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The loneliness of the long-distance leader – politicalbetting.com
The loneliness of the long-distance leader – politicalbetting.com
Sir Keir Starmer has a lot going for him. He is credible as a PM-in-waiting, which is more than can be said for his two predecessors. He seems competent, thoughtful, consistent, honourable, and honest, which are not conspicuous strengths of our current PM. Admittedly he is rather dull, and a poor public speaker, but overall voters think quite favourably of him; his net ratings were modestly positive in six out of the seven December polls.
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Speaking to Times Radio on Jan 3, Sir John said he was more concerned about the South African strain than the UK one "by some margin".
"The mutations associated with the South African form are really pretty substantial changes in the structure of the protein," he said, explaining that the strain had mutated in the part of the virus which allows antibodies to stick to it.
Sir John added that although there was no data yet on whether it increases severity, "it's increased the infectiousness, probably by increasing its ability to bind to the human cells".
Asked whether current Covid-19 vaccines would be able to tackle both the UK and South African variants, he said the Oxford University team was currently assessing this and there was still "room to manoeuvre" because the vaccines worked "much better than any of us thought they were going to".
"I think it's unlikely that these mutations will turn off the effects of vaccines entirely – I think they'll still have a residual effect," he said, adding that it was "perfectly possible" to make new vaccines in a matter of weeks if necessary.
"It might take a month, or six weeks, to get a new vaccine, so everybody should stay calm. It's going to be fine
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/01/03/south-african-variant-could-resistant-vaccine-expert-suggests/
Being dull and competent may well work, it has in the past.
My house move should be fine then
The disparity between Starmer's proclamations & Drakeford's actions are so glaring that the only explanation is that Labour have completely forgotten that they are running Wales.
Possibly Labour have been running Wales for so long, they just think it is the place where they can mooch around in flip-flops and nothing ever gets done there.
It is very common. OGH was earlier fulminating about the folly of keeping the schools open.
Apparently OGH is unaware that the last LibDem in power anywhere (darling Kirsty) is actually in charge of the Welsh education portfolio, and is busy keeping the schools in Wales open.
I have given up expecting any consistency between what English Labour and LibDem politicians say, and what their representatives in the Welsh Government actually do.
As Richard points out SKS needs someone at the heart of the project who can share the load rather than increase it. If I was him I would be exploring getting Burnham back into Westminster, assuming that Ed Balls has had enough of front line politics.
I'm not really sure how much he can do to make it a team effort as suggested though, in fairness. Things are even more presidential than they were for Cameron and Blair, and how much the public perceives there is strength beyond the leader is nebulous to define.
He has time, but not infinite time, and now that a year has gone under Boris, more dramatic indications of progress may start to be needed to avoid worries in his ranks, given the electoral maths as noted.
That said I don't even think he is as dull as made out. Oh, he's not causing paroxyms of excitement in his own ranks or fear in the others, yet, but for the time being at least his softly softly approach is having an effect, and he is not offputting. He could say the same things as Corbyn and not cause people to worry as much.
So there's nothing to worry about in their motivations. Indeed, the politicians have been slower to implement measures than the public want, so the instinctual position is clearly to relax.
He really does himself no favours
Is it a deliberate strategy to establish Starmer as The Leader?
I'd suggest mistaken, if so, but if not then maybe it's just that current Labour politicians are a bit rubbish. Balls and Burnham weren't notably successful previously.
Well I suppose that's a but of an improvement...still going to take years at that rate.
Thankfully I did history, and there's no concerns about cultural or structural issues there.
However a more heavyweight frontbench team would help eg Ed Miliband replacing Anneliese Dodds and Yvette Cooper replacing Lisa Nandy for example, Thomas Symonds being the only heavyweight besides Starmer in Labour's top team.
It should be remembered though that we are only 10 years into a Tory government ie the equivalent of Kinnock 1989 for Starmer, Blair took over in 1994 after 15 years of the Tories in power
She will be going on to do whatever failed LibDems go on to do.
Posting on pb.com, probably.
But he makes some decent points here.
Because he doesn't want to do lockdown so will always listen to the no lockdown proponent.
Wilson 1964.
Major 1992 might be an inelegant example.
PCR negative test 48 hours before (otherwise no flying)
+
Antigen prior to boarding (otherwise no flying)
+
Antigen at airport on arrival (in case of confirmed positive, entire plane is quarantined in an airport hotel for two weeks)
That's less intrusive that most places, but would reduce by 99% the number of imported cases.
https://twitter.com/timspector/status/1346130213382610944
Instead the Lions committee won't even make a decision till Feb. Only a week or so before the 6N is due to kick off.
https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1346144438041632768?s=20
Punishing people for not being perfect while overworked, stressed out and dead tired does not seem helpful in this circumstance.
Many of these science and engineering people use a strange, exclusionary language. Maths.
Also they claim to know answers with absolute truth.
If you are from the dumb zone in the arts, this is very, very scary.
You are excluded from shaping the world
You have no idea how this works
You don't want to know how this works
Someone stop it now!!!
Excellent article. Unless the interesting question highlighted can be answered the chance of Starmer being PM is very slight. His only chance would be the Tories being so bad that they manage to come second to a carthorse. Ed Miliband is not a heavyweight. His brother is. They have never recovered from rejecting DM.
Swearing doesn't bother me, but then I grew up in Fife.
The paper is submitted to the Danish Journal of Women, Gender and Research
I recommend her earlier arXiv postings on Robot Rights and Algorithmic Injustices should you need a second or third helping.
If he’d only found a way to ditch the ‘dull’ part...
We are excluded from shaping the world
We have no idea how this works
We don't want to know how this works
Someone stop it now!!!
To be fair, I think maths is over-rated in understanding complexity.
'I suspect the closest Boris Johnson manages to get close to the Churchill comparison is by losing a general election to a leftie Labour lawyer.'
I don't feel convinced enough yet. They still feel like the defenders of mediocrity and the place man.
And the ranting left tendency is still around.
Remember, Ed Miliband was +12 two years after the GE that brought the Coalition to power.
SKS needs to show some some good poll leads this year.
It is not an easy year for him outside England. I suspect there are middling to bad results waiting for him in Scotland and Wales.
He really needs to line most of the leadership of the Welsh and Scottish Labour parties against a wall, and ...
Starmer's defeat in Wales will not look good against a resurgent Johnson and the Conservatives nationally, post Brexit, and post vaccine.
Germany said on Monday that it had agreed with BioNTech last September to supply an additional 30 million doses on a bilateral basis........
The bilateral German deal predates by two months the EU contract for the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine that was signed in November after talks that had been going on at least since July.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-eu-pfizer-idUKKBN2991WF?taid=5ff353405b2aa000013649c0&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
There is a certain class of AI researcher who is simply adament that AI cannot be racist as it is "just data and algorithms" the idea that humans have crafted both of them seems to completely slip their mind.
Which leads you to having facial recognition systems that have a 5 times false positive rate on black faces or chat bots that spew put Racial slurs because their source corpus is full of racist texts
I expect, though, the next Welsh Govt will be a Labour + Plaid combo.
Starmer however is likely to make gains in England though regardless, for example last time the county council seats were up in 2017 the Tories were 11% ahead, even with Deltapoll's post Deal poll today they are only 5% ahead. Labour are also likely to win big in London in both the Mayoral and Assembly polls
There's a big aspect of hindsight here. At the time, they were pretty widely derided as political lightweights with sod all government experience (which inevitably was true after more than a decade in opposition). Gordon Brown was a fairly capable performer but simply hadn't evolved into anything like the Big Clunking Fist in 1996, let alone the likes of Straw and Blunkett. Similar with Cameron's Tory front bench.
That said, he will need to reshuffle later in the year as there are fairly clear strengths and weaknesses. Anneliese Dodds just hasn't carved out a clear and consistent line of attack on Rishi Sunak for example.
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/politics/market/1.138799270
Turns out Brentford have a massive racism problem, they hired a security who is the boyfriend of an employee, and said steward used the N Word. Turns out the steward is a convicted football hooligan.
But lots of Brentford fans have been banned for being massive racists.
Who could have predicted people who screamed 'White Lives Matter' were massive racists and antisemites?
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/sport/brentford-employed-racist-who-was-a-convicted-football-hooligan-9lqvmcqvw
https://twitter.com/grantshapps/status/1345736524151861252
One or two actually in Kent and up toward East Anglia would be a good idea though.
Here's the cavalcade of wit & beauty:
https://labour.org.uk/people/shadow-cabinet-2/
I read the legislation that such travel means to campus for face-to-face teaching. The only other reference for students seems to be the end-of-term travel home to the family household. I see nothing in the rules allowing travel up to a student flat in another council area so you can be with your mates rather than having the daily joy of your mum telling you to get up and think about having a shower and possibly tidying your room.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ssi/2021/1/regulation/4/made
Lockdown 2.0 is going to be a nightmare.
The choice between a 6N played behind closed doors + a probably cancelled lions tour that they will have wasted money planning vs a 6N with crowds and definitely no lions Tour they don't have to fund seems like a no brainer to me.
If the training set is racist, then the network output will be. E.g., if the training set is mainly composed of white-faced images, then the facial recognition system will identify black faces as white ones.
However, if the training set is mainly composed of black faces, then white faces will be recognised as black ones.
It is not so much the algorithm that is racist, it is the training set.
It is the data on which the network has been trained.