New betting market – when will LAB next get a poll lead? – politicalbetting.com

The Smarkets exchange where Shadsy is now running the political markets, has just put up a new bet – when will LAB next get a poll lead? The rules are dead simple:
0
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
State of play. Past 6 months, Tories remarkably consistent given all the wild swings in news, the scandals, etc.
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/
Gravity will hit the Tories at some point, but doesn't seem to as of yet.
Boris tests negative for covid and is to hold a 5.00pm conference with JVT and Vallance
Twitter is about to go into meltdown if he appears in person.
The Tories has messed up on Delta variant, had the Hancock scandal, Cummings saying Boris isn't fit to be PM and bodies piled high (etc), ongoing sleaze, Patel / Boris been accused as racist enablers....and yet Labour are further behind than before.
I keep thinking this is the one that will do it, but it doesn't seem to.
Would be a start.
But then again as SKS has said he would make masks mandatory - until when? - I can't see the lockdown-related vote happening.
Perhaps vaccinating children? But then again its tricky, because the JCVI are independent of government and like the 12 week stuff, the public trust "the experts". On this specific issue, there is no suggestion that the government is doing anything but following their advice.
https://twitter.com/whatukthinks/status/1417091300290072577?s=20
Then look at the lowest Tory polling. 40%
That's Boris's hardcore vote, that's Labour's big problem. They need Brexit to fade away to have a chance of winning, or even leading
And as with so called 'Freedom Day' the government is suddenly swimming in treacherous waters, I agree it's a value bet. I estimate there is a 40-50% chance of such a poll in 2021.
If economy goes into stagflation, with so much of our debt payment linked to inflation, the leader the Tories put up against Starmer won’t even come from cabinet.
As we saw in 2017 and 2019, that can change quickly: what Boris would need to do is something that massively alienates parts of his base whilst Starmer rallies his and offers a better progressive narrative to capture the centre at the same time.
I'd rate the former as more likely than the latter.
* or though, I can see the Tories following the US strategy and just saying it was a one off, its was a war, we are going to carry on borrowing (carefully), level up, build back better, yadda yadda yadda.
2021 or perhaps 2022 are probably value. Politics is volatile in some ways, even if it feels hegemonic in others.
What I previous posted you proved correct, you read the question as needing radical narrative shift.
The problem for Labour / against this scenario is that it seems to be that people have been reminded that the yellow peril exist and that eats into the anti-Boris / anti-government vote.
If you are angered by any aspect of Wokeness (even if you don't know what Woke means) then your only choice is to vote Tory, all the other main parties are pathetically PC
The Conservative Party has been calamitously inept and cack-handed in multiple ways, but in this department they have shown strategic genius
A whiny but sometimes insightful essay on this point, here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/19/right-winning-culture-war
Government can do whatever it wants with SAGE advice. They have frequently gone against SAGE advice. Government sets the questions to SAGE. Government decides who is on SAGE. SAGE has no fixed membership (we are told on SAGE and subcommittees that we are not "members", we are "participants"): every meeting is at the behest of the Government and who they want there. People are brought into and out of SAGE as needed for their expertise.
The belief by some that SAGE is this menacing power behind the throne, directing policy, while Johnson and Hancock/Javid are somehow kept hostage, is complete nonsense. It is the Conservative Government under Prime Minister Boris Johnson who has made every UK policy decision.
Government has access to and pays attention to multiple other sources of advice, both in terms of weighing public health concerns against other issues (the economy, international relations, principles of law, etc.) and in terms of other public health advice. They listen to MPs. Departments and agencies have their own employed experts. Departments and agencies seek other external input. I'm an academic. I'm on two SAGE sub-committees. Across both, we've met once in the last quarter. But I talk to Department of Health & Social Care officials most weeks, and we've sent them around one report per month with research findings.
SAGE does need reform, because SAGE was never designed to work as it has since the pandemic. I think it never had many more than 5 meetings in a row for past emergencies ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Advisory_Group_for_Emergencies#History ). It recently had its 93rd COVID meeting ( https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sage-93-minutes-coronavirus-covid-19-response-7-july-2021 ). But is has been reformed (we're working very differently in 2021 to in 2020). What it doesn't need is political interference. The purpose of SAGE is, in so far as possible, to tell Govt what the science says. Govt retains all the power. Govt is democratic and political. You don't need extra political interference in SAGE when anything SAGE says is merely one input into Government's decision making, and Government decision making remains as political as it must always be.
Freedom Day? No
Air conditioning? Yes
I'm at home with a desk fan.
In terms of how long it takes for political support to unravel, you pointed to SNP decade long stranglehold, and perfectly right to do so. Brexit Boris can unravel in next couple of years though, because his support is based on delivering promise of change to better in this parliament. He has no wriggle room at all to include stagflation recession.
Seems to be that Berlusconi's political fortunes decisively changed for the worse due to the Eurozone debt crisis in 2011. This rather gloomily suggests that we'll only be rid of Johnson once we've run out of money for him to spend.
In terms of Labour's future polling prospects I'd suggest that any perception of tax rises, or a large dose of inflation, are both likely triggers for a loss of Tory support.
Probably not this year.
So the mean lead in the 10 OGH shows is 9.6% whilst the lowest is 5%. That's pretty typical, so a Tory lead down to 6-7% for any period of time would probably permit an outlier with a Labour lead, and if the Tory lead drops below 5% a Labour lead at some point would become massively likely.
Good value backing Labour in the initial pricing, I agree, which may be the intention to get things kicked off.
I note the possibility of a headline tie, with the underlying weighted data showing slightly more Labour support, and that such an event would not settle the market.
Oh Francis, you are such a wag 🙂. And right it does hold Labour share back.
* I know teachers don't work from home, but do you think that that will stop the National Education Union?
They face either tightening policy to create the mother of all recessions, or just sitting there and watching inflation destroy living standards.
Well, you stupid, stupid idiots, you bankrolled the CCP designed Western response to covid, what did you expect?
The simple answer is that Covid spending is ignored and countries start to reduce borrowing ASAP but as we don't currently know what none Covid borrowing looks like that is going to be difficult.
The Blair card was also bad in being bland promises, not stiff targets or exciting change at all.
However,
1 the Bedrock isn't, by itself, quite enough. 40 percent loses to a reasonably efficiently-distributed opposition, even if each component of that opposition is well behind.
2 Bedrock is also subject to erosion. One of the grim fascinations of the next few years might be watching how the UK comes to terms with Brexit if the settled majority view becomes "well that was a mistake but we're stuck with it". (I'm not saying that will happen, but it's a plausible extrapolation from here.)
The other way of looking at things is that, in 2020 there were three events that cut though enough to shift polls in a reasonably solid L+3/C-3 way. Durham, Exam grades and December. If the current score is 41-33 (say), a similar cockup takes the average to 38-36, in which case you'd expect an outlier to give a Labour lead. Curtaingate at the end of April came damn close.
So this is a bet on the Johnson government not screwing up, even temporarily, for the rest of 2021. Put like that, do you feel lucky, Boris? Do you?
To add my anecdata to the mix just returned from the big tesco's store. A firm that still insists wearing masks is mandatory in store. Estimate that maskless has increased from about 10% last week to 40% today and they have removed the guy on the door asking you to wear a mask as you go in. Supect by this time next week the enmasked will be the minority.
Also a huge amount of people smiling at each other for a change
I think if the government were hoping businesses would enforce mask wearing their plan failed
Meanwhile, @contrarian makes an excellent point. The sight of Labour’s core vote packing dance floors and partying all night last night suggests there is a dissonance between what people tell pollsters, and what they actually do.
Glad I’m all out.
When you have members of SAGE who are members of a political party whose avowed intent is to bring down capitalism and replace it with something else, you do wonder about the objectivity of the advice received.
Edit: ah, that was in the last thread (thankfully).
The LD vote is less of an issue if some Tory Remainers go LD
Hi, we have made the decision to operate under English guidance, with regards to social distancing on cross border services, to provide consistency to customers. Therefore, customers may be seated next to each other when travelling from 19 July onwards.
https://twitter.com/LNER/status/1416844949769830403?s=20
Or you could read Susan's work for yourself and see that it's great science, not an exercise in revolution. Her seminal work is https://implementationscience.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1748-5908-6-42
So ultimately we have a tyranny of scientists who think they know what's best for us because the government knows the media will go mental every time one of you lot go rogue and decide that actually, you know what's better for the country than the people who have been elected.
Your post just doesn't hold water after the year that we've been through. Even now we've got a lot of push back against giving people the freedom to choose what they want to do. At least we got rid of Hancock who had just become a sage mouthpiece. Hopefully the anti lockdown people will manage to remove all of the other lockdown fascists from public life soon.
There is a risk to children from covid. It's just very low.
Sometimes we seem to gloss one very small risk as being the same as another (because both are "very small") or even ignore one and not the other. Even though one very small risk may be hundreds of times smaller than the other.
The chance of death from covid for a child is particularly tiny, but the chance of hospitalisation is real, but very small (probably between 1-2 in a thousand, given the rates of hospitalisation we've seen in children to date).
The risk to children from myocarditis with Pfizer looks to be below a hundredth of that - two orders of magnitude lower.
It's also noticeable that the risk of myocarditis to children from covid looks to be on the close order of 2%. This figure is a lot higher than the hospitalisation rate, because myocarditis generally doesn't result in a hospital visit unless the person with it engages in strenuous activity at the wrong time.
The myocarditis, in both cases (whether virus-induced or vaccine induced at under a hundredth the rate) usually sees full recovery in a short time, anyway (other symptoms of covid may not clear as quickly or completely).
In short - if it is viewed that "children are not at risk from covid", then the orders-of-magnitude lower risk from the vaccine cannot realistically be cited as a risk, either.
If the extremely low risk of transient myocarditis from the vaccine is seen as a risk of significance, then the hundreds of times greater risk to the child from covid should be seen as a pretty significant risk as well.
One cannot have the far smaller one seen as significant while the larger one is deemed nonexistent.
Personally my money is on a time travelling consumptive romantic poet from the late eighteenth century
If he posed as a software engineer then we might not ever pick him out.
Kicking off - bottles being throw at the police anti lockdown protesters and police fighting back with some punches at parliament square, a good 2000 protesters here and a heavy police presence …. In this heat it’s going to be a long day of clashes
https://twitter.com/PaulBrown_UK/status/1417077491081023501?s=20
Cynically looks like SG now standing back to watch social media spin up a convenient nationalist grievance story of "English" disregard for Scotland, without clarifying position.
https://twitter.com/JamesManuell/status/1417103068399812611?s=20
Seriously. Want us to keep paying for your pensions, benefits and services? just let us get on with it?
Why is nobody in the tory party presenting the electorate with what the choice really is?Back to your lives or penury. That was always the choice
https://twitter.com/HugoGye/status/1417065158711599108?s=20
Wearing a mask: 54%
Distancing: 49%
Washing hands: 43%
Ventilation: 28%
Cleaning surfaces: 20%
@chriscurtis94
@OpiniumResearch
16 July 2021
https://twitter.com/tomhfh/status/1417100177660329988?s=20
Poor government education.
“Anti-sex” beds at the Olympics (are fake news)
https://twitter.com/McClenaghanRhys/status/1416567768938291203?s=20
Possible though that the next election still some way off at October 23, if not delayed by bad polls, will be about economics and not the “freedom” questions from the historical Covid period?
Thinking back to how flip floppy the Cameron/Osborne loto was on positive message till they got a recession to build support on, Labour may not need to go out and win the match with great game plan.
The political narrative could quickly move on from Covid now, and the economic challenges can easily dominate the agenda for years.
Correct me where my amateur study of economics is wrong, stagflation is a term used when inflation was causing a problem and growth had stalled? Another politically damaging thing in 60s 70s was where growth leapt and ebbed greatly in short bursts. Whilst best thing is to have steady moderate growth with low inflation over long period. After the shock to economic system of both Covid and Brexit, either stagflation or more likely the wild variation model would not be a surprise?
The added issue with inflation, while voters moan about their pay not keeping up with cost of living, behind the scenes government may have become too reliant on printing money with magic money wand, and discover the interest on the debt is linked to inflation, so the governments spending power drys up without the wand.
https://twitter.com/JasonGroves1/status/1417093082106015746?s=20
Distancing
Mask
Hands
Surface
The true order I think ?
So your proposals would destroy a whole industry for good. In case you were wondering.
All to stop a few oldies from sh8tting themselves a bit less, whilst still demanding the services and benefits the nightclub industry helps to fund.
Was going to hospital today for routine tests. Just had a call. My consultant - double jabbed - has just been pinged. So he is now isolating and his entire list thrown into chaos.
Bring forward the Aug isolation rules. It's madness
8:23 AM · Jul 19, 2021"
https://twitter.com/stephenpollard/status/1417022225052545026
If anything mandatory Covid vaccination passports could encourage customers to nightclubs as they would know their fellow dancers had all been vaccinated.
When a poster is banned their avatar on my screen doubles up. So they've gone and yet at the same time there are now 2 of them.
I am double jabbed. Domestic vaccination passports would still be a PITA.
My Conservative principles are about protecting liberty. Not providing a comfort blanket for the frit.
I wonder if the deep irony of the NHS telling NHS staff to delete the NHS app will be lost on Bozza?