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In January 2004 the former governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, looked as though he might make it right through to the nomination. He had been a big pioneer of utilising the internet for online donations and mobilising volunteers something that was quite new at the time. In the polls ahead of Iowa, then like now the first state to decide, he looked strong and was tight favourite, at one stage odds-on in the betting, for the nomination.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/business/cum-ex.html
...Exactly how that machine operated is a central question in the first cum-ex prosecution, which began in September in Bonn, Germany. In a trial expected to last until February, German prosecutors intend to make an example of Mr. Shields, 41, and a former colleague. (Mr. Mora, 52, was indicted in December and will be tried separately in the coming months.) The men in the Bonn case have been charged with “aggravated tax evasion” that cost the German treasury close to $500 million.
Last month, the presiding judge issued a preliminary ruling that, for the first time, declared cum-ex a felony, calling it a “collective grab in the treasury.” Punishment has yet to be determined, but the give-it-back and the go-to-prison phases of this calamity are about to begin.
German prosecutors say they will now pursue 400 other suspects, unearthed in 56 investigations. Banks large and small will be ordered to hand over cum-ex profits, which could have serious consequences for some. Two have already gone bust...
At the next Welsh Assembly elections, I think an interesting question is where do the 7 UKIP seats go ?
I think it must be very likely the next WA election delivers a result in which either a Lab or Tory led alliance could in principle hold power.
Although the Tories may be tarnished by 1 year or so of being in control in Westminster, it is very difficult to see Mark Drakeford repeating the electoral performance of Carwyn Jones.
It could well be that the new Labour leader will be facing a difficult test in Wales & Scotland in the first year.
If that goes badly -- as it did for Ed -- the leader may well never really recover.
PT -
This could well be a "Heard about Robbie and Take That?" type comment but in exchange with @AndyJS I discovered something amazing and fresh (to me).
The Con vote and the aggregate Lab/LD vote at GE19 were TIED at 43.6%.
From this I thought that if we treat Lab/LD as a single party - the much touted 'unified centre left' if you will - 'it' would have been close to the Cons in seats under FPTP.
But no! The Cons would still have won by 321 over 261.
Sign that the electoral system right now is significantly skewed against the Cognescenti?
https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2016/10/09/joff-wild-says-keep-an-eye-on-keir/
https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2016/10/09/joff-wild-says-keep-an-eye-on-keir/
I would have thought that Scotland's pretty well written off now as far as Labour is concerned. Curious to think that Alex Salmond led just 5 other MP's in the 2010 Parliament.
However there doesn't ...... yet at any rate ....... seem to be a similar movement which can sweep Wales in the way the SNP has Scotland.
What tended to happen in 2019 were big Labour falls and small Conservative increases.
But overall Boris did much better in these areas than Cameron ever did.
Carwyn Jones (like or him) not was an impressive media performer. His successor Mark Drakeford is not.
My point is only that 2021 is a tough test for the new leader, and it is likely to be very difficult to get a Labour success story to tell.
I don't see much positive emerging in Scotland. The best Labour can hope in Wales is to be largest party (though even that is doubtful), so the headline will be "Labour loses Wales".
Onto things far more important than Welsh opinion polls.
Housing, as I have to remind Conservatives regularly, isn't just a question of building houses and flats and watching property developers and estate agents (and of course the Government) grow fatter on the process.
It's also about those who don't have a home and the truth is the increasing gap between rents and housing benefits combined with the shortage of affordable housing is causing families (remember the "hard working families" so beloved of the modern Tories) real distress.
7,110 households are currently in bed and breakfast accommodation, a 15-year high while Council spending on the homeless rose to £643 million which was in itself an overspend on the planned spend of £502 million.
Of that spend, £115 million goes on keeping families in bed and breakfast accommodation.
Now, Government supporters might argue the Homelessness Reduction Act of 2019 is the answer to all this - no, it isn't. The Act puts more duties onto Councils but doesn't provide additional funding nor does it magically provide the affordable housing so badly needed.
As an aside, we are also seeing with this Government a clear agenda to weaken the rental sector in favour of home ownership but not everyone can afford to buy and a strong rental sector is vital to satisfy the demand in that sector of the housing market.
Why is the Conservative agenda all about home ownership? Simply because all the evidence suggests once you own your own home you're more likely to vote Conservative so it's a political agenda rather than a genuine attempt to tackle the chronic housing problems in this country which start of course with the price of land and its limited supply.
The bare majority in Wales is probably gone, and Scotland could be anything of a result - but the headlines are unlikely to involve Labour unless it’s a very bad night for them.
(I think Kinabula has got there, but whether the Labour Party ever will is doubtful.)
But its beneficiaries won't change it, so Labour will need to win an election under FPTP first.
No one said at the time "it's a little harsh on Ed". They only say that 9 years later !
It's easier to improve from a lower starting point. Lots of people aren't fans of the PM but loathed Corbyn. The Conservatives (if we include the Coalition) have been in power for a decade, so the time for a change line will only grow more potent. Leaving the EU, even if it were done competently, will have some disgruntled with it, and that helps Labour too.
The danger of a party winning under FPTP is that they conclude that FPTP is not broken (as Tony Blair and Justin Trudeau both did).
After all Labour in Wales have been in power since 1999. Problems have been building and building.
At the time, I wasn't following US politics closely enough to say how much his campaign's collapse was about the scream and how much was other things (e.g. his unexpectedly poor result). For those who were, was it the election-changing moment? That is, might he have won without that scream?
Of course, Mandy Rice-Davie applies!
How long will the national anthem at the Super Bowl take to be sung?
https://www.si.com/nfl/jets/news/super-bowl-national-anthem-odds
(I’m on the ‘under’, but not for real money as it’s almost impossible to get an account with a US bookie).
But they do have advantages elsewhere.
Flying people out to all around the world seems exceedingly daft and to top it all we tell people to self quarantine, but expect them to make their own way home from the airport in packed trains, buses and tubes.
Couldn't plan the spread better if one tried.
I don't want to try to calculate how many hours I've spent on pb over the years.
BBC News - Coronavirus: Britons on Wuhan flights to be quarantined
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51292590
Some will be affordable and some will be available on shared ownership though nowhere near enough in my view. The point is if you build 3,000 flats you add a minimum of 6,000 (and likely more) people to an area.
That puts pressure on transport, health care provision, schools and a range of other services including (not surprisingly) sewage, water supply, electrical infrastructure all of which need spending to be improved and you'd better believe a Section 106 doesn't get anywhere near that.
A Section 106 might get you a new community facility for a medical centre which is fine for the 6,000 people who all need a GP but what about transport? Let's say 4,500 commute so that's extra people being jammed onto a system already at or beyond capacity in peak periods so where are the extra trains, the extra tracks, the extra capacity?
Answer came there none.
Housing needs planning - housing needs infrastructure, housing needs money spent before a single flat is built. That, unfortunately, is not how we are doing it. we are doing it to maximise profit for property developers, construction companies (many of whom employ EU migrant workers so that'll be interesting) and estate agents as well as the Government.
Mr. Meeks, 2007 is also when I joined. Very different political world it was.
I guess my point is that anyone in Labour who is focusing on the electoral system right now has the wrong priority. Let the Electoral Reform Society and the Lib Dems do that.The less time the Opposition spends complaining about FPTP, the more chance they have of getting rid of it.
I agree with your point about Blair and Trudeau, although I'm optimistic that the winner of the Labour leadership contest won't be so interested on concentrating power on him/herself.
I had a quick look at polling for the general election and the SNP vote was around 6:1 in terms of Yes/No indy ref votes - whereas Labour is almost 1:6.
There may be complex arguments, and many reasons why Labour went from Scottish dominance to wipeout, but clearly the big change was the referendum.
Brexit voting is likely to unwind in England and Wales, but, while there's still a conversation about another indy ref, then it's unlikely Labour will make any inroads in Scotland.
I also wonder whether it is too late. Would it not be better to leave people in place and look after their needs there.
I assume she was ranting the same as otherwise I have no idea re the link.
You aren't wrong inasmuch as we need to think beyond adding bits to the existing but London, in particular, is such a distorting force on the economy (for all the comments about "northern powerhouses") that it's the place people feel they need to be - as usual, people go to the money, they always have.
The supply/demand equation for London would only be resolved if the Green Belt was removed and the capital allowed to sprawl but even then you'd need all the infrastructure to which I referred in my previous and that's the issue with a new town.
Roads can be built fairly quickly but we should be looking at rail and light rail schemes as an alternative - perhaps replace the traditional "High Street" with retail mixed in with residential and take the notion of "Place" much more seriously - strong digital coverage enabling people to work and relax in the same environment and not doing the daily commute.
I'd say Keir & Becky have come to the same conclusion:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jan/26/rebecca-long-bailey-calls-for-greater-powers-for-scotland-and-wales
Devo-max, or a fully federal UK, is probably the only thing that can help Labour in Scotland now. This kind of change goes hand in hand with electoral reform.
My guess is that if the Labour party "wins" the next election, it will do only with a mandate for, and support from, those wanting massive constitutional change.
That slice might be thin, and a lot of them would have chosen Boris over Jez last month. But not every opponent will be as bad as Jez '19.
What he said was basically everybody being allowed to leave China have already been deemed low risk and will be screened before they even get on a plane, so the very little danger thus being allowed to make their own way home and the self quarantining is just super extra precaution.
Generally, I normally tend to urge on the government is shit at stuff side of things, but a) when it comes to big crisis stuff the government are normally very good e.g. see how they got 100,000s of people home after airline went bust and b) I tend to believe some non-governmental international expert without an axe to grind and who is involved in the actual field being talked about.
Meanwhile, Long-Bailey is trying to recover some of the points she lost with Momentumites by signing up to the Board of Deputies' proposals on anti Semitism, by vehemently attacking Trump's Middle East peace "plan".
In addition, there were those Remain voters who, for all they opposed the decision to leave the EU, recognised it was a democratic vote which needed to be enacted and Johnson was the only one pledging so to do.
Those two groups added to the 75% of Leave voters gave Johnson his victorious coalition. The question for the future is once we have left the EU how or indeed if that coalition can hang together.
Worth also pointing out that, while this group is at least as horrified by Corbyn as all the others (albeit more on economic grounds than any other area), they'll also likely be less impressed with Johnson than any other bit of the Tory electoral coalition. Which is a problem that will eventually fix itself.
The interviews with people there who were complaining about the advice being nonsense who were just told general advice that they could fly home and self isolate and asking how they got from the airport to home. There was no mention of 'low risk' or 'screening' it was general advice.
Also how do you screen if you are infectious for 2 weeks without symptoms.
It also appears that after this became apparent there is now going to be isolation. Of course if you are right it may just be a pointless reaction to people needlessly over-reacting.
To me the logical thing is to keep people in place and not fly them all around the world.
So a "win" is certainly possible without any recovery at all in Scotland.
The potential leaders are doing the sensible thing. They're making positive noises on constitutional change but not making it the focus of their campaign. Some of them are also talking positively about working with other parties (I would like to hear all of them do that). They are all avoiding the catastrophic mistake of whining about the system that created the defeat. That would be so clueless that we could say goodbye to any hope of getting rid of FPTP. I'm glad that they're showing more sense.
Starmer's now 9/2 as next PM which I think is a very attractive price since he is all but nailed on now as next Labour leader. It looks particularly attractive if combined with a bet on the Conservatives having most seats at the next GE at 4/6 on, to create something not too far from an arb.
Reasoning is as follows: Assuming Labour was the largest party in 2024 but in a minority, I would not expect the LDs and SNP to vote against Starmer-led minoirty Labour government in a vote of confidence, not initially at least. Furthermore, both bets could potentially come good. Even if the Conservatives get most seats in 2024 and continue in Government, the next PM bet would still very probably be live. I would at the very least expect Labour to pick up enough seats at the next GE for Starmer to have a second bite at the cherry in 2029 (aka Kinnock in 1992) even if 2024 is a step too far. The biggest risk to that scenario is how long Johnson might wish to go on as PM and whether Conservative MPs might choose to depose him if things turn seriously against him. As Johnson is still only 55, I think the risk is more in the latter after 2024 and not the former. The possibility of Johnson going before the end of this parliament must be quite long odds.
See all the stuff people said about why weren't they being evacuated from Libya, or even about flights back when Monarch / Thomas Cook went bust.
My elderly parents were affected by that, and said people didn't listen / want to listen. They saw them appear at airports and scream blue murder about why weren't they on such and such a flight, when they just hadn't read carefully when their flight was or the procedure that was to be followed.
As for "low risk", remember when we talk about Wuhan, the city bigger than London. The authorities will have a good idea which neighbourhoods it is prevalent in, where individuals have been etc. This is China, nobody goes anywhere without the state being able to find out.
Basically, I massively dislike this trial by media. We don't know all the details and they want to MAKE a story (not report one), even when their view is contradicted by an independent expert.
Too busy making a success of post-Brexit Britain to take time off for fun.....
It's like "history began with the Premier League"
The 'towns' discussion on here a few days ago was enlightening, but it's clear that the two major issues are parking and business rates - both of which encourage people to avoid the town centre.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/01/28/dont-misled-huawei-affair-lot-paranoid-fuss-nothing/
But so what? Much better to argue politics on the internet.
a) We clearly know people have been told to self quarantine. The minister said so in parliament. In itself that might be very logical. The risk may be very low in terms of transmission, impact on most people if they get it, etc. In which case this is a sensible suggestion if we are not too worried.
b) We then start advising people to leave, and plan to stop flights, etc, etc.
c) With a virus that is contagious without symptoms for several days we then put people in a sealed box for many hours after which these several hundred were expected to enter some more boxes crammed full of people and travel all over the UK.
d) When people who challenged this advice raised it this morning the plan changed dramatically within hours.
What bit of that is wrong?
As I said in my first post we should be doing this properly or not at all. The original advice may have been all that was needed, but a halfway house is pointless in fact worse than pointless as was obviously realised this morning. This has nothing to do with people not listening or panicking, as of course they will.
You can go right back to the post-war years to lay blame. Back when we just assumed than Made in Japan meant cheap crap knock-offs, but instead Japan rapidly became one of the main suppliers of electronics. You might have thought we would learn our lesson when South Korea did the same trick, and that we would certainly have twigged that China would follow the same path. We did not learn any such lesson.
So we now live in a world were electronics = Asia, and even the richest companies rely on Asian suppliers and manufacturers to turn their designs into products.
Even the US military has problems manufacturing their most high-tech and security sensitive components, as US manufacturers are not able to offer competitive leading-edge electronics manufacturing technology.
From the HoC Library report on political party membership:
"Reported membership fell from 666,000 to 348,000 between 1979 and
1980, but the large decrease was probably due to a change in reporting
standards and suggests Labour’s actual membership before 1980 was
likely to be exaggerated. From 1956, constituency Labour Parties were
forced to record a minimum membership of 800, which likely inflated
the national total."
Which after the May years would make even the most reckless PM look relatively attractive - and thus far he has not been particularly reckless.
https://spectator.us/battle-cry-politically-homeless/
https://twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1222423266045911040
"The postmortem was grim. In the room, leading Labour MPs, recent party staffers and assorted Labour figures of long experience pored over the entrails exposed by the high priests of polling and academia. Pointers for the future lie in this gruesome raking over of the details. Too many in Labour give only token nods to the cataclysmic abyss that has opened up between the party and the voters out there."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/28/labour-split-affection-corbyn