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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » It is time to salute the brilliance of the visionary that is D
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » It is time to salute the brilliance of the visionary that is Diane Abbott
A year ago this weekend Diane Abbott made this prediction
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Or using Abbott's maths, twelvety-fifth.
Abbott was just whistling in the wind. Her communication skills are terrible. However, she is respected hugely in the Black community.
It's all fake hystericalist propaganda anyway. When Gove Mogg-Boris becomes Mime Prinister, we will all be liberated from the tyranny of opinion polls!
http://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2016/12/11/betting-on-will-boris-johnson-still-be-foreign-secretary-of-the-1st-of-january-2018/
As someone who has never lived in London I am suspicious of the focus of all things SE and London, my feeling is that for Labour to succeed it needs to look beyond the capital city - Scotland, the midlands need to really feel loved by Labour (and to love them back) for there to be a serious Gen Election win in the offing which I do not see much evidence of, then again who knows where we will be in a year's time.
Labour paying police officers £30 a year and forcing them to walk around stark naked into their 80s? Well, with Macdonnell in charge taking us back to the seventeenth century and a fully agrarian economy it seems plausible.
We have all LOLed at her in times past, which I'm sure we all feel duly guilty about after revelations about her illness.
Turn weather type on to see the snow.
And it's still falling faster than Theresa May's poll rating after the dementia tax. The kerbs are now covered.
Edit - on a close look ther's something else quite worrying. It's not quite pure snow. It's got some sleet. But it's freezing as soon as it hits the ground.
What would you call it?
(Oh, and Cannock isn't North. It's Midlands.)
I have a funny feeling there won't be too many at church this morning. I'm not risking the car so I'll have to walk. But the church I normally play for has a high average age so I'm thinking most will stay at home. This is slippery and anyone going over could easily break something.
Or there'll be a run on snoods
And insert joke about Liverpool/Man Utd fans not being able to drive up from the South.
I agree with others that Jezza did better once the public focused on him during GE rather than reading about him in the papers.
As for next leader - not convinced... I think she could get on the ballot if backed by Corbyn - but she did poorly the time she ran before...
That leaves an awful lot riding on Corbyn not breaking down, and even allowing for his health, vigour and admirably healthy lifestyle he's 69 in a few months. While he's doing far better than anyone expected - probably including him - the ineptitude of his succession planning given his age is not suggestive of a man with a grasp of long term strategy.
Labour are very fortunate to be facing a government in such disarray.
Broken clock syndrome.
Gove was a dogmatist who had some ideas that were not bad in and of themselves but no idea of how to implement them effectively where they ran counter to reality. Rayner is a dogmatist with no ideas at all beyond 'me good, they bad' and no idea of how to implement them effectively.
She has not grown into her brief and Labour's policy on various aspects of education insofar as it has one remains a shambles. About the only significant policy achievement she has was getting Corbyn's not at all a promise on tuition fees scrapped, but beyond that and some vague aspirations on extending adult educational opportunities (not a bad idea in itself) her policy seems to consist mostly of 'we'll do something different on pay, workload and governance but we don't know what it is yet.'
Put bluntly, there are three issues facing education: funding shortages, accountability and staff recruitment. That's over and above the perennial issue of uneven standards and the difficulty of getting a good education to children from poorer backgrounds.
For funding shortages there is no obvious cure. Pupil numbers are rising and spending increases are not keeping pace. More money is needed but where it comes from I will freely admit I don't know. Labour's policy was to tax private schools to provide it, but the rates they proposed were so penal most private schools would have closed and therefore there would have been no extra money and a sudden increase in numbers in the state sector.
Accountability is easy, but nobody is willing to do it. Local authorities are not, surprisingly, particularly accountable, academy chains however are far less so. The easy solution is to leave the school under the control of parent governors. No government will do it because it would be embarrassing if it worked.
Staff recruitment is linked to poor pay, but especially to insane hours spent planning and marking. The average teacher works around a 65 hour week, more if they have other responsibilities. The solution is to cut class sizes. The funding shortages are so acute the reverse is happening. And there is no obvious progress on this in sight.
Standards would probably be improved by abolishing OFSTED, which started as an ego trip for Chris Woodhead, a failed teacher who was later also unmasked as a sex offender, and has gone downhill from there. It requires as much time to be spent doing paperwork as planning lessons, which is insane. And yet they still demand ever more impossible things, including, unforgettably, a lesson plan for each individual child in one school I worked in that they were threatening with special measures.
I would vote for any party with practical ideas for sorting these out. Let me know if you ever come across one. Labour haven't even got to grips with the problems yet beyond teacher pay (which is I think more to do with their client vote in the public sector than anything else) never mind proposed realistic solutions.
While that is something (speaking as somebody who doesn't rate her) she should be applauded for it didn't exactly endear her to Momentum.
It's also worth noting that this is an issue she's consistent on and it hasn't stopped her critcizing Israel where needed or supporting a Palestinian state. But that apparently isn't good enough.
There is proper snow settling in London, which wasn't forecast.
This from the Guardian is relevant to the thread header- Nick Cohen raises some good points
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/09/what-would-it-take-for-labour-moderates-to-revolt
Much of what you say therefore seems familiar. The problem is how do you ensure better quality of teaching without killing it with bureaucracy. Its not easy. I went to a fairly good state school but there were many teachers simply coasting. My History teacher for example would have 20 questions relevant to a couple of chapters on the board when we came in. He would disappear for 30 minutes of the lesson and then pop back to ask people at random the questions to see whether we had read the chapters in his absence.
I do fear that part of the problem has been that the teaching unions have not behaved like professional bodies. If incompetent teachers were winnowed out the need for bureaucracy would be diminished. Solicitors, accountants and others can all be penalised for inadequate professional service to the point they are no longer allowed to practice. An incompetent teacher is more likely to get promoted out of the classroom into a deputy head role.
Its not easy but it does seem to me that the profession needs to start imposing discipline on itself as well as telling those not in it to bugger off. I admit I have no idea how we go down this road.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/dec/10/brexit-q-and-a-politicians
It appears that the gross amount is actually 80bn Euros, but we have the option to get 20bn back mostly through EU spending in Britain, reducing it to 60bn. That normally comes with a rider that Britain needs to fund it too - we have in the past turned down some opportunities for EU spending because the programme it would fund wasn't a priority for the British government.So the true figure does seem higher than the 40ish bn reported and possibly more than 60bn. The source for this is EU calculations, and as the British haven't published a brekdown it's hard to be sure ifit's right, but at least it's split up so we can see what we're talking about.
With this scale of numbers it's hard to get a feeling for what's a lot and what isn't, but 60bn is about £800 a head, mostly front-loaded but a quarer of it after we leave(pensions etc.).
I'm afraid having lambasted Rayner and Gove I must admit I don't have easy solutions either. The problems are vast.
Chadsmoor have just told me they are cancelling their morning service. Which means my inability to grab five minutes somewhere in the week to practice is for once not an issue.
I shall pull on my boots and see what's happening at St Luke's in Cannock instead.
Have a good morning everyone and to echo the estimable @Jonathan stay safe if you venture out
Snow on the ground in London before Xmas is very rare. Indeed for the southern UK generally, snowfall is statistically more likely at Easter than at Christmas.
Supposed to be going to a concert later so hope the tube is alright
To be honest if this was the end result I would rather stay in. No control over free movement, our laws, and unable to do our own trade deals is pointless
One minor insanity you missed out was the abolition of national key stage assessment standards along with the expectation that every school develop their own.
He has confirmed he wants a free trade deal with the best of Canada and South Korea's deals with the EU plus something on services
I do not like the federalist aim of Europe which, even this week, Schulz has made full federalism as a condition on a coalition with Merkel.
I do want immigration , but I want it controlled, I do want us to decide on how our money is spent, and I would like us to be able to do independent trade deals, and our laws as sovereign.
Realistically I hope for a deal which enables the last paragraph, and allows a transition period of 2 to 3 years.
However, who knows where it will end
But no, do not dismiss predictions that seem outlandish and out of step with what appears to be true at the time: which is why I say again that Jeremy Corbyn will lose the next general election.
And he lost both general elections. As will Corbyn.
(nb that is not asked in defense of DD...)
Nothing but howling wind and rain here. My inner child is disappointed. More apropos, Diane Abbott is ghastly, you heard it here first. A bientot.
Despite 2015 and 2017, 1992 remains the worst forecast general election ever by UK pollsters, at least in 2015 half and in 2017 all the pollsters had the Tories ahead even if they underestimated them in 2015 and overestimated them in 2017.
http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/historical-polls/voting-intention-1987-1992
I do try to resist the 'Good Old Days' syndrome; there is no better time to be alive than right now, but we do seem to have poorer politicos as a minor downside.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5163579/Trump-drinks-12-Cokes-watches-8-hours-news-day.html