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The odds on Starmer for next PM move to a point where he’s now a value bet – politicalbetting.com
The odds on Starmer for next PM move to a point where he’s now a value bet – politicalbetting.com
The above chart shows the movement on the Betfair “next PM” market over the past 12 months. As can be seen the big mover has been Starmer who reached a 32% chance last August but has now fallen back to just 12%.
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As is the 4% chance on Sajid Javid. Yes, dishi Rishi is well ahead and rightly so. But there are circumstances where Javid might prove the likelier option.
At the moment I think that SKS is no more than evens to even fight the next election. If he loses on Thursday he will be under enormous pressure to stand down and face yet more negative publicity. It is true that Labour find it much more difficult to remove a leader, even in opposition, but SKS does not have anything like the support in the membership that Corbyn had.
Secondly, it is hard to rule out another Tory PM before there even is a general election. The good ship Boris has been taking in a lot of water of late and still has very choppy seas to cut through. Also, unlike SKS, he has a number of obvious alternatives around him. Boris has potential health problems and a wife who seems to have an incredibly
cloth ear for someone who has worked in politics at a fairly high level. His finances are a mess and there is a chance he may want to cash in at some point too.
Thirdly, whether under Boris or not it is going to take some doing for the Tories to lose their majority in one go from here. A much smaller majority is the most likely possibility and that would probably be the end of SKS despite Corbyn getting 2 goes.
It is not easy putting values on each of these but add them altogether and a 12% chance doesn't seem ungenerous.
The only thing holding the coalition together is Brexit. They wanted it for different reasons, but as time goes on all of Brexit voters are realising "this is not the Brexit I voted for..."
And I also don't see Boris stepping down any time soon. To achieve his goal (the history books, more per speech than Blair), he needs to win another election. Three years in the saddle is not enough.
I'm not saying 12% is a bargain... it's not. But nor is it crazy either. I think it is more than 50% that the next election is Johnson vs Starmer, and therefore a one-in-four that Boris is no longer PM on the other side looks perfectly reasonable.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-9736261/Psychic-Deborah-Davies-predicted-coronavirus-outbreak-reveals-thoughts-two-years.html
If Labour have the option of Confidence and Supply with Stamer or more secure coalition with A N Other as PM then he may be ousted between election and limo ride to see Lizzie
The DUP voted for Brexit, but not this Brexit.
Fishermen voted for Brexit, but not this Brexit.
Farmers voted for Brexit, but not this Brexit.
Pub owners voted for Brexit, but not this Brexit.
Rock stars voted for Brexit, but not this Brexit.
There comes a point when everybody realises they got shafted by BoZo and chums. An 80 seat collapse is not unlikely at that point
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-30/a-trump-inspired-twitter-troll-gets-chance-to-set-the-eu-agenda?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_content=politics&utm_medium=social&cmpid==socialflow-twitter-politics
OneTwo of my most successful bets ever.So, yes, mock not.
Fisherman - 0.0000001% of GDP, so what, a few 1,000 votes?
Farmers - same
Pub owners - maybe COVID is a bit more of an issue right now...
Rock stars -
The largest group of Brexiteers appear to be those who voted out to tell the EU and the wealthy elites who benefitted from it to fuck the hell off as a punishment for all their many sins and patronising BS over many years. And however costly and damaging that Brexit has been, that is mission accomplished. Look how furious many remainers in business still are. How bewildered, as well.
And unfortunately the risk is that as long as they continue to obsess about their anger, rather than change their behaviour to deal with the issues, people will continue to vote for Johnson to stick two fingers up.
What was he said? ‘Fuck business?’ Could still resonate among the unemployed of Stoke while he builds shiny new toys for them.
That's the point.
BoZo fucks over everybody. the only question is when they realise it.
Johnson has none of Cameron’s squeamishness about
printing moneyborrowing and he’s also very good at announcing things without following through, which is a cheap way of providing shiny new toys.Meanwhile, constantly talking about the failures of Brexit when the voters Starmer needs to win back will see it as a success is hardly going to change their minds. Jobs, housing, health service and education are what will make them think again.
And while Johnson has no obvious policy on any of those, except ludicrous ones that will be disasters, neither do Labour.
I’m not sure what your point is?
One is that BoJo starts the campaign in a winning position, but then blows up. Not impossible- it nearly happened to TMay. But BoJo is no TMay.
The other is that BoJo becomes unpopular in the country but stays on. Now BoJo is arrogant and his political antennae aren't that good- see his initial approach to things like Free School Meal food parcels. And he has increased the weakling/sycophant percentage in his Cabinet and on his backbenches. But it really isn't like the Conservatives to hold on to someone heading for defeat. Major is the counterexample, I guess, but in his case there was no sign of an acceptable alternative who would do better.
What percentage do they add up to? Or is there another path?
The one that I think will be announced and then abandoned is NPR. Which is a depressing thought because it’s very badly needed.
Now, maybe it will be what we need when us plebs can't afford cars, but it would be nice if the government were up front about that being its purpose.
Senior Labour figures believe the party has only a 5% to 10% chance of holding the West Yorkshire seat of Batley and Spen in Thursday’s byelection, as Keir Starmer’s team brace themselves for a backbench revolt if the Tories take the seat.
https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1410118207126507528?s=21
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9739259/Indoctrination-generation-Racially-segregated-clubs-white-pupils-told-theyre-oppressors.html
Our economic future has rarely looked so uncertain. It could be great or it could be very tough indeed. Either way, its going to be interesting.
There has been extraordinary political volatility over the last decade, and likely to continue, so perfectly possible for Labour to overturn that majority. Not via Starmer though.
By the way the classified annexe of the Pentagon report was reportedly accompanied by about 15 videos, described by an attributed source as “like watching sci fi”. Will be interesting to see what reactions we get from senators in coming weeks and months.
Romney said without irony along the lines of “well I do find it hard to believe they’re from outer space but I can sure as hell tell ya they’re not Russian or Chinese!…2 trillion galaxies hmmm yes I’d be very interested if they came from there. But really we have so much more to worry about with global warming and the debt than spending time looking at ufos’”.
I suspect there’s a lot of senior politicians who are not used to spending any time thinking beyond their next fundraiser. They’ve suddenly been presented with a bunch of extraordinary evidence that taken in the round leads to only one logical endpoint. And they don’t know what to think or say about. “Mmmm yes seems UFO’s might be real. But who cares, we gotta keep an eye on that deficit!”
Is this right?
Even if the Tories do not have a majority, we could end up in a situation in which the only viable coalition is Tories plus one other Party.
(This is basically what happened in 2010. No doubt the LibDems would have much preferred to deal with a Labour party, whose leader's head they could have demanded as price of any Lab-Lib coalition. But, that was not in practice possible).
Starmer has to be able to construct a viable Government with enough support in the HoC. The condition for this is stricter than the Tories losing their majority.
(Of course, no other party at the moment is likely to admit that they would offer confidence & supply to a minority Tory Government).
Anti-Tories always have this picture of a Rainbow Coalition in which ROY G. IV all live happily in a giant arc in the House of Commons, but there is a reason why it never happens.
Now, with HS2, the likelihood is that will prove a sound investment both financially and ecologically. Fast, reliable trains and more electric rail capacity powered by green sources so we can get cars and lorries off the road. And it would be profitable given the numbers of people it would likely carry. In the post Covid age people are likely to live further from work and do fewer but longer journeys as commuting, so actually I don’t buy the ‘railways will never recover’ argument. The fact that all governments for 15 years have been in favour of it also shows it isn’t just a Johnson vanity project.
The issue will be whether all the money is spent as sensibly as that. Given Johnson’s track record I am sceptical.
And I hope @JosiasJessop is right about NPR for much the reasons he gives.
Edit - one way you may see Johnson’s influence or at least that of his government in HS2 is the gross gilding of the contracts. Standards of embankment slippage required by no railway ever, the highest speeds ever, the best new stock. Which has inflated costs by maybe 25%.
But overall it should still prove a success and an asset.
Have a good morning.
Bruce Dickinson did not get an interview on live TV yesterday for a trivial effect.
The effects are masked by Covid, but that is not a permanent state.
BoZo's bigger issue is probably a backbench revolt. Trying to keep the Red wall sweet is costing him in the home counties.
How many letters to Graham Brady can he afford?
I think there is decent value in predicting the next election will have two different leaders, but it will still be a Blue win. Liar is ever closer to the rocks where one more "whoops" moment brings down sufficient fury for the grandees to suggest he retires to spend more time making money and having affairs.
He'll get replaced with Sunak or Hunt or whoever, they will bring back serious government, it will get boring and austere again and people will swing back to shouting at Labour for not offering any alternatives. It'll be a smaller Blue win but its still a win.
Even at level pegging, the calls to Recruit Rishi will become deafening.
Now on the lookout for a pub that’s going to have a ‘mixed’ crowd.
Of course it won't solve every problem or even most of them. We still need to live in a world where every state's sovereignty is reined in by agreements, regulations etc and many of the problems blamed on the EU were in fact their response to those pressures which will not have gone away.
"No no, there was no plan for a high speed line, this is it" say all the new Tories in the area. Whats worse is that so few people know what actual NPR was that people will probably buy it.
Same with the towns fund where red wall Tory MPs are busy announcing that they are all spending the same money. Yes the money doesn't actually exist so very little will be spent. But people are largely disinterested in politics and don't track the details. So they'll vote for the announcement that Good is coming and miss the fact that it hasn't yet arrived.
Don't say they won't, they already have. For Labour. For decades.
And it good to see someone recognising that, apart from another election in a couple of months, the Cons-LD Coalition was the only practical deal available.There can be arguments about that was managed, especially by the LD side but at the time the Labour Party, as a party of government was tired and fractious and unfit for Government.
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Ultimately cash is king, they want your money and the reputation that comes from you sending your kids there. I can't imagine the Daily Mail story does them much good, does not something like a fee strike work? OK not a "strike" as communistic, but late payment of invoices due to a dispute over services received...?
Mr. Pioneers, I've heard that non-white people also get to have lots of money. And lots of white people don't have much money.
White privilege is a bloody stupid term.
There are millions of Brexit voters though who were already in the desperate camp. The impacts won't be trivial to them. Brexit was a hail mary pass, vote down the man, make our own destiny, fewer forriners driving down wages and taking our jobs/benefits means more better paid jobs for whitey.
Unless those more and better paid jobs start arriving, and their communities start improving, they are not going to be happy. They voted to be better off so your "relatively trivial" worsening of their already screwed situation means a lot to them.
Of course BJ has had a lifetime of getting away with it so his Untergang will be necessarily of a greater magnitude. It’s gonna be great!
I am not claiming to have any special powers, but I have been alive to this deranged woke cult for many years and saw something like this coming in 2019 when looking for a school for my son. Went around the trendy schools in the rapidly gentrifying part of town where we live and saw the right on extinction rebellion parents and their kids running out of control and just thought no way.
In consequence, we drive our son out to a boring conservative suburban school every day. The parents dress in supermarket clothes and do real jobs and, from what I can tell, don't even know about the concept of white privelege. The headteacher is clearly a very smart guy and he is obviously having absolutely none of the woke cult rubbish.
Boris -- whether you call him a pragmatist or an opportunist or just a lying shit -- occupies the centre ground and even some of the ground to the left of centre, leaving little or no room for his opponents.
To lose, Boris has to be forced from this ground -- either (i) by Sir Keir or (ii) by Tory MPs or (iii) by external financial /economic pressure.
The former is very unlikely, Boris has the beating of Sir Forensic.
The second is very unlikely, as long as the Tories are doing well in the polls & (it seems) still taking Red Wall seats. It would be more likely if Sir Forensic were putting the Government under pressure, but that seems a forlorn hope.
That just leaves the third.
Seems inevitable to me.
I think it’s a bad idea that will now become entrenched.
I’ve changed my mind on this over the last few days. I don’t like it one bit.
But we didn’t change schools lightly - the trend was clearly one way with academic subjects being crowded out to make room for lessons on social justice. And we were very worried by the new DIE Director given her track record.
But the crunch for me was we sent our daughter to her new school for a taster. Her view: “I want to be taught like that. It’s challenging.”
As you say most red wall Tories are not Tories at all, so when their man goes and the new PM Sunak starts telling them sadly that there is no money left, what will they do? Some will go back to Labour of course, but I doubt in anywhere near sufficient numbers.
In the red wall it is like scales have been washed from people's eyes. They have realised that despite in some places voting for Labour since the Danelaw that nothing substantial has been done to improve and rebuild their communities in this post industrial age. Too many MPs and too many councils make excuses for what they can't do and all they have to offer is negativity.
New Tories like Ben "Southgate is no Bobby Robson" Houchen have flipped this around and have taken something hopeless (Teesside Airport) and gee'd everybody up into something really positive. Despite the reality that Teesside Airport is a hopeless waste of good housing land being ever more obvious.
PM Sunak's asset is that the Houchens of the party will work their socks off to try and hold onto sufficient voters to stop Labour coming back. And for at least the next election I am certain they will succeed.
And I hope you find a nice pub too…
I laid it in tiny size and backed it back at 2/1 so not shouting about some super shrewd trading. I win £30 on Sir Keir £915 on Jess Phillips and lose a fiver on anyone else
That's.much harder now he's at the top of the tree.
The Ladbrokes bet on Labour doing better than Galloway was free money at 1-4, and is IMO still free money at the current 1-8 - a 10% return in 24 hours, after all. It ought to be at least 1-50.
For example: she was told to write about someone who inspired her so write about Alfred the Great. The teacher criticised her saying she should write about someone in the High School and praise their community work instead.
I believe for every passing day, the introduction of our own laws including on state aid and various new trade deals, the likelihood of us rejoining the EU diminishes
Furthermore, the EU itself is in a poor state, with UVDL being a disaster especially with her vaccine rollout failure
This has been followed with the Merkel - Macron pairing being put back in their box over a summit with Putin and trying to prevent UK holidays makers going to the Mediterranean countries, and the general lack of agreement over many other issues
Merkel and Macron will both be gone next year.
Additionally only the SNP and Plaid will be standing at the next GE on a rejoin platform, so I do believe that those who just cannot be reconciled to Brexit will be in a permanent state of despair
The conservative party do have candidates to replace Boris and as I have said on many occasions , Rishi is my choice and I would be delighted too see him in place sooner rather than later and he is very popular in the country
Labour do not have a realistic alternative to Starmer and are being squeezed by the conservatives and lib dems with nowhere to go it seems
Very depressing if you are a Labour supporter
Where the WWC get discriminated against is class. Posh whitey sending their kids to fee paying schools don't want to spend their money on the WWC. So they vote in MPs who vote against feeding hungry white kids in massively poor areas who then bemoan the poor educational attainment of kids they voted to keep hungry. And then use this as proof that there is no white privilege such as having a spare £32k to spend on school fees per child.
Are such schools exclusively white? Of course not! But look how hard it is for non-white parents to be in that position compared to white parents. It does happen, but in tiny numbers. And when its a tiny percentage of the population in a position to spend that kind of cash on school fees, its a truly tiny percentage of non-whites.
Schools like that cannot pretend they are ordinary, that their students are ordinary. All of them are massively and extraordinarily privileged to a level that most kids can barely conceive of. Teaching them that - and that with privilege comes responsibility - is surely a basic. I do with my kids and their level of privilege is nothing compared to Charles et al
I can see the way this is going!
I’m off…
My daughter is at QCPS and I detect no ideological unsoundness. The reverse, really.
The intake is pleasingly cosmopolitan and the idea of racial politics feels redundant.
Who the hell that might be I have no idea.
I think 1963 is right, though.
A loss of “innocence”, and then a chaotic period of social fragmentation, military quagmires, and political corruption.
(Unless you’re black, in which case the 50s/60s were the start of something, not the end).
https://twitter.com/bbcgaryr/status/1410130536501293058?s=21
Labour are irrevocably split. The Corbynites, having had a taste of power will never accept consensus. That's why talk of a united front against the Tories is impossible. They can't agree among themselves.
They have morphed into a middle-class, woke and self-regarding (verging on arrogant) bunch who don't particularly like their fellow travellers on the left, or their old natural allies from years back - the old working class.
The Tories aren't loved, but that's baked in. It's accepted they have grievous faults but it's often seen as natural self-interest. It doesn't inspire quite the acrimony it used to.
Brexit exposed the hatred that some of on the left have for their fellow Brits. It's not a pretty look. The nasty bastard tendency. It doesn't matter if Brexit succeeds or fails. It's become visceral.
Boris can't do anything wrong because he's being compared to that mindset. Despite his incompetence, he has that as a shield. Keir doesn't.