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The polls have been so static it’s hard to bet on a LAB lead in 3 weeks – politicalbetting.com
The polls have been so static it’s hard to bet on a LAB lead in 3 weeks – politicalbetting.com
One of the regular markets that Smarkets is now putting up is whether Labour will get a poll lead within a set period. I got on yes in the first market which covered the whole period between August and the end of the year. This proved to be a winner for as a result of that solitary LAB lead in mid-September.
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"On the topic of human wanderlust, evolution and freedom of movement. This is something I've long found fascinating. Is there a genetic difference between those people who are happy to stay put, and are rooted in their communities, and those who are forever on the search for new horizons. Citizens of the world. The Paul Young gene. And by extension does this have an impact on politics or are other factors like social class, upbringing and economics much more important?
There is at least some scientific basis for some of this, e.g. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14100-did-hyperactivity-evolve-as-a-survival-aid-for-nomads/
The question is does this also drive differences between the somewheres and the nowheres, the migratory urban populations and the sedentary rural ones? Who knows."
+++++
I've always thought that humanity can usefully be divided between the farmers and the hunter-gatherers. The 9 to 5 ers and the freelancers. The stay-at-homes and the travel addicts. Immanuel Kant v Bruce Chatwin.
A lot of human misery is likely created by forcing the natural farmers to move, or by forcing the travellers to stay home and have jobs
Get the story straight, lads.
If the true lead is C+4 (C 39-40, L 35-36), you'd begin to expect a Labour lead as the edge of the uncertainty range.
And yet, nothing.
so he's going to join the LDs?
The polls are strange. The Tory line scarcely wavers. Labour goes up and down to the benefit or expense of the Greens and Lib Dems, but the conservatives just sit still at 40-41%.
At the same time Labour seem to be going through some sort of existential crisis. They look divided, aimless and somewhat short of ideas. God knows where Boris is going to get his program for his next majority from. The pickings of Ed's Manifesto are getting thin and there is not much else to go on. A random poll can of course produce a result as we saw in September but its not looking likely.
No shit...
EDIT:
The problem seems to be the idea that discussing this is about "blaming" immigrants. Or anyone else making rational choices.
We have a situation (for example), where for the long term unemployed, the benefits system discourages them from getting work. The kind of low end jobs they are likely to get have hard conditions, and because of the withdrawal of benefits, they don't get very much money out of it.
This policy could have been designed to make sure people don't get jobs.
https://twitter.com/TanjaBueltmann/status/1447943572624445449
"Moreover, the protocol represents a moment of EU overreach, when the UK's negotiating hand was tied, and therefore cannot reasonably last in its current form..."
https://twitter.com/tconnellyRTE/status/1447941898300166154?s=20
When you consider the huge industry dedicated to remembering the Holocaust - the books, the museums, the movies, the art, the tours of the death camps - and yet, on Unit 731 there is almost nothing. And yet it is comparable in horror, and enormous in scale.
Perhaps it is something to do with THIS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cover-up_of_Japanese_war_crimes
Without universal in-work benefits like housing benefit and tax credits/universal credit then it'd be tougher for someone in a minimum wage job to pay UK housing costs. Still possible especially in overcrowded flatshares, but tougher.
https://twitter.com/lisaocarroll/status/1447934347114393605
We weren't that happy with the deal, we thought the deal was risky, but rather than put it to the public so they could weigh it up, we just ploughed on regardless, risking our country in the process.
Quite the admission.
https://twitter.com/EmporersNewC/status/1447944825504997383
Can you imagine government decisions made by reading social media comments? May as well give Putin and Xi the keys to No 10 now.
Not happy.
There is a very nasty cough gong round at the moment - everyone testing negative so far.
It is worth considering that at the very highest peaks of COVID, only a small minority of tests were returning a positive result. Even when test were in short supply at the start and being rationed by doctors to only cases that had all the right symptoms.....
Labour do not need to be in the lead in the polls to form the next government. They need to do better than 2019, which is not difficult, so as to win 35 net seats, the LDs need to win 10-15 net seats in the southern remain heartlands where they come a good second now, and the SNP to take 2 or 3 off the Tories.
That could be done, if Labour have the wind behind them, on roughly C 38, Lab 35 LD 12 (LDs having also tactical voting and irregular swing)
That is SKS as PM. Look at recent polling. And of course with L, LD, SNP and G combined, the centre left would have well over half the votes and some legitimacy.
The temptation to see 1949 as the beginning of a clean slate was strong.
In-work benefits fuelled the availability of unlimited migration. If you're a poor and unskilled Romanian then are you better off working in a minimum wage Romanian job, or in the UK getting a British minimum wage, plus housing allowance, plus child benefits etc, etc?
In addition to the Booker-prize winning novel, you have ...
(Proper) video nasty "Men behind the sun"
There's an X-files arc/series of episodes about Unit 731
one of the Call of Duty games uses the backstory for the zombie mini-game.
This is clearly not meant to be an exclusive list, just some higher profile media in which it is referenced.
What's he said?
The UK holds all the cards right now so we absolutely should put out maximalist demands. Its exactly what Barnier would have done if he was still in place and held the cards.
The winter of 2020 was different because we had a choice. In March 2020 we didn't and pretending that moving deaths around was in some way reducing the death toll is just delusional.
The discussion has centred upon wage rises. Your position is that with the return of the immigrants wages will go up and if that puts up prices then that is also good (your jocular 4.1% vs 4.0% - how we laughed).
Mine is that if that is the case then no one is better off in such a scenario plus I have noted that demand will decrease and hence equilibrium will eventually return to pre-"shock" levels.
Max has noted that per capital demand will be lower with lower wages which of course is true. But demand of course has a multiplier and the contraction means that it is not a 1:1 relationship immigrant out one unit of his demand down.
You also noted that this has been the case for "many years". To which point I have to ask - what and when was the pre-fall state?
Studenty areas around Leeds are nice and low on the gov.uk map so it suggests it's the nasty cold going around. I had it in early August and it lasted 2 weeks (had a negative PCR to confirm it) but at least one person I've known has had it since then and we're in Oct now.
And the Tories still have the basic numbers.
Labour will be in power the election after this next one though, all governments fall apart eventually.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/12/radio-dj-emma-b-says-wayne-couzens-flashed-her-in-2008
For the umpteenth time my position is not that the return of immigrants will affect wages. It won't. That is not my argument at all. Immigration or emigration cancels out as new immigrants create demands themselves.
The "shock" is not Brexit. The "shock" was the expansion of the supply of labour to unlimited levels in 2004. That infinite supply slashed pay rates to the minimum wage level across many sectors that used to pay a factor more than minimum wage.
Brexit ends the infinite supply of labour which will return us to an equilibrium pre-shock, which is pre-2004 not pre-2020.
2003/04 was the pre-shock state not 2015, 2016 or 2019. The creation of an infinite pool of cheap minimum wage labour turned the minimum wage into a maximum wage and created the permanent "labour shortage" we've had for seventeen years now.
Despite being the head of the local Nazi party.
"Finally, with only his status as an official of an allied nation for protection, Rabe did what now seems the unthinkable: he began to roam about the city, trying to prevent atrocities himself.
Whenever he drove through Nanking, some man would inevitably leap out and stop the car to beg Rabe to stop a rape in progress -- a rape that usually involved a sister, a wife, or a daughter. Rabe would then let the man climb into the car and direct him to the scene of the rape. Once there, he would chase Japanese soldiers away from their prey, on one occasion even bodily lifting a soldier sprawled on top of a young girl. He knew these expeditions were highly dangerous ("The Japanese had pistols and bayonets and I ... had only party symbols and my swastika armband," Rabe wrote in his report to Hitler), but nothing could deter him -- not even the risk of death."
"With these women Rabe developed a warning system to protect them from Japanese rapists. Whenever Japanese soldiers scaled the wall of his yard, the women would blow a whistle and send Rabe running out into the yard to chase the offenders away. This happened so frequently that Rabe rarely left his home at night, fearful that Japanese intruders would commit an orgy of rape in his absence."
After the war, he lived in poverty due to his status as an ex-Nazi. He survived on food parcels and money sent to him from China, where he is now widely regarded as a hero.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/the-nazi-leader-who-in-1937-became-the-oskar-schindler-of-china/251525/
Sometimes, people are complex.
In other words the gulf between Labour victory (+127 seats) and Labour led government (Tories lose 47+ seats to anybody) is immense. The second is a perfectly feasible plan. The outfit that will have noticed this is the Tory party.
For SKS what looks like headline polling fail is in fact success. He knows this. Don't expect him to let on.
Now we have dealt with that, we can replace the Protocol with a permanent arrangement.
Quite a mild film such as A Town Like Alice features death marches, hints at sex slavery and features a crucifixion.
At least it didn't end after 35 minutes with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangka_Island_massacre
This was in the news quite recently, can't remember why.
But given the overpowering horror of this crime and its absolute enormity, this is all pretty trifling. Even now, it seems, the Japanese government has not even accepted that anything *bad* happened with its doctors, let alone made any specific apology
"Unit 731 scientists conducted the most macabre and sadistic experiments on human beings in the known history of medicine or warfare. Thousands died at their massive laboratory at Pingfang near Harbin, China. Tens of thousands died in their field experiments"
https://thediplomat.com/2015/05/abes-japan-cannot-apologize-for-the-pacific-war/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2014/03/09/imperial-japans-abominable-dr-death-and-the-most-disgraceful-war-crime-cover-up-in-history/?sh=742d245675de
We've had less than a handful showing any covid symptoms in three weeks, and only one of those positive.
On Okinawa the Japanese soldiers herded Japanese civilians (some not willingly) into caves. There they hid, intending to kill American soldiers by blowing themselves up when they appeared. Along with the civilians.
The American marines, when they found out this was happening, instead of simply throwing satchel charges into the caves to kill everyone (or using flame throwers), actually went in (on multiple occasions), to kill the Japanese soldiers in hand to hand combat. Literally.
This was despite the knowledge of what the Japanese had be up to with respect to POWs.
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/lord-frost-speech-observations-on-the-present-state-of-the-nation-12-october-2021
“Brexit Deal was signed at a time when Gov was weak & gripped by a constitutional crisis, the EU took advantage”
EU trade agreement was signed *year* after his party won a maj 80 seats in election to *get Brexit done* Shameless
https://twitter.com/JibbaJabb/status/1447683780655947778/video/1
In 2003 there were 500,000 jobs at the national minimum wage rate.
In 2016 there were 2,000,000 jobs at the national minimum wage rate.
The availability of an infinite supply of low-paid labour change the minimum wage from a floor to a cap across many sectors. The end of that means that jobs that were not previously minimum wage jobs can now come off the minimum wage floor.
Source: Low Pay Commission.
When I looked a couple of days ago, Manchester's 10-14 case rate was half that of Kirklees, so it's an age for age lower rate as well, not just the demographic holes that students leave when they go home, and not just the lesser numbers of young kids and their parents in city areas.
Still, might there be a hope there is going to be barely any wave amongst the mostly recently vaccinated, last year heavily exposed, student body.
And interesting that 2004 was pre-shock. Yes I understand that. For a Brexiter that was Year Zero and le deluge was most unwelcome. As it has been to previous generations.
Time to post this again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJX5XHnONTI
That video has nothing about about what I was saying.
The quantity of jobs in 2016 was 400% of the quantity of jobs at minimum wage levels in 2003.
Why? Because in 2003 if you wanted a job filling you had to offer a market rate of labour that attracted someone to fill you vacancy, but by 2016 if you wanted a job filling you could offer minimum wage and someone would come because there was an infinite supply of people willing to work fro that rate.
Brexit ends that infinite supply of minimum wage labour and means that supply and demand for wages can start to work properly again.
We're back to the pretending about "Oven-Ready Deals" applying to something else.
The IJA inflicted cruelty for the sheer fun of it, upon people who had long since surrendered. It was not a case of soldiers running amok in the heat of storming a city, it was sheer, joyful, sadism, encouraged from the top.
Including that, so that the government can then exploit what it got included to ratchet an even better deal? That is bloody brilliant.
I just wondered when your Year Zero was and it turns out it was 2003, when you were if I might hazard, just becoming politically, socially active.
Prior to you, exactly the same arguments were made, as Hollie so eloquently points out, about any wave of immigration you care to name. And yet...and yet....wages have continued to grow this whole time.
The minimum wage is a problem with any excess in the workforce (not just your pool of unlimited immigration) as you describe.
The conservatives' poll ratings slump when they look disunited and fight among themselves. They are not doing that now, and won't while they have a huge majority.
One scenario I could envisage is something in between the May 2017 and Major 1992 result. An earlyish election in 2022 (Boris wanting to capitalise before things take a turn), Tories left with a "working" majority of say 5-10 seats, setting the perfect conditions for Tory internecine warfare and the backbenches of one flavour or another turning on the PM like they did with TM. The difference now would be there is no Boris equivalent waiting in the wings. They would have to turn to a less charismatic leader, because there is no-one in the parliamentary party as charismatic as Boris. He is the Clarkson to the Tories' Top Gear, and once Clarkson left Top Gear the magic died overnight.
What was lowering wages wasn't the immigration per se it was the supply of possible immigration that meant that the quantity of minimum wage jobs could quadruple in just a dozen years post-EU8 accession.
Wages will rise now because that infinite pool of possible future migrants has been cut off, so now supply and demand can work within the country for everyone here. Including those EU migrants who've come here already in the past seventeen years and their children etc.
I never thought I would find it hard to simply READ about atrocities (visual evidence is always much more challenging, of course). But in this case, some of this stuff is genuinely difficult to absorb. The mind blanks at the evil
Rishi, Hunt, Truss ?
If there was a problem of excess supply of workforce then that should be showing itself in unemployment rates. But the UK has been at full employment for a long time, so no there was not an excess domestic supply of labour.
The excess workforce was coming from abroad, not domestic.
https://twitter.com/seanjonesqc/status/1447957735887286273
Masterclass of brilliance not stupidity.
Young adults ceatainly seem to be missing Covid this time round.
Getting the whole thing up in the air again because we can get an even better deal now we're not stuck in Article 50 anymore is fantastic too.
Win/win. And its entirely thanks to the original negotiations getting Article 16 into the Protocol that has made that possible.
Negotiating a good deal is one thing. Negotiating a good deal that you can then turn into a better deal is even better.
I expect that the rhetoric from this groups will ramp up even more as the EU negotiates is position down to basically what Frost is asking for and suddenly they will find themselves in a position even more "pure" than the EU itself.