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Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings – politicalbetting.com
Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings – politicalbetting.com
Today is the second anniversary of Keir Starmer’s election to the LAB leadership and the polls have him with positive approval ratings with his party a small but robust voting intention lead over the Tories.
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The elusive Tory lead could finally occur today although it could also be the last be the last one for a while.
There is something rather indicative in how the one central or eastern European leader who until recently was getting any attention in the UK was Orban. All the impressive Harvard educated types are ignored as Zelensky was too.
Net favourability
Sturgeon 13%
Scottish Government 7%
Anas Sarwar 1%
Keir Starmer -10
Patrick Harvie -15
Alex Cole-Hamilton -15
Lorna Slater -15
Rishi Sunak -19
Douglas Ross -21
UK Government -50
Alex Salmond -62
Boris Johnson -62
(Savanta ComRes/The Scotsman; 14-18 January; 1,004)
The reason the Lib-Labs run token candidates in Scottish Conservative seats is not to encourage their sympathisers to vote SNP, but exactly the opposite.
I want to be trans
I am in a psychiatric hospital
MI6 will investigate
If you are alleging electoral fraud, it is beholden on you to provide the serious evidence.
Otherwise you really are no better than Donald Trump.
A shadowy foreign power forced me to allegedly snort coke and commit assault shows it isn't just Putin who's disinformation requires some contortions of logic.
SKS is a dud
No policies Blair had plebty of radical policies
No Charisma Blair had plenty
No Political Nouse Blair had it in spades
No hope Blair offered some
This is my favourite bleak photo this morning.
Del Boy watches an aircraft carrier from his amphibious Transit van.
Starmer's main success therefore has been in winning over voters who voted Labour in 2017 but LD or Conservative in 2019.
In terms of winning voters who voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 he has been less successful and he has also lost a few voters who voted for Corbyn Labour to the Greens. That means it will likely still be a close election
He has negative ratings north of the border.
@zoltanspox
A special greeting to the Hungarians of Transcarpathia - I tell them not to grieve, to hold on - the Mother country is with them.
https://twitter.com/zoltanspox/status/1510721699528032262
Remember that episode of Yes, Minister where Hacker was driven mad by everyone telling him that he was doing all right? That. It may not be enough, but Starmer is doing all right. Or not all wrong, anyway.
Jury out.
Charisma does not equal competent governance.
Political νοῦς like Chilcot/Iraq?
Blair’s “hope” led directly to Brexit and dissolution of the Union.
But, I am unconvinced that Boris will fight. Boris doesn't like to lose, and he must surely already be looking enviously at his lucrative post-PM opportunities.
I mean, furfucksake, even a completely talentless nonentity like Nick Clegg is now earning 2.7 million dollars a year.
I think Lab-SNP tactical voting was probably maxed out in 2019.
Let's hope you are never accused of anything serious ... but if you are, I will still be arguing that the burden of proof is on your accusers.
Shows why bookies make money and I don't. Hey ho.
That said if you take the official narrative seriously you have to believe that during a bombing campaign the Moscow FSB staged an essentially identical drill/test without informing any of the authorities in Ryazan, and when this "test" was passed the Russian government initially praised the Ryazan authorities for foiling a real terrorist attack, only to change positions the next day, to it being merely a drill, when some members of the FSB were arrested.
It would be like a few days after the 7/7 bombings if the Met Police had staged a very similar attack in Manchester, the GMP had foiled it, and the Home Secretary had congratulated Manchester. The next day the GMP arrest some Met officers and the Home Secretary then says "ha ha, it was just a test".
Even if you buy the official narrative, it it still completely nuts, the disregard for public safety is extraordinary.
I hope that one day when Putin is dead a future Russian government will properly investigate the origins of the Second Chechen War.
I have no idea how this will play out, what is Putin's endgame or plan such as it was or is, or anything much else.
I do note a couple of things, that said. First that vituperation heaped upon those who do not tow, or perhaps worse still question the PB Russa-Ukraine line. Secondly, the latching onto particular twitter feeds as if they give the gospel truth.
Whether these latter do or not it is not imo a good habit to get into to so slavishly and without question treat them as the only true source of information. It smacks to me more of hope over experience (perfectly understandable but not necessarily a good analytic framework).
Election Maps says "One party has seen a pretty significant increase in their support compared to last week"...
Cabt think its the Tories so i reckon Labour up 4 or 5% to a 6 or 7% lead
Just a guess
Generally we do collectively underestimate the "strong ethnic nationalist leader" theme in countries in difficulty, despite the ample evidence that it nearly always ends badly.
The DUP won't support the Tories either unless they invoke Art 16
Hungary is some way down that road, and the election result wasn't a massive surprise.
Pre-genocide Putin would be in Boris’s ballpark.
Post-genocide Putin would likely be the perfect -100.
This week, he spends $2.9bn on buying a 9.2% stake in the company.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/04/04/twitter-shares-soar-elon-musk-takes-29bn-stake/
That was always something of an unlikely prospect.
Boris does not have the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board, his skills are in oratory and the lecture circuit.
To maximise his earnings there he needs to stay in No 10 as long as possible to get near Thatcher and Blair fees on the circuit and ideally raise his profile in the US further too at the same time
Yesterday it was the “England is not a country” gambit.
I wish you BritNats would learn some more tunes.
If you predicted the election in Hungary correctly, well done. I am only pointing out that the UK press -- from the Daily Mail to the Guardian -- did not.
And of course, I am standing up for the principle that serious allegations deserve serious evidence and then a serious investigation
Though quite how one might go about an independent investigation of such things in Hungary is an interesting question.
"... the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board".
But that wins the prize.
Hungary is one of Ukraine's shortest borders - Poland, Slovakia, and Romania all provide better access.
Shame.
Who would have thought there could be any weaker Candidates than Laura K
Evidence in the public domain for such a statement is scant, but I’m all ears.
Jack Dorsey is a Bitcoin maxi and plans to integrate Jack Mallers Strike payment system through Twitter. Musk also owns billions of dollars of Bitcoin.
The annual Bitcoin conference is happening in Miami this week, last year the surprise announcement was the first country (El Salvador) to announce Bitcoin as legal tender.
Other countries, possibly Honduras, are expected to make a similar announcement this week, there are also rumours of Apple Pay integration with the Lightning network.
Twitter will eventually have venmo-style payment integration via the Bitcoin lightning network and there are eyes on it eventually becoming a competitor to the likes of Western Union for immigrants sending money to the folks back home.
Amiright?
That Musk is involved with it is the one thing that makes me lose respect for him. I don't have much respect for Dorsey to lose in the first place.
Calling patriotic British posters BritNats is a foul slur.
Who’d’ve thunk that ‘Muscular Unionism’ would breed intolerance and double-standards? We’ll all have to learn to doff our caps to the British Übermenschen.
SLab could also gain up to 30-40 council seats on a good day although I am less confident of that.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Or something.
Bizarre
The first time around they wanted someone who would break news and get scoops. Then it seems having interviewed a load of people the powers-that-be decided that was unrealistic so they then wanted someone who had the heft to do the analysis and explaining part of the role. And round they went again. At some point Mason, having ruled himself out, was asked to rule himself back in.
https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1510938199178285061
Gets lots of attention though.
What was the German busines-as-usual approach to Putin's Russia is not entirely dissimilar to their relations with Orban's Hungary.
Interesting question as to what happens next.
How Orbán played Germany, Europe’s great power
https://www.direkt36.hu/en/a-magyar-nemet-kapcsolatok-rejtett-tortenete/
I will however retain your post. I could do with a good laugh in May, just before we’re all evaporated.
https://twitter.com/blairmcdougall/status/1510866153819750400
"The papers this morning report that the SNP member who posted about me being hung from a lamp post has been suspended. Good. Now that they've set the precedent that it's wrong to talk about the execution of your opponents (a low bar, I know) let's test if they mean it"
The rhetoric is truly horrific, even by the standards of what I'm used to seeing from pro-Kremlin media
Below are a few quotes:
"Denazification is a set of measures aimed at the nazified mass of the population, which technically cannot be subjected to direct punishment as war criminals"
"However, besides the elite, a significant part of the masses of the people, who are passive nazis, are accomplices to Nazism. They have supported the Nazi authorities and indulged them..."
"...The just punishment for this part of the population is possible only as the bearing of the inevitable hardships of a just war against the Nazi system"
"The name Ukraine can seemingly not be retained as the title of any fully denazified state formation on the territory liberated from the Nazi regime"
"Denazification is inevitably also deukrainisation – a rejection of the large-scale artificial inflation of the ethnic element of self-identification of the population of the territories of the historical Malorossiya and Novorossiya begun by the Soviet authorities"
"Unlike, let’s say, Georgia or the Baltics, Ukraine, as history has shown, is unviable as a national state, and attempts to 'build' one logically lead to Nazism"
"The Banderite elite must be liquidated, its reeducation is impossible. The social 'swamp' which actively and passively supports it must undergo the hardships of war and digest the experience as a historical lesson and atonement"
https://twitter.com/francska1/status/1510898134481788930
(a) it is actually the PBTories who make that equation because ...
(b) they deny that their 'patriotism' under the UJ is actually nationalism (whether UK, 'British' or English depending on the individual)
Outside the likes of UKIP, the purest and most blood and soil political discourse I can remember is David Cameron's major Glasgow [edit] speech in advance of the 2014 referendum, and it was British nationalist from start to end by any objective analysis.
If I wanted to send $100 to El Salvador, Western Union would charge me $7.99. The idea of the lightning network is that you can convert dollar > bitcoin and back to dollar again and the transaction is instant and costs less than a cent.
Jack wants to enable that kind of remittance to happen via Twitter and I dare say that is why Musk has invested.
Is it a good investment? I don't know. Despite being around for a year in El Salvador bitcoin hasn't exactly caught on with a largely suspicious population who prefer to hoard physical dollars. However, that's the play.
It's estimated that about 1.7bn people are unbanked globally, which is a heck of an untapped market if this thing catches on.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/keir-starmer-approval-rating