"In Hyderabad, a child lost her grandparents and within a few hours, her mother due to Covid-19. Despite searches and calls to relatives, no one wanted to take the child home. They feared that she may be infected too. Last week, a 20-year-old girl and an 18-year-old boy were reportedly planning to end their lives after their parents died of Covid-19, the Delhi police told a newspaper. The siblings were rescued and connected with their relatives following a counseling session. A three-day-old baby girl and a six-month-old baby in Delhi also lost their parents to the virus."
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
That coalition was one led by Cameron who had conciously moved the Tories to the centre on social policy (which was one thing that gave UKIP space to grow on the right).
But more importantly (apart from the numbers), Labour was tired, fractious and losing seats whereas the Tories had just gained a load, which not only was a positive point when it came to 'mandate' but also meant they were in the mood for compromise if it meant a shot at office. Now, whether Labour's yet in that mindset remains to be seen but the Conservatives certainly no longer are.
"In Hyderabad, a child lost her grandparents and within a few hours, her mother due to Covid-19. Despite searches and calls to relatives, no one wanted to take the child home. They feared that she may be infected too. Last week, a 20-year-old girl and an 18-year-old boy were reportedly planning to end their lives after their parents died of Covid-19, the Delhi police told a newspaper. The siblings were rescued and connected with their relatives following a counseling session. A three-day-old baby girl and a six-month-old baby in Delhi also lost their parents to the virus."
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
"In Hyderabad, a child lost her grandparents and within a few hours, her mother due to Covid-19. Despite searches and calls to relatives, no one wanted to take the child home. They feared that she may be infected too. Last week, a 20-year-old girl and an 18-year-old boy were reportedly planning to end their lives after their parents died of Covid-19, the Delhi police told a newspaper. The siblings were rescued and connected with their relatives following a counseling session. A three-day-old baby girl and a six-month-old baby in Delhi also lost their parents to the virus."
In the Times Radio interview (Does anyone else follow them on twitter? Interesting stuff on there) John Curtice says Labour under Starmer have become too Conservative, and worried about upsetting voters, whilst Boris's Tories are radicals who are prepared to piss off their usual voters to get things done.
Seems fair to me, but the biggest change in politics in my lifetime, one that I am no closer to understanding now that at any other time, is that the Labour Party, in allowing Freedom of Movement to the A8, put the low paid jobs of those the party was set up to look out for out to tender to millions of people who had a huge incentive to undercut them.
Labour basically deregulated the Labour market in a way no right wing, free marketeer could have dreamed of getting away with, opening up gold mines for exploitative capitalists to the detriment of the working class, and their refusal to admit they made a mistake, or that it was any kind of big deal - let alone apologise - has led to Old Etonian, Bullingdon Boy Boris ripping through the northern heartlands like a bushfire.
Curtice is right that pretending it never happened is not an option for Labour. How on earth they put the bloke in charge who was trying to stop the Leave vote being respected beggars belief
I do wonder if the French political system would be able to cope with a Le Pen election victory.
Even if she won En Marche and Les Republicains would likely have more seats in the National Assembly than National Rally
Is that right? If Le Pen was capable of hitting 50% in a presidential election, then you'd think she'd be able to back that up in parliamentary ones shortly after.
I know 2017 went catastrophically wrong for FN (as it still was) but the winning president's party usually gets a huge boost in the parliamentary one shortly after as the honeymoon effect works for them, while other parties struggle with defeat debates and recrimination, and differential motivation among both voters and activists.
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
That coalition was one led by Cameron who had conciously moved the Tories to the centre on social policy (which was one thing that gave UKIP space to grow on the right).
But more importantly (apart from the numbers), Labour was tired, fractious and losing seats whereas the Tories had just gained a load, which not only was a positive point when it came to 'mandate' but also meant they were in the mood for compromise if it meant a shot at office. Now, whether Labour's yet in that mindset remains to be seen but the Conservatives certainly no longer are.
Indeed, though its worth noting that of course Boris has moved the Tories to the centre too, which is why they've been gaining seats across the country. People even talk about Boris adopting bits of Labour's previous manifestos. Outside the issue of Europe there's not that much that divides Boris's Tories from Davey's Lib Dems.
If the 2010 General Election results in say 315 for the Tories, 230 Labour, 50 SNP, 30 Lib Dems and 18 NI with 7 others across Greens, PC, Speaker etc - then the Tories continuing with confidence from the Lib Dems might be more viable than any other alternative.
In short, Brexit has changed everything, and Labour shouldn’t sit about hoping things go back to normal whilst Boris takes the bull by the horns and gets on with it
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
If the maths work, UUP would be more appropriate than DUP, but otherwise your point is good.
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
That coalition was one led by Cameron who had conciously moved the Tories to the centre on social policy (which was one thing that gave UKIP space to grow on the right).
But more importantly (apart from the numbers), Labour was tired, fractious and losing seats whereas the Tories had just gained a load, which not only was a positive point when it came to 'mandate' but also meant they were in the mood for compromise if it meant a shot at office. Now, whether Labour's yet in that mindset remains to be seen but the Conservatives certainly no longer are.
It is compromise enough having to work off Miliband’s manifesto?
I have followed the UK elections via the Danish media where Sturgeon is praised for wanting to help her country escape Boris Johnson and it seems the the British media are exagerrating Labour's poor performance - the real story is that having won some mayoral contests and Wales Labour's position is strengthened - that's a right wing Danish paper's take anyway. Not sure how close that is to the analysis of PBs finest!
Excellent take. Cool detached Scandi thinking at its finest.
Really? To me it suggests that the Danish media are dopes, an opposition going backwards is not an exaggerated poor performance but a very bad one. If it was exaggerated SKS wouldn't have made a spectacle of himself over the weekend.
"In Hyderabad, a child lost her grandparents and within a few hours, her mother due to Covid-19. Despite searches and calls to relatives, no one wanted to take the child home. They feared that she may be infected too. Last week, a 20-year-old girl and an 18-year-old boy were reportedly planning to end their lives after their parents died of Covid-19, the Delhi police told a newspaper. The siblings were rescued and connected with their relatives following a counseling session. A three-day-old baby girl and a six-month-old baby in Delhi also lost their parents to the virus."
And yet - like so much of the third world - the numbers don't look that bad. Obviously there's likely to be some underreporting, but how much? Are the figures showing 20% of the real levels? 10%? 1%? Are we at a stage where you'd notice the impact of the pandemic on any demographic graphs?
Poor Roger will need to move....I hear hartlepool is good
Given the topics being discussed here I misread that as Pol Roger.
Me too. Lol. We’ve got the Luxury Travel Jones BAD
I guess we could play around with definition of luxury travel. In recent years we have prioritised location and stayed in eco-lodges in prime spots. Eco lodges can be quite splendid. This can be a lot cheaper than luxury places to stay and it puts one closer to nature. Who spends a lot of time in their room anyway? This tactic has worked for us in Sri Lanka, Mexico and on safari in South Africa.
Yes, eco-lodges are often great. And luxury is often pointless
This place in Greenland is fucking sensational: an eco lodge next to one of the world’s most active glaciers. Quite cheap,(but you have to get there).
If you do sleep there you will probably be 50km from the next human (other than those in the lodge). It is decidedly eerie
Stayed at a lovely airbnb ecolodge in Utah. Nice little money maker for the owner.
Stayed in an ecolodge in the Panatanal, southern Brazil. You get woken at some ungodly hour by the vulnerable Hyacinth Macaws - a crazy blue giant of a parrot.
It wouldn't be so bad if you hadn't been out most of the night on the back of a truck, looking for eye-shine from things such as ocelot and tapirs - and even weirder critters.....
That sounds awesome, Right up my street, Which eco lodge in the Pantanal was it? You ever used Naturetrek?
I used Wildwings, but I think they are now Africa only. The target was to see jaguar - which we achieved (hence the avatar!).
"In Hyderabad, a child lost her grandparents and within a few hours, her mother due to Covid-19. Despite searches and calls to relatives, no one wanted to take the child home. They feared that she may be infected too. Last week, a 20-year-old girl and an 18-year-old boy were reportedly planning to end their lives after their parents died of Covid-19, the Delhi police told a newspaper. The siblings were rescued and connected with their relatives following a counseling session. A three-day-old baby girl and a six-month-old baby in Delhi also lost their parents to the virus."
And yet - like so much of the third world - the numbers don't look that bad. Obviously there's likely to be some underreporting, but how much? Are the figures showing 20% of the real levels? 10%? 1%? Are we at a stage where you'd notice the impact of the pandemic on any demographic graphs?
From analyses I have seen done*, some Modi critics put the under-reporting of both cases and deaths in the 10-30x (not percent) range.
* mostly on the number of cremations as it is easiest to count
The India variant looks to be more infectious than the UK variant judging by our latest Covid map. If the reproductive rate is higher than we are stopping via vaccine, of course there will be community transmission.
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
Davey is not LD members.
If the Tories end up significantly north of 300 MPs but shy of a majority, then its entirely possible a Rishi or other led Tory Party could get at the very least Confidence from Davey's LDs. They might claim Boris's scalp as part of the agreement, a price the Tories would pay to maintain control of Downing Street.
0 deaths reported in England for first time in 14 months today.
When we lap Wednesday reported deaths should be a big decline from the bank holidat catch up last week, now solidly in to single digits each day by date of occurance.
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
There's a difference between "wanting to" and being motivated by it.
I would prefer that Britain was still a member of the EU but I'm not going to vote based on that as there's no prospect of that happening unless everything goes to shit. I can imagine a lot of people are similar.
"In Hyderabad, a child lost her grandparents and within a few hours, her mother due to Covid-19. Despite searches and calls to relatives, no one wanted to take the child home. They feared that she may be infected too. Last week, a 20-year-old girl and an 18-year-old boy were reportedly planning to end their lives after their parents died of Covid-19, the Delhi police told a newspaper. The siblings were rescued and connected with their relatives following a counseling session. A three-day-old baby girl and a six-month-old baby in Delhi also lost their parents to the virus."
And yet - like so much of the third world - the numbers don't look that bad. Obviously there's likely to be some underreporting, but how much? Are the figures showing 20% of the real levels? 10%? 1%? Are we at a stage where you'd notice the impact of the pandemic on any demographic graphs?
Yes, it's all so opaque
I've seen various estimates that say they are under-reporting cases and deaths by anything between two and ten times
The overload of cremations - which can be counted - suggest 4 or 5 times the stated figures, in some cities (worse in others). So let's say 5
That means, in reality, around 1.5m new cases are being racked up every day, and about 20,000 are dying
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
Davey is not LD members.
If the Tories end up significantly north of 300 MPs but shy of a majority, then its entirely possible a Rishi or other led Tory Party could get at the very least Confidence from Davey's LDs. They might claim Boris's scalp as part of the agreement, a price the Tories would pay to maintain control of Downing Street.
Davey would face an immediate vote of no confidence if he did that and likely lose the leadership to say Layla Moran.
In any case the price of LD support would be single market membership or as close as possible to it which no Tory leader could agree for a generation as it would mean immediate loss of the Red Wall seats again and mass defections of Leave voters back to Reform UK and UKIP
We are seeing falls in every category, as we have for a while.
While the numbers are falling, the elderly groups are still providing the bulk of the admissions and deaths. Either the vaccinations are not protecting universally against hospitalisation and death or the unvaccinated are bing hit - or both.
Without the differential data on vaccinated vs unvaccinated we simply don't know the answer.
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
Davey is not LD members.
If the Tories end up significantly north of 300 MPs but shy of a majority, then its entirely possible a Rishi or other led Tory Party could get at the very least Confidence from Davey's LDs. They might claim Boris's scalp as part of the agreement, a price the Tories would pay to maintain control of Downing Street.
Davey would face an immediate vote of confidence if he did that and likely lose the leadership to say Layla Moran.
In any case the price of LD support would be single market membership or as close as possible to it which no Tory leader could agree for a generation as it would mean immediately loss of the Red Wall seats again and mass defections of Leave voters back to Reform UK and UKIP
I seriously doubt the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market membership unless things were looking economically glum. It would result in too much upheaval AGAIN.
In the Times Radio interview (Does anyone else follow them on twitter? Interesting stuff on there) John Curtice says Labour under Starmer have become too Conservative, and worried about upsetting voters, whilst Boris's Tories are radicals who are prepared to piss off their usual voters to get things done.
Seems fair to me, but the biggest change in politics in my lifetime, one that I am no closer to understanding now that at any other time, is that the Labour Party, in allowing Freedom of Movement to the A8, put the low paid jobs of those the party was set up to look out for out to tender to millions of people who had a huge incentive to undercut them.
Labour basically deregulated the Labour market in a way no right wing, free marketeer could have dreamed of getting away with, opening up gold mines for exploitative capitalists to the detriment of the working class, and their refusal to admit they made a mistake, or that it was any kind of big deal - let alone apologise - has led to Old Etonian, Bullingdon Boy Boris ripping through the northern heartlands like a bushfire.
Curtice is right that pretending it never happened is not an option for Labour. How on earth they put the bloke in charge who was trying to stop the Leave vote being respected beggars belief
Because, not least, the membership *wanted* the Leave vote to be disrespected.
"Starmer's policy" is something of a misnomer, both because it wasn't a credible policy but also because it wasn't Starmer's. It came out of hours of tortuous compromise at Labour's conference and, predictably, looked exactly like it was: a committee-drawn rag-bag of half-ideas that didn't hang together but gave everyone enough to go away with for the time.
But the important thing was that Labour's membership as well as its vote was, by 2019, very heavily pro-Remain. Add to that the pressure the Lib Dems were exerting on the issue (beating Labour at the Euros, including in London), and you can see how it happened. I doubt that many of the people drafting the composite motion were from Bishop Auckland or Bolsover.
Indeed, though its worth noting that of course Boris has moved the Tories to the centre too, which is why they've been gaining seats across the country. People even talk about Boris adopting bits of Labour's previous manifestos. Outside the issue of Europe there's not that much that divides Boris's Tories from Davey's Lib Dems.
Not much at all, Mr Thompson...... Except that the Conseratives under Johnson are authoritarian, bordering on the dictatorial. While the Lib Dems are essentially liberal - even Liberal! - and believe that individuals should have the freedom to decide how they lead their lives - always respecting the freedom and rights of others to do the same.
Curiously, the Labour Party is also authoritarian, and so is the Green Party.
So there is a pretty clear distinction between the Lib Dems and all the rest. The distonguishing policies stem from that distinction.
As for the comment about "Boris adopting bits of Labour's previous manifestos", there is nothing serious there. It is all for show - as is everything that "Boris" says and does.
The neo-Conservative Party has no principles or morals.
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
Davey is not LD members.
If the Tories end up significantly north of 300 MPs but shy of a majority, then its entirely possible a Rishi or other led Tory Party could get at the very least Confidence from Davey's LDs. They might claim Boris's scalp as part of the agreement, a price the Tories would pay to maintain control of Downing Street.
Davey would face an immediate vote of confidence if he did that and likely lose the leadership to say Layla Moran.
In any case the price of LD support would be single market membership or as close as possible to it which no Tory leader could agree for a generation as it would mean immediately loss of the Red Wall seats again and mass defections of Leave voters back to Reform UK and UKIP
I seriously doubt the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market membership unless things were looking economically glum. It would result in too much upheaval AGAIN.
The LDs whole core message at the moment is based on being anti Boris' 'hard Brexit' which is why they voted against his Brexit deal, of course they would refuse to support the Tories if there was anything less than single market alignment and it is absurd to suggest otherwise. They would lose almost all their voters to Labour and the Greens if they did not
Helping India and Nepal, as much as we can, would be a good thing to do. It is the quintessence of enlightened self-interest. The sooner we control the virus there the less chance there is of a final hideous variant scorpion-tailing the rest of the world
Plus it is an overwhelming human catastrophe, in the making. Potentially the worst I have seen in my lifetime - BUT we have the means to end it, with vaccines
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
Davey is not LD members.
If the Tories end up significantly north of 300 MPs but shy of a majority, then its entirely possible a Rishi or other led Tory Party could get at the very least Confidence from Davey's LDs. They might claim Boris's scalp as part of the agreement, a price the Tories would pay to maintain control of Downing Street.
Davey would face an immediate vote of confidence if he did that and likely lose the leadership to say Layla Moran.
In any case the price of LD support would be single market membership or as close as possible to it which no Tory leader could agree for a generation as it would mean immediately loss of the Red Wall seats again and mass defections of Leave voters back to Reform UK and UKIP
I seriously doubt the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market membership unless things were looking economically glum. It would result in too much upheaval AGAIN.
The LDs whole core message at the moment is based on being anti Boris' 'hard Brexit' which is why they voted against his Brexit deal, of course they would refuse to support the Tories if there was anything less than single market alignment and it is absurd to suggest otherwise. They would lose almost all their voters to Labour and the Greens if they did not
Do we know what the LD's "core" national message is right now?
I voted Lib Dems on Thursday and there was no mention of "Brexit" on any literature.
Well done! Eagerly awaiting my appointment. Hoping that I'll be able to book my second within a few weeks too.
Not to play one-up on you, Max, but I've had my 2nd jab now and am therefore pretty much immune. And what a boost it gives you. I feel so strong, so powerful. Gonna go out there soon and give all the people a big fat kiss. I'll kiss the men, I'll kiss the beautiful women, I'll kiss EVERYONE on the Finchley Road!
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
Davey is not LD members.
If the Tories end up significantly north of 300 MPs but shy of a majority, then its entirely possible a Rishi or other led Tory Party could get at the very least Confidence from Davey's LDs. They might claim Boris's scalp as part of the agreement, a price the Tories would pay to maintain control of Downing Street.
Davey would face an immediate vote of confidence if he did that and likely lose the leadership to say Layla Moran.
In any case the price of LD support would be single market membership or as close as possible to it which no Tory leader could agree for a generation as it would mean immediately loss of the Red Wall seats again and mass defections of Leave voters back to Reform UK and UKIP
I seriously doubt the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market membership unless things were looking economically glum. It would result in too much upheaval AGAIN.
The LDs whole core message at the moment is based on being anti Boris' 'hard Brexit' which is why they voted against his Brexit deal, of course they would refuse to support the Tories if there was anything less than single market alignment and it is absurd to suggest otherwise. They would lose almost all their voters to Labour and the Greens if they did not
Do we know what the LD's "core" national message is right now?
I voted Lib Dems on Thursday and there was no mention of "Brexit" on any literature.
It was a local election, based on the local LD message of no new housing anywhere at any time
I have followed the UK elections via the Danish media where Sturgeon is praised for wanting to help her country escape Boris Johnson and it seems the the British media are exagerrating Labour's poor performance - the real story is that having won some mayoral contests and Wales Labour's position is strengthened - that's a right wing Danish paper's take anyway. Not sure how close that is to the analysis of PBs finest!
On a map, Wales does look quite big.
On a map seems like the best way to experience Wales.
Well done! Eagerly awaiting my appointment. Hoping that I'll be able to book my second within a few weeks too.
Not to play one-up on you, Max, but I've had my 2nd jab now and am therefore pretty much immune. And what a boost it gives you. I feel so strong, so powerful. Gonna go out there soon and give all the people a big fat kiss. I'll kiss the men, I'll kiss the beautiful women, I'll kiss EVERYONE on the Finchley Road!
Butd not for two weeks, remember ... would hate to lose you.
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
Davey is not LD members.
If the Tories end up significantly north of 300 MPs but shy of a majority, then its entirely possible a Rishi or other led Tory Party could get at the very least Confidence from Davey's LDs. They might claim Boris's scalp as part of the agreement, a price the Tories would pay to maintain control of Downing Street.
Davey would face an immediate vote of confidence if he did that and likely lose the leadership to say Layla Moran.
In any case the price of LD support would be single market membership or as close as possible to it which no Tory leader could agree for a generation as it would mean immediately loss of the Red Wall seats again and mass defections of Leave voters back to Reform UK and UKIP
I seriously doubt the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market membership unless things were looking economically glum. It would result in too much upheaval AGAIN.
The LDs whole core message at the moment is based on being anti Boris' 'hard Brexit' which is why they voted against his Brexit deal, of course they would refuse to support the Tories if there was anything less than single market alignment and it is absurd to suggest otherwise. They would lose almost all their voters to Labour and the Greens if they did not
Do we know what the LD's "core" national message is right now?
I voted Lib Dems on Thursday and there was no mention of "Brexit" on any literature.
It was a local election, based on the local LD message of no new housing anywhere at any time
Yes. So I disagree with you. I don't think the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market alignment unless the economy was looking rocky. If the economy is booming, even the most ardent remainers are going to be talking about other things. You're discussing the last war.
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
Davey is not LD members.
If the Tories end up significantly north of 300 MPs but shy of a majority, then its entirely possible a Rishi or other led Tory Party could get at the very least Confidence from Davey's LDs. They might claim Boris's scalp as part of the agreement, a price the Tories would pay to maintain control of Downing Street.
Davey would face an immediate vote of confidence if he did that and likely lose the leadership to say Layla Moran.
In any case the price of LD support would be single market membership or as close as possible to it which no Tory leader could agree for a generation as it would mean immediately loss of the Red Wall seats again and mass defections of Leave voters back to Reform UK and UKIP
I seriously doubt the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market membership unless things were looking economically glum. It would result in too much upheaval AGAIN.
The LDs whole core message at the moment is based on being anti Boris' 'hard Brexit' which is why they voted against his Brexit deal, of course they would refuse to support the Tories if there was anything less than single market alignment and it is absurd to suggest otherwise. They would lose almost all their voters to Labour and the Greens if they did not
Do we know what the LD's "core" national message is right now?
I voted Lib Dems on Thursday and there was no mention of "Brexit" on any literature.
HYUFD seems to think the LDs are still led by Jo Swinson and they haven't moved on. 🤪
Lol Ben Bradley is now leader of Notts County Council Tbh I'm glad of this, hopefully he has some plans I feel the previous admin was stymied by having to listen to the numerous parochial independents - it's the main reason I voted Conservative (My seat remained Labour they do have some support in the red wall still ).
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
Davey is not LD members.
If the Tories end up significantly north of 300 MPs but shy of a majority, then its entirely possible a Rishi or other led Tory Party could get at the very least Confidence from Davey's LDs. They might claim Boris's scalp as part of the agreement, a price the Tories would pay to maintain control of Downing Street.
Davey would face an immediate vote of no confidence if he did that and likely lose the leadership to say Layla Moran.
In any case the price of LD support would be single market membership or as close as possible to it which no Tory leader could agree for a generation as it would mean immediate loss of the Red Wall seats again and mass defections of Leave voters back to Reform UK and UKIP
Had we had a hung parliament in 2019, it's just about imaginable that Corbyn's toxicity would have been enough to force the Lib Dems into some sort of arrangement with the Conservatives, but even that's a stretch.
As things stand, the centre-right slice of the old Lib Dem coalition of voters got assimilated in 2015. They're either still backing Boris, or they will have left and become active anti-Conservatives.
The price of reaching out to embrace UKIP/BXP party voters is to make any sort of deal towards the centre pretty much impossible. That might well be a price worth paying for the Conservatives. But they can't can't have their cake and eat it.
Indeed, though its worth noting that of course Boris has moved the Tories to the centre too, which is why they've been gaining seats across the country. People even talk about Boris adopting bits of Labour's previous manifestos. Outside the issue of Europe there's not that much that divides Boris's Tories from Davey's Lib Dems.
Not much at all, Mr Thompson...... Except that the Conseratives under Johnson are authoritarian, bordering on the dictatorial. While the Lib Dems are essentially liberal - even Liberal! - and believe that individuals should have the freedom to decide how they lead their lives - always respecting the freedom and rights of others to do the same.
Curiously, the Labour Party is also authoritarian, and so is the Green Party.
So there is a pretty clear distinction between the Lib Dems and all the rest. The distonguishing policies stem from that distinction.
As for the comment about "Boris adopting bits of Labour's previous manifestos", there is nothing serious there. It is all for show - as is everything that "Boris" says and does.
The neo-Conservative Party has no principles or morals.
You seem to be seriously clueless about success in modern politics.
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
Davey is not LD members.
If the Tories end up significantly north of 300 MPs but shy of a majority, then its entirely possible a Rishi or other led Tory Party could get at the very least Confidence from Davey's LDs. They might claim Boris's scalp as part of the agreement, a price the Tories would pay to maintain control of Downing Street.
Davey would face an immediate vote of confidence if he did that and likely lose the leadership to say Layla Moran.
In any case the price of LD support would be single market membership or as close as possible to it which no Tory leader could agree for a generation as it would mean immediately loss of the Red Wall seats again and mass defections of Leave voters back to Reform UK and UKIP
I seriously doubt the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market membership unless things were looking economically glum. It would result in too much upheaval AGAIN.
The LDs whole core message at the moment is based on being anti Boris' 'hard Brexit' which is why they voted against his Brexit deal, of course they would refuse to support the Tories if there was anything less than single market alignment and it is absurd to suggest otherwise. They would lose almost all their voters to Labour and the Greens if they did not
Do we know what the LD's "core" national message is right now?
I voted Lib Dems on Thursday and there was no mention of "Brexit" on any literature.
It was a local election, based on the local LD message of no new housing anywhere at any time
Yes. So I disagree with you. I don't think the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market alignment unless the economy was looking rocky. If the economy is booming, even the most ardent remainers are going to be talking about other things. You're discussing the last war.
LD voters nationally and LD members are ideologically anti Brexit and ideologically anti Boris' Brexit in particular, if they were not they would be voting Tory.
It does not matter what the economy looks like in 2024, they will not support the Tories unless they move to a softer Brexit deal with the EU at minimum
We are seeing falls in every category, as we have for a while.
While the numbers are falling, the elderly groups are still providing the bulk of the admissions and deaths. Either the vaccinations are not protecting universally against hospitalisation and death or the unvaccinated are bing hit - or both.
Without the differential data on vaccinated vs unvaccinated we simply don't know the answer.
Well given non of the vaccines claim to confer 100% protection, the immune systems of the extremely elderly are generally pretty shit, and eternal life is not on the table, it'd hardly surprising we still have a small, slightly declining stream of people dying. Frankly they have to die of something and so as long as it's just the very old and very feeble then vaccines are still doing their job.
"I look around - the open parking lot has been converted into a crematorium. An old woman is picking up ashes, there is still smoke on the pyre, but she can't wait, they need the space for more bodies coming in. If you are bringing a family member who died of Covid, you are not even allowed inside; drop off the body, leave, it will be cremated. That's it."
"The platform supports 12 pyres at one time. "Sir ji, all of them have to be burnt together." "Why?" I point to other platforms. "Use those?" "No", reply the workers, "because there are so many bodies coming in every day, we have developed a method. Burning all of them together ensures best utilization of space."
Indeed, though its worth noting that of course Boris has moved the Tories to the centre too, which is why they've been gaining seats across the country. People even talk about Boris adopting bits of Labour's previous manifestos. Outside the issue of Europe there's not that much that divides Boris's Tories from Davey's Lib Dems.
Not much at all, Mr Thompson...... Except that the Conseratives under Johnson are authoritarian, bordering on the dictatorial. While the Lib Dems are essentially liberal - even Liberal! - and believe that individuals should have the freedom to decide how they lead their lives - always respecting the freedom and rights of others to do the same.
Curiously, the Labour Party is also authoritarian, and so is the Green Party.
So there is a pretty clear distinction between the Lib Dems and all the rest. The distonguishing policies stem from that distinction.
As for the comment about "Boris adopting bits of Labour's previous manifestos", there is nothing serious there. It is all for show - as is everything that "Boris" says and does.
The neo-Conservative Party has no principles or morals.
If I truly believed this, then they'd have my vote. In fact, despite some rhetoric to this effect, I have never had the impression from LD actions or election campaigns that this is indeed a political philosophy that would have any practical impact on the electorate's personal freedoms in daily life.
In the Times Radio interview (Does anyone else follow them on twitter? Interesting stuff on there) John Curtice says Labour under Starmer have become too Conservative, and worried about upsetting voters, whilst Boris's Tories are radicals who are prepared to piss off their usual voters to get things done.
Seems fair to me, but the biggest change in politics in my lifetime, one that I am no closer to understanding now that at any other time, is that the Labour Party, in allowing Freedom of Movement to the A8, put the low paid jobs of those the party was set up to look out for out to tender to millions of people who had a huge incentive to undercut them.
Labour basically deregulated the Labour market in a way no right wing, free marketeer could have dreamed of getting away with, opening up gold mines for exploitative capitalists to the detriment of the working class, and their refusal to admit they made a mistake, or that it was any kind of big deal - let alone apologise - has led to Old Etonian, Bullingdon Boy Boris ripping through the northern heartlands like a bushfire.
Curtice is right that pretending it never happened is not an option for Labour. How on earth they put the bloke in charge who was trying to stop the Leave vote being respected beggars belief
I have linked to this a lot, but if anyone is interested in the Blue Labour theory for Brexit being a good thing, and why working class people aren't being racist, just trying to protect their income, this explains it quite well, albeit in slightly political wonk terms, from Maurice Glasman
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
Davey is not LD members.
If the Tories end up significantly north of 300 MPs but shy of a majority, then its entirely possible a Rishi or other led Tory Party could get at the very least Confidence from Davey's LDs. They might claim Boris's scalp as part of the agreement, a price the Tories would pay to maintain control of Downing Street.
Davey would face an immediate vote of confidence if he did that and likely lose the leadership to say Layla Moran.
In any case the price of LD support would be single market membership or as close as possible to it which no Tory leader could agree for a generation as it would mean immediately loss of the Red Wall seats again and mass defections of Leave voters back to Reform UK and UKIP
I seriously doubt the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market membership unless things were looking economically glum. It would result in too much upheaval AGAIN.
The LDs whole core message at the moment is based on being anti Boris' 'hard Brexit' which is why they voted against his Brexit deal, of course they would refuse to support the Tories if there was anything less than single market alignment and it is absurd to suggest otherwise. They would lose almost all their voters to Labour and the Greens if they did not
Do we know what the LD's "core" national message is right now?
I voted Lib Dems on Thursday and there was no mention of "Brexit" on any literature.
It was a local election, based on the local LD message of no new housing anywhere at any time
I cant say any party seems pro development when its locally specific. They all use the same language and messages.
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
Davey is not LD members.
If the Tories end up significantly north of 300 MPs but shy of a majority, then its entirely possible a Rishi or other led Tory Party could get at the very least Confidence from Davey's LDs. They might claim Boris's scalp as part of the agreement, a price the Tories would pay to maintain control of Downing Street.
Davey would face an immediate vote of confidence if he did that and likely lose the leadership to say Layla Moran.
In any case the price of LD support would be single market membership or as close as possible to it which no Tory leader could agree for a generation as it would mean immediately loss of the Red Wall seats again and mass defections of Leave voters back to Reform UK and UKIP
I seriously doubt the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market membership unless things were looking economically glum. It would result in too much upheaval AGAIN.
The LDs whole core message at the moment is based on being anti Boris' 'hard Brexit' which is why they voted against his Brexit deal, of course they would refuse to support the Tories if there was anything less than single market alignment and it is absurd to suggest otherwise. They would lose almost all their voters to Labour and the Greens if they did not
Do we know what the LD's "core" national message is right now?
I voted Lib Dems on Thursday and there was no mention of "Brexit" on any literature.
It was a local election, based on the local LD message of no new housing anywhere at any time
Yes. So I disagree with you. I don't think the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market alignment unless the economy was looking rocky. If the economy is booming, even the most ardent remainers are going to be talking about other things. You're discussing the last war.
LD voters nationally and LD members are ideologically anti Brexit and ideologically anti Boris' Brexit in particular, if they were not they would be voting Tory.
It does not matter what the economy looks like in 2024, they will not support the Tories unless they move to a softer Brexit deal with the EU at minimum
Davey isn't making a big deal about the EU at all now, why would he in 2024 if that's not what the election is fought on?
Maybe, just maybe, you should listen to Davey and not Jo "next PM" Swinson.
Well done! Eagerly awaiting my appointment. Hoping that I'll be able to book my second within a few weeks too.
Not to play one-up on you, Max, but I've had my 2nd jab now and am therefore pretty much immune. And what a boost it gives you. I feel so strong, so powerful. Gonna go out there soon and give all the people a big fat kiss. I'll kiss the men, I'll kiss the beautiful women, I'll kiss EVERYONE on the Finchley Road!
Poor Roger will need to move....I hear hartlepool is good
Given the topics being discussed here I misread that as Pol Roger.
Me too. Lol. We’ve got the Luxury Travel Jones BAD
I guess we could play around with definition of luxury travel. In recent years we have prioritised location and stayed in eco-lodges in prime spots. Eco lodges can be quite splendid. This can be a lot cheaper than luxury places to stay and it puts one closer to nature. Who spends a lot of time in their room anyway? This tactic has worked for us in Sri Lanka, Mexico and on safari in South Africa.
Yes, eco-lodges are often great. And luxury is often pointless
This place in Greenland is fucking sensational: an eco lodge next to one of the world’s most active glaciers. Quite cheap,(but you have to get there).
If you do sleep there you will probably be 50km from the next human (other than those in the lodge). It is decidedly eerie
Stayed at a lovely airbnb ecolodge in Utah. Nice little money maker for the owner.
Stayed in an ecolodge in the Panatanal, southern Brazil. You get woken at some ungodly hour by the vulnerable Hyacinth Macaws - a crazy blue giant of a parrot.
It wouldn't be so bad if you hadn't been out most of the night on the back of a truck, looking for eye-shine from things such as ocelot and tapirs - and even weirder critters.....
That sounds awesome, Right up my street, Which eco lodge in the Pantanal was it? You ever used Naturetrek?
The Pantanal ecolodge was Pousada Araras Pantanal Ecolodge, btw.
Well done! Eagerly awaiting my appointment. Hoping that I'll be able to book my second within a few weeks too.
Not to play one-up on you, Max, but I've had my 2nd jab now and am therefore pretty much immune. And what a boost it gives you. I feel so strong, so powerful. Gonna go out there soon and give all the people a big fat kiss. I'll kiss the men, I'll kiss the beautiful women, I'll kiss EVERYONE on the Finchley Road!
Careful, there's some very dodgy people on Finchley Road.
We are seeing falls in every category, as we have for a while.
While the numbers are falling, the elderly groups are still providing the bulk of the admissions and deaths. Either the vaccinations are not protecting universally against hospitalisation and death or the unvaccinated are bing hit - or both.
Without the differential data on vaccinated vs unvaccinated we simply don't know the answer.
I don't think there is data available, at lest not to the public, to back this up, but I think/suspect a reasonably large proportion of the deaths happening now, are of elderly ish people, who where infected many weeks or even months ago, (before vaccines where available to their age groups) that have been hanging on, on ventilators and in ICU units, and sometimes sadly they don't make it.
Well done! Eagerly awaiting my appointment. Hoping that I'll be able to book my second within a few weeks too.
Not to play one-up on you, Max, but I've had my 2nd jab now and am therefore pretty much immune. And what a boost it gives you. I feel so strong, so powerful. Gonna go out there soon and give all the people a big fat kiss. I'll kiss the men, I'll kiss the beautiful women, I'll kiss EVERYONE on the Finchley Road!
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
Davey is not LD members.
If the Tories end up significantly north of 300 MPs but shy of a majority, then its entirely possible a Rishi or other led Tory Party could get at the very least Confidence from Davey's LDs. They might claim Boris's scalp as part of the agreement, a price the Tories would pay to maintain control of Downing Street.
Davey would face an immediate vote of confidence if he did that and likely lose the leadership to say Layla Moran.
In any case the price of LD support would be single market membership or as close as possible to it which no Tory leader could agree for a generation as it would mean immediately loss of the Red Wall seats again and mass defections of Leave voters back to Reform UK and UKIP
I seriously doubt the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market membership unless things were looking economically glum. It would result in too much upheaval AGAIN.
The LDs whole core message at the moment is based on being anti Boris' 'hard Brexit' which is why they voted against his Brexit deal, of course they would refuse to support the Tories if there was anything less than single market alignment and it is absurd to suggest otherwise. They would lose almost all their voters to Labour and the Greens if they did not
Do we know what the LD's "core" national message is right now?
I voted Lib Dems on Thursday and there was no mention of "Brexit" on any literature.
It was a local election, based on the local LD message of no new housing anywhere at any time
Yes. So I disagree with you. I don't think the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market alignment unless the economy was looking rocky. If the economy is booming, even the most ardent remainers are going to be talking about other things. You're discussing the last war.
LD voters nationally and LD members are ideologically anti Brexit and ideologically anti Boris' Brexit in particular, if they were not they would be voting Tory.
It does not matter what the economy looks like in 2024, they will not support the Tories unless they move to a softer Brexit deal with the EU at minimum
Rubbish. Brexit is over. It's done. They may not support the Tories because they are anti Boris but that doesn't mean they want to reopen the can of worms.
If Brexit is by and large going well by 2024, there will be no demand for single market or whatever, the focus will be on other issues.
In the Times Radio interview (Does anyone else follow them on twitter? Interesting stuff on there) John Curtice says Labour under Starmer have become too Conservative, and worried about upsetting voters, whilst Boris's Tories are radicals who are prepared to piss off their usual voters to get things done.
Seems fair to me, but the biggest change in politics in my lifetime, one that I am no closer to understanding now that at any other time, is that the Labour Party, in allowing Freedom of Movement to the A8, put the low paid jobs of those the party was set up to look out for out to tender to millions of people who had a huge incentive to undercut them.
Labour basically deregulated the Labour market in a way no right wing, free marketeer could have dreamed of getting away with, opening up gold mines for exploitative capitalists to the detriment of the working class, and their refusal to admit they made a mistake, or that it was any kind of big deal - let alone apologise - has led to Old Etonian, Bullingdon Boy Boris ripping through the northern heartlands like a bushfire.
Curtice is right that pretending it never happened is not an option for Labour. How on earth they put the bloke in charge who was trying to stop the Leave vote being respected beggars belief
Because, not least, the membership *wanted* the Leave vote to be disrespected.
"Starmer's policy" is something of a misnomer, both because it wasn't a credible policy but also because it wasn't Starmer's. It came out of hours of tortuous compromise at Labour's conference and, predictably, looked exactly like it was: a committee-drawn rag-bag of half-ideas that didn't hang together but gave everyone enough to go away with for the time.
But the important thing was that Labour's membership as well as its vote was, by 2019, very heavily pro-Remain. Add to that the pressure the Lib Dems were exerting on the issue (beating Labour at the Euros, including in London), and you can see how it happened. I doubt that many of the people drafting the composite motion were from Bishop Auckland or Bolsover.
It was awkward for them no doubt. My main problem is with Blair for the original sin of allowing FOM from the A8. But Starmer was the Brexit Sec, he was the one announcing that it was an important point of principle that Lab would be campaigning for a 2nd Ref then for Remain if they got it, so to then make him the face of the Party and hope to get back the voters they lost over Brexit was pretty stupid in my opinion.
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
Davey is not LD members.
If the Tories end up significantly north of 300 MPs but shy of a majority, then its entirely possible a Rishi or other led Tory Party could get at the very least Confidence from Davey's LDs. They might claim Boris's scalp as part of the agreement, a price the Tories would pay to maintain control of Downing Street.
Davey would face an immediate vote of confidence if he did that and likely lose the leadership to say Layla Moran.
In any case the price of LD support would be single market membership or as close as possible to it which no Tory leader could agree for a generation as it would mean immediately loss of the Red Wall seats again and mass defections of Leave voters back to Reform UK and UKIP
I seriously doubt the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market membership unless things were looking economically glum. It would result in too much upheaval AGAIN.
The LDs whole core message at the moment is based on being anti Boris' 'hard Brexit' which is why they voted against his Brexit deal, of course they would refuse to support the Tories if there was anything less than single market alignment and it is absurd to suggest otherwise. They would lose almost all their voters to Labour and the Greens if they did not
Do we know what the LD's "core" national message is right now?
I voted Lib Dems on Thursday and there was no mention of "Brexit" on any literature.
It was a local election, based on the local LD message of no new housing anywhere at any time
Yes. So I disagree with you. I don't think the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market alignment unless the economy was looking rocky. If the economy is booming, even the most ardent remainers are going to be talking about other things. You're discussing the last war.
LD voters nationally and LD members are ideologically anti Brexit and ideologically anti Boris' Brexit in particular, if they were not they would be voting Tory.
It does not matter what the economy looks like in 2024, they will not support the Tories unless they move to a softer Brexit deal with the EU at minimum
Davey isn't making a big deal about the EU at all now, why would he in 2024 if that's not what the election is fought on?
Maybe, just maybe, you should listen to Davey and not Jo "next PM" Swinson.
Is Davey making a big deal about anything though? If he is, he's having trouble cutting through.
Lib Dems need a informal pact with Labour and the Greens, if they are to have a serious chance of taking Amersham & Chesham.
Keir would agree this, too, but only if he realised that it shows a determination to actually win the next election. Which he doesn’t.
2019 Results:
Con, 55.4 LDm, 26.3 Lab, 12.9 Grn, 5.5
To win, the Liberals need to pick up, say, 20% of the Tory vote and 50% of the Lab/Green vote.
V difficult.
Labour has to fight Chesham seriously. Obviously it has no chance of winning or even finishing second but there is a serious risk of it finishing fourth, behind the Greens. Given that Batley is far from a banker to hold, to be beaten by the Greens in C&A would just add to the narrative of a party going nowhere (or backwards).
By the way, there is another parliamentary by-election next week, in a seat Labour needs to win if it's serious about recovering in Scotland (they came within 200 votes in 2017).
In the Times Radio interview (Does anyone else follow them on twitter? Interesting stuff on there) John Curtice says Labour under Starmer have become too Conservative, and worried about upsetting voters, whilst Boris's Tories are radicals who are prepared to piss off their usual voters to get things done.
Seems fair to me, but the biggest change in politics in my lifetime, one that I am no closer to understanding now that at any other time, is that the Labour Party, in allowing Freedom of Movement to the A8, put the low paid jobs of those the party was set up to look out for out to tender to millions of people who had a huge incentive to undercut them.
Labour basically deregulated the Labour market in a way no right wing, free marketeer could have dreamed of getting away with, opening up gold mines for exploitative capitalists to the detriment of the working class, and their refusal to admit they made a mistake, or that it was any kind of big deal - let alone apologise - has led to Old Etonian, Bullingdon Boy Boris ripping through the northern heartlands like a bushfire.
Curtice is right that pretending it never happened is not an option for Labour. How on earth they put the bloke in charge who was trying to stop the Leave vote being respected beggars belief
Because, not least, the membership *wanted* the Leave vote to be disrespected.
"Starmer's policy" is something of a misnomer, both because it wasn't a credible policy but also because it wasn't Starmer's. It came out of hours of tortuous compromise at Labour's conference and, predictably, looked exactly like it was: a committee-drawn rag-bag of half-ideas that didn't hang together but gave everyone enough to go away with for the time.
But the important thing was that Labour's membership as well as its vote was, by 2019, very heavily pro-Remain. Add to that the pressure the Lib Dems were exerting on the issue (beating Labour at the Euros, including in London), and you can see how it happened. I doubt that many of the people drafting the composite motion were from Bishop Auckland or Bolsover.
Yep. 2 reasons for Labour's pivot to Ref2/Remain.
The membership demanded it. And they are the party.
The LDs. If Labour had not moved, the LDs would have been free to plough the Remain furrow alone, which risked carnage in Remainia for Labour. Possibly the LDs tickling them up for 2nd place in seats. This prospect could not be countenanced and had to be taken out of the equation.
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
Davey is not LD members.
If the Tories end up significantly north of 300 MPs but shy of a majority, then its entirely possible a Rishi or other led Tory Party could get at the very least Confidence from Davey's LDs. They might claim Boris's scalp as part of the agreement, a price the Tories would pay to maintain control of Downing Street.
Davey would face an immediate vote of confidence if he did that and likely lose the leadership to say Layla Moran.
In any case the price of LD support would be single market membership or as close as possible to it which no Tory leader could agree for a generation as it would mean immediately loss of the Red Wall seats again and mass defections of Leave voters back to Reform UK and UKIP
I seriously doubt the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market membership unless things were looking economically glum. It would result in too much upheaval AGAIN.
The LDs whole core message at the moment is based on being anti Boris' 'hard Brexit' which is why they voted against his Brexit deal, of course they would refuse to support the Tories if there was anything less than single market alignment and it is absurd to suggest otherwise. They would lose almost all their voters to Labour and the Greens if they did not
Do we know what the LD's "core" national message is right now?
I voted Lib Dems on Thursday and there was no mention of "Brexit" on any literature.
It was a local election, based on the local LD message of no new housing anywhere at any time
Yes. So I disagree with you. I don't think the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market alignment unless the economy was looking rocky. If the economy is booming, even the most ardent remainers are going to be talking about other things. You're discussing the last war.
LD voters nationally and LD members are ideologically anti Brexit and ideologically anti Boris' Brexit in particular, if they were not they would be voting Tory.
It does not matter what the economy looks like in 2024, they will not support the Tories unless they move to a softer Brexit deal with the EU at minimum
Rubbish. Brexit is over. It's done. They may not support the Tories because they are anti Boris but that doesn't mean they want to reopen the can of worms.
If Brexit is by and large going well by 2024, there will be no demand for single market or whatever, the focus will be on other issues.
Why are they anti Boris? As they are anti his Brexit Deal mainly.
That is the defining issue which differentiates the LDs from the Tories at the moment, opposition to a hard Brexit, they are not going to back down on that and it is ludicrous to suggest otherwise.
To stay in power in a hung parliament the Tories would have to win over the DUP again and try and remove the border in the Irish Sea, the LDs will not touch them with a bargepole while they remain a party of hard Brexit under Boris
Lib Dems need a informal pact with Labour and the Greens, if they are to have a serious chance of taking Amersham & Chesham.
Keir would agree this, too, but only if he realised that it shows a determination to actually win the next election. Which he doesn’t.
2019 Results:
Con, 55.4 LDm, 26.3 Lab, 12.9 Grn, 5.5
To win, the Liberals need to pick up, say, 20% of the Tory vote and 50% of the Lab/Green vote.
V difficult.
Labour has to fight Chesham seriously. Obviously it has no chance of winning or even finishing second but there is a serious risk of it finishing fourth, behind the Greens. Given that Batley is far from a banker to hold, to be beaten by the Greens in C&A would just add to the narrative of a party going nowhere (or backwards).
By the way, there is another parliamentary by-election next week, in a seat Labour needs to win if it's serious about recovering in Scotland (they came within 200 votes in 2017).
Most Labour voters in Chesham & Amersham have probably already decided to vote for the LDs.
Have green any chance of coming 2nd in this bye election.
A market without the Cons could be interesting.
I think it's unlikely: they have no local strength to draw on, and they don't have any great experience of performing in by-elections.
The party that outperforms is the one that can persuade as many "others" that they are going to outperform. I just can't see how the Greens manage that from fourth place in the locals.
Well done! Eagerly awaiting my appointment. Hoping that I'll be able to book my second within a few weeks too.
Not to play one-up on you, Max, but I've had my 2nd jab now and am therefore pretty much immune. And what a boost it gives you. I feel so strong, so powerful. Gonna go out there soon and give all the people a big fat kiss. I'll kiss the men, I'll kiss the beautiful women, I'll kiss EVERYONE on the Finchley Road!
But not for two weeks, remember ... would hate to lose you.
Well done! Eagerly awaiting my appointment. Hoping that I'll be able to book my second within a few weeks too.
Not to play one-up on you, Max, but I've had my 2nd jab now and am therefore pretty much immune. And what a boost it gives you. I feel so strong, so powerful. Gonna go out there soon and give all the people a big fat kiss. I'll kiss the men, I'll kiss the beautiful women, I'll kiss EVERYONE on the Finchley Road!
Careful, there's some very dodgy people on Finchley Road.
In the Times Radio interview (Does anyone else follow them on twitter? Interesting stuff on there) John Curtice says Labour under Starmer have become too Conservative, and worried about upsetting voters, whilst Boris's Tories are radicals who are prepared to piss off their usual voters to get things done.
Seems fair to me, but the biggest change in politics in my lifetime, one that I am no closer to understanding now that at any other time, is that the Labour Party, in allowing Freedom of Movement to the A8, put the low paid jobs of those the party was set up to look out for out to tender to millions of people who had a huge incentive to undercut them.
Labour basically deregulated the Labour market in a way no right wing, free marketeer could have dreamed of getting away with, opening up gold mines for exploitative capitalists to the detriment of the working class, and their refusal to admit they made a mistake, or that it was any kind of big deal - let alone apologise - has led to Old Etonian, Bullingdon Boy Boris ripping through the northern heartlands like a bushfire.
Curtice is right that pretending it never happened is not an option for Labour. How on earth they put the bloke in charge who was trying to stop the Leave vote being respected beggars belief
Much truth in this. Assume for a moment that voters are sorts of spectrums, which can be described in a number of ways: from richest to poorest, from PhD to no qualifications; Remain and Rejoin to Ardent Hard Brexit and so on.
To win general elections you need 40%+ of the spectrum to vote for you. More people cluster round the middle of the spectrum than anywhere else - that's a general law of maths and reality - we are mostly middling sorts.
The best way of getting 40%+ to vote for you it to be around the middle, and you can shift your centre a fair way either side of the middle depending on circumstances.
That's what Tories do. The hostility to them comes from some but not all of the ends of the spectrums: least and highest educated, most urban, richest and poorest, most remainy, the loony left the fascist right. None of it comes from the centre.
IMHO they have shifted focus to move their spectrum so as to gain a lot of WWC and to lose Putney and Cambridge, but still occupy a central piece of the spectrum - from Henley to Hartlepool. All their opponents occupy smaller and detached chunks.
Chesham & Amersham is the third-least deprived constituency in the country according to this table. CHB's backyard of NE Hampshire is number two, with Wokingham at number one.
Chesham & Amersham is the third-least deprived constituency in the country according to this table. CHB's backyard of NE Hampshire is number two, with Wokingham at number one.
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
Davey is not LD members.
If the Tories end up significantly north of 300 MPs but shy of a majority, then its entirely possible a Rishi or other led Tory Party could get at the very least Confidence from Davey's LDs. They might claim Boris's scalp as part of the agreement, a price the Tories would pay to maintain control of Downing Street.
Davey would face an immediate vote of confidence if he did that and likely lose the leadership to say Layla Moran.
In any case the price of LD support would be single market membership or as close as possible to it which no Tory leader could agree for a generation as it would mean immediately loss of the Red Wall seats again and mass defections of Leave voters back to Reform UK and UKIP
I seriously doubt the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market membership unless things were looking economically glum. It would result in too much upheaval AGAIN.
The LDs whole core message at the moment is based on being anti Boris' 'hard Brexit' which is why they voted against his Brexit deal, of course they would refuse to support the Tories if there was anything less than single market alignment and it is absurd to suggest otherwise. They would lose almost all their voters to Labour and the Greens if they did not
Do we know what the LD's "core" national message is right now?
I voted Lib Dems on Thursday and there was no mention of "Brexit" on any literature.
It was a local election, based on the local LD message of no new housing anywhere at any time
Yes. So I disagree with you. I don't think the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market alignment unless the economy was looking rocky. If the economy is booming, even the most ardent remainers are going to be talking about other things. You're discussing the last war.
LD voters nationally and LD members are ideologically anti Brexit and ideologically anti Boris' Brexit in particular, if they were not they would be voting Tory.
It does not matter what the economy looks like in 2024, they will not support the Tories unless they move to a softer Brexit deal with the EU at minimum
Rubbish. Brexit is over. It's done. They may not support the Tories because they are anti Boris but that doesn't mean they want to reopen the can of worms.
If Brexit is by and large going well by 2024, there will be no demand for single market or whatever, the focus will be on other issues.
Why are they anti Boris? As they are anti his Brexit Deal mainly.
That is the defining issue which differentiates the LDs from the Tories at the moment, opposition to a hard Brexit, they are not going to back down on that and it is ludicrous to suggest otherwise.
To stay in power in a hung parliament the Tories would have to win over the DUP again and try and remove the border in the Irish Sea, the LDs will not touch them with a bargepole while they remain a party of hard Brexit under Boris
Well I think you're wrong.
It's not just Brexit, it's everything surrounding Brexit and the political realignment that has occured. I think that once the immigration system has bedded in and trade has stabilised with the EU, no party will be proposing to rip it up and start again. It will be mere tinkering around the edges, and perhaps a change to the NI protocol, but that's it. Maybe we'll join Erasmus and have closer integration in some areas, but no wholesale change.
Of course if the economy is in the doldrums, then all bets are off.
Lib Dems need a informal pact with Labour and the Greens, if they are to have a serious chance of taking Amersham & Chesham.
Keir would agree this, too, but only if he realised that it shows a determination to actually win the next election. Which he doesn’t.
2019 Results:
Con, 55.4 LDm, 26.3 Lab, 12.9 Grn, 5.5
To win, the Liberals need to pick up, say, 20% of the Tory vote and 50% of the Lab/Green vote.
V difficult.
Labour has to fight Chesham seriously. Obviously it has no chance of winning or even finishing second but there is a serious risk of it finishing fourth, behind the Greens. Given that Batley is far from a banker to hold, to be beaten by the Greens in C&A would just add to the narrative of a party going nowhere (or backwards).
By the way, there is another parliamentary by-election next week, in a seat Labour needs to win if it's serious about recovering in Scotland (they came within 200 votes in 2017).
Surely they treat Chesham & Amersham like they did Newbury and Christchurch by elections in 1993 where they polled 2% in each.
Has there been any indication as to when any by election at Batley& SSpen might take place? I would be surprised if polling was before October or November.
Has there been any indication as to when any by election at Batley& SSpen might take place? I would be surprised if polling was before October or November.
A single dose of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine lowers a person’s risk of death from Covid-19 by 80 per cent - a figure that rises to 97 per cent for two shots of the Pfizer jab, new analysis shows.
The latest data, from Public Health England, further highlights the effectiveness of the UK’s two main vaccines in protecting against coronavirus. According to estimates, the jabs have already saved at least 10,000 lives since the beginning of the rollout.
Separate analysis from PHE also confirms that one dose of the AstraZeneca or Pfizer vaccine is highly effective in reducing the risk of hospitalisation, especially in those aged 70 and over.
PM confirms rule of 6 will apply indoors from next Monday, 13 can meet together outdoors, hotels and cinemas to reopen and travel overnight across Britain reallowed and bigger crowds at sporting events. Facemasks no longer to be needed in classrooms, all university students to return to in person teaching.
On topic, I think there's a difference in the voting behaviour of those who voted Remain for economic reasons as opposed to values reasons.
On the Tory side, particularly in the Shires, they tend more to the former and therefore, as the four horsemen of the apocalypse fail to materialise, it will tend to decrease in salience over time.
I think this is far less so for Labour who have (perhaps unintentionally) ending up radicalising their voting coalition over Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats still want to turn it up to eleven.
Yes, there's a tendency to assume everyone who voted Remain is as furious as Gina Miller. Many, if not most remainers, voted Remain as they saw it as the low-risk or most mainstream option, rather than because of any great cultural identity with the EU. That said, when we say the Leave/Remain divide is not just about Brexit, that's true of the shires as well as the red wall. There are a lot (and some of them are here) of broadly Cameroony Tories whose ambivalence to the current lot is not just (or even primarily) about Brexit. If the Lib Dems can stop banging on about transsexuals and siding with the French when we are in disputes with them, they should be well-placed to hoover up votes where Cameroonies were most common.
Seats which voted for Cameron in 2010 and 2015 but now have LD MPs eg Oxford West and Abingdon, Richmond Park, Kingston and Surbiton, Twickenham, Bath, St Albans etc tend to be amongst the wealthiest, most educated and poshest in the country.
They voted Remain largely for economic reasons and are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (ie the opposite of Northern and Midlands Redwall seats). As the Tories increasingly move to RedWall values they have left a gap in other similar Cameroon Remain seats like Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, Guildford, Henley, Esher and Walton as last week's results showed and they are where the LDs will be focusing on
Doesn't help the Labour Party of course
It does as the LDs are more likely to back Starmer's Labour Party over Boris' Tories if 2024 produces a hung parliament
That's what people said in 2009.
If LD seats are in Cameroon areas, then even in a Hung Parliament it might end up depending upon the results like it did in 2010. Especially now Brexit won't be an issue anymore.
Davey was comfortable in the Coalition.
LD voters and LD members want to return to the single market or as closely aligned to it as possible, there is no prospect of that under Boris who LDs hate in a way they did not hate Cameron, the LDs will back Labour now Corbyn has gone whoever has most seats.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
Davey is not LD members.
If the Tories end up significantly north of 300 MPs but shy of a majority, then its entirely possible a Rishi or other led Tory Party could get at the very least Confidence from Davey's LDs. They might claim Boris's scalp as part of the agreement, a price the Tories would pay to maintain control of Downing Street.
Davey would face an immediate vote of confidence if he did that and likely lose the leadership to say Layla Moran.
In any case the price of LD support would be single market membership or as close as possible to it which no Tory leader could agree for a generation as it would mean immediately loss of the Red Wall seats again and mass defections of Leave voters back to Reform UK and UKIP
I seriously doubt the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market membership unless things were looking economically glum. It would result in too much upheaval AGAIN.
The LDs whole core message at the moment is based on being anti Boris' 'hard Brexit' which is why they voted against his Brexit deal, of course they would refuse to support the Tories if there was anything less than single market alignment and it is absurd to suggest otherwise. They would lose almost all their voters to Labour and the Greens if they did not
Do we know what the LD's "core" national message is right now?
I voted Lib Dems on Thursday and there was no mention of "Brexit" on any literature.
It was a local election, based on the local LD message of no new housing anywhere at any time
Yes. So I disagree with you. I don't think the LDs would arbitrarily ask for single market alignment unless the economy was looking rocky. If the economy is booming, even the most ardent remainers are going to be talking about other things. You're discussing the last war.
LD voters nationally and LD members are ideologically anti Brexit and ideologically anti Boris' Brexit in particular, if they were not they would be voting Tory.
It does not matter what the economy looks like in 2024, they will not support the Tories unless they move to a softer Brexit deal with the EU at minimum
Rubbish. Brexit is over. It's done. They may not support the Tories because they are anti Boris but that doesn't mean they want to reopen the can of worms.
If Brexit is by and large going well by 2024, there will be no demand for single market or whatever, the focus will be on other issues.
Why are they anti Boris? As they are anti his Brexit Deal mainly.
That is the defining issue which differentiates the LDs from the Tories at the moment, opposition to a hard Brexit, they are not going to back down on that and it is ludicrous to suggest otherwise.
To stay in power in a hung parliament the Tories would have to win over the DUP again and try and remove the border in the Irish Sea, the LDs will not touch them with a bargepole while they remain a party of hard Brexit under Boris
Well I think you're wrong.
It's not just Brexit, it's everything surrounding Brexit and the political realignment that has occured. I think that once the immigration system has bedded in and trade has stabilised with the EU, no party will be proposing to rip it up and start again. It will be mere tinkering around the edges, and perhaps a change to the NI protocol, but that's it. Maybe we'll join Erasmus and have closer integration in some areas, but no wholesale change.
Of course if the economy is in the doldrums, then all bets are off.
So on that basis you think the LDs will effectively merge themselves into the Tories too then
Comments
"In Hyderabad, a child lost her grandparents and within a few hours, her mother due to Covid-19. Despite searches and calls to relatives, no one wanted to take the child home. They feared that she may be infected too. Last week, a 20-year-old girl and an 18-year-old boy were reportedly planning to end their lives after their parents died of Covid-19, the Delhi police told a newspaper. The siblings were rescued and connected with their relatives following a counseling session. A three-day-old baby girl and a six-month-old baby in Delhi also lost their parents to the virus."
https://www.boomlive.in/explainers/covid-orphan-children-how-to-help-13011
But more importantly (apart from the numbers), Labour was tired, fractious and losing seats whereas the Tories had just gained a load, which not only was a positive point when it came to 'mandate' but also meant they were in the mood for compromise if it meant a shot at office. Now, whether Labour's yet in that mindset remains to be seen but the Conservatives certainly no longer are.
The Tories have to win another majority or enough seats to stay in government with the DUP in 2024 to remain in office
Awful. Such a wonderful, friendly country, and the people have already endured so much - the earthquake.....
Seems fair to me, but the biggest change in politics in my lifetime, one that I am no closer to understanding now that at any other time, is that the Labour Party, in allowing Freedom of Movement to the A8, put the low paid jobs of those the party was set up to look out for out to tender to millions of people who had a huge incentive to undercut them.
Labour basically deregulated the Labour market in a way no right wing, free marketeer could have dreamed of getting away with, opening up gold mines for exploitative capitalists to the detriment of the working class, and their refusal to admit they made a mistake, or that it was any kind of big deal - let alone apologise - has led to Old Etonian, Bullingdon Boy Boris ripping through the northern heartlands like a bushfire.
Curtice is right that pretending it never happened is not an option for Labour. How on earth they put the bloke in charge who was trying to stop the Leave vote being respected beggars belief
I know 2017 went catastrophically wrong for FN (as it still was) but the winning president's party usually gets a huge boost in the parliamentary one shortly after as the honeymoon effect works for them, while other parties struggle with defeat debates and recrimination, and differential motivation among both voters and activists.
If the 2010 General Election results in say 315 for the Tories, 230 Labour, 50 SNP, 30 Lib Dems and 18 NI with 7 others across Greens, PC, Speaker etc - then the Tories continuing with confidence from the Lib Dems might be more viable than any other alternative.
Might be going to the Mistley Thorn in July btw
I'll stop saying thanks individually now as it must be pretty annoying, sorry.
* mostly on the number of cremations as it is easiest to count
If the reproductive rate is higher than we are stopping via vaccine, of course there will be community transmission.
If the Tories end up significantly north of 300 MPs but shy of a majority, then its entirely possible a Rishi or other led Tory Party could get at the very least Confidence from Davey's LDs. They might claim Boris's scalp as part of the agreement, a price the Tories would pay to maintain control of Downing Street.
When we lap Wednesday reported deaths should be a big decline from the bank holidat catch up last week, now solidly in to single digits each day by date of occurance.
I would prefer that Britain was still a member of the EU but I'm not going to vote based on that as there's no prospect of that happening unless everything goes to shit. I can imagine a lot of people are similar.
Not everything is about Brexit.
I've seen various estimates that say they are under-reporting cases and deaths by anything between two and ten times
The overload of cremations - which can be counted - suggest 4 or 5 times the stated figures, in some cities (worse in others). So let's say 5
That means, in reality, around 1.5m new cases are being racked up every day, and about 20,000 are dying
I decided against having any more (it was a strong possibility) when I realised I am now so old I can barely run
In any case the price of LD support would be single market membership or as close as possible to it which no Tory leader could agree for a generation as it would mean immediate loss of the Red Wall seats again and mass defections of Leave voters back to Reform UK and UKIP
A market without the Cons could be interesting.
We are seeing falls in every category, as we have for a while.
While the numbers are falling, the elderly groups are still providing the bulk of the admissions and deaths. Either the vaccinations are not protecting universally against hospitalisation and death or the unvaccinated are bing hit - or both.
Without the differential data on vaccinated vs unvaccinated we simply don't know the answer.
This is the link to COVID admitions to hospital which have been going down since early Jan.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare
"Starmer's policy" is something of a misnomer, both because it wasn't a credible policy but also because it wasn't Starmer's. It came out of hours of tortuous compromise at Labour's conference and, predictably, looked exactly like it was: a committee-drawn rag-bag of half-ideas that didn't hang together but gave everyone enough to go away with for the time.
But the important thing was that Labour's membership as well as its vote was, by 2019, very heavily pro-Remain. Add to that the pressure the Lib Dems were exerting on the issue (beating Labour at the Euros, including in London), and you can see how it happened. I doubt that many of the people drafting the composite motion were from Bishop Auckland or Bolsover.
Curiously, the Labour Party is also authoritarian, and so is the Green Party.
So there is a pretty clear distinction between the Lib Dems and all the rest. The distonguishing policies stem from that distinction.
As for the comment about "Boris adopting bits of Labour's previous manifestos", there is nothing serious there. It is all for show - as is everything that "Boris" says and does.
The neo-Conservative Party has no principles or morals.
Plus it is an overwhelming human catastrophe, in the making. Potentially the worst I have seen in my lifetime - BUT we have the means to end it, with vaccines
I voted Lib Dems on Thursday and there was no mention of "Brexit" on any literature.
...Kidding!
Keir would agree this, too, but only if he realised that it shows a determination to actually win the next election. Which he doesn’t.
2019 Results:
Con, 55.4
LDm, 26.3
Lab, 12.9
Grn, 5.5
To win, the Liberals need to pick up, say, 20% of the Tory vote and 50% of the Lab/Green vote.
V difficult.
Tbh I'm glad of this, hopefully he has some plans I feel the previous admin was stymied by having to listen to the numerous parochial independents - it's the main reason I voted Conservative (My seat remained Labour they do have some support in the red wall still
As things stand, the centre-right slice of the old Lib Dem coalition of voters got assimilated in 2015. They're either still backing Boris, or they will have left and become active anti-Conservatives.
The price of reaching out to embrace UKIP/BXP party voters is to make any sort of deal towards the centre pretty much impossible. That might well be a price worth paying for the Conservatives. But they can't can't have their cake and eat it.
It does not matter what the economy looks like in 2024, they will not support the Tories unless they move to a softer Brexit deal with the EU at minimum
"I look around - the open parking lot has been converted into a crematorium. An old woman is picking up ashes, there is still smoke on the pyre, but she can't wait, they need the space for more bodies coming in. If you are bringing a family member who died of Covid, you are not even allowed inside; drop off the body, leave, it will be cremated. That's it."
"The platform supports 12 pyres at one time. "Sir ji, all of them have to be burnt together." "Why?" I point to other platforms. "Use those?" "No", reply the workers, "because there are so many bodies coming in every day, we have developed a method. Burning all of them together ensures best utilization of space."
https://www.ndtv.com/blog/blog-what-it-took-to-cremate-my-father-in-delhi-2438818
I have linked to this a lot, but if anyone is interested in the Blue Labour theory for Brexit being a good thing, and why working class people aren't being racist, just trying to protect their income, this explains it quite well, albeit in slightly political wonk terms, from Maurice Glasman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa5vsa1FLKY
Maybe, just maybe, you should listen to Davey and not Jo "next PM" Swinson.
If Brexit is by and large going well by 2024, there will be no demand for single market or whatever, the focus will be on other issues.
By the way, there is another parliamentary by-election next week, in a seat Labour needs to win if it's serious about recovering in Scotland (they came within 200 votes in 2017).
The membership demanded it. And they are the party.
The LDs. If Labour had not moved, the LDs would have been free to plough the Remain furrow alone, which risked carnage in Remainia for Labour. Possibly the LDs tickling them up for 2nd place in seats. This prospect could not be countenanced and had to be taken out of the equation.
That is the defining issue which differentiates the LDs from the Tories at the moment, opposition to a hard Brexit, they are not going to back down on that and it is ludicrous to suggest otherwise.
To stay in power in a hung parliament the Tories would have to win over the DUP again and try and remove the border in the Irish Sea, the LDs will not touch them with a bargepole while they remain a party of hard Brexit under Boris
The party that outperforms is the one that can persuade as many "others" that they are going to outperform. I just can't see how the Greens manage that from fourth place in the locals.
To win general elections you need 40%+ of the spectrum to vote for you. More people cluster round the middle of the spectrum than anywhere else - that's a general law of maths and reality - we are mostly middling sorts.
The best way of getting 40%+ to vote for you it to be around the middle, and you can shift your centre a fair way either side of the middle depending on circumstances.
That's what Tories do. The hostility to them comes from some but not all of the ends of the spectrums: least and highest educated, most urban, richest and poorest, most remainy, the loony left the fascist right. None of it comes from the centre.
IMHO they have shifted focus to move their spectrum so as to gain a lot of WWC and to lose Putney and Cambridge, but still occupy a central piece of the spectrum - from Henley to Hartlepool. All their opponents occupy smaller and detached chunks.
http://automaticknowledge.org/images/uk-deprivation-constituency-2021-v1-border.png
See Cambridge turning red ..
It's not just Brexit, it's everything surrounding Brexit and the political realignment that has occured. I think that once the immigration system has bedded in and trade has stabilised with the EU, no party will be proposing to rip it up and start again. It will be mere tinkering around the edges, and perhaps a change to the NI protocol, but that's it. Maybe we'll join Erasmus and have closer integration in some areas, but no wholesale change.
Of course if the economy is in the doldrums, then all bets are off.
The latest data, from Public Health England, further highlights the effectiveness of the UK’s two main vaccines in protecting against coronavirus. According to estimates, the jabs have already saved at least 10,000 lives since the beginning of the rollout.
Separate analysis from PHE also confirms that one dose of the AstraZeneca or Pfizer vaccine is highly effective in reducing the risk of hospitalisation, especially in those aged 70 and over.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/covid-astrazeneca-oxford-vaccine-pfizer-b1845062.html
”@pritipatel
On this day in 1940, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister for the first time. A truly great Briton – and a former Home Secretary too.”
https://twitter.com/pritipatel/status/1391783773788950530
Redfield & Wilton Strategies
@RedfieldWilton
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Westminster Voting Intention (10 May):
Conservative 45% (+5)
Labour 34% (-4)
Liberal Democrat 8% (+1)
Scottish National Party 4% (–)
Green 5% (–)
Reform UK 2% (-1)
Changes +/- 3 May