Categories
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » For decades the standard Tory election PlayBook has been to de
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » For decades the standard Tory election PlayBook has been to demonise whoever the LAB leader is. How will they do that with Starmer?
In just about every general election in recent times a key Tory approach has been to demonise the the Labour leader in order to frighten voters not to vote for the party. That big broad approach more than anything was why Johnson won a clear majority last December.
0
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
And that strategy is also applied to the Lib Dem leadership.
Paradoxically, the shorter Starmer's odds the less likely he will be "next PM" because the Tories will ditch Boris for a shiny new face.
The Police's job is to enforce the LAW, no more and no less. The public should take account of the ADVICE and then operate within the law using their own common sense.
To take @TOPPING 's repeated example of drinking and driving, the advice is crystal clear: don't do it! For good reason too. But if you get pulled over and blow a positive number so you have alcohol in your system but under the legal limit then the Police will not charge you. They may advise you that the advice is to not have any, but that is the end of the matter and quite right too.
The law is set, the advice is set and people need to think for themselves.
I doubt I'm alone.
The great advantage they have is that they’ll do it at arms length. The heavy lifting will all be done through outriders in blogs and in the press, so that the leadership can retain a facade of reasonableness. Utterly disingenuous, but it works.
With a bit of luck Labour will find a way to counter it this time.
With Blair, Tories flip-flopped between Bambi and Demon-eyes; with SKS, they need to choose whether he is dangerous or dull.
The economic numbers beggar belief. Many tory MPs must be absolutely stunned.
It turns out that there are reasons why no British government ever has shut down the country's economy, whatever misfortune has befallen its citizens. We learn today that one in three firms say they may never re-open.
Lockdown. The biggest policy mistake by any British government ever.
More and more we need to look easing off QE, even if that means servicing costs rise a bit.
https://twitter.com/davidallengreen/status/1260247465275637760?s=21
1. Decent but weak leader trapped by extremist party into backing disastrous manifesto pledges. Dangerous elements in LP and Unions will be empowered if SKS becomes PM.
2. Out of touch member of PC obsessed elite.
I think he needs to very publicly purge the party, get the loony left to walk in disgust or something similar. If he does that then he can defeat attack #1
No that long ago Milliband was the latest neo communist peril. They got at him through his dead dad.
Mr. kjh, thanks very much for that recommendation. Found the segment, about 9 minutes long, here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/more-or-less-behind-the-stats/id267300884?i=1000471187873
Very interesting, whilst at the same time not providing the clear-cut wear it/don't answer I was hoping for, but that seems to be down to disputes over efficacy.
Thought rather than discussing it I'd make a start.
even if Sunak imposes huge tax increases the economy will simply be too small and weak to give him much of a yield.
We simply cannot finance the debts and the deficits he is racking up. The economy is too small.
People thought I was mad when I suggested a sterling crisis might be on the cards.
Maybe I don't look so mad now.
Milliband was a lot to the left of the government and he wanted to take the country far to the left compared to where we were and overspend dramatically. The fact he didn't accept Labour overspent just showed that and was why he was literally laughed at during the election campaign.
That Corbyn was far, far, far to the left of even Milliband doesn't put Milliband in the centre.
If you think we need the IMF perhaps you can explain what interest rate the UK bonds we're issuing are going for on the free market. If the free market thought we couldn't pay for them our bond yields would be going up as they were when Gordon Brown got us into a hole . . . so what are they now?
He was obeying the law (exercising more than once a day) which was what you were doing (shandy/glass of wine then driving). He was pointing out the inconsistency of the law and that in the current times the govt made a huge issue of easing exercise rules but actually not changing the law at all on it and then saying "look we've changed the rules". Which they hadn't.
And then after they hadn't changed the rules, everyone saying: what a wonderful Conservative government and PM we have now that they've changed the rules.
Is what he was saying. And I tend to agree with him.
We will have tory ministers writing 'there is no money left' notes to labour ones!
That may be a good thing for the country but risky for Boris personally if the blue team panics over the economic numbers.
I have a problem with people acting like the advice is meaningless, never to be followed and not something the government have done or should do.
I have a problem with people pretending a change in the advice is meaningless.
I have a problem with people implying others shouldn't be following the advice, or they'll only follow advice under any circumstances if its the law and the Police tell them to do so.
The government had changed the rules in the advice. Not the rules in the law. Since people are trying to follow the rules in the advice that is a change. You follow the advice because its the right thing to do and because you can, not because its the law.
The point being, to coin a phrase, nothing has changed (advice, schmadvice) but many are saying the government is fantastic in the way they are bringing us out of lockdown.
Also we are likely to see a boost in later months in staycations, as holidays in Europe seem unlikely this year for many reasons and that will be a big hit to some european economies
TBH, the last three Labour leaders haven't needed Tory demonisation. Brown and Miliband were unsuited to high office, and Corbyn was by a country mile the worst leader of a major political party for at least a hundred years. Voters were quite capable of seeing that for themselves.
Sir Keir is certainly better than those three, not being a particularly thick anti-Semitic Marxist extremist being a jolly good start. It is a great relief to see that once again the Labour Party is led by someone whom a responsible adult could with integrity support as PM. So if I were advising the Conservatives, I think I'd recommend directing attacks not on him personally, but on the remaining tensions within Labour, pointing up the fact that assorted hate-filled loons still infest the party.
How well Sir Keir will play with voters is less clear. The jury is out on that one. He doesn't really meet the 'I'll keep listening if he's being interviewed on the radio' test. But maybe that won't matter in the overall political landscape.
I did criticise Brown's overspending because he did overspend. For the stage of the economic cycle we were in it was unsustainable economic vandalism to be running a virtually 3% deficit just prior to the crash. Unprecedented madness.
Over the last decade it has lent $540 bn across 90 countries, currently it is lending $200bn to 35 countries.
If and when we needed the IMF surely the amount we would need would be way too big in relation to what they lend? If its a few billion there are loads of ways of raising that, if we wanted $300bn it seems unlikely we could get it.
Yikes
It won;t happen immediately because there is zero value in the global government bond markets and many economies are in bad shape.
As I said I try to never drink when I'm driving. I'll drink soft drinks or alcohol free drinks when I'm driving.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/05/covid-19-boris-johnson-and-dominic-cummings-are-trapped-few-stories-left-sell
That, I think, may explain why Corbyn was toxic in 2019 but not 2017.
It's bizarre that in a theoretical Johnson vs Starmer campaign, it might be easier for the former to portray the latter as part of the elite, than the reverse, but there you go.
The base scenario is a 14% shrinkage this year. I think that's a very conservative estimate.
The advice is to do as little as is necessary. That some people are unhappy with the idea that economics is more necessary than a social life doesn't change that.
Eventually people are going to have to go back to work and we are just going to have to live with the risk. It's a matter of managing the risk, and enduring the crisis, its not able to be solved.
The park is going to be more crowded, you will come within 5m of far more people, so if you either of you have it the virus spreads faster.
https://www.hl.co.uk/news/2020/5/13/treasury-blueprint-to-raise-taxes-and-freeze-wages-to-pay-for-300bn-coronavirus-bill
The paper seems sensible enough, laying out options.
We have neither. But lets see.
Which advice do I stick to? Raab on his first Monday interview? Raab on his second? Raab on his third? It definitely isn't Raab on his 4th interview of Monday morning as they pulled him because every interview he gave that morning contradicted the previous one.
Or how about listening to the PM. Do we listen to the advice of Sunday's broadcast? Of Monday's documents? Of Monday's press conference. He contradicted himself FFS.
How can anyone insist that people obey the advice when the advice keeps changing? From one minister to the next? Or when they are really tired from one interview to the next. This is why we need simple clear and unambiguous policies.
This is about two very simple things: stopping people from dying and maintaining the rule of law. The police say the new regulations are unenforceable. The ministers contradict each other openly. We have councils openly stating they will not allow floods of people to travel into their town whether they are allowed or not. And a transport secretary unwilling to use public transport state whilst his government forces people with no other options to use it if they do so then they will be stopped.
Go to work / don't go to work. Go outside / don't go outside. See 1 / 2 / 0 parents outside / not in a garden
The Tories will find themselves without many of their conventional weapons. Accusing Labour of having unrealistic spending plans after this year and next is going to sound false. "Picking winners" is another that might need to be put to one side. In the medium term I suspect alleging hidden tax increases may well become more problematic too. But if Boris and Rishi steer us out of this with modest damage over the next 3 years they will do ok.
That you still don't understand that is flabbergasting.
It's just of a different sort. Usually the eat baby/poor-bashing type.
every time there's a recession or a sector is under pressure, the left will be calling for furloughs.
I
However, we must all understand you cannot eliminate risk altogether, that is impossible and the country cannot stay behind closed doors indefinitely either
If it isn't then it's not the Conservative Party anymore, and the only battle left is that over identity politics.
Not one I'm too enamoured with.
Covid-19 gives cover for the hardest of Brexits.
https://landsec.com/sites/default/files/2020-05/Annual Results announcement - 12 05 2020.pdf
Forecasting no recovery until 2022 at the earliest, inflation from next year (interesting take) and 75% slump in retail rents
Given the whole world is in the same boat couldn't there be a Bretton-Woods type conference (maybe with the IMF in attendance) next year where the whole world agrees at once to wipe out a chunk of the 2020 debts, and start afresh with a clean-ish slate again? Or at least agreed targeted debt relief and write-downs over the decade to 2030?
I'm not sure what the economic consequences of this would be. It's probably a trick you could only pull once.
It's a little disingenous to pretend like the Conservatives are the only ones playing the micro-targeting game, like there's something wrong with it. A bit like how Trump was evil in 2016 for perfecting a bunch of strategies Obama developed in 2008 and 2012.
I do not see how Starmer shifts Labour's big structural problem, which is the loss of its WWC support in the North and Midlands, and the loss of Scotland and, increasingly, Wales. He is another North London middle class lawyer representing an inner London seat and several of his DPP decisions are not exactly the type to endear him to these lost voters. I can see him strengthening Labour's position in well heeled / mixed urban areas with socially conscious voters who were scared of Corbyn's tax policies and Labour will probably pick up seats in the commuter belt but the risk is he accelerates declines in some of the more WWC areas.
However, I am sure even these restrictions will be eased at the end of the lockdown in June
Starmer is here or there to the extent that he is seen as an acceptable alternative PM. Boris had a get-out-of-jail-free card with Corbyn as a majority of the electorate wouldn't have had him at any price. Starmer is already on the way to being viewed as an acceptable PM.
Here's one: insurers would have to take an immediate write-down on the debt instruments they own to back the liabilities they hold. Coming straight after one of the worst years for the industry in memory, it could force a lot of them into insolvency (or at least sever difficulty, to the point where regulators would have to force them to stop trading).
In addition, it might be impossible for the EU to agree. By EU law, insurers are allowed to assume that EU-area government debt denominated in the issuer's home currency is risk-free and so insurers (possibly banks as well?) don't have to hold capital against them defaulting.