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Could Bojo be tempted to cash in on current polling by going early? – politicalbetting.com
Could Bojo be tempted to cash in on current polling by going early? – politicalbetting.com
Undoubtedly the Conservatives are doing very well at the stage to be maintaining the poll lead over Labour and the question must arise as to whether the prime minister will decide to go for it early before things like the tax rises due for next spring come into effect?
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/08/uk-faces-grim-winter-as-cost-of-living-crisis-quickens-pace
I think it will be 2023 probably Q2 which is when elections normally are, but even that represents only a 3.5 year gap.
Half the current polls even have the Tories losing their majority and a hung parliament. He will wait until 2023/4.
As May and Trudeau showed in 2017 and this September unnecessary elections called early rarely get the big majorities aimed for, both scraped back into power rather than romping home
Also don't forget the boundary changes.
An unnecessary GE in what may be a winter surge in covid and will almost certainly be crisis in NHS over flu and a looming lockdown would go down very badly I think.
i think
Starmer will still be leader of the opposition so there won't be a big Labour lead either. There's a lot of bad news coming down the line and it won't be over in 18 months, so polls are probably going to be showing them neck and neck in 2022/2023.
2024 allows an extra year to get bad news out of the way a bit, introduce boundary changes and even replace Boris if that is deemed necessary.
Of course the election won't be in December, so it will be a bit early, Spring 2024 looks favourite or possibly early October.
But it is interesting to find someone in US politics who advocates the things I do like - both a radically smaller state but also much increased immigration. I am more used to the two being rather mutually exclusive in most people's politics.
I have not yet worked out if he is part of the religious right nutter tendency which would rather put a dampener on my positive opinion of him but I live in hope given that he is a strong advocate for minority religious and ethnic groups.
I will probably end up being disillusioned with him but thanks anyway for pointing him out.
I think the voters would rightly punish him if he tried it... so I hope he does
In the case of May, she had a very small majority and had actually been at real risk of failing to get a budget through due to a backbench rebellion. She also had extraordinary poll figures and an opponent who was both largely discredited and considered totally unelectable.
And still look what happened.
No PM is going to risk a majority of 80 after just two years. It wouldn’t be worth it. Whatever you get almost certainly wouldn’t be as good as what you had. That’s ultimately why Brown backed out in 2007.
Moreover, the government as a whole might calculate better to lose narrowly in 2024 and have a weak Labour coalition clean up the mess, fail and then they’re back in for another 15 years.
The only way there’s an election before 2024 is if there’s a change of leader and the Tories split. The first is possible and even probable. The second - again, no.
Interesting question:
Here's a question:
Scotland is smashing it out the park in terms of vaccinating 12-15 year olds. And check out the rate of jabs in 16-17 year olds compared to England.
But how come vaccine coverage is higher in all ages over 50 in Scotland even with comparable ONS denominators?
https://twitter.com/VictimOfMaths/status/1446510730723926016?s=20
Ignoring the obvious (and unlikely) "the denominator is wrong"* could it be greater proportion of ethnic minority (and more vaccine resistant) population in England?
On the children there's a clearly different approach - Scotland "walk in" vs England "via schools only" - but older ages reasons not as immediately obvious...
@Mexicanpete is this one of my "anti-devolution posts"?
*Actually, some of the Scottish denominators are wrong with 103% fully vaccinated.....however, that's less likely to be the case in the larger population cohorts.
Is anyone watching the new “28 Up”?
It is not at all as good as the original, although it’s interesting to think why.
One reason, I think, is that Britain really is less class-bound than it was 30 years ago. Most of this crop of kids (who were 7 in 2000) have settled into a kind of generic lower middle class-ness, regardless of race or even disability. And the two rich kids have done fuck-all with some very expensive educations.
The kids appear to be duller, too. Maybe growing up in the 60s and 70s was more character-building.
A bit too long and tried way too much to be the perfect denouement to Daniel Craig's James Bond.
Skyfall would have done a better job as the perfect ending if you ask me but NTTD was a solid movie but it was no Skyfall nor SPECTRE.
The economy is more knobbed than anyone suspects. When the first Covid relief package came out, we thought, uh oh, this pandemic is going to be bad.
If an election is called it may signal that it will be 2027 before we are anywhere near total recovery.
Then it might make sense.
It’s awful for Plaid Cymru though. If my rough figures are right they would start with one notional hold, although they would certainly be in contention in Ceredigion Preseli and should at least be second in Caerfyrddin.
https://twitter.com/alexstubb/status/1446347168290324481
If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
Remember that the production profile of a shale gas well is very different to that of a traditional oil or gas project. With shale, if you stop drilling, production drops very rapidly.
What we've seen is that demand fell during the pandemic, drilling stopped, and shale gas production dropped sharply. Rig counts are now rising (although they still need to increase further), and production will rapidly follow.
There are still essentially no spot exports of LNG from the US, but that will change in the next few months. By April/May next year, US natural gas production should have increased more than 10 billion cubic feet a day, and be hitting new highs. (For reference, UK natural gas demand is only 7 billion feet/day)
How do you reckon that?
Just a thought.
I am reasonably well known on this board. And my real world identity is hardly a secret.
So, it sounds reasonable. Although I don't know where June futures are right now.
It is worth noting that one of the problems the UK has had is that the domestic natural gas plants all get very used to buying spot. For a long time, excess (or spot) LNG cargos sold for 30-40% less than long-term contract prices. Which meant that people who bought long-term were making much smaller margins than those who bought spot.
When the pandemic receded, we found ourselves without lots of contracted LNG, having to fight in the market for a very small number of spot cargoes. It was an entirely self inflicted wound.
Alongside increasing the amount of gas storage in the UK, it would not be unreasonable to require those gas plants that wish to receive capacity payments from the grid, to have precontracted for a certain portion of their gas needs.
May 2023 would be too early (just three and a half years since the previous election). November/December 2023 would be a Winter election, which most people would choose to avoid. Ad November/December 2024 is both too long (five years) and a Winter election.
So, May 2024 has to be the favorite.
Equally, it’s partly balanced by a new seat in Swansea. Also I think Bridgend and Delyn would be back in play, and Aberconwy should certainly start as a notional Labour hold with Bangor being assigned to it.
I want to do some more detailed work on them burrowing into wards, but that’s my instinctive reaction.
Equally it was always going to be like that given the majority of seat reductions are happening are where Labour are strong. One in the west and two in the north were never going to be as painful for Labour as the reductions in the numerous smallish seats in the south east.
Plaid must have absolutely crapped themselves though. There’s very little redeeming feature here for the certain loss of Arfon.
Are they all reading the New York Times, and nothing else?!
It’s genuinely hard to fathom. One element must be Strasbourg Syndrome. Brexit is evil therefore it can only cause evil things to the evildoers responsible. It is a religious reflex at work
It's a work day on Monday and I've got some research on UK agriculture that's finally come through and how it survives (or doesn't) the new high wage economic model that is being imposed at great speed. The initial research showed that loads and loads of UK agriculture was a function of imported labour working British farmland. The whole ecosystem was lifted from how agriculture is carried out in Eastern Europe, just in the UK. I'll be interested to see what the final report says but the initial one was pretty grim reading from a headline GDP perspective but fairly positive from a per capita GDP perspective.
SpartacusSeanT?and a follow up
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57587023
https://www.croydon.gov.uk/council-and-elections/voting-and-elections/governance-referendum-7-october-2021#
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/bdy2023_wales_summary.html
They make it Lab-4, Con-2 PC -2.
However, that is on 2019 votes being repeated. The Tories have a number of notional seats which are very marginal indeed. Labour not nearly so much. Ynys Mon, all 5 in Clwyd and Vale of Glamorgan.
Currently, they are predicting 5 of those to go red.
So. The Tories gain for now. But end up net losers on very small swings.
2023 remains a decent chance, but less than it was as there is no recent polling to help Boris, and if anything the trend is very slightly adverse. OTOH the longer Boris goes on the greater the chance of an event to make his wheels come off; so earlier is tempting. 2023 + 4 years would give him 8 years as PM, which places him among a very select group.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/58788750
We're going to get pounded like a dockside hooker.
But especially during Covid it is the taking part that counts.
A December 2021 election gives Johnson a circa 40/50 seat majority until May 2026 by which time he could happily jump ship to the US after dinner circuit.
The added bonus of a defeated Starmer would leave the Labour Party in turmoil.
It's a win, win, win for Johnson. Not so much for the rest of us.
He was a lovely man and greatly liked
Lots of people really believe the EU is the only game in town, their world is being shattered right now as the UK prospers completely outside of its structures. This is their worst nightmare come true.
Compare it to, say, Scottish Nationalism.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/notes-on-nationalism/
The EU and Biden have quite a few things in common.
How fucking depressing.
I'm not scared of this virus. But I am scared of how our public sector reacts to it.
I am not totally convinced by their reasoning, but equally, as I say I haven’t crunched the full data and I am perfectly capable of making many mistakes. I will see what I come up with over half term.
I agree about Clywd’s marginality but as with Ceredigion and Preseli and Newport there is another factor - increasing numbers of people migrating across the border in search of cheap housing (or stunning scenery). Many of whom then vote Conservative…so those seats might actually keep trending blue even if in other areas they are falling back.
(Ynys Môn is one I always leave out of calculations as local conditions make predictions a mug’s game.)
One thing we can surely agree on is that however you look at it it’s disastrous for Plaid. They seem to be going backwards on all fronts anyway and now they have one MP who might be considered safe. They really could do without the blow to their profile and prestige this would deal.
It is not disastrous for the Liberal Democrats, however, who lose no seats as a result of these changes
And Curtice explained why:
The public thinks "Oh, why are we having an early GE? It must be because things are about to go wrong so the Governing Party is calling a quick GE now before that happens."
Cases are flat - in England the 10-14 group is beginning to fall.
Admissions are flat(ish) - unsurprising, since the cases among the at-risk groups have been rather flat for a while.
Deaths are falling rapidly.
This is something
Therefore we must do this
My daughter turns 7 in a few months and it is both sobering and exciting to think of what kind of person she might be in 20 years time (sobering because of the parental responsibility…).
Was that Reagan? One of my faves anyway
Imagine if several British Cabinet ministers were making daily threats against France. That *would* be obsessive