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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The polls aren’t moving but Labour shouldn’t be too concerned
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The polls aren’t moving but Labour shouldn’t be too concerned
The government is presiding over a mounting coronavirus death toll, many ministers seem completely out of their depth, Keir Starmer is beginning to provide considered and serious opposition, so why aren’t the headline numbers in the polls even hinting at a change of mood?
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LotO is a nightmare job during a serious crisis, it's difficult to strike the right tone between holding the government to account, and micro-analysing decisions made under extreme pressure with the benefit of perfect hindsight.
As we move to the post-lockdown phase, there will be somewhat more time for politics-as-usual, and Starmer will be able to highlight people who fall through the cracks of the various government programmes, as the decisions taken by ministers will be more political rather than scientific in nature.
His biggest issue is still going to be party management, the hard left are still trying to dominate where they can, and are using very inflammatory language to describe government actions that goes down poorly with the public.
Guess who was on this committee?
As a contrarian to those who aren't keen on the fuss about VE Day I think it can mean a lot to those from that generation still with us. And we should be grateful we still have some with us ... I was young for the comparable anniversary for WWI and didn't fully comprehend it's importance then, now there's nobody left from then.
My wife's put a lot of effort into VE Day commemorations in the home she works at, they've been doing things through this week and it's been very much appreciated. She said yesterday there were a couple of people who'd fought in the war smiling with tears in their eyes.
Like anything in life it can be abused but this anniversary is significant and meaningful to many we are fortunate to still have with us. We shouldn't take that for granted while we bicker about other things. We should pay less attention to those who abuse it and more attention to those we should appreciate.
The press are always going to be videoing the new LOTO clapping for NHS workers, clearly he was keeping his daughter out of shot whilst the cameras "got what they needed".
And Turkish PPE, every country has got burned during this crisis. UK government got burned worse than some gowns from Turkey e.g. the antibody tests and fairly regular for PPE from China not to be what it says it is...and that is what the rest of Europe have experienced.
NHS app (i have been critical) but we dont know that it is a disaster yet.
Do they have any plus points or can they get any worse.
What will shape the next election isn't this crisis it's the next 4 years. The economy will need resetting after this, care homes already needed sorting and are now rightly getting more attention. Healthcare is perennially an issue.
This crisis will trigger conversations and actions that may never have happened otherwise but the next 4 years will decide the next election.
Anyone who pays attention to today's polling is on a hiding to nothing. Both parties have a chance and nothing is guaranteed.
Can't a man have a sex party during lockdown without attracting criticism...its just plain harassment is what it is.
We have raised a specific issue with the UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock, about a decision that was taken with respect to the Department for International Trade overseas network and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office issuing advice not to support new procurement requests from devolved administrations.
The Department for International Trade’s overseas networks should be supporting the devolved Administrations, as parts of the UK.
Ultimately however it will only matter if it feeds a wider narrative. Cameron being caught getting a flashier car and lying about his reasons, or having his car follow him with a clean shirt while he ostentatiously cycled to work, didn’t ultimately resonate because he was considered fairly solid. Miliband’s banana and other Miliband’s bacon sandwich resonated because everyone thought (however unfairly) they were socially clueless geeks.
Also, on the subject of being allowed to learn from expensive mistakes, the classic example is (well, apart from innumerable ministers over the decades) Jacob Rees-Mogg who famously was forgiven a $4 million mistake in the over a City takeover in a job he'd only got because Lloyd George (grandson of ...) knew his father, and now he's got more money than the Queen.
I think most importantly no one feels the 'fear' which people would have with Corbyn. He's on the left, but he's not going to do anything stupid. He doesn't say anything stupid, he's not got the mad outrunners which just want to watch the world burn. Sure he might push taxes up and make the rich pay more, but he's not going to destroy the engines.
He seems to truly respect people, and people across the political spectrum.
He's likely to get plenty more opportunities in future so perhaps he'll get better.
We currently don;t have the freedoms our fathers and grandfathers fought for.
They have been stripped from us on a dubious premise designed by man who has been shown to be a wildly inaccurate hypocrite.
In the grand scheme of things though, it's tomorrow's chip paper - assuming he doesn't make a habit of such slip-ups that could develop into a media 'narrative'.
*Raises eyebrows*
Have you considered AA?
It will be interesting to see what CCHQ comes up with if SKS continues to do well. Paternity leave; overseas summits; reversion to two sessions so SKS has only three questions each time, making it harder to develop an argument and giving Boris two "last words"?
The Games - David Goldblatt (history of the Olympics)
The Crucibles greatest matches -Hector Nunns (I love snooker and any "pub" game)
Who dares wins -Dominic Sandbrook (Britain 1979-1982)
The medal factory - About British Cycling and its recent triumphs and tribulations.
A better betting with a decent fellow - A social history of Bookmaking
A short history of Europe - Simon Jenkins
A short history of London -Simon Jenkins
Ghosts at the table - a history of poker
Airhead -Emily Maitlis
Quite proud of myself even if all on my sort of hobbies!
An excellent thread, @SouthamObserver for which many thanks and I don't disagree. Starmer has started well and paradoxically the covid-19 crisis gives him time to get his feet under the table and control of the Party as the Government is or are the ones taking the big decisions and will of course have to accept the scrutiny that goes with it.
Labour has to come up with a policy programme for the late 2020s and beyond - imagining a Britain with a different relationship to the world than it has had for the past 50 years - clear of the EU but still having to find its place (economic, cultural, strategic) in the world.
I've said on here leaving the EU provided the opportunity to re-think the concept of the nation state from the bottom up (or the top down) and Labour has that opportunity to imagine a very different Britain - hopefully with power much more devolved to re-invigorate politics at local level but also retaining the linkage that is what we are as English (or Scottish, Welsh or Irish or British and we must never forget many who have come here to settle see themselves first and foremost as British).
It will be interesting to see if Starmer has the vision to make Labour a truly progressive party - if so, he will deserve support.
https://order-order.com/2020/05/07/corbyn-joins-abbott-ribeiro-addy-anther-antisemitic-zoom-chat/
1. Care homes - that was either an oversight or a deliberate consequence of a desire to protect capacity in the NHS at all costs. It’s fair to blame the government. But it’s interesting that every other government made the same choice
2. Late lockdown - he followed the guidance from SAGE. That’s the right thing to do.
3. Turkish PPE - until you have it you can’t test it. I’d rather money was wasted buying stuff on spec than not having enough. Has any hospital *actually* run out of PPE?
4. Ferguson. Why is one mans inability to keep his duck in his pants and his willingness to break the rules the governments fault? 😏
5. NHS App. haven’t followed the story closely enough. But if it’s no good then that is blameworthy
I don’t see 5 as being more than a Hancock level issue. 1 might be, depending on the fact pattern
Brazil, Russia, India, Nigeria still fairly exponential. Europe leveling out as is well known.
I suppose maybe Jews just needed to get a better understanding of English irony ...
However events could still change things as the Iraq War cut Blair's poll lead drastically from 2003 as the impact of Covid and hard Brexit and the end of the transition period in December could slash Boris' poll lead
Structural Basis for Potent Neutralization of Betacoronaviruses by Single-Domain Camelid Antibodies
https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30494-3.pdf
... Coronaviruses make use of a large envelope protein called spike (S) to engage host cell receptors and cata- lyze membrane fusion. Because of the vital role that these S proteins play, they represent a vulnerable target for the development of therapeutics. Here, we describe the isolation of single-domain antibodies (VHHs) from a llama immunized with prefusion-stabilized coronavirus spikes. These VHHs neutralize MERS-CoV or SARS- CoV-1 S pseudotyped viruses, respectively. Crystal structures of these VHHs bound to their respective viral targets reveal two distinct epitopes, but both VHHs interfere with receptor binding. We also show cross-reac- tivity between the SARS-CoV-1 S-directed VHH and SARS-CoV-2 S and demonstrate that this cross-reactive VHH neutralizes SARS-CoV-2 S pseudotyped viruses as a bivalent human IgG Fc-fusion. These data provide a molecular basis for the neutralization of pathogenic betacoronaviruses by VHHs and suggest that these molecules may serve as useful therapeutics during coronavirus outbreaks....
I understand her frustration at the VE-day celebrations. We emphasise this rather than VJ-day and there was still a major conflict going on in Asia when we were celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Yet Liberation Day (and that in many ways is far more appropriate a title) is still celebrated every year in the Channel Islands and we have little or no perception of what it is like to be conquered and the sheer unalloyed joy of liberation and the restoration of freedom.
Apart from countries which were neutral in both World Wars only Britain of all the nations of Europe has never experienced what it is like to be conquered in modern times. To have hostile foreign troops walking down your streets, to be told what you do and when to do it by "the enemy" and to be second class citizens in your own country.
I think it's right we continue to celebrate our liberation and that of the world from the darkness of Naziism and celebrate all those who contributed to that including the USSR and the various resistance groups. We were alone for a while but we won with the help of large parts of the rest of the world. As someone said the Americans provided the money, the Russians provided the blood and we provided the time.
I am not trying to be fair or unfair, just pointing out that the cockups are piling up to the extent that an overall impression of incompetence is increasing.
It will be interesting to see ho the re-opening of civic amenity sites on Monday in many authorities goes in terms of queues. Poor weather forecast for many areas might dampen (literally) the desire to get up early and head for the dump but I still think we will see plenty of pictures of queues.
The two horror stories coming out of this are care homes which we are already discussing and the rise in domestic violence about which little has been said. I'm aware of a number of authorities frantically seeking to bring former sites into use as refuges for the surge in domestic violence cases - I think we will hear some really unpleasant stories coming out.
As for care homes, I'll simply point out local councils have been spending money like water in the past six weeks and for all Sunak's largesse it is really a drop in the ocean. Prioritising where the Government money goes is a huge issue - some have looked at spending on temporary hospitals, mortuaries and provision of food parcels for those on the sheltered list (which numbers tens if not hundreds of thousands nationally).
The only people who are not seem to be a few diehard Remainers like Alistair Meeks and Cyclefree who refuse to join Brexiteers in celebrating anything and the AfD in Germany who refuse to celebrate a German defeat, even if it was the Nazis defeated
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52574748
But at some point the government will face some stark choices. For example, would Labour support a bailout of one or more banks? When tax rises are announced, Labour will inevitably want to criticise them, but how would they pay for this? The public may be more supportive of tax rises than Labour expects.
The numbers out exercising don't appear to be excessive, and the train station car park is as quiet as usual, but the roads are definitely busier. Maybe not quite as busy as on a normal bank holiday, but not a million miles from it.
Methinks that the public are moving out of lockdown ahead of Government, just as they were one step ahead going into it. Yes, some of the extra traffic is probably shopping-related (there was a queue outside Morrisons in town, so experience suggests that the one at Tesco will be very much lengthier,) but I reckon there's also quite a lot of family visiting going on.
If the car journey stats in the Government daily briefings don't show a continued uptick, relative to previous weeks, in the coming days then I shall be surprised.
He and his staff had planned an invasion of Malaya for September 1945 (Operation Zipper) leading to Operation Mailfist, the liberation of Singapore, planned for early 1946.
Instead, he had to deal with Japanese troops in Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaya, Singapore and elsewhere as well as Allied POWs across a vast area.
Mountbatten took the surrender of the Japanese Southern Army Group in Singapore on 12th September.
You don’t have to share platforms with raving neo-Nazis and honour mass murderers to be a trenchant critic of Israel and its actions. If you do you show what kind of person you are.
And incidentally his refusal to admit it and his repeated lies on the matter demonstrates his moral cowardice, although I know this conflicts with his carefully crafted public image.
There is a case for differing lockdown easing/imposition but that's got to depend on circumstances, not just be an all-England/Scotland/Wales approach. Big cities across the UK may need to act differently to villages.
FPT: Mr. Away, I always have a book by my computer, usually one I've already read, that I can delve into when doing scans or waiting for something. I'm about 5/6 into Journey to the West right now.
Also halfway through the third of Phil Tucker's Chronicles of the Black Gate, a fantasy series I'm really rather enjoying.
Today is the anniversary of the liberation of Europe from the Nazis and the end of one of the worst evils the world has ever seen. Today's mundane international politics isn't relevant.
Kingswood as a Tory gain, the only seat still Tory
https://twitter.com/suzanne_moore/status/1258688913012674561?s=20
Burma was often called "the forgotten war" and while we think of the POWs and the Bridge over the River Kwai, the perception is the Americans did all the fighting against the Japanese which not only forgets the contribution of the British but also the Australians, the Chinese, the Indians and local resistance movements such as the Viet Minh who fought the Japanese but also wanted independence from France.
Maybe it's as much to do with the unacceptable opposition becoming acceptable as the state of the Government.
[That said, if I were Starmer I'd rather face Boris Johnson than Rishi Sunak].
Reading Mountains of the Mind at the moment. Mallory just kicked the bucket.
80% of Leavers think it is right to celebrate VE Day but only 61% of Remainers do
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/arts/survey-results/daily/2020/04/29/70023/1?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Daily_Questions&utm_campaign=Question_2