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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Is Corbyn at risk from the mother of all political decapitatio
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Is Corbyn at risk from the mother of all political decapitations?
We’ve heard a lot about how Boris Johnson is at risk of losing his Westminster seat come the next election. His 5,034 majority over Labour in Uxbridge & South Ruislip is not at all commanding – Labour need just a 5.4% swing to take the seat – and what with Johnson leading the charge towards a No Deal Brexit, with the economic and other disruption that would cause, on top of local issues like Heathrow, the prospect isn’t one to be ignored lightly.
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But the odds of it happening are truly astronomical.
- given the geography of politics in Islington, and her less messianic status, Thornberry is the one at risk;
- if the Greens threw their lot in with the LibDems in Islington, it could be a game changer. However Inner London Greens tend to be very lefty;
- the fact we are even having this discussion underlines how useless referring back to previous GE results, and using the UNS model, will be (assuming the political climate remains like this).
https://twitter.com/LordAshcroft/status/1157539957650706432?s=20
But neither is going to happen.
On a related note I wonder what the Portillo Moment" of the next election will be? Clearly that depends on the general election date but if we have an October/November poll I think my shortlist would be :
Amber Rudd - Hastings.
Denis Skinner - Bolsover
Steve Baker - Wycombe
Hooray, we're in the Premier League now!
I know the Ruth love-in is but a distant memory, that she'll have a list seat as a back up, she's only leader of a sub branch (currently), an election is some distance away and it's 'only' Holyrood, but Davidson is the leader most likely to get a humiliating order of the boot from her constituency.
https://twitter.com/TheMendozaWoman/status/1157200762688004097
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/08/02/reformation-making-modern-britain-brexit-similar-opportunity/
Although I'm more than a bit surprised to see a Catholic Eurosceptic using that analogy.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49209013
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49213743
Can non criminals think about it though?
But if he doesn't provide the resources to do it quickly, his target is meaningless.
(I'm also baffled by these experts who think 5G will be easier than cabling in the Highlands of Scotland. Have they ever tried to make a phone call in Fort Augustus?)
Do you exercise your perogative?
Only when it's slack.
Because seat boundaries haven't changed for ages, it is possible to "test" UNS with previous GE results - since swings work both forwards and backwards (i.e. if UNS is correct, you can get back to the previous GE results by deducting the swing from the latest ones).
Running UNS (with a separate calc for Scotland) for the 2015 GE predicts a Tory majority of 64, compared to the actual outcome of 12. For the 2010 GE it predicts a Tory majority of 70, compared to the actual hung parliament.
In both cases the flaw is to understate the seats won by the LibDems and SNP (except 2015 for the latter) and to overstate Conservative seats and understate Labour. As a predictive tool for previous GEs it is poor - as we would expect given that it was designed for two-party politics whereas recent elections have been determined by the rise and fall of votes for other parties.
To imply that UNS is somehow a "tested model", as HY does, is a mistake. It's a broken model.
This is the flaw that Flavible are trying to overcome, using a battery of other data including local and Euro election and 2016 referendum results and demographics. It's true this is untested (although their B&R prediction was very close), and given the way their model works it cannot really be tested with previous GE results. Nevertheless plugging the 2010 vote shares into Flavible produces a result very much closer to the actual (including the Tories falling short of a majority), principally because it recognises that a significant shift in LibDem support will be anything but uniform
(the areas where the LDs are doing very well now in locals and Euros are broadly the same ones where they used to be strong but lost out the most in 2015/17)
Personally I prefer a model that is trying to overcome the flaws in another that is obviously broken. Until further data suggests otherwise.
But - and I think this worth noting - I think many aspects of Corbyn's situation illustrate an important point (even if one which might not apply to him for other reasons), and we could potentially see shock Labour losses in an autumn election similar in reverse to their gains in Canterbury or Kensington, where the demographics/politics of an area makes them susceptible to a very large swing against.
But, that's not that he'll actually lose - but as David points out the majority hasn't been as huge in the past and may be slashed in a way that worries other MPs with smaller substantial majorities.
Unless you wanted to just sit it out.
Setting aside the real danger to everyone else and the recklessness etc, that’s got to be nigh on impossible even without traffic. Sure you don’t mean Chepstow castle?
I don't think a Remain alliance is all that realistic in terms of candidates actually standing down - the Greens in particular leave it entirely to their constituency parties, where a handful of determined people can insist on standing (which is what went wrong in Broxtowe in 2010). But an informal agreement on who's going to try harder in different places and a certain restraint in deliberatrely misleading bar charts where we know that someone else has a better chance is conceivable. I know from direct contact that that will happen in parts of the southeast, and it was already visible in the local elections if you looked hard enough.
You have DSL, I suspect.
And how DSL works is that the wire that runs between your house and (at the least) your local wiring cabinet is divided into two frequency bands. One is the regular frequencies your voice uses when you're talking. The rest is used for data. But this process of sectioning off certain frequencies for data and for voice is incredibly inefficient. It means that between you and your local exchange your voice is being carried as an inefficient analog signal, and then converted to digital, and then converted back again at the other end. And you have to make sure there are big frequency "gaps" to avoid cross-contamination.
If we simply got rid of the analog portion of the network, put ethernet sockets in homes, then we could massively simplify our networks, increase speeds dramatically, and do this all without digging up the streets to take fibre the last 100 yards. (We'd still want to do the digging up in dense urban areas... but in most towns and suburbia... why bother? Using the full frequency of twisted pair over 100 yards gets you about 2gig of bandwidth today, and that's only going to increase over time.)
You may be right. The heart of the constituency is where the Seven Sisters Rd/Holloway Rd meet (Nags Head?) and that is still very different in character.
Those on the left priority is stop Johnson No Deal
Only 1 party can do that.
Plus Swinson is crap Tory voting hypocrite.