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A CON majority no longer outright favourite for next election – politicalbetting.com
A CON majority no longer outright favourite for next election – politicalbetting.com
There’s been a little of movement on a few betting markets in reaction to the latest developments in Afghanistan. Probably the most significant is above on the outcome of the next election.
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My estimate would be 65-70% probability Conservative majority, 25-30% NOM.
What a monumental cluster that we’re even having to talk about this. But surely by now there are a bunch of such gents [Hereford branch of the diplomatic corp] figuring out an extraction plan for British citizens stranded outside of Kabul.
I'm not naming names. Yet.
Prof Jeffrey S Morris
@jsm2334
·
Aug 17
Many are confused by results that >1/2 of hospitalized in Israel are vaccinated, thinking this means vaccines don't work. I downloaded actual Israeli data https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/COVID-19/general… and show why these data provide strong evidence vaccines strongly protect vs. serious disease (1/8)
https://mobile.twitter.com/jsm2334/status/1427465003007942659?s=20
Rather than the usual middle aged englishmen and germans, the place is full of young french and poles, due to it being one of the very few warm places on their green lists. The lady at the Tourist Information said she is hopeful that they will go home and spread the word, and Malta might get more varied tourists in the future.
It is, however, rather hot here. The tomato harvest, much of which goes to Italy, has been spoilt by extreme heat blistering the fruit.
Also it likely means closer alignment to the SM and CU for GB removing the Irish Sea border also cementing GB closer to NI.
NOM is thus likely bad for the Tories as they lose office, even the DUP may prefer Starmer for the reasons in my second sentence however it would be good for the Union
You have a combination of boundary changes, an uninspiring Labour leader, and history on your side.
Tory majority = no IndyRef = good for union.
No Tory majority = no Tory PM = good for union.
But that's not just a Labour majority. That's also covers:
(1) A party like Reform or the Greens winning a majority
(2) The Conservatives cleaving in two and one of the (no longer named Conservatives) parties winning.
Edited to add - on the substantive point, that does actually slightly surprise me. I mean, we all knew the poster in question was a gibbering idiot - confusing contingency planning with clairvoyance was a bit of a giveaway - but I was assuming stupidity not malice.
Maybe just another poster trying to put the opposite view to their classic one, so they can be proved right in the end?
Uncertainty in the Tory leader at election time is feeding this trend regardless of what the odds on Johnson exit date might say.
Does someone want to put up any odds ?
NYTimes
Looks like US is heading towards booster shots this winter.
I remember feeling so sorry for Hague, I think he was Foreign Secretary at the time, getting a real grilling as to why the evac plane to Tripoli hadn’t taken off yet. It became clear a few days later, as a couple of Hercules landed on a makeshift runway in the middle of the Libyan desert, to collect the Western oil field workers - who had all been rounded up by the SAS and ‘built’ the runway! It was of those stories that makes you proud to be British.
Been away on holiday (in Cumbria) this weekend without much in the way of internet. Did I miss any news? Seems to have been like a Smithson holiday. 😕
Johnson (4 point lead) Sturgeon (22 point lead) and Drakeford (no post May polling?) are all looking good thus far.
(No idea who’s in charge in NI and don’t care. A failed state.)
I'm sorry if thinking the GE result is peripheral to the political direction of Sindy isn't exciting. I lack dramatic flair, we're not all flint knappers extraordinaires.
End of SNP Honeymoon* is as much a PB meme as “Scottish Tory Surge” used to be.
(*most honeymoons do not last 14 years)
There is a website called Electoral Calculus. Run by a nice mathematician/finance chap called Martin Baxter. Have a wee look around there. Take your time. Fiddle about with his various calculators. Then have a good, long, hard, cold look at the words you just typed.
So, are you really measuring vaccine efficacy fading? Or are you measuring susceptibility of a person to infection?
Your politeness is generally commendable, and I see you as a bellwether on PB, ie if Kle4 takes an actual new position there is probably something worth looking at in the argument
I just thought I’d insult you out of random malice. Hope that’s OK
The simple fact of a non-Conservative government will do quite a bit to cement the Union in place for a few more decades. That's before we get devoMax with a thistle on top. (It's really obvious how that pas-de-deux plays out. There will be nothing before the election. Afterwards, the SNP will have to do whatever's needed to kick the Conservatives out and Labour will have to offer something in exchange, but not much.) In the event of a Starmer minority government in 2024 and a referendum pencilled in for about 2028 (a short generation, but... let's just say I've been a secondary school teacher and I know of what I speak) would be a win for "No" at a canter. To the extent that I can see the SNP looking for reasons not to hold it.
An ongoing Conservative hegemony, on the other hand, keeps Scotland in the Union by refusing a referendum. That will work as long as the balance of Scottish opinion is in the 45/55 range either way. But it accelerates the time when Scotland breaks decisively for independence. Beyond a certain point, it doesn't matter if Westminster refuses a referendum. I don't know where that point is, but a wildcat referendum where a majority of the electorate (not just voters) voted for independence would be blooming hard to ignore.
There are lists on the internet of open proxy servers that I run the IPs of posters against from time-to-time. If someone seems to always post through a different open proxy, I tend to get a little suspicious.
If that person also has an obviously fake email address that I do not get a response from, then that scepticism gets increased dramatically.
Richer countries should focus on ramping up vaccine supply to the billions who are still waiting for their first dose.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02219-w
That won't be overturned in one go without something remarkably dramatic.
Additionally GSK has fixed the CureVac vaccine so the 2nd gen version will not only work against all of the variants (current and possibly a few predicted ones now that we have a common evolutionary path figured out) but will have extremely high efficacy.
Finally, waning efficacy is based on the 3 week gap for Pfizer. Moderna notably doesn't see much drop off in efficacy at all in the same time period and incoming PHE numbers based on the 8-12 week gap for Pfizer will show whether our dosing strategy will deliver another victory against COVID. The JCVI has said the preliminary data for keeping the dosing gap at 8 weeks convinced them to hold onto it despite having no supply issues from around May onwards for Pfizer/Moderna.
Athens is just stuffed with wonderful things to see. I’ve been here nine days (with a couple left) and I could do another week easily and not get bored
Maybe the Pnyx didn’t totally wow me because I was wholly wowed earlier by lunch at the Acropolis Museum. It’s an utterly fantastic restaurant (seriously world class food) AND you get to eat it (and drink great Greek wine) with a majestic view of the Parthenon. That’s also a high bar
I got sloshed and ate split pea with salami and squid and radish and weirdness and it was brilliant and I toasted the goddess Athena
I don’t know if you missed our earlier discussion of modern Greek food (at least in Athens) but it is genuinely first rate. You eat better in Athens, on average, than Paris, very easily. Possibly better than London or Madrid. AND it is markedly cheaper
Starmer would be better keeping the Tories in as a minority, than be utterly dependent on the SNP for every vote, and with a fresh election clearly coming quickly down the line.
Am I the first on PB?
Though the chances of England leaving the Union are low but would be hilarious if it ever happened.
((For All Time timeline this exact situation happened))
On which: I have no idea if Hellenic Navy Ship Olympias the trieres/trireme is even accessible to the public. Probably not. And it won't be rowing around. Not easy to drum up so many rowers at once, never mind socially distanced. Thouigh I did meet one on the train once.
The risk is, a la Corbyn/May, that the Tories get a new leader that rejuvenates the party and finds a winning formula.
I'm sceptical that trick can be repeated again though.
A lot of people are still horribly frightened, this won’t help
I stand to be corrected by events, of course, but as I see it the position of Scottish Nationalism at Westminster is extremely weak. This is wholly unsurprising when you consider that they are the third largest party, with less than 10% of the seats; they can't realistically work with one of the big two (and you can hardly extract a price for being kingmakers when you're only willing to back one claimant to the throne;) and parties 1, 2, 4 and 5 are all Unionist and, therefore, diametrically opposed to the SNPs core aim. The sole route to getting what they want is to build a substantial and sustained majority for secession amongst popular opinion at home.
A colleague in her twenties has been off work sick this week with you-know-what.
Single jabbed, I think.
Not as many customers as usual, and there was not much traffic on the roads either. Not sure why.
Plus you get to boast forever after. Simply because you’ve been. I did it in 2019
“Oh yes my favourite holidays was in the Solovetsky Islands”
“Where???”
“Oh it’s a remote Russian archipelago in the White Sea, and a sacred mediaeval site of Orthodoxy, with a sensational microclimate, and it was the first Gulag, and Peter the Great built a chapel on an island of lesbians, and they make the world’s best fish and chips, have you not been? You just need to go to St Petersburg then get a night train then persuade a driver to take you to the tiny port which is only open two months a year, it’s lovely”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solovetsky_Islands
A bit like most respiratory viruses.