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The only thing we have to Keir is Keir itself – politicalbetting.com
The only thing we have to Keir is Keir itself – politicalbetting.com
Sir Keir Starmer might be a symptom not a cause of a long term Labour malaise.
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Which is why our economy is heading fast towards soft socialism though we have a Conservative PM as I write.
(Of course, Starmer's failure is that he was chosen as the candidate most likely to win an election. So his failure, if he fails, will be particularly abject.)
Oh, hold on.
Both parties are broad churches (necessarily so, under our electoral system), but Labour's extremities seem to hate each other more viscerally than the Tory's extremities. And many tend not to mind letting that show in public either.
It's no coincidence that Labour's most effect period as a political party in the last 50 years was also the time when the leadership seemed to be most focussed at ensuring everyone was 'on message'.
I can't see any of these three changing in the next 50 years -- at least, not on a permanent basis -- so my long-term predication would be for continuing Conservative dominance (with only occasional sporadic bursts of non-Conservative Government when the electorate get tired of them and they need some time in opposition to renew themselves).
Andy Zaltzman commented in last week's News Quiz that Labour is essentially two parties welded together by the exigencies of First Past The Post. That's true. It's also true for the Conservatives, except their welding has been done more professionally and most of the time is far less noticeable.
So Labour loses the battle but wins the war.
We're through the looking glass here, people.
Don’t also underestimate the extent to which our crooked political system both gives the Tories a hand up and helps them hang together.
And a Spanish police source told the Sunday Mirror last night: “Officially we can’t confirm, but unofficially he’s in a big luxury villa on the border between Marbella and Benahavis.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/boris-johnson-jets-holiday-brits-25178355
Germany, where 4/9 Chancellors of the Federal Republic have been left wing (including the one that's probably about to replace Merkel), Canada, Australia (10/17 PMs since 1945 right wing) and the United States (7R and 7D since 1945), seem more even.
But only in Sweden of the countries I've looked at does the left have a lock on power as great as, or even greater than, the Conservatives in Britain. There the Social Democrats have been in power for 68 of the last 85 years. That actually makes the Tories' record here (55 of the last 85 years) look pretty poor.
Every successful leader is lucky, but they make their own luck to a large extent.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-19-delta-outbreak-60-community-covid-cases-today-second-woman-on-northland-trip-contacted-expert-freaking-out/TFLIG7BP4XII2S2GRLEB4YDF3I/
Criticism of Jacinda happy to do press conferences when they have low cases but not when cases are growing.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-19-delta-outbreak-judith-collins-calls-on-jacinda-ardern-to-front-clearly-questions-pm-does-not-want-to-be-asked/C47MHT564MFYNSPU5XNSK4JF4E/
Still struggle to see how NZ get out of a zero Covid mindset to learn to live with it in the future.
Home working left Britons at Taliban's mercy: Ministers reveal civil servants couldn't access vital documents and lost critical days during Afghan exit as UK citizens tried to flee brutal regime
Cabinet Ministers claim 'work from home' culture in Whitehall left Brits at mercy of Taliban in Afghanistan
Civil servants away from desks couldn't read documents on UK citizens fleeing
The UK failed to airlift hundreds out of Afghanistan before August 28 withdrawal
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10076061/Home-working-left-Britons-Talibans-mercy-Afghanistan-Ministers-claim.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/09/priti-patel-johnson-blocks-public-sexual-harassment-law-home-office-pm-offence
F1: the Turkish race (NB not the specials) on Ladbrokes are oddly indicated as being on the 14th, so if you're after those they'll be in the future rather than marked as being for today.
In fact, she would almost certainly still have won in 1983 with or without it. What it did rather than help her electorally was give her cover within the Tories themselves for a much more radical programme by enhancing her personal prestige and making the key ‘wets’ look silly.
What cost Labour the 1983 election were its policy offering and its leadership. It is no coincidence that its support dropped substantially during the election campaign itself, to the extent even Thatcher began to urge people to vote for them (as she was more afraid of an opposition led by the SDP).
With vaccinations, the virus has become a mild, treatable disease for most, he added, urging people to go about their daily activities, taking necessary precautions and complying with safe management measures.
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/spore-must-press-on-with-strategy-of-living-with-covid-19-and-not-be-paralysed-by
ETA specifically on the Falklands, Mrs Thatcher was fortunate not to be blamed for her withdrawal of HMS Endurance which triggered the invasion. The obvious parallel is Churchill becoming Prime Minister in May 1940 on the fall of Chamberlain over the disastrous Norway campaign, whose architect was Winston Churchill.
Incidentally your post mentioned ‘Falklands and Labour split’ which could have been a reference to the divisions over how to respond to the invasion within Labour (I realise it wasn’t).
It really comes down to this: the Tories, broadly speaking, give the impression of quite liking the country as it already is, whereas Labour activists don't. For the latter, everything is dreadful and radical change must come immediately. If you're part of the vast swathe of the electorate that doesn't agree, then Labour hates you and you deserve to be cancelled.
The one Labour leader in modern times who managed to convince the electorate that he actually liked Britain and would deliver change that didn't involve ripping everything down and starting again was Blair, and under him Labour won by a landslide. Here endeth the lesson that Labour's activists don't want to learn.
Blair got the backing of media like the Sun. He won after a very long period of Tory rule. He won whilst the economy was actually doing pretty well under Major.
Singapore had been braver - but "new normal" is now 3-6 months away:
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/pm-lee-expects-singapores-covid-19-new-normal-is-three-to-six-months-away
Their PH messaging has the advantage of being clear - something the UK nations could learn from:
They are trying to stop people going to A&E with symptoms and in a highly vaccinated population "recover at home" is their key message.
Betting PostF1: backed Hamilton to win each way (third the odds top 2), at 4.1:
https://enormo-haddock.blogspot.com/2021/10/turkey-pre-race-2021.html
Reckon the Mercedes has the legs on the Red Bull here.
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
https://twitter.com/TomMcTague/status/1446930609809526788?s=20
NZ will adjust fine I think. Virtually everyone there is going to get covid after being vaccinated, which is probably the best outcome possible.
The LibDems tried change - but their proposals were thrown out by the unconvinced voters.
Throw in a word like "crooked" and you just lose the reader.
Cape Keir?
Labour 4
Conservatives 6
In the last quarter of a century the Conservatives have only won two General Elections.
See? Not so conclusive after all.
Must be a terrible racist though..
"she is strongly critical of the tactics of the Black Lives Matter movement itself, arguing that it undermines teaching children to take personal responsibility, encourages violence and exacerbates racism by making debates harder and encouraging black teenagers to focus on identity politics or victimhood"
"Birbalsingh is opposed to teaching children about white privilege in schools and subjecting staff or pupils to unconscious bias training, arguing that such measures encourage racial segregation over constructively solving racism and distract from the true meaning of education."
"Birbalsingh also asserted her opposition to what she described as the growth of "woke culture" in education, arguing that it is more focused on "making children into revolutionaries" and inserting political bias into classes over instilling values such as kindness, tolerance and hard work"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Birbalsingh
Am I the only person to become increasing annoyed at the definition of deaths due to Covid..... deaths within 28 days of a positive test. I'm sure we've agonised over this before, but it really doesn't, IMV anyway, present a true picture.
At one time someone here was able to post figures for the average daily deaths in the four parts of the UK over the past 5 or so years and quite often the figures nowadays were lower.
Most of us know that fiscally and economically things are heading downhill in the short and medium term.
Boris Johnson hates being put under the spotlight and Keir Starmer will do and, I believe, do so effectively in a campaign. Johnson will try to avoid tv debates entirely because he will be forensically scrutinised.
'BORIS ISN'T WORKING' and 'BREXIT ISN'T WORKING' posters are already beginning to pop up. This was the brilliant ('LABOUR ISN'T WORKING') Satchi and Satchi campaign that launched Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher was certainly NOT charismatic. She was dour and famously had no sense of humour. She's actually a lot like Keir Starmer in that respect. They are similar intelligent people in having an eye for detail and a great grasp of facts. When the country needed fixing that is exactly what people wanted.
You can get 3/1 on Labour boosted with Ladbrokes. It's worth it. Beware the peril of recency bias.
In answer to your question, yes I agree entirely she was fortunate not to be blamed, although technically the withdrawal of Endurance had only been announced, not enacted. What triggered the invasion was the desperate need of Galtieri’s junta for a quick military success that would unite the army and the country behind him and hopefully boost economic productivity via a feel good factor (the latter not materialising as no further credit was available to a nation that had taken on one of the world’s most important financial powers). Not only that, but the Foreign Office and the MoD had missed so many signals that the Argentines were preparing to invade you have to wonder if there were senior figures who were complicit in it.
But agreed (again) the announcement that Endurance was to be withdrawn was one reason why he thought he would get away with it.
It was all Fatcha’s fault!!
That's Boris Johnson's greatest card. He will almost certainly have the tabloids rallying to his triumphalist nationalist bullshit.
It is really hard to overturn a big majority in one go. It’s expensive, for a start. Paying for all the necessary information/advertising, and boots on ground talking to people, and setting up local campaigns, and effectively targeting the message - bearing in mind if you want 14 million votes, you have to explain 14 million pathways why people should vote for you.
It can be done, and certainly what’s coming should be highly damaging to the incumbent government given much of it is due to their mistakes. But overturning this size of majority will be very hard.
That’s even before we ponder the fact that to get a majority of 1 without a major revival in Scotland Labour need a swing larger than the one Blair got in 1997. Which was the most seismic election result since 1945 (arguably 1906). And Starmer is no Blair, nor was Blair facing a government with a majority of 80.
I’m not tempted by anything less than 30/1 as value.
*Discounting 1906 where the government of 1900 was (a) in opposition at the time and (b) so badly split between three warring factions that the notional 134 majority was in practice not a majority.
78.5% of those over the age of 12 have had both jabs, 85.4% have so far had one. The pool left in the UK will very soon be recording essentially the terminally ill and the suicidally inclined.
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
Especially not here. I suspect there isn't a country on the planet at least one of our contributors hasn't visited....
. I prefer not to do negotiations by twitter, but since
@simoncoveney
has begun the process...
...the issue of governance & the CJEU is not new. We set out our concerns three months ago in our 21 July Command Paper.
The problem is that too few people seem to have listened.
https://mobile.twitter.com/DavidGHFrost/status/1446981187663192066
It’s a negotiation. Get over it.
1992 Major had a majority of 21. I know I know, you will say that was eroded away over 5 years but the fact is that 1997 was a massive overturn, demonstrating that when the mood shifts, boy can it shift. 170 seat shift (weighted), that's a hell of a movement and would land Starmer's Labour a massive majority if repeated.
And in that time we've had coalition governments so there aren't really many general elections with which to measure your assertion. Really since 1979 there have only been two big regimes: Thatcher's from 1979-1997 and Blair's from 1997 to 2010.
A lot depends on whether you think Boris Johnson's 2019 victory reset the tory clock, or whether in time it will come to be seen as part of the Cameron-May tory rule running back to c. 2010. A case can be made for both sides of that argument but my view is that it was a very distinctive 'Get Brexit Done' election.
I have a growing sense that we're in a tory fade.
And next time Johnson won't be facing the impossible-to-elect Jeremy Corbyn.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/northern-powerhouse-rail-hs2-levelling-up-b1934935.html
But there are two crucial ways in which it is different. Heath led a united party with everyone accepting that while he wasn’t the best of leaders, in the absence of an obvious alternative he should be given a chance. That’s not the case with Starmer, who has much work to do sorting out the divisions and chaos in his own party.
Heath was also quietly and very efficiently targeting those seats and voters he believed he could win from 1966 onwards. Studying the operation he ran in that period makes Mandelson seem like a bungling amateur. He set up a programme that identified, targeted and persuaded those who were ‘soft Labour’ to vote for the Tories. He also had very precise information on how well they were doing, which disregarded the headline opinion polls - the positive ones from 1967-69 and the worse ones in 1969-70. And he was proven right by the results. There’s no evidence Starmer has even begun to do anything similar.
(Of course, Heath’s success was a mixed blessing. It made him very complacent about his electoral brilliance, with unfortunate consequences in 1974…)
And I bet I've travelled more and lived more widely than the majority of posters on here, including Leon.
* Obviously this is hyperbole but most people ran for their atlases when the news broke, so there's no need for you to be personally obdurate.
Frost refuted that claim and said it had been clear in the July proposals from the UK
Please explain the bad faith.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Eta Rose something?
Side thought; do people still collect stamps?
There's something of the 1939-45 about what has happened these past two years that ought to make punters a little wary, especially of being too assertive.
I’m guessing you don’t have any actually facts or arguments to back your statement up then?
I find it hard to believe that the majority of people didn't know where they were.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
So yeah, most of us roughly knew where the Falklands were. Certainly smarter than the US sense of geography back then:
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1984/12/13/Study-One-fifth-of-students-cant-find-US-on-a-map/2120471762000/
Alliance/SDP voters prefered Thatcher to Foot.
So to blame The Falklands and the Alliance/SDP for Labour's shellacking in 1983 is denialism by the left.
Anyway, I have better things than to be sidetracked on that one. The vastly more important point was that the Falkland War probably saved Margaret Thatcher's premiership.
Now I have some baking to be done!