Just 13 of the 31 local seats in Hartlepool on Westminster by-election day have Tory contenders – po
Just 13 of the 31 local seats in Hartlepool on Westminster by-election day have Tory contenders – politicalbetting.com
As we all know the Hartlepool Westminster by-election is taking place on May 6th – the same day as the locals throughout England and the Scottish and Welsh Parliament elections.
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However with a lack of ground game an issue during the plague impacting all parties this might not be so damaging to the Tories.
I think Eastleigh was the most famous where at the run up to GE 2015 the Lib Dems held 40 out of the 44 council seats in Eastleigh, the blue meanies held the other four.
I think this is the full list of candidates. Make of it what you will. So far as I can see the monkey is not standing.
"@MichaelMDowling
As English pubs open today, we should recognise they achieved this by risking the health of their population by vaccinating too early with vaccines they didn't understand.
The EU approach is testing new medicine is vastly superior to the early chance to pop into Weatherspoons."
https://twitter.com/MichaelMDowling/status/1381596226639036417
Tories need Brexit voters to (a) turn out and (b) vote for them.
If they can do that, they’re laughing.
If not, Labour will hold.
It really is that easy.
All the wards have 3 seats in them and the Tories have 1 candidate in all wards except for Throston (no candidate) and Rural West (3 candidates)
So there is a Tory candidate (albeit only 1) in all wards they have a chance of winning and 3 in the ward they are likely to win all the seats and don't have independents.
That does seem a very low number of Conservatives, even assuming some number of pretty conservative Independents or local parties.
What do you think @Scott_P
We have also undoubtedly saved many more lives than have sadly been lost from the vaccine. As ever though. you cannot ever show who has been saved, only the dead are known.
I counted seven Reform and goodness knows how many 'Veteran and People's Party....??
Sad to see the passing of Baroness Shirley Williams. Someone for whom I would ditch the BBC schedules to celebrate her life.
Maybe he engaged his brain after opening his Twitter feed?
As with many politicians I did not agree with many of the things she believed in and promoted but she was of a generation which saw politics as a a matter of public service and undoubtedly worked for the public good. After Mrs Thatcher she was, to my mind, the most powerful female politician of post war Britain and outshone most of her male contemporaries. A powerful speaker, a fearsome intellect and someone who you always felt was working to make life better for people.
As I said I may have disagreed with many of her political positions but that does not mean she did not have the good of the country and the people at heart.
A good age but still a sad loss.
RIP
??
What a load of rubbish - as it seems he has deleted the tweet I think he realises how stupid he looks by posting such crap
It looks like vaccines will be opened to 45+ very shortly (unless they do it in smaller age bands).
https://twitter.com/HugoGye/status/1381627929331953664
https://twitter.com/HugoGye/status/1381629685281488908?s=20
It wouldn't surprise me if you are late 40s and you go on there now if you can't book.
If they do - and do so in Wales as well - Labour are in deep, deep shit.
Outside Hartlepool and North Wales, the places to watch are the Monmouthshire seats - both seats in Newport, and Torfaen. If the Brexit voters switch en bloc there, Labour are in massive trouble.
The specimen date numbers don't look too bad but it seems odd nonethless.
Will try again tomorrow as it won't be long away if they are talking about it.
A blog post alleging that the SNP has channelled public funding to voluntary groups that advocate lowering the age of consent to 10 has provoked controversy on social media.
The post on the Wings Over Scotland blog amplified comments attributed to Alba Party candidate for Central Scotland, Margaret Lynch.
A tweet on Saturday 10 April by another party supporter claimed Lynch had argued in an online party forum for women that LGBT+ groups in Scotland were lobbying to reduce the age of consent to 10.
Although the tweet was subsequently deleted, screen grabs of it continued to be shared online and Lynch has subsequently re-shared other tweets making similar arguments from her Twitter account.
The author of the Wings Over Scotland blog developed the claims further. In a post he described a document said to provide evidence for the claims as a ‘paedophile charter,’ and concluded the SNP are “paying lobby groups with your money to try to reduce the age of consent in Scotland to 10”.
This blog post was subsequently shared on Twitter by Alba Party MP and Scottish Parliamentary candidate, Neale Hanvey. It was also shared repeatedly on Twitter, and in a number of Facebook groups.
Ferret Fact Service looked at this claim and rated it FFS.
https://theferret.scot/claim-snp-funding-paedophile-charter-groups-ffs/
But let's try to rise above our prejudices.
A litigant-in-person has been hit with a bill of almost £100,000 in costs, after the court slammed him for being "difficult to deal with, condescending" and "offensive".
Sir Henry Royce Memorial, a charitable foundation, brought a claim in the High Court for costs on an indemnity basis against former finance director Mark Hardy. The claim followed a previous trial where Hardy had accused Sir Henry Royce Memorial and its directors of fraud and false accounting.
Hardy's accusations of wrongdoing by the directors were unproven. And the court ruled that his request for inspection of documents under the Companies Act was invalid, and not made for a proper purpose.
Judge Paul Matthews ruled that Hardy had a "rather condescending manner" and exhibited "unnecessary" behaviour when dealing with the other side, which resulted in "more time and resources" being spent on the "problems of tone and language than in addressing the real issues in the case."
The judge said the matter did not require "such disproportionate efforts" from Hardy, and highlighted his "excessive correspondence", which ran to two lever arch files for the trial bundle. Hardy had also exhibited a 500 page transcript of a particular meeting, which the judge noted was not "more than remotely relevant to the issues in the case".
Hardy had "vigorously" insisted that a remote trial of his claim should be live streamed on the internet because there would be a great public interest with "possibly hundreds of requests to join". However, no more than 14 members of the public requested the link.
The judge said Hardy should not be excused for his behaviour just because he was a litigant-in-person. The problem was that Hardy had "no sense of responsibility to the system" and "no duty of the kind that would be owed by a lawyer to the court," said the judge.
The claimant sought to recover costs estimated at around £163,000 on an indemnity basis. The judge said the size of the costs was "significant" and while they may be justified, "are somewhat larger than I would have expected for what is essentially a short point under the Companies Act."
The judge ordered Hardy to pay 60% of the costs upfront, with the remainder going for detailed assessment.
https://www.rollonfriday.com/news-content/litigant-person-hit-ps100k-bill
Never, never, ever be a LIP.
I have also just been informed that my own former MP for Norwich North - Ian Gibson - has died at 82.
Double checking extremely low death numbers maybe?
It's hard to know where to draw the line, but some people intentionally or not take the piss when they play barrack room lawyer out of a misplaced sense of thoroughness, and a hyper focus on tone and language, and arguing over trivial matters, is a common sign of it.
Very busy, no-one wearing masks except staff. Prices hiked a fair bit but I don't begrudge that given the torrid time hospitality has had. I reckon they have done 250-300 covers over lunch time (it's a big pub) and if average £25 a head that's approx £7k takings.
Good for them.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/shirley-williams-how-margaret-thatcher-changed-britain-8564673.html
The current leadership is made up of Independent union, Conservatives + Vetrans with Independents supporting them
Burn Valley - 2 independents standing again
De Bruce - Labour
Fens - 2 Independent Union both standing again
Foggy - was socialist labour so probably Labour
Hart - Independent is standing down - Tory won the the seat last time round
Headland - the 3 Hartlepool Independent Candidates will win again (they are all mad around there)
Manor House - was Socialist Labour so probably Labour
Rural West - 3 Tories all standing again
Seaton - It will be the 2 independents that won last time
Throston (was Jesmond) was 1 Hartlepool people, 1 labour, 1 reform UK - not a clue
Victoria - 3 seats were Labour will be again
So yes are a lot of independent candidates who are really Tory
Why pay to watch middle aged men fighting on a Saturday night, when you go to a spoons and watch it for free?
Has anything amusing ever happened to you in connection with a 'spoons?
vs Yesterday
That's a terrible number for positive tests, if it's right. As you say, seems completely out of whack with recent trends.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-56690579
from cases
from hospitalisations
Well Uber has published new figures and it is on target to delivery $52bn of food over the next year worldwide
https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1381632619004235779
Uber’s delivery business is at a run-rate of $52bn. 🤯 (Though total 2019 US restaurant spending was $770bn) https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001543151/84bcb1ae-108c-493b-a622-c8fcd2bb29b7.pdf
It also says there will be an impact due to the Employment tribunal result and there are other tax issues in the UK (which is the VAT case we talked about on Friday).
"President Mitterrand used to bring her flowers when they met. In private, he admitted to his friends that he found her very attractive. She had, he said, the eyes of Caligula, but the mouth of Marilyn Monroe."
But I think a lot of the public don't think rationally about pubs anyway, given the sorts of reactions to closures and conversions of pubs which people simply are not going to enough to keep open.
Hartlepool was always a place to fill up the car for the return journey - for some unknown reason, it had the cheapest petrol in the country.
The problem isn't with Wetherspoons it's with other large breweries charging ridiculous rent and not allowing pubs to choose their own beer or prices.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/testing
1,218.037 vs 913,693.
As ever, it pays to look into the details.
https://www.politico.eu/coronavirus-in-europe/
One possible side effect of proximity to the vaccine seemed to be a tendency to move in slow motion. Some of the NHS staff seemed particularly badly affected. Something to look out for.
Nevertheless, they are pretty aggressive on the tax side, and I can't blame small pub owners being put out by them.
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Judgments/r-v-farooqi-others.pdf