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This should help Labour in Wellingborough – politicalbetting.com
This should help Labour in Wellingborough – politicalbetting.com
Disgraced MP Peter Bone has been in talks with Reform UK party about standing as a candidate in the up-coming Wellingborough by-election, which was called because Mr Bone was ousted as Conservative MP for the constituency@ChaplainChloe reportshttps://t.co/YjYWqLh8zw
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Either way if he stands it’s an easy Labour win
If you want a black swan for 2024, what the hell would be the political impact - in the US and the UK - of Biden going on the telly from the Oval Office to confirm that we have been in contact with intelligent life from outside our solar system...
It's going to happen sometime, why not 2024?
There's many MPs the Commons and the Tories would be better off without, he has to have been close to the top of the list.
https://twitter.com/RishiSunak/status/1742120380226027632
Clearly, allowing incorrect statements to the challenged is a good thing, but that's going to rule out 99.9 percent of political communication.
Are notes on notes going to be the next step?
Reform selecting a candidate who has been hit by sexual misconduct allegations also likely reduces likely Tory voter leakage to Reform in the by election too
I've never really had subordinates so have luckily not had temptation put in my way.
https://www.theipsa.org.uk/freedom-of-information/cas-156839
Reform aren't a real political party, they're attention seeking nobodies.
I would guess the chances are 50%, 1%, and 10%, so 0.05% overall.
It's a great Black Swan suggestion mind.
My simpler one is that one of Trump or Biden dies in 2024.
We are already too far down the road for Biden to withdraw without serious disruption to the Democrats' nomination process, with replacement candidates unannounced, unready and unable to stand in many primaries. It would probably be possible to fudge something involving the later primaries and the convention but it would be messy.
Further, the longer Biden waited before withdrawing, the messier it gets, as convention delegates start piling up in his tally, more deadlines are passed and public scrutiny of potential successors goes by the way.
As for selecting a "well known local councillor from the Wellingborough area", if they are that well known then there will be ample photos of them with the local MP, and comments from them on what a good egg he is.
But the kicker is (d) picking up and identifying the signal.
I'd then expect Biden to retort "They are so technologically advanced, it would just give them a good laugh if we tried to fight them off. My proposed course of action is dialogue - and bridging this technology gap through friendship."
Be interesting to see how it shook up politics. Especially with the Christian right.
But even so, a couple of orders of magnitudes more likely than your alien calculation*.
*I'd add another couple of orders on top of that, FWIW. Your 50% is a reasonable guess, but the other two not so much. Particularly for "in contact with" vs "We detected a very distant signal not consistent with natural origin".
Bone standing as a Reform candidate means any local Tory councillor could now easily disown him as 'the Reform candidate' whereas if he was still a Tory Labour could still tie Bone more easily to them
Hi Ben. Have just put my entry up on the competetion thread. I hope I am not too late. I had been waiting to see what Leondamus had to say so that I could do the opposite but it seems he has been waiting for me with the same intention.
Thanks for your efforts. All good fun!
PtP
I don't rule out intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but it's far from certain. Candidate planets are few and a hell of a long way between. Those that there are may well not have life, or have organic life but not intelligent life, or the intelligent life may have died out millions of years ago.
Realistically, if we had anything at all, it'd be a matter of detecting a faint signal we can't quite explain and is worth looking into further, noting even if it was sent to us from others it may well have been sent many millennia ago and take us just as long to reply to (which would all be intriguing but of limited political significance). More than that is the stuff of science fiction - nothing is impossible but it's all vanishingly unlikely.
Reform need yo show their polling can translate into actual votes. From this perspective co-opting Bone makes tactical sense.
A couple of suggestions (based on 1997 results in the constituencies):
James Cleverly
Penny Morduant
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Although I personally think it more likely we will first get confirmation that signs of life have been detected in analysis of light given off by a planet going round some close-ish star, there is enough noise around images of inexplicable craft in our atmosphere to make a declaration of our being visited by intelligent life distinctly possible.
A better bet is probably to identify a molecule that can only arise through technology and look for that via spectroscopy.
I suspect the answer is that Space Is Big, big enough to keep civilisations from meeting.
Which, given the technological prowess you would need for space travel, is probably for the best. If we're lucky, they'd keep us as amusing pets.
Bad to the Bone?
Just you watch how disruptive ReFUK can be with a Bone waved in the voter's faces.
Could certainly fire up the woke debate.
that being said, seeing MPs lose their seats is the best bit of election night.
Given the size and variety of the universe, the probability that other planets have carried other advanced lifeforms is very high. Whether any of these are around and sufficiently proximate during the span of human history, with the ability to travel to or communicate with us, is extremely low.
Maybe God, despite purported omnipotence, can actually only cope with the avalanche of casework from one advanced bunch of critters at a time?
JRM all the way. The only others I can think of who’d have similar impact would be Patel, Braverman or Raab before he announced he was stepping down.
There will of course be a number of Lee Anderson moments as some of the smallest majorities are with the new thug tendency.
https://twitter.com/politvidchannel/status/1741161192155226539
They've been scoring c9% in opinion polls for ages. Yet every time real votes are cast they struggle to get a quarter of that.
They need a decent-ish real life performance.
At least with Bone they'll get some publicity.
‘The tang of adrenaline in these dumb animals induced by the chase tenderises them beautifully..’
This won't change until we can show that both life and mental events are in fact emergent properties of the physical order of things, which currently we can't.
b) If, as claimed, there are reasons to think there are about 6 billion trillion earth like planets around then the tiny probabilities - .many zeros .1% - do in fact come into play.
c) The absence of evidence thus far - no broadcasts of the Archers from other planets etc - suggests that the answer to (a) might be taken to be Zero until something else turns up.
Given the nominative determinism that seems to rife among Conservative MPs, you can't help but wonder if Richard "Dick" Holden, Chairman of the Party, might not be the next gift that keeps giving....
So far, what we *know* is that lots of planets have formed around stars.
If it's a very bad election for the Tories, which seems likely, they will of course lose some "names" and opponents will thoroughly enjoy it.
But Portillo was a class apart as he was the face of the Tory right back in 1997, and the heir presumptive who had (& if memory serves this is literally true) set up his campaign HQ for the leadership campaign that he and many others believed was his to lose.
Of the three you mention, neither Cleverly nor Mordaunt truly have the pantomime villain quality, and Rees-Mogg is yesterday's man (or at least he's not a serious leadership contender).
(1.76 pints of mind bleach are enclosed with this post).
- many (former) Tory voters are disaffected and will tell pollsters that they will vote for someone else, or will stay at home, whereas in reality when it comes to it some of them at least end up ‘doing the Big_G’;
- Reform has yet to acquire any sort of nationwide support or membership base to be able to contest elections with any regularity or dynamism.
C 37.8%
L 27.8%
LD 18.6%
There's also Reform (9.2%) and Green (5.7%)
If Lab and LibDem (plus Greens?) could come to some arrangement (maybe involving the other half of Fareham constituency, which will form part of the new Hamble Valley constituency) we could have a 'Portillo' moment involving none other than - Suella Braverman (ruling her out as the Tories new opposition leader)
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/calcwork23.py?seat=Fareham and Waterlooville
The other thing about the Portillo moment was that it was kind of the making of him. He responded in a surprisingly classy way, which belied his reputation as a right wing Bovver Boy.
JRM can do civil words. It's the sentences that form and the actions they describe that are ghastly.
Assuming he loses, the Conservatives will be better off without him. Just beware his reinvention doing a remake of Donald Sinden's Discovering English Churches.
Sir Christopher Chope would also be a treat.
TissuePrice perhaps the exception.
This was one of the (many) mistakes that ChangeUK made. Endeavouring to rerun the SDP pitch of being something fresh and new, then putting up slates of candidates almost all of whom were tired and old.
To which you can add the failure to advance any sort of political platform or principles, and choosing a name that sat somewhat awkwardly with their true desire to leave pretty much everything exactly as it was.
And if it's in the Daily Mail, then it must be true!!!!!!