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The pre-CON conference GE betting has “hung parliament” still favourite – politicalbetting.com
The pre-CON conference GE betting has “hung parliament” still favourite – politicalbetting.com
So as is usual it is the Tories who hold the last of the main party conferences and the party always follows immediately after Labour. I wonder whether after Johnson has made his final speech on Wednesday morning whether this chart will look different.
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Tory majority really should be favourite.
But that would be so very rude.
Where is the waiver on insurance and GDPR you should be signing?
Where’s the information on who’s paying for it?
ISage made worst case scenarios sound like plausible minimums, those who wanted to avoid home educating their children tried to say that this weird correlation between schools being open and cases exploding was due to something else entirely.
But it’s also shown that when they put their minds to a practical rather than theoretical problem are lot of them are also very able.
If, in 2023, things are going well and the problems have dissipated, the government will win.
If things are a bit rubbish, Westminster is constantly firefighting and we're fed up with more tax and somewhat shabbier public services, the opposition has a decent opportunity.
If things go seriously wrong, and interest rates rise enough to really hit house prices then Mrs Starmer can start discussing the soft furnishings in No 10 immediately.
And this has relatively little to do with the virtues and vices of the government- they are bobbing around on a choppy sea like everyone else. That's why "Take Back Control" is so potent a slogan- we fear powerlessness in a scary world. It's also why it's so dishonest- we are all more at the mercy of the fates than we want to admit.
Put like that 45:45:10 might be about right. Roughly equal chances of success and moderate failure from here, with a small risk of utter calamity.
A relative dealt with some of the fall out of the "courts" created under Title XI in the US. He does pro-bono work for NAACP. On more than one occasion, he read up on what was happening on the plane, got off the plane straight into a meeting with the lawyers for the University. And had their lawyers, literally, head in hands, by reading from a few things he highlighted....
Haven’t had one of those in No. 10 in a few years. Not since Lady Douglas-Home in 1964, who apparently had more changes of name than any other once–married woman due to her husband continually changing his title.
I guess everyone on the isles has had it now?
A lot of the difficulty in science is finding the right question to ask- soluble, but not already solved. A crisis like Covid is great for that, because everything is new. And whilst the first couple of cycles of idea-test-improve or reject are messy, it's remarkable how quickly science converges on something workable.
Yay, science.
That was a 7 figure settlement, 15 minutes.
Their political agenda greatly discredited the use of data to reassure the public. I mean 100,000 cases if we opened up this summer? Utter bollocks.
The things which may gives rise to reconsidering these numbers is the White Swan which is beginning to get talked about and is paddling furiously under the surface. Inflation. Interest rates. Mortgages. Foreclosures. Negative equity. London. South East. Unsellable Million pound one bed flats.
A tiny numerical rise in interest rates will only slightly benefit older voters who vote Tory anyway, but because artificially low interest rates have led to artificially high asset prices especially in London and SE a catastrophe is completely foreseeable.
Amateur divers find ‘perfectly preserved’ Roman treasure in Spain
‘It’s incredible, it’s every child’s dream,’ says Luis Lens about the 53 gold coins with legible inscriptions that date back to the 4th and 5th centuries, and illustrate the empire’s decline
https://english.elpais.com/usa/2021-09-24/amateur-divers-find-perfectly-preserved-roman-treasure-in-spain.html
A major bear market in equities too. I can see some ominous signs out there in the markets.
Isn't the key thing about interest rates the difference between interest and inflation? Roughly interest > inflation leads to contraction, interest < inflation leads to expansion.
In which case, doesn't a move from minimal inflation to some inflation mean that interest rates have to go up to keep up? If they don't, isn't there a positive feedback loop leading to higher inflation down the line?
People need to start thinking about housing as a cost and not an asset. People don't celebrate food costs going up so why housing costs? Declining prices are needed for affordability ... And higher inflation would help avoid negative equity.
We innocent boys liked to think it was because someone tipped him the wink that dad ran the town's protection racket, and not because they ever did meet.
Not having a correction is going to be utterly catastrophic in the long term too.
While the government is popular and the opposition isn't, is precisely the time to get through much needed corrections. If they don't, then what's the point in them?
We'd be in a much better place had the wealth tied up by the Thatcher and Blair house price booms been used on something, anything, more productive.
But nobody, and I mean nobody knows how to get re-elected if house prices aren't rising.
Or are you referring to the Community Relations Service created under Title X of the 1964 Civil Rights Act?
Initially under the US Commerce Dept, but currently and for most of its existence under Dept of Justice, according to wiki's quoting of the law the function of CRS is to aid in resolving "community conflicts and tensions arising from differences of race, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion and disability."
Nothing about transitory labour shortages in some sectors and a small spike in wage inflation is going to alter the fundamentals.
Though conceptual Black Swans abound. Eg. The laws of nature change next Tuesday so that H2O is characteristically dark green and poisonous to humans; Dropped stones generally fly upwards; red things appear yellow on Fridays.
There are enough white swans to concern Boris. Inflation + high interest rates might finish him without further help.
As the old 'sound money' Tories (remember those?) used to say: "Inflation is theft".
Where both government and BofE assure us inflation’s just a blip.
I’m unconvinced.
Candidates for Black Swan? Twin Towers. The rise of Islamism. Then specific series of events leading to WW1. Banking crisis of 2008. Mrs Thatcher. May 1940. The Holocaust.
It is trivially easy for Brexiteers to create and sustain a fantasy version of reality that is favourable to their preconceptions in a way that was not true pre-internet.
The danger is that any of the above statistics spiral out of control. Despite everything that’s happened since 1994, economically things have generally been stable or rising, with the exception of the sharp recession in 2009 and the pandemic last year. Many people have never known real volatility in the economic data.
Going into the winter, we see potentially major issues around energy supplies and global logistics, either of which could be the spark that lights the fire.
Already the opinion columnists are lining up to tell the PM to ditch the “Green Crap”, as it becomes more clear that it means bigger household bills and more volatile supply.
Given that Parliamentary speakers are getting stroppy about the Commons being told about policy first, will that potentially impose any limitations on announcements at the Tory Conference?
With trillions of dollars and potentially all of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda on the line, Democratic U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal stared down her own party’s leadership. She didn’t blink.
All day Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had said the House would vote that day on a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that represents a small portion of Biden’s agenda.
And all day, Jayapal had said that she, and most of the 96-member Congressional Progressive Caucus that she leads, would not vote for the infrastructure bill unless it was paired with the rest of Biden’s agenda — a vast $3.5 trillion package to raise taxes on the wealthy, make community college free, provide child care and paid family leave, expand Medicare and invest in programs to combat climate change.
Thursday evening, one of the few moderate Democrats skeptical of the bigger package told CNN he was “1,000 percent” certain the infrastructure bill would pass that night. Moments later, Jayapal said she was certain there would be no vote and if there was, it wouldn’t pass.
Jayapal was right. Realizing she didn’t have the votes, Pelosi never brought the bill up for a vote Thursday night.
Jayapal, the third-term congresswoman from West Seattle, has become one of the key negotiators as Democrats, with razor-thin majorities in the House and the Senate, try to pass the ambitious health care, child care, education and climate proposals that Biden ran on and are critical to the success of his presidency.
Biden’s agenda is split into those two bills and Jayapal, and the newly energized and organized progressive wing of the party, is trying to make sure that the smaller one doesn’t pass without the larger one. . . .
The Senate has passed the physical infrastructure package, boosting spending for roads, transit and broadband internet. It was negotiated, in part, by two centrist Democrats, Sen. Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona.
But Manchin and Sinema have balked at the larger bill. And, with Democrats having only a one-vote majority in the Senate, and no hopes of getting even a single Republican vote for the larger package, they can’t afford to lose either senator.
Meanwhile, Jayapal and her progressive caucus have used the infrastructure bill as leverage. Ultimately, they’ll support it, but they are refusing to vote for it until Manchin and Sinema (and the rest of the Senate) sign on to some form of the climate and social programs package. . . .
“Jayapal is providing a master class these last few weeks in how to wield power,” wrote Brian Fallon, director of the progressive group Demand Justice . . . .
“It allowed the Biden administration to sort of stand back,” he said. “They let Jayapal be the bad cop here, I think there’s sort of a wink-wink relationship in her making these demands. . . " . . . .
I knew a guy in Derbyshire - a builder - who was built like a brick outhouse. He was a nice bloke, but he just looked menacing. It was therefore funny when he'd say in a relatively high pitched voice: "Aye up, flower, fancy a pint?"
Both groups, very quietly, are becoming aware that it is actually both too late and politically impossible to avert a cataclysm if the science is correct. Neither group has decided what to do about it. When they do it will be very interesting.
So will voters go for a party who believe in Brexit but aren't doing a good job with it? Or a party that, even now, really doesn't believe?
I can see arguments against each side.
Global supply chain on the brink of collapse as cargo ships face 4-WEEK wait at US ports
https://twitter.com/MailOnline/status/1444348976032006144
The combination of ultra-low interest rates (and therefore very low savings rates), low but rising inflation, absurd house prices in parts of the country, rapidly increasing wages in some sectors, rapidly increasing prices for some essentials, and huge, huge borrowing by the government just feels to me like an explosive cocktail that is not sustainable.
Onshoring is going to accelerate.
Nonetheless, other equity markets in the world, even the FTSE 250 to a degree, have increased greatly over the last few years in a way that is difficult to sustain.
It remains to be seen what wage growth actually happens over a longer timescale, and how evenly distributed demographically and geographically.
I’ve given you the most important metric, which is – never mind life expectancy, never mind, you know, cancer outcomes – look at wage growth.
But this certainly underlines the fact that Boris intends to use wage inflation as his foremost political weapon.