, but in the end somebody always pays.
Can't really be a "swing" if they don't stand though? More accurately, the Tories didn't pick up many Kippers, and lost some of their own voters.
Kippers didn't stand in our byelection either. Well, the party didn't. The Tory candidate was a Kipper until very recently. From our perspective turnout was up, and we took 67% of the increased vote.
Excellent1 A satisfying result then. Congratulatins.
Amazing result in Herefordshire where the Greens take a Conservative seat which was previously held with over 60% of the vote.
PB getting excited about winter council elections, part 2893.....
Far, far too much is read into council by-elections. Each has their own peculiairity. Last week we heard much about a TMay revival and "Peak Corbyn". Doubtless these results will be equally indicative.
Can't really be a "swing" if they don't stand though? More accurately, the Tories didn't pick up many Kippers, and lost some of their own voters.
Kippers didn't stand in our byelection either. Well, the party didn't. The Tory candidate was a Kipper until very recently. From our perspective turnout was up, and we took 67% of the increased vote.
Excellent1 A satisfying result then. Congratulatins.
Can't really be a "swing" if they don't stand though? More accurately, the Tories didn't pick up many Kippers, and lost some of their own voters.
Kippers didn't stand in our byelection either. Well, the party didn't. The Tory candidate was a Kipper until very recently. From our perspective turnout was up, and we took 67% of the increased vote.
Excellent1 A satisfying result then. Congratulatins.
Golly, reading this thread is upsetting. I did not realise when I voted for Brexit that I was voting for my wife and son to go hungry.
Starvation, planes grounded, deep recession, collapsed pound, food banks for all, and third world status at the very least according to the remain camp
I’m going to stock up with some montagnolo just in case. And maybe some Chablis to go with it. Otherwise I think we’ll be fine.
Maybe a pistol as well just in case
The crescendo of remain noise just now is astonishing and maybe the panic relates to the next few days when TM gives her ultimatum as she is in a win win with it. EU accepts and progress to trade talks or TM leaves with the backing of the majority of the Country
It has been rather shrill of late, perhaps for the reasons you outline.
There's also been a curious lack of pasted tweets regarding car production and retail sales recently.
Booming German industry is helping our manufacturing exports. Good news for us unless we do something that puts up new borders...
But we're not going to be putting up borders to exports.
Who knows? Brexit means Brexit, WTO means WTO...
Its the country which is importing which puts up the barriers.
And whatever the trading terms if a country wants to restrict imports it will find a few ways of doing so.
In my experience while the French are supposed to be good at such restrictions they're actually pretty fair but the Germans can be difficult with typical teutonic efficiency when it suits them.
I don't doubt that our friend Alanbrooke can tell tales on this subject.
If we are on WTO terms with the EU27, then the Germans are obligated to apply WTO terms to us, as for any third country.
A YouGov poll for The Times found that the budget triggered a modest improvement in Mr Hammond’s ratings, with his net approval up from minus 20 to minus 12, while 34 per cent thought the budget was fair against 23 who thought it unfair. About 40 per cent are braced for their own financial situation to deteriorate in the next year and 51 per cent think the economic predicament of the country will get worse.
Will May even survive until Christmas? The word seems to be that she will back down and offer the EU 40bn without an explicit link to a trade agreement, or even a clear link to talks, nor an agreement that this is the final amount. This is the exact opposite of what Boris and Gove apparently agreed.
If she backs this up with a concession on ECJ jurisdiction then she is finished. The great Brexit betrayal is just beginning...
She is looking stronger now than at any time since that catastrophic election result. Good for at least another 2 years I reckon and I don’t say that with any particular enthusiasm.
I've got a series of bets on both the next election and Mays departure being later than people seem to think, some at 2020 or later and some (at 5/1 or longer) on 2022.
At the moment May is oddly safe, as everyone wants her gone but no-one wants the risk of another election or the Brexit talks being wrecked by the handover. Even if switching PMs now didn't actually harm the talks, if we switched and then ran out of time or they collapsed it would be an easy narrative to take hold (especially given the Tories chose to have an election after A50). I wouldn't completely rule out the government just collapsing, since so many pretenders to the crown circle and May has no particular power-base or success in the job, but I think she'll survive 2018.
Ultimately even if people decided it was worth the risk, with no clear successor neither Hard, Soft, or Non-Brexiters in the Tory party are that likely to risk the wrong faction running the negotiations.
2019 is therefore a real risk. I think we will more than likely either No Deal or Transition Deal (probably with some outlines of a trade deal agreed in principle). At that point, oddly, all factions are willing to risk anyone running the talks. Either we've crashed out, so it's too late to worry about those talks, or we've got the basics agreed so the 'wrong' faction can't derail things. Also, I think that trade talks will clearly be a long-term thing once we leave in 2019, either because the transition trade deal may drag on or because we will have dozens of deals to negotiate after a No Deal Brexit and thus know it will take years. We can only stay obsessed about trade talks for so long. With the A50 period over, I think which faction runs No 10 won't be as all consuming a focus, so people might be willing to axe May even if their faction isn't certain to take over.
But deposing a sitting PM is harder than it looks, and I think May has a decent chance of hanging on like Brown did until an election can't be avoided.
A YouGov poll for The Times found that the budget triggered a modest improvement in Mr Hammond’s ratings, with his net approval up from minus 20 to minus 12, while 34 per cent thought the budget was fair against 23 who thought it unfair. About 40 per cent are braced for their own financial situation to deteriorate in the next year and 51 per cent think the economic predicament of the country will get worse.
As a matter of interest any ratings for May and Corbyn
Amazing result in Herefordshire where the Greens take a Conservative seat which was previously held with over 60% of the vote.
PB getting excited about winter council elections, part 2893.....
Far, far too much is read into council by-elections. Each has their own peculiairity. Last week we heard much about a TMay revival and "Peak Corbyn". Doubtless these results will be equally indicative.
There are two constants.
LibDems get excited by local byelections.
LibDems do worse in May local elections than local byelections predicted.
Amazing result in Herefordshire where the Greens take a Conservative seat which was previously held with over 60% of the vote.
PB getting excited about winter council elections, part 2893.....
Far, far too much is read into council by-elections. Each has their own peculiairity. Last week we heard much about a TMay revival and "Peak Corbyn". Doubtless these results will be equally indicative.
And now a swing to Cons in Stroud. From Green to Tory. Sound and fury signifying nothing. Consistent gains over a period, not individual, or even week-by-week swings are what matters. Although if you are personally involved like @RochdalePioneers, a pat on the back is earned.
A YouGov poll for The Times found that the budget triggered a modest improvement in Mr Hammond’s ratings, with his net approval up from minus 20 to minus 12, while 34 per cent thought the budget was fair against 23 who thought it unfair. About 40 per cent are braced for their own financial situation to deteriorate in the next year and 51 per cent think the economic predicament of the country will get worse.
Hammond is to long at 25 for next leader.
He has responded to Brexiteer bile, by turning the other cheek. Good bloke.
A YouGov poll for The Times found that the budget triggered a modest improvement in Mr Hammond’s ratings, with his net approval up from minus 20 to minus 12, while 34 per cent thought the budget was fair against 23 who thought it unfair. About 40 per cent are braced for their own financial situation to deteriorate in the next year and 51 per cent think the economic predicament of the country will get worse.
Hammond is to long at 25 for next leader.
He has responded to Brexiteer bile, by turning the other cheek. Good bloke.
I lacked confidence that he wouldn't make a horlicks of the budget but to be fair he called it as it is and maybe if May and Hammond can bury any problems, we may see a period of more stable government
If claims Gove has won the day on divergence from EU rules then I don’t see how there can be any substantial deal with the EU. They will want to know how things will be different and I presume he hasn’t got the answer to all of that just yet. That could fit with a rapid deal though.
Perhaps govt will declare a very limited pta a success and then move on.
And in actual fact, if you are going to Brexit and don’t mind about short term economic disruption, this sort of makes some kind of sense. Not sure if the public will see things this way though.
I'm also glad I was raised by parents who view debt as the eighth deadliest sin.
Me too. I am relieved that I can ride out Brexit with impunity, and have sorted my offspring as well, and sorted my finance. Are we at tipping point yet re Brexit? I am a remainer, and the self inflicted damage we are receiving will only grow. Yes I am old, a northerner, time to come out and declare.
Not tipping point yet.
Leavers knew there'd be job losses once Brexit happens but they still voted for it.
I suspect tipping point will be a long post Brexit slump (and the rest of the EU is booming), people will think they know what the causation is.
. But most people prefer to blame their governments rather than themselves.
It's not laziness or complacency. It's just the rest of the world finally catching up with the West, and enjoying all the techno and industrial advantages we take for granted. A Bangladeshi metal basher is just as good as a Birkenhead metal basher, there is no difference. So why should the latter earn ten times the former?!
Read across for any number of professions/vocations.
The rest of the world has caught up with the West. We are no longer an army of muskets facing tribes with spears. So our growth slows as theirs powers ahead. Note that America now has a predicted growth rate of about 1.8% per annum. Barely better than the UK.
This sounds bad for us, but it is great for humanity as a whole: global poverty levels are plummeting. We should stop whingeing. We aren't exactly starving, and across Asia and parts of Africa BILLIONS are being lifted from desperate poverty. At last.
Spot on.
(But don't forget we're also getting f*cked by demographics.)
And so surely not the time to be cutting ourselves adrift from leading a large trading bloc that will move forward in this new paradigm.
Or surely the.perfect time to embrace free trade with the billions that are growing fast rather than hide behind a protectionist curtain of yesterday's nations.
Comments
- our trade deficit with Europe
- the detail of customs duties (i.e. who pays them)
- how export markets work
- and that they're different to importing
https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/933760814049247232
We're paying for the EBA and EMA to relocate o_O ?
And whatever the trading terms if a country wants to restrict imports it will find a few ways of doing so.
In my experience while the French are supposed to be good at such restrictions they're actually pretty fair but the Germans can be difficult with typical teutonic efficiency when it suits them.
I don't doubt that our friend Alanbrooke can tell tales on this subject.
I worked in IT in the 90's (and arguably the noughties and teens, but let's not go there: it's painful) and did two Y2K contracts, so I may be able to explain.
From about the 60's to very approximately the 90's, the majority of the world's code[1] was written and located on mainframes, large white wardrobes in a Freon-protected room in the company basement, on operating systems such as IBM's MVS/XA and Unix. The programs were written and accumulated with little documentation, formal or otherwise.People stayed in post for two-three years then moved into management, so code accumulated. Bear in mind that banks and insurance societies keep customers for decades and records for centuries. Numerical data on such systems were held in formats[2] such as COMP-3 or packed decimal, where the numbers were held not as bytes but in the bits within bytes.
As the decade wore on, it became obvious that these formats would not easily cope with dates moving from two-numbers to four numbers, and in cases where it would - COMP-3 would hold a two digit date across two bytes as three nibbles (a nibble is 4bits) and a sign, hence '098C' - it would behave counterintuitively. So people had to go thru each line of ~~billions of lines of code and work out ways of handling it. Ways were worked out (eg "if date < 30 then newdate = date+2000 else newdate = date+1900") and automated code correction software written but it took time.
Y2K contracts started being issued ~1992 and peaked ~1996, but by 1998 they tailed off and by early 1999 it was over.
But journalists and the general public interpreted "computers" as the white box on their office desk or weird things like "War Games", and interpreted "expensive and important" as some big bad things that take place instantaneously (plane crashes, nuclear meltdowns) instead of many small bad things over a longer period, and the gossip and headlines reflected this. So when Y2K came and went with no explosions, it was taken as a sign of fraud, rather than their misconception.
Technology changed: mainframes were supplanted by servers were supplanted by cloud computing, relational by noSQL, Assembler by Cobol by C by VB by C++ by Java by R, but it in the end it's always the same: some schmuck wading thru lines of code whilst drinking cold coffee.
I assume Brexit will go the same way: everybody is expecting explosions, food shortages, wrath of God (and given the short notice, not impossible) but its true cost will be lots of things getting a bit worse for longer. Drive a plane into a building and kill three thousand people and you warp politics for a decade, but kill 200 more people in car crashes per week and nobody notices, even though it's a lot deadlier. People find it very difficult to conceptualise risk and cost, but in the end somebody always pays.
[1] This depends on how you count spreadsheets
[2] http://www.3480-3590-data-conversion.com/article-cobol-comp.html
Last week we heard much about a TMay revival and "Peak Corbyn".
Doubtless these results will be equally indicative.
https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/933843800019095553
Labour 41% (down 2 points), Con 39% (down 1 point) Liberal Democrats 7% (up 1 point)
Fieldwork appears to be post budget
At the moment May is oddly safe, as everyone wants her gone but no-one wants the risk of another election or the Brexit talks being wrecked by the handover. Even if switching PMs now didn't actually harm the talks, if we switched and then ran out of time or they collapsed it would be an easy narrative to take hold (especially given the Tories chose to have an election after A50). I wouldn't completely rule out the government just collapsing, since so many pretenders to the crown circle and May has no particular power-base or success in the job, but I think she'll survive 2018.
Ultimately even if people decided it was worth the risk, with no clear successor neither Hard, Soft, or Non-Brexiters in the Tory party are that likely to risk the wrong faction running the negotiations.
2019 is therefore a real risk. I think we will more than likely either No Deal or Transition Deal (probably with some outlines of a trade deal agreed in principle). At that point, oddly, all factions are willing to risk anyone running the talks. Either we've crashed out, so it's too late to worry about those talks, or we've got the basics agreed so the 'wrong' faction can't derail things. Also, I think that trade talks will clearly be a long-term thing once we leave in 2019, either because the transition trade deal may drag on or because we will have dozens of deals to negotiate after a No Deal Brexit and thus know it will take years. We can only stay obsessed about trade talks for so long. With the A50 period over, I think which faction runs No 10 won't be as all consuming a focus, so people might be willing to axe May even if their faction isn't certain to take over.
But deposing a sitting PM is harder than it looks, and I think May has a decent chance of hanging on like Brown did until an election can't be avoided.
LibDems get excited by local byelections.
LibDems do worse in May local elections than local byelections predicted.
Sound and fury signifying nothing.
Consistent gains over a period, not individual, or even week-by-week swings are what matters.
Although if you are personally involved like @RochdalePioneers, a pat on the back is earned.
Britain Elects @britainelects · 7m7 minutes ago
Wakefield West (Wakefield) result:
LAB: 49.6% (+7.1) HOLD.
CON: 41.4% (+12.5)
YORK: 6.9% (+6.9)
LDEM: 2.0% (+2.0)
Britain Elects @britainelects · 22m22 minutes ago
Chalford (Stroud) result:
CON: 45.2% (+8.6) HOLD.
LAB: 25.4% (-6.1)
GRN: 20.6% (-11.3)
LDEM: 8.8% (+8.8)
He has responded to Brexiteer bile, by turning the other cheek. Good bloke.
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/country-on-brink-of-general-election-as-taoiseach-set-to-tell-tds-he-is-backing-embattled-tnaiste-36348016.html
Benched Marvin Jones Jr
Going back to sleep
Perhaps govt will declare a very limited pta a success and then move on.
And in actual fact, if you are going to Brexit and don’t mind about short term economic disruption, this sort of makes some kind of sense. Not sure if the public will see things this way though.
But Smith is in now...