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What happened when I switched the CON and LAB GE2019 vote shares on the Electoral Calculus seat pred
What happened when I switched the CON and LAB GE2019 vote shares on the Electoral Calculus seat predictor – politicalbetting.com
For some time I’ve been planning a piece on how difficult it is going to be for LAB to win a majority at the next election and overnight I got down to it.
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Thanks for the header, Mike.
Mike do you know how Scotland feeds into this? Have Labour ever won an outright majority off only seats south of the border?
Another way to ask that is that if Labour continue to flounder in Scotland is their route to an overall majority impossible?
(I know some will say that they can form a coalition with the SNP but we all know what the price of that would be.)
Mike, do you have any idea how this might adjust once there has been a Boundary Commission and the resulting changes?
Or is this off the table for the next election now?
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-55547685
The thinking is that it moves 6-10 seats to the Tories, which should incentivise the government to get it passed, but as always the devil is in the detail of the proposals.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9420785/Angela-Merkel-Emmanuel-Macron-call-Vladimir-Putin-discuss-getting-Sputnik-jab-EU.html
But they want them to be made in the EU, don’t have a factory yet and haven’t approved Sputnik.
Book domestic UK holidays this summer, folks!
Labour Party seats won in Scotland during General Elections:
1997: 56
2001: 56
2005: 41 (boundary changes meant Blair lost 5 seats not 15)
Gordon Brown took over and in:
2010 Labour also won 41 seats in Scotland
In 2015 Labour won 1 seat in Scotland, losing 40 of their MPs under Metropolitan Miliband.
In 2017, Corbynism took them up to 7 seats in Scotland, losing all of those gains in 2019 when Labour again returned to 1 seat.
I fail to see how Labour can possibly win a majority unless they win back their Scottish base.
1. The British press will scaremonger massively at the prospect of Sturgeon holding the reins of Westminster power. This will work. It will frighten decent ordinary English and Welsh citizens to vote for anyone but Labour.
2. The price of SNP coalition would be indyref2, probably leading to the break up of the Union and (ironically) the loss of all Labour seats north of the border anyway.
Unless Labour win back their Scottish Westminster MPs, as far as I can see they're totally screwed.
He also won 34/40 seats in Wales pushing him over the line.
(I’m agreeing with your point, btw, is that it is very hard for Labour without Scotland - Blair is the exception that proves the rule)
I think you probably know that, and that it will not be repeated under Keir Starmer, as you acknowledge.
We need to be real. I cannot see how Labour can win a General Election majority again unless they regain their base in Scotland.
Remember also Labour will lose a lot of seats in Wales on these boundary changes. Possibly as many as eight.
Boris or his successor would have to be caught in flagrante delicto with a sheep. Even then, I'm not sure Labour would win 330 English seats. They need Scotland. Badly.
Which is also of course why they oppose indyref2. Nothing to do with principles.
The truth is - and it’s a truth Labour have never confronted - is that they are totally shit at winning elections. When in doubt, they retreat to their comfort zones and pile up huge majorities in safe seats while neglecting swing voters. In 1951 they got 49.5% of the vote and still lost. In 2017 they got 39.99% of the vote and were nowhere near power. Electoral calculus is of course a reflection of Corbyn’s especially poor performance in this regard in 2019, where he was barely even preaching to the choir.
The genius of Blair and to a lesser extent Wilson (much less, as he proved in 1970) was to understand you have to speak to swing voters. So far, Starmer is struggling to do that. Equally, the situation he inherited is a very tough one.
It has not been adequately explained why it would be that your typical family of four from some sun-starved corner of Lancashire would want to spend their entire holiday in a hot, sweaty gag, having to constantly force miserable children to keep the hot, sweaty gags on as well, and to come back afterwards with a neat little set of rectangular white patches burnt into their faces for weeks afterwards.
I mean, ideally the UK Government will render the issue moot by telling them not to go anyway, but if and when foreign travel is allowed there will be a lot of people who will rush off to these sunshine destinations, oblivious to whatever madcap regulations exist there, and end up getting a very unpleasant surprise.
They've lost Scotland and they've lost the Red Wall. They've lost their constituency base, retreating instead to policies that sound great to residents of Islington but totally and utterly out of touch with ordinary voters. I can't see Remainer Keir Starmer winning back the kind of people they need.
So they'll probably continue to do well in London. And that will be it.
Scotland is now a serious liability for Labour. It's a valuable weapon, already deployed in 2015, for the Tories to use against them. Come the next GE we should expect the same to happen again.
The nightclub you might go to after your day by the pool is of course a completely different kettle of fish.
For all the talk of domestic ‘vaccine passports’ for bars and clubs, don’t put it past foreign governments to require various systems and processes to access the sort of venues you’d expect to spend your time on holiday. Also remember that quarantine regulations can be changed at short notice, and your insurer won’t necessarily cover spending the first few days of your break confined to your hotel room.
The big one to watch for, is needing a (negative) PCR test before your *return* flight. Many fell foul of this one in my part of the world over the winter, and had an unscheduled two week extension to their holiday - either confined to their hotel room at their own expense, or in a government-run field hospital. This applies even if you’ve been vaccinated.
Haha very good
We won't be gong anytime soon imo.
It doesn't seem all that long to me since the talk in 2001 was could the Tories ever win again given the astonishing efficiency of the Labour vote under Blair where a tiny lead by comparison with the header gave him a very comfortable majority. A repeat of that without the efficiency boost that Scotland gave then is unlikely but there is nothing set in stone about the efficiency of votes under our oh so fun FPTP system.
Just this, from the previous thread.
Right now Labour are very, very, lost.
Anyone betting otherwise is taking a massive gamble, or has money to throw away.
An alternative view is that both major parties have ideologues pretty unappealing to those outside of their supporters, but that the Tories command a larger, and more electorally efficient minority.
It difficult to see how that will change this side of the next election.
We ignore this at our peril. It's a sea change in my lifetime. And whilst I take the above point about Tony Blair in 2001, that's twenty years ago.
Labour are nowhere near power. They're not on the starting blocks. They're not on the warm up lap. They're not even in the stadium.
All that said, the broad thrust of your argument is correct. Labour risks becoming permanently trapped in its comfort zone - which is more than sufficient to win it a substantial Parliamentary bloc, but not nearly enough to win. If that happens then it will become a zombie opposition, facilitating continuous Conservative rule both by failing to win itself and by stifling the emergence of a successor party that might be more capable of so doing.
It’s far from conclusive - it would be a surprise if it were, given both the difficulty of pinning down the precise origins of viruses, and the difficulty of free enquiry in China - but the evidence suggests the virus did not originate in the lab.
Good thread:
https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1376954932004196352
That’s why @SandyRentool said the other day in great frustration that he wanted a Labour Party that represented the workers.
The government has shipped millions of doses to the 21 mass vaccination hubs, or “pilot” community centers, in states such as California, Florida, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas. The hubs are part of a $4 billion federal system that funds more than 1,000 smaller vaccination locations across the country and provides other vaccination support — such as supplies — to states across the country. The Federal Emergency Management Agency did not respond to repeated questions about how much the pilot sites cost.
Despite the money the federal government has spent on the mass-vaccination pilot sites, they are administering just a fraction of the shots given across the country each day. Federal data show the retail pharmacy program — which has signed up 21 chains and 17,000 stores — can reach far more Americans in a shorter time, according to four senior officials with direct knowledge of the matter. The bottom line, those sources said, is that more Americans seem to be willing to walk to their local pharmacist to get the vaccine than to travel to a federal vaccination site for the shot.
For now the prospect for those of us enthusiastic for neither of the major parties is not appealing.
Whatever next ?
The combination of sun, fresh air, and sea makes it all but impossible to spread the virus.
Plus, of course, Brits will all be vaccinated by then.
But here's my prediction: Spain will not, in fact, have these measures in place in July and August.
I take more notice of his hunches that those of @Leon ...
https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1377117062082879488
As you pointed out yesterday by the Autumn they may well have caught up as the world increasingly becomes awash with vaccines but this summer is going to see a lot of cases and death in mainland Europe. Personally, I don't need HMG to tell me to stay away.
There are obviously new variants this time, but seasonality being a big factor in European case numbers again would hardly be surprising.
We may need to put 2019 in the same category: a seismic shift.
Ydoethur, the thing is that if we're saying that Labour have gone from representing the working class to representing the Metropolitan elite then fine but they won't win power from such a base. It's not even entirely true. There are large swathes of cities, especially in the north and east, which did not reap the Eurostar love-in of the Blairite years. It's a London centric party now.
I really think Labour are in huge trouble. It's not simply about Sir Keir Starmer. It's their whole vision. What do they stand for and represent now that Boris has swung a sufficient number of working class voters behind his Brexit Britain?
I will bet that 2019 was the political reboot for the tories and we should ignore the preceding pre-Brexit semi tory wins. I could see a scenario where Labour are out of power for at least another 10, perhaps 15, years. They need to find a reason for existing and right now I've no idea what it is. I don't think they do either.
Anyone? What's their vision which is going to recapture the north?
I remain unpersuaded that there is anything any more inevitable about the efficiency that Boris achieved in 2019.
I’d also say that I don’t think ‘workers’ are some kind of unified block all with the exact same interests or outlook on life, which might be why Labour can’t be that party anymore.
Pity SLAB is fishing in such a small pool. A competent Scottish Leader nationally could be the way back.
The other thing I note is that it is probably easier for Labour to have a majority after Scottish Independence than before.
My (long-ago, now) experience was that being asked for advice could be a 'many times a day' experience, especially where the same pharmacist had ben visible in the pharmacy for several years.
Many of these groups are young and don't vote enough but they have relatives and friends who do and must be disappointed that the State shows so little interest in them. Once upon a time, under a different economic structure, trade unions would have represented many of these people but they are no longer relevant. Nevertheless, they need a champion and Labour could be it.
https://twitter.com/jamesjohnson252/status/1376956258230673408?s=19
Labour was written off under Kinnock, the Tories under IDS/Howard, the Republicans during Obama (and probably shortly to be again), etc. Yet sleaze, the financial crisis, Trump...something surprising tends to come along sooner or later.
In Germany it looks like vaccinations have managed to almost keep up with the third wave for those groups, but the third wave is just ahead of healthy over 70s. But lots of the healthy over 70s can keep themselves safe for a few weeks longer until they are vaccinated. What we're seeing in hospitals locally is more people in their 50s and 60s - people who can't avoid contacts because they have to go to work, or have children going to school etc.
I don't understand why this fact is not questioned. Everyone assumes that face masks must work yet real world evidence does not back up that theory.
So its highly likely that watering masks knocks a significant percentage off R, which while not enough in some places to knock R below 1 is avoiding R hitting 2.
This is more like it!
(Sadly, no Emperor Moths lured into the garden to show you. Will have to go to Dartmoor....)
The rise of the gig economy, and it goes far beyond Deliveroo with casual workers in all sorts of academic and office jobs, is a way of circumventing these laws. We have looser employment protections than many EU countries, tighter than the USA, but it does show through in job creation and flexibility.
Perhaps there is a sweetspot where workers are protected from abusive employers yet hiring/firing are permissable to the point that the economy is flexible and dynamic, but we don't seem to have found it yet.
An alternative is to redesign a Universal Credit type scheme so that gig and ZHC workers have a safety net via the government as bread and butter, with the gig job as the jam. It would make lives easier and less hand to mouth, and might even incentivise gig employers into better terms and conditions.
When I get in trouble, I don't want a lapdog as my advocate, I want the pit bull.
So from the pov of England & Wales, we really, really need Scotland in order to prevent a one-party state.
Prior to the Alba party setting up shop, it could have been argued that it was a reciprocal arrangement to prevent a one-party state there as well. But probably not, now.
Good morning, everybody.
Those polled aren't paying attention to events if they are suggesting Labour are playing party politics with the pandemic. That would be my biggest criticism of Starmer's Labour, they have called Johnson out on absolutely nothing, excess deaths, PPE procurement corruption, track and trace profligacy and the September non-lockdowns.
The media narrative is at present very much in Johnson's favour, and it is a false narrative. Can this continue?
Sums up much of the 20th cent. industrial relations in the UK.
Was effective and capable as an organiser, membership grew in her workplace.
Then she was turfed out of the union position, because someone who was politically active needed the role as part of building their career.
And of course, high levels of vaccination in the first wave is extremely important for averting trouble next winter because 1) it will mean an existing level of protection in the population against serious illness 2) it is much more simple running a one shot "booster" programme
Great timing people