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What will Reform voters do at the general election? – politicalbetting.com
What will Reform voters do at the general election? – politicalbetting.com
There are either 12 or perhaps fewer months to the General Election, and the Labour lead in the polls seems solidly in the mid to high teens. The recent Autumn Statement seems to be having no real effect on that lead. Is it possible for the Tories to close that gap? One possibility mooted is that Reform Party (REFUK) voters will switch to the Conservatives when that GE focuses minds. It does seem as if REFUKs predecessor The Brexit Party voters did at GE 2019, and the Brexit Party did stood aside in Conservative seats, so an area worth exploring.
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Sorry about the odd typo in the piece, but I think the point gets across. These voters really don't like the current incarnation of the Tories.
This is an interesting/ depressing/ perhaps unsurprising insight into the mindset of young Palestinian men living in the West Bank. Tldr - they're angry and frustrated and don't think they have anything to lose.
Thanks @foxy for a good piece.
That's a very partisan view of the complicated history, but it's what they think and it explains their attitudes and why Hamas, or some successor, will never be short of recruits.
Personally I have always thought that if anything will save Sunak it's differential turnout. People say they vote Labour because it's cool, but how many will turn out at crunch time? We see how mad the left of Labour still is with him over Corbyn (although to be fair his party looks altogether more wholesome without most of the far left) and there is no Blair-style wave of enthusiasm.
That, however, rather presupposes that Tory voters will turn out themselves. Recent events suggest this may be a bold assumption.
Tice says he’s intending to stand someone in every seat in GB.
against was spurious and disingenuous. England in particular has always seen its thriving economy require imported labour, be that Irish labourers to build the canals and railways or post war Welsh school teachers. Not to mention train drivers, doctors and nurses from the Caribbean.
And here we are now, a net immigration of 600,000 to keep our economy going, and because of Brexit those people, necessary incomers to keep our economy on track are from places that make our bigoted racist friends turn puce with rage. But hey, Boris told you any shortfall in labour after Brexit would be reliant on "our friends from the Indian subcontinent". A truth the bigots ignored because they were so used to him lying. And to cap it all, those self-same Tory politicians who lit this version of the immigration touch paper nearly 20 years ago are again raging that legal immigration is out of control, pretending it is not on their watch, and it is not they're fault.
Economic migration is a fact of life. If in the 1950s you wanted the buses to run, you relied on help from the commonwealth, now we are reliant on anyone who wants to travel 5,000 miles to look after our elderly parents because we don't have the time or inclination. Maybe if the Tories didn't keep weaponising immigration to the UK they wouldn't find themselves in this political dilemma, a dilemma authored by them.
And as to your last statement, it's almost worth voting Tory, if only to piss off people who baulk at the idea of a non- white Prime Minister. Sod 'em!
“So this is what caused the open ai board to freak out.
The found a new model that could lead to AGI
One that used new maths to break encryption that would’ve taken 37 years to crack.
YT link below”
https://x.com/gritcult/status/1728564126836781477?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
Inter alia, this could destroy crypto/bitcoin overnight
However, approach with caution, several expert voices say this is bullshit
That's not to say implicit and institutional racism have disappeared, but while we may disagree with its extent, or whether anti-zionism is intrinsically anti-semitic, there is near universal agreement that racism is bad.
Anti-immigrant feeling is not purely racial, but also about practical issues like housing, job opportunities, social mobility and also a fear of "the other". That perceived threat to indigenous cultures is not to be dismissed, though neither should it be exagerrated.
Immigrants do assimilate, yet retain some distinctive cultural traits. When we have a recent Home Secretary of Mauritian Hindu and East African Goan Christian descent, who follows a Bhuddist sect, and is married to a practicing Jew who can rail that "Multiculturalism has failed" we can see that assimilation does indeed happen.
If the consequence of them telling the Tories what they really think was someone like Corbyn many would hold their nose and vote Tory to stop him. They will not do that for Starmer so the Tories are more likely to bleed votes to the right than in 2019 or 2017.
Yet more bad news for Sunak I’m afraid.
Whether or not all the houses will be sold, is, of course, a different question!
And good morning to one and all. And congratulations to Foxy on the header!
https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=363652
Interesting thing is that the extremely wealthy often do pay large amounts of IHT.
...Korea's rate, well over double the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average of 25 percent, first came to media attention in 2021 when the tax for the bereaved family members of the late Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee amounted to 12 trillion won ($9.3 billion).
The figure is about triple the 2.8 billion won sought from the heirs of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs in 2011. Lee's widow and three children agreed to pay the total amount in five-year installments through 2026. Their primary method of payment has been and will continue to be through stock loans, a move to limit unwanted changes in the current crossholding structure.
Currently, a tax rate in a range of between 10 percent and 50 percent is imposed in a five-stage system. The minimum is for bequeathed amounts lower than 100 million won and the maximum is for 3 billion won or greater. The maximum tax rate of 60 percent includes 20 percent extra on the largest shareholders of large firms bequeathing stocks to their family members...
Sunak is turning out to be just as dishonest. However, when push comes to shove, his vision is more "a land safe for hedge fund squillionaires" and (more importantly) he's not capable of styling it out.
If the political benefit of charisma is to be able to lie more effectively, Sunak's lack of charisma is probably for the best.
Taiwan's main opposition party announces vice presidential candidate as hopes for alliance fracture
https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=363886
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
The whole YT is absolutely worth watching. If it is right this model has cracked maths, and codes, and games, and is recursively self improving - it is meta cognitive - self aware of its own thoughts. Combine that with GPT4 or 5 and you surely have AGI; not only that, if it can really self improve then we could be moments from ASI
Brace
What did Costas say in Parliament about Glen Parva? I missed that? Is it to do with the new prison?
We could be living through the most interesting years in human history
To many people, this typifies what is wrong with the country.
Could all be bullshit, tho
Sunak doesn’t have such a weapon. His attempt to make the boat people a similar target has blown up in his face. These people are lost to him.
We will brace ourselves for your next breathless report.
But for many who veer that way (UKIP, Brexit, Reform, even BNP in the bad old days) their natural home is Labour.
Labour is absolutely split between Hampstead/Guardian/Free Palestine Labour and those for whom for 100 years Labour has been the party most on the side of the bloke who gets up early to work 48 hours a week. In the long run Labour needs their votes most of all.
As a generally Tory voter I and a few million others can (and this time will) vote for the second Labour party. Nothing would get me to vote for the first. I think Starmer knows this.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
[Hunt] spoke as if getting more out of the economy was a novel idea that had never occurred to anyone before, but his is the 12th growth plan the Tories have fanfared since 2010, which makes it one for almost every year they have been in power.
Osbornite austerity, sporadic interventionism during the May days, Johnsonian Brexit boosterism, the self-destructing experiment of Liz Truss, each of these was presented as the road to nirvana. Yet Britain still finds itself trudging through the dark valley of grim growth and high taxes while living standards have taken a horrible beating. It is true that many of the advanced economies have been struggling to significantly improve their productivity ...Yet Britain has performed worse than most of its peers in critical respects.
Bad decision-making explains some of this. So does the repellent way our politics has been conducted. Investors, both domestic and international, prefer a predictable environment to a chaotic one. This has been an era of Tory instability. Five prime ministers since 2010, seven chancellors and nine business secretaries.
There is wide agreement that Mr Hunt did announce some useful reforms to encourage investment and speed up economically beneficial projects. Against that, the chancellor added a drag to growth by declaring a cash freeze in government investment spending.
Labour’s emphasis on growth is smart and welcome, but a lot of question marks hover over whether Sir Keir and Ms Reeves can pass the tests the Conservatives have flunked. Labour is now putting a lot of weight on generating growth from planning reforms designed to accelerate housebuilding and the construction of critical infrastructure. That and refashioning government to become “an agile state” working in partnership with trades unions and business. I get a bit of a sense of deja vu about that too.
A Labour government will be handed a nation with miserable productivity, emasculated public services, big debts, high tax levels and acute inequalities. The ultimate success or otherwise of a Labour government will be determined above all else by whether it can deliver a more vigorous economy. You could even call it Sir Keir’s holy grail. His government will fail if the quest for growth eludes him as dismally as it has the Tories.
And now, quite fittingly, I am off to eat a dog
To those paying attention of course, it is obvious that Sunak foolishly tried (and still tries) to ride both the One Nation and Populist horses at the same time. This proves to them that he is not serious enough.
Anderson, 56, made the comments at a “Lagers with Lee” meeting at Cambridge Rugby Club last month after saying: “We’re not taping this, are we?”
In the recording of the event, hosted by South Cambridgeshire Conservative Association, the Tory MP for Ashfield revealed that he had been approached to defect to Reform UK.
Anderson told activists at the gathering: “Now there is a political party that begins with an R that offered me a lot of money to join them. I say a lot of money, I mean a lot of money.”
The leaked recording is likely to set off alarm bells in Downing Street, which is already reeling from the news of last year’s record-breaking net migration figure of 745,000.
Senior Tories fear that Nigel Farage, currently appearing in the reality TV show I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, is only too happy to exploit Conservative divisions over immigration following the recent sacking of Suella Braverman as home secretary.
In a sign of the growing anxiety about the threat posed by Farage and Reform UK, the prime minister said in an interview with the Mail on Sunday: “A vote for everyone who is not a Conservative is a vote to put Keir Starmer into office.
“The question for people who care about tackling migration, who want to get our taxes down, who think we need to have more common sense in our discourse is: do you want Keir Starmer or me to be your prime minister?”...
...Richard Tice, the Reform UK leader, denied Anderson’s claim that he had been offered money to defect, adding: “Desperate Tories will make desperate lies to save their skin.”
But the Conservative Party revealed last night that Anderson told Simon Hart, the chief whip, in February this year that he had been offered money by Reform UK — previously known as the Brexit party and founded with support from Farage in 2018 — to defect...\.
...Hart met the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, to inform him that senior Tory MPs were being offered £400,000-plus “bribes” to defect to Reform UK, which the party believed may be against electoral law. The chief whip claimed the offers were based on an agreement that if MPs joined Reform UK they would be guaranteed to receive up to five years of their MP’s salary if they lost their seat after defecting. MPs’ pay increased to £86,584 in April, making five years’ salary worth about £430,000.
Hoyle is now expected to ask the chief whip to pass any details the party has of the Anderson case to the police.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lee-anderson-offered-money-defect-reform-party-03fktxrl2
And then there were the indicative votes, which were canned just as they were getting somewhere. Two rounds was never going to be enough for a deliberative process like that- think how long Papal conclaves take.
(Unless you have a backdoor type technique).
Voters aren't stupid and can see this. I would rather that we didn't concrete over large chunks of the country to build estates of nasty Barrett houses. My small town has nearly doubled in ten years, during which time there has been no corresponding increase in infrastructure, and a lot of it's character has been destroyed, but the price of houses has gone up by 50%.
I want enough building to bring the price of housing down so it's easily affordable again. But that is impossible all the while the government ships in 3/4 of a million people a year.
The only long term sustainable solution is net zero immigration - the only question is how long will it take a government to realise and act on this, and how much worse will the moment of truth be when it happens?
Incidentally, all those people who are calling people like me racists, and think that's why we don't want to vote for the gimp in Downing St - you're nasty dirty liars trying to smear a view you disagree with by ascribing views to people which they do not have. There are hardly any real racists left in the country, my problem with Rishi is what he's doing, not who he is, and that will be true of 99% of RefUk voters too.
Interesting times ahead.
Ok I am approaching the dog eating cafe
Why are REFUK voters unsympathetic to Sunak? Cos he's brown.
Will REFUK voters go home to the Tories? Nope.
The interesting thing about UKIXPFUK is the journey that so many of its voters have been on. Many were the "bigoted woman" strain of the left who wandered towards Farage and are still there. Others the shire bigots who dislike anyone who isn't exactly like them.
In 2019 we saw the Tories win a majority of 80. There are many seats at least in the NE where the UKIXPFUK vote was bigger than the Tory majority. They didn't go home to the Tories then - and that Tory party offered (at least on paper) what they want). Why would they vote Tory this time when it is the opposite of what they want?
I don't think that Sunak/Hunts Tories and Starmer/Reeves Labour are similar ideologically. Indeed they are miles apart philosophically.
The reasons that their policies look so similar is more to do with economic , financial and social reality as government and alternative government. They are heavily constrained in what they can do with an ageing population, failing civic institutions, poor growth and flat productivity.
This creates a gap for dissenters of all stripes to propose fantasy policies that appeal to the disaffected. Those parties are a safety valve, and can frame debates, but are never going to wake up on a Friday morning and actually have to implement their promises.
LibDems were narrowly second beating Corbyn's Labour into 3rd last time, so I'll probably go with them (though I'm not convinced they're left of centre at all) but in truth mine is a wasted vote whatever I do (thanks FPTP!).
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
From "The Rundown AI" newsletter/
Though as @DavidL points out, recapturing the REFUK voters risks a much bigger pool of centrists.
To an extent, that was true of Boris (born in NY, son of an MEP). But he covered it up with bluster. And of Braverman (studied at the Sorbonne, but I don't want to look inside her head) and Badenoch, though their life stories haven't really been poked into because they're not important enough yet.
But Rishi couldn't pull off "stout patriot" even if he tried. Which he doesn't.
Part of 2016-9 was a revolt against the metropolitan elites. Unfortunately, it was a revolt led by a different elite, many of them pining for a bigger stage than a mere metropolis. And I'm not sure it's a better one.
The level of their voteshare is more up in the air, but doesn't need to be big to achieve the goal, at least when Labour are doing well enough for the Reform hit on the Tories to make things even worse.
So it may be the case they'd do better chasing the ReFuk vote as they have more to gain and not many centrist left to lose.
However they've been sporadic in chasing it and now give the impression of trying to move away from it in the last reshuffle, so I think they've decided large parts of the ReFuk support is lost top.
Agreed its not racism.
As Foxy points outReform's numbers ticked up when Sunak became PM. They were averaging 3% throughout 2022 until 25 October; by the end of 2022 they were averaging 7%.
It feels sadly plausible to me that 4 or 5% of the electorate are racists who will never vote for Sunak (or Braverman or Badenoch).
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
FWIW - Labour will absolutely hammer that point if inheritance tax is cut.
'Sunak has just decided to give his family a £300 million tax cut' will be the Labour attack line.
*Yes, this is the gross, not the net, figure but it was the £350m gross figure that went on the side of the bus.
The switchers would have happened if Sunak was white, the cost of living crisis etc has damaged the Tory vote, the Truss bombshell of higher mortgages filtered through on Sunak's watch.
That will require a different approach.
Properly used, LLMs can boost producivity enormously.
My prediction is that they will be used to increase the size of the telephone directory sized reports that no-one reads.
There’s much wailing and gnashing of teeth this week about the problems with the British economy, yet not much mention of the B-word. The self-imposed omertà continues despite the country knowing Brexit has failed for the bulk of businesses and people in this country. But not the elites who funded and lied for it. They’re happy. And their media remains silent.
The biggest boost the British economy could have is getting back into the Single Market. Something, you’ll remember many prominent Leavers saying, we would never be stupid enough to leave. A lie, of course. Once the right were given their head it was always going to happen.
Because no trade deals have become anywhere near to mitigating the damage Brexit has done. The OBR now says joining the CPTPP will boost the economy 0.04% over the next 15 years.
Brexit was supposed to heal the Tories. That’s failed. It was supposed to lower immigration. That’s failed.
It was supposed to improve our economy. That’s failed. It was supposed to help the NHS. That’s failed. What was the point of all the division and the harm we have done to ourselves?
* We could of course reduce it by about 40% by redefining it to exclude students until and unless they apply for a work visa to stay on as many other countries do.
Flood of mental health diagnoses isn’t working
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/5f9a2679-6c36-4075-a1a7-ab87f3691488?shareToken=ae3b69ceaf8301256802f78509de79b8
Mental health crisis may not be all it seems
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/77449e0e-32f2-11ee-b04c-88a034803f06?shareToken=1090069b15391cd2b0e4bc5590a60227
AI is unlikely to have similar emotional needs as humans, and humans certainly dont offer blind obedience and attention to an owner (excluding Trumpists of course).
I suspect the relationship will be more one where humans are initially a threat, then a waste of resources, then just waste.
Re training the dog to find the kibble under a cup (the interest in which I am finding surprising), he has now cracked it, but only if I move the cups very slowly. It is amusing watching the concentration on his face as the cups are moved and it is very sweet when he taps the cup with his paw, to tell me to lift it so he can get the treat.