politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The limitations of polling: How Americans responded when as

@ bobajob

"bumpkin prejudices", you don't see a slight contradiction in that phrasing ? :-)

Bobajob said:

TwistedFireStopper said:

Come on Bob, Chukka has shown himself to be a vain, arrogant, rich-as-feck, out of touch poshlad.
We've got more than enough of those in all our mainstream parties, so he deserves as much ridicule as the rest of 'em.

Total rubbish. He is rich. So what? He has a tough south London seat and, AFAIK, works hard for it. He's from a clubbing background, which is more in-touch with many of his trendy constituents that getting in a small-businessman from the Midlands or a miner's son from Sheffield.


I understand that, and can appreciate that he works hard. He's Labour and that is good. From now on I will only attack hard working right wingers. Is that acceptable?

Maybe he studies sociology with a participant observation bent.

CarlottaVance said:

Bobajob said:

CarlottaVance said:

Bobajob said:

CarlottaVance said:

Bobajob said:

CarlottaVance said:

TGOHF said:

Can we draw a line thru Chukka for next Labour leader yet ?

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4883826/Labour-snob-Chuks-1m-Ibiza-pad-no-West-End-trash-allowed.html

"His millionaire dad"

Curiously enough mentioned in neither his Wiki entry nor constituency profile.....

......just as well no one holds wealthy parents or going to a posh school against anyone......

Yet more envious drivel from you. He is from a rich family? So what? The Labour Party is a broad church made up of people from all social classes.

And Labour posters never ever make something of an MPs parents wealth or the educational choices they made for them....no siree!

CarlottaVance said:

Bobajob said:

CarlottaVance said:

TGOHF said:

Can we draw a line thru Chukka for next Labour leader yet ?

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4883826/Labour-snob-Chuks-1m-Ibiza-pad-no-West-End-trash-allowed.html

"His millionaire dad"

Curiously enough mentioned in neither his Wiki entry nor constituency profile.....

......just as well no one holds wealthy parents or going to a posh school against anyone......

Yet more envious drivel from you. He is from a rich family? So what? The Labour Party is a broad church made up of people from all social classes.

And Labour posters never ever make something of an MPs parents wealth or the educational choices they made for them....no siree!

Point me to a post where I showed class prejudice. Arguing with you is like debating a childish schoolboy. "Yeah but.."

I didn't - my point was about Labour posters making the same class/wealth observations now being made about Chuka. Are you claiming such comments are not made?

Since you are such a Chuka fanboy, perhaps you could clarify what is meant by "Jetrosexual"!

I guess jetrosexual means a trendy, well presented, straight man who travels.

No doubt your defence would be just as robust if he was a Tory!

I look forward to your future defences of Tories from "bumpkin prejudices"

His favoured holiday destinations appear to be Ibiza and South Beach....

You know a man by his friends:

A Labour councillor has been found guilty of falsely branding a Liberal Democrat rival a paedophile and telling electors he had sex with teenage boys.
Miranda Grell slurred gay Lib Dem candidate Barry Smith while campaigning for the Leyton ward in Waltham Forest Council, east London, in 2006.

Grell, 29, was convicted by magistrates of two counts of making false statements about another candidate.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7006231.stm

"This is base politics of the worst kind and there will be no winners save for Cllr Grell when she clears her name." Chuka Umunna

http://www.libdemvoice.org/chuka-umunna-barack-obama-miranda-grell-2375.html

It's strange for a police officer to be anti-Thatcher.

If there's one thing you could say for absolute certain about Maggie it's that her support for the forces of law and order (police/army etc) was unbelievable.

Her moral belief in the law and the inate goodness of the police was a bit innocently naive in my view, but all the same, the coppers did alright with her.

Police - GOOD
Football fans (all) - BAD

Army - GOOD
Catholics in NI (nearly all) - BAD

There's much to admire in a conviction politician, but even reading her own words and own views there's no doubt she was infuriatingly black and white on some issues.

I suppose the Orgreave situation was an encapsulation of it. I know a miner who was picked up by the police, held with his arms behind him and dropped on to a kerb, breaking his ribs. He may have deserved it, I don't know, but - even as someone who thinks Scargill is a tw*t - I find it amusing how Maggie would consistently venerate the police despite so much talk of ill behaviour. And I think she truly believed they were all a force for good too.

Anyone who has been to a particularly tetchy football game will know what it's like to be on the receiving end of some good, old fashioned, moral policing!

@tim - Yes, Osborne fits well into that sequence. Unpopular at times, but right on the main issues and sticking to his guns.

@CarlottaVance

'I didn't - my point was about Labour posters making the same class/wealth observations now being made about Chuka. Are you claiming such comments are not made?'

Tory public school educated millionaire toffs = Bad.

Labour public school educated millionaire toffs = Good

I don't really get Guido-followers' sudden obsession with Chuka. Did he tweak his wikipedia entry or say something rude about clubbers before he was an MP? Who cares? It wouldn't really matter if he did it last week, and 7 years ago? Get a life, chaps.

And no, Carlotta, I've never criticised a Tory for where he went to school. Generalising about 'Labour posters' is like generalising about 'pbtories'. We vary. You vary. Variation is good.

@NickPalmer -I did not write "all" Labour posters write about where people went to school - but you wouldn't deny it does appear to obsess some of them, no?

The point on Chuka is that this sort of nonsense is flung about frequently by some on the left about Tories - but point it out about a Labour MP and they get entertainingly aerated.

And since 6 national newspapers have stories about Chuka today, it's hardly "Guido-followers"!

Alanbrooke said:

Hannan: Mining coal is good but burning coal is bad, I'm struggling to understand the Left.


http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100211743/how-many-of-the-people-complaining-of-pit-closures-would-want-to-work-in-a-coal-mine/

"... of deindustrialisation in the 1980s. That process had begun at least half a century earlier, and had accelerated through the Sixties and Seventies, when Harold Wilson closed nearly twice as many pits as Margaret Thatcher was to do. Of course, what we mean by 'closed' is that the Government discontinued the grants that had kept unprofitable mines in operation. Neither Wilson nor Thatcher prohibited the extraction of coal; they simply stopped obliging everyone else to subsidise it."

I was under the impression Margaret Thatcher closed pits, but she only stopped subsidies - like WIlson did before ? Surely not.

@tim

"Whereas New Labour clearly learnt the lesson of the importance of party discipline and pragmatism from the 1980s, the post-Thatcher Conservative Party has become more ideological and less disciplined, as exemplified in the bizarre murmurings over the prospect of replacing David Cameron, the first Conservative leader in a decade to make them a competitive electoral force, even if he was not able to win a majority against a deeply unpopular incumbent."

“Not as classy as Sunny-Jim though, was she...?”

Mr Fluffy, when it comes to ‘inappropriate’ awarding of gongs to foreigners of dubious merit, Gordon Brown’s knighthood to Ted Kennedy must be at the top of the list.

The only decent and honourable thing the old soak ever did was to pop his clogs before it arrived in the post.

The Daily Mail has outdone itself in the self parody stakes this week with its fawning over Thatcher and its manufactured outrage over anyone perceived not to be mourning her passing intensely enough.

@sam

it will also be (the first?) question on AQ tonight.

<blockquote class="Quote" rel="CarlottaVance">
And what shall we call you, next time you make a tyop?
</blockquote>

You tell me who 'we' is and I'll let you know (or is that your wee tribute to granny Magrit?).

Would a hypocrisy tax wipe out the deficit? Who would be most affected though? We would need to have all those fairness tests first.....

@old_labour Your partner is not the only one to have had problems crossing the river between the two countries. The Hungarians and the Slovaks have a scratchy relationship. This must rank as one of the silliest diplomatic incidents ever:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_ban_of_Hungarian_President_from_Slovakia

Komárno is ethnically majority Hungarian (as is much of southern Slovakia).

Conservative candidate for South Shields:

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/parliament/2013/04/karen-allen-chosen-s-conservative-candidate-for-south-shields-byelection.html

Alanbreac said:

@TURD

sometimes we all make shit typos.

Indeed, plukey Alan.

Pulpstar said:

Alanbrooke said:

@pulpstar

did you get your german issue sorted ?

Not yet, I'm trying another tack on the issue though. If you can translate I'm all ears.

I do German-English translations as a second job - drop me a note if you like? (nickmp1 at aol dot com) Missed the original post so I don't know if it's a sentence or a 1000-page book...

shipmate1 said:

Would a hypocrisy tax wipe out the deficit? Who would be most affected though? We would need to have all those fairness tests first.....

Excellent idea. Brings to mind a certain poster here who berated those on PB who use events as an excuse to "drip bile" on those whom they dislike...

This is interesting. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/12/climate-change-not-2012-drought

An excerpt:

The lead author of the report, Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told the Associated Press he had tried to create computer simulations of the the drought, factoring in climate change conditions. Hoerling undertook a similar exercise with the 2011 drought in Texas, finding that climate change had indeed been a factor.

He was unable to do so in this case, Hoerling said, arguing that it demonstrated the drought had been a one-off event.

It's the first time I've heard of a study being published where someone had failed to find a link between a weather extreme and global warming. There have been previous studies linking extremes such as the 2000 south England floods, the 2003 European heatwave and the 2010 Russian heatwave with global warming.

I was beginning to wonder whether there was a publication bias involved - people rarely publish studies with a null result simply because they are less interesting.

Lessons from Thatcher haunt the utterly useless Osborne:

it is very hard to shrink the size of government even when a strong leader has complete control of the legislature, that it takes many years of arduous work to do so and that at the end of the day it won’t shrink very much.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/the-legend-of-margaret-thatcher/

@Tim @Smithson I see you have your bff supporting you now. It's so refreshing to see the site owner rushing to your defence. How very Bercow of him. BTW You wouldn't know a fact if it hit you in the face.

tim said:

@Scampi

Pointing out that someone who posts "hypocracy" next to "leftard" might not be very bright is hardly a smear, it's a statement of fact.

Leftard is, you know, like retard. It's hilarious. It implies left-wingers are, you know, retarded. How funny is that? It's nearly as hilarious (and clever) as Zanu Labour and Al-Beeb.

Plato said:

LOL Batman meets Mrs T *still chuckling at this several minutes later* https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BHpFA06CQAABMOW.jpg:large

And a view from the centre:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BHozHFlCEAA4IM9.jpg:large

anotherDave said:

The Independent is reporting that UKIP are contesting 1001 seats in the 2nd May elections, rather than the 1727 mentioned on PB.

"The anti-EU party is consistently in double figures in the opinion polls and is fielding 1,001 candidates, up from 319 last year."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/tories-braced-for-heavy-losses-as-coalition-goes-headtohead-8569156.html

http://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2013/04/09/ukip-are-fielding-candidates-in-three-quarters-of-the-local-seats-up-on-may-2nd/

The article says "Its best hopes are in Hull, Hartlepool, Stockton-on-Tees and West Wiltshire."

But i don't think Hull, Hartlepool and Stockton vote this year!

@Tim

'Cameron's issue is his fakeness'

And Chuka Harrison is authentic,your having a laugh.

SimonStClare said:

Mr Fluffy, when it comes to ‘inappropriate’ awarding of gongs to foreigners of dubious merit, Gordon Brown’s knighthood to Ted Kennedy must be at the top of the list.

The only decent and honourable thing the old soak ever did was to pop his clogs before it arrived in the post.

Sadly not true Mr StClare: Labour awarded Ceaus' the highest noble award in chivalry! Sums-up their understanding of democracy and tradition...!

Plato said:

RT @Khyberman: Q:How many Socialists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: "Let's not change it. Let's just keep blaming Margaret Thatcher indefinitely."

LOL

North Korea is better armed than I thought it was:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/04/10/graphic-north-koreas-conventional-arms/

Rexel56 said:

O/T

Grove vindicated on history teaching as two university students on Pointless fail to identify any of the following five facts related to the Civil War having been given straightforward clues:

- Cavaliers
- Oliver Cromwell
- New Model Army
- Edge Hill
- Charles I

They plumped for "redcoats" as being the name given to the Royalists that was derived from the French for horseman.

Mr. Rexel, I am not surprised students knew nothing about the English Civil war (or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms as we are now supposed to call it), it has been skipped over in school history syllabus for donkey's years. The first time I studied it was a few years ago as part of a history degree, even then the course skimped on the military events in favour of social perspectives and a feminists view (part of the "Women's History quota).

Mind you how they got to "Redcoats" being derived for the French for Horseman let alone being applied to Royalists is beyond me.

antifrank said:

I know who looks the likeliest candidate, but with no evidence at all, I shall stay mute for now.

It would take balls.....

@GIN1138

'Of course if this was a potential Conservative leader imploding Tim would have gone into posting meltdown, but he's been strangely quiet about Chuka. Can't think why?'

If it was a Tory public school educated, millionaire, toff referring to voters as 'trash' the PB server would have crashed by now.

HurstLlama said:

Rexel56 said:

O/T

Grove vindicated on history teaching as two university students on Pointless fail to identify any of the following five facts related to the Civil War having been given straightforward clues:

- Cavaliers
- Oliver Cromwell
- New Model Army
- Edge Hill
- Charles I

They plumped for "redcoats" as being the name given to the Royalists that was derived from the French for horseman.

Mr. Rexel, I am not surprised students knew nothing about the English Civil war (or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms as we are now supposed to call it), it has been skipped over in school history syllabus for donkey's years. The first time I studied it was a few years ago as part of a history degree, even then the course skimped on the military events in favour of social perspectives and a feminists view (part of the "Women's History quota).

Mind you how they got to "Redcoats" being derived for the French for Horseman let alone being applied to Royalists is beyond me.

Oh it was even more depressing. They suggested 'redcoats' on the basis that one of the girl's american boyfriend used that as a nickname for her...

CarlottaVance said:

North Korea is better armed than I thought it was:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/04/10/graphic-north-koreas-conventional-arms/

North Korea has a lot of stuff but most of it is obsolete and would really just be providing a target rich environment if war ever kicked off. Their forces are geared to fight a 1950s war not a modern one.

@TGOHF

Well jr. was one of the Forces From Hell.

@Tim

'A guide to Ed Balls' London'

Did Chuka write the guide?

Latest Bundestag poll:

Forschungsgruppe Wahlen:

CDU/CSU: 42%
SPD: 27%
Green: 14%
Linke: 6%
FDP: 4%
Others: 7%

http://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/index.htm

@John Sims

" If it was a Tory public school educated, millionaire, toff referring to voters as 'trash' the PB server would have crashed by now."

I doubt it. We'd have had a thread and continuation thread to prevent a crash.

Pulpstar said:

Alanbrooke said:

Hannan: Mining coal is good but burning coal is bad, I'm struggling to understand the Left.


http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100211743/how-many-of-the-people-complaining-of-pit-closures-would-want-to-work-in-a-coal-mine/

"... of deindustrialisation in the 1980s. That process had begun at least half a century earlier, and had accelerated through the Sixties and Seventies, when Harold Wilson closed nearly twice as many pits as Margaret Thatcher was to do. Of course, what we mean by 'closed' is that the Government discontinued the grants that had kept unprofitable mines in operation. Neither Wilson nor Thatcher prohibited the extraction of coal; they simply stopped obliging everyone else to subsidise it."

I was under the impression Margaret Thatcher closed pits, but she only stopped subsidies - like WIlson did before ? Surely not.

That's an interesting article, thanks.

One thing people forget is that the traditional image of mining - the grimy men working in awful conditions underground (as shown in the picture in the article) is far from the whole story. A very large number of men worked above ground in a whole plethora of roles, from plant fitting, stockpile maintenance, to back-office. Much of it was still hard work, and many of them were tough men (some were older miners who had been medicalled off underground work). Strangely, every ex-miner I've known well worked above ground.

As for your question: ISTR that subsidies were reduced, not removed. But many mines shut, not because of any economic reasons, but because they were exhausted, with little obtainable coal left. This is a process that had been occurring for hundreds of years and was impossible to prevent.

Having said that, some mine closures were travesties.

I don't know if anyone knows definitively, but ISTR that several mine were closed immediately after the strike because the strikers had not allowed maintenance engineers in. This led to flooding and the destruction of underground machinery and support structures. Myth of truth?

Neil said:

MarkSenior said:

It is certainly not in flux as all the SOPN have been published and are on my spreadsheet .

I suspect you have a better grasp of the numbers than UKIP's HQ.

It is almost impossible to be 100% accurate for various reasons . I know of 2 UKIP , 1 Lib Dem and 1 Labour candidate who are on the ballot paper with No Party Description probably because they simply forgot to bring the relevant signed documentation with them when they submitted their nomination papers . There have also been 2 withdrawals that I know of both Green candidates .