Could it be that the key factor in the US election has become law and order?
If that's the case Biden has blown it.
That seems to be the current punditry consensus, and it's what I'd have expected if you'd described the situation a year ago and asked me where the voters would be. But it's not what the polling is showing. This is from August 27 to 28, that's pretty recent. There's loads of interesting stuff in here, but to pick a couple:
Which of these approaches would help get things under control? Law and order 39% Bringing people together 61%
Which comes closest to your view? Police departments don’t need to be reformed: 21% Police departments have a problem with race, but the problem can be fixed by reforming the existing system: 61% Police reform hasn’t worked. We need to defund police and reinvent our approach to public safety: 18%
The fact is that where Biden is is where the voters are.
This might be a two peoples divided by a common language thing.
When I saw law & order, I mean law & order. In other words, it's the most basic duty of Government to avoid anarchy and ensure fair and just administration of the law and to maintain public order and safety on the streets. There's nothing political or partisan about it - all lawlessness should be dealt with equally.
It may have more partisan connotations in the States more akin to "sticking the boot in", which might account for that poll.
Blair's best slogan was "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime".
While not depriving people of agency, and their own bad decisions, undeniably social conditions contribute heavily to crime.
Trumps commitment to Law and Order is highly partisan, refusing to condemn Kyle Rittenhouse, for example.
No, it is the same as we saw in our 2017 election. Law and order helps the right *except* when voters turn round and say to the President or Prime Minister, this is happening on your watch; you clearly can't stop it; in fact you are making things worse"
You might say Heath's Who Governs Britain? election was the same thing. In any case, I do not see this helping Trump and it is lazy punditry to assume it will do so.
It is the laziest of echo chamber punditry. Any evidence that doesn't match the preconception is dismissed. At the peak of the George Floyd protests everyone was going "BLM is really. Unpopular this will be great for Trump" and when a poll was released showing BLM had absolute majority of support amongst Americans it was consigned straight to the memory hole.
The legitimate concerns that the BLM movement was channelling are different to the political objectives of the official BLM movement.
The former has majority support whilst I very much doubt the latter does.
The "official" BLM group is not something most of the protesters consider, it is only a small minority of the protesters combined with the views of people against the protests that keep it vaguely in the news at all.
If asked do they support BLM, most supporters are answering yes because they dont identify BLM with a few radical anarchists searching for publicity. It is about social justice and equality, and the recognition that we dont have it for all.
Well said, people jump on bandwagons for their own agenda all the time, doesn't mean the right thing to do stops being the right thing to do just because the wrong people support it.
What's ironic though is that many people (and I'm not saying you personally) who can instinctively recognise that here are the same people who chose to attack all Leavers as racists because of the likes of Farage.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
I agree with you, but have one pedantic point. The senate cannot be gerrymandered, unless state boundaries are redrawn, or significant populations are moved accross state borders. You can complain that Hawaii and Texas both having 2 senators is unfair, but that is not gerrymandering.
The constituency boundaries in the House though, are a disgrace.
Jungle primaries comes pretty close
California Democrats legislate that the top 2 candidates in a primary are the only ones eligible to run for senator
Hmmm: that means that it’s always only 2 Democrats that get to stand
You can vote for anyone you like so long as they are a Democrat
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
I agree. The electoral college is stupid. I don't know anybody who would set it up as it is now if they were starting from scratch.
Our electoral system is not perfect either, as constituencies are not equal-sized. The Outer Hebridies has 21k and the Isle of Wight has 105k. So an OH vote is worth 5x what an Isle of Wight vote is worth.
But Wyoming has one EC vote per 190k people while CA has one per 1.4m, a 7x disparity. So our system is better, from tha point of view.
If we finally get around to equalising constituency sizes, of course, that's another matter.
Of course with STV we wouldn't have to get so worked up over constituency sizes. Equally, 'just' lumping the Outer Hebrides in with, for example, North Scotland wouldn't necessarily be fair, either. Although they don't seem to vote significantly differently from the rest of that area.
They used to.
For many decades the Western Isles was a Labour/SNP battleground, whereas the Inner Hebrides and mainland Highlands were pretty solid Liberal then Liberal Democrat.
Tory fans of defence cuts (there must be some because they keep voting for them) will be stoked to know that the MQ-9B MALE drone program has been cut from 20 to 16. They are also going to be jointly managed and operated with the Belgian Air Force's 4 examples.
On topic, the odds on Harris and Pence should be the other way around, the one that is the incumbent Vice President should be the shortest odds.
Anyhoo aren't we in the window where as per Betfair's terms and conditions the winner can only be either Trump or Biden*, as they will be the ones on the ballot papers/electoral college electors**
*I'm excluding third party candidates
**Faithless voters won't count.
I can't believe you're writing off Kanye West so quickly.
Kanye West is even more a licence to print money in this election than Hillary Clinton.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
I agree. The electoral college is stupid. I don't know anybody who would set it up as it is now if they were starting from scratch.
Our electoral system is not perfect either, as constituencies are not equal-sized. The Outer Hebridies has 21k and the Isle of Wight has 105k. So an OH vote is worth 5x what an Isle of Wight vote is worth.
But Wyoming has one EC vote per 190k people while CA has one per 1.4m, a 7x disparity. So our system is better, from tha point of view.
If we finally get around to eqalising constituency sizes, of course, that's another matter.
The US system has varying EC votes all the way through, for example, you could compare Texas vs. Rhode Island or Florida vs. South Dakota
Once our new boundaries are put in place, you should have 645 constituencies all within a narrow range, and then 5 undersized constituencies due to being islands
Cummings does have a vision of central control by committed apparatchiks, backed by information on all citizens and iron discipline that whiffs more than a bit of Stalinism.
I think his suspicion of the traditional institutions of state, including Civil Service, Journalists, Universities and even Armed Forces very reminiscent too. Purges and showtrials are all part of his 5 year plan.
The psychologically (maybe even psychiatrically) interesting thing is what happens next.
The Cummings thesis is that government can run better- to the tune of picking up billion pound notes off the street- with a Mission Control office packed with the right people and a fat pipe of real-time data projected onto big screens.
It's possible that he's right. Almost everything is possible. But there are reasonable reasons to think that he's wrong, and this model is going to make lots of things worse.
If that happens- if Cummings's Control Room buttons are connected to a tangle of wet string- what does he do next?
It depends how you measure success. The Cummings/Gove educational "reforms" in England score badly on objective metrics - the bits they didn't touch are doing better than those they transformed. You could say they were a failure.
However, the reforms won't be overturned and are embedded. Cummings was successful from that point of view.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
I agree. The electoral college is stupid. I don't know anybody who would set it up as it is now if they were starting from scratch.
Our electoral system is not perfect either, as constituencies are not equal-sized. The Outer Hebridies has 21k and the Isle of Wight has 105k. So an OH vote is worth 5x what an Isle of Wight vote is worth.
But Wyoming has one EC vote per 190k people while CA has one per 1.4m, a 7x disparity. So our system is better, from tha point of view.
If we finally get around to eqalising constituency sizes, of course, that's another matter.
The US system has varying EC votes all the way through, for example, you could compare Texas vs. Rhode Island or Florida vs. South Dakota
Once our new boundaries are put in place, you should have 645 constituencies all within a narrow range, and then 5 undersized constituencies due to being islands
Very true.
I'll never understand why living on an island should mean that somebody's vote is worth four times more than somebody else's.
It was a blatant Coalition bung to the Lib Dems - yet another way in which the Liberal Democratic party is profoundly undemocratic.
I think the Mail is on a hiding to nothing in its fruitless campaign to try to get the Government to force people back into cities.
Its not what the people want, its not what the Government stands for, its not the right thing to do economically, its not what the voters want. It isn't going to happen. Get over it and move on.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
States / constituencies elect MPs
The MPs caucus together and select a head of the executive branch
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
But it doesn't represent communities. That's the bizarrest defence of the EC yet.
It defines a state as a community - it’s just a language point
There are some good picks on that list, but a remarkable number of has-beens.
IDS back at work & pensions and May at the home office? I mean, really?
Also not clear to me that Javid would be better than Sunak as Chancellor
Its brilliant trolling. Hopefully this alternative "this is what you could have had" will shut up people who bang on about this Cabinet supposedly being weak.
More kite-flying. Even the bit of the paywalled story I can see talks about the Treasury "gearing up for a fight". And I'm not even sure I believe Sunak is behind this.
The .07% foreign aid pledge has been unpopular with some on the Tory right for the past couple of decades, and I suspect it is one of these sounding off, rather than our esteemed Chancellor.
The reason is that Rachel Glennerster, the DfiD economist has just been appointed to the combined Foreign Office/DfiD post. A quick glance at Wikipedia places Glennerster at Oxford at the same time as Boris (and Cameron and half the Establishment) but also reveals she is a strong advocate of *testing* the outcomes of aid interventions, which is guaranteed to ring Dominic Cummings' bells. In short, she probably has friends in high places, and Sunak will know this, not to mention that .01% off the aid budget is loose change.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
I agree with you, but have one pedantic point. The senate cannot be gerrymandered, unless state boundaries are redrawn, or significant populations are moved accross state borders. You can complain that Hawaii and Texas both having 2 senators is unfair, but that is not gerrymandering.
The constituency boundaries in the House though, are a disgrace.
There's some hilarious House seat boundaries out there, the product of decades of partisan gerrymandering.
I said yesterday that the USA needs a polling council like the BPC, they also need the states to employ independent boundary commissioners - the vast majority allow the politicians to draw the boundaries themselves, hence the gerrymandering.
Cummings does have a vision of central control by committed apparatchiks, backed by information on all citizens and iron discipline that whiffs more than a bit of Stalinism.
I think his suspicion of the traditional institutions of state, including Civil Service, Journalists, Universities and even Armed Forces very reminiscent too. Purges and showtrials are all part of his 5 year plan.
The psychologically (maybe even psychiatrically) interesting thing is what happens next.
The Cummings thesis is that government can run better- to the tune of picking up billion pound notes off the street- with a Mission Control office packed with the right people and a fat pipe of real-time data projected onto big screens.
It's possible that he's right. Almost everything is possible. But there are reasonable reasons to think that he's wrong, and this model is going to make lots of things worse.
If that happens- if Cummings's Control Room buttons are connected to a tangle of wet string- what does he do next?
Using big data to improve the govt and its departments seems very worthy. Putting the inexperienced big data geeks in charge of key decisions rather than giving advice seems very risky and likely to go wrong.
Morning all - and not a great start to it with the ghastly Donald Trump going fav on Betfair. I think it's mug money talking but still I don't like to see it. I've got my opening spread bets on now (as of yesterday) and so I want to see Trump on the drift from this point onwards. My main bet is a buy of Biden EC supremacy at 28.5. That's gone up a point, the spreads not moving in line with Betfair as yet.
Anyway, not to worry, the more interesting story is the lack of right wing comedy on the BBC. That's a scandal, there being so much brilliant right wing comedy out there. To illustrate and to cheer everyone up here's a very good one I heard just the other day -
How many socialists does it take to change a light bulb?
None, because socialists haven't got a fucking clue and in any case they can't buy a new one because as per usual they've run out of other people's money.
That may be your funniest joke yet!
Anyway, this is why Biden should, ultimately, prevail. Trump's attacks on him don't pass the basic test of plausibility:
Johnson's political problem: conservative covid-denialism
That's a small 'c'. Johnson's base is skewed old and are the most vulnerable to covid. They're also the most conservative (implicit in his Party name). They don't like change, don't like disruption, don't like uncertainty, and really don't like to be scared. Covid causes all of these.
The human tendency when confronted by unpleasant and unwelcome facts is denial. "No. It's not true. It can't be true."
And there's plenty of commentators and political opportunists who will supply that denial, in wholesale quantities. Partly because it's lucrative - you sell papers, clicks, and attention by giving people what they want. Partly because they want it to be true as well. Humans love reinforcement and validation. If lots of people are agreeing with you, you must be right? Right? That's how it works, isn't it?
Covid IS dangerous. Its mortality increases exponentially by age (negligible in the very young; up to 20% in the eldest, with an inflexion point somewhere between 40 and 60). It can take down the young if they have common 'co-morbidities' (asthma (12% of UK), diabetes (6% of UK), even obesity (28.7% of UK)). It non-uncommonly provides a post-viral syndrome dubbed "Long Covid" that can leave you debilitated or affected (or with organs damaged) for months, at least (we don't know if it's permanent, because it's only been going for months for us). It spreads between generations and demographics, even if we decide "Well, I'm okay, Jack. If it's a choice between those other people dying and me having some discomfort in a mask or disruption to my everyday life; well, not a difficult choice." The unthinking reflex of those ignorant of economics that "there's a trade off between economic damage and accepting deaths" is actually the wrong way around. And it's not permanent - a vaccine is near-certainly on the way in record time. We're talking months. Not years.
All of those facts will weigh on Johnson's mind. As well as the fact that the Telegraph, Mail, and numerous commentators are howling that it's all not real, it'll just go away if we want it to, we should just man up, the younger people should go back to the office right now, we don't want any permanent change, thank you very much, go back to how it was, keep it as it was forever, and stop frightening us! And everything will be fine and happy. God, how stupid are these Governments? It's all a conspiracy to control us!
That hits his base. He can't let them die (not only the moral imperative of a Government, but the political impact of letting his base preferentially die and suffer). But taking measures to protect them runs into the denialism (many of them are determined to believe it's all unnecessary, so massive unpopularity awaits).
Johnson hates being unpopular. The swings and lurches in policy and messaging are easily explained. Every route results in unpopularity, and he's very bad at that.
Cummings does have a vision of central control by committed apparatchiks, backed by information on all citizens and iron discipline that whiffs more than a bit of Stalinism.
I think his suspicion of the traditional institutions of state, including Civil Service, Journalists, Universities and even Armed Forces very reminiscent too. Purges and showtrials are all part of his 5 year plan.
The psychologically (maybe even psychiatrically) interesting thing is what happens next.
The Cummings thesis is that government can run better- to the tune of picking up billion pound notes off the street- with a Mission Control office packed with the right people and a fat pipe of real-time data projected onto big screens.
It's possible that he's right. Almost everything is possible. But there are reasonable reasons to think that he's wrong, and this model is going to make lots of things worse.
If that happens- if Cummings's Control Room buttons are connected to a tangle of wet string- what does he do next?
Using big data to improve the govt and its departments seems very worthy. Putting the inexperienced big data geeks in charge of key decisions rather than giving advice seems very risky and likely to go wrong.
Using big data is a great idea until you understand that the data is incomplete and usually contaminated before you look at it. And one piece of contaminated data will contaminate every it touches including the entire dataset when it's combined together.
Some big data projects work (HMRC is a prime example) because all the data sources are know and trustworthy. That's rarely the case elsewhere.
More kite-flying. Even the bit of the paywalled story I can see talks about the Treasury "gearing up for a fight". And I'm not even sure I believe Sunak is behind this.
The .07% foreign aid pledge has been unpopular with some on the Tory right for the past couple of decades, and I suspect it is one of these sounding off, rather than our esteemed Chancellor.
The reason is that Rachel Glennerster, the DfiD economist has just been appointed to the combined Foreign Office/DfiD post. A quick glance at Wikipedia places Glennerster at Oxford at the same time as Boris (and Cameron and half the Establishment) but also reveals she is a strong advocate of *testing* the outcomes of aid interventions, which is guaranteed to ring Dominic Cummings' bells. In short, she probably has friends in high places, and Sunak will know this, not to mention that .01% off the aid budget is loose change.
It's all kite flying - it's how this Government operates - but it will take the path of least resistance.
It's pretty obvious to me that they will claim the 0.7% target has been nominally met whilst reclassifying some spending within it into essential defence upgrades on the premise that this will benefit others globally.
They might even be right.
They should find the BBC world service from DfID. Real benefit for the U.K. globally (soft power) but marginal benefit for individual license fee payors
ONS death figures out for week ending 21st August 2020. Deaths well above average, but increase not caused by Covid which represented just 1.4% of deaths. It is so clear that the obsession with Covid is stopping treatment for all the other illnesses that kill people.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
I agree with you, but have one pedantic point. The senate cannot be gerrymandered, unless state boundaries are redrawn, or significant populations are moved accross state borders. You can complain that Hawaii and Texas both having 2 senators is unfair, but that is not gerrymandering.
The constituency boundaries in the House though, are a disgrace.
Jungle primaries comes pretty close
California Democrats legislate that the top 2 candidates in a primary are the only ones eligible to run for senator
Hmmm: that means that it’s always only 2 Democrats that get to stand
You can vote for anyone you like so long as they are a Democrat
Ah, are Republicans banned from standing in the jungle primaries then?
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
But it doesn't represent communities. That's the bizarrest defence of the EC yet.
It defines a state as a community - it’s just a language point
You do realise that all the Electoral College does is choose the president and vice-president? Because your comments imply that you don't know this.
I think the Mail is on a hiding to nothing in its fruitless campaign to try to get the Government to force people back into cities.
Its not what the people want, its not what the Government stands for, its not the right thing to do economically, its not what the voters want. It isn't going to happen. Get over it and move on.
The Mail is doing it because a lot of their readers and advertisers are hurting and so want it.
The Government is doing it so it can pass the blame elsewhere.
So I can see why they are doing it even though even they know it probably won't work.
Cummings does have a vision of central control by committed apparatchiks, backed by information on all citizens and iron discipline that whiffs more than a bit of Stalinism.
I think his suspicion of the traditional institutions of state, including Civil Service, Journalists, Universities and even Armed Forces very reminiscent too. Purges and showtrials are all part of his 5 year plan.
The psychologically (maybe even psychiatrically) interesting thing is what happens next.
The Cummings thesis is that government can run better- to the tune of picking up billion pound notes off the street- with a Mission Control office packed with the right people and a fat pipe of real-time data projected onto big screens.
It's possible that he's right. Almost everything is possible. But there are reasonable reasons to think that he's wrong, and this model is going to make lots of things worse.
If that happens- if Cummings's Control Room buttons are connected to a tangle of wet string- what does he do next?
It depends how you measure success. The Cummings/Gove educational "reforms" in England score badly on objective metrics - the bits they didn't touch are doing better than those they transformed. You could say they were a failure.
However, the reforms won't be overturned and are embedded. Cummings was successful from that point of view.
Fair point about their difference between the exercise of power and the effect on the nation. But the most likely outcome of the shiny new office is nothing. Cummings hates entropy, but entropy always wins.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
I agree. The electoral college is stupid. I don't know anybody who would set it up as it is now if they were starting from scratch.
Our electoral system is not perfect either, as constituencies are not equal-sized. The Outer Hebridies has 21k and the Isle of Wight has 105k. So an OH vote is worth 5x what an Isle of Wight vote is worth.
But Wyoming has one EC vote per 190k people while CA has one per 1.4m, a 7x disparity. So our system is better, from tha point of view.
If we finally get around to eqalising constituency sizes, of course, that's another matter.
The US system has varying EC votes all the way through, for example, you could compare Texas vs. Rhode Island or Florida vs. South Dakota
Once our new boundaries are put in place, you should have 645 constituencies all within a narrow range, and then 5 undersized constituencies due to being islands
The EC system would be better if it wasn't 'winner takes all', and the EC votes were split according to the votes cast. In the last list HYUFD posted the two main candidates were within a percentage point of each other in most cases; in only the last two was there what one might describe as a clear lead for one or the other, yet in each case all the EC votes were cast one way or the other.
An interesting question is why Trump is so open about wanting to steal the election? He could follow his mentor Putin and pervert democracy covertly with a layer of just-about-plausible deniability. He would have plenty of Republican useful helpers in the states. A covert operation would have a fair chance of success.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
States / constituencies elect MPs
The MPs caucus together and select a head of the executive branch
What’s fundamentally different?
The MPs don't then go home job done, they continue to represent their constituencies, and are also able select someone else as Prime Minister whenever they want. Are you being deliberately obtuse or do you really believe there is any kind of comparison, in which case you are much stupider than I thought?
More kite-flying. Even the bit of the paywalled story I can see talks about the Treasury "gearing up for a fight". And I'm not even sure I believe Sunak is behind this.
The .07% foreign aid pledge has been unpopular with some on the Tory right for the past couple of decades, and I suspect it is one of these sounding off, rather than our esteemed Chancellor.
The reason is that Rachel Glennerster, the DfiD economist has just been appointed to the combined Foreign Office/DfiD post. A quick glance at Wikipedia places Glennerster at Oxford at the same time as Boris (and Cameron and half the Establishment) but also reveals she is a strong advocate of *testing* the outcomes of aid interventions, which is guaranteed to ring Dominic Cummings' bells. In short, she probably has friends in high places, and Sunak will know this, not to mention that .01% off the aid budget is loose change.
Is 0.1% of GDP not about £20bn? Not sure I would describe that as loose change even in our fiscally incontinent times.
Could it be that the key factor in the US election has become law and order?
If that's the case Biden has blown it.
That seems to be the current punditry consensus, and it's what I'd have expected if you'd described the situation a year ago and asked me where the voters would be. But it's not what the polling is showing. This is from August 27 to 28, that's pretty recent. There's loads of interesting stuff in here, but to pick a couple:
Which of these approaches would help get things under control? Law and order 39% Bringing people together 61%
Which comes closest to your view? Police departments don’t need to be reformed: 21% Police departments have a problem with race, but the problem can be fixed by reforming the existing system: 61% Police reform hasn’t worked. We need to defund police and reinvent our approach to public safety: 18%
The fact is that where Biden is is where the voters are.
This might be a two peoples divided by a common language thing.
When I saw law & order, I mean law & order. In other words, it's the most basic duty of Government to avoid anarchy and ensure fair and just administration of the law and to maintain public order and safety on the streets. There's nothing political or partisan about it - all lawlessness should be dealt with equally.
It may have more partisan connotations in the States more akin to "sticking the boot in", which might account for that poll.
Yes, that may be right, and even as I'd understand it it's a slightly weird question. But whatever American voters think "law and order" means, it's the thing that Trump is explicitly running on, and also the thing that the punditry are currently suggesting might win it for Trump, if he can raise its salience. I think it's important that the available data - and there are quite a lot of polls showing similar things in different ways - suggests that this is not at all a winning message. It's an issue where Trump's opponent's message is more popular than his own, by quite a margin.
He's be better off running on the economy IMHO; I know the whole thing went to hell with the virus, but it was going pretty well until that happened, and there's room for an optimistic story about how much better it'll get once everybody's vaccinated.
I am not sure that even in America "Law and Order" means supporting out of state teenage vigilantes toting assault rifles, shooting people, getting tacit police approval and presidential support.
Trump is using "Law & Order!!" to mean "Any black punks disturbing the peace are gonna wish they hadn't, trust me." Similar to what we often hear at Tory conferences - except it's more crass (since it's him) and the racial angle is front and centre. So not actually very similar, tbf.
It's all a bit Dirty Harry. Indeed if you study his demeanour and delivery you can tell that he's consciously channeling his fellow Republican, Eastwood. It's very embarrassing to watch if you have refined sensibilities. It is also, as a matter of dark irony, the exact same sentiment that lies at the heart of the disturbances, the one that animates the gung ho racist cops as they use excessive force on people (usually black), sometimes killing them. They no doubt fantasize that they are Dirty Harry as they indulge in this.
Although, point of order, I do not recall Clint ever kneeling on a windpipe or shooting somebody 7 times in the back. But that's detail.
Cummings does have a vision of central control by committed apparatchiks, backed by information on all citizens and iron discipline that whiffs more than a bit of Stalinism.
I think his suspicion of the traditional institutions of state, including Civil Service, Journalists, Universities and even Armed Forces very reminiscent too. Purges and showtrials are all part of his 5 year plan.
The psychologically (maybe even psychiatrically) interesting thing is what happens next.
The Cummings thesis is that government can run better- to the tune of picking up billion pound notes off the street- with a Mission Control office packed with the right people and a fat pipe of real-time data projected onto big screens.
It's possible that he's right. Almost everything is possible. But there are reasonable reasons to think that he's wrong, and this model is going to make lots of things worse.
If that happens- if Cummings's Control Room buttons are connected to a tangle of wet string- what does he do next?
Using big data to improve the govt and its departments seems very worthy. Putting the inexperienced big data geeks in charge of key decisions rather than giving advice seems very risky and likely to go wrong.
Using big data is a great idea until you understand that the data is incomplete and usually contaminated before you look at it. And one piece of contaminated data will contaminate every it touches including the entire dataset when it's combined together.
Some big data projects work (HMRC is a prime example) because all the data sources are know and trustworthy. That's rarely the case elsewhere.
I think its fairly likely that they will also uncover things in health and education using data that can lead to significant improvements. However the data analysts shouldnt be imposing their solutions on the departments from the centre, but arguing their case to the relevant cabinet secretaries and senior civil servants (who in turn should be open minded to outside advice).
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
I agree with you, but have one pedantic point. The senate cannot be gerrymandered, unless state boundaries are redrawn, or significant populations are moved accross state borders. You can complain that Hawaii and Texas both having 2 senators is unfair, but that is not gerrymandering.
The constituency boundaries in the House though, are a disgrace.
There's some hilarious House seat boundaries out there, the product of decades of partisan gerrymandering.
I said yesterday that the USA needs a polling council like the BPC, they also need the states to employ independent boundary commissioners - the vast majority allow the politicians to draw the boundaries themselves, hence the gerrymandering.
Part of the problem is the requirement to draw minority majority districts, which actually helps the Republicans. So, for example, in Alabama you have one Democrat district that takes in the most heavily black parts of Birmingham and Montgomery, while the other 6 districts are all safely Republican
There are some good picks on that list, but a remarkable number of has-beens.
IDS back at work & pensions and May at the home office? I mean, really?
And I think Sunak has done a brilliant job as Chancellor. That list looks like someone yearning for the days of Theresa May's time the only person I'd have back is Hunt as Health Sec and I'd have Tom Tugendhat in as Foreign Sec over Raab. Javid made no impression as Chancellor and I had really high hopes for him.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
States / constituencies elect MPs
The MPs caucus together and select a head of the executive branch
What’s fundamentally different?
What's fundamentally different is the winner-takes-all nature of the Electoral College at a statewide level. Take Florida 2000 as a famous example. Even discarding the hanging chads issues, there were millions of votes for both candidates but only a few hundred lead for Bush and the result was that all 25 Electoral College votes went to Bush. A few hundred votes the other way and all 25 would have switched to Gore.
The UK doesn't switch MPs en bloc like that. Since the 1948 Representation of the People Act each constituency in the United Kingdom is only worth a single MP. That is completely different to the US system.
As an example if we were to operate like the USA then take Lancashire. Lancashire has 16 constituencies which have gone 11 to the Tories, 4 to Labour and 1 to The Speaker. Under the US system it would be 16 to the Tories. In 2005 Labour won 12 of 15, with the Tories getting 3, while in 2010 the Tories won 9, Labour 6 and LDs 1. In the US system it would have been 2005 Labour 15, Tories 0; in 2010 Tories 16, Labour 0.
Cummings does have a vision of central control by committed apparatchiks, backed by information on all citizens and iron discipline that whiffs more than a bit of Stalinism.
I think his suspicion of the traditional institutions of state, including Civil Service, Journalists, Universities and even Armed Forces very reminiscent too. Purges and showtrials are all part of his 5 year plan.
The psychologically (maybe even psychiatrically) interesting thing is what happens next.
The Cummings thesis is that government can run better- to the tune of picking up billion pound notes off the street- with a Mission Control office packed with the right people and a fat pipe of real-time data projected onto big screens.
It's possible that he's right. Almost everything is possible. But there are reasonable reasons to think that he's wrong, and this model is going to make lots of things worse.
If that happens- if Cummings's Control Room buttons are connected to a tangle of wet string- what does he do next?
Using big data to improve the govt and its departments seems very worthy. Putting the inexperienced big data geeks in charge of key decisions rather than giving advice seems very risky and likely to go wrong.
Data is only as good as its inherent quality and its models. This requires tip-top hygiene, boring attention to detail, team-working and rigorous governance. Every one of which things Cummings and his government are particularly bad at.
Cummings does have a vision of central control by committed apparatchiks, backed by information on all citizens and iron discipline that whiffs more than a bit of Stalinism.
I think his suspicion of the traditional institutions of state, including Civil Service, Journalists, Universities and even Armed Forces very reminiscent too. Purges and showtrials are all part of his 5 year plan.
The psychologically (maybe even psychiatrically) interesting thing is what happens next.
The Cummings thesis is that government can run better- to the tune of picking up billion pound notes off the street- with a Mission Control office packed with the right people and a fat pipe of real-time data projected onto big screens.
It's possible that he's right. Almost everything is possible. But there are reasonable reasons to think that he's wrong, and this model is going to make lots of things worse.
If that happens- if Cummings's Control Room buttons are connected to a tangle of wet string- what does he do next?
If I can look at the October Revolution and say that there were particular events and circumstances that lead to its degeneration into bloodthirsty terror, rather than that being an inevitable consequence of Socialist Revolution, then I'm sure that Cummings can find plenty of other people to blame for the failure of his system of government.
Another alternative is that, like many attempts to run things with data, it might be successful by the metrics chosen to measure success, and he'll be outraged when everyone does not agree that it's successful.
So that raises the question: what does success look like for Dominic Cummings?
Cummings does have a vision of central control by committed apparatchiks, backed by information on all citizens and iron discipline that whiffs more than a bit of Stalinism.
I think his suspicion of the traditional institutions of state, including Civil Service, Journalists, Universities and even Armed Forces very reminiscent too. Purges and showtrials are all part of his 5 year plan.
The psychologically (maybe even psychiatrically) interesting thing is what happens next.
The Cummings thesis is that government can run better- to the tune of picking up billion pound notes off the street- with a Mission Control office packed with the right people and a fat pipe of real-time data projected onto big screens.
It's possible that he's right. Almost everything is possible. But there are reasonable reasons to think that he's wrong, and this model is going to make lots of things worse.
If that happens- if Cummings's Control Room buttons are connected to a tangle of wet string- what does he do next?
Using big data to improve the govt and its departments seems very worthy. Putting the inexperienced big data geeks in charge of key decisions rather than giving advice seems very risky and likely to go wrong.
Centralising power is the other big mistake. Even if Dominic Cummings, or Boris, is HAL, we know that distributed intelligence will likely be wiser, as well as less prone to being overwhelmed or just plain tired. Cummings should know this from his studies of the internet, and every Conservative should have some appreciation of markets over central planning. As the old chestnut has it, there is no Central Soviet planning the production and distribution of bread.
Could it be that the key factor in the US election has become law and order?
If that's the case Biden has blown it.
That seems to be the current punditry consensus, and it's what I'd have expected if you'd described the situation a year ago and asked me where the voters would be. But it's not what the polling is showing. This is from August 27 to 28, that's pretty recent. There's loads of interesting stuff in here, but to pick a couple:
Which of these approaches would help get things under control? Law and order 39% Bringing people together 61%
Which comes closest to your view? Police departments don’t need to be reformed: 21% Police departments have a problem with race, but the problem can be fixed by reforming the existing system: 61% Police reform hasn’t worked. We need to defund police and reinvent our approach to public safety: 18%
The fact is that where Biden is is where the voters are.
This might be a two peoples divided by a common language thing.
When I saw law & order, I mean law & order. In other words, it's the most basic duty of Government to avoid anarchy and ensure fair and just administration of the law and to maintain public order and safety on the streets. There's nothing political or partisan about it - all lawlessness should be dealt with equally.
It may have more partisan connotations in the States more akin to "sticking the boot in", which might account for that poll.
I think that's close, but it's perhaps also a reflection of the extraordinarily entrenched partisanship in the US (which Trump has a lot to do with). If you heard that Corbyn passionately favoured something you liked, or I heard that Nick Griffin was dead keen on something I support, we'd both have a queasy moment, I expect - but in the US, it's magnified way beyond that. "Trump keeps going on about law and order, so I'm against law and order, because what he means is..."
Also, of course, in the poll it's up against the innocuous "bring people together", and everyone is pretty much for that.
Yes, good point. It's a loaded poll.
I suspect most people are in favour of law & order in a way that doesn't divide the community but is backed by all sides of it.
I think the point is that most people are but Trump clearly isn't.
More kite-flying. Even the bit of the paywalled story I can see talks about the Treasury "gearing up for a fight". And I'm not even sure I believe Sunak is behind this.
The .07% foreign aid pledge has been unpopular with some on the Tory right for the past couple of decades, and I suspect it is one of these sounding off, rather than our esteemed Chancellor.
The reason is that Rachel Glennerster, the DfiD economist has just been appointed to the combined Foreign Office/DfiD post. A quick glance at Wikipedia places Glennerster at Oxford at the same time as Boris (and Cameron and half the Establishment) but also reveals she is a strong advocate of *testing* the outcomes of aid interventions, which is guaranteed to ring Dominic Cummings' bells. In short, she probably has friends in high places, and Sunak will know this, not to mention that .01% off the aid budget is loose change.
Is 0.1% of GDP not about £20bn? Not sure I would describe that as loose change even in our fiscally incontinent times.
1% is about £20bn, the pledge costs ~ £15bn per year, it should be scrapped until such time that the whole G20 agrees to it and we should divert the money to eradicating child poverty in the UK.
More kite-flying. Even the bit of the paywalled story I can see talks about the Treasury "gearing up for a fight". And I'm not even sure I believe Sunak is behind this.
The .07% foreign aid pledge has been unpopular with some on the Tory right for the past couple of decades, and I suspect it is one of these sounding off, rather than our esteemed Chancellor.
The reason is that Rachel Glennerster, the DfiD economist has just been appointed to the combined Foreign Office/DfiD post. A quick glance at Wikipedia places Glennerster at Oxford at the same time as Boris (and Cameron and half the Establishment) but also reveals she is a strong advocate of *testing* the outcomes of aid interventions, which is guaranteed to ring Dominic Cummings' bells. In short, she probably has friends in high places, and Sunak will know this, not to mention that .01% off the aid budget is loose change.
The aid budget is 0.7% of GDP, not 0.07% - This year it's £14bn, which is a fair chunk of change for a Chancellor trying to rebalance the books.
There are some good picks on that list, but a remarkable number of has-beens.
IDS back at work & pensions and May at the home office? I mean, really?
And I think Sunak has done a brilliant job as Chancellor. That list looks like someone yearning for the days of Theresa May's time the only person I'd have back is Hunt as Health Sec and I'd have Tom Tugendhat in as Foreign Sec over Raab. Javid made no impression as Chancellor and I had really high hopes for him.
I think very likely Sunak > Javid but your review of Javid is harsh given he never even got around to making a budget and wasnt allowed much, if any, say on staffing and strategy. Just unproven as Chancellor and we will never know.
More kite-flying. Even the bit of the paywalled story I can see talks about the Treasury "gearing up for a fight". And I'm not even sure I believe Sunak is behind this.
The .07% foreign aid pledge has been unpopular with some on the Tory right for the past couple of decades, and I suspect it is one of these sounding off, rather than our esteemed Chancellor.
The reason is that Rachel Glennerster, the DfiD economist has just been appointed to the combined Foreign Office/DfiD post. A quick glance at Wikipedia places Glennerster at Oxford at the same time as Boris (and Cameron and half the Establishment) but also reveals she is a strong advocate of *testing* the outcomes of aid interventions, which is guaranteed to ring Dominic Cummings' bells. In short, she probably has friends in high places, and Sunak will know this, not to mention that .01% off the aid budget is loose change.
The aid budget is 0.7% of GDP, not 0.07% - This year it's £14bn, which is a fair chunk of change for a Chancellor trying to rebalance the books.
Indeed. I don't want to hear about tax rises when we're borrowing 14 billion a year to give away right now.
There are some good picks on that list, but a remarkable number of has-beens.
IDS back at work & pensions and May at the home office? I mean, really?
And I think Sunak has done a brilliant job as Chancellor. That list looks like someone yearning for the days of Theresa May's time the only person I'd have back is Hunt as Health Sec and I'd have Tom Tugendhat in as Foreign Sec over Raab. Javid made no impression as Chancellor and I had really high hopes for him.
I think very likely Sunak > Javid but your review of Javid is harsh given he never even got around to making a budget and wasnt allowed much, if any, say on staffing and strategy. Just unproven as Chancellor and we will never know.
The only thing I can say in his favour is that he was better than Hammond who seemed more interested in counting pennies than anything else.
Bozo’s Quarantine Hokey Cokey continues as Ministers are considering reimposing quarantine measures for those arriving in the UK from Portugal as coronavirus cases rise, sources have told the BBC.
A change this Thursday would be the fifth affecting travellers and travel companies to Portugal since this whole sorry farce commenced.
Well your choices are:
A) no restrictions blanket ban C) flexible restrictions which change as the facts change
C) seems like a logical approach to me
Why is your data better than the people reviewing the information and making the decision on behalf of the government?
I'm with Charles on this one. Everyone knows that travelling abroad at the moment carries the risk of restrictions changing and at short notice. If you are not prepared to take the risk that you might need to isolate at the end of the trip, or worse cut the trip short, you should not be undertaking foreign travel, not at the moment.
Exactly. I have absolutely zero sympathy for those caught by a change in the regulations. They have taken a very obvious gamble and lost. Tough. The only reasonable alternative is the blanket ban (by which I mean no travel without quarantine) which would be simpler to administer.
I agree with your general point. However as quarantine updates appear to be happening weekly it doesn't seem a massive organisational burden to announce the changes midweek for implementation at the weekend. That would give people a couple of days to trigger their contingency rather than be caught out by the shutters coming down the same evening.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
I agree with you, but have one pedantic point. The senate cannot be gerrymandered, unless state boundaries are redrawn, or significant populations are moved accross state borders. You can complain that Hawaii and Texas both having 2 senators is unfair, but that is not gerrymandering.
The constituency boundaries in the House though, are a disgrace.
Jungle primaries comes pretty close
California Democrats legislate that the top 2 candidates in a primary are the only ones eligible to run for senator
Hmmm: that means that it’s always only 2 Democrats that get to stand
You can vote for anyone you like so long as they are a Democrat
If a Republican had enought support to eventually win, would they also win one of the top two slots in primaries?
There are some good picks on that list, but a remarkable number of has-beens.
IDS back at work & pensions and May at the home office? I mean, really?
And I think Sunak has done a brilliant job as Chancellor. That list looks like someone yearning for the days of Theresa May's time the only person I'd have back is Hunt as Health Sec and I'd have Tom Tugendhat in as Foreign Sec over Raab. Javid made no impression as Chancellor and I had really high hopes for him.
I think very likely Sunak > Javid but your review of Javid is harsh given he never even got around to making a budget and wasnt allowed much, if any, say on staffing and strategy. Just unproven as Chancellor and we will never know.
The only thing I can say in his favour is that he was better than Hammond who seemed more interested in counting pennies than anything else.
He wasnt allowed to decide anything and didnt get to present a budget. Not really sure how he is better or worse than anyone on that basis.
More kite-flying. Even the bit of the paywalled story I can see talks about the Treasury "gearing up for a fight". And I'm not even sure I believe Sunak is behind this.
The .07% foreign aid pledge has been unpopular with some on the Tory right for the past couple of decades, and I suspect it is one of these sounding off, rather than our esteemed Chancellor.
The reason is that Rachel Glennerster, the DfiD economist has just been appointed to the combined Foreign Office/DfiD post. A quick glance at Wikipedia places Glennerster at Oxford at the same time as Boris (and Cameron and half the Establishment) but also reveals she is a strong advocate of *testing* the outcomes of aid interventions, which is guaranteed to ring Dominic Cummings' bells. In short, she probably has friends in high places, and Sunak will know this, not to mention that .01% off the aid budget is loose change.
The aid budget is 0.7% of GDP, not 0.07% - This year it's £14bn, which is a fair chunk of change for a Chancellor trying to rebalance the books.
Indeed. I don't want to hear about tax rises when we're borrowing 14 billion a year to give away right now.
Suggest you just put your fingers in your ears and go 'nah-nah-nah-nah' then.
It's the only way you'll avoid hearing about tax rises.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
I agree with you, but have one pedantic point. The senate cannot be gerrymandered, unless state boundaries are redrawn, or significant populations are moved accross state borders. You can complain that Hawaii and Texas both having 2 senators is unfair, but that is not gerrymandering.
The constituency boundaries in the House though, are a disgrace.
Jungle primaries comes pretty close
California Democrats legislate that the top 2 candidates in a primary are the only ones eligible to run for senator
Hmmm: that means that it’s always only 2 Democrats that get to stand
You can vote for anyone you like so long as they are a Democrat
If a Republican had enought support to eventually win, would they also win one of the top two slots in primaries?
well if either party manages to run lots of candidates that all get votes, while the other party runs 2 candidates that both get votes, then it's possible that the less popular party could win by winning top 2 slots in the jungle primary - seems to me that in California this is more likely to favour Republicans than Democrats though.
ONS death figures out for week ending 21st August 2020. Deaths well above average, but increase not caused by Covid which represented just 1.4% of deaths. It is so clear that the obsession with Covid is stopping treatment for all the other illnesses that kill people.
More kite-flying. Even the bit of the paywalled story I can see talks about the Treasury "gearing up for a fight". And I'm not even sure I believe Sunak is behind this.
The .07% foreign aid pledge has been unpopular with some on the Tory right for the past couple of decades, and I suspect it is one of these sounding off, rather than our esteemed Chancellor.
The reason is that Rachel Glennerster, the DfiD economist has just been appointed to the combined Foreign Office/DfiD post. A quick glance at Wikipedia places Glennerster at Oxford at the same time as Boris (and Cameron and half the Establishment) but also reveals she is a strong advocate of *testing* the outcomes of aid interventions, which is guaranteed to ring Dominic Cummings' bells. In short, she probably has friends in high places, and Sunak will know this, not to mention that .01% off the aid budget is loose change.
It's all kite flying - it's how this Government operates - but it will take the path of least resistance.
It's pretty obvious to me that they will claim the 0.7% target has been nominally met whilst reclassifying some spending within it into essential defence upgrades on the premise that this will benefit others globally.
They might even be right.
Using the aid budget to buy weapons would go down like a lead balloon for anyone that cares about aid, but from the suggestions in that article funding hospital ships that can be used for disaster relief from the aid budget looks like an excellent idea that everyone should be able to support. I don't see why disaster relief shouldn't be considered aid, it absolutely should be.
Divert anything like hospitals etc that can be used with disasters etc to the aid budget from defence and buy any weaponry etc from the defence budget. That seems entirely reasonable to me.
There are some good picks on that list, but a remarkable number of has-beens.
IDS back at work & pensions and May at the home office? I mean, really?
And I think Sunak has done a brilliant job as Chancellor. That list looks like someone yearning for the days of Theresa May's time the only person I'd have back is Hunt as Health Sec and I'd have Tom Tugendhat in as Foreign Sec over Raab. Javid made no impression as Chancellor and I had really high hopes for him.
The main move that's needed is Boris off to something more of his ability like the department of culture to be replaced by Sunak. Javid can fill the Chancellor gap again.
It is curious why those four were chosen, defence doesnt seem to fit in very well. Where is health or the treasury? Id have thought for cross department working together education, health and treasury would be key.
More kite-flying. Even the bit of the paywalled story I can see talks about the Treasury "gearing up for a fight". And I'm not even sure I believe Sunak is behind this.
The .07% foreign aid pledge has been unpopular with some on the Tory right for the past couple of decades, and I suspect it is one of these sounding off, rather than our esteemed Chancellor.
The reason is that Rachel Glennerster, the DfiD economist has just been appointed to the combined Foreign Office/DfiD post. A quick glance at Wikipedia places Glennerster at Oxford at the same time as Boris (and Cameron and half the Establishment) but also reveals she is a strong advocate of *testing* the outcomes of aid interventions, which is guaranteed to ring Dominic Cummings' bells. In short, she probably has friends in high places, and Sunak will know this, not to mention that .01% off the aid budget is loose change.
Is 0.1% of GDP not about £20bn? Not sure I would describe that as loose change even in our fiscally incontinent times.
Ah, I fear we have both slipped a decimal point but in opposite directions and 0.1% is 2 billion (if GDP is £2 trillion).
Cummings does have a vision of central control by committed apparatchiks, backed by information on all citizens and iron discipline that whiffs more than a bit of Stalinism.
I think his suspicion of the traditional institutions of state, including Civil Service, Journalists, Universities and even Armed Forces very reminiscent too. Purges and showtrials are all part of his 5 year plan.
The psychologically (maybe even psychiatrically) interesting thing is what happens next.
The Cummings thesis is that government can run better- to the tune of picking up billion pound notes off the street- with a Mission Control office packed with the right people and a fat pipe of real-time data projected onto big screens.
It's possible that he's right. Almost everything is possible. But there are reasonable reasons to think that he's wrong, and this model is going to make lots of things worse.
If that happens- if Cummings's Control Room buttons are connected to a tangle of wet string- what does he do next?
If I can look at the October Revolution and say that there were particular events and circumstances that lead to its degeneration into bloodthirsty terror, rather than that being an inevitable consequence of Socialist Revolution, then I'm sure that Cummings can find plenty of other people to blame for the failure of his system of government.
Another alternative is that, like many attempts to run things with data, it might be successful by the metrics chosen to measure success, and he'll be outraged when everyone does not agree that it's successful.
So that raises the question: what does success look like for Dominic Cummings?
That's an excellent question. And the fact that it's an excellent question (he's not the PM, he's the hired help, after all) shows that we all may have a problem.
My concern is that it involves making nationally averaged KPIs go up, and ignoring the 70 million individuals that make up those averages.
A bit like the old jokes about Soviet production targets; a factory tasked with making a million boots would make a million boots (size 6, left foot).
As happened with the Covid tests (raw numbers mattered, even if fewer, faster and more convenient tests would have been more useful), Saving The NHS by sending Granny back to the care home to infect all her friends, and the A Level results (all the right results, many of them given to the wrong people).
Morning all - and not a great start to it with the ghastly Donald Trump going fav on Betfair. I think it's mug money talking but still I don't like to see it. I've got my opening spread bets on now (as of yesterday) and so I want to see Trump on the drift from this point onwards. My main bet is a buy of Biden EC supremacy at 28.5. That's gone up a point, the spreads not moving in line with Betfair as yet.
Anyway, not to worry, the more interesting story is the lack of right wing comedy on the BBC. That's a scandal, there being so much brilliant right wing comedy out there. To illustrate and to cheer everyone up here's a very good one I heard just the other day -
How many socialists does it take to change a light bulb?
None, because socialists haven't got a fucking clue and in any case they can't buy a new one because as per usual they've run out of other people's money.
That may be your funniest joke yet!
Anyway, this is why Biden should, ultimately, prevail. Trump's attacks on him don't pass the basic test of plausibility:
To maximize his chances though, BLM and the like should take a nice 2 month holiday and say and do absolutely nothing...
Yes. I don't buy the notion that street disorder hands the election to Trump but I would be more comfortable with Covid back on top of the news agenda.
More kite-flying. Even the bit of the paywalled story I can see talks about the Treasury "gearing up for a fight". And I'm not even sure I believe Sunak is behind this.
The .07% foreign aid pledge has been unpopular with some on the Tory right for the past couple of decades, and I suspect it is one of these sounding off, rather than our esteemed Chancellor.
The reason is that Rachel Glennerster, the DfiD economist has just been appointed to the combined Foreign Office/DfiD post. A quick glance at Wikipedia places Glennerster at Oxford at the same time as Boris (and Cameron and half the Establishment) but also reveals she is a strong advocate of *testing* the outcomes of aid interventions, which is guaranteed to ring Dominic Cummings' bells. In short, she probably has friends in high places, and Sunak will know this, not to mention that .01% off the aid budget is loose change.
The aid budget is 0.7% of GDP, not 0.07% - This year it's £14bn, which is a fair chunk of change for a Chancellor trying to rebalance the books.
Indeed. I don't want to hear about tax rises when we're borrowing 14 billion a year to give away right now.
Shouldn't have voted Tory then. BXP were promising what your after.
Sen. Ed Markey 55.6 percent; U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III 44.4 percent.
Yes, largely as the final polls predicted, however I would not rule out Kennedy running for Governor in 2022 now or even for Senate again if Biden wins and appoints Warren AG.
On the Republican side Kevin O'Connor won the nomination and must have a slim chance of beating Markey in the general election in November if he can win over some of the white working class Kennedy voters and pin AOC's support and the support of the far left on Markey.
Why does a journalist think it appropriate to insult the PM?
Yes he has a hell of a to do list. Yes it would be a stretch for any PM in history. Yes he may well fail.
But she’s implying that he’s stupid, which he certainly isn’t
No, she's implying he's inept, which he certainly is.
Isaac Newton wasn’t able to come up with the theory of relativity but he wasn’t inept
That's not fair to Newton. As he himself said, "if he saw further it was only because he stood on the shoulders of giants."
Einstein had more giants to stand on the shoulders of than Newton did. If Newton had been active in the early 20th Century, and hadn't spent so much time on alchemy, who knows what he might have contributed.
It is curious why those four were chosen, defence doesnt seem to fit in very well. Where is health or the treasury? Id have thought for cross department working together education, health and treasury would be key.
Like Trump, Cummings seems to think Defence means Space Lasers
Bozo’s Quarantine Hokey Cokey continues as Ministers are considering reimposing quarantine measures for those arriving in the UK from Portugal as coronavirus cases rise, sources have told the BBC.
A change this Thursday would be the fifth affecting travellers and travel companies to Portugal since this whole sorry farce commenced.
Well your choices are:
A) no restrictions blanket ban C) flexible restrictions which change as the facts change
C) seems like a logical approach to me
Why is your data better than the people reviewing the information and making the decision on behalf of the government?
I'm with Charles on this one. Everyone knows that travelling abroad at the moment carries the risk of restrictions changing and at short notice. If you are not prepared to take the risk that you might need to isolate at the end of the trip, or worse cut the trip short, you should not be undertaking foreign travel, not at the moment.
Exactly. I have absolutely zero sympathy for those caught by a change in the regulations. They have taken a very obvious gamble and lost. Tough. The only reasonable alternative is the blanket ban (by which I mean no travel without quarantine) which would be simpler to administer.
I agree with your general point. However as quarantine updates appear to be happening weekly it doesn't seem a massive organisational burden to announce the changes midweek for implementation at the weekend. That would give people a couple of days to trigger their contingency rather than be caught out by the shutters coming down the same evening.
Isn't giving people a couple of days notice a case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted?
Since infections data, hospital data etc is a very lagging indicator by the time we have made a decision to quarantine a country its because there's already a problem - not because we have the foresight to know there will be a problem.
Personally I think we should give people less notice not more. The moment a decision is made it should be implemented ASAP.
More kite-flying. Even the bit of the paywalled story I can see talks about the Treasury "gearing up for a fight". And I'm not even sure I believe Sunak is behind this.
The .07% foreign aid pledge has been unpopular with some on the Tory right for the past couple of decades, and I suspect it is one of these sounding off, rather than our esteemed Chancellor.
The reason is that Rachel Glennerster, the DfiD economist has just been appointed to the combined Foreign Office/DfiD post. A quick glance at Wikipedia places Glennerster at Oxford at the same time as Boris (and Cameron and half the Establishment) but also reveals she is a strong advocate of *testing* the outcomes of aid interventions, which is guaranteed to ring Dominic Cummings' bells. In short, she probably has friends in high places, and Sunak will know this, not to mention that .01% off the aid budget is loose change.
It's all kite flying - it's how this Government operates - but it will take the path of least resistance.
It's pretty obvious to me that they will claim the 0.7% target has been nominally met whilst reclassifying some spending within it into essential defence upgrades on the premise that this will benefit others globally.
They might even be right.
Using the aid budget to buy weapons would go down like a lead balloon for anyone that cares about aid, but from the suggestions in that article funding hospital ships that can be used for disaster relief from the aid budget looks like an excellent idea that everyone should be able to support. I don't see why disaster relief shouldn't be considered aid, it absolutely should be.
Divert anything like hospitals etc that can be used with disasters etc to the aid budget from defence and buy any weaponry etc from the defence budget. That seems entirely reasonable to me.
There was a suggestion, IRRC, that an HMS Ocean style* LHD or 2 should be funded out of the aid budget.
*HMS Ocean was cheap. This was because it was built to commercial standards. This meant if it was hit by an actual torpedo or missile it would either (1) sink (2) burn like crazy and then sink. So fine for "low intensity" operations....
ONS death figures out for week ending 21st August 2020. Deaths well above average, but increase not caused by Covid which represented just 1.4% of deaths. It is so clear that the obsession with Covid is stopping treatment for all the other illnesses that kill people.
Thank you Doctor.
Rather than try and be clever why don't you come up with a reason that death figures are now well above average when Covid deaths are just 1.4% of the total.
Using the aid budget to buy weapons would go down like a lead balloon for anyone that cares about aid, but from the suggestions in that article funding hospital ships that can be used for disaster relief from the aid budget looks like an excellent idea that everyone should be able to support. I don't see why disaster relief shouldn't be considered aid, it absolutely should be.
Hospital ships are a non-starter due to their vast crewing requirements - USNS Comfort and Mercy have complements of over 1,400 each! There are only 33,000 regulars in the RN in total.
I suppose Dido H. could organise Serco or Capita to run them. I'm sure that would work out splendidly.
ONS death figures out for week ending 21st August 2020. Deaths well above average, but increase not caused by Covid which represented just 1.4% of deaths. It is so clear that the obsession with Covid is stopping treatment for all the other illnesses that kill people.
Thank you Doctor.
Rather than try and be clever why don't you come up with a reason that death figures are now well above average when Covid deaths are just 1.4% of the total.
More kite-flying. Even the bit of the paywalled story I can see talks about the Treasury "gearing up for a fight". And I'm not even sure I believe Sunak is behind this.
The .07% foreign aid pledge has been unpopular with some on the Tory right for the past couple of decades, and I suspect it is one of these sounding off, rather than our esteemed Chancellor.
The reason is that Rachel Glennerster, the DfiD economist has just been appointed to the combined Foreign Office/DfiD post. A quick glance at Wikipedia places Glennerster at Oxford at the same time as Boris (and Cameron and half the Establishment) but also reveals she is a strong advocate of *testing* the outcomes of aid interventions, which is guaranteed to ring Dominic Cummings' bells. In short, she probably has friends in high places, and Sunak will know this, not to mention that .01% off the aid budget is loose change.
Is 0.1% of GDP not about £20bn? Not sure I would describe that as loose change even in our fiscally incontinent times.
You're out by a factor of 10
GDP is £2trn, £2,000bn 1% of GDP is £20bn 0.1% of GDP is £2bn 0.01% of GDP is £200m
Currently on holiday in Wales. Beautiful day yesterday, this morning looks like rain rain rain and more rain. Best be better tomorrow visiting Beaumaris Castle and a boat trip to Puffin Island booked. Trip to Dublin Friday?
Boris Johnson has declined to meet members of a campaign group representing families bereaved by coronavirus, despite appearing to promise to do so on live TV last week.
Given that he has 15 working hours in the day, what would this meeting achieve?
Using the aid budget to buy weapons would go down like a lead balloon for anyone that cares about aid, but from the suggestions in that article funding hospital ships that can be used for disaster relief from the aid budget looks like an excellent idea that everyone should be able to support. I don't see why disaster relief shouldn't be considered aid, it absolutely should be.
Hospital ships are a non-starter due to their vast crewing requirements - USNS Comfort and Mercy have complements of over 1,400 each! There are only 33,000 regulars in the RN in total.
I suppose Dido H. could organise Serco or Capita to run them. I'm sure that would work out splendidly.
I don't see why that's a non-starter, that sounds even better. Buy 3 hospital ships and transfer the wages of 4,200 of the 33,000 from MOD to FCDO. Job done.
Comments
What's ironic though is that many people (and I'm not saying you personally) who can instinctively recognise that here are the same people who chose to attack all Leavers as racists because of the likes of Farage.
California Democrats legislate that the top 2 candidates in a primary are the only ones eligible to run for senator
Hmmm: that means that it’s always only 2 Democrats that get to stand
You can vote for anyone you like so long as they are a Democrat
For many decades the Western Isles was a Labour/SNP battleground, whereas the Inner Hebrides and mainland Highlands were pretty solid Liberal then Liberal Democrat.
Once our new boundaries are put in place, you should have 645 constituencies all within a narrow range, and then 5 undersized constituencies due to being islands
However, the reforms won't be overturned and are embedded. Cummings was successful from that point of view.
I'll never understand why living on an island should mean that somebody's vote is worth four times more than somebody else's.
It was a blatant Coalition bung to the Lib Dems - yet another way in which the Liberal Democratic party is profoundly undemocratic.
Its not what the people want, its not what the Government stands for, its not the right thing to do economically, its not what the voters want. It isn't going to happen. Get over it and move on.
The MPs caucus together and select a head of the executive branch
What’s fundamentally different?
Mary Riddell’s comment (“he’s stupid he is”) doesn’t inform or educate.
Perhaps write a thoughtful piece on the challenges and why Johnson is unsuited for the role instead?
From memory it’s about £17bn
Saving 1/7 of that is a useful £2.5bn
I said yesterday that the USA needs a polling council like the BPC, they also need the states to employ independent boundary commissioners - the vast majority allow the politicians to draw the boundaries themselves, hence the gerrymandering.
Anyway, this is why Biden should, ultimately, prevail. Trump's attacks on him don't pass the basic test of plausibility:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNo059I8Z7k
To maximize his chances though, BLM and the like should take a nice 2 month holiday and say and do absolutely nothing...
That's a small 'c'. Johnson's base is skewed old and are the most vulnerable to covid. They're also the most conservative (implicit in his Party name). They don't like change, don't like disruption, don't like uncertainty, and really don't like to be scared. Covid causes all of these.
The human tendency when confronted by unpleasant and unwelcome facts is denial. "No. It's not true. It can't be true."
And there's plenty of commentators and political opportunists who will supply that denial, in wholesale quantities. Partly because it's lucrative - you sell papers, clicks, and attention by giving people what they want. Partly because they want it to be true as well. Humans love reinforcement and validation. If lots of people are agreeing with you, you must be right? Right? That's how it works, isn't it?
Covid IS dangerous. Its mortality increases exponentially by age (negligible in the very young; up to 20% in the eldest, with an inflexion point somewhere between 40 and 60). It can take down the young if they have common 'co-morbidities' (asthma (12% of UK), diabetes (6% of UK), even obesity (28.7% of UK)). It non-uncommonly provides a post-viral syndrome dubbed "Long Covid" that can leave you debilitated or affected (or with organs damaged) for months, at least (we don't know if it's permanent, because it's only been going for months for us). It spreads between generations and demographics, even if we decide "Well, I'm okay, Jack. If it's a choice between those other people dying and me having some discomfort in a mask or disruption to my everyday life; well, not a difficult choice." The unthinking reflex of those ignorant of economics that "there's a trade off between economic damage and accepting deaths" is actually the wrong way around. And it's not permanent - a vaccine is near-certainly on the way in record time. We're talking months. Not years.
All of those facts will weigh on Johnson's mind. As well as the fact that the Telegraph, Mail, and numerous commentators are howling that it's all not real, it'll just go away if we want it to, we should just man up, the younger people should go back to the office right now, we don't want any permanent change, thank you very much, go back to how it was, keep it as it was forever, and stop frightening us! And everything will be fine and happy. God, how stupid are these Governments? It's all a conspiracy to control us!
That hits his base. He can't let them die (not only the moral imperative of a Government, but the political impact of letting his base preferentially die and suffer). But taking measures to protect them runs into the denialism (many of them are determined to believe it's all unnecessary, so massive unpopularity awaits).
Johnson hates being unpopular. The swings and lurches in policy and messaging are easily explained. Every route results in unpopularity, and he's very bad at that.
Some big data projects work (HMRC is a prime example) because all the data sources are know and trustworthy. That's rarely the case elsewhere.
That sounds pretty serious.
Because your comments imply that you don't know this.
https://twitter.com/SiDedman/status/1301081785963556864
The Government is doing it so it can pass the blame elsewhere.
So I can see why they are doing it even though even they know it probably won't work.
https://twitter.com/gsoh31/status/1301081420039958534?s=21
It's all a bit Dirty Harry. Indeed if you study his demeanour and delivery you can tell that he's consciously channeling his fellow Republican, Eastwood. It's very embarrassing to watch if you have refined sensibilities. It is also, as a matter of dark irony, the exact same sentiment that lies at the heart of the disturbances, the one that animates the gung ho racist cops as they use excessive force on people (usually black), sometimes killing them. They no doubt fantasize that they are Dirty Harry as they indulge in this.
Although, point of order, I do not recall Clint ever kneeling on a windpipe or shooting somebody 7 times in the back. But that's detail.
Olympic boxer Nicola Adams will make Strictly Come Dancing history by becoming the first contestant to be part of a same-sex pairing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-53989693
Sen. Ed Markey 55.6 percent; U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III 44.4 percent.
The UK doesn't switch MPs en bloc like that. Since the 1948 Representation of the People Act each constituency in the United Kingdom is only worth a single MP. That is completely different to the US system.
As an example if we were to operate like the USA then take Lancashire. Lancashire has 16 constituencies which have gone 11 to the Tories, 4 to Labour and 1 to The Speaker. Under the US system it would be 16 to the Tories. In 2005 Labour won 12 of 15, with the Tories getting 3, while in 2010 the Tories won 9, Labour 6 and LDs 1. In the US system it would have been 2005 Labour 15, Tories 0; in 2010 Tories 16, Labour 0.
That's a big difference.
And now they have to pay for the licence too!@!!
Another alternative is that, like many attempts to run things with data, it might be successful by the metrics chosen to measure success, and he'll be outraged when everyone does not agree that it's successful.
So that raises the question: what does success look like for Dominic Cummings?
Surely the only people who give a s**t about who appears on a BBC Dancing program are people who watch the BBC. I couldn't care less.
She is calling BoZo inept.
And he clearly is.
It's the only way you'll avoid hearing about tax rises.
Plays into that, I think.
Divert anything like hospitals etc that can be used with disasters etc to the aid budget from defence and buy any weaponry etc from the defence budget. That seems entirely reasonable to me.
https://twitter.com/petermacmahon/status/1301084717505224704
Will Richard Leonard be on his way out before May?
So yes, she's an idiot, but an influential one...
My concern is that it involves making nationally averaged KPIs go up, and ignoring the 70 million individuals that make up those averages.
A bit like the old jokes about Soviet production targets; a factory tasked with making a million boots would make a million boots (size 6, left foot).
As happened with the Covid tests (raw numbers mattered, even if fewer, faster and more convenient tests would have been more useful), Saving The NHS by sending Granny back to the care home to infect all her friends, and the A Level results (all the right results, many of them given to the wrong people).
On the Republican side Kevin O'Connor won the nomination and must have a slim chance of beating Markey in the general election in November if he can win over some of the white working class Kennedy voters and pin AOC's support and the support of the far left on Markey.
A Change Research poll last year had Republican governor Charlie Baker beating Markey 45% to 44% had he run for Senate but Kennedy beat Baker 49% to 41% in the same poll.
https://commonwealthmagazine.org/politics/kennedy-holds-17-point-lead-over-markey-in-poll/
As Scott Brown proved in 2010 it is not impossible for a Republican to win a Massachussetts Senate race against a non Kennedy candidate
Einstein had more giants to stand on the shoulders of than Newton did. If Newton had been active in the early 20th Century, and hadn't spent so much time on alchemy, who knows what he might have contributed.
Since infections data, hospital data etc is a very lagging indicator by the time we have made a decision to quarantine a country its because there's already a problem - not because we have the foresight to know there will be a problem.
Personally I think we should give people less notice not more. The moment a decision is made it should be implemented ASAP.
*HMS Ocean was cheap. This was because it was built to commercial standards. This meant if it was hit by an actual torpedo or missile it would either (1) sink (2) burn like crazy and then sink. So fine for "low intensity" operations....
I suppose Dido H. could organise Serco or Capita to run them. I'm sure that would work out splendidly.
https://twitter.com/MarinaHyde/status/1301079452961640448
GDP is £2trn, £2,000bn
1% of GDP is £20bn
0.1% of GDP is £2bn
0.01% of GDP is £200m
The aid budget is 0.7% of GDP, £14bn