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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » GE2015 could see UKIP winning more votes than the LDs yet not getting a single MP
In the May 2013 local elections UKIP chalked up nearly twice as many votes as the Lib Dems yet won barely half the number of seats – a fact that attracted very little comment at the time.
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There will be safe Tory seats out there where not only do the Tories hardly normally bother to campaign, but large sections of the Tory activist base will have defected to UKIP. If UKIP play their cards right, the Tories won't even know which seats these are until it's too late.
If it's really a national race, that won't help them; UKIP will be remorselessly squeezed, and it won't matter what happens on the ground. But if local campaigning really makes a difference beyond the margins, UKIP should be able to score some upsets where nobody is watching.
I'm guessing the former, but I'm not sure.
The most interesting piece I read over the weekend is this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/10439497/Can-British-business-double-exports-by-2020.html
It is the government's "ambition" (presumably somewhere between a target and an aspiration) to double exports by 2020.
This government has done quite a lot to help with this and unlike Brown clearly and correctly recognises that our balance of trade is important. But have they done enough?
I would say not. This ambition (or even getting close to it frankly) is probably more significant for the wealth of our children than any other single policy, even deficit reduction. It really should be the driver of our entire economic policy.
That would mean not ducking questions about airport expansion, focussing available infrastructure spending on work relevant to helping our export industries, focussing our tertiary education spend on necessary skills, abolishing APT, prioritisng spending assisting companies into new markets, emphasising the importance of education as an export industry by facilitating students coming to genuine establishments, accelerating fracking as an import substitute etc etc.
There may not be many votes in this in the short term, in fact many of these decisions are not voter friendly, but it really is important. In December George has an election to win but he must not lose sight of the prize he highlighted 18 months ago.
Does anybody know if they're doing those things, and if so where? Not if they're doing it right.
Talk about hoist by your own petard.
https://www.greenprimary.eu/
Meanwhile the Socialists decided not to bother. After all, who needs new members and data about potential voters when you have a candidate like this:
https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/529137_607766959259482_1108232085_n.jpg
?
I hadnt even realised that contest was for the Commission President nominee (is it a job share if there are two of them?!). I thought it was for some nonsense about lead candidates for the campaign or something. A desperate attempt by the European Parliament to get people to notice them or care. Which they probably never will and certainly wont by next year. Clearly they havent articulated what it is meant to be very well to even party members so far. If name recognition counts then Bove is the only one I recognised!
I doubt even the Socialists would want that guy as President of the Commission. Meaning the whole thing is just a sad farce? Depending on who the EPP nominates.
Mr. Punter, what would be very unamusing would be a politician seeking to fiddle the system to benefit himself or his party.
If UKIP endures, I think it will advance by gradual stages, rather than the kind of sudden breakthrough Labour made in 1922-24.
It's also not a sure thing that the member states will agree to nominate the winner, since Lisbon is a little bit vague about it. If the Socialists win I'd have thought they'd pick Schultz, in that:
1) Picking a Socialist this time also fits with the alternative, traditional principle for deciding this, which is Buggin's Turn.
2) The Socialists and probably the Greens in parliament will refuse to ratify anyone else.
3) Allegedly he has a good working relationship with Angela Merkel. Her plus the Socialist countries would be quite a hard coalition to argue with.
I'm not sure how the centre-right will play this; I doubt they are either, which is why they won't nominate their candidate until a couple of months before the election.
What is really blockheaded is assuming without proof that Heathrow expansion is the correct solution to the problem. I am far from convinced that it is.
Will a three-runway Heathrow be able to cope with projected traffic twenty or thirty years into the future, or will it soon be capacity constrained once more? BAA claim it's futureproof. I'm far from convinced.
We have a rather poor recent history in the UK of building the minimum infrastructure to solve a problem, and soon running into costly problems. We need to take a long view about the national airport infrastructure, taking into account *all* our airports. That is why the Airport Commission is so vital, even if the timing of the final report is wrong.
Other countries are tackling the problem in other ways.
Turkey are planning a brand-new six-runway airport near Istanbul:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_New_Airport
And other countries are pouring the concrete:
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/30/travel/my-airports-bigger-than-yours/
We need the right answer, not just the answer you support just because it would cause most trouble for the Tories.
Import substitution sounds easy but is often very hard to achieve - usually on a price basis. Also we have literally exported a lot of the equipment and operational units that we would need to reverse those imports.
BoP will come under more pressure as N Sea oil and gas declines and that is why fracking could be so valuable.
The banks which factor invoices need rapidly to think export rather than domestic; for example Lloyds Factors do not factor invoices for exports to many EU countries which are not in the Eurozone, also do not cover China, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Russia, India etc.
Large companies are fine using LCs, ECGD or other insurance etc but for SMEs who have constrained cash flow and smaller invoices, such invoice factoring is essential and will inhibit their ability to export and could put them off even thinking about exporting.
As N Sea oil declines the BoP will be come a real issue. It's a 5-10 yr trek to import less or export more but even then as oil drops off we'll have to run hard just to stand still.
I guess it must be hard to come up with something that focus-groups well in all the different languages.
"Stronger economic growth in the UK over the next few years will not be accompanied by a big rise in employment, a survey has suggested.
A survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), a body for human resources professionals, found most employers were planning to take on new staff in the coming weeks.
But it found less appetite for hiring over the medium term.
Companies are looking to improve productivity instead, the CIPD said.
Fewer than one in five firms are planning to significantly raise staffing levels should growth pick up.
The UK economy is widely expected to strengthen over the coming months, after registering 0.8% growth in the third quarter of the year, according to the Office for National Statistics."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24894194
As long as HMG continues to tax employment we are doing the same. We shall be setting up more overseas operations whilst developing the IPR in the UK. A potential employee in Iran will cost me £10kpa whilst for the same highly qualified specialist in the UK would cost £60k salary plus all on costs.
Union costs Scotland £64B
http://wingsoverscotland.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/stimes1.jpg
There’s a rumour doing the rounds that Anna Soubry’s comments on immigration during Thursday night’s edition of Question Time did not come as a surprise to Tory High Command. Apparently, Soubry refused to take direction from the party machine and made clear that she would say, more or less, what she said.
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/11/anna-soubrys-attack-on-nigel-farage-was-planned/
Hasn't UKIP also changed from wanting a full burkha-ban to a partial one?
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-iranian-shoe-store-trade-sanctions/
you sent us Gordon Brown he cost us over £1 trn.
In an alternative history GB would have become PM of Scotland and we'd now be sending food parcels to the handful of Scots who couldn't afford to emigrate.
Schultz is well-rated by Continental socialists and many others not on the hard right. He is outrageous just often enough to emerge from the bland image that many MEPs adopt - the Boris strategy, you might say. I think he'll win easily.
Just to raise a smile on this rainy morning
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2498992/Q-How-identify-athletes-foot-A-Its-end-athletes-leg--Hilarious-genuine-exam-howlers-come-class-laughter.html
Respect and the Greens have managed to get MPs - that Ukip haven't is due to their own poor tactics.
http://www.economicsuk.com/blog/001951.html#more
"One of the functions of this column is to separate myth from reality. One myth, that the economy could never recover as long as the government was pursuing a deficit-reduction strategy. is being comprehensively disproved."
""Now that myth is being replaced by another, which is that the economy is only recovering because of a debt-fuelled consumer and housing boom"
"The amount owed by individuals, £1.43 trillion on Bank figures, is lower in cash terms than in September 2008, and 15% lower in real terms. Far from going on a debt binge, households have been quietly deleveraging."
"Real household disposable incomes are nearly 4% above pre-crisis levels but consumer spending is more than 2% below.
Housing equity withdrawal, the amount people take out out of the equity in their properties for other purposes, supported consumer spending in the run-up to the crisis. But it has been negative since 2008 and in the second quarter of this year hit £15.4bn, its biggest negative since the crisis.
When this turns around maybe it will be possible to talk about echoes of the pre-crisis era, but not before."
The obvious solution (apart from allowing the voters to specify transfers, which can also help) would be to have one seat for Kent with 17 members, instead of 17 seats with one member.
Agreed. That's the rules of the game under FPP, and if Ukip fail to land an MP they have simply played it badly.
Unless you mean more MPs any given voter could ask to help with their problems or champion their opinion, which sounds like exactly what we need.
OGH "This will be a small price to pay if their highly focused targeting strategy enables them to hold on to 30+ seats.
House prices are rising and credit isn't - FACT.
Just more evidence free trolling from you.
Once you get over the tradition of not letting a voter have more than one MP a lot of problems solve themselves. You don't have to keep changing the boundaries when the population changes, and you can use a boundary that people actually understand, like their county, instead of some weird obscure thing.
It's only if you start from the tautological premise that the number of MPs per party should be proportional to national vote share and that therefore any deviation from a linear relationship between vote share and numbers of MPs is a Bad Thing - i.e that an election is some kind of awards ceremony or opinion poll, rather than a means of choosing a government out of those realistically on offer - that this is a problem.
The danger with FPTP (and all systems have problems, so don't think I'm proposing a change!) is that you could potentially end up with a wildly disproportionate result where a party with less than 25% of the vote ends up with an absolute majority of seat in the House of Commons. This is not a likely outcome, but if the share of the vote continues to fragment - there used to be two parties with more than 10% of the vote, then three, now four - then increasingly disproportionate outcomes become more likely.
RBS said it had so-far approved 169 of its 1,075 applications, and five customers had already completed their purchases.
It said the majority of applications had come from young couples with a joint salary of less than £50,000. The average price of the property being bought was £167,565.
Halifax said more than 80% of the applications it had received under the scheme were from first-time buyers.
It said the majority of applications had come from outside London and the south-east of England, where property prices are rising fastest.
A very good start - exactly what is wanted.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24892649
Con 34%, Lab 33%, LD 12% and UKIP 15%
Leads to a seat distribution
Con 285, Lab 313, LD 25, UKIP 0.
Lab short by 12.
Lab/Lib alliance?
The parties that finished 2nd and 4th forming a government, that would be an abomination.
I did wonder if a croc was going to get one of the lions as they went into the water to escape the buffalo.
The Lib Dems doing well because of FPTP and in thanks to an Anti-EU party.
Alanis Morissette should update the lyrics to "Ironic"
FPTP post punishes third and fourth parties and to a certain extent the Tories. However I recall Nigel Farage saying in May that he favours a proportional system for Westminster -preferably the German or Scottish or Welsh system of Additional Member System.
Edit: if they lost more than half their seats.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24896266
BBC piece accidentally forgets to tell us about the Labour leadership.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2497971/Liverpool-England-star-Andre-Wisdom-forced-abandon-100-000-Porsche-mud-pit.html
Liverpool FC player gets stuck in...
Nah - they'd be in with Labour in a flash, I reckon.
Curious, don't you think?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/10340948/Cameron-opens-talks-with-Clegg-on-second-Coalition.html
TSE's post below sems to point towards Clegg going in the event of Lib/Lab coalition too.
It'd be quite bizarre if a result that seemed (to some) unfair to the Conservatives led to reform that the Conservatives didn't want, but which (in the short term, at least) would help them electorally.
PR remains a deranged, stupid system. Coalitions erode accountability, make manifestos a menu rather than a promise and give the political class rather than the people the decision over who forms the government.
Since you bring up Falkirk:
THE chairman of the Scottish Labour Party has been drawn into the Falkirk vote rigging scandal after it emerged he was directly involved in the campaign to sign up union members to influence the constituency selection battle.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/wider-political-news/scottish-labour-chairman-exposed-in-falkirk-scandal.22649010
ED Miliband has shown some deft political footwork of late, championing the cause of ordinary people in hard times against the perceived profiteering of the energy giants and the pay-day loan industry, but there is no point in the Labour leader coming up with popular lines of attack externally if he cannot put his own house in order.
It must surely be obvious by now that the issues of trade union influence on the party, the allegations of attempts to rig candidate selection in Falkirk, and the wider tactics of the Unite union raise issues that are not going away.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/herald-view/miliband-must-put-his-house-in-order.22634722
FORMER first minister Henry McLeish has become the latest senior Labour figure to call for a reopening of the inquiry into the controversy surrounding the selection of a candidate for the Falkirk West by-election.
Mr McLeish joins other senior party figures – including ex-chancellor Alistair Darling, Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont and ex-foreign secretary Jack Straw – in putting pressure on UK party leader Ed Miliband to reopen the inquiry into Unite, the party’s biggest donor.
http://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/reopen-probe-into-falkirk-by-election-mcleish-1-3183169
One of Labour’s most senior officials was alerted to a membership drive by a Unite activist in Falkirk ten months ago, raising questions about when the leader’s office became aware that a vote-rigging scandal could be brewing.
Emilie Oldknow, Labour’s executive director of governance and party services, was contacted on January 14 and asked to help sort out difficulties with some of those signed up in the recent recruitment exercise.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/politics/article3918635.ece
And that's just this morning's stories......
1) They wouldn't clarify (despite being asked) whether that was seats or votes.
2) When this was tested in 2010 having the right to be the first to try to form a government turned out to mean being the first party they would negotiate with. It didn't stop them trying to cut a deal with Lab, or at least pretending to try to cut a deal with them to satisfy their base and/or extract more concessions from Con.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/wider-political-news/scottish-labour-chairman-exposed-in-falkirk-scandal.22649010
"More than half of the Cabinet, including David Cameron, the Prime Minister, George Osborne, the Chancellor, and Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, are thought to have gone to private school and are independently very wealthy".
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/10439303/Truly-shocking-that-the-private-school-educated-and-affluent-middle-class-still-run-Britain-says-Sir-John-Major.html
So maybe Sir John Major forgot to mention Labour in his speech, or maybe Labour no longer runs the country. Or both.
Though the Getelarph also says: "Similar concerns about social mobility were voiced by Michael Gove, the Education secretary who went to state school" but did not Gove go to Robert Gordon's in Scotland?
Every year, I end up with a new poppy, and post remembrance Sunday, I put my old poppy in an old tin, as throwing them in a bin seems disrespectful.
Now this tin is heaving, what should I do with these old poppies?
His lips are moving.