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David Cameron: Liberal Democrat Slayer – politicalbetting.com
David Cameron: Liberal Democrat Slayer – politicalbetting.com
For those of us who were Conservative activists in the 1990s and the early 2000s we were often in awe of the Liberal Democrat campaigning efforts. The Liberal Democrat activists would enter an area, secure a foothold on the local council, eventually take control of the council, and in plenty of these areas take the parliamentary seat shortly thereafter.
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The fact that they spent around a quarter of the campaign talking about transsexuals didn't help in portraying them as the sensible party either.
I mean, what are the Lib Dems for, if they can’t attract the NIMBYs?
Although they occasionally come out with loopy ideas they're largely untainted. Unlike the LibDems who betrayed students.
The latter is important to mention. An entire generation will never vote LibDem after what Clegg did to them over student fees.
There will be a case rise, not merely because of the Indian variant but because of unlocking. But the severity of the illness will be minimal because of our vaccination programme, although the imperative is to get your second jab.
If they ride this one out and the vaccines beat the virus then this kind of 18 point opinion poll lead for the tories won't go away.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/05/22/voting-intention-con-46-lab-28-19-20-may
Surely with all the singing and songwriting talent in the UK, the BBC can find an established artist to put together a singalong hit? Bonus points for long skirts that get torn off!
The best outcome for Starmer is if no one watches this.
If they are that concerned, they would be better off with a warning in advance that "If you are affected by issues of domestic abuse/cruelty to animals/whatever deeply unpleasant aspect of human nature we are televising today - then just don't watch this. Trust us, it is not for you. It will do your head in....switch off and read a book instead."
Plus, the LibDems got found out as being rather shit at politics.
F1: shade wary of Leclerc-specific bets until the gearbox is definitively cleared up. If it's not, a penalty is still possible, late as it is.
As of 19:25 last night, he was still on pole. Official updates will appear at:
https://www.fia.com/documents/season/season-2021-1108/championships/fia-formula-one-world-championship-14
I’m looking to bet on Hamilton. He’s likely to be priced well, and I think he will save his tyres to go very long in the first stint while praying for a safety car.
Good morning, everyone.
Cheers for the link.
I think the RB and Merc cars have better race pace than Ferrari, so if Leclerc gets away first there could be a long train behind him.
Betting PostF1: heroically backed, half a stake each, more than 16.5 classified finishers at 2.1 and more than 17.5 classified finishers at 2.75.
https://enormo-haddock.blogspot.com/2021/05/monaco-pre-race-2021.html
Therefore they have lost most centre right and/or Brexity interest - they are not on the possibles list.
And they have joined the internal fight for votes within a split centre left. Yesterdays poll gave Lab 28, G/LD 16. An OK result (44%) if it is all for one party; 1983 territory if split 3 ways.
Reorganisation of centre left politics is essential.
Otherwise they will be a sad rabble of single interest groups without coherence.
It is the Conservative-Labour-Green Party who are the profligate ones.
The Liberal Democrats normally have their manifesto thoroughly examined by some economic experts before each general election.
When the present Conservative bubble finally bursts, people will be looking for responsible government once again.
"Bollocks to Brexit" may have been a bit juvenile as a slogan, but it was the best LD performance in terms of popular vote in 3 General elections.
The reason there are 3 opposition parties rather than one is that they stand for different things. The LD vote in 2019 was hard core Remainerism, the Green vote now a rejection of Starmerism etc.
As a floating voter it is extremely off putting when party members say the reason for the party is an ideas farm for Labour and the Tories to copy rather than an aspiration for power, even shared power.
In an astonishing series of tweets on Saturday just days before he is due to appear before a Commons inquiry, the prime minister’s former adviser in effect accused the health secretary, Matt Hancock, of lying about the “herd immunity” plan and talking “bullshit” when he denied it to the media.
Cummings also claimed that if “competent” people had been in charge of Covid strategy in its early stages, then it may have been possible to avoid the first lockdown, and certainly the second and third would not have been needed.
The second bit, well wasn't Cummings as the link between SAGE and the cabinet/PM one of the people in charge. If he failed to convince from that role perhaps he should consider how competent he really is himself.
Did we make mistakes? Yes
Was the PM suited to this type of crisis? No
Could we really have avoided any lockdown? Only with extreme good luck
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/22/dominic-cummings-claims-ministers-backed-herd-immunity-against-covid?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
You can see that happening, perhaps, if the Conservatives succeed in reducing Labour to 150 seats and nailing it up inside the urban cores, and if the Lib Dems manage a substantial revival in the South - but we're a long way from that point at the moment.
Labour remains, for the time being, the overwhelmingly dominant centre-left party in England and Wales. Unless or until that changes, they'll be all in favour of digging in and waiting for the pendulum to swing back towards them, as has happened at regular intervals since the War.
About 2.5m cannabis users spending about £500 per year spend £1.25bn.
Govt take half in tax raises just over £600m
Add in other drugs, which would be more controversial perhaps up to £1bn govt revenue.
A quick google says Holland brings in e400-600m from drugs tax so I am probably too low, if in the right order of magnitude although there is obviously a lot of drugs tourism to Amsterdam. Perhaps £2bn for the UK.
The impact in improved efficiency on policing and the justice system should be worth several times the tax revenue, as well as improving people's lives by reducing crime.
https://twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1396364948520022016
https://twitter.com/danbloom1/status/1396207447547711488
Re: Italy - i distinctly recall "no10 briefings" (AKA Cummings) to newspapers in early/mid March 2020 arguing that Italy had it bad for all sorts of reasons that simply didn't apply to the UK.
It made them look ridiculous. Every time they popped up with some insane uttering about how shit the government was and how they would have done it better if they were the government it was just really weird.
Defending Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision not to follow other European countries by closing schools and banning mass gatherings, Patrick Vallance said it was the government’s aim to “reduce the peak of the epidemic, pull it down and broaden it” while protecting the elderly and vulnerable.
But Sir Patrick told Sky News that experts estimated that about 60 per cent of the UK’s 66m population would have to contract coronavirus in order for society to build up immunity.
“Communities will become immune to it and that’s going to be an important part of controlling this longer term,” he said. “About 60 per cent is the sort of figure you need to get herd immunity.”
In another interview with the BBC, Sir Patrick said: “If you suppress something very, very hard, when you release those measures it bounces back and it bounces back at the wrong time.”
He added: “Our aim is to try to reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely; also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission, at the same time we protect those who are most vulnerable to it.”
https://www.ft.com/content/38a81588-6508-11ea-b3f3-fe4680ea68b5
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-populist-pm-takes-non-populist-approach-when-it-comes-to-pandemics-11956657 https://twitter.com/BethRigby/status/1396367422689628160/photo/1
We had threads upon threads discussing it here before the handbrake abrupt about turn and the columnists sudden memory holing.
Of course there was one MP who held their seat against a lot of the odds - Nick Clegg - who did so on the back of massive tactical voting from Con voters.
There is still an internationalist-minded cohort of Tory MPs who don’t like what these [aid] cuts say about the values of their party and who will rebel if they get the opportunity. In a recent Commons debate, the Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell invited the chancellor to think about the “very savage” damage being done to both “the poorest people in the world” and “Britain’s reputation”.
It would take 44 Conservative MPs combining with the opposition parties to defeat the government. Remarks one of the Tory dissenters: “We’ve probably got that number and the government knows we’ve probably got that number, which is why they are running shy of a vote.”
Ministers are swerving a reckoning in parliament by arguing that they are not changing the target, but choosing to miss it for an unspecified amount of time, a shameless exercise in semantics. The case that the government is behaving unlawfully could be taken to court, but it would likely take at least a year to secure a verdict. The Tory rebels are hoping to find a piece of legislation to which they can attach an amendment designed to force a government retreat. “We are lying in wait for an amendment,” says one of them.
Which meant to keep the rate of people who got ill low enough to avoid overwhelming the NHS while the virus progressed through the population.
You still get people asking “when did that change?”
"During this time the highest number of transmission chains were introduced from Spain (33%), France (29%), and then Italy (12%) – with China accounting for only 0.4% of imports."
Spain, Italy and France was primarily where our first wave came from.
Then Belgium, Netherland, Ireland, Switzerland, US.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52993734
What they hadn’t factored in was the critical load on ICUs, which would have been overwhelmed, with people left to die untreated. For some reason what was going on in Bergamo at that very moment was an insufficient clue.
And we all know of course that he’s a thoroughly untrustworthy liar.
Not so great when they caught the car. And then got reversed over by the car....
*No new build houses spoiling your view
*Pension triple lock (which we created, remember?) to continue forever
*Refugees welcome! (But not here, somewhere like Haringey or Rochdale where they'll blend in and you won't have to look at or smell them - out of sight is out of mind, after all)
*No new build houses, which would attract inappropriate poor people to the area
*Lovely clean, green electricity (from solar farms and windmills, neither of which will be built in nice places like this)
*No tax rises for nice middle class people. We've worked out that we can extract £237bn per year from banks, corporations, but mostly out of Amazon
*Trans women are women (though if you don't believe that we'll just tut disapprovingly, rather than fire-bombing your house like those nasty lefties)
*NO NEW BUILD HOUSES, EVER!!!
It could be a thing. The Lib Dems have been moribund for the last decade, so they've not much left to lose by trying.
But anything he says in front of the committee will be a lie. Because that’s how he operates. It helps that he’s capable of deluding himself into believing his lies, so to the uninitiated he sounds convincing.
That doesn’t mean others will be telling the truth, merely that his evidence will be totally valueless in establishing what really happened.
Often forgotten is that one of the LibDem slogans for fighting the 2010 GE was “no more broken promises”.
Canada is the test for that.
So unless it can be confirmed internally, it’s still worthless.
Funny, possibly, but worthless.
First, as the chart on this page about 3/4 of the way down shows:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7529/
The Lib Dems held steady in terms of councillors when Cameron was elected - between 2006 and 2010, Conservative gains came from Labour. They only started to collapse after they entered government in 2010.
Second, as the article notes, the Lib Dems haven't really recovered since Cameron left. If he were the explanation, you'd expect some uptick in 2016 or 2017. TMay was very different from David Cameron, but they failed to make any headway against her.
Third, it is national elections that count, not local ones, in this country, and the Lib Dem performance in 2010 was the same as in 2005 - why would that be if Cameron were so toxic to the Lib Dems?
Fourth, all the evidence shows that Cameron was a poor performer electorally. He couldn't win a majority against Gordon Brown after the latter had completely screwed up the UK economy and was for a while the least popular PM in history.
David Cameron didn't slay the Lib Dems, or even damage them much. It was their own behaviour in the 2010-5 government that has doomed them to insignificance.
It’s no coincidence that it was Lord Browne, a self-confessed perjurer, thief and sex pest,* who came up with it after talking solely to Vice Chancellors.
Those in itself should have been good reasons to reject it, of course.
*I am still stunned that even the infamous David Eady let him get away with that.
The priority should be investing heavily in early warning systems and an infrastructure that manages to narrow risk scenarios as potential threats are identified as soon as possible - but we shouldn't need to be in a position where we are spending money on the basis that a once in a hundred years scenario will happen every other year.
The danger that could arise is that people could lose sight of the reality that new virus's can come in many forms - many won't even get off the ground and reach epidemic status, let alone pandemic - and also at various levels of danger to public health. Because people are now becoming obsessed by the potential for (implicitly dangerous) "virus mutations" even the most mild of virus may in future be treated with extreme.
When investigating the Government approach to Covid and learning lessons for the future, it would be well to consider how having learned those lessons they would be applied in practice to, say, the 2010 Swine flu pandemic.
Then in Coalition, if a policy was popular the Conservatives accepted the credit, and if it was upopular blamed the LDs. All the while senior LDs like Clegg didn't realise this, because they were busy parading the streets and TV studios in their "new clothes" of government, and were far too important to notice.
So on your point, why should the LDs focus on the positives of coalition when it is wholly of benefit to the Conservatives? Why vote orange Tory when one can vote for the real thing?
Johnson does just make stuff up. Generally on the basis of "what does my current audience want to hear?"
G-C usually have some sort of factual basis, and lots of footnotes. It's just that their sources get twisted out of all recognition in support of the conclusion they've already reached.
Though choosing between the approaches is like choosing which painful disease you want to get.
(On the substantive point, DC is going to need more than this to significantly harm BoJo.)
It will also massively ease the pressure on the prison service.
Finland needs to get back to the hard rocking principles of Corb..er..Lordi.
https://twitter.com/tneenan/status/1396216541989986306?s=21
One of their predecessors the Liberal Party also suffered in the 1979 General Election because they had a pact with the Labour government, although this was a bit short of a full coalition.
It seems that people say that the Tories have been in since 2010 without mentioning the fact that there was a coalition and also that the Labour party were in power during the disastrous Winter of Discontent without mentioning that Liberals propped them up.
But when it comes to the next General Election, the voters don't forget that they were the people who kept their main political enemies in power and so they are less likely to vote tactically.
The LDs as well as Labour should have accepted the Brexit referendum result even if their senior members didn't like it, there will be many people who previously voted for them who also voted leave and were disgusted by their behaviour in the 2017-2019 Parliament.
"I paid for the wallpaper", as an example