Tories forever? – politicalbetting.com
Tories forever? – politicalbetting.com
There used to be such a thing in politics as the pendulum. Rather like its physical counterpart, it appears to have gone out of fashion. In fact, there were two pendulums operating simultaneously, one between general elections and one across them.
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So the question then becomes, how does Labour get a Hung Parliament? Well two ways, try and get above 40% again in the right seats. Emphasis on the right seats there.
Second, try and get the Tory vote base to split and return to results more like 2005 to 2015. Labour would probably then not need to go much higher than 40% again in the right seats.
As I’ve said many times, the big problem for Labour right now is how weak the Lib Dems are. Starmer should really be the ideal candidate for them to do well, as I recall he’s very popular with their voters. That should encourage tactical voting and a strong Lib Dem turnout in seats like Guildford, Winchester. Seats in the South that probably only matter at the margins.
Right now Labour seems doomed. But then it seemed doomed after 2019, then it seemed on course to do well just a few months ago. Now it is doomed again.
What I will say is that this isn’t going to be plain sailing for the Tories. Things will go wrong as they already have, some people will get annoyed. The Government will at some point become unpopular. This always happens.
The question is how Starmer capitalises on that. And right now he has not been able to. I think to be fair that’s not his fault, see the focus groups that say he opposes too much despite not really opposing much at all. The next year is going to be crucial for him.
Finally, Labour needs a big idea. A contrast with the Tories that makes people stand up and take notice. Attlee had it, Wilson had it. Blair had it. Does Starmer?
It's true the Conservatives have been in office since 2010, and currently look to have a good chance of re-election in a couple of years. That's clearly a good run.
It's not unprecedented - they've had more time in office than Labour over the past century (so an odd sort of pendulum) and had 18 years in office to 1997. Only one of the recent elections has been convincing - two were hung Parliaments, one a wafer thin majority. They've had plenty of shaky moments, and were assisted by Labour leadership woes.
So, if I were a Conservative, I'd be happy about the current situation, but it really doesn't represent some kind of new paradigm.
https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1383328199816351748
None of this, when taken together, has any semblance of normality.
The question is this; is this the way the future feels, or will boring good old normality return, in which two modest and slightly competent parties fight it out? Is the present climate in nation and politics a big or a feature. If it is a feature, it is a Black Swan event, slowly unfolding. if it is a bug, it would be rather nice if it ended soon.
Every attempt to understand the current state of British politics ought to start with thia line.
What a sensible post to start the thread. Never say never.
Another string to Boris' bow.
FPT: Good morning, everyone.
F1: interesting video on practice so far:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIArL3DPbrs
Last time the government screwed up, in 2018 and early 2019, the same party managed to reinvent itself with a new leader, and the Opposition never got a look-in.
Therefore if we sail to 2024 with nothing bad coming then they’ll win again. I’d even bet on a win.
But is that realistic? We’ve thrown around a lot of money, we’re in an economic hole and I am sceptical that we will recover back to where we were. People will lose their jobs, businesses will collapse. It’s not going to be good for some. The question is, how many people will be impacted?
Economics will be what sinks the Tories. If it does.
The really big story slowly simmering to boiling point.
"Lothar Wieler, head of the Robert Koch Institute, gave a shocking account of developments on Thursday, warning that the picture was now worse than at the peak of the deadly second wave. Intensive care wards are hitting saturation in several regions. Ecmo machines for oxygen are running short."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/04/16/germany-warns-lasting-economic-damage-covid-cases-spin-control/
A day on the wife's one man, digging for victory, chain gang beckons.
Or, Johnson's refusal to do something about cross border travel results in the vaccine miracle becoming redundant as a vaccine escape variant from abroad hits us. Lockdown again in early autumn and next winter thanks to that kind of f off means all bets off for Johnson imho. The public will want blood.
It’s just the mediocrities in government- Johnson, Sturgeon, Drakeford - have an advantage over the mediocrities who are not - Starmer, Ross, Davies.
If they keep getting accused of committing criminal acts this advantage may be reduced, of course.
The pattern since then has been very different. 97 Blair, 2010 Cameron and that's it. 2 changes of government in 24 years with another change not looking particularly imminent. Why is this? Clearly incumbency has become an enormous advantage. In Scotland too we have had the same party in power for 14 years and they will clearly be the next government whatever the balance on a majority will be. Being in government, having the ability to bribe the electorate and dominate the airways seems an almost impossible advantage now.
Almost, but not quite. In 97 Blair won by a landslide, a tired, arrogant, divided government shown to be economically incompetent by black Wednesday got show the door emphatically. In 2010 a tired, arrogant divided government shown to be economically incompetent by the GFC got shown the door. It was almost as emphatic but Cameron started a long way behind where Blair was in 97.
So to overcome the advantage of incumbency we need something dramatic that bears directly on the performance of the government and a perceived to be competent alternative. We live in dramatic times but so far Boris's government is not wearing the consequences of the pandemic, quite the reverse, and Brexit is an issue for sad obsessives and no one else. That makes this government relatively safe. Of course if the short term boom of bounce back is followed by a severe recession in 2024 that might change but 92 showed that even a severe recession is not enough on its own.
And then there is the perceived to be competent alternative. This is not just the leader its the team. Blair had Brown, Cameron had Osborne, both powerful figures in their own right. Starmer needs a better team to help give himself more credibility. And he needs to hope.
And now, the centre of hi-tech isn't Silicon Valley, it is under the Martian surface. Says a bloke who should know (or who has gone bat-shit crazy.)
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/weird-news/former-israeli-space-security-chief-says-extraterrestrials-exist-trump-knows-n1250333
As an aside, the previous periods of party governance were both between one and two decades. If you count the Coalition as Conservative, we're in that window now.
The quality of the government and opposition front benches is the poorest I can remember. The fact that Johnson is likely to win the next GE is only really of interest to those who see politics as akin to supporting a football team. For anyone interested in the good-governance of the country we are in a sorry state either way.
The only alternative to the Tories is a rainbow alliance with Labour in the lead. At the next election (sooner rather than later I suspect) it will become obvious that and alliance of Lab, LD, PC, SNP and Green are not the obvious grouping for an enthusiastic continuation of Brexit policy. Labour will say the right things of course but the level of belief is its credibility will be nil. Even lower for all other parties.
Unless there is a solution to this electoral conundrum no sort of multi party normality can prevail. No other possible government has its heart in Brexit. Labour show no sign of solving it yet.
We are now 11 years into this Tory government and the next general election in 2024 will be after 14 years of the Tories in power, so closest to 2010 which was held after 13 years of Labour in power and remember Cameron only got in then in a hung parliament with LD support, not an overall majority.
1997 is not a valid comparison as that was after 18 years of the Tories in power ie the equivalent would be Starmer as Kinnock in 1992 and making a few gains in 2024 but not enough to win and then being replaced by a Blair like figure who won a landslide in 2029 after 19 years of the Tories in power. Kinnock's Labour voteshare in 1992 of 34% is pretty close to Starmer's average Labour score now so he is actually about par for where he should be.
Similarly when Wilson got in in 1964 after 13 years of Tory rule it was with a majority of just 4 and thanks to the support of Scottish and Welsh MPs as Home won a majority in England, a scenario more likely for Starmer in 2024 than a Blair 1997 rehash
Though, sadly and ironically enough, that led to the election of one of the most venal leaders Italy has ever had. So even if a regime falls, there is no guarantee that what will replace it will be any better.
My very first case as an in-house investigator related to one of the cases brought by Italian magistrates against various politicians. It involved a Sicilian businessman (concrete was his business), a Swiss bank, an Italian state-owned enterprise and 2 apparently unsuspecting and naive US banks. What fun that was. The main lesson it taught me is that there is nothing people won't believe if they badly want it to be true.
Anyway, turf to remove, Terram sheeting to be laid, three hundredweight of slate chippings to be shovelled and an ageing back to be broken. I must off.
It's also the case that, while Labour is miles away from being able to form a majority which would require an earthquake of a swing, the Tories aren't all that far from losing their majority, in terms of required swing. Both remove the Tories from office.
But in the local elections it was a different story:
2011 Con 38% Lab 37%
2012 Lab 39% Con 33%
2013 Lab 29% Con 26%
2014 Lab 31% Con 30%
Compare with the leads the Conservatives had in the local elections before 2010:
2006 Con 39% Lab 26%
2007 Con 40% Lab 26%
2008 Con 43% Lab 24%
2009 Con 35% Lab 22%
The Conservatives had 'broken through' although 2009 did suggest it was more a desire to get rid of Labour and that there was still uncertainty about the Conservatives.
Whereas EdM's Labour achieved a couple of Kinnock style performances in 2011-2 and then sank back into hopes about hung parliaments.
I am looking forward to it. It will be nice to do something vaguely normal for a change.
I had terrible trouble with the site until I started posting via Vanilla. I am not a good typist at the best of times but hasty posting and an inability to correct once posted was my downfall.
Off to trim the some bushes now, subject to birds in their little nests.
I take it that whoever was boasting about being a drunk in control of a car over a distance he could have walked in 2 minutes was pissed out of his brain yesterday evening. Some of us know people who are in wheelchairs because of bastards who drove whilst drunk.
It took the 1987 defeat to make Labour properly change their mindset and move them towards a credible alternative government but with so much ground to make up it took them two more elections to win. Something similar happened after 2005 for the Tories (but the change started with crowning Michael Howard).
The one thing that could change everything is a Scottish vote for independence. Will voters abandon the Tories? Will Labour be able to convince people that they will be able to negotiate firmly?
It's worth noting that since 1955 Labour has only won a majority of seats in England 4 times. Scottish independence could make it more likely that there's a (more) permanent Tory majority,
Covid-19 infections across the UK dropped to the lowest level since the autumn, according to the latest figures.
But a professor of immunology has called for Britain to be on its guard against a third wave after a possible vaccine-busting mutation was recorded in England and Scotland.
Public Health England (PHE) reported that 77 cases of the B.1.617 variant, which was first discovered in India, have been found.
Imperial College’s Danny Altmann said that as a result, those arriving into the country from India should be subject to a hotel quarantine if the UK is to shut out variants that could set back the Prime Minister’s lockdown easing plans.
But despite the warnings, Downing Street has insisted Boris Johnson’s trip to India later this month - his first major international visit since securing a Brexit trade deal with Brussels - will go ahead.
The Liberal Democratic Party first won a general election in Japan in 1958, and then won either an outright majority or something reasonably close to it in every single subsequent election until it was swept from power in 2009, 51 years later.
The LDP then won the next election, in 2012, with a substantial majority over a hopelessly fragmented opposition, and normal service was resumed. That makes 60 out of the last 63 years as the party of government, and counting.
Prolonged one party rule in a plural, democratic system is atypical, but possible. There is no reason to suppose that the UK is immune to this.
The American officials (and ex officials) have been quite careful not to sound too outlandish. They’re basically saying “we are seeing things that are not ours, they interfere with our military operations, in a lot of cases they defy our understanding of materials science and physics itself, and we have a lot of multi point evidence backing it up. We need insight on what these things are”.
A multi decades campaign of public ridicule on the subject has meant people have been too scared to engage with it. At least in America, that’s now changing. We’ve yet to catch up here, somewhere between 2-3 years behind the process in America I’d say.
There is no way that a party as inept as the current Tories can maintain their current level of support. Punters generally want competent fair government and despite the pox and Brexit making many voters suspend this, it won't last. However I don't put it past the Tories to reinvent themselves with a new leader leading a "new" government.
Then we have Labour. Without significant seats won in Scotland there is no route to a majority. Without a wholesale rethink of how to speak to people they aren't going to win back seats in the former red wall. Starmer isn't really the problem, the party is. A Blair would lead from the front, inspire the centre and build an unstoppable coalition of voters. I just don't see that Labour have anyone of that calibre to choose from...
It's no threat at all to the position of the Conservatives in England. The end of the Union would upset some of the Tory voter coalition, but can we see any significant proportion of it abandoning the party over it? I think not.
As you say, if Scotland fell off tomorrow, it would only make the position of the Conservative Party south of the border much more secure. It would leave the Government with 359 of the remaining 591 MPs, boosting its majority to 127 seats.
New Party time?
The Dave Party? I forget.
Edited extra bit: no, it was the Patrick Party!
However if it ever happened it would be the end of the Conservative and Unionist Party anyway, they would become the English National Party instead ie the English equivalent of the Scottish National Party and to ensure no compromise with the SNP in Scexit talks, Labour would be out of power for another generation in both England and Scotland and would probably have to reinvent itself in Wales as the Welsh Nationalist Party to see off a Plaid resurgence there
Below the line... HYUFD states that there will be a military intervention (if the British Army can get any of its 3 tanks to start) to prevent the inevitable Cumbrian independence referendum, Sean is pretending to be a Chinese AI and apparently something inconsequential happened in 'F1'.
Which is what is playing out.
123 seats need to be won. However, of those 123 seats where Labour wins on a UNS of 5.2% - not quite a Blair style swing, but much larger than the one Thatcher got - sixteen are held by the SNP and one by Plaid Cymru (which will of course be redrawn into a new seat anyway). That’s before we consider they will either lose or face significant cuts to majorities in several seats due to redrawn boundaries, while in others the majority they face may well increase.
Roughly speaking, therefore, they need to be making realistic challenges in Wimbledon, Telford, Bassetlaw and Stafford. Now that’s not impossible. They held have held all four seats in the last 20 years, and indeed Bassetlaw was a Labour seat until 2019.
The issue is, not only does it require the government to implode more spectacularly than Middlesex’s batting lineup, but unless the government’s decline is so abrupt it renders campaigns meaningless - as in 1997 when several paper candidates were unexpectedly elected - it requires them to be able to mount a simultaneous ground game in over 150 constituencies at once.
It’s one hell of an ask.
But with Boris Johnson in charge, all things are possible.
These are unprecedented times, both because of the virus, but equally because of the personality of the PM. It strikes me that the next three years are entirely unpredictable, and that the key will not be what happens to the economy or any other 'normal' metric, but what happens to BJ. Unlike Blair or Thatcher, for example, there's something inherently unstable about BJ, and he could implode at any time over some unforeseen issue. I don't deny his popularity at all, but I don't think the government or his rather cavalier leadership are built on very firm foundations, and he could easily be blown off course by events. Of course, Labour would have to be strong enough to exploit such events - it remains to be seen whether it will be. I think something, somewhere, may explode to blow the PM off course. At the moment he's treading carefully and avoiding the landmines, but he may well stand on one in due course.
When the end comes it could well be quick and brutal.
If I were a paranoid US military type figure, these intelligence reports would disturb me greatly. As it is, I just sit back and enjoy the ride, taking comfort from the human story so far being on balance a positive one. Despite them almost certainly being there from our start if they’re with us now (as looks increasingly likely).
Now the situation is reversed. Labour is the party you support if you think that the country is a cesspool of racism and all kinds of horrid phobias, and most of the voters are brain dead scum who are wholly complicit in its manifold evils. Its remaining support base is very heavily skewed towards pissed off youths, minority interests and various shades of hard leftists and, apart from the occasional act of ritual genuflection before the NHS, they give a strong impression of having nothing good to say about Britain at all.
Starmer himself was meant to be the next Kinnock, but you do wonder if he's more like Labour's IDS? I don't know - yes, a lot could change in the years ahead, but how is this iteration of Labour meant to win back large numbers of voters directly from the Tories (or the SNP, for that matter?) It doesn't look at all promising for them...
There is also the question of wealth. I am unconvinced by reports of Boris's genteel poverty but they do exist. On that note, he will have a new datum: that David Cameron was in line for £60 million for sending a few text messages.
Most of us are decent people who want what is best for the country, but just happen to believe that what's best includes a reduction in gross inequalities and a more tolerant, forward-looking culture. It's an optimistic vision.
But, yes, the great political realignment away from class based voting has been turbocharged by Brexit/Johnson and the Tories have emerged massively on the right side of it. The equal and opposite applies to Labour. The old rules for analysis must be binned. They're no use any more. Serve only to mislead and lead to bad calls and losing bets. Hartlepool, for example, has become a Con seat and a Labour target. The sort of seat Labour can win if they're on the up. It's truly fascinating.
The best GE bet imo is Cons largest party. I'm on that at 1.8 and it remains excellent value at 1.66.
A new punditry for a new politics. Welcome aboard, David. There are a few of us now.
I have to decide who to vote for. In 2019 I spoiled my ballot paper, but I don’t want to do that again. People died for my right to vote and the very least I can do is use it.
But - I have in all elections a choice of three candidates. Con, Lab, Green.
The Cons are out. More out than a Hundred batter.
Labour will win easily, so in a sense this soul searching is irrelevant. But I’m dubious about them at the moment, particularly since both sets of local councillors have spent the last four years ignoring all local issues.
That leaves the Greens.
I’ve searched high, and low, and sideways. Can I find anything about their position on vaccine passports? Can I ecky thump.
Does anyone know whether they are opposed to
ID cards by stealthvaccine passports?About the only meaningful policy they have for Cannock is they want us to have much worse train services. Which for some obscure reason does not inspire me.
But if they are against vax passports, I will be willing to consider voting for them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-56781228
That didn’t quite work out.
Plenty of my fellow Greens won't be vaccinated for the same reason as me - tested on animals.
https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/conference/2007/09/labour-majority-increase
The problem that some PB posters have is that they assume that once a person has voted Conservative, he will continue to do that for the rest of his life.
In fact, there is a very large pool of people who could vote Conservative, or Lib Dem, or UKIP - and which way they vote in any one election will be influenced by a large number of factors. Similarly, there is a large pool of people who could go Labour, or Lib Dem, or Green Party, and the same principle also applies.
In the present round of local elections, the Lib Dems are talking about local issues, not national ones. Boris Johnson is irrelevant. I would not be surprised by a good Lib Dem result in May.
While Labour has always been a coalition of interests (Attlee was a London lawyer too), rarely have the Tories had such a coalition as the current one between free-market, low tax Atlanticists, and working class communities, wanting protection from competition and magic money tree spending. It is as difficult a combination as Labour has.
She may be opposed (judging from her remarks) for many of the wrong reasons. But she is at least opposed. The rest is detail.
Looks like I’m going with the Greens.
And Gallowgate was expressing exasperation about their lack of effort in Ashington.
I hope they have a good result, but they’ve got to want it for themselves.
Oumuamua!
Who knew?
One thing is for sure, if it is proved intelligent alien life has reached earth and is making contact - the most momentous discovery in the history of Homo sapiens - the third PB header following this galactic encounter will focus on what it all means for voting reform in Wales