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Labour has a bigger problem in seeking power than Scotland: the Midlands…. – politicalbetting.com
Labour has a bigger problem in seeking power than Scotland: the Midlands…. – politicalbetting.com
It is often said that Labour has no route to Downing Street without retrieving its former solid bloc of seats north of the border. Or winning back those “Red Wall” seats in the north-west and north-east of England. What is less often remarked upon is that it will not be enough – unless it can also do something about the Midlands.
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Edit: Yes indeed!
(Apols to TissuePrice if you're lurking)
Europe Elects
@EuropeElects
Turkey, Gezici poll:
Presidential election, run-off scenario:
Kılıçdaroğlu (CHP-S&D): 51%
Erdoğan (AKP~NI): 49%
Fieldwork: May 2021
Sample size: 2,280
https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1394197096518066176
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_2019_Istanbul_mayoral_election
Ok, it didn't work so systems and voters were strong enough, but felt like a tester.
He'll cheat to stay in power.
Is this simply what you would expect when one party is so far ahead of another in the national vote, or has the Labour vote become so concentrated in the big cities, and therefore inefficient, that there's an actual difference?
Maybe Labour's problem is just to become more popular, and the electoral geography will look after itself.
If labour become more popular, geography will matter much less. It just so happens that Labour's diehard vote is now metropolitan university seats, rather than northern and midland coalfields.
West Midlands constituencies
2010
Con 39.5 - 30.6 Lan
2015
Con 41.8 - 32.9 Lab
2017
Con 49.1 - 42.6 :Lab
2019
Con 53.5 - 33.9 Lab
There's something about that header image that speaks to me on a deep level. Not sure why though.
The Tories won Nuneaton in the 80's by 5,000 or so. It is now 13,500.
So this level of shift is unprecedented.
Not after the way she handled the 2017 campaign.
Bristol West - Tories lost by 1,493 votes in 1997. In 2019 they lost by 38,000 votes.
https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2021/05/16/the-case-for-labour-making-an-electoral-pact/
The 2019 Labour vote is much more concentrated than the 2005 Con vote.
Holiday 'police' to knock on your door: As hopes rise for full freedom in June, Priti Patel reveals plans for up to 10,000 quarantine checks EVERY day to make sure Britons returning from abroad are in isolation
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9597685/Priti-Patel-reveals-plans-10-000-quarantine-checks-day.html
Broadly centre left. Anti-Islam.
Now the Conservatives party has changed, as has Labour and as have the villages themselves. And now they may well be Conservative majority seats.
Other seats have gone the other way. Cambridge used to be a Conservative seat. Indeed, many University seats were Conservative.
And in political positioning too.
There are 70 SEXTILLION stars in the observable universe, =
70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
And we might be in one of an infinite number of parallel universes. Makes my recent Camden weather complaints looks a bit trivial, TBH
Been saying this for a while. For all the banging on about "the North", it is the most politically heterogeneous. Some of it swinging wildly blue, other areas barely moving at all.
The Midlands is all one way traffic. Been going that way for some time now. Shows no sign of reversing.
Partly the areas changed- big family houses were converted into flats, so a different demographic lived there. Partly, there has been a drift of educated urbanites away from the Conservatives for decades; Johnson just out rocket boosters under it.
Take Cambridge. A Conservative seat until 1992, and only just lost then. Now there aren't even really any council wards where they are in a competitive second place.
Everywhere we look, or solar system looks very ordinary.
So maybe life is ordinary too? If not, and we are it - what a fucking waste of a Universe.
The Tories have hoovered up the NOTA it seems.
It just replaced them with an ever bigger influx of former Labour voters.
You're on the ball now you aren't spending every moment revising.
The Wikipedia page on the Fermi Paradox ("where is everyone?") is absolute genius. Superbly informative, balanced, referenced, updated. The internet was made for shit like this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57176858
"The government has announced the biggest shake-up in the UK's railways since privatisation in the mid-1990s. The reform plan will see the creation of a new state-owned body, Great British Railways (GBR), which will own and manage rail infrastructure."
A traveller can return as one of three states:
1) No covid, no problem
2) With a covid strain unresistant to vaccines, which is no problem.
3) With a covid strain that largely escapes vaccines, which is a problem.
Under current rules the isolation period is shorter than the incubation period, and naturally porous via family members/ some people not isolating properly so no matter how many rona police there are some will escape the net. Lets be *extremely* generous and assume that quarantine/test & release prevents 95% of cases imported going on to infect someone else vs every single imported case infecting at least 1 other person without quarantine.
R of Kentish/Indian Covid seems to be somewhere between 3-6 in a population that largely isn't social distancing and doesn't have rules in place.
Lets give a rough estimate of 1m people entering and leaving the country every week this summer (which is low), and say 0.05% have vaccine resistant COVID (500 cases per week), using the assumptions above all bar 25 of the cases imported per week would be stopped under current rules, only issue is that in one generation those 25 cases (among a vulnerable population) would have a R of ~4/5 (generation 1: 113, generation 2: 506), so at most quarantine buys us 20 days head start.
If a vaccine resistant strain emerges it *will* find it's way in unless we shut our borders completely, so the current isolation rules seem to impose maximum cost while giving us extremely limited benefits.
GLA 2021 & Labour doesn't even control the council. Oh.
Regular readers will be delighted to know I was asked to self-define my gender, whether it was the same at birth and my preferred pronouns.
Although you don't want to work for those woke fascists anyway.
SIGH
Pity they aren't so hot on the GDPR. Asked for the names, addresses, phone number and emails of referees at the application stage.
I didn't know.
If a problem variant comes in then its better to have those cases at a low number that can be suppressed and not simply (at this stage) give up and let it rip.
In March 2020 we were struggling to do thousands of tests per day, now we can do a million plus tests per day. If limited outbreaks occur then surge testing etc can squish it, which isn't the case if its just letting it run wild without a care. 20 days head start is absolutely massive.
Makes decent sense on the face of it. I would guess that some lines might continue to be run directly by the state (as NI and LNER are currently).
It’s a massive roll back from the idiocy of franchising and renationalisation of sorts. Will be popular.