In spite of CON leads of 7-9% in the polls punters still rate a hung parliament as the most likely G
In spite of CON leads of 7-9% in the polls punters still rate a hung parliament as the most likely GE outcome – politicalbetting.com
Above is the latest Betdata.io betting chart of Betfair’s next General Election overall majority market and as can be seen another Tory majority is rated as just a 37% chance behind a hung parliament.
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In 2001, there was a swing of around 1.7% to the Tories. That should have got them 16 gains from Labour. It didn’t. It got them five gains and they still managed to lose Dorset South.
Look at Harrow West:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrow_West_(UK_Parliament_constituency)
It needed a swing of 1.2% for the Tories to win it in 2001. What happened? A swing of 5.4% to Labour. That seat is still Labour today.
Perhaps this time, things will be different. But punters should have this in the back of their minds when betting on seats in 2024.
Cancelling Olympics remains an option, says Japan official
A senior Japanese ruling party official said cancelling this year’s Olympics in Tokyo remains an option if the coronavirus crisis becomes too dire, as a fourth wave of infections surges less than 100 days from the planned start of the Games, Reuters reports.
a) It's Davey, the guy who was standing way behind Starmer when charisma was being doled out.
b) You think the Tories haven't been working those seats hard?
c) Rejoin is a very different thing to sell to Remain that gave them the bounce in those seats in 2019. Especially when Rejoin will come with a whole bunch of things we will have give up. Like membership of trade organisations that actually want us.
d) Four more years of incumbency.
The love of the EU and the antipathy towards Boris is far, far different on pb.com than that amongst the wider electorate.
The salary is pants but it’s a great opportunity and the team seems lovely — I hope it pays off.
So what could bring us back to no overall majority? Economic disaster possibly but this government has not and will not hesitate to spend its way out of trouble if they can. The next year and a half, possibly 2 according to the IMF, will have strong growth on the back of that stimulus but by 2024 a recession is possible. Corruption and sleaze is something Tory governments are prone to. Losing Scotland in a referendum would not go down well. There are possibilities but the probability at the moment seems to me Labour going nowhere fast, the Lib Dems struggling to make an impact and the Tories cruising in a post UKIP world.
As for Davey, there is much more about him than Starmer. His issue is finding a voice.
Please stick to the facts.
Red wall seats may be happy to gee along the Tories now thinking they have won. But as we go further along, as Brexit turns out to be a chimera and they see democratic consent thrown in the bin, that will change. Teesside is a great example of what happens when the voters think the powers that be are ignoring their will - they vote for anyone but.
The Tories want to watch out...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/14/boris-johnson-is-telling-scotland-that-the-union-is-no-longer-based-on-consent
Sanjeev Gupta restructured his empire to obtain more money under a taxpayer-backed C… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1382579221202141185
The last 5 years have seen incredible political volatility though, and the pandemic has not yet peaked in most of the world. Indeed the record increases in case numbers in much of Asia and their low vaccination rate looks very ominous. The economic and political consequences of this are hugely unpredictable. I think it too far off to wage significant sums on 2024.
Bury South is a bit of a special case in my view - Manchester halfway out, large middle class section, and the sort of seat which Labour has done reasonably well in in recent years. However, it's very Jewish. Interesting to see whether the swing against Labour in Jewish areas will unwind now Corbyn has gone.
Is the dogged insistence the games go ahead regardless a face issue or a cash issue? If the latter is it being driven by the IOC demanding their billions? I would imagine the Japanese have built Olympic facilities that can be used ongoing unlike some other host cities.
Holding the games this summer would be madness. I know some anti-lockdown people on here insist the pox is over and we can and MUST return to status quo ante on the date set by Shagger, but in the real world it is still everywhere...
Interestingly, my son is doing his advanced higher dissertation for economics at the moment. Various sources and analysis shows that the best outcome for foreign aid is zero benefit for the recipient country. Most aid is actually detrimental to growth and destabilises the economy of the recipient. The one possible exception to that is medical aid, provided it is delivered direct and does not get bled into corruption. Our aid budget should almost exclusively be focused on the delivery of vaccines for at least the next 2 years, arguably 3.
I think it very unlikely that a boring reversion to the Mean will be the order of events.
Remember how steady the polls were from May 2017 to May 2019 before massive swings took place? Predictions based on that weren't worth the price of a pint.
Although athletes are probably least likely to be over 50 or under 50 with vulnerable health conditions.
The problem with the 0.7% (or any fixed %age) of aid is that it has absolutely nothing to do with the demands of the recipients, or making wise choices for the benefit of the recipients. It is purely doing something based upon our status not theirs. Purely about our politics, our economy, not theirs.
Japan isn’t vaccinating people, countries haven’t planned qualifying competitions, athletes in many cases haven’t competed for a year, media want to send tens of thousands of people there as they’ve paid top dollar for rights, nowhere else has the facilities for such a huge event, most facilities can’t be adequately socially distanced etc etc. Just way too many unknowns.
Maybe we get an Olympic tournament for each sport, held later in the year in countires that have low rates of virus and high rates of vaccination - USA, UK, UAE, Israel and hopefully a few others.
The UN has somewhat optimistically estimated the proportion of aid lost to corruption at 30%; Hadjimichael and Reichel in 1995 found a negative correlation between savings and aid, Boone found aid helps consumption rather than investment, food aid is highly damaging to domestic production and financial aid tends to result in an over valuation of the recipient's currency damaging exports.
The body of evidence on this is increasingly overwhelming. What countries need is institutional stability, the rule of law, the ability to trade more effectively with us (lower, non reciprocal tariff cuts) and peace (the economic cost of civil wars being far greater than the immediate damage as FDI is reduced and capital is a major issue for all LEDCs). Effective healthcare facilitates growth but it does come with many of these other problems. (this is a summary of 5.5k words).
I was thinking the opposite. Brexit saw a 'rally to the [EU] flag' effect across Europe in response. Plus since the Tory Party dominates in England whereas Labour would rely upon the SNP, then I was expecting that in any divorce proceedings Scotland would rally to the SNP to represent its interests but that England would rally to the Tories to represent England's interests.
Like 2015 but on steroids.
I have worked in some small medical aid projects in Africa and Asia, via Christian organisations. A lot of good work is done medically and educationally. I believe there is reasonable evidence that programmes for female literacy have the most positive effect on GDP overall, and unsurprisingly military aid the most negative.
I await developments with interest...
The type of project you have worked on (and huge respect for that by the way) is one of the things that can help but Covid is a massive threat to growth in Africa, just as the AIDs epidemic and Ebola in Sierra Leone/West Africa have been in the past.
If it had happened in 2014 then yes Cameron would have had to go, but if it happens now it would be culminating an almost inevitability. Like removing a wisdom tooth.
The key if it happens is to accept the result and not be dragged kicking and screaming every step of the way which is what made Black Wednesday so bad, the failed attempts on the day to ramp up interest rates really destroyed all remaining credibility.
As for the dynamic Davey having more about him than Starmer, they both have the look of the "Quiet Man" about them, albeit Davey appears "quieter" than Starmer Maybe I am missing something and he is silent but deadly.
Boris Johnson was lobbied by killer Saudi prince: Prime Minister acted on personal plea from Mohammed Bin Salman over 'axed' £300m deal to buy Newcastle United football club... now it may be back on
Mohammed Bin Salman urged PM to 'correct and reconsider' a 'wrong' decision
Premier League was accused of blocking a £300m takeover of Newcastle United
The angry crown prince warned that Anglo-Saudi relations would be damaged
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9472051/Boris-Johnson-lobbied-Saudi-prince-Prime-Minister-acted-plea-Mohammed-Bin-Salman.html
Arbitration continues in the background...
Don't forget to take the necessary precautions. Face, space and whatever the third one is.
The transmission of SARS-CoV-2 after touching surfaces is now considered to be relatively minimal.
Greensill scandal sucking in Francis Maude and Boris’s deputy chief of staff - The Hound:
https://reaction.life/greensill-scandal-sucking-in-francis-maude-and-boriss-deputy-chief-of-staff/
Curiously, when I got my vaccine on Monday I had to wait 15 minutes and we were asked to wipe down our chairs with disinfectant when we had done our time.
Albeit the issue might be the typical flaw of being found to have done it rather than doing it without being found out.
On Topic I think Boris is a double edged sword. He is probably the most likely to motivate the cohort of Tory supporters, but does repel other possible Tory voters, and well I can't be the only one to think there is a clear danger of him completely screwing up. I think that explains the difference between current leads and likely future government.
My wife started off as a paralegal on a shite salary. 8 years later she's a qualified in-house commercial lawyer and earns nearly £75k pa + bonus.
Hang on in there. It will come.
Female education is absolutely key, not least as the one thing that most significantly reduces the birth rate and therefore the risk that Africa (and pretty much only Africa, nowadays) faces from population growth. Low cost interventions of the sort managed by VSO can make a massive difference - I have seen it myself first hand - and it is tragic that political posturing by this government is putting much of this work at risk.
Where I disagree with Foxy is that I have a strong disregard for many of the religious charities that go peddling their propaganda on the back of their aid. The way some of them behave in the field is sometimes shameless. Aid is better delivered by organisations that aren’t trying to peddle politics or religion at the same time.
It always strikes me as odd that funding lost to corruption or inefficiency is postulated as somehow unique to foreign aid programmes. I wonder what proportion of UK government spending or local government spending is ‘lost’ to corrupt or inefficient practices? The difference, I guess, is that the way this works in the developed world is usually more sophisticated than taking wads of cash in envelopes or ambushing goods off the back of a lorry. Although not always. Cf. Cash for questions, or the current state of Liverpool council.
One reason that Pakistan is so fanatical is that in many rural areas civil education is rubbish, and the only option for the poor is the Madrassahs, but what they teach! 🙄
So, I will be taking an interest towards the end of next year - not before - and perhaps not even until 2023.
The same principle applies to other GE bets - for example it’s a reasonable view that the current circumstances, of the population being rescued from the virus by the vaccination programme - represents a uniquely favourable circumstance for the government in office, from which the large majority of possible future trajectories are likely to be downwards. If you buy this view then there is money to be made selling the Tories now, expecting to buy back at better odds when the inevitable next stormy patch comes along.
https://mobile.twitter.com/PrivateEyeNews/status/1382225257541537793/photo/1
As an expert in the working classes I will tell you that if you a call a woman 'shagger' then you're eating teeth as they and their partner consider it an insult.
I'm playing those already. I laid Nigel Farage at 80/1 for next PM the other day - which was an easy £5.
But I'm still puzzled by why we need legal professionals to jump out of aeroplanes.
Here's the board of The Public Investment Fund.
H.E. Yasir Othman Al-Rumayyan - Governor of the Public Investment Fund
H.E. Mohamed Mazyed Altwaijri - Advisor at the Royal Court
H.E. Mohammed Abdullah Al-Jadaan - Minister of Finance
H.E. Khalid Abdulaziz Al-Falih - Minister of Investment
H.E. Ahmed Aqeel Al-Khateeb - Minister of Tourism
H.E. Mohammad Abdul Malek Al Shaikh - Minister of State and member of the Saudi Council of Ministers
H.E. Dr. Majid Abdullah Al Qasabi - Minister of Commerce
H.E. Dr. Ibrahim Abdulaziz Al-Assaf - Minister of State and member of the Saudi Council of Ministers
and last and not least, this chap, who nobody has heard about.
His Royal Highness Mohammad bin Salman Al-Saud - Crown Prince, Deputy Prime Minister, Chairman of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs, Chairman of the Public Investment Fund.
But of course the Saudi Public Investment Fund has nothing to do with the government of Saudi Arabia because they said so.
For anybody interested, the range of services they offer to government can be seen by browsing their website:
https://fma.com/
IMO not a good idea to rely on these kind of cross-country regressions. With the right level of data mining and selection of control variables, you can achieve almost any result.
I note from Radio 5 this morning that the government quietly dropped advice to quarantine items in shops back in November, and that you can now use changing rooms to try on garments. There seems to be no appetite to bring this science up to date more widely.
Just too confusing?
My son (it is not my argument although I find it persuasive) does not argue that education, especially for girls, is not a good thing. What he argues and seems to vouch by analysis is that it does not lead to growth or even economic stability on its own. The interesting question is why not? The brain drain seems to be a major part of the answer as does the need for institutions that facilitate growth in the country.