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Opinium has the Midlands and the North recording the biggest falls in Boris’s approval ratings – pol
Opinium has the Midlands and the North recording the biggest falls in Boris’s approval ratings – politicalbetting.com
Overnight we have the latest Opinium poll for the Observer which includes the regular approval ratings. The chart takes the latest numbers by region and shows the changes since the firm’s May 13th poll when the PM’s “vaccine bounce” was at its peak.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-57958278
The straw clutching by some pb tories tells me an awful lot about how precarious they really think their position is. If they wrote that they expected a mid-term slump at some point but believed Boris would nevertheless turn it around for the election then I'd pay more attention. The outright denial of plain facts is dissembling.
In truth, I think Boris IS in the shit, and it's because most people are vaccinated and feel safer than they did. No need to hang on to the Govt for support... and furlough is ending.
The Nat Insurance story is the one that is making the difference imho in voting intention and popularity. Noone likes to.pay more tax.
https://amp.economist.com/britain/2021/07/20/britain-tests-the-limits-of-mass-vaccination?__twitter_impression=true
His position is, therefore, recoverable. Whether it will recover later is anybody's guess. But there's no particular reason at this stage to believe that a great mass of his erstwhile supporters have seen through the man, or fallen out of love with him, or whatever. It may simply be, and I know this might be a controversial suggestion, that Boris Johnson isn't the Pied Piper and the new fraction of the Tory electoral coalition aren't bewitched, mindless followers under his spell, but that the relationship is transactional.
The Government is seen to be doing poorly at the moment so its position softens; should the Plague crisis finally abate by September, and the more doom-laden predictions be proven false, then it may pull ahead again. The only constant is that people get far too excited by opinion polls. Labour was ahead in them for almost the entirety of the 2010-2015 Parliament; Theresa May was recording 20pt leads less than a month out from GE2017. Look what happened next.
I do not think there can be any doubt after the last 10 days of shambles from Boris that his poll ratings are falling and to be fair it is only in this period that we have seen such a dramatic change
I would attribute it to several causes including his misstep over his initial isolation, the public's fear of any lifting of lockdown, but singularly the chaos over pinging double vaccinated to isolate when apparently on the 16th August this requirement disappears. It is incomprehensible and ridiculous.
It has caused the obvious knock on to tens of thousands in isolation unnecessarily, many more deleting the app, and shortages in delivery to supermarkets that provides very real evidence to the public of the failure of this policy
However, I doubt in the short term it will have much affect on Boris's tenure as there are only three ways he can be replaced and there are no signs any of these are relevant just now.
1) Conservative mps decide he has to go
2) There is a GE
3) He decides to go himself
In an ideal world I would be delighted to see Rishi takeover today, but that is for the future and I would just suggest caution to those who are desperate for Boris to go, as I do not see his successor largely changing anything on covid, brexit, or the economy
Indeed, if the evidence seen in the daily figures continues to show a fall in infections and death rates and we enter herd immunity the picture for Boris could just as easily charge again
And It is not as if there is a competent opposition waiting in the wings to take over
30% of British adults have not had both jabs and we know that under 18's can spread covid so the decision not to vaccinate them is crass.
45% of British citizens are not vaccinated. We are a petri dish for mutations.
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=GBR
My reaction to the 4th graph: People think he has principles?
Some of your post I agree with but this last remark is careless.
Whatever you think of Keir Starmer (uncharismatic, dour, unnecessarily anti-Corbynite, too pro-EU etc. etc) incompetent is not a fair charge. He's very competent.
That doesn't necessarily mean he would make a better PM than Johnson, although I'm sure he would, but he's perfectly 'competent.'
I suspect it will take time for Labour support to grow, but grow it will. I think we vastly underestimate the poisonous effect that Jeremy Corbyn had on vast swathes of sensible middle Britain. I still encounter people who mention Corbyn and who could not, ever, vote for Labour whilst he was in charge. The fan club will never get this but he was a walking deadly nightshade. A thoroughly nasty piece of anti-semitic, misogynist, shit who caused untold damage to the Labour Party.
For the tories to tank properly in the polls will not just take their own popularity to ebb. It requires the opposition parties to rise too. The LibDems are (evidentially) rising again. The SNP are doing their usual stuff north of the border and Labour in Wales are in good fettle. It's Labour in England (and Scotland) where the issues lie. Until they begin to rebuild support properly Boris Johnson's Government will continue to perform better in the overall voting intention figures than his (un)popularity would suggest.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=People+vaccinated+(by+dose)&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=GBR~European+Union~USA
45% of British citizens are unvaccinated. That's a disaster in the making if we don't get our act together. Not vaccinating under-18's is an incredibly dangerous policy.
We began well but I'm afraid the Government took its eye off the ball and thought we'd done enough because we had vaccinated the most vulnerable. This ignored the fact that the virus can rip through the remaining population if they're not vaccinated.
You just wait until a mutation properly side-steps the vaccines which has to be a very real possibility this autumn/winter.
The EU is fast catching up. Countries such as Spain will be overtaking us soon.
Under 18 year olds?
Or the rest of us? Especially those not vaccinated.
That’s what the JCVI is grappling with and I don’t envy them their task. Perhaps you can enlighten them?
It's not an original insight, but BoJo has trained himself to make a great first impression. Good political skill that one, and the only difference about Boris is how utterly brilliant he is at it. But he makes a terrible third impression.
We're making a huge mistake that could have global consequences. Johnson is too stupid and too idle to realise this.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/16/englands-covid-unlocking-a-threat-to-the-world-experts-say
The Government realise that the vaccination situation here is not going well and they're trying to bribe and coerce the remaining chunk to get jabbed.
Not vaccinating under-18's is a significant problem.
In view of your assertions can you provide Sage's official stance on this
Was there a special q for Scots: whit de ye think of that f****** lying, useless w***** noo?
Therefore, the delays in releasing restrictions - face masks, distancing, out of hours leisure - do have much more negative consequences for those areas than for the south.
That’s pure speculation of course but it might be a point to consider.
China’s puppetsthe WHO are opposed that suggests Johnson is for once making a good call.Re our colleague from Romford's last comment, I seem to recall several people here who have spent time with him, or met him more than once for for more than a quick greeting, are were not looking for advancement, said something very similar.
'The more that he spoke of his honour, the faster we counted the spoons' or similar applied.
The government could overrule them but it would have to have a good reason to do so.
I would say the time to vaccinate would be if they decided to withdraw the permission for unjabbed Under-18s to avoid isolating.
Otherwise, given the timeframes and the opportunity cost of vaccines that could be redirected to those in more need I can see why they’re hesitant.
Or maybe not.
Before I’m banned for being cheeky, it was nice knowing you.
Again, I’m not a Tory, never voted for them, but their many faults can be exposed without manipulating the truth as you do here.
But it's not that long ago that suggesting that France, Germany et al would be as little as ten weeks behind the UK marked one out as either an insane optimist or an agent of Brussels or both. It has to be fair to say that the UK has underperformed on things like assertive outreach to the reluctant; our early success seems to have bred complacency.
I think that we will probably look to offer to vaccinate 16-18 year old's who are old enough to make an informed choice. My son had his first vaccine whilst still 17 so to some extent this is happening already. I doubt we will look to vaccinate those younger than that.
However, the key target should be those 11% of unvaxxed adults, plus getting second doses into the arms of the 20% or so who have had only one jab.
Once that is done, and boosters if necessary, then it will be time to take stock of where to go next.
I have to say, personally I probably would have vaccinated under 18s. But it was a marginal call. If they are abolishing the isolation requirement for under 18s, it becomes an even more marginal call.
Arguably the best reason for doing it is that then jabs could be administered to Year 8s in school from hereafter if we did, which would be simpler and quicker than GP centres. But that does presuppose the vaccine effect lasts for decades, and we’re seeing signs it may not.
(+/- change from Opinium/Observer 8-9 July)
SNP 50% (-7)
SCon 33% (+5)
SLab 7% (-2)
SLD 4% (+2)
SGP 2% (-1)
oth 4% (+2)
Anybody care to point out any flaws?
The evidence is that it is both efficacious and safe.
Now we've hit a demand wall from adults, we should open up the vaccine for children.
Rishi Sunak might be, of course.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/myocarditis.html
London +9
Midlands -7
South -9
North -19
Wales -21
N Ireland -23
Scotland -44
The “Minister for the Union” is doing a fine job… dividing the UK.
Why is Mr Cockney so sure of a vaccine “side stepping” variant? Has he not read about the relative immutability of SARS-COV2 and the molecular modelling indicating that the virus is headed down an evolutionary dead end? Or the fact that we’re about to launch the booster programme, probably unnecessarily, just in case?
As others have said, WHO is a corrupted busted flush. One of the few good things Trump did was call attention to that.
Ah, the WHO. Who ignored Taiwan's warnings, believed China's lies, criticised the UK's prolonged intervals (which turned out to be correct).
The moves here may be wrong or right but the word of the WHO weighs more lightly than it should because they've harmed their own reputations by their previous actions and statements.
By the way, I see speculation that Greece and Spain are heading for Amber Plus, thereby threatening nearly 6 million holidays.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/amber-plus-list-france-spain-greece-announcement-b1889926.html?amp
Montgomerie was very critical on LBC yesterday, and also reporting anecdotally that everyone inside Number Ten is now worrying about the PM's failings. Westminster Hour on R4 yesterday had a review of the year and also contained criticism of the PM from Fraser Nelson, as well as all of the political commentators interviewed.
It’s a sign of age. Now that I’m entering the autumn years I forgot the first rule of PB Club: nasty nats are always wrong, even when they’re not.
Buried amongst the words regarding the missing £600k and the investigation into its whereabouts, are some reports that should concern every single person that wants a fair and just legal system in Scotland
https://twitter.com/Iain_L/status/1419180210407280643?s=20
Police and Prosecutors accused of criminality in Rangers case
https://twitter.com/BBCHelena/status/1419033731663282177?s=20
It shouldn't need an adviser to tell the Prime Minister he can't tell his people to isolate when pinged, then try to dodge isolation himself.
It shouldn't need an expert to explain there is a case to be made for Covid passports and a case to be made against Covid passports but no case for jumping frantically between the two.
No committee of officials should be required to get him to see what every man, woman and child in the country can see: that unless people are released from their pingdemic prison, the nation's businesses and services will grind to a halt.
These are the basics. And the PM cannot subcontract them.
Absurdly, we are asked to believe that those threatening violence upon Rowling are the people who, in their own pious, self-aggrandising phrase are “on the right side of history” and it is Rowling who, in defiance of all evidence to the contrary, is guilty of fomenting hatred and violence.......
There are other areas in which, contrary to what the first minister appears to believe, the rights of trans people may from time to time conflict with women’s rights but, as so often, the Scottish government’s preferred response is simply to deny plainly observable reality. If you wish hard enough, a problem — or a clash of rights — may be made to disappear.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/8547d582-ecbf-11eb-a9f0-ebe3f77d4a7e?shareToken=1014e5065d7aa9b8d005660d57948372
Is it St Nicola's turn?
I'll be sad if she does crash and burn; I always thought she was grossly maligned in some quarters for things she was doing well.
PS. Well done taking over the Sunday morning shift from Philip. It's about time they employed a female
https://www.geoffmulgan.com/post/spectators-v-doers-the-challenge-for-the-uk-s-ruling-clique
While it may overstate it's case, certainly food for thought.
Reming me, how do the police usually vote?
Rogerdamus.. never right, talks shite.