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Polling update for first half of August – politicalbetting.com

It is August and we are not getting very many surveys at the moment and indeed there is not that much domestic UK political news.
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The Tory share is pretty consistent. And down off its highs. Still an election winning figure though. The Labour score isn't.
Also phone lines will be extinct in a couple of years so that polling will by necessity end
Sorry, fifth
Like the number of Afghan army soldiers who actually fought the Taliban.
1. Tories
2. Lefty-fluid
It is less about who the not Tories vote for in terms of numbers, more about where they are voting.
If all of these LibDem votes are in the right places the Tories will suffer.
And unlike most other stories over the past few months this one will really bite with loyal Boris supporters. The Mail and Telegraph are up in arms and the question is being asked about why all 'our boys' died in vain out there, let alone the utter betrayal of the Afghan peoples.
Whatever your views on our involvement twenty years ago, this is an absolutely disgraceful episode in western foreign policy, a defeat of epic proportions.
Not sure what, if anything, we can derive from that?
I shan't bore people with the details. Cases, deaths, hospitalisations going the wrong way. But the worst data of the lot is what is coming out of Israel.
Trouble ahoy I'm afraid.
WTF was it all for???
The West could have kept a small garrison in Afghan in perpetuity for a billion a year. Not ideal. But it would have prevented this terrible shame and disgrace, and rape and bloodshed, which benefits absolutely no one (not even China) apart from radical Islam. It is a calamity
https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1427299296295145476/photo/1
The populist right seems to be fading fast, though one of those strange parties formed around one person of hard-to-classify views is up toi 18%.
Strange it may seem to you and me but that seems to be the unfortunate reality.
And all the endless billions spent on 'nation building' was a waste.
Just imagine how much good that money could have achieved it we had spent it elsewhere.
I’m not really sure what your seeing that’s making you so fearful.
But I agree it's a disgraceful episode of western foreign policy. What made the west think that it could transpose its norms and values into Afghani culture through a combination of military force and bribery, and get buy-in from the locals, including the Afghani army?
Mercifully, and at least in the short-term, the Taliban 'revolution' seems to have been relatively peaceful. We haven't read of large numbers of casualties, apart from the disorder at the airport. This does seem to indicate that Taliban rule is not unpopular with a lot of Afghanis, perhaps even a majority. There's not a lot we can do about that, however much we don't approve.
However. None of this is any use unless the Tories fall below 40%. And probably nearer 37 consistently.
When I did my ELBOW analysis in the run-up to the 2015 election, I found that phone polls (there were a fair few of them back then) gave consistently higher Tory share/lower Labour share.
It's tragic and the West has surely cocked up supremely with devastating consequences, but I'm not sure about betrayal.
Bangladesh are not *that* bad.
They had no understanding of the underlying reality.
The most extreme within their movement will now assume moral command. Within a few months they will be stoning women and exporting terror, all over again. They are scorpions who have no other weapon than the stinger
Britain’s decline as a global power has been a long one, but you can still see it happening in real time. Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, seems determined to seal this country’s fate with the wholesale sell-off of our defence and aerospace industry to America. Buyers are being allowed to swoop on vital home-grown defence suppliers with impunity.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/08/16/defence-sector-sell-off-final-nail-coffin-uk-foreign-policy/ (£££)
This may have betting significance as well – some PBers have backed him to succeed Boris.
Firstly well done Saudi Arabia for reportedly being the first country to recognise the Taliban as the new legitimate government of Afghanistan. By your friends shall one know ye
At last a bit of honesty from Ben Wallace regarding the chances of getting everyone out who the UK intended to get out, ie slim to none. As I mentioned last night both US citizens who would have been involved with the previous government and security apparatus as well as Afghans with the approval to get on a plane are still in the city and many are stuck because, not bloody surprisngly the taliban have set up roadblocks on the routes to KBL. One of those checkpoints is so close you can see it with the Mark 1 eyeball from the airport. If they move and get caught, there is every chance of a problem, one worse for Afghans than perhaps those carrying a US passport. In fact some reports suggest the Taliban are in the airport on the civilian side of the place (unconfirmed)
The Taliban can make this really hard for the US if they want, simply by refusing to let anyone else out including US Citizens and the US can do fuck all about it. The US wont strike out to regain control of the city or indeed establish zones of control as assembly points (though they could so the latter if they really wanted to slug it out). This all bears the question, just exactly how many troops do you need at the airport? By the time all these apparent UK & US announced troop are on the ground the numbers will be around 8000+ including fragments of other forces. Not all of them are fighting units but plenty of them are, what are they going to be doing?
Are you not the Epicurean antithesis ?
Many actively wanted the Taliban, many others preferred the Taliban to any alternative and far too few were willing to actually fight against the Taliban.
The West has totally misunderstood the Afghan people.
It turns out they were not like some nice middle class emigres in the West.
Yes, it's a terrible tragedy but ultimately, and this has to be admitted, the Afghan Army and Air Force, which we trained and equipped, didn't just fail to defend their country - they ran away or surrendered without firing a shot.
At least in South Vietnam in April 1975, some units fought to the bitter end at Xuan Loc and elsewhere but we've seen so-called Government "strongholds" such as Jalalabad, Mazar-E-Sharif and Kabul fall with virtually no resistance.
We knew the Karzai and Ghani regimes were corrupt and venal. I suspect we also knew, if push came to shove, no one would fight for them and we also probably knew the key players had already pre-planned their exiles and ensured their money, families and goods were safely taken to Tajikistan, Uzbekistan or wherever. None of them had any stake in defending their country - they probably robbed us blind as well.
How much of all the largesse we threw at Kabul ended up either where we wanted it or where it would do any good?
Yet we are beating ourselves up or making cheap political capital - we should be holding those who ran away to account.
I was wrong in one crucial respect. I thought it would happen in five years. I underestimated the determination of politicians to save face. I have to disagree with the last sub clause (hard to disagree with the ‘absolute disgrace’ part). It is, ultimately, one part of a mosaic. One reason why the US has withdrawn from Afghanistan is it has calculated it needs to focus elsewhere. As was true of, to use the parallel others keep making, Vietnam. Withdrawing from Vietnam and staying out allowed a focus on the real challenges - South America and the Middle East. Withdrawing from Afghanistan allows a renewed focus on the ME and the Pacific. It is all about balancing acts.
Trump, to some extent, did apparently understand this although I don’t know whether he grasped the reasoning behind it. What was Biden supposed to do once Trump had committed to withdrawal? Keep soldiers there to accomplish - well, what exactly? The Taleban were advancing from several years ago. They couldn’t have been kept at bay forever unless NATO abandoned every other commitment it had and focussed just on Afghanistan.
From that point of view, the real mistake was switching focus to Iraq in 2003. If there was a faint chance of sorting the mess, the assault on Um Qasr is when and where it died. But that is also past praying for.
So this is shameful, humiliating, a horrible tragedy for the people of Afghanistan. But it was also inevitable from the moment the Americans invaded in support of the Northern Alliance. To call it ‘A defeat of epic proportions’ is just silly hyperbole.
A couple of weeks of bad Covid news in the middle of a needless general election. Seems risky?
This feels extremely half arsed. Biden has played this poorly.
- Taliban want to be a legitimate, recognised government this time, in order to ensure continued international aid, which the country is dependent upon.
- In order to achieve this primary goal, they will not provide a safe haven for terrorists.
Only one of the world’s research institutes, but let’s hope they’re right!
(report on Sveriges Radio)
He is not convincing to be honest
Might not be wrong, but I am a bit surprised as to how blunt he's being.
The most likely result will be aid continuing because liberal western idiots will believe them over the empty terrorism promises and they will also harbour terrorists who will commute heinous crimes against the UK, US and other western countries.
Did the US do that? I don't think so, or they did but didn't care.
https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1427344154883985417?s=20
I seem to recall some stories last year he might be forced into an election, scandal troubles perhaps, but he seems to have turned it around I guess.
Scottish sub-sample:
SNP 49%
SCon 24%
SLab 18%
SGP 2%
Reform UK 2%
SLD -
oth (presumably mostly Alba) 4%
China and Russia must be licking their lips thinking what they could get away with.
I am not particularly anti Trudeau, he is certainly better than Singh and the NDP and the BQ but he is taking a big risk and voters do not like being taken for granted, I certainly think there are no guarantees he will get the majority he wants
If you can't get the people to believe in the nation they are supposed to be fighting for they won't fight. So it came to pass. It was almost twitter FBPE foolishness on steroids as the liberal idiots spoke to the tiny section of liberal Afghan people in Kabul and they each convinced each other that the wider population in a deeply conservative and Islamist nation was actually on board with the idea of building a secular nation. It never was and I doubt it ever will be.
Biden is a fool if he truly believed that the Afghan army would ever stand up to the Taliban.
My brain is just latching on to anything remotely positive, or in reality slightly less negative, than the wall to wall horror scenarios being bandied about.
There may be more repressive and liberal factions battling it out, but something different from that seems to be going on , so far.
Not a good look
https://twitter.com/NickCohen4/status/1427293951199952898?s=20
Though at least Carter has redeemed himself post presidency with his humanitarian work