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Can Starmer get a conference boost? – politicalbetting.com
Can Starmer get a conference boost? – politicalbetting.com
One of the innovative betting markets that Smarkets has up is in the chart above. What will LAB’s polling average be at the end of the month? These are the market rules:
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edit: and (I think!) third first in a row! I'm spending a little too much time on PB, methinks ...
GB News will be down to a viewership of only those exiled from PB for causing England batting collapses.
My hunch is, the value, if there is any, is probably laying 34-36% @2.1 if there’s any liquidity available.
Btw, sorry to be a pedant but there’s a typo;
“Although 34-46%, the current favourite“
Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
In some respects Starmer is Labour's IDS, less disliked than the previous party leader but with no charisma and few fans either
What is the biggest conference bounce on record?
I examined them closely at the time! It was called the Camden Spur I think? Something like that
If you look at old HS2 documents online you'll probably find them still
Pan-European services are a GREAT idea. The key is to make them luxurious and FUN.
There were enormous benefits for the people who really matter - i.e, people from the Red Wall keen to spend time i Tuscany, and not moany Remainers in Camden.
But it does rather feel like two bald men fighting over a comb.
It was when Brown was thinking of calling a snap election.
One of Brown’s MPs even wrote this seldom mentioned piece during those heady days.
'Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority'
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2007/09/labour-majority-increase
https://assets.dft.gov.uk/publications/hs2-maps-20120110/hs2arp00drrw05140issue2.pdf
Wasn't is supposed to be mainly in tunnel? Which would make it horrendously expensive for marginal return....
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-58585788
Except for the convenience of having your own car in Southern Europe without either the strain of driving 15 hours through the night or the luxury, in terms of time, of wending your way down over three or four days, as I am now able to do. And motorrail was a great way to start a holiday, forcing you to relax on the train; having dinner in the dining car as the train sped south through France was always a pleasure, even if despite the actual food.
In that way, it makes sense for Murdoch to come in plus he can cross-advertise / promote with his newspapers.
And now, work
Straight away gave off an amateurish air. Which meant the non-committed lost interest quickly.
With a limited market and the strong domestic demand for a high speed path into London, it just makes sense for everyone to catch a train to Euston and walk to St Pancreas for international services. There are longer walks in Heathrow.
The new military alliance to contain Beijing’s rise looks, then, at first glance, like a reassertion of the old order, but it is really one of the first murmurings of a new one taking its place.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/09/us-uk-australia-china/620094/
Now, will it stop someone managing to smuggle in cannabis from the Netherlands? No. Can it be used to make sure everyone has passports? Yes.
I know what I would pick most of the time, which is why those routes don't make any sense in real life.
You can get wild polling day of Leader speeches or day after, end of conference. But it’s ephemeral.
Labour are struggling to poll nearer 40 or above because they have a problem with Lexits still in love with Boris, an existential problem to Starmer hopes of ever being PM if it this crisis of Lexits doesn’t go away.
The only thing of note from this Labour conference is what Starmer has to say to the Lexits he needs back. And does it work.
That was one of the changes that also helped kill off sleeper and motorail services, which in the ‘old days’ used to run gratis over the networks of countries other than the operator, on the basis that during the night there were few other trains about and hence marginal cost for the non-operating network was minimal. When average cost charging between countries came in (during the early 2000s I think), such that Belgian railways had to pay French or German and Austrian or Swiss and Italian railways to travel on their lines, many of the services were wound up as unviable within the next few years.
But I'm not convinced there's that big a market for any network TV news channel in the UK. Simply, outside of waiting rooms in London offices (which are also going the way of the dodo), what is the combined viewership of TV news channels in the UK?
I mean, I guess Fox could effectively use the same reportage with a different set of commentators and make the numbers work, but video delivery is all VOD/YouTube/Instagram/TikTok these days, and viewership of even new channels in the US is cratering.
A curated set of commentators on on-line platforms with cross promotion could work. But I think the days of big centrally planned TV news channels are coming to an end.
If they had managed to hire the likes of say Ferrari, Morgan, fresh face like a Freddie Sayers, who is super smart and different to usual news channel types without being a nutter, plus Farage and Neill, not necessarily my cup of tea, but it would have got ratings.
The fact he became PM means it was a victory.
As this puts Dave’s achievement into context.
In comparison, Sky News has never has had much of an audience, I am not sure what the backers of GB News thought they could achieve that a multi-channel mass broadcaster with all the leverage couldn't.
And on Alpine roads, you can see where the edge is much easier when you are sitting right by it!
Then when the children were younger we regularly put the car on the train at Bruges and travel with the car overnight to Italy, with a lovely evening meal in the restaurant car. You could get off at Livorno and you were in Tuscany. Or go on to Rome. You could also do it via Germany.
The other option was to put the car on a train in Paris and go to Nice while taking a separate overnight couchette. But the last time I did that the service was abysmal.
If they reintroduce trains like this it would be great. Much more fun than having to drive through large parts of Europe. But I'll believe it when I see it. It will take significant investment and much better levels of service.
United Kingdom Daily Coronavirus (COVID-19) Report · Thursday 16th September.
26,911 new cases (people positive) reported, giving a total of 7,339,009.
158 new deaths reported, giving a total of 134,805.
https://twitter.com/UKCovid19Stats/status/1438518800706457600?s=20
It’s quickly turning into gibberish. It should wake people up though to what’s really been going on, how our sleep at the wheel leaders have dropped us in it. It’s only like, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, our government is still selling us off to China!
Interesting Reddit post/discussion on energy from ppl who claim to be in the know.
Could we potentially see blackouts?
(Although it was from Schaarbeek station near Brussels, not Bruges)
The alarming thing - for first time travellers on Belgian motorail anyhow - was that they often used to take the cars down on a separate train and sort and connect them up during the night. So you’d trundle out of Schaarbeek in the passenger carriage and see out of the window your own car sitting on another train in the siding.
(Speaking as a former resident of Camden).
If Camden had never existed, Ken Livingstone might never have got his big break in the late 70s.
It has to be well under 20%.
And b) you have completely failed to address the central point: that SLEEPER trains save you a day. Because you are travelling at NIGHT – i.e. not wasting an entire day of your holiday scrutinising Toblerone bars in some godforsaken, overlit, overheated northern airport.
The other two were Foot and Kinnock in the 80s.
And, of course, Kinnock could still technically become Prime Minister...
The basics are these: In 2016, Australia struck a deal with France to buy a fleet of diesel-powered submarines, rejecting an Anglo-American alternative for nuclear-powered vessels.
Were they offered such an alternative, or is this embroidery with fairy-stories?
5 and a half hours in A&E and still waiting.....
Thinking of you.
Also the second point is demand simply isn't there. The total demand across the North for flights to Tuscany is probably equal to one train max a week.
1) The original plan for the channel tunnel passenger services was to run night trains from at least between Manchester and Paris, but that was scrapped fairly soon before the main ex-London services began as the low-cost airline revolution had begun and it was clear the planes would outcompete the trains. They had even bought rolling stock for the night services which ended up being sold to the Canadians.
A few years back, many internal European sleeper services were dying off until governments started to get more aggressive about reducing internal air travel for environmental reasons, and now the night trains are coming back, hence this plan.
2) There is a bypass around Paris, before the pandemic Eurostar ran weekly direct trains to Avignon in the summer. There was a connector planned between HS1 and HS2 to bypass changing trains in London but that got dropped on cost grounds quite early on.
3j Originally immigration formalities took place on the train, with cursory customs checks at the destination. This was later replaced by the current “juxtaposed” checks before boarding. This resulted in the so-called “Lille shuffle” where UK-bound pax from Avignon had to detrain at Lille and go through British border control before reboarding.
To make cross-channel sleeper services attractive, as well as for north-of-London services using a bypass connector, it’d be much better to restore on-train checks for those trains, which was routine pre-Schengen and across more closed borders. Even the Finns and the Russians do on-train checks on their service between Helsinki and St Petersburg.
4) Perhaps the biggest challenge is technical. British railways have a smaller “loading gauge” (the space the actual vehicle bodies can safely travel in, not the width between the wheels), than the standard European one, so standard European trains won’t fit on most British lines. As the current HS1 line from St Pancras to the tunnel wasn’t completed until well after the tunnel opened, the original Eurostar trains were built to British loading gauge. The new fleet replacing them is built to the standard European high-speed line specifications, as was HS1 and will be HS2, but it’s still going to require a connection somewhere between HS1 and HS2 to make London-bypassing night or day trains possible. They could go back to the original plan of using British-spec rolling stock for north-of-London services, but I suspect that will be difficult to work financially.
Even with a connector, HS2 is only as of now definitely (if at all) going to Birmingham and I think Crewe / Manchester is most likely to happen next, but I doubt all the services further out on that German map will happen any time soon.
I’ll get me coat.
Edit - the 2016 bidders where France, Germany and Japan. Nuclear clearly wasn't an option as Australia went for the Diesel version of France's Diesel / Nuclear submarine design
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/apr/26/france-to-build-australias-new-submarine-fleet-as-50bn-contract-awarded has the story.
Tories under Blair really started the ditching the leader after one defeat. Or none in IDS' case.
Edit. Oops. You've covered that.
So, who was the Tory leader before Hague never to be PM?
19th Century I reckon.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/480372/HS2-HS1_report.pdf
"The principle of a rail connection linking HS1 and HS2 remains strategically attractive, and HS2 Ltd remains committed to it if it could physically be achieved at a reasonable and proportionate cost. HS2 Ltd will keep an open mind to this possibility. However, the combination of tight physical constraints and the demands on existing services in this critical part of our national infrastructure make it very difficult to achieve. Longer-term opportunities for a rail connection could be safeguarded by making some provision during the construction of HS2, but lower-cost passive provision options would lead to unacceptable disruption to HS2 during construction of the link. To guard against this, the provision would have to be active rather than passive, and this would come at considerable cost. There are a number of other reasons why future investment in the rail link would be highly unlikely – notably because of the other difficulties with later construction, and the limited capacity that would be available for international services on HS2. Accordingly, neither active nor passive provision for a rail link is recommended."
Basically: whilst a rail link is an attractive idea, the Camden link was a compromise. It required expensive works, and had to fit in around the North London Line services, so there would not be many paths for services.
I had the option of staying in Bruges on the return from my current trip. But I think there’s a chance of getting the dog a Belgian passport so have rerouted to Ypres instead. Which apparently in Flemish is Leper.
"The History of Australia's Attack-class Submarine 2009-2020: France, via Naval Group, fleeced $90 Billion dollars from Australia for the promise of Regional Submarine Superiority. The greatest robbery in the modern era."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_Y4QQ8Hm3k
It's interesting how the person who wrote the contract for the subs (when it was believed to be going to Japan) went to work in France... and then France won!