The 2bn trees figure is straight out of the same playbook as the £58bn for the WASPI women, or the £250bn for the investment fund, or the £400bn for the state bank. Labour are just plucking numbers out of the air that are so vast as to be incomprehensible. They just go straight over the heads of the voters, and the vital fact - that all of these policies are therefore undeliverable - is lost. Voters just get some vague message about being handed out slabs of (other peoples') money or it being spent on hospitals and schools and trees and a zillion and one other nice things, and think that sounds rather wonderful.
That's how come we're going to end up with another Hung Parliament. All of the places where there were enough voters sceptical of these crackpot schemes to count against Labour were already lost to them the last time around. All the remaining seats clearly contain the necessary accumulation of core Labour voters plus those who are receptive to these telephone number figures. If anything, we should be expecting a more fanciful Labour offer than last time to be pushing a few Con-Lab marginals into the Labour column, which is why I hazarded a guess that the Tories (allowing also for a few losses to the SNP) ought to finish this election somewhere around the 300 mark.
The Conservatives have no effective defence against this strategy. All that they can do is resign themselves to a spell on the Opposition benches, wait for Labour to fail to deliver and hope that this teaches a sufficient number of voters a lesson.
Another good example of the national dyscalculia I was describing yesterday. It is a major problem and the inability to count both in politics and the media is undermining our democracy.
Otherwise your post is way too pessimistic. Things are getting tighter and the outcome is uncertain but there is everything to play for. Having Boris instead of May is key. He knows how to campaign and how to win. She didn't.
Employing 10,000 people to plant 30 per day each doesn't seem impossible or unreasonable.
Blimey. How long do you think it takes to plant a tree?
Er, I planted a tree in my garden recently. I dug a small hole, put the tree in, filled in the hole. It can't have taken more than twenty minutes.
So, a ten hour day then? .
Creates a problem for Labour’s 32 hour working week!
Would it be fair to say Labour’s new strategy targeting Labour leave constituencies with 2 weeks to go is a sign of panic? I think they will need to drop the 2nd ref policy to get these people back onside...
Clearly reading the comments on this thread very few of you have any idea what is involved in large scale tree planting. For a start, the majority of tree planting in the UK takes place on upland hills, usually in sparsely populated areas. Just drive through Cumbria, North Yorkshire, the Borders or Scottish Highlands to get the picture. Large scale infrastructure planning has to go into major planting, often involving creating miles of rough track roads to give access and the erection of bridges and pontoons to cross rivers, moor land and bogs. The last time we had major planting was in the 1970s and early 1980s when from memory there were huge tax breaks under Schedule A which enabled people like Terry Wogan and the popstars of the day to avoid £100,000s in tax. They mass planted crap fast growing Norwegian spruce trees which for the last 30 years ecologists have been trying to remove because they destroy the native landscapes. Just ask the people of Caithness about the damage to the Flow country!!
One of the largest forests in the country is being planted about 2 miles from my village. The Heart of England Forest has planted just over a million trees on 3000 acres and aims to cover 30,000 acres of Warwickshire in what was the Forest of Arden. Its a long slow process, but a delight to watch.
The project's Chairman is John Snow of C4, maybe Labour should have asked him for advice first.
On the subject of trees: one billion trees is nearly twenty (nearer 17 in fact) for each person in the country. Large scale planting in the Lake District and Highlands of Scotland would be the only way to do it I think.
And such planting would be castastrophic for peat land and native fauna. As a councillor I have had a couple of emails from the FOTE website demanding we double tree cover. Who is going to pay for the use of the fields ? The trees produced on high ground would be at best sickly even if they lived. Native trees will not grow above 900 ft - well not in any meaningful way. There are many areas where modern conservation was a reaction to Economic Forestry in the 1970s planting softwoods. This was particularly true in Exmoor. Here in Yorkshire Dales they were going to cut them down, then discovered they were the only place Red Squirrels were thriving.
And, when you have planted them, thinned them, left them, they eventually start to fall over. So, at that point you have to harvest the essentially worthless crop of mal-formed and stunted trees. In theory it can be done at a profit but I don't know of many instances where that has happened. So, you have to put roads in and the eco people object to that as well, and the lorries and the shit on the roads.
And after harvesting the land then has to be squared up or re-planted. I think these people who are advocating this nonsense need to be invited to the forestry in Garsdale or Dentdale for a photoshoot.
I THINK you would need to provide about £200 per acre per annum for 40 yrs for people to sign up to wreck the habitat on grade 5 or grade 6 land here in Yorkshire Dales. it would be an ecological disaster and a very expensive one. If Fysics Teacher is right above, and I think he is then that is about £11 Billion per annum, £460 billion in total.
For the Dales it's currently a case of pick your own disaster - Brexit will destroy sheep farming so there goes the current landscape. Equally replace sheep with trees and you are in the same boat.
In fact the only part of the Dales that would remain the same is the grouse and pheasant Moorlands and the less said about that the better.
I find a 2015 article stating that there are 3 billion trees in the UK. Labour policy then is roughly to increase the number of trees by two-thirds over twenty years. I can envisage the incentives that would encourage land to switch from marginal agriculture to forestry/woodland, so land isn't necessarily a problem. The supply of trees is more likely to be problematic, particularly with the disease risks of importing them.
Does it have to be a mature tree. Will an acorn do the trick? You could easily cultivate and plant millions of those. Whilst the numbers are 'interesting', the romantic in me likes the idea of our generation restoring Britains woodland. A legacy of which we could be truly proud.
I’m getting visions of Robin Hood stories - Sherwood Forest - vast areas of dense forest into which mere mortals fear to tread
Wouldn’t it make more sense to plant them all abroad somewhere?
Blimey. How long do you think it takes to plant a tree?
If you were ever going to meet Labour's unthought-through target, the first years would be dobbing in conkers or acorns or whatever. That doeosn't take the time - harvesting them in advance does. Allowing for failures, and deer eating the young trees, the sorts of numbers of seeds you would need to get to 2 billion mature trees is astronomic. You would also be competing with our existing wildlife for those seeds. The poster for Labour's efforts would end up being starving red squirrels..... You could import saplings. And import who knows what tree diseases. Ash Die-back was supposedly imported with saplings. (The millions of ash we are already losing means you are in negative territory before your efforts start.) Assuming you aren't just going to plant on the land that produces our food, the land you would be planting on would likely be in areas of outstanding natural beauty/national parks. A massive tree planting exercise would change the character of the land as well as our protected ecological variety. I'm no fan of mono-culture prairies, but equally I like to eat. You could reinstate a network of small fields with trees and hedges around them. But your food will be more expensive and less of it. I'm all for planting lots more trees. But where you plant them will take great effort if you aren't going to cause unintended consequences. First off I would look at extensive plantings to prevent flood plains from flooding, for example.
Would it be fair to say Labour’s new strategy targeting Labour leave constituencies with 2 weeks to go is a sign of panic? I think they will need to drop the 2nd ref policy to get these people back onside...
And if they did that the LDs would revive at their expense quicker than Lazarus
Would it be fair to say Labour’s new strategy targeting Labour leave constituencies with 2 weeks to go is a sign of panic? I think they will need to drop the 2nd ref policy to get these people back onside...
And lose most of their voters to the Lib Dems ! It probably is a sign of panic but Labour Leavers when polled tend to be less Leave and more worried about public services .
The 2bn trees figure is straight out of the same playbook as the £58bn for the WASPI women, or the £250bn for the investment fund, or the £400bn for the state bank. Labour are just plucking numbers out of the air that are so vast as to be incomprehensible. They just go straight over the heads of the voters, and the vital fact - that all of these policies are therefore undeliverable - is lost. Voters just get some vague message about being handed out slabs of (other peoples') money or it being spent on hospitals and schools and trees and a zillion and one other nice things, and think that sounds rather wonderful.
That's how come we're going to end up with another Hung Parliament. All of the places where there were enough voters sceptical of these crackpot schemes to count against Labour were already lost to them the last time around. All the remaining seats clearly contain the necessary accumulation of core Labour voters plus those who are receptive to these telephone number figures. If anything, we should be expecting a more fanciful Labour offer than last time to be pushing a few Con-Lab marginals into the Labour column, which is why I hazarded a guess that the Tories (allowing also for a few losses to the SNP) ought to finish this election somewhere around the 300 mark.
The Conservatives have no effective defence against this strategy. All that they can do is resign themselves to a spell on the Opposition benches, wait for Labour to fail to deliver and hope that this teaches a sufficient number of voters a lesson.
Another good example of the national dyscalculia I was describing yesterday. It is a major problem and the inability to count both in politics and the media is undermining our democracy.
Otherwise your post is way too pessimistic. Things are getting tighter and the outcome is uncertain but there is everything to play for. Having Boris instead of May is key. He knows how to campaign and how to win. She didn't.
Employing 10,000 people to plant 30 per day each doesn't seem impossible or unreasonable.
10,000 tree planters. Say 5,000 admin support staff. Average employment costs of £40K including maternity rights, pensions, sick pay etc. Direct Employment costs of roughly £600m a year. Overheads including accomodation costs very conservatively the same. Kit, including road making kit for remote areas, drainage for boggy ground etc maybe another £1bn. Not sure how many tens of billions you want to allow for land costs. Oh, and the cost of the saplings etc and the nursery areas to allow them to grow. Transport costs. This could make bribing ladies of a certain age look cheap.
We can spend the next two weeks talking about trees or we can interrogate Boris' plan to 'Get Brexit Done' within year. We would all benefit from a bit more flesh on the bones of that plan.
The latter seems like the more useful thing for us to do right now. This stuff needs serious scrutiny.
We can spend the next two weeks talking about trees or we can interrogate Boris' plan to 'Get Brexit Done' within year. We would all benefit from a bit more flesh on the bones of that plan.
The latter seems like the more useful thing for us to do right now. This stuff needs serious scrutiny.
We also need to flesh out the preposterousness of Labour policy.
We can spend the next two weeks talking about trees or we can interrogate Boris' plan to 'Get Brexit Done' within year. We would all benefit from a bit more flesh on the bones of that plan.
The latter seems like the more useful thing for us to do right now. This stuff needs serious scrutiny.
Perhaps Labour should have thought of that before they decided to grab the headlines?
I find a 2015 article stating that there are 3 billion trees in the UK. Labour policy then is roughly to increase the number of trees by two-thirds over twenty years. I can envisage the incentives that would encourage land to switch from marginal agriculture to forestry/woodland, so land isn't necessarily a problem. The supply of trees is more likely to be problematic, particularly with the disease risks of importing them.
Does it have to be a mature tree. Will an acorn do the trick? You could easily cultivate and plant millions of those. Whilst the numbers are 'interesting', the romantic in me likes the idea of our generation restoring Britains woodland. A legacy of which we could be truly proud.
I’m getting visions of Robin Hood stories - Sherwood Forest - vast areas of dense forest into which mere mortals fear to tread
Wouldn’t it make more sense to plant them all abroad somewhere?
Blimey. How long do you think it takes to plant a tree?
If you were ever going to meet Labour's unthought-through target, the first years would be dobbing in conkers or acorns or whatever. That doeosn't take the time - harvesting them in advance does. Allowing for failures, and deer eating the young trees, the sorts of numbers of seeds you would need to get to 2 billion mature trees is astronomic. You would also be competing with our existing wildlife for those seeds. The poster for Labour's efforts would end up being starving red squirrels..... You could import saplings. And import who knows what tree diseases. Ash Die-back was supposedly imported with saplings. (The millions of ash we are already losing means you are in negative territory before your efforts start.) Assuming you aren't just going to plant on the land that produces our food, the land you would be planting on would likely be in areas of outstanding natural beauty/national parks. A massive tree planting exercise would change the character of the land as well as our protected ecological variety. I'm no fan of mono-culture prairies, but equally I like to eat. You could reinstate a network of small fields with trees and hedges around them. But your food will be more expensive and less of it. I'm all for planting lots more trees. But where you plant them will take great effort if you aren't going to cause unintended consequences. First off I would look at extensive plantings to prevent flood plains from flooding, for example.
couldn't we just flatten London and turn it in to a Forest ?
Much better use of the land and environmentally friendly. We would be carbon neutral in an instant.
2 billion trees huh Labour? 20 feet apart for long term viability (recommended for fruit trees - larger spacing for hardwoods unless you are going to thin them later - but then that is not 2 billion trees to maturity) But lets really squash them in a bit closer and say 200 to the acre. 200 to the acre. 2,000,000,000 trees = 10,000,000 acres required. Yorkshire is 2,900,000 acres. So three and half Yorkshires covered in trees to meet Labour's pledge. Wales is 5.1237 million acres. So two plots the size of Wales covered in trees to meet Labour's pledge. Did they even have access to a fag packet when they pulled that number out their arse?
It sounds impressive and opponents repeat it to criticise it, spreading awareness. Labour on several issues are trying to go with the 350m strategy from the referendum. Might as well put the WASPI bribe on the side of a bus.
Blimey. How long do you think it takes to plant a tree?
If you were ever going to meet Labour's unthought-through target, the first years would be dobbing in conkers or acorns or whatever. That doeosn't take the time - harvesting them in advance does. Allowing for failures, and deer eating the young trees, the sorts of numbers of seeds you would need to get to 2 billion mature trees is astronomic. You would also be competing with our existing wildlife for those seeds. The poster for Labour's efforts would end up being starving red squirrels..... You could import saplings. And import who knows what tree diseases. Ash Die-back was supposedly imported with saplings. (The millions of ash we are already losing means you are in negative territory before your efforts start.) Assuming you aren't just going to plant on the land that produces our food, the land you would be planting on would likely be in areas of outstanding natural beauty/national parks. A massive tree planting exercise would change the character of the land as well as our protected ecological variety. I'm no fan of mono-culture prairies, but equally I like to eat. You could reinstate a network of small fields with trees and hedges around them. But your food will be more expensive and less of it. I'm all for planting lots more trees. But where you plant them will take great effort if you aren't going to cause unintended consequences. First off I would look at extensive plantings to prevent flood plains from flooding, for example.
couldn't we just flatten London and turn it in to a Forest ?
Much better use of the land and environmentally friendly. We would be carbon neutral in an instant.
Not too dissimilar to Rory Stewart’s actual policy.
O/T tactical voting. Assumptions seem to be that tactical voting will be high because of the massive anti Tory or anti Labour votes. But these are tribal. Isn’t there a third group which is basically fed up with both. And these people may just revert to which ever option they like best regardless of chances to win (assuming they vote at all).
Would it be fair to say Labour’s new strategy targeting Labour leave constituencies with 2 weeks to go is a sign of panic? I think they will need to drop the 2nd ref policy to get these people back onside...
And lose most of their voters to the Lib Dems ! It probably is a sign of panic but Labour Leavers when polled tend to be less Leave and more worried about public services .
I’m not sure that’s the case. It’s no coincidence where all the Tory gains are. The Tory challenger’s job in these seats is to say “your Labour MP wants to ignore your vote and have a 2nd referendum”. It’s job done. How can Labour counter that message in the marginals? It’s much bigger than any policy, it’s an issue of trust and respect.
MRP & Don Valley.. We are given to believe that BJ&co will be receiving an 8% majority, or 4000 on a 2017 turnout. Given Flinty had a 5000 lab Maj in 2017, and is quite well thought of hereabouts for actually supporting Leave (sort of), presumably nearly all of these ex pit villagers are now voting Tory. This in a seat last held by a non-lab MP in 1918. Not coincidentally, I suspect, at this last event the Tories didn't stand.. UGov are having a giraffe.
Flint will lose.
The problem that rebel Labour MPs have got is that their support for the Boris deal has not increased support for *them* as MPs but has hardened support for *Brexit* in their constituencies, and voters who want to "Get Brexit done" are much more likely to support Boris or Farage. In other words these MPs get no thanks at all from their constituents.
This is a familiar pattern, which we also saw with MPs rebelling over Iraq and the current ex-Tories like Grieve and Soubry. Rebel MPs get polite acknowledgements from people who voted against them, before proceeding to vote against them again. Meanwhile, some loyalists stay at home.
On another subject, Sanders seems to be edging forwards - ahead of Buttigieg in New Hampshire, and a clear 2nd nationally with one tie with Biden. Bloomberg has merely joined the 3% pack though of course it's early days for him.
O/T - Labour nationalisations. Most of discussion has been about how they would compensate shareholders with “bonds” (and today - whether this would be legal under EU law).
But on a different tack - what happens to Corporate bondholders in these companies? Especially in companies like Thames Water which would presumably effectively cease to exist? I’m presuming that most of the large investment they have made into infrastructure in recent years (“replacing Victorian network”) has been initially funded by debt, to be met from existing and future revenues. Are these bonds going to be swapped with Govt bonds as well?
Not sure why they would. A change of shareholder does not per se affect the bondholder. But I have little doubt that the OBR would insist on those bonds being brought onto the government balance sheet as government debt making our debt/GDP ratio even worse.
I suspect the bonds would have a change of control clause in them.
The 2bn trees figure is straight out of the same playbook as the £58bn for the WASPI women, or the £250bn for the investment fund, or the £400bn for the state bank. Labour are just plucking numbers out of the air that are so vast as to be incomprehensible. They just go straight over the heads of the voters, and the vital fact - that all of these policies are therefore undeliverable - is lost. Voters just get some vague message about being handed out slabs of (other peoples') money or it being spent on hospitals and schools and trees and a zillion and one other nice things, and think that sounds rather wonderful.
That's how come we're going to end up with another Hung Parliament. All of the places where there were enough voters sceptical of these crackpot schemes to count against Labour were already lost to them the last time around. All the remaining seats clearly contain the necessary accumulation of core Labour voters plus those who are receptive to these telephone number figures. If anything, we should be expecting a more fanciful Labour offer than last time to be pushing a few Con-Lab marginals into the Labour column, which is why I hazarded a guess that the Tories (allowing also for a few losses to the SNP) ought to finish this election somewhere around the 300 mark.
The Conservatives have no effective defence against this strategy. All that they can do is resign themselves to a spell on the Opposition benches, wait for Labour to fail to deliver and hope that this teaches a sufficient number of voters a lesson.
Another good example of the national dyscalculia I was describing yesterday. It is a major problem and the inability to count both in politics and the media is undermining our democracy.
Otherwise your post is way too pessimistic. Things are getting tighter and the outcome is uncertain but there is everything to play for. Having Boris instead of May is key. He knows how to campaign and how to win. She didn't.
Wheres the proof he knows how to campaign in this present day?
MRP & Don Valley.. We are given to believe es didn't stand.. UGov are having a giraffe.
Flint will lose.
The problem that rebel Labour MPs have got is that their support for the Boris deal has not increased support for *them* as MPs but has hardened support for *Brexit* in their constituencies, and voters who want to "Get Brexit done" are much more likely to support Boris or Farage. In other words these MPs get no thanks at all from their constituents.
This is a familiar pattern, which we also saw with MPs rebelling over Iraq and the current ex-Tories like Grieve and Soubry. Rebel MPs get polite acknowledgements from people who voted against them, before proceeding to vote against them again. Meanwhile, some loyalists stay at home.
On another subject, Sanders seems to be edging forwards - ahead of Buttigieg in New Hampshire, and a clear 2nd nationally with one tie with Biden. Bloomberg has merely joined the 3% pack though of course it's early days for him.
Since the model works by starting from a very small sample of local voters - as I recall fewer than a hundred - and then projects demographic-based voting behaviour based on regional and national polling onto the seat to make up the result - I would have thought a weakness of this approach is determining accurately the level of support for Indy’s like Field or the TIGs?
I don’t expect them to win, just wonder how accurate the MRP can be for such candidates?
Last time round the MRP severely overestimated Claire Wright's appeal over the Tories in East Devon.
You’re right - and I remember wondering then how the model could do that. Nothing in any of the descriptions I have read suggests how you can use demographics to work out whether people are going to vote for an Independent standing in one constituency.
+1 I wrote the model off for this reason - it just made it look like it hadn't been through proper review by people who actually understood electoral mechanics. On the other hand, she did have just about the largest error bar of any prediction in any seat in the country... but, even so ...
Do any statisticians happen to know roughly what the margin of error would be in a poll of just 100 people? Ignoring for the moment that they're not randomly sampled.
Blimey. How long do you think it takes to plant a tree?
If you were ever going to meet Labour's unthought-through target, the first years would be dobbing in conkers or acorns or whatever. That doeosn't take the time - harvesting them in advance does. Allowing for failures, and deer eating the young trees, the sorts of numbers of seeds you would need to get to 2 billion mature trees is astronomic. You would also be competing with our existing wildlife for those seeds. The poster for Labour's efforts would end up being starving red squirrels..... You could import saplings. And import who knows what tree diseases. Ash Die-back was supposedly imported with saplings. (The millions of ash we are already losing means you are in negative territory before your efforts start.) Assuming you aren't just going to plant on the land that produces our food, the land you would be planting on would likely be in areas of outstanding natural beauty/national parks. A massive tree planting exercise would change the character of the land as well as our protected ecological variety. I'm no fan of mono-culture prairies, but equally I like to eat. You could reinstate a network of small fields with trees and hedges around them. But your food will be more expensive and less of it. I'm all for planting lots more trees. But where you plant them will take great effort if you aren't going to cause unintended consequences. First off I would look at extensive plantings to prevent flood plains from flooding, for example.
couldn't we just flatten London and turn it in to a Forest ?
Much better use of the land and environmentally friendly. We would be carbon neutral in an instant.
Not too dissimilar to Rory Stewart’s actual policy.
2 billion trees huh Labour? 20 feet apart for long term viability (recommended for fruit trees - larger spacing for hardwoods unless you are going to thin them later - but then that is not 2 billion trees to maturity) But lets really squash them in a bit closer and say 200 to the acre. 200 to the acre. 2,000,000,000 trees = 10,000,000 acres required. Yorkshire is 2,900,000 acres. So three and half Yorkshires covered in trees to meet Labour's pledge. Wales is 5.1237 million acres. So two plots the size of Wales covered in trees to meet Labour's pledge. Did they even have access to a fag packet when they pulled that number out their arse?
We can spend the next two weeks talking about trees or we can interrogate Boris' plan to 'Get Brexit Done' within year. We would all benefit from a bit more flesh on the bones of that plan.
The latter seems like the more useful thing for us to do right now. This stuff needs serious scrutiny.
We also need to flesh out the preposterousness of Labour policy.
If you look at the polls and betting markets, Labour are not in this race. We need to give Boris some proper scrutiny and get him to make commitments on the record. We are 12 months away from a hard Brexit.
2 billion trees huh Labour? 20 feet apart for long term viability (recommended for fruit trees - larger spacing for hardwoods unless you are going to thin them later - but then that is not 2 billion trees to maturity) But lets really squash them in a bit closer and say 200 to the acre. 200 to the acre. 2,000,000,000 trees = 10,000,000 acres required. Yorkshire is 2,900,000 acres. So three and half Yorkshires covered in trees to meet Labour's pledge. Wales is 5.1237 million acres. So two plots the size of Wales covered in trees to meet Labour's pledge. Did they even have access to a fag packet when they pulled that number out their arse?
Iffy stats. 12-15 ft more usually recommended for apples on mm106 which is a biggish rootstock. And fruit trees are a special case because you want maximum horizontal spread for ease of harvesting. For non fruit trees (you don't mean hardwood - all fruit trees are hardwood) you don't care and you can let them follow their natural instinct and grow upwards as hard as they can.
Not disputing it's still a lorra trees.
Not wanting to put ideas in their heads but if you abolished grouse shooting that's a lot of uplands you could rewood .
Isnt moorland a unique environment ?
Can really see the point in plastering them with conifers, that was one of the big criticisms of earlier plantings
Not Grouse Moors. Grouse Moors are blasted hell scrapes that frankly would be improved by some awful industrial forests.
But such is their size you wouldn't have to stick nasty industrial sized forests on them but could just gently dot them with some trees.
2 billion trees huh Labour? 20 feet apart for long term viability (recommended for fruit trees - larger spacing for hardwoods unless you are going to thin them later - but then that is not 2 billion trees to maturity) But lets really squash them in a bit closer and say 200 to the acre. 200 to the acre. 2,000,000,000 trees = 10,000,000 acres required. Yorkshire is 2,900,000 acres. So three and half Yorkshires covered in trees to meet Labour's pledge. Wales is 5.1237 million acres. So two plots the size of Wales covered in trees to meet Labour's pledge. Did they even have access to a fag packet when they pulled that number out their arse?
Did they say they'd plant them all in the UK ?
Good point. I hear you can plant a tree in some distant part of the world with a credit card and a click of a button.
PB has been far too focused on Brexit. This election is going to be decided by much more boring, golden-oldie topics, eg:
NI: the Union Wales: living standards Scotland: the Union England: ongoing national decline; now into its 2nd century.
Certainly in Scotland the Union continues to trump Brexit which is why the Tory vote is holding up so much better than expected post Ruth. Swinson had better hope it does in East Dumbartonshire too.
Only a matter of time David,the unionists have had it in Scotland.
I think we have actually passed peak independence. Sturgeon is going to be seriously damaged by that trial and the SNP have no one else even close to the competence of either Salmond or Sturgeon. They have been remarkably fortunate in their leaders for a very considerable time. That time may be drawing to a close.
1. Wishful thinking 2. Psychological projection
Just because the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party is utterly devoid of talent does not automatically mean that other organisations suffer from the same complaint.
MRP & Don Valley.. We are given to believe es didn't stand.. UGov are having a giraffe.
Flint will lose.
The problem that rebel Labour MPs have got is that their support for the Boris deal has not increased support for *them* as MPs but has hardened support for *Brexit* in their constituencies, and voters who want to "Get Brexit done" are much more likely to support Boris or Farage. In other words these MPs get no thanks at all from their constituents.
This is a familiar pattern, which we also saw with MPs rebelling over Iraq and the current ex-Tories like Grieve and Soubry. Rebel MPs get polite acknowledgements from people who voted against them, before proceeding to vote against them again. Meanwhile, some loyalists stay at home.
On another subject, Sanders seems to be edging forwards - ahead of Buttigieg in New Hampshire, and a clear 2nd nationally with one tie with Biden. Bloomberg has merely joined the 3% pack though of course it's early days for him.
Since the model works by starting from a very small sample of local voters - as I recall fewer than a hundred - and then projects demographic-based voting behaviour based on regional and national polling onto the seat to make up the result - I would have thought a weakness of this approach is determining accurately the level of support for Indy’s like Field or the TIGs?
I don’t expect them to win, just wonder how accurate the MRP can be for such candidates?
Last time round the MRP severely overestimated Claire Wright's appeal over the Tories in East Devon.
You’re right - and I remember wondering then how the model could do that. Nothing in any of the descriptions I have read suggests how you can use demographics to work out whether people are going to vote for an Independent standing in one constituency.
+1 I wrote the model off for this reason - it just made it look like it hadn't been through proper review by people who actually understood electoral mechanics. On the other hand, she did have just about the largest error bar of any prediction in any seat in the country... but, even so ...
Do any statisticians happen to know roughly what the margin of error would be in a poll of just 100 people? Ignoring for the moment that they're not randomly sampled.
It should be inversely proportional to the square root of the sample size.
So for a 100 the margin of error would be 3 times as much as for 900, or 20 times as much as for 40,000.
Reforestation is a great initiative, the numbers don't matter because no one believes them, what it does is put Labour on the side of virtue. It makes people feel good about voting Labour, even if they know it's all unrealistic bullshit. We need policies that make people feel good about voting Conservative. I think we should front run the Labour announcement on student fees and bring them down to £3k and have debt and interest forgiveness for current and past students on the £9k fees. Even if it costs £10-20bn to refund graduates, it literally puts us on the side of the young vs Labour on the side of the WASPIs.
Labour'e Brexit policy has been a shambles. Would have been much more sensible to offer a second referendum and campaign for a deal centred on leaving.
Ditto, the LDs should have offered a second referendum and offered to campaign for remain.
Simple problem for both is that there doesnt appear to be a majority for remain.
We can spend the next two weeks talking about trees or we can interrogate Boris' plan to 'Get Brexit Done' within year. We would all benefit from a bit more flesh on the bones of that plan.
The latter seems like the more useful thing for us to do right now. This stuff needs serious scrutiny.
We also need to flesh out the preposterousness of Labour policy.
If you look at the polls and betting markets, Labour are not in this race. We need to give Boris some proper scrutiny and get him to make commitments on the record. We are 12 months away from a hard Brexit.
If you believe the polls of course, Labour policy needs it ludicrousness pointing out. The Tories are not going to ignore Labour, that would be crazy imho
I find a 2015 article stating that there are 3 billion trees in the UK. Labour policy then is roughly to increase the number of trees by two-thirds over twenty years. I can envisage the incentives that would encourage land to switch from marginal agriculture to forestry/woodland, so land isn't necessarily a problem. The supply of trees is more likely to be problematic, particularly with the disease risks of importing them.
Does it have to be a mature tree. Will an acorn do the trick? You could easily cultivate and plant millions of those. Whilst the numbers are 'interesting', the romantic in me likes the idea of our generation restoring Britains woodland. A legacy of which we could be truly proud.
I think there are various reasons why it makes more sense to plant a sapling (grown from an acorn in a nursery) rather than acorns directly. The issue then is capacity (which is also a problem for increasing housebuilding and infrastructure generally). These problems are solvable, but equally if the policy ends up failing it's likely to be why. I would be delighted if we substantially increased our area of woodland.
With all the hype about "two weeks to go" from the MRP, don't numbers tend to favour the status quo the final couple of days of buildup? The 2017 MRP had May's numbers as somewhat lower than the final result (but then again, it was closer to the day)
With all the hype about "two weeks to go" from the MRP, don't numbers tend to favour the status quo the final couple of days of buildup? The 2017 MRP had May's numbers as somewhat lower than the final result (but then again, it was closer to the day)
I suspect Remain would win a second referendum. It's daft how stupid pro-EU MPs have been. Turns out voting for things you don't want isn't the way to get what you want.
MRP & Don Valley.. We are given to believe that BJ&co will be receiving an 8% majority, or 4000 on a 2017 turnout. Given Flinty had a 5000 lab Maj in 2017, and is quite well thought of hereabouts for actually supporting Leave (sort of), presumably nearly all of these ex pit villagers are now voting Tory. This in a seat last held by a non-lab MP in 1918. Not coincidentally, I suspect, at this last event the Tories didn't stand.. UGov are having a giraffe.
Flint will lose.
The problem that rebel Labour MPs have got is that their support for the Boris deal has not increased support for *them* as MPs but has hardened support for *Brexit* in their constituencies, and voters who want to "Get Brexit done" are much more likely to support Boris or Farage. In other words these MPs get no thanks at all from their constituents.
Nice theory. Tories however have selected another non-resident as their candidate. Here today, gone tomorrow etc. We're a bit local round here.
For the Dales it's currently a case of pick your own disaster - Brexit will destroy sheep farming so there goes the current landscape. Equally replace sheep with trees and you are in the same boat.
In fact the only part of the Dales that would remain the same is the grouse and pheasant Moorlands and the less said about that the better.
Brexit will not destroy sheep farming in the way that membership of the EU has destroyed suckler cow and dairy farming - there will be some sort of trade relationship. In fact the agri-environmental schemes for common land have been moderately successful on the fells I know best. The tree bits of them haven't worked. There are some efforts to get cattle back on to the fells in order to break up the tilthe a bit - might happen. Winter housing is the killer in the suckler cow business.
The grouse and pheasant industry is probably near its peak - I doubt there is much aspiration to extend it any more and as it isn't grazed it doesn't qualify for Single Farm Payment - I think.
It is likely there will be some planting in the Dales, some good, some not so good. I expect some shift from sheep to cattle but will need big sheds. Then the old barns can be converted into housing for off comers. ( They are not fit or safe for modern agriculture. )
The 2bn trees figure is straight out of the same playbook as the £58bn for the WASPI women, or the £250bn for the investment fund, or the £400bn for the state bank. Labour are just plucking numbers out of the air that are so vast as to be incomprehensible. They just go straight over the heads of the voters, and the vital fact - that all of these policies are therefore undeliverable - is lost. Voters just get some vague message about being handed out slabs of (other peoples') money or it being spent on hospitals and schools and trees and a zillion and one other nice things, and think that sounds rather wonderful.
That's how come we're going to end up with another Hung Parliament. All of the places where there were enough voters sceptical of these crackpot schemes to count against Labour were already lost to them the last time around. All the remaining seats clearly contain the necessary accumulation of core Labour voters plus those who are receptive to these telephone number figures. If anything, we should be expecting a more fanciful Labour offer than last time to be pushing a few Con-Lab marginals into the Labour column, which is why I hazarded a guess that the Tories (allowing also for a few losses to the SNP) ought to finish this election somewhere around the 300 mark.
The Conservatives have no effective defence against this strategy. All that they can do is resign themselves to a spell on the Opposition benches, wait for Labour to fail to deliver and hope that this teaches a sufficient number of voters a lesson.
Another good example of the national dyscalculia I was describing yesterday. It is a major problem and the inability to count both in politics and the media is undermining our democracy.
Otherwise your post is way too pessimistic. Things are getting tighter and the outcome is uncertain but there is everything to play for. Having Boris instead of May is key. He knows how to campaign and how to win. She didn't.
Employing 10,000 people to plant 30 per day each doesn't seem impossible or unreasonable.
The 2bn trees figure is straight out of the same playbook as the £58bn for the WASPI women, or the £250bn for the investment fund, or the £400bn for the state bank. Labour are just plucking numbers out of the air that are so vast as to be incomprehensible. They just go straight over the heads of the voters, and the vital fact - that all of these policies are therefore undeliverable - is lost. Voters just get some vague message about being handed out slabs of (other peoples') money or it being spent on hospitals and schools and trees and a zillion and one other nice things, and think that sounds rather wonderful.
That's how come we're going to end up with another Hung Parliament. All of the places where there were enough voters sceptical of these crackpot schemes to count against Labour were already lost to them the last time around. All the remaining seats clearly contain the necessary accumulation of core Labour voters plus those who are receptive to these telephone number figures. If anything, we should be expecting a more fanciful Labour offer than last time to be pushing a few Con-Lab marginals into the Labour column, which is why I hazarded a guess that the Tories (allowing also for a few losses to the SNP) ought to finish this election somewhere around the 300 mark.
The Conservatives have no effective defence against this strategy. All that they can do is resign themselves to a spell on the Opposition benches, wait for Labour to fail to deliver and hope that this teaches a sufficient number of voters a lesson.
Another good example of the national dyscalculia I was describing yesterday. It is a major problem and the inability to count both in politics and the media is undermining our democracy.
Otherwise your post is way too pessimistic. Things are getting tighter and the outcome is uncertain but there is everything to play for. Having Boris instead of May is key. He knows how to campaign and how to win. She didn't.
Employing 10,000 people to plant 30 per day each doesn't seem impossible or unreasonable.
And the land? Two areas the size of Wales???
Nationalisefarmland. You tories lack creativity!
Having seen the kind of logical contortions Tories will go through to justify Brexit, I don't think that a lack of creativity is the problem.
2 billion trees huh Labour? 20 feet apart for long term viability (recommended for fruit trees - larger spacing for hardwoods unless you are going to thin them later - but then that is not 2 billion trees to maturity) But lets really squash them in a bit closer and say 200 to the acre. 200 to the acre. 2,000,000,000 trees = 10,000,000 acres required. Yorkshire is 2,900,000 acres. So three and half Yorkshires covered in trees to meet Labour's pledge. Wales is 5.1237 million acres. So two plots the size of Wales covered in trees to meet Labour's pledge. Did they even have access to a fag packet when they pulled that number out their arse?
Did they say they'd plant them all in the UK ?
Logic says they couldn't possibly plant them all in the UK. But then, who knows what logic was applied when the policy was dreamt up by people in Islington who can't get their heads round the difference between a million and a billion....
MRP & Don Valley.. We are given to believe es didn't stand.. UGov are having a giraffe.
Flint will lose.
The pr.
This is a familiar pattern, which we also saw with MPs rebelling over Iraq and the current ex-Tories like Grieve and Soubry. Rebel MPs get polite acknowledgements from people who voted against them, before proceeding to vote against them again. Meanwhile, some loyalists stay at home.
On another subject, Sanders seems to be edging forwards - ahead of Buttigieg in New Hampshire, and a clear 2nd nationally with one tie with Biden. Bloomberg has merely joined the 3% pack though of course it's early days for him.
Since the model works by starting from a very small sample of local voters - as I recall fewer than a hundred - and then projects demographic-based voting behaviour based on regional and national polling onto the seat to make up the result - I would have thought a weakness of this approach is determining accurately the level of support for Indy’s like Field or the TIGs?
I don’t expect them to win, just wonder how accurate the MRP can be for such candidates?
Last time round the MRP severely overestimated Claire Wright's appeal over the Tories in East Devon.
You’re right - and I remember wondering then how the model could do that. Nothing in any of the descriptions I have read suggests how you can use demographics to work out whether people are going to vote for an Independent standing in one constituency.
+1 I wrote the model off for this reason - it just made it look like it hadn't been through proper review by people who actually understood electoral mechanics. On the other hand, she did have just about the largest error bar of any prediction in any seat in the country... but, even so ...
Do any statisticians happen to know roughly what the margin of error would be in a poll of just 100 people? Ignoring for the moment that they're not randomly sampled.
It should be inversely proportional to the square root of the sample size.
So for a 100 the margin of error would be 3 times as much as for 900, or 20 times as much as for 40,000.
Thank you kindly. The MOE for a 1000-1200 poll is usually put at around +/- 2.5%. So we're looking at an MOE of somewhere in the region of 7-10% for YouGov's mini-samples, which I guess isn't that bad of a start point for assessing how well the various Indys might do?
2 billion trees huh Labour? 20 feet apart for long term viability (recommended for fruit trees - larger spacing for hardwoods unless you are going to thin them later - but then that is not 2 billion trees to maturity) But lets really squash them in a bit closer and say 200 to the acre. 200 to the acre. 2,000,000,000 trees = 10,000,000 acres required. Yorkshire is 2,900,000 acres. So three and half Yorkshires covered in trees to meet Labour's pledge. Wales is 5.1237 million acres. So two plots the size of Wales covered in trees to meet Labour's pledge. Did they even have access to a fag packet when they pulled that number out their arse?
Iffy stats. 12-15 ft more usually recommended for apples on mm106 which is a biggish rootstock. And fruit trees are a special case because you want maximum horizontal spread for ease of harvesting. For non fruit trees (you don't mean hardwood - all fruit trees are hardwood) you don't care and you can let them follow their natural instinct and grow upwards as hard as they can.
Not disputing it's still a lorra trees.
Not wanting to put ideas in their heads but if you abolished grouse shooting that's a lot of uplands you could rewood .
One thing that struck me in the US was that pretty much every hill and mountain had trees all over it, in a way that is unusual in Europe (I never got to the desert-y bits). Although it was attractive it did make the scenery of upland areas very samey, and when you walked up a hill often you didn’t get any views even when you got to the top, unless there was a fire tower. It was a reminder of how things were here until people came along.
People with sheep. I have rights of common on Dartmoor, and it's astonishing what an artificial construct a wilderness actually is.
How does planting a silver birch tree improve hekp with Co2 emissions over, say, 100 years? I can appreciate the tree might suck up some carbon during its life, but surely it will release it when it dies?
Since the model works by starting from a very small sample of local voters - as I recall fewer than a hundred - and then projects demographic-based voting behaviour based on regional and national polling onto the seat to make up the result - I would have thought a weakness of this approach is determining accurately the level of support for Indy’s like Field or the TIGs?
I don’t expect them to win, just wonder how accurate the MRP can be for such candidates?
Last time round the MRP severely overestimated Claire Wright's appeal over the Tories in East Devon.
You’re right - and I remember wondering then how the model could do that. Nothing in any of the descriptions I have read suggests how you can use demographics to work out whether people are going to vote for an Independent standing in one constituency.
+1 I wrote the model off for this reason - it just made it look like it hadn't been through proper review by people who actually understood electoral mechanics. On the other hand, she did have just about the largest error bar of any prediction in any seat in the country... but, even so ...
Do any statisticians happen to know roughly what the margin of error would be in a poll of just 100 people? Ignoring for the moment that they're not randomly sampled.
It should be inversely proportional to the square root of the sample size.
So for a 100 the margin of error would be 3 times as much as for 900, or 20 times as much as for 40,000.
Thank you kindly. The MOE for a 1000-1200 poll is usually put at around +/- 2.5%. So we're looking at an MOE of somewhere in the region of 7-10% for YouGov's mini-samples, which I guess isn't that bad of a start point for assessing how well the various Indys might do?
This is a bit misleading though isn’t it, because yougov’s projections are not based solely on the people sampled in each individual constituency. They are a combination of individual constituency polling, combined with wider demographic data from elsewhere combined with matching up constituencies with similar characteristics. It’s more of an exit poll approach.
The MRP modelling technique is based on sampling the voting preferences of a large number of demographic groups and then applying the result to the demographics of each constituency. It is a model. My model does not rely on demographics at all - not even remain/leave of each seat. It assumes that the demographics of each seat are "baked in" to the 2017 actual result including the relative strength of the activists base, council representation, history etc that I don't think the MRP model reflects. It then applies assumptions about tactical voting. It is a model. The appeal of the MRP model is that it was close last time. But that is a sample of one. I think it was also used in the US so a sample of two. Imagine a heavily promoted modelling technique (with whizzy multilevel Regression and Post-stratification) that correctly picked the 20/1 winner of last year's Grand National. Would its prediction for this year influence the betting? You bet it would - whether it was a sound model or not! "The computer says" For this reason I'm betting against the MRP which has moved certain markets e.g LD over 25.5 seats at 3.35 looks good value. It shot up after the MRP was published. EDIT. If my model proves to be spot on this time, you shouldn't assume it is a good model. It might just be lucky. But I suspect it would be followed with close attention next time!
The 2bn trees figure is straight out of the same playbook as the £58bn for the WASPI women, or the £250bn for the investment fund, or the £400bn for the state bank. Labour are just plucking numbers out of the air that are so vast as to be incomprehensible. They just go straight over the heads of the voters, and the vital fact - that all of these policies are therefore undeliverable - is lost. Voters just get some vague message about being handed out slabs of (other peoples') money or it being spent on hospitals and schools and trees and a zillion and one other nice things, and think that sounds rather wonderful.
That's how come we're going to end up with another Hung Parliament. All of the places where there were enough voters sceptical of these crackpot schemes to count against Labour were already lost to them the last time around. All the remaining seats clearly contain the necessary accumulation of core Labour voters plus those who are receptive to these telephone number figures.
The Conservatives have no effective defence against this strategy. All that they can do is resign themselves to a spell on the Opposition benches, wait for Labour to fail to deliver and hope that this teaches a sufficient number of voters a lesson.
Another good example of the national dyscalculia I was describing yesterday. It is a major problem and the inability to count both in politics and the media is undermining our democracy.
Otherwise your post is way too pessimistic. Things are getting tighter and the outcome is uncertain but there is everything to play for. Having Boris instead of May is key. He knows how to campaign and how to win. She didn't.
Employing 10,000 people to plant 30 per day each doesn't seem impossible or unreasonable.
10,000 tree planters. Say 5,000 admin support staff. Average employment costs of £40K including maternity rights, pensions, sick pay etc. Direct Employment costs of roughly £600m a year. Overheads including accomodation costs very conservatively the same. Kit, including road making kit for remote areas, drainage for boggy ground etc maybe another £1bn. Not sure how many tens of billions you want to allow for land costs. Oh, and the cost of the saplings etc and the nursery areas to allow them to grow. Transport costs. This could make bribing ladies of a certain age look cheap.
There will be massive global revenue from carbon offsetting the air industry, especially long haul. If we get our tree planting industry off the ground quickly we could corner the market, could even turn a profit. We're only talking about a two thirds increase in our tree stock, doesn't seem impossible. Who knew Tories hated trees so much?
I find a 2015 article stating that there are 3 billion trees in the UK. Labour policy then is roughly to increase the number of trees by two-thirds over twenty years. I can envisage the incentives that would encourage land to switch from marginal agriculture to forestry/woodland, so land isn't necessarily a problem. The supply of trees is more likely to be problematic, particularly with the disease risks of importing them.
Does it have to be a mature tree. Will an acorn do the trick? You could easily cultivate and plant millions of those. Whilst the numbers are 'interesting', the romantic in me likes the idea of our generation restoring Britains woodland. A legacy of which we could be truly proud.
I think there are various reasons why it makes more sense to plant a sapling (grown from an acorn in a nursery) rather than acorns directly. The issue then is capacity (which is also a problem for increasing housebuilding and infrastructure generally). These problems are solvable, but equally if the policy ends up failing it's likely to be why. I would be delighted if we substantially increased our area of woodland.
Acorns planted would never be seen again - its a squirrel thing !
You need to plant things that are about 2 ft tall optimum. I am a great believer in over planting rather than the sodding plastic guards which tend to kill those trees the rabbits don't eat. But as I said earlier you really can't get oak trees to grow at over 900 ft - have a nice photo of one at that height, just about their limit.
And none of this addresses the other reality Ash Dieback a disaster of European proportions. I know I have about 400 or so ash trees on my farm so I scaled that up to somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 in South Lakeland. They will all be dead within five years.
For the blanket planting being proposed you need to be talking larch or spruce I guess and Japanese Larch are not exactly native. Historically in the valleys of the dales the terminal species were oak in the lower dry areas with ash further up, perhaps to 1200 ft. Alder in the wetter areas and birch up to the tree line, perhaps even covering the drier parts of the fell tops at 2000 ft. But the weather was a lot better 5,000 years ago of course.
On reflection I think you would be planting a lot denser than Fysics Teacher and I suggested earlier - you should do 50 trees per acre ajust our calculations accordingly.
LOL @ Labour planning to target their leave voting areas after spending the past two years telling them they are nothing but racist scum and then throwing them under the bus.
How does planting a silver birch tree improve hekp with Co2 emissions over, say, 100 years? I can appreciate the tree might suck up some carbon during its life, but surely it will release it when it dies?
Only if it burns. The carbon needs to join with oxygen via a chemical reaction (aka fire).
MRP doesn't match reports that I am hearing from the ground. That bit was right last time doesn't mean it's right this time as it's a very different election. However, it's impact will be real. The parties will react to it and that will make changes. Labour seem to want to target their leavers. So a more explicit pro-leave message, reinforcing the obvious reality that a Labour government would back a Labour negotiated leave deal*. This combined with Tories feeling more comfortable that Corbyn wont win means less Tory one nation remainers clinging to a party they no longer recognise. Thus fragmenting the growing squeeze. *Labour's plans to steal vast billions from pension funds by nationalizing companies at a price they set rather than the market price is screamingly illegal under EU law. As I've been saying for ages Corbyn is a leaver so nobody can stop him renationalising National Carriers and BOAC. This latest confirmation that the EU would tie us up in court just reinforces it
How does planting a silver birch tree improve hekp with Co2 emissions over, say, 100 years? I can appreciate the tree might suck up some carbon during its life, but surely it will release it when it dies?
Because the whole agenda consists of partial accounting - like cows and methane only adding up the bits you want to add up.
Silver birch is a bad example - they tend only to live about 50 years. But substitute alder then at the end you have perhaps a 10 T tree. Of that I guess 6 or 7 T would be wood - the rest brash. You then bury it and that is 6 T sequestrated. Oh, you want to burn it - well then the 6 T goes back into the atmosphere. There is the gain of the energy and substitution of fossil fuel so not an entire loss.
But, does it fix more CO2 than would be fixed by grass, heather or any other crop over the same time scale ? Not a chance. We need to build up our peat which is our greatest carbon sink. Sadly planting trees on peat mosses destroys peat and releases carbon rather than storing it - visit the reservoirs in the Peak District and see all the peat that comes down from the fell tops.
O/T - Labour nationalisations. Most of discussion has been about how they would compensate shareholders with “bonds” (and today - whether this would be legal under EU law).
But on a different tack - what happens to Corporate bondholders in these companies? Especially in companies like Thames Water which would presumably effectively cease to exist? I’m presuming that most of the large investment they have made into infrastructure in recent years (“replacing Victorian network”) has been initially funded by debt, to be met from existing and future revenues. Are these bonds going to be swapped with Govt bonds as well?
Not sure why they would. A change of shareholder does not per se affect the bondholder. But I have little doubt that the OBR would insist on those bonds being brought onto the government balance sheet as government debt making our debt/GDP ratio even worse.
I suspect the bonds would have a change of control clause in them.
Maybe but HMG is (probably) a substitute owner that they would be obliged to accept. Indeed since these would effectively become better paying gilts they might welcome it.
The MRP modelling technique is based on sampling the voting preferences of a large number of demographic groups and then applying the result to the demographics of each constituency. It is a model. My model does not rely on demographics at all - not even remain/leave of each seat. It assumes that the demographics of each seat are "baked in" to the 2017 actual result including the relative strength of the activists base, council representation, history etc that I don't think the MRP model reflects. It then applies assumptions about tactical voting. It is a model. The appeal of the MRP model is that it was close last time. But that is a sample of one. I think it was also used in the US so a sample of two. Imagine a heavily promoted modelling technique (with whizzy multilevel Regression and Post-stratification) that correctly picked the 20/1 winner of last year's Grand National. Would its prediction for this year influence the betting? You bet it would - whether it was a sound model or not! "The computer says" For this reason I'm betting against the MRP which has moved certain markets e.g LD over 25.5 seats at 3.35 looks good value. It shot up after the MRP was published. EDIT. If my model proves to be spot on this time, you shouldn't assume it is a good model. It might just be lucky. But I suspect it would be followed with close attention next time!
MRP therefore wins over a 'static' model if the change in voting behaviour is driven by demographics - as has been the case in recent years. The MRP also starts with the data from its panellists (around 100?) in each seat, rather than starting with a blank piece of paper.
Where you have a point is that the MRP will itself affect the result. Last time it came late and few people believed it. This time it comes early and, as you say, with a lot of credibility.
2 billion trees huh Labour? 20 feet apart for long term viability (recommended for fruit trees - larger spacing for hardwoods unless you are going to thin them later - but then that is not 2 billion trees to maturity) But lets really squash them in a bit closer and say 200 to the acre. 200 to the acre. 2,000,000,000 trees = 10,000,000 acres required. Yorkshire is 2,900,000 acres. So three and half Yorkshires covered in trees to meet Labour's pledge. Wales is 5.1237 million acres. So two plots the size of Wales covered in trees to meet Labour's pledge. Did they even have access to a fag packet when they pulled that number out their arse?
Another good example of the national dyscalculia I was describing yesterday. It is a major problem and the inability to count both in politics and the media is undermining our democracy.
Otherwise your post is way too pessimistic. Things are getting tighter and the outcome is uncertain but there is everything to play for. Having Boris instead of May is key. He knows how to campaign and how to win. She didn't.
Employing 10,000 people to plant 30 per day each doesn't seem impossible or unreasonable.
10,000 tree planters. Say 5,000 admin support staff. Average employment costs of £40K including maternity rights, pensions, sick pay etc. Direct Employment costs of roughly £600m a year. Overheads including accomodation costs very conservatively the same. Kit, including road making kit for remote areas, drainage for boggy ground etc maybe another £1bn. Not sure how many tens of billions you want to allow for land costs. Oh, and the cost of the saplings etc and the nursery areas to allow them to grow. Transport costs. This could make bribing ladies of a certain age look cheap.
There will be massive global revenue from carbon offsetting the air industry, especially long haul. If we get our tree planting industry off the ground quickly we could corner the market, could even turn a profit. We're only talking about a two thirds increase in our tree stock, doesn't seem impossible. Who knew Tories hated trees so much?
I like trees. Not so sure about government though. Ronald Reagan and the most dangerous sentence in the English language and all that. Why don't we just incentivise the land owners to plant more trees and let them get on with it?
The 2bn trees figure is straight out of the same playbook as the £58bn for the WASPI women, or the £250bn for the investment fund, or the £400bn for the state bank. Labour are just plucking numbers out of the air that are so vast as to be incomprehensible. They just go straight over the heads of the voters, and the vital fact - that all of these policies are therefore undeliverable - is lost. Voters just get some vague message about being handed out slabs of (other peoples') money or it being spent on hospitals and schools and trees and a zillion and one other nice things, and think that sounds rather wonderful.
That's how come we're going to end up with another Hung Parliament. All of the places where there were enough voters sceptical of these crackpot schemes to count against Labour were already lost to them the last time around. All the remaining seats clearly contain the necessary accumulation of core Labour voters plus those who are receptive to these telephone number figures. If anything, we should be expecting a more fanciful Labour offer than last time to be pushing a few Con-Lab marginals into the Labour column, which is why I hazarded a guess that the Tories (allowing also for a few losses to the SNP) ought to finish this election somewhere around the 300 mark.
The Conservatives have no effective defence against this strategy. All that they can do is resign themselves to a spell on the Opposition benches, wait for Labour to fail to deliver and hope that this teaches a sufficient number of voters a lesson.
Another good example of the national dyscalculia I was describing yesterday. It is a major problem and the inability to count both in politics and the media is undermining our democracy.
Otherwise your post is way too pessimistic. Things are getting tighter and the outcome is uncertain but there is everything to play for. Having Boris instead of May is key. He knows how to campaign and how to win. She didn't.
Employing 10,000 people to plant 30 per day each doesn't seem impossible or unreasonable.
Although to be economic, successful and environmentally sound you only plant trees from November to February. That is 4 months out of the available 12, which will alter the equation a little....
The 2bn trees figure is straight out of the same playbook as the £58bn for the WASPI women, or the £250bn for the investment fund, or the £400bn for the state bank. Labour are just plucking numbers out of the air that are so vast as to be incomprehensible. They just go straight over the heads of the voters, and the vital fact - that all of these policies are therefore undeliverable - is lost. Voters just get some vague message about being handed out slabs of (other peoples') money or it being spent on hospitals and schools and trees and a zillion and one other nice things, and think that sounds rather wonderful.
That's how come we're going to end up with another Hung Parliament. All of the places where there were enough voters sceptical of these crackpot schemes to count against Labour were already lost to them the last time around. All the remaining seats clearly contain the necessary accumulation of core Labour voters plus those who are receptive to these telephone number figures. If anything, we should be expecting a more fanciful Labour offer than last time to be pushing a few Con-Lab marginals into the Labour column, which is why I hazarded a guess that the Tories (allowing also for a few losses to the SNP) ought to finish this election somewhere around the 300 mark.
The Conservatives have no effective defence against this strategy. All that they can do is resign themselves to a spell on the Opposition benches, wait for Labour to fail to deliver and hope that this teaches a sufficient number of voters a lesson.
Another good example of the national dyscalculia I was describing yesterday. It is a major problem and the inability to count both in politics and the media is undermining our democracy.
Otherwise your post is way too pessimistic. Things are getting tighter and the outcome is uncertain but there is everything to play for. Having Boris instead of May is key. He knows how to campaign and how to win. She didn't.
Employing 10,000 people to plant 30 per day each doesn't seem impossible or unreasonable.
Although to be economic, successful and environmentally sound you only plant trees from November to February. That is 4 months out of the available 12, which will alter the equation a little....
I think everyone should adopt the word "dyscalculia" and use it daily.
The 2bn trees figure is straight out of the same playbook as the £58bn for the WASPI women, or the £250bn for the investment fund, or the £400bn for the state bank. Labour are just plucking numbers out of the air that are so vast as to be incomprehensible. They just go straight over the heads of the voters, and the vital fact - that all of these policies are therefore undeliverable - is lost. Voters just get some vague message about being handed out slabs of (other peoples') money or it being spent on hospitals and schools and trees and a zillion and one other nice things, and think that sounds rather wonderful.
That's how come we're going to end up with another Hung Parliament. All of the places where there were enough voters sceptical of these crackpot schemes to count against Labour were already lost to them the last time around. All the remaining seats clearly contain the necessary accumulation of core Labour voters plus those who are receptive to these telephone number figures. If anything, we should be expecting a more fanciful Labour offer than last time to be pushing a few Con-Lab marginals into the Labour column, which is why I hazarded a guess that the Tories (allowing also for a few losses to the SNP) ought to finish this election somewhere around the 300 mark.
The Conservatives have no effective defence against this strategy. All that they can do is resign themselves to a spell on the Opposition benches, wait for Labour to fail to deliver and hope that this teaches a sufficient number of voters a lesson.
Another good example of the national dyscalculia I was describing yesterday. It is a major problem and the inability to count both in politics and the media is undermining our democracy.
A consequence of the UK having not living within its means.
When you have to live within your means you become wary about big spending commitments.
When you live to the style you think entitled to the bigger the spending the better.
Great responses thank you. I'm very keen on silviculture as a potential third career - for fuel rather than as CCS. Trees as CCS doesn't appear in the old books that I have read. It seem to be very fashionable right now though. It does seem to be pretty inefficient use of land though, especially if we (the world) are planting the trees and simultaneously digging coal out of the ground to burn. Biomass projects, say coppiced willow, would make more sense to me and might contribute to flood alleviation.
Some of the best holds for Labour according to the model: Plymouth Sutton & Devonport, Portsmouth South, Canterbury, Croydon Central, Reading East, Bridgend, Gower, Newport West, Lincoln, Gedling, Lancaster.
Lincoln is the one that seems the most anomalous.
Lincoln is low on the Boomer percentage at 27.6%
Is Boomer the new gammon?
It is the new insult for people they don’t like used by people who jump on the outrage bus at any insult aimed at them or people they like. Apparently this makes it different.
What we are seeing now is the effect of the Lib Dems’ catastrophe in 2015. They are so out of contention that it will take several elections for them not to be squeezed so horribly.
Back to pointing at broken paving slabs and potholes in leaflets. Less of overall political strategy nonsense for the LDs
What we are seeing now is the effect of the Lib Dems’ catastrophe in 2015. They are so out of contention that it will take several elections for them not to be squeezed so horribly.
Also they are crap and elected a Tory donkey of a leader. They need to learn from their mistakes , not prolong them.
malcy, I'm sure the LibDems would love your advice on which - if any - of their current MPs wouldn't be "a Tory donkey of a leader".
PB has been far too focused on Brexit. This election is going to be decided by much more boring, golden-oldie topics, eg:
NI: the Union Wales: living standards Scotland: the Union England: ongoing national decline; now into its 2nd century.
Certainly in Scotland the Union continues to trump Brexit which is why the Tory vote is holding up so much better than expected post Ruth. Swinson had better hope it does in East Dumbartonshire too.
Only a matter of time David,the unionists have had it in Scotland.
I think we have actually passed peak independence. Sturgeon is going to be seriously damaged by that trial and the SNP have no one else even close to the competence of either Salmond or Sturgeon. They have been remarkably fortunate in their leaders for a very considerable time. That time may be drawing to a close.
David, you may be right on Sturgeon but I do not see how you get the opinion re independence which is still on an upward trend and apart from pensioners would be an absolute certainty. It is only a matter of time and hopefully I will see it. Maybe we will see the King across the Water back after his trial victory. Angus Robertson or Mike Russell would be favourites I guess if not.
MRP & Don Valley.. We are given to believe that BJ&co will be receiving an 8% majority, or 4000 on a 2017 turnout. Given Flinty had a 5000 lab Maj in 2017, and is quite well thought of hereabouts for actually supporting Leave (sort of), presumably nearly all of these ex pit villagers are now voting Tory. This in a seat last held by a non-lab MP in 1918. Not coincidentally, I suspect, at this last event the Tories didn't stand.. UGov are having a giraffe.
Flint will lose.
The problem that rebel Labour MPs have got is that their support for the Boris deal has not increased support for *them* as MPs but has hardened support for *Brexit* in their constituencies, and voters who want to "Get Brexit done" are much more likely to support Boris or Farage. In other words these MPs get no thanks at all from their constituents.
Nice theory. Tories however have selected another non-resident as their candidate. Here today, gone tomorrow etc. We're a bit local round here.
Um, the Conservative candidate lives in the constituency (unlike Caroline Flint) and has lived in the Doncaster area all his life. Much better than the previous Tory! There's no need to lie just because you don't like the results. https://www.doncasterconservatives.org/news/nick-fletcher-don-valley
FACTCHECK : the tory candidate claims to reside in a town outside the Don Valley constituency. Always helps when a candidate knows the boundaries..
MRP & Don Valley.. We are given to believe that BJ&co will be receiving an 8% majority, or 4000 on a 2017 turnout. Given Flinty had a 5000 lab Maj in 2017, and is quite well thought of hereabouts for actually supporting Leave (sort of), presumably nearly all of these ex pit villagers are now voting Tory. This in a seat last held by a non-lab MP in 1918. Not coincidentally, I suspect, at this last event the Tories didn't stand.. UGov are having a giraffe.
Flint will lose.
The problem that rebel Labour MPs have got is that their support for the Boris deal has not increased support for *them* as MPs but has hardened support for *Brexit* in their constituencies, and voters who want to "Get Brexit done" are much more likely to support Boris or Farage. In other words these MPs get no thanks at all from their constituents.
Nice theory. Tories however have selected another non-resident as their candidate. Here today, gone tomorrow etc. We're a bit local round here.
Um, the Conservative candidate lives in the constituency (unlike Caroline Flint) and has lived in the Doncaster area all his life. Much better than the previous Tory! There's no need to lie just because you don't like the results. https://www.doncasterconservatives.org/news/nick-fletcher-don-valley
FACTCHECK : the tory candidate claims to reside in a town outside the Don Valley constituency. Always helps when a candidate knows the boundaries..
Comments
Creates a problem for Labour’s 32 hour working week!
The project's Chairman is John Snow of C4, maybe Labour should have asked him for advice first.
www.heartofenglandforest.com
In fact the only part of the Dales that would remain the same is the grouse and pheasant Moorlands and the less said about that the better.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to plant them all abroad somewhere?
You would also be competing with our existing wildlife for those seeds. The poster for Labour's efforts would end up being starving red squirrels.....
You could import saplings. And import who knows what tree diseases. Ash Die-back was supposedly imported with saplings. (The millions of ash we are already losing means you are in negative territory before your efforts start.)
Assuming you aren't just going to plant on the land that produces our food, the land you would be planting on would likely be in areas of outstanding natural beauty/national parks. A massive tree planting exercise would change the character of the land as well as our protected ecological variety. I'm no fan of mono-culture prairies, but equally I like to eat. You could reinstate a network of small fields with trees and hedges around them. But your food will be more expensive and less of it.
I'm all for planting lots more trees. But where you plant them will take great effort if you aren't going to cause unintended consequences. First off I would look at extensive plantings to prevent flood plains from flooding, for example.
The latter seems like the more useful thing for us to do right now. This stuff needs serious scrutiny.
I have to agree. But Labour back-tracking on a second referendum would only drive the ardent Remainers to the Libs. Not sure what that would achieve.
Astonishing how far the LDs have fallen in their heartland.
By contrast 15 seats there in London and the South East which had Remain votes above the national average.
Much better use of the land and environmentally friendly. We would be carbon neutral in an instant.
But such is their size you wouldn't have to stick nasty industrial sized forests on them but could just gently dot them with some trees.
2. Psychological projection
Just because the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party is utterly devoid of talent does not automatically mean that other organisations suffer from the same complaint.
So for a 100 the margin of error would be 3 times as much as for 900, or 20 times as much as for 40,000.
Ditto, the LDs should have offered a second referendum and offered to campaign for remain.
Simple problem for both is that there doesnt appear to be a majority for remain.
I would be delighted if we substantially increased our area of woodland.
Every year checks to see they have autonomy as per 1999 terms.
Beijing not happy
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-50581862
I just got a small bet on Labour to win Wakefield (in spite of yesterday`s poll) at 5/1.
I suspect Remain would win a second referendum. It's daft how stupid pro-EU MPs have been. Turns out voting for things you don't want isn't the way to get what you want.
Tories 41%
SNP 40%. Close Well if it doesn't then the changes have to be worse somewhere else. So for Labour's sake they better hope yes!
The grouse and pheasant industry is probably near its peak - I doubt there is much aspiration to extend it any more and as it isn't grazed it doesn't qualify for Single Farm Payment - I think.
It is likely there will be some planting in the Dales, some good, some not so good. I expect some shift from sheep to cattle but will need big sheds. Then the old barns can be converted into housing for off comers. ( They are not fit or safe for modern agriculture. )
But then, who knows what logic was applied when the policy was dreamt up by people in Islington who can't get their heads round the difference between a million and a billion....
How does planting a silver birch tree improve hekp with Co2 emissions over, say, 100 years? I can appreciate the tree might suck up some carbon during its life, but surely it will release it when it dies?
My model does not rely on demographics at all - not even remain/leave of each seat. It assumes that the demographics of each seat are "baked in" to the 2017 actual result including the relative strength of the activists base, council representation, history etc that I don't think the MRP model reflects. It then applies assumptions about tactical voting. It is a model.
The appeal of the MRP model is that it was close last time. But that is a sample of one. I think it was also used in the US so a sample of two.
Imagine a heavily promoted modelling technique (with whizzy multilevel Regression and Post-stratification) that correctly picked the 20/1 winner of last year's Grand National. Would its prediction for this year influence the betting? You bet it would - whether it was a sound model or not! "The computer says"
For this reason I'm betting against the MRP which has moved certain markets e.g LD over 25.5 seats at 3.35 looks good value. It shot up after the MRP was published.
EDIT. If my model proves to be spot on this time, you shouldn't assume it is a good model. It might just be lucky. But I suspect it would be followed with close attention next time!
You need to plant things that are about 2 ft tall optimum. I am a great believer in over planting rather than the sodding plastic guards which tend to kill those trees the rabbits don't eat. But as I said earlier you really can't get oak trees to grow at over 900 ft - have a nice photo of one at that height, just about their limit.
And none of this addresses the other reality Ash Dieback a disaster of European proportions. I know I have about 400 or so ash trees on my farm so I scaled that up to somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 in South Lakeland. They will all be dead within five years.
For the blanket planting being proposed you need to be talking larch or spruce I guess and Japanese Larch are not exactly native. Historically in the valleys of the dales the terminal species were oak in the lower dry areas with ash further up, perhaps to 1200 ft. Alder in the wetter areas and birch up to the tree line, perhaps even covering the drier parts of the fell tops at 2000 ft. But the weather was a lot better 5,000 years ago of course.
On reflection I think you would be planting a lot denser than Fysics Teacher and I suggested earlier - you should do 50 trees per acre ajust our calculations accordingly.
Good luck with that...
However, it's impact will be real. The parties will react to it and that will make changes.
Labour seem to want to target their leavers. So a more explicit pro-leave message, reinforcing the obvious reality that a Labour government would back a Labour negotiated leave deal*. This combined with Tories feeling more comfortable that Corbyn wont win means less Tory one nation remainers clinging to a party they no longer recognise. Thus fragmenting the growing squeeze.
*Labour's plans to steal vast billions from pension funds by nationalizing companies at a price they set rather than the market price is screamingly illegal under EU law. As I've been saying for ages Corbyn is a leaver so nobody can stop him renationalising National Carriers and BOAC. This latest confirmation that the EU would tie us up in court just reinforces it
Silver birch is a bad example - they tend only to live about 50 years. But substitute alder then at the end you have perhaps a 10 T tree. Of that I guess 6 or 7 T would be wood - the rest brash. You then bury it and that is 6 T sequestrated. Oh, you want to burn it - well then the 6 T goes back into the atmosphere. There is the gain of the energy and substitution of fossil fuel so not an entire loss.
But, does it fix more CO2 than would be fixed by grass, heather or any other crop over the same time scale ? Not a chance. We need to build up our peat which is our greatest carbon sink. Sadly planting trees on peat mosses destroys peat and releases carbon rather than storing it - visit the reservoirs in the Peak District and see all the peat that comes down from the fell tops.
Where you have a point is that the MRP will itself affect the result. Last time it came late and few people believed it. This time it comes early and, as you say, with a lot of credibility.
When you have to live within your means you become wary about big spending commitments.
When you live to the style you think entitled to the bigger the spending the better.
Great responses thank you. I'm very keen on silviculture as a potential third career - for fuel rather than as CCS.
Trees as CCS doesn't appear in the old books that I have read. It seem to be very fashionable right now though. It does seem to be pretty inefficient use of land though, especially if we (the world) are planting the trees and simultaneously digging coal out of the ground to burn. Biomass projects, say coppiced willow, would make more sense to me and might contribute to flood alleviation.
Thank you
Maybe we will see the King across the Water back after his trial victory.
Angus Robertson or Mike Russell would be favourites I guess if not.
http://www.carolineflint.org/don_valley
https://dmbcwebstolive01.blob.core.windows.net/media/Default/Council and Democracy/Elections/SOPN Don Valley_A3.pdf