So where's the Tory polling collapse we were assured would occur if we were unable to leave by today?
All those like Nabavi and co insisting Boris had made a terrible mistake and the opposition fans that insisted delaying an election until after Halloween would see a polling collapse for the Tories - when are we expecting that to occur? Tomorrow, next week?
As I have repeatedly explained, the hit would have been felt over the next few months if Johnson had been kept in his box. No Brexit, no GE, no resignation, Deal exposed as piss poor. World of pain.
He's been saved from this by the election.
No, Parliament would have made itself a laughing stock refusing to implement Brexit or face up to a General Election.
When the government wants a GE, the opposition can't hide away forever.
Apart from the triumphalist gloating of the Conservatives on here, who will then have the small matter of actually providing good governance for this country, the other main result of a Conservative landslide will be an opportunity for Labour.
Defeat brings opportunity - indeed, you can tell a lot about a party from how it handles its defeats. While I'm not a fan of the symmetrical pattern of history, a third successive GE defeat, especially if it is a significant reverse from 2017 (back to low 200s for example) would provide Labour with a chance to wipe the slate clean.
That's not how politics works though - you won't see a centrist immediately take over. What tends to happen is someone who becomes a leader begins a journey of change just as so many have done in the past. The Neil Kinnock of 1992 was unrecognisable from the Neil Kinnock of 1983 and the same opportunity beckons for a new leader to take the party and move it back to power.
Make no mistake, Boris will find the next GE a lot harder than this because people will have had five years of him and he will have a record to defend. Labour may well, if they truly want to get back into Government, have a real opportunity to present themselves as a credible alternative which, at the moment, they aren't.
"Defeat brings opportunity" sounds a bit like "there are no disasters, just opportunities; indeed opportunities for new disasters" (paraphrased). Indeed JC may be living up to this playbook. In reality victory brings more opportunities - like repeal of the FTPA and implementation of Boundary Commission recommendations.
So where's the Tory polling collapse we were assured would occur if we were unable to leave by today?
All those like Nabavi and co insisting Boris had made a terrible mistake and the opposition fans that insisted delaying an election until after Halloween would see a polling collapse for the Tories - when are we expecting that to occur? Tomorrow, next week?
If the Brexit party vote doesn't collapse to the tories, I dont see how they get a majority to make up the losses to the SNP and libdems.
One thing to watch in the polls is whether Boris's woman problem continues. It may be this will decide whether Boris agrees to a debate including Jo Swinson, or if CCHQ deems it too risky to have two hours of Boris hectoring a woman on national television.
Corbyn framing this election as "whose side are you on?" (yacht owners or disabled children etc). He seems to be re-running what seemed to work in 2017.
So where's the Tory polling collapse we were assured would occur if we were unable to leave by today?
All those like Nabavi and co insisting Boris had made a terrible mistake and the opposition fans that insisted delaying an election until after Halloween would see a polling collapse for the Tories - when are we expecting that to occur? Tomorrow, next week?
If the Brexit party vote doesn't collapse to the tories, I dont see how they get a majority to make up the losses to the SNP and libdems.
Labour is polling in the twenties while the Tories are polling in the high thirties and some polls putting them in the 40s. I'm more worried about Labour gaining votes than where the Tories will gain more from.
She actually has the smallest % saying she IS trustworthy (25%, but not much difference from the other two, both around 26%) and the highest number of don't knows.
Labour will love that one. It seems to be based solely on the 2017GE.
This is why tactical voting is such an omnishambles. The confusion will create the very outcome they claim to want to avoid, possibly more so then just shutting up about it and allowing UNS to do its thing.
@Barnesian - I think your tactical model assumes that voters have perfect information. Have you considered modelling it with different assumptions?
You could see what happens if some voters follow the different website recommendations, or if they decide on the tactical situation randomly.
Apart from the triumphalist gloating of the Conservatives on here, who will then have the small matter of actually providing good governance for this country, the other main result of a Conservative landslide will be an opportunity for Labour.
Defeat brings opportunity - indeed, you can tell a lot about a party from how it handles its defeats. While I'm not a fan of the symmetrical pattern of history, a third successive GE defeat, especially if it is a significant reverse from 2017 (back to low 200s for example) would provide Labour with a chance to wipe the slate clean.
That's not how politics works though - you won't see a centrist immediately take over. What tends to happen is someone who becomes a leader begins a journey of change just as so many have done in the past. The Neil Kinnock of 1992 was unrecognisable from the Neil Kinnock of 1983 and the same opportunity beckons for a new leader to take the party and move it back to power.
Make no mistake, Boris will find the next GE a lot harder than this because people will have had five years of him and he will have a record to defend. Labour may well, if they truly want to get back into Government, have a real opportunity to present themselves as a credible alternative which, at the moment, they aren't.
You can rely on Labour to react in exactly the wrong way to its impending defeat. Instead of asking questions of itself, the party will blame everyone else.
I think the way the Tories develop over the next few years is going to be grimly fascinating. It is very clear they are heading way to the right. I am not sure that the country is ready for what is coming. My strongly held belief is that Johnson will be the last Tory PM to win an election for a generation. The reality of Brexit is going to prove immensely unpopular.
One thing to watch in the polls is whether Boris's woman problem continues. It may be this will decide whether Boris agrees to a debate including Jo Swinson, or if CCHQ deems it too risky to have two hours of Boris hectoring a woman on national television.
Boris doesn't have a statistically significant 'woman problem', as we saw in Mike's header on the YouGov figures yesterday:
Somewhat or very unfavourable:
Boris: 53% Men, 56% Women Corbyn: 72% Men, 68% Women
Or, if he does, Corbyn has a much worse one, and a very much worse 'man problem' to boot.
Corbyn framing this election as "whose side are you on?" (yacht owners or disabled children etc). He seems to be re-running what seemed to work in 2017.
Unsurprising really, considering what happened last time.
The big question is whether what happened last time will work this time. It’s one I’m really not sure of yet.
She actually has the smallest % saying she IS trustworthy (25%, but not much difference from the other two, both around 26%) and the highest number of don't knows.
Apologies. I took the +20 from the newspaper report. I think it was the Mail. I thought it was extraordinary. I didn't have the data tables at the time.
Off topic but when on earth are Liverpool meant to be able to play their League Cup Quarter Final? They're playing 2 games a week every week in December already. Is there any space to bring it forwards to be played in November? There's Champions League at the end of November so it would need to be hastily arranged for mid-November it looks to me?
Corbyn`s resignation may come after a GE defeat. Due to this what are PBers` thoughts about the Next Labour Leader market?
Seems to me that the MPs that head the betting, with the possible exception of Starmer, lack credibility as potential leaders.
Further down the field Cooper is 20/1, but I guessing is hampered by the make-up of the Labour membership. It would be useful to know, if anyone has insight on this, what the hard left/soft left balance is in the membership, particularly after the raft of membership leavers that has been reported.
Further down the field still, Benn stands out to me as a potential leader - but I haven`t confidence to back him, even at 66/1.
I'm a member and will probably vote for Laura Pidcock if she stands.
She make learning the alphabet easier. She uses very few consonents
One thing to watch in the polls is whether Boris's woman problem continues. It may be this will decide whether Boris agrees to a debate including Jo Swinson, or if CCHQ deems it too risky to have two hours of Boris hectoring a woman on national television.
Boris doesn't have a statistically significant 'woman problem', as we saw in Mike's header on the YouGov figures yesterday:
Somewhat or very unfavourable:
Boris: 53% Men, 56% Women Corbyn: 72% Men, 68% Women
Or, if he does, Corbyn has a much worse one, and a very much worse 'man problem' to boot.
Given over half of men and women have an unfavourable view of them they both have a people problem, and yes Corbyns is significantly worse. The flip side is the people have a Johnson and Corbyn problem without any obvious solution.
I see the appeal but I am not her biggest fan. She seems a little too much about her personal brand - "Jessness" - for my liking. I just have a suspicion that much of it is put on. That said, she is definitely an asset, electorally, and it's not hard for me to see her as a future leader if the party goes in a soft left direction following a big loss on 12th Dec.
Being about the personal brands is a necessity as we enter the 2020s. Anybody expecting to contest an election on policy or any of that fucking rubbish is going to get destroyed. Being able to throw shade and deliver sick burns is far, far more important and Jess Rodham Phillips is very good at that. I can't see Labour having the institutional acuity to select her though. They'll go for Pisscock or the other one who sounds like Raquel from Coronation Street as they are more philosophically proximate to the Corbyn godhead.
Off topic but when on earth are Liverpool meant to be able to play their League Cup Quarter Final? They're playing 2 games a week every week in December already. Is there any space to bring it forwards to be played in November? There's Champions League at the end of November so it would need to be hastily arranged for mid-November it looks to me?
They could apply to UEFA for an extension, apparently there is a recent precedent in another sport?
I understand we are attending Chesterfield College next few days to try and drive Registrations.
I’m on iPad so can’t link but if you put dashboard voter registration uk into your search engine you can find lots of info .
Good luck with that. However, we tried something similar in our local uni in 2015, found pitifully few students generally milling around so we could not have bumped into 95% of them, and even when we did the sticking point was that they just didn't know their National Insurance number, so it wasn't possible to get people to register online on the spot. We didn't bother again in 2017.
What I think did work in both the 2015 and 2017 election campaign was leafleting specifically on the need to register to vote, to every property across the third of the constituency with lousy registration rates, generally cheap private housing where people are very transient. That covered a lot of students live in cheap rented housing amongst others.
If I were still politically active, I would repeat that in 2019 but also make a lot more use of geographically and age-filtered targeted advertising on the likes of social media.
1. I don't believe that the BXP are going to get anything like the 12% or so which polls currently show, even if they do stand in most seats (which looks unlikely). I think Boris has, if not shot their fox, at least stunned it. That doesn't mean they've gone away, but I think they've gone away for this election. They'll be back harvesting the 'not real Brexit, it's betrayal' meme once Boris starts trying to negotiate the FTA and also asks for an extension to the transition period.
2. The figures in this article, which appear to be based on some serious MRP analysis, look pretty dire for the prospects of a major breakthrough by the LibDems, Even with heroic assumptions for tactical voting in their favour, they remain at under 44 seats, and with more plausible assumptions well below that:
Corbyn framing this election as "whose side are you on?" (yacht owners or disabled children etc). He seems to be re-running what seemed to work in 2017.
Colour me sceptical but do we really expect that the 500bn spending spree is going to be paid for by the 50000 yacht owners
Labour will love that one. It seems to be based solely on the 2017GE.
This is why tactical voting is such an omnishambles. The confusion will create the very outcome they claim to want to avoid, possibly more so then just shutting up about it and allowing UNS to do its thing.
@Barnesian - I think your tactical model assumes that voters have perfect information. Have you considered modelling it with different assumptions?
You could see what happens if some voters follow the different website recommendations, or if they decide on the tactical situation randomly.
How many seats where the LDs didn't come 2nd to Cons in 2017 are realistic prospects for them?
Labour will love that one. It seems to be based solely on the 2017GE.
This is why tactical voting is such an omnishambles. The confusion will create the very outcome they claim to want to avoid, possibly more so then just shutting up about it and allowing UNS to do its thing.
@Barnesian - I think your tactical model assumes that voters have perfect information. Have you considered modelling it with different assumptions?
You could see what happens if some voters follow the different website recommendations, or if they decide on the tactical situation randomly.
Yes, the problem with basing the tactical voting advice solely on the last election results is that Labour came second in a lot of seats in the south-east for the first time in about 45 years at the last election almost by default, because the LDs did so badly. In reality a lot of those seats have always been Con/LD battlegrounds and it's very likely most of them will go back to being so at this election. But the tactical voting website isn't taking this into account.
Apart from the triumphalist gloating of the Conservatives on here, who will then have the small matter of actually providing good governance for this country, the other main result of a Conservative landslide will be an opportunity for Labour.
Defeat brings opportunity - indeed, you can tell a lot about a party from how it handles its defeats. While I'm not a fan of the symmetrical pattern of history, a third successive GE defeat, especially if it is a significant reverse from 2017 (back to low 200s for example) would provide Labour with a chance to wipe the slate clean.
That's not how politics works though - you won't see a centrist immediately take over. What tends to happen is someone who becomes a leader begins a journey of change just as so many have done in the past. The Neil Kinnock of 1992 was unrecognisable from the Neil Kinnock of 1983 and the same opportunity beckons for a new leader to take the party and move it back to power.
Make no mistake, Boris will find the next GE a lot harder than this because people will have had five years of him and he will have a record to defend. Labour may well, if they truly want to get back into Government, have a real opportunity to present themselves as a credible alternative which, at the moment, they aren't.
You can rely on Labour to react in exactly the wrong way to its impending defeat. Instead of asking questions of itself, the party will blame everyone else.
I think the way the Tories develop over the next few years is going to be grimly fascinating. It is very clear they are heading way to the right. I am not sure that the country is ready for what is coming. My strongly held belief is that Johnson will be the last Tory PM to win an election for a generation. The reality of Brexit is going to prove immensely unpopular.
When you say Boris will head right, what do you mean? Socially, fiscally? Both? Seems to me, from reading his columns over the years, that he is pretty socially liberal and no more pro market than Cameron was.
Labour will love that one. It seems to be based solely on the 2017GE.
This is why tactical voting is such an omnishambles. The confusion will create the very outcome they claim to want to avoid, possibly more so then just shutting up about it and allowing UNS to do its thing.
@Barnesian - I think your tactical model assumes that voters have perfect information. Have you considered modelling it with different assumptions?
You could see what happens if some voters follow the different website recommendations, or if they decide on the tactical situation randomly.
How many seats where the LDs didn't come 2nd to Cons in 2017 are realistic prospects for them?
Lots because of the almost tripling of the Liberal Democrat vote share, particularly if the remaining Labour voters in those seats are correctly aware that Labour start the campaign in third.
Corbyn framing this election as "whose side are you on?" (yacht owners or disabled children etc). He seems to be re-running what seemed to work in 2017.
Colour me sceptical but do we really expect that the 500bn spending spree is going to be paid for by the 50000 yacht owners
Dura_Ace said: "I am trying to recall when this fucking pointless shit became so pervasive. I think it was after Iraq II.
I'll salute anybody who refuses to wear one."
Thank you Dura Ace. About time someone talked some sense over this. I refuse to wear one too. What on earth must visitors to the UK think of our obsession with this militaristic shit.
The poppy is about remembrance and the tragedy of war, on remembrance day we say things like "never again" and "lest we forget" . . . if you think that is militaristic that is beyond me.
As for when it became pervasive, I remember it all my life. It was just as pervasiving in my memory in the 80s and 90s.
There was a massive change in poppyness starting about 20 years ago.
Poppies are everywhere now, poppy sculptures, pop up poppy shops, ww2 bombers dropping poppies (what is that even supposed to mean). And the double silence as well, there used to be a silence on rememberemce Sunday. Then, in the early 00s 'the nation' started having a silence on the 11th as well.
As someone who marched in remerenace day parades, carried the flag, laid the wreath, say in the remembrance day services it is all rather superficial yet oppressive these days.
And it's not what those who actually lived through the war would have wanted IMO. I grew up in the 1970s when anyone over about 35 could remember the war but it was rarely mentioned.
Dad's Army ran for nine years and was one of the most popular series on British television. I haven't checked but its audiences must have been around 15-20 million and almost everyone in the 1970s had heard of Captain Mainwaring, Private Pike, etc.
Films about the second world war were also popular. Colditz was a standard reference.
> Most people saw it as a terrible experience best left in the past. I cannot remember ever wearing a poppy or attending an organised remembrance event at school. I learned recently - 50 years later - that one of my teachers had escaped from the Nazis on one of the kindertransports and all her family perished in the holocaust. This came as a complete surprise to me, these events were just not talked about at that time.
The experiences in the German concentration camps in Poland and Germany etc. were also talked about. It was British forces that liberated Belsen, and harrowing film of the emaciated survivors was shown on newsreels in British cinemas.
Labour will love that one. It seems to be based solely on the 2017GE.
This is why tactical voting is such an omnishambles. The confusion will create the very outcome they claim to want to avoid, possibly more so then just shutting up about it and allowing UNS to do its thing.
@Barnesian - I think your tactical model assumes that voters have perfect information. Have you considered modelling it with different assumptions?
You could see what happens if some voters follow the different website recommendations, or if they decide on the tactical situation randomly.
How many seats where the LDs didn't come 2nd to Cons in 2017 are realistic prospects for them?
Lots because of the almost tripling of the Liberal Democrat vote share, particularly if the remaining Labour voters in those seats are correctly aware that Labour start the campaign in third.
One thing to watch in the polls is whether Boris's woman problem continues. It may be this will decide whether Boris agrees to a debate including Jo Swinson, or if CCHQ deems it too risky to have two hours of Boris hectoring a woman on national television.
Boris doesn't have a statistically significant 'woman problem', as we saw in Mike's header on the YouGov figures yesterday:
Somewhat or very unfavourable:
Boris: 53% Men, 56% Women Corbyn: 72% Men, 68% Women
Or, if he does, Corbyn has a much worse one, and a very much worse 'man problem' to boot.
If you look at the favourability ratings, Boris has 42:34. The other leaders do not have a similar discrepancy in either direction. My guess would be that CCHQ will be researching what causes this (and is it my imagination or have we seen less of Carrie lately, as CCHQ wants no reminders of Boris's serial infidelity?).
The point, however, is this may impact not the Tories but the LibDems, by excluding Jo Swinson from debates.
1. I don't believe that the BXP are going to get anything like the 12% or so which polls currently show, even if they do stand in most seats (which looks unlikely). I think Boris has, if not shot their fox, at least stunned it. That doesn't mean they've gone away, but I think they've gone away for this election. They'll be back harvesting the 'not real Brexit, it's betrayal' meme once Boris starts trying to negotiate the FTA and also asks for an extension to the transition period.
2. The figures in this article, which appear to be based on some serious MRP analysis, look pretty dire for the prospects of a major breakthrough by the LibDems, Even with heroic assumptions for tactical voting in their favour, they remain at under 44 seats, and with more plausible assumptions well below that:
Given (1) - Do you accept you were wrong now to keep saying Johnson had made a tremendous mistake with the date?
Since Johnson has made such a big deal about the date he has:
* Been elected leader and PM * Made the BXP go away for this election * Seen the Tory ratings surge * Got an "impossible to get" new deal without a backstop.
Not a bad record in my humble opinion. If Johnson wins a majority, takes us out with a deal, and asks for an extension to transition to ensure we get a good FTA and not crash out after transition without one then I will be quite happy with that scenario and if Farage wants to cry that its not a real Brexit I couldn't care less - he won't be either an MP or an MEP by that point.
Labour will love that one. It seems to be based solely on the 2017GE.
This is why tactical voting is such an omnishambles. The confusion will create the very outcome they claim to want to avoid, possibly more so then just shutting up about it and allowing UNS to do its thing.
@Barnesian - I think your tactical model assumes that voters have perfect information. Have you considered modelling it with different assumptions?
You could see what happens if some voters follow the different website recommendations, or if they decide on the tactical situation randomly.
Yes, the problem with basing the tactical voting advice solely on the last election results is that Labour came second in a lot of seats in the south-east for the first time in about 45 years at the last election almost by default, because the LDs did so badly. In reality a lot of those seats have always been Con/LD battlegrounds and it's very likely most of them will go back to being so at this election. But the tactical voting website isn't taking this into account.
Using their principles I could model the 2019 election very quickly - it is the 2017 election result! If anyone did that, and said we dont look at any other election results ever or any polling, we would assume them absurd.
£10 minimum wage for 16+ will see a return of high youth unemployment.
Dont Tories say that everytime Minimum wage is brought up
It's a totally mad idea, which only someone as daft and ignorant of the real world as Corbyn could come up with. Why on earth would any employer give a job to a youngster, who is going to be fairly useless for a while, when for the same wage they can get someone with a bit of experience and nous?
Apart from the triumphalist gloating of the Conservatives on here, who will then have the small matter of actually providing good governance for this country, the other main result of a Conservative landslide will be an opportunity for Labour.
Defeat brings opportunity - indeed, you can tell a lot about a party from how it handles its defeats. While I'm not a fan of the symmetrical pattern of history, a third successive GE defeat, especially if it is a significant reverse from 2017 (back to low 200s for example) would provide Labour with a chance to wipe the slate clean.
That's not how politics works though - you won't see a centrist immediately take over. What tends to happen is someone who becomes a leader begins a journey of change just as so many have done in the past. The Neil Kinnock of 1992 was unrecognisable from the Neil Kinnock of 1983 and the same opportunity beckons for a new leader to take the party and move it back to power.
Make no mistake, Boris will find the next GE a lot harder than this because people will have had five years of him and he will have a record to defend. Labour may well, if they truly want to get back into Government, have a real opportunity to present themselves as a credible alternative which, at the moment, they aren't.
You can rely on Labour to react in exactly the wrong way to its impending defeat. Instead of asking questions of itself, the party will blame everyone else.
I think the way the Tories develop over the next few years is going to be grimly fascinating. It is very clear they are heading way to the right. I am not sure that the country is ready for what is coming. My strongly held belief is that Johnson will be the last Tory PM to win an election for a generation. The reality of Brexit is going to prove immensely unpopular.
All the signs point to Boris wanting to be a fluffy liberal big spending Tory once Brexit is done.
Apart from the triumphalist gloating of the Conservatives on here, who will then have the small matter of actually providing good governance for this country, the other main result of a Conservative landslide will be an opportunity for Labour.
Defeat brings opportunity - indeed, you can tell a lot about a party from how it handles its defeats. While I'm not a fan of the symmetrical pattern of history, a third successive GE defeat, especially if it is a significant reverse from 2017 (back to low 200s for example) would provide Labour with a chance to wipe the slate clean.
That's not how politics works though - you won't see a centrist immediately take over. What tends to happen is someone who becomes a leader begins a journey of change just as so many have done in the past. The Neil Kinnock of 1992 was unrecognisable from the Neil Kinnock of 1983 and the same opportunity beckons for a new leader to take the party and move it back to power.
Make no mistake, Boris will find the next GE a lot harder than this because people will have had five years of him and he will have a record to defend. Labour may well, if they truly want to get back into Government, have a real opportunity to present themselves as a credible alternative which, at the moment, they aren't.
You can rely on Labour to react in exactly the wrong way to its impending defeat. Instead of asking questions of itself, the party will blame everyone else.
I think the way the Tories develop over the next few years is going to be grimly fascinating. It is very clear they are heading way to the right. I am not sure that the country is ready for what is coming. My strongly held belief is that Johnson will be the last Tory PM to win an election for a generation. The reality of Brexit is going to prove immensely unpopular.
When you say Boris will head right, what do you mean? Socially, fiscally? Both? Seems to me, from reading his columns over the years, that he is pretty socially liberal and no more pro market than Cameron was.
I suggest it will all depend on what he sees as advantageous to Brand Boris. After all but for the toss of a coin he'd have been marching up and down the country in the first half of 2016 loudly proclaiming the advantages of the EU.
I think he agrees with me. We're both saying he should be calling for an election.
Ask yourself this question - why does the opposition, as evidenced by agreeing to the election, so clearly agree with me?
But if he thought his polling would likely get better if the impasse continued, rather than there being a big risk that it would get worse, he would not have been so desperate for the 'now' election, would he?
And the Labour opposition, as we know, were not keen for the GE. They were bounced into it by the LDs and the SNP.
1. I don't believe that the BXP are going to get anything like the 12% or so which polls currently show, even if they do stand in most seats (which looks unlikely). I think Boris has, if not shot their fox, at least stunned it. That doesn't mean they've gone away, but I think they've gone away for this election. They'll be back harvesting the 'not real Brexit, it's betrayal' meme once Boris starts trying to negotiate the FTA and also asks for an extension to the transition period.
2. The figures in this article, which appear to be based on some serious MRP analysis, look pretty dire for the prospects of a major breakthrough by the LibDems, Even with heroic assumptions for tactical voting in their favour, they remain at under 44 seats, and with more plausible assumptions well below that:
Given (1) - Do you accept you were wrong now to keep saying Johnson had made a tremendous mistake with the date?
Since Johnson has made such a big deal about the date he has:
* Been elected leader and PM * Made the BXP go away for this election * Seen the Tory ratings surge * Got an "impossible to get" new deal without a backstop.
Not a bad record in my humble opinion. If Johnson wins a majority, takes us out with a deal, and asks for an extension to transition to ensure we get a good FTA and not crash out after transition without one then I will be quite happy with that scenario and if Farage wants to cry that its not a real Brexit I couldn't care less - he won't be either an MP or an MEP by that point.
The deal wasnt impossible, it was the EUs first offer to us in autumn 2018. Johnson described it as feeble, akin to wearing a suicide vest. It does indeed meet your UK sovereignty concerns better than Mays deal, but your concerns were quite niche and not those of Johnson, who promised never to put a border in the Irish sea.
1. I don't believe that the BXP are going to get anything like the 12% or so which polls currently show, even if they do stand in most seats (which looks unlikely). I think Boris has, if not shot their fox, at least stunned it. That doesn't mean they've gone away, but I think they've gone away for this election. They'll be back harvesting the 'not real Brexit, it's betrayal' meme once Boris starts trying to negotiate the FTA and also asks for an extension to the transition period.
2. The figures in this article, which appear to be based on some serious MRP analysis, look pretty dire for the prospects of a major breakthrough by the LibDems, Even with heroic assumptions for tactical voting in their favour, they remain at under 44 seats, and with more plausible assumptions well below that:
Given (1) - Do you accept you were wrong now to keep saying Johnson had made a tremendous mistake with the date?
Since Johnson has made such a big deal about the date he has:
* Been elected leader and PM * Made the BXP go away for this election * Seen the Tory ratings surge * Got an "impossible to get" new deal without a backstop.
Not a bad record in my humble opinion. If Johnson wins a majority, takes us out with a deal, and asks for an extension to transition to ensure we get a good FTA and not crash out after transition without one then I will be quite happy with that scenario and if Farage wants to cry that its not a real Brexit I couldn't care less - he won't be either an MP or an MEP by that point.
No I don't accept that. It was a disastrous mistake, which boxed him into grovelling for a deal much worse than the one previously on offer. It wasn't necessary for him to make the brain-dead pledge to do that; any fool could have got a deal on the terms he eventually did (and which bore no resemblance whatsoever to the terms he insisted were his 'final offer' just days before).
I do accept that I greatly underestimated the extent to which Leavers have been credulous about the deal. Of course Boris was greatly helped in that by the Benn Act, which closed off the 'no deal' fantasy, thank goodness.
£10 minimum wage for 16+ will see a return of high youth unemployment.
Dont Tories say that everytime Minimum wage is brought up
No.
The Minimum Wage was brought in with a very sensible staggering. Young people are on average quite frankly less employable, less experienced etc than older people - but the minimum wage deliberately and sensibly reflected that. If you can hire two young people for the same price as one experienced older person then there's an incentive to do so and when they get older they've got experience and get a pay rise.
But despite the fact the minimum wage incentivises people to hire young people, youth unemployment is still higher than older age brackets. If you marginally increase the minimum wage for 25+ but double the minimum wage for 16/17 then the consequences of that should be obvious.
Apart from the triumphalist gloating of the Conservatives on here, who will then have the small matter of actually providing good governance for this country, the other main result of a Conservative landslide will be an opportunity for Labour.
Defeat brings opportunity - indeed, you can tell a lot about a party from how it handles its defeats. While I'm not a fan of the symmetrical pattern of history, a third successive GE defeat, especially if it is a significant reverse from 2017 (back to low 200s for example) would provide Labour with a chance to wipe the slate clean.
That's not how politics works though - you won't see a centrist immediately take over. What tends to happen is someone who becomes a leader begins a journey of change just as so many have done in the past. The Neil Kinnock of 1992 was unrecognisable from the Neil Kinnock of 1983 and the same opportunity beckons for a new leader to take the party and move it back to power.
Make no mistake, Boris will find the next GE a lot harder than this because people will have had five years of him and he will have a record to defend. Labour may well, if they truly want to get back into Government, have a real opportunity to present themselves as a credible alternative which, at the moment, they aren't.
You can rely on Labour to react in exactly the wrong way to its impending defeat. Instead of asking questions of itself, the party will blame everyone else.
I think the way the Tories develop over the next few years is going to be grimly fascinating. It is very clear they are heading way to the right. I am not sure that the country is ready for what is coming. My strongly held belief is that Johnson will be the last Tory PM to win an election for a generation. The reality of Brexit is going to prove immensely unpopular.
When you say Boris will head right, what do you mean? Socially, fiscally? Both? Seems to me, from reading his columns over the years, that he is pretty socially liberal and no more pro market than Cameron was.
I would agree entirely.
My concern with Johnson is always his competence and his aptitude (I think he is basically intellectually and practically lazy) not his underlying philosophy as far as it can be gleaned.
Labour will love that one. It seems to be based solely on the 2017GE.
This is why tactical voting is such an omnishambles. The confusion will create the very outcome they claim to want to avoid, possibly more so then just shutting up about it and allowing UNS to do its thing.
@Barnesian - I think your tactical model assumes that voters have perfect information. Have you considered modelling it with different assumptions?
You could see what happens if some voters follow the different website recommendations, or if they decide on the tactical situation randomly.
I assume that voters have information about the 2017 election and will be bombarded with "info" by Labour and LDs. It is too difficult to model the tactical voting sites.
Specifically I assume if the Labour vote was less than the LDs in 2017, 45% of Labour voters will vote tactically for the LDs.
If the LD vote was less than 30% of the Labour vote in 2017, I assume that 35% of LD voters will vote tactically for Labour (LDs too far behind). If the LD vote was less than the Labour vote in 2017 then I assume that no Lab voters will vote tactically for the LDs.
Overall these tactical voting assumptions add 6 seats to labour and 8 seats to the LDs and takes 14 off the Tories.
I also assume that the Green vote splits evenly between Lab and LDs with 2% increased share for each of them. The rest stays Green This assumption adds 10 seats to Labour and 4 seats to LDs and takes another 14 seats off the Tories.
So the tactical assumptions overall add 16 to Labour, 12 to LDs and take 28 from the Tories.
I haven't enough data to model the BXP effect yet. If, for instance there was a move of 4% BXP share to Tory and 2% to Labour then the Tories would gain 11 seats, Labour would lose 5 seats and LDs would lose 6.
I think he agrees with me. We're both saying he should be calling for an election.
Ask yourself this question - why does the opposition, as evidenced by agreeing to the election, so clearly agree with me?
But if he thought his polling would likely get better if the impasse continued, rather than there being a big risk that it would get worse, he would not have been so desperate for the 'now' election, would he?
And the Labour opposition, as we know, were not keen for the GE. They were bounced into it by the LDs and the SNP.
Thinking cap please.
I said that if the Tories are saying this Parliament is broken and we need an election, but Parliament continues to block an election, then his polling could continue to improve. That's not possible if he's not calling for a 'now' election now is it? Thinking cap please.
Had Labour agreed to the election last September they'd have gone into it with a better relative polling to the Tories than they are now.
YouGov found 13% for BXP? Did they ask "And which way will you vote if BXP isn't standing in your constituency?" Polling may be worth more once nominations close in 14 November.
Being about the personal brands is a necessity as we enter the 2020s. Anybody expecting to contest an election on policy or any of that fucking rubbish is going to get destroyed. Being able to throw shade and deliver sick burns is far, far more important and Jess Rodham Phillips is very good at that. I can't see Labour having the institutional acuity to select her though. They'll go for Pisscock or the other one who sounds like Raquel from Coronation Street as they are more philosophically proximate to the Corbyn godhead.
You might be right but I'm still resisting that. If Trump were to beat, say, Warren in WH2020 then, OK, game over for serious politics, I will give up and go on a long trip with no electronic devices. But till then, I am staying optimistic.
I think Pidcock is something of a brand herself, btw. She's no machine, that's for sure.
So we have had two tactical voting websites mentioned so far, one of which seems to default to “Vote LD” and the other to “Vote Labour”. Are they going to end up cancelling out?
To be fair, I think the Miller one defaults to whoever came second to the Tories. Hence vote Labour in Woking and Lib Dem in Guildford.
It's still not great to be honest.
It's far worse than "not great". In Witney, the Tories got 33.8k in 2017, Labour 12.6 k and LD 12.5k. In 2019, the LD's polled ten times what Labour got.
Yet the Miller site describes the seat as "In the 2019 general election, the data suggests that Witney will be a contest between Conservative and Labour". Which is manifest nonsense.
This isn't a piece of objective advice: it's simple Labour propaganda by @votetools "a political tech collective" - or fellow traveller for a bunch of neo-Marxists who want Britain out of the EU and more closely aligned with Putin
Miller - who claims to be a Remainer - should be ashamed to be associated with this transparent Corbynbite crap.
If you are reduced to stating that defeat is good for Labour and Boris will find his second electoral victory more difficult in 2024, then you have already admitted defeat.
In the cold light of day, my friend, this election IS over as a contest. The Conservatives have a commanding and substantial advantage and would have to exceed their normally high levels of ineptitude by quite some way to throw this away. As always, there will be nothing left to chance which money cannot resolve.
Boris is an insubstantial figure but he will always say what he thinks the audience in front of him wants to hear and that combined with his superficial bonhomie leaves people feeling good and thinking he is on their side (as the DUP found out to their cost). He will, as PM, systematically alienate every section of his voting coalition until there is no one left and he will, I predict, lead the Conservatives to a disastrous defeat one day.
For now, though, he radiates a cheery optimism to which people will warm. Corbyn is the better campaigner and will always argue and he does that well. However, he is personally profoundly unpopular with large sections of the electorate (even if some of the policies, individually, are).
Given (1) - Do you accept you were wrong now to keep saying Johnson had made a tremendous mistake with the date?
Since Johnson has made such a big deal about the date he has:
* Been elected leader and PM * Made the BXP go away for this election * Seen the Tory ratings surge * Got an "impossible to get" new deal without a backstop.
Not a bad record in my humble opinion. If Johnson wins a majority, takes us out with a deal, and asks for an extension to transition to ensure we get a good FTA and not crash out after transition without one then I will be quite happy with that scenario and if Farage wants to cry that its not a real Brexit I couldn't care less - he won't be either an MP or an MEP by that point.
No I don't accept that. It was a disastrous mistake, which boxed him into grovelling for a deal much worse than the one previously on offer. It wasn't necessary for him to make the brain-dead pledge to do that; any fool could have got a deal on the terms he eventually did (and which bore no resemblance whatsoever to the terms he insisted were his 'final offer' just days before).
I do accept that I greatly underestimated the extent to which Leavers have been credulous about the deal. Of course Boris was greatly helped in that by the Benn Act, which closed off the 'no deal' fantasy, thank goodness.
Disastrous how?
The deal is better than the one previously on offer. If the voters of NI don't like it they can leave it and for GB Leavers it is undeniably better. Win/Win.
So the Tories could win a majority at this election and you'll still be saying that Boris had made a disastrous mistake then? You and I have different definitions of disastrous.
As for Leavers I and other Leavers did say all along that if Boris is blocked by Parliamentarians then Leavers would blame Parliament and not Boris. That should have been self-evident.
Dura_Ace said: "I am trying to recall when this fucking pointless shit became so pervasive. I think it was after Iraq II.
I'll salute anybody who refuses to wear one."
Thank you Dura Ace. About time someone talked some sense over this. I refuse to wear one too. What on earth must visitors to the UK think of our obsession with this militaristic shit.
The poppy is about remembrance and the tragedy of war, on remembrance day we say things like "never again" and "lest we forget" . . . if you think that is militaristic that is beyond me.
As for when it became pervasive, I remember it all my life. It was just as pervasiving in my memory in the 80s and 90s.
There was a massive change in poppyness starting about 20 years ago.
Poppies are everywhere now, poppy sculptures, pop up poppy shops, ww2 bombers dropping poppies (what is that even supposed to mean). And the double silence as well, there used to be a silence on rememberemce Sunday. Then, in the early 00s 'the nation' started having a silence on the 11th as well.
As someone who marched in remerenace day parades, carried the flag, laid the wreath, say in the remembrance day services it is all rather superficial yet oppressive these days.
And it's not what those who actually lived through the war would have wanted IMO. I grew up in the 1970s when anyone over about 35 could remember the war but it was rarely mentioned.
Dad's Army ran for nine years and was one of the most popular series on British television. I haven't checked but its audiences must have been around 15-20 million and almost everyone in the 1970s had heard of Captain Mainwaring, Private Pike, etc.
Films about the second world war were also popular. Colditz was a standard reference.
> Most people saw it as a terrible experience best left in the past. I cannot remember ever wearing a poppy or attending an organised remembrance event at school. I learned recently - 50 years later - that one of my teachers had escaped from the Nazis on one of the kindertransports and all her family perished in the holocaust. This came as a complete surprise to me, these events were just not talked about at that time.
The experiences in the German concentration camps in Poland and Germany etc. were also talked about. It was British forces that liberated Belsen, and harrowing film of the emaciated survivors was shown on newsreels in British cinemas.
What I genuinely love about Dad's Army is that it still pulls in around 1 million people every Saturday as they repeat it over and over again.
If you were to create seven age intervals with equal numbers of voters in them, what would they be? I'm guessing you probably wouldn't have 18-24 and 25-29 as separate intervals.
Apart from the triumphalist gloating of the Conservatives on here, who will then have the small matter of actually providing good governance for this country, the other main result of a Conservative landslide will be an opportunity for Labour.
Defeat brings opportunity - indeed, you can tell a lot about a party from how it handles its defeats. While I'm not a fan of the symmetrical pattern of history, a third successive GE defeat, especially if it is a significant reverse from 2017 (back to low 200s for example) would provide Labour with a chance to wipe the slate clean.
That's not how politics works though - you won't see a centrist immediately take over. What tends to happen is someone who becomes a leader begins a journey of change just as so many have done in the past. The Neil Kinnock of 1992 was unrecognisable from the Neil Kinnock of 1983 and the same opportunity beckons for a new leader to take the party and move it back to power.
Make no mistake, Boris will find the next GE a lot harder than this because people will have had five years of him and he will have a record to defend. Labour may well, if they truly want to get back into Government, have a real opportunity to present themselves as a credible alternative which, at the moment, they aren't.
You can rely on Labour to react in exactly the wrong way to its impending defeat. Instead of asking questions of itself, the party will blame everyone else.
I think the way the Tories develop over the next few years is going to be grimly fascinating. It is very clear they are heading way to the right. I am not sure that the country is ready for what is coming. My strongly held belief is that Johnson will be the last Tory PM to win an election for a generation. The reality of Brexit is going to prove immensely unpopular.
When you say Boris will head right, what do you mean? Socially, fiscally? Both? Seems to me, from reading his columns over the years, that he is pretty socially liberal and no more pro market than Cameron was.
Are columns much of a vouchsafe for what the author really believes, or more an indication of what the author thinks his readers want to hear?
The latter not a bad definition of BJ's approach to politics come to think of it.
With the stated objective of keeping the Tories out.
Tactical voting advice is inherently about keeping a particular party out, no? For instance I'm I'm certain that a Unionist tactical voting wheel of SNPbad is being fashioned in the orc pits of Barad-dûr as I type.
Sure - but the context is Gina Miller the doughty champion of Parliament’s rights.
That was all bollocks. She was just a wealthy, articulate anti-Tory Remainer who saw an opportunity to overturn the people’s wishes
Interesting that Labour launch today in Battersea-would tie in with the defensive strategy.As I have mentioned before, I understand they could be in trouble in this seat from the Tories as Labour voters slip away to the LDs. Very early days though of course.
So we have had two tactical voting websites mentioned so far, one of which seems to default to “Vote LD” and the other to “Vote Labour”. Are they going to end up cancelling out?
To be fair, I think the Miller one defaults to whoever came second to the Tories. Hence vote Labour in Woking and Lib Dem in Guildford.
It's still not great to be honest.
It's far worse than "not great". In Witney, the Tories got 33.8k in 2017, Labour 12.6 k and LD 12.5k. In 2019, the LD's polled ten times what Labour got.
Yet the Miller site describes the seat as "In the 2019 general election, the data suggests that Witney will be a contest between Conservative and Labour". Which is manifest nonsense.
This isn't a piece of objective advice: it's simple Labour propaganda by @votetools "a political tech collective" - or fellow traveller for a bunch of neo-Marxists who want Britain out of the EU and more closely aligned with Putin
Miller - who claims to be a Remainer - should be ashamed to be associated with this transparent Corbynbite crap.
Labour will love that one. It seems to be based solely on the 2017GE.
This is why tactical voting is such an omnishambles. The confusion will create the very outcome they claim to want to avoid, possibly more so then just shutting up about it and allowing UNS to do its thing.
@Barnesian - I think your tactical model assumes that voters have perfect information. Have you considered modelling it with different assumptions?
You could see what happens if some voters follow the different website recommendations, or if they decide on the tactical situation randomly.
I assume that voters have information about the 2017 election and will be bombarded with "info" by Labour and LDs. It is too difficult to model the tactical voting sites.
Specifically I assume if the Labour vote was less than the LDs in 2017, 45% of Labour voters will vote tactically for the LDs.
If the LD vote was less than 30% of the Labour vote in 2017, I assume that 35% of LD voters will vote tactically for Labour (LDs too far behind). If the LD vote was less than the Labour vote in 2017 then I assume that no Lab voters will vote tactically for the LDs.
Overall these tactical voting assumptions add 6 seats to labour and 8 seats to the LDs and takes 14 off the Tories.
I also assume that the Green vote splits evenly between Lab and LDs with 2% increased share for each of them. The rest stays Green This assumption adds 10 seats to Labour and 4 seats to LDs and takes another 14 seats off the Tories.
So the tactical assumptions overall add 16 to Labour, 12 to LDs and take 28 from the Tories.
I haven't enough data to model the BXP effect yet. If, for instance there was a move of 4% BXP share to Tory and 2% to Labour then the Tories would gain 11 seats, Labour would lose 5 seats and LDs would lose 6.
If you were to create seven age intervals with equal numbers of voters in them, what would they be? I'm guessing you probably wouldn't have 18-24 and 25-29 as separate intervals.
would it not make sense to the bars as, approximately, equal populations?
So we have had two tactical voting websites mentioned so far, one of which seems to default to “Vote LD” and the other to “Vote Labour”. Are they going to end up cancelling out?
To be fair, I think the Miller one defaults to whoever came second to the Tories. Hence vote Labour in Woking and Lib Dem in Guildford.
It's still not great to be honest.
It's far worse than "not great". In Witney, the Tories got 33.8k in 2017, Labour 12.6 k and LD 12.5k. In 2019, the LD's polled ten times what Labour got.
Yet the Miller site describes the seat as "In the 2019 general election, the data suggests that Witney will be a contest between Conservative and Labour". Which is manifest nonsense.
This isn't a piece of objective advice: it's simple Labour propaganda by @votetools "a political tech collective" - or fellow traveller for a bunch of neo-Marxists who want Britain out of the EU and more closely aligned with Putin
Miller - who claims to be a Remainer - should be ashamed to be associated with this transparent Corbynbite crap.
Lesson: get the anoraks to check it first.
Lesson - vote for the party you actually prefer, perhaps ?
By praising John Bercow for cutting back on the number of "strange garments" worn in Parliament, Jeremy Corbyn deliberately triggered Tories into jeering at the green tie he was wearing, Then it turns out the tie was to honour the victims of the Grenfell fire. Ouch. One-nil.
This minor bit of theatre was very well conceived and handled. Corbyn has got a skilled manager.
1. It was much better done than Jacob Rees-Mogg's "lie down for a snooze when you're supposed to be taking questions as a government minister and then look nonchalant when you open your eyes" manoeuvre.
2. It was judo. Corbyn knows that many Tory MPs love nothing better than jeering and scoffing as a pack, sometimes after they've enjoyed baiting their chosen target. He also knows that they're not beneath rounding off their fun with some whining. A classic case was when they baited Corbyn by shouting "Look behind you" at him before the Christmas pantomime season started and then when he muttered "stupid people" under his breath, they complained that he'd actually said "stupid woman". (Never mind that the jeerers had been visibly geed up by a woman, namely Theresa May.) Some of them even ran to show Sir their video footage of his lips moving, for such was the extent of their righteous pain. (I've never seen a "Remoaner" whine half as much as that!) Given that the media chatterers could and did then opine on and debate the supposedly serious question of whether the Leader of the Opposition had said "people" or "woman", rather than the appropriateness or decency of how the Tory MPs had been behaving under the prime minister's leadership, Corbyn lost that one.
But he won yesterday. The jeerers found their access to the whining stage at the end had been cut off.
This is going to be a corker of an election. The TIG having now practically rotted away in the polls and what's happening with this year's other new association the Brexit Party still uncertain, the LDs may have positioned themselves as a "don't vote Labour" effort in some markets but this is a two horse race: essence of Labour versus essence of Tory.
Essence of Hard Labour vs Essence of Tory Bluekip probably appeals to about 40% of the electorate. What are the rest of us supposed to do? Twiddle our thumbs and see which side gets to make a mess of it first?
I think it will be more essence of Labour versus essence of Tory: not the hard or UKIP-friendly versions, but the core brands - of two parties which together attracted 85% of GB voters in 2017. For much of its history Labour hasn't been especially hard and the Tory party hasn't been especially anti-EU. It won't be like the 2019 EU election where the two parties' combined voteshare was somewhere around 25%.
The deal is better than the one previously on offer. If the voters of NI don't like it they can leave it and for GB Leavers it is undeniably better. Win/Win.
So the Tories could win a majority at this election and you'll still be saying that Boris had made a disastrous mistake then? You and I have different definitions of disastrous.
As for Leavers I and other Leavers did say all along that if Boris is blocked by Parliamentarians then Leavers would blame Parliament and not Boris. That should have been self-evident.
I have always said that Boris might get a majority in an early election. My definition of 'disastrous' looks more than three months ahead.
The reasons why this deal is so much worse than May's are obvious. Firstly it is seriously bad for NI, and especially for the union; the DUP is right that it's completely unacceptable that businesses will have to fill in export forms for trading within their own country. Secondly, it hands a loaded gun to the EU, since it removes the backstop as a fall back position if we can't agree an FTA with them; we'll be left with exactly the same weak position that got us to this mess on the Withdrawal Agreement, of having only the disaster of No Deal available as an alternative to whatever they deign to offer us. Under May's deal, the EU would have had to swallow the backstop, giving us complete access to the Single Market for goods for zero cost, and there was no way they'd have been happy to let that happen for long if at all. We on the other hand would have been 100% protected from any cliff-edge.
As for blame, yes, I underestimated the credulousness of Leavers. I thought they'd be able to distinguish 'we will leave on the 31st October, do or die' from 'I will do my best to ensure we leave on the 31st October'. It seems they can't, so for the moment at least they trust Boris. We'll see how long that lasts, but it will get him through this election.
Comments
https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/1189867533920296961?s=21
When the government wants a GE, the opposition can't hide away forever.
In reality victory brings more opportunities - like repeal of the FTPA and implementation of Boundary Commission recommendations.
Physician, heal thyself.
Another for my "40% by 31/10" prediction.
She actually has the smallest % saying she IS trustworthy (25%, but not much difference from the other two, both around 26%) and the highest number of don't knows.
Page 42 here
This is why tactical voting is such an omnishambles. The confusion will create the very outcome they claim to want to avoid, possibly more so then just shutting up about it and allowing UNS to do its thing.
@Barnesian - I think your tactical model assumes that voters have perfect information. Have you considered modelling it with different assumptions?
You could see what happens if some voters follow the different website recommendations, or if they decide on the tactical situation randomly.
I think the way the Tories develop over the next few years is going to be grimly fascinating. It is very clear they are heading way to the right. I am not sure that the country is ready for what is coming. My strongly held belief is that Johnson will be the last Tory PM to win an election for a generation. The reality of Brexit is going to prove immensely unpopular.
Somewhat or very unfavourable:
Boris: 53% Men, 56% Women
Corbyn: 72% Men, 68% Women
Or, if he does, Corbyn has a much worse one, and a very much worse 'man problem' to boot.
The big question is whether what happened last time will work this time. It’s one I’m really not sure of yet.
The Non Tories best take seriously https://tactical.vote/all
Why does Johnson, as evidenced by his craving for the election asap, so clearly agree with me?
As you were.
Ask yourself this question - why does the opposition, as evidenced by agreeing to the election, so clearly agree with me?
What I think did work in both the 2015 and 2017 election campaign was leafleting specifically on the need to register to vote, to every property across the third of the constituency with lousy registration rates, generally cheap private housing where people are very transient. That covered a lot of students live in cheap rented housing amongst others.
If I were still politically active, I would repeat that in 2019 but also make a lot more use of geographically and age-filtered targeted advertising on the likes of social media.
https://twitter.com/gsoh31/status/1189867297810395137
1. I don't believe that the BXP are going to get anything like the 12% or so which polls currently show, even if they do stand in most seats (which looks unlikely). I think Boris has, if not shot their fox, at least stunned it. That doesn't mean they've gone away, but I think they've gone away for this election. They'll be back harvesting the 'not real Brexit, it's betrayal' meme once Boris starts trying to negotiate the FTA and also asks for an extension to the transition period.
2. The figures in this article, which appear to be based on some serious MRP analysis, look pretty dire for the prospects of a major breakthrough by the LibDems, Even with heroic assumptions for tactical voting in their favour, they remain at under 44 seats, and with more plausible assumptions well below that:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/30/tactical-voting-could-deliver-remain-victory-in-election-study
And yes I think they should take that site seriously.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/530382/boat-ownership-numbers-united-kingdom-uk/
Even if that is individuals who own the yachts it is 1 million per head in tax due.
Films about the second world war were also popular. Colditz was a standard reference. The experiences in the German concentration camps in Poland and Germany etc. were also talked about. It was British forces that liberated Belsen, and harrowing film of the emaciated survivors was shown on newsreels in British cinemas.
The point, however, is this may impact not the Tories but the LibDems, by excluding Jo Swinson from debates.
Since Johnson has made such a big deal about the date he has:
* Been elected leader and PM
* Made the BXP go away for this election
* Seen the Tory ratings surge
* Got an "impossible to get" new deal without a backstop.
Not a bad record in my humble opinion. If Johnson wins a majority, takes us out with a deal, and asks for an extension to transition to ensure we get a good FTA and not crash out after transition without one then I will be quite happy with that scenario and if Farage wants to cry that its not a real Brexit I couldn't care less - he won't be either an MP or an MEP by that point.
Just following Mao's example, I guess.
And the Labour opposition, as we know, were not keen for the GE. They were bounced into it by the LDs and the SNP.
Thinking cap please.
So depressing
Tory manifesto completely impossible to implement
I do accept that I greatly underestimated the extent to which Leavers have been credulous about the deal. Of course Boris was greatly helped in that by the Benn Act, which closed off the 'no deal' fantasy, thank goodness.
The Minimum Wage was brought in with a very sensible staggering. Young people are on average quite frankly less employable, less experienced etc than older people - but the minimum wage deliberately and sensibly reflected that. If you can hire two young people for the same price as one experienced older person then there's an incentive to do so and when they get older they've got experience and get a pay rise.
But despite the fact the minimum wage incentivises people to hire young people, youth unemployment is still higher than older age brackets. If you marginally increase the minimum wage for 25+ but double the minimum wage for 16/17 then the consequences of that should be obvious.
My concern with Johnson is always his competence and his aptitude (I think he is basically intellectually and practically lazy) not his underlying philosophy as far as it can be gleaned.
It is too difficult to model the tactical voting sites.
Specifically I assume if the Labour vote was less than the LDs in 2017, 45% of Labour voters will vote tactically for the LDs.
If the LD vote was less than 30% of the Labour vote in 2017, I assume that 35% of LD voters will vote tactically for Labour (LDs too far behind).
If the LD vote was less than the Labour vote in 2017 then I assume that no Lab voters will vote tactically for the LDs.
Overall these tactical voting assumptions add 6 seats to labour and 8 seats to the LDs and takes 14 off the Tories.
I also assume that the Green vote splits evenly between Lab and LDs with 2% increased share for each of them. The rest stays Green
This assumption adds 10 seats to Labour and 4 seats to LDs and takes another 14 seats off the Tories.
So the tactical assumptions overall add 16 to Labour, 12 to LDs and take 28 from the Tories.
I haven't enough data to model the BXP effect yet. If, for instance there was a move of 4% BXP share to Tory and 2% to Labour then the Tories would gain 11 seats, Labour would lose 5 seats and LDs would lose 6.
Had Labour agreed to the election last September they'd have gone into it with a better relative polling to the Tories than they are now.
I think Pidcock is something of a brand herself, btw. She's no machine, that's for sure.
Yet the Miller site describes the seat as "In the 2019 general election, the data suggests that Witney will be a contest between Conservative and Labour". Which is manifest nonsense.
This isn't a piece of objective advice: it's simple Labour propaganda by @votetools "a political tech collective" - or fellow traveller for a bunch of neo-Marxists who want Britain out of the EU and more closely aligned with Putin
Miller - who claims to be a Remainer - should be ashamed to be associated with this transparent Corbynbite crap.
Boris is an insubstantial figure but he will always say what he thinks the audience in front of him wants to hear and that combined with his superficial bonhomie leaves people feeling good and thinking he is on their side (as the DUP found out to their cost). He will, as PM, systematically alienate every section of his voting coalition until there is no one left and he will, I predict, lead the Conservatives to a disastrous defeat one day.
For now, though, he radiates a cheery optimism to which people will warm. Corbyn is the better campaigner and will always argue and he does that well. However, he is personally profoundly unpopular with large sections of the electorate (even if some of the policies, individually, are).
The deal is better than the one previously on offer. If the voters of NI don't like it they can leave it and for GB Leavers it is undeniably better. Win/Win.
So the Tories could win a majority at this election and you'll still be saying that Boris had made a disastrous mistake then? You and I have different definitions of disastrous.
As for Leavers I and other Leavers did say all along that if Boris is blocked by Parliamentarians then Leavers would blame Parliament and not Boris. That should have been self-evident.
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/10/why-a-tory-brexit-party-pact-is-unlikely/
https://twitter.com/humantravl/status/1189874568258838530
The latter not a bad definition of BJ's approach to politics come to think of it.
That was all bollocks. She was just a wealthy, articulate anti-Tory Remainer who saw an opportunity to overturn the people’s wishes
The reasons why this deal is so much worse than May's are obvious. Firstly it is seriously bad for NI, and especially for the union; the DUP is right that it's completely unacceptable that businesses will have to fill in export forms for trading within their own country. Secondly, it hands a loaded gun to the EU, since it removes the backstop as a fall back position if we can't agree an FTA with them; we'll be left with exactly the same weak position that got us to this mess on the Withdrawal Agreement, of having only the disaster of No Deal available as an alternative to whatever they deign to offer us. Under May's deal, the EU would have had to swallow the backstop, giving us complete access to the Single Market for goods for zero cost, and there was no way they'd have been happy to let that happen for long if at all. We on the other hand would have been 100% protected from any cliff-edge.
As for blame, yes, I underestimated the credulousness of Leavers. I thought they'd be able to distinguish 'we will leave on the 31st October, do or die' from 'I will do my best to ensure we leave on the 31st October'. It seems they can't, so for the moment at least they trust Boris. We'll see how long that lasts, but it will get him through this election.