On this week’s PB / Polling Matters podcast, Keiran Pedley and Leo Barasi look at a recent Bloomberg story investigating links between hedge funds and pollsters on the day of the EU referendum, public opinion on Heathrow and the environment and ask what Blair hopes to achieve with his latest intervention (and why David Cameron seems to be so quiet).
Comments
After that, we shall probably face Brazil, who are frightening but no longer invincible and then either France or Uruguay. I am starting to wonder if there is any value in Portugal but they depend hugely on Cristiano Ronaldo.
Things could look quite different after the Round of 16 in terms of survivors. We also may well find out that Belgium prefers to come second too, making for interesting gamesmanship!
I reckon we should go for it, with only a few minor changes, such as Rashford in for Sterling. Beating Brazil in a QF is what a the tournament is all about, rather than an ignominious defeat by Japan.
As my tickets are for the St Petersburg Semi, I have strong interest in this!
In the 1950s and early 1960s, it was expected that there would soon be large (by current standards) space stations in orbit, each with perhaps a dozen or more people on board. The US Air Force's cancelled Manned Orbital Laboratory or Russia's Almaz were essentially prototypes of this.
The reason is reconnaissance and communications: if you wanted to spy on something on the ground, the technology at the time required you to launch a rocket, fly the satellite over, and the satellite would then drop its film payload, which was caught in mid-air and taken for processing and interpretation (e.g. the US's Corona program). This was not time-responsive (if you wanted to examine something quickly, the chances are you didn't have an unused satellite ready) and very expensive.
So the idea was to have manned satellites capable of significant changes in orbital plane, where the crew would develop film and interpret the images in space.
Likewise, communications: anything that required communications would have to use valves or the newfangled transistors. The early technology was unreliable and its use in space uncertain, so it was assumed that communications satellties would have people on board, changing valves or transistors and crystals.
Both these uses for man in space: reconnaissance and communications, became redundant after the integrated circuit became reliable: we could digitally scan images from space and send them down via encrypted links, allowing reconnaissance satellites to stay up for years, and communications satellites are far more capable. And without people in orbit, we haven't really ahd the excess manpower to work out other productive reasons to have them up there.
So we have massively more unmanned satellites doing things than expected, but find it very hard to find a reason for manned programs.
A couple of points:
1. The Yougov/Sky poll on 23rd June 2016 was an online poll asking their panel how they’d voted, as opposed to the in-person outside the polling station poll which is usually described as an “exit poll”.
2. Surely air pollution around an airport is much better if planes arrive and land immediately, rather than arrive and spend half an hour going around in circles because there’s a queue for the runway?
Blair has none.
Roberto Martínez struck a different tone to Gareth Southgate by claiming winning their final group game against England is not a priority and insisting protecting his players from injury and suspension was of greater importance.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/jun/27/roberto-martinez-belgium-world-cup-beating-england-not-priority
Whatever Southgate decides, England's deeper squad means we should beat Belgium.
As for resting players, the game against Panama was played at a walking pace. I'd rather we fielded our strongest team and gave them 90 minutes practice playing against a decent opposition that will have more of the ball. And remember we are still new to the 3-5-2 formation also.
Meanwhile, the EU27 is preparing for crash Brexit. Seems sensible.
https://twitter.com/FinancialTimes/status/1012189435906215936?s=19
Things would not have serenely continued the way they were.
Whilst I think, like most people, that England are more dangerous with Rashford on the pitch it is really at the back that England have looked vulnerable. I would want to try at least a couple of different defenders to see how they go, possibly a different goalkeeper as well. I would like to see Rose and Alexander-Arnold play, possibly Jones as well.
Mr. Sandpit, although partly complacent (a hallmark of both sides), Leave did at least have some positive sentiment behind it.
I do think people want a positive case for X to be made.
Even now, Nigel Farage and UKIP have nothing to say about what our post-Brexit position should be, and Brexit was their raison d'etre so if not even they've given the matter much thought over the past decade, it is no wonder we are in a pickle.
I'm unsure committed leavers would ever see *any* argument for the EU positively ...
The In campaign found it incredibly difficult to say anything positive about the EU. Many of the leaders of the In campaign had won a lot of cheap votes over the years by criticising it and pretending to be more sceptical than they actually proved to be. Nick Clegg was an exception but he had been damaged by the Coalition. I really don't feel that way but I can well imagine that those who think that the EU is a worthy institution must have suffered very similar frustrations to those I felt in Scotland.
I think the lesson in both is that fear is rarely enough. It will win some votes but to get over the top you need to have a convincing case for what you want. Better together found its true voice very much at the last minute and not without some equivocation. The remain campaign did not.
That is going to concentrate some minds.
One side or the other - perhaps even several- would have cried foul, that the Brexit option the commission chose was an 'establishment stitch-up'. This is the same reason why lazy Europhobes wanted Cameron and the government to state what 'leave' meant: because it would give them something else to argue against. He didn't fall into that trap.
More importantly, leave didn't want a settled view; as they only way they won the referendum was by offering everything to everyone: a 'keep-out-the-foreigner' Brexit for the gormless, and a 'business-friendly' Brexit for those worried about the economy. These are mutually incompatible, but without a set view they could sell both of these to the electorate.
That said, it’s a big ask to hold a referendum where the government is arguing for the status quo. It will almost certainly invite a huge number of people unhappy with the status quo to vote against it, irrespective of what’s actually on the ballot paper.
If we crash out early next year, which we won't, the "bill" from a payments perspective will be perhaps GBP15bn, which is a pittance compared to the effect on EU - or indeed UK - GDP from a no deal Brexit.
He will go down in history as a complacent buffoon.
As DavidL says, the Scottish referendum was nearly lost. Astonishingly, Cameron took precisely the wrong lesson and decided he could win any old vote.
A serious democracy would have had a Commission examine a series of options - let’s call them Norway, Switzerland, and Canada - and asked us to vote first on a “preferred Brexit”. A second vote would have then asked us to Leave under this preferred model, or to Remain.
Cameron was not serious. He took the country to the casino, and lost.
Edit: @DavidL’s last couple of posts make this point far better than I.
But the more I looked at what the EU was as an institution, the way it did things and most importantly its direction of travel the more I became persuaded that we should leave. People criticise the incoherence of the Leave vision, and rightly so. But if we had remained what kind of EU did we want to be a part of? Did we want to be at its heart, as per Blair, or in a more associate role hiding behind opt outs? How were we going to resolve the issue of the EZ and QMV? Remain had no answer to these and many other questions. No one really sold a positive vision of what life in the EU would be like in 10-20 years. They deserved to lose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi6v4CYNSIQ
It seems to me that there are a lot of veteran (as in ex-military) Democratic candidates this time around.
Whilst I would not put it as strongly as he does, Mr Meeks does have a point in the way the leave campaigns were run. In part this changed me from veering towards leave to voting remain.
(There is also thee point that the EU was thee status quo, and it is easier to attack the status quo that it is to actually do anything. This is the reason I expect some of the media to become more pro-EU as Brexit progresses. The new editorship of the Mail is interesting wrt this.)
If you didn't see a 'positive' vision of what life in the EU would be like, then either you were not listening, or you did not see it as positive.
Given your recently-stated views on the migrants in the Med, I'm guessing the latter.
both sides ran muckspreader campaigns, personally I couldn't choose between them as to which was worse
Buy you evidently differ.
Blair is a national politician. Without exception they tell lies, partly because, at times, voters prefer bright sunlit uplands rather than the bleak landscape of reality. That said politicians in power are a mendacious bunch and too many pretty second rate.
I find my personal default position is to expect lying incompetence from the body politic and be amusingly surprised when a modicum of honesty and adequacy rises to the surface.
(Bias is, of course, a real issue with this sort of conversation. People often see what they want to see. However the way the leave campaigns were conducted were a factor in me changing my vote. to make it clear, I should have been a leaver, and I have argued both for and against the EU in the past.)
Osborne gets the same treatment.
Answers on a postcard
Mr. L, that's the problem with decades of triangulating and then having a binary referendum on the specific topic. There is no centre ground, just two opposing sides, one of which has had supportive words but precise little action for decades.
The Lisbon referendum-that-wasn't is arguably the biggest single reason we voted to leave. Many voters won't have trusted politicians to give us another chance, ever. For that matter, many didn't believe we'd leave even having voted for it.
It's one of the major reasons that May's dithering is so unforgivable. It makes it more economically challenging (due to lack of preparation) to leave without a deal, increasing pressure, on economic grounds, to sign up to whatever the EU wants.
But, politically, if we leave in name only, losing all influence over the EU but remaining ensnared by the red tape of an institution the electorate just voted to leave, there are substantial risks to.
The far left already squats on the Labour front bench, and there's a small but plausible risk of a new far right emerging, its potential enhanced by a departure in name only. [I'm of the view that a takeover approach, as per the lunatic left and Labour, is unlikely to occur with the Conservatives, because their rulebook isn't ridiculous and their MPs actually appear to understand how their own leadership election rules work].
I ended about 80-20 for Leave and a sense of regret that some old bonds would be broken
What moved my vote was Osbornes obvious lies and Obama's intervention. Nobody on Remain could put forward a positive argument over a six month period and they all sounded shifty as to the future direction of the EU.
Leave also ran some total crap the £350m I just took as a yeah right and dismissed it. I didn't like Farage but had got used to him as an irritant over the last 10 years. Leave didn't have any strong economic arguments except to say the change will shake things up and thats
what I think we need.
So my 20 per cent shift was 10 for Remain having nothing worth saying and 10 for Leave shaking things up.
https://www.sunderlandecho.com/news/business/nissan-halts-investment-plans-while-it-remains-in-the-dark-over-brexit-plans-according-to-reports-1-9225210/amp?__twitter_impression=true
I don't like the political aspects of the EU, and I particularly don't like the direction the EU was heading. But I could see many advantages in being part of a large, loose group of similar-minded countries in an increasingly globalised world.
IMV we've remover ourselves from the former (which is generally a positive move), but also from the latter, and I am far from sure we will be able to replicate the advantages alone.
I think the main unanswered question for me over the EU is the following: in the modern world, is it really possible to get effective large-scale collaboration between small- and medium-sized countries without the full economic and political union that I personally dislike?
For a group that like to lay claim to patriotism, there's precious little about Britain that they actually like.
He’s quite upset about the state of the Tory party too.
Ten years after leaving office Blair is in a broadly similar state. In ten years time, Blair will come back in fashion a bit. May and co are accelerating the process.
They voted for Blair then switched to Cameron in 2010 and have voted Tory ever since
He worries me a lot; because of the way his tenure entirely undermined the last vestiges of trust in British politics.
https://twitter.com/montie/status/1012235835197001728
I'm not a football fan (to put it mildly), but yesterday afternoon I was in a Cambridge pub just at the end of the Germany - SK match. Being Cambridge, the pub held quite a wide range of nationalities. As SK scored the first, and then the second, everyone cheered or smiled.
Except for one young woman sitting at a table amongst her friends, who looked rather disgusted ...
To be honest much of his rule was indeed Tory-lite. It almost certainly benefited me financially.
I don't like him because he undermined public trust in politics.
It's a shame it came to this, as the Lisbon referendum could've offered a very strong opportunity to signal the UK's dislike of the direction of travel, but the alternative was signing up to something about which many people had grave misgivings.
https://twitter.com/betapolitics/status/1012219606637989889?s=21
His error was to think that the country was not chock-full of morons.
But this was exploded when it became clear Leave would fight almost solely on immigration.
In his wildest dreams he never thought the likes of Gove, Hannan, and Carswell would run a campaign demonising Muslims.
It is common knowledge in Westminster that Gove privately now regrets that campaign.