I presume Harry Cole was ramping this one earlier today? Or maybe not...
NEW. The Labour Party has EXTENDED its lead over the Conservatives, according to the first exclusive YouGov poll of the campaign for Sky News
The Great Britain poll - conducted on Mon and Tue this week - puts Labour on 47%, the Tories on 20%, Reform on 12%, the LibDems on 9% and Greens on 7%.
There was lots of moronic poll ramping yesterday both on here and on Twitter. It needs to stop.
Hopium.
"No, it can't be true. I can't be so massively disconnected from what most people think.
The polls must all be wrong."
YouGov today Baxters to Tories 29 seats. The real puzzle is who is disconnected from what? Am I disconnected because I don't think this or something a bit like it will happen despite the evidence? "It can't be true" (though I don't mind if it is) is running through a multitude of PB minds.
I doubt Baxters model can cope with the current levels of Tory support, it's a given that there are some constituencies that will only ever elect a conservative no matter how low their overall support and that's more than 29, circa 100 feels a more likely rock bottom. It's also unlikely to be able to account for voter confusion over which party is the realistic challenger, voters won't be helped there by misinformation, whether that is deliberate bias or poor analysis.
Yeah, if your model is telling you "29 tory seats" you should be suspecting "model has been pushed outside its valid range" rather than "historically unprecedented wipeout incoming". It *could* be the latter, but the former is more likely to be what's going on.
I think 29 seats is a reasonable prediction for vote shares of 47-20 with FPTP.
Remember that in 2010, the Lib Dems received 23% of the vote, were only 6pp behind Labour and only 13.1pp behind the Tories, but won only 57 seats - and that only thanks to two decades of local campaigning to concentrate their vote enough to win seats.
If the Tories really do end up 27pp behind then it is almost inevitable that FPTP will produce something approaching a wipeout.
There is a poor correlation between LibDem vote share and seats won. In 1997, the LibDems made 28 (notional) seat gains while their vote share went down 1pp. In 2001, their vote share went up 1.5pp, but that only produced 6 more seats. In 2010, the vote share went up 1pp, but the party lost 5 (notional) seats.
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
The Diane Abbott thing is definitely a screw up. It really should have been a polite we are happy to have you back but you are not well and 70 years old, there is a peerage of you retire quietly..
Should it be though? Abbott is understandably given leeway given her status as a historic figure - rightly in many senses. But what she said was egregious, it was hardly a first offence in terms of antisemitism denial, and though there was an apology, I'm not sure many on those on the wrong end of her comments think it was overly sincere. Plus, she really does hold views Labour shouldn't be associating itself with - look at what she said when Russia was invading Ukraine.
You couldn't really give her a peerage without it looking grubby in another way.
Yes, they've handled it badly. But let's not pretend this is someone who is entirely blameless getting the boot for factional reasons rather than someone who holds some pretty dismal views that are now, thankfully, not acceptable within Labour. Who Labour were in a quandary about dealing with in the harsh way might otherwise have done because she holds significance for other reasons.
Abbott's was not intended as antisemitism denial so much as claiming a special place for anti-Black racism. That is not to say it was not ill-advised or offensive but there is no mens rea as SKS might say.
Giving her back the whip is a sign she has served her proportionate punishment in the eyes of the party. Not letting her stand is more personal - Keir not interested in starting out with the same serial rebels as the last Labour government, he can get his own.
It might worry some people that Starmer appears as intolerant of dissent as Boris was. These are the men who have expelled their internal opponents from Parliament, not Corbyn or Brown or Thatcher. Perhaps in a year's time the country will be revisiting the debates around diversity and groupthink.
The airline I am trying to use is even worse than Wizz
Virtual PB points to anyone who can guess
Flyone - enjoy Chișinău and Moldova...
Spot on
Felicitări
Are the Gazette sending you to do a piece in Moldova? Will you be comparing the Moldova of today to that portrayed in what is I think the classic (indeed, possibly, only) example of Moldovan travel writing: Tony Hawks' "Playing the Moldovans at Tennis"?
I am an Official Guest of the Moldovan Government
Seat: 1A
HAS ANY OTHER PB-ER BEEN AN OFFICIAL GUEST OF THE MOLDOVAN GOVERNMENT SO THEY GOT SEAT 1A TO CHISINAU?!
And having been mean about Flyone just now (and they cancelled a plane on me last year at the last moment and never refunded) this is all going smoothly. Well done Flyone - probably the best airline in Europe
SKS's first banana skin. Poor judgement shifty and patronising. If she chooses to she could make things quite uncomfortable for him. 'An online course in anti semitism!'
The Labour Party, once a bastion of hope, is no longer a sanctuary for Black people. It has degenerated into a veritable cesspit of racism and a haven for those who abet genocide.
Blimey.
Wouldn't "Vote Conservative" have been more succinct?
I'm with BigJohn.
Starmer consolidated himself in the leadership by telling pro-Israeli lies about Jeremy Corbyn, and from the moment when he said Israel have the right to cut the water and electricity to Gaza, i.e. commit genocide, there has been no possibility I would ever vote Labour when it's still led by such a man. That's final. Not even if the Tories promise to give death-penalty rights to district commissions established by local councils and ratepayers' organisations.
Given you claim Keir must have very early on told 'pro-Israeli lies' (since you say that's what he did to 'consolidate' his leadership) colour me skeptical you only turned against him late last year/early this year over Gaza. The two assertions don't match in time.
The airline I am trying to use is even worse than Wizz
Virtual PB points to anyone who can guess
Flyone - enjoy Chișinău and Moldova...
Spot on
Felicitări
Are the Gazette sending you to do a piece in Moldova? Will you be comparing the Moldova of today to that portrayed in what is I think the classic (indeed, possibly, only) example of Moldovan travel writing: Tony Hawks' "Playing the Moldovans at Tennis"?
I am an Official Guest of the Moldovan Government
Seat: 1A
HAS ANY OTHER PB-ER BEEN AN OFFICIAL GUEST OF THE MOLDOVAN GOVERNMENT SO THEY GOT SEAT 1A TO CHISINAU?!
And having been mean about Flyone just now (and they cancelled a plane on me last year at the last moment and never refunded) this is all going smoothly. Well done Flyone - probably the best airline in Europe
Looks like fun.
Go much further east and we will start calling you Borat !
I presume Harry Cole was ramping this one earlier today? Or maybe not...
NEW. The Labour Party has EXTENDED its lead over the Conservatives, according to the first exclusive YouGov poll of the campaign for Sky News
The Great Britain poll - conducted on Mon and Tue this week - puts Labour on 47%, the Tories on 20%, Reform on 12%, the LibDems on 9% and Greens on 7%.
There was lots of moronic poll ramping yesterday both on here and on Twitter. It needs to stop.
Hopium.
"No, it can't be true. I can't be so massively disconnected from what most people think.
The polls must all be wrong."
YouGov today Baxters to Tories 29 seats. The real puzzle is who is disconnected from what? Am I disconnected because I don't think this or something a bit like it will happen despite the evidence? "It can't be true" (though I don't mind if it is) is running through a multitude of PB minds.
I doubt Baxters model can cope with the current levels of Tory support, it's a given that there are some constituencies that will only ever elect a conservative no matter how low their overall support and that's more than 29, circa 100 feels a more likely rock bottom. It's also unlikely to be able to account for voter confusion over which party is the realistic challenger, voters won't be helped there by misinformation, whether that is deliberate bias or poor analysis.
Yeah, if your model is telling you "29 tory seats" you should be suspecting "model has been pushed outside its valid range" rather than "historically unprecedented wipeout incoming". It *could* be the latter, but the former is more likely to be what's going on.
I think 29 seats is a reasonable prediction for vote shares of 47-20 with FPTP.
Remember that in 2010, the Lib Dems received 23% of the vote, were only 6pp behind Labour and only 13.1pp behind the Tories, but won only 57 seats - and that only thanks to two decades of local campaigning to concentrate their vote enough to win seats.
If the Tories really do end up 27pp behind then it is almost inevitable that FPTP will produce something approaching a wipeout.
There is a poor correlation between LibDem vote share and seats won. In 1997, the LibDems made 28 (notional) seat gains while their vote share went down 1pp. In 2001, their vote share went up 1.5pp, but that only produced 6 more seats. In 2010, the vote share went up 1pp, but the party lost 5 (notional) seats.
Yes, because if you are not in the lead in national vote share, you only win seats under FPTP to the extent that your vote is locally concentrated - and so the SNP can win ~50 seats on a ~4% GB-wide vote share (because it's all concentrated in Scotland).
For the Tories, if they are 27pp behind and on 20%, then the number of seats they win will be a function of (a) how concentrated that 20% is in their ~100 safest seats, and, (b) to what extent the anti-Tory vote coalesces behind one party in each seat.
I would expect an MRP to do a reasonably good job of modelling (a), but (b) would be very difficult to predict. 29 seats is definitely within the range of plausible outcomes, and not, a priori evidence that the model producing the prediction is definitely wrong.
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
I suppose north of the border Swinney could turn it round, or at least, with 45% backing Indy has a better chance too, but he's no campaigner and if he urges the SNP will stand up for Scotland better than Labour he immediately faces the question 'how come you haven't then?'
It was the dementia tax which really shifted the polls as that hit the Tory core vote as well as swing voters in London and the South. Only the Labour core vote are really anti grammar, most voters wouldn't be that bothered with a few more grammars where local demand and even fox hunting was just a promise of a free vote to the rural Tory shires with little prospect of it getting through
2017, is the election I just can't get my head around, really didn't see it coming, looks like a lot of idiots who voted for Corbyn, went off and voted for Brexit and Johnson, two years later, where will the idiot vote land this time, Reform possibly
I remember the key thing being the murder of Jo Cox. The dementia tax had just landed like a turd on the living room floor. Reaction was appalling and a reverse ferret was expected imminently. Then the murder happened and all campaigning stopped for a week, It just sat there stinking out the room. Once we came back there was no way to row back.
The airline I am trying to use is even worse than Wizz
Virtual PB points to anyone who can guess
Flyone - enjoy Chișinău and Moldova...
Spot on
Felicitări
Are the Gazette sending you to do a piece in Moldova? Will you be comparing the Moldova of today to that portrayed in what is I think the classic (indeed, possibly, only) example of Moldovan travel writing: Tony Hawks' "Playing the Moldovans at Tennis"?
I am an Official Guest of the Moldovan Government
Seat: 1A
HAS ANY OTHER PB-ER BEEN AN OFFICIAL GUEST OF THE MOLDOVAN GOVERNMENT SO THEY GOT SEAT 1A TO CHISINAU?!
And having been mean about Flyone just now (and they cancelled a plane on me last year at the last moment and never refunded) this is all going smoothly. Well done Flyone - probably the best airline in Europe
Looks like fun.
Go much further east and we will start calling you Borat !
Flyone are absolutely brilliant and Moldova is going to be wonderful
I presume Harry Cole was ramping this one earlier today? Or maybe not...
NEW. The Labour Party has EXTENDED its lead over the Conservatives, according to the first exclusive YouGov poll of the campaign for Sky News
The Great Britain poll - conducted on Mon and Tue this week - puts Labour on 47%, the Tories on 20%, Reform on 12%, the LibDems on 9% and Greens on 7%.
There was lots of moronic poll ramping yesterday both on here and on Twitter. It needs to stop.
Hopium.
"No, it can't be true. I can't be so massively disconnected from what most people think.
The polls must all be wrong."
YouGov today Baxters to Tories 29 seats. The real puzzle is who is disconnected from what? Am I disconnected because I don't think this or something a bit like it will happen despite the evidence? "It can't be true" (though I don't mind if it is) is running through a multitude of PB minds.
I doubt Baxters model can cope with the current levels of Tory support, it's a given that there are some constituencies that will only ever elect a conservative no matter how low their overall support and that's more than 29, circa 100 feels a more likely rock bottom. It's also unlikely to be able to account for voter confusion over which party is the realistic challenger, voters won't be helped there by misinformation, whether that is deliberate bias or poor analysis.
Yeah, if your model is telling you "29 tory seats" you should be suspecting "model has been pushed outside its valid range" rather than "historically unprecedented wipeout incoming". It *could* be the latter, but the former is more likely to be what's going on.
I think that wrongly privileges number over other sorts of information. You would not think it a terribly strong defence of Harold Shipman that he is unlikely to have done so many murders because the numbers are so far off the scale. OK we may never have seen such a wipeout before but we have also never had the three worst prime ministers in history in sequence and in the same year.
So Rishi Sunak's kids, when they reach 18, are going to spend a year crawling through mud on Salisbury Plain being swore at by a Sergeant -Major and then get skilled apprenticeships in bricklaying?
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
I suppose north of the border Swinney could turn it round, or at least, with 45% backing Indy has a better chance too, but he's no campaigner and if he urges the SNP will stand up for Scotland better than Labour he immediately faces the question 'how come you haven't then?'
It was the dementia tax which really shifted the polls as that hit the Tory core vote as well as swing voters in London and the South. Only the Labour core vote are really anti grammar, most voters wouldn't be that bothered with a few more grammars where local demand and even fox hunting was just a promise of a free vote to the rural Tory shires with little prospect of it getting through
2017, is the election I just can't get my head around, really didn't see it coming, looks like a lot of idiots who voted for Corbyn, went off and voted for Brexit and Johnson, two years later, where will the idiot vote land this time, Reform possibly
I remember the key thing being the murder of Jo Cox. The dementia tax had just landed like a turd on the living room floor. Reaction was appalling and a reverse ferret was expected imminently. Then the murder happened and all campaigning stopped for a week, It just sat there stinking out the room. Once we came back there was no way to row back.
Jo Cox was murdered during the referendum campaign not 2017, that was Manchester and Westminster Bridge
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
The Diane Abbott thing is definitely a screw up. It really should have been a polite we are happy to have you back but you are not well and 70 years old, there is a peerage of you retire quietly..
Should it be though? Abbott is understandably given leeway given her status as a historic figure - rightly in many senses. But what she said was egregious, it was hardly a first offence in terms of antisemitism denial, and though there was an apology, I'm not sure many on those on the wrong end of her comments think it was overly sincere. Plus, she really does hold views Labour shouldn't be associating itself with - look at what she said when Russia was invading Ukraine.
You couldn't really give her a peerage without it looking grubby in another way.
Yes, they've handled it badly. But let's not pretend this is someone who is entirely blameless getting the boot for factional reasons rather than someone who holds some pretty dismal views that are now, thankfully, not acceptable within Labour. Who Labour were in a quandary about dealing with in the harsh way might otherwise have done because she holds significance for other reasons.
Abbott's was not intended as antisemitism denial so much as claiming a special place for anti-Black racism. That is not to say it was not ill-advised or offensive but there is no mens rea as SKS might say.
Intent is difficult to judge. She apologised quite quickly - and maybe she was being truthful about it being an early draft. But I am sceptical.
The letter said this in relation to prejudice against Jews, travellers and the Irish: “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism”
That is a terrible view. I am a ginger and have been picked on at school (and still see and her slurs against redheads in the media). But at no point would I consider those minor barbs akin to those suffered by Jews, travellers and the Irish for simply existing. Which is what the letter seems to suggests. What a ridiculous view. I appreciate that there is an argument about where race begins (and so racism - I don’t buy it, but there is an argument), but I am certain my experience as ginger is not the same as those with the characteristics noted at the top of the letter.
Each racial characteristic that suffers from prejudices has its own history of disgraceful behaviour. For blacks I would see slavery as that key original crime. For Jews the holocaust. You could play the game of rating each other’s past suffering and playing it off against each other. But what would be the point of that? I also think different forms of racism manifest themselves in the modern world in different ways. But I think I could say that without doing down different types of racism. I would have hoped that Diane Abbot could have done that too.
London St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway goes from one gleaming new station to another gleaming new station
And it takes…. 24 minutes
And Luton Airport is ideally placed to serve an Oxford-Cambridge traffic corridor.
It’s now an excellent airport
Small enough to be easy to get around. Yet now modernised so it has nice shops and bars. Special gin bar! And ridiculously close to London’s best station - St Pancras. 24 minutes!l
😶😎
Does any other great global city have TWO airports less than 25 minutes by fast train from the centre?
We do moan about British infrastructure and HS2 is a planet sized calamity yet quietly we also get things done. Luton Airport is an example
Having said all that I will now probably suffer a 6 hour delay
We moan about British infrastructure, yes. And we wonder why London seems to get priority in almost every project and gets things done.
The airline I am trying to use is even worse than Wizz
Virtual PB points to anyone who can guess
Flyone - enjoy Chișinău and Moldova...
Spot on
Felicitări
Are the Gazette sending you to do a piece in Moldova? Will you be comparing the Moldova of today to that portrayed in what is I think the classic (indeed, possibly, only) example of Moldovan travel writing: Tony Hawks' "Playing the Moldovans at Tennis"?
I am an Official Guest of the Moldovan Government
Seat: 1A
HAS ANY OTHER PB-ER BEEN AN OFFICIAL GUEST OF THE MOLDOVAN GOVERNMENT SO THEY GOT SEAT 1A TO CHISINAU?!
And having been mean about Flyone just now (and they cancelled a plane on me last year at the last moment and never refunded) this is all going smoothly. Well done Flyone - probably the best airline in Europe
Looks like fun.
Go much further east and we will start calling you Borat !
So Rishi Sunak's kids, when they reach 18, are going to spend a year crawling through mud on Salisbury Plain being swore at by a Sergeant -Major and then get skilled apprenticeships in bricklaying?
I doubt any of that is available in California to be honest.
On Diane Abbott, it seems to me that Labour/the NEC were desperately hoping that she'd retire with dignity and go down in history as a trailblazer. They didn't want her to stand again largely because of her ill-health - she's 70, and in recent years it does appear that she's been struggling - and partly because she was unwilling to agree not to champion Corbyn's cause in the neighbouring constituency. But Diane refused to go willingly - hence the stand off, and the long delay - hoping she'd change her mind. To my mind, it's a sad situation, and a disappointing end to a distinguished career.
The airline I am trying to use is even worse than Wizz
Virtual PB points to anyone who can guess
Flyone - enjoy Chișinău and Moldova...
Spot on
Felicitări
Are the Gazette sending you to do a piece in Moldova? Will you be comparing the Moldova of today to that portrayed in what is I think the classic (indeed, possibly, only) example of Moldovan travel writing: Tony Hawks' "Playing the Moldovans at Tennis"?
I am an Official Guest of the Moldovan Government
Seat: 1A
HAS ANY OTHER PB-ER BEEN AN OFFICIAL GUEST OF THE MOLDOVAN GOVERNMENT SO THEY GOT SEAT 1A TO CHISINAU?!
And having been mean about Flyone just now (and they cancelled a plane on me last year at the last moment and never refunded) this is all going smoothly. Well done Flyone - probably the best airline in Europe
There's a Moldovan restaurant just up the road, where half the Greek restaurant used to be, next to the betting shop. You can (or rather I can) walk or get the bus. Probably the best bus in Europe.
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
The Diane Abbott thing is definitely a screw up. It really should have been a polite we are happy to have you back but you are not well and 70 years old, there is a peerage of you retire quietly..
Should it be though? Abbott is understandably given leeway given her status as a historic figure - rightly in many senses. But what she said was egregious, it was hardly a first offence in terms of antisemitism denial, and though there was an apology, I'm not sure many on those on the wrong end of her comments think it was overly sincere. Plus, she really does hold views Labour shouldn't be associating itself with - look at what she said when Russia was invading Ukraine.
You couldn't really give her a peerage without it looking grubby in another way.
Yes, they've handled it badly. But let's not pretend this is someone who is entirely blameless getting the boot for factional reasons rather than someone who holds some pretty dismal views that are now, thankfully, not acceptable within Labour. Who Labour were in a quandary about dealing with in the harsh way might otherwise have done because she holds significance for other reasons.
Abbott's was not intended as antisemitism denial so much as claiming a special place for anti-Black racism. That is not to say it was not ill-advised or offensive but there is no mens rea as SKS might say.
Intent is difficult to judge. She apologised quite quickly - and maybe she was being truthful about it being an early draft. But I am sceptical.
The letter said this in relation to prejudice against Jews, travellers and the Irish: “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism”
That is a terrible view. I am a ginger and have been picked on at school (and still see and her slurs against redheads in the media). But at no point would I consider those minor barbs akin to those suffered by Jews, travellers and the Irish for simply existing. Which is what the letter seems to suggests. What a ridiculous view. I appreciate that there is an argument about where race begins (and so racism - I don’t buy it, but there is an argument), but I am certain my experience as ginger is not the same as those with the characteristics noted at the top of the letter.
Each racial characteristic that suffers from prejudices has its own history of disgraceful behaviour. For blacks I would see slavery as that key original crime. For Jews the holocaust. You could play the game of rating each other’s past suffering and playing it off against each other. But what would be the point of that? I also think different forms of racism manifest themselves in the modern world in different ways. But I think I could say that without doing down different types of racism. I would have hoped that Diane Abbot could have done that too.
You need to ask yourself the question if you had a forced choice between being Jewish or black in this country, which would you choose? If one is obviously preferable to the other, she surely has a point
London St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway goes from one gleaming new station to another gleaming new station
And it takes…. 24 minutes
And Luton Airport is ideally placed to serve an Oxford-Cambridge traffic corridor.
It’s now an excellent airport
Small enough to be easy to get around. Yet now modernised so it has nice shops and bars. Special gin bar! And ridiculously close to London’s best station - St Pancras. 24 minutes!l
😶😎
Does any other great global city have TWO airports less than 25 minutes by fast train from the centre?
We do moan about British infrastructure and HS2 is a planet sized calamity yet quietly we also get things done. Luton Airport is an example
Having said all that I will now probably suffer a 6 hour delay
We moan about British infrastructure, yes. And we wonder why London seems to get priority in almost every project and gets things done.
So move to london?! Get a nice airy garden flat in Primrose Hill or a little mews house near Portobello Road. It’s not like some clever trick we’re playing on everyone else - just get a nice gaff in The Smoke. Marylebone is also nice for townhouses or you could try a loft in Borough if you like that steampunk feel
Then you’d have all the benefits of London’s excellent infrastructure - plus galleries and restaurants and museums and the glorious parks
Derrrr. Yet you all decide to live in Newent or “Macclesfield” or Wick and then you moan
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
The Diane Abbott thing is definitely a screw up. It really should have been a polite we are happy to have you back but you are not well and 70 years old, there is a peerage of you retire quietly..
Should it be though? Abbott is understandably given leeway given her status as a historic figure - rightly in many senses. But what she said was egregious, it was hardly a first offence in terms of antisemitism denial, and though there was an apology, I'm not sure many on those on the wrong end of her comments think it was overly sincere. Plus, she really does hold views Labour shouldn't be associating itself with - look at what she said when Russia was invading Ukraine.
You couldn't really give her a peerage without it looking grubby in another way.
Yes, they've handled it badly. But let's not pretend this is someone who is entirely blameless getting the boot for factional reasons rather than someone who holds some pretty dismal views that are now, thankfully, not acceptable within Labour. Who Labour were in a quandary about dealing with in the harsh way might otherwise have done because she holds significance for other reasons.
Abbott's was not intended as antisemitism denial so much as claiming a special place for anti-Black racism. That is not to say it was not ill-advised or offensive but there is no mens rea as SKS might say.
Intent is difficult to judge. She apologised quite quickly - and maybe she was being truthful about it being an early draft. But I am sceptical.
The letter said this in relation to prejudice against Jews, travellers and the Irish: “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism”
That is a terrible view. I am a ginger and have been picked on at school (and still see and her slurs against redheads in the media). But at no point would I consider those minor barbs akin to those suffered by Jews, travellers and the Irish for simply existing. Which is what the letter seems to suggests. What a ridiculous view. I appreciate that there is an argument about where race begins (and so racism - I don’t buy it, but there is an argument), but I am certain my experience as ginger is not the same as those with the characteristics noted at the top of the letter.
Each racial characteristic that suffers from prejudices has its own history of disgraceful behaviour. For blacks I would see slavery as that key original crime. For Jews the holocaust. You could play the game of rating each other’s past suffering and playing it off against each other. But what would be the point of that? I also think different forms of racism manifest themselves in the modern world in different ways. But I think I could say that without doing down different types of racism. I would have hoped that Diane Abbot could have done that too.
You need to ask yourself the question if you had a forced choice between being Jewish or black in this country, which would you choose? If one is obviously preferable to the other, she surely has a point
No one is putting armed guards outside “black” schools in Britain
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
I suppose north of the border Swinney could turn it round, or at least, with 45% backing Indy has a better chance too, but he's no campaigner and if he urges the SNP will stand up for Scotland better than Labour he immediately faces the question 'how come you haven't then?'
It was the dementia tax which really shifted the polls as that hit the Tory core vote as well as swing voters in London and the South. Only the Labour core vote are really anti grammar, most voters wouldn't be that bothered with a few more grammars where local demand and even fox hunting was just a promise of a free vote to the rural Tory shires with little prospect of it getting through
2017, is the election I just can't get my head around, really didn't see it coming, looks like a lot of idiots who voted for Corbyn, went off and voted for Brexit and Johnson, two years later, where will the idiot vote land this time, Reform possibly
I remember the key thing being the murder of Jo Cox. The dementia tax had just landed like a turd on the living room floor. Reaction was appalling and a reverse ferret was expected imminently. Then the murder happened and all campaigning stopped for a week, It just sat there stinking out the room. Once we came back there was no way to row back.
Jo Cox was murdered during the referendum campaign not 2017, that was Manchester and Westminster Bridge
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
The Diane Abbott thing is definitely a screw up. It really should have been a polite we are happy to have you back but you are not well and 70 years old, there is a peerage of you retire quietly..
Yes, I am no fan of Abbott but she has been a long serving and prominent member of the party for nearly her entire life, breaking glass ceilings in her earlier days. She deserves better than this. I am reminded of the way Boris treated Ken Clarke. Hurting people to make a political point shows a somewhat nasty edge.
I think one thing we'll hear about when he's PM is that Starmer appears to be rather poor at people management, and tends to avoid getting his own fingerprints on it in a way that isn't helpful to him.
The Corbyn thing, I entirely get. Whether or not Corbyn wins in Islington (and he may well) it's simply helpful to detoxifying Labour that Corbyn has very visibly been cast out of Labour.
But Abbott isn't toxic in that way (and is a bit of an icon for some simply as first black female MP), and this has festered far too long. Similarly, the relationship with Duffield appears dire, and he's done little personally to resolve it.
I suspect he'll get real problems over this sort of thing when, inevitably, he has to disappoint people in reshuffles etc. That's particularly problematic if he wins big - he'll simply be managing a lot more people with fewer opportunities to keep them happy with jobs.
Firing people is something you need to do strictly by the book. Starmer's problem, I think, is that the ostensible justification for expelling Abbott from the Labour Party, the letter to the Observer, didn't break any Party rules. So Party management were stuck with either climbing down or being sued probably successfully by Abbot for breaking the rules themselves. But Starmer and Party management do have discretion on who gets to be a parliamentary candidate. They used that power.
The thing is a mess, but given the intention all along presumably was to get rid of Abbott, they got the result they wanted. These messy situations happen a lot in the business world.
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
I suppose north of the border Swinney could turn it round, or at least, with 45% backing Indy has a better chance too, but he's no campaigner and if he urges the SNP will stand up for Scotland better than Labour he immediately faces the question 'how come you haven't then?'
It was the dementia tax which really shifted the polls as that hit the Tory core vote as well as swing voters in London and the South. Only the Labour core vote are really anti grammar, most voters wouldn't be that bothered with a few more grammars where local demand and even fox hunting was just a promise of a free vote to the rural Tory shires with little prospect of it getting through
2017, is the election I just can't get my head around, really didn't see it coming, looks like a lot of idiots who voted for Corbyn, went off and voted for Brexit and Johnson, two years later, where will the idiot vote land this time, Reform possibly
I remember the key thing being the murder of Jo Cox. The dementia tax had just landed like a turd on the living room floor. Reaction was appalling and a reverse ferret was expected imminently. Then the murder happened and all campaigning stopped for a week, It just sat there stinking out the room. Once we came back there was no way to row back.
Jo Cox was murdered during the referendum campaign not 2017, that was Manchester and Westminster Bridge
You're right - it was Manchester.
The thing is that the 2017 election campaign was (hopefully) unique in forcing a massively unpopular policy to be undefended/reverted for a substantial period. That is maybe why the polling change was so extreme. It's unlikely to happen again
Not sure Truss should be doing what she’s doing but also not sure that the histrionic pearl clutching response from Jess is helpful. Although I get that she is just burnishing her brand credentials.
I presume Harry Cole was ramping this one earlier today? Or maybe not...
NEW. The Labour Party has EXTENDED its lead over the Conservatives, according to the first exclusive YouGov poll of the campaign for Sky News
The Great Britain poll - conducted on Mon and Tue this week - puts Labour on 47%, the Tories on 20%, Reform on 12%, the LibDems on 9% and Greens on 7%.
There was lots of moronic poll ramping yesterday both on here and on Twitter. It needs to stop.
Hopium.
"No, it can't be true. I can't be so massively disconnected from what most people think.
The polls must all be wrong."
YouGov today Baxters to Tories 29 seats. The real puzzle is who is disconnected from what? Am I disconnected because I don't think this or something a bit like it will happen despite the evidence? "It can't be true" (though I don't mind if it is) is running through a multitude of PB minds.
I doubt Baxters model can cope with the current levels of Tory support, it's a given that there are some constituencies that will only ever elect a conservative no matter how low their overall support and that's more than 29, circa 100 feels a more likely rock bottom. It's also unlikely to be able to account for voter confusion over which party is the realistic challenger, voters won't be helped there by misinformation, whether that is deliberate bias or poor analysis.
Yeah, if your model is telling you "29 tory seats" you should be suspecting "model has been pushed outside its valid range" rather than "historically unprecedented wipeout incoming". It *could* be the latter, but the former is more likely to be what's going on.
I think 29 seats is a reasonable prediction for vote shares of 47-20 with FPTP.
Remember that in 2010, the Lib Dems received 23% of the vote, were only 6pp behind Labour and only 13.1pp behind the Tories, but won only 57 seats - and that only thanks to two decades of local campaigning to concentrate their vote enough to win seats.
If the Tories really do end up 27pp behind then it is almost inevitable that FPTP will produce something approaching a wipeout.
There is a poor correlation between LibDem vote share and seats won. In 1997, the LibDems made 28 (notional) seat gains while their vote share went down 1pp. In 2001, their vote share went up 1.5pp, but that only produced 6 more seats. In 2010, the vote share went up 1pp, but the party lost 5 (notional) seats.
Yes, because if you are not in the lead in national vote share, you only win seats under FPTP to the extent that your vote is locally concentrated - and so the SNP can win ~50 seats on a ~4% GB-wide vote share (because it's all concentrated in Scotland).
For the Tories, if they are 27pp behind and on 20%, then the number of seats they win will be a function of (a) how concentrated that 20% is in their ~100 safest seats, and, (b) to what extent the anti-Tory vote coalesces behind one party in each seat.
I would expect an MRP to do a reasonably good job of modelling (a), but (b) would be very difficult to predict. 29 seats is definitely within the range of plausible outcomes, and not, a priori evidence that the model producing the prediction is definitely wrong.
Essentially it's that there's a tipping point isn't there? If you're one of the big two in FPTP and poll 20-25% nationally then you hit a tipping point where you stop hanging on in your heartlands but start losing everywhere and finishing 2nd in a lot of places. You can quickly go from 130-50 seats to a handful without losing much national vote share. For the same reason there's not a big correlation between Lib Dem NVS and seats and they got stuck in the 40-60 seat range even when polling in the low to mid 20s.
What matters are how concentrated your voters are, whether you get over the line in lots of narrow contests that could go either way, and how well your opponents coalesce to maximise your defeats.
A 'tipping point' is arguably what terrified Labour into offering a second referendum in 2019 as the smarter aides knew that although offering one meant they couldn't win, it took the disastrous scenario of both them and the Lib Dems polling in the 20s and a catastrophe where they were wiped out outside inner London and the North West, off the table.
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
The Diane Abbott thing is definitely a screw up. It really should have been a polite we are happy to have you back but you are not well and 70 years old, there is a peerage of you retire quietly..
Should it be though? Abbott is understandably given leeway given her status as a historic figure - rightly in many senses. But what she said was egregious, it was hardly a first offence in terms of antisemitism denial, and though there was an apology, I'm not sure many on those on the wrong end of her comments think it was overly sincere. Plus, she really does hold views Labour shouldn't be associating itself with - look at what she said when Russia was invading Ukraine.
You couldn't really give her a peerage without it looking grubby in another way.
Yes, they've handled it badly. But let's not pretend this is someone who is entirely blameless getting the boot for factional reasons rather than someone who holds some pretty dismal views that are now, thankfully, not acceptable within Labour. Who Labour were in a quandary about dealing with in the harsh way might otherwise have done because she holds significance for other reasons.
Abbott's was not intended as antisemitism denial so much as claiming a special place for anti-Black racism. That is not to say it was not ill-advised or offensive but there is no mens rea as SKS might say.
Intent is difficult to judge. She apologised quite quickly - and maybe she was being truthful about it being an early draft. But I am sceptical.
The letter said this in relation to prejudice against Jews, travellers and the Irish: “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism”
That is a terrible view. I am a ginger and have been picked on at school (and still see and her slurs against redheads in the media). But at no point would I consider those minor barbs akin to those suffered by Jews, travellers and the Irish for simply existing. Which is what the letter seems to suggests. What a ridiculous view. I appreciate that there is an argument about where race begins (and so racism - I don’t buy it, but there is an argument), but I am certain my experience as ginger is not the same as those with the characteristics noted at the top of the letter.
Each racial characteristic that suffers from prejudices has its own history of disgraceful behaviour. For blacks I would see slavery as that key original crime. For Jews the holocaust. You could play the game of rating each other’s past suffering and playing it off against each other. But what would be the point of that? I also think different forms of racism manifest themselves in the modern world in different ways. But I think I could say that without doing down different types of racism. I would have hoped that Diane Abbot could have done that too.
You need to ask yourself the question if you had a forced choice between being Jewish or black in this country, which would you choose? If one is obviously preferable to the other, she surely has a point
As I acknowledge here: “I also think different forms of racism manifest themselves in the modern world in different ways. But I think I could say that without doing down different types of racism.”
Lived experiences can be different and change over time and context. At my school and where I grew up I think it would be better to be black than Romany or Irish Traveller stock (for some reason they came in for a lot of stick when I grew up). But I don’t think that is the case everywhere.
Just seen Liz Truss is 1/4 to retain her seat. Obviously there's a lot of negativity towards her but it's one of the safest seats in the country. Surely that price is a gift?
SKS's first banana skin. Poor judgement shifty and patronising. If she chooses to she could make things quite uncomfortable for him. 'An online course in anti semitism!'
The Labour Party, once a bastion of hope, is no longer a sanctuary for Black people. It has degenerated into a veritable cesspit of racism and a haven for those who abet genocide.
Blimey.
Wouldn't "Vote Conservative" have been more succinct?
I'm with BigJohn.
Starmer consolidated himself in the leadership by telling pro-Israeli lies about Jeremy Corbyn, and from the moment when he said Israel have the right to cut the water and electricity to Gaza, i.e. commit genocide, there has been no possibility I would ever vote Labour when it's still led by such a man. That's final. Not even if the Tories promise to give death-penalty rights to district commissions established by local councils and ratepayers' organisations.
Cutting the water supply to a civilian population is a crime against humanity. Remind me what Starmer's profession is again?
PS Oh I get flagged. Some tool probably thinks the above statements are "pro-Hamas".
Its a view! I think the basic problem is this. If we were in a time of prosperity, of good public services and people feeling reasonably well off then the protests may have some momentum. cf 2003 and Iraq.
But none of those things are true. And the Palestine obsessives think their issue is the only issue - and for a large majority of voters it isn't an issue at all.
What really doesn't help is that the pro-Palestine groups / protests rapidly descend into being pro-Terror and antisemitism. "Yemen Yemen make us proud, turn those ships around" as was being chanted in Aberdeen last week is support for terrorism. So if you support Iranian terrorism how can you object to Israeli terrorism?
I presume Harry Cole was ramping this one earlier today? Or maybe not...
NEW. The Labour Party has EXTENDED its lead over the Conservatives, according to the first exclusive YouGov poll of the campaign for Sky News
The Great Britain poll - conducted on Mon and Tue this week - puts Labour on 47%, the Tories on 20%, Reform on 12%, the LibDems on 9% and Greens on 7%.
There was lots of moronic poll ramping yesterday both on here and on Twitter. It needs to stop.
Hopium.
"No, it can't be true. I can't be so massively disconnected from what most people think.
The polls must all be wrong."
YouGov today Baxters to Tories 29 seats. The real puzzle is who is disconnected from what? Am I disconnected because I don't think this or something a bit like it will happen despite the evidence? "It can't be true" (though I don't mind if it is) is running through a multitude of PB minds.
I doubt Baxters model can cope with the current levels of Tory support, it's a given that there are some constituencies that will only ever elect a conservative no matter how low their overall support and that's more than 29, circa 100 feels a more likely rock bottom. It's also unlikely to be able to account for voter confusion over which party is the realistic challenger, voters won't be helped there by misinformation, whether that is deliberate bias or poor analysis.
Yeah, if your model is telling you "29 tory seats" you should be suspecting "model has been pushed outside its valid range" rather than "historically unprecedented wipeout incoming". It *could* be the latter, but the former is more likely to be what's going on.
I think 29 seats is a reasonable prediction for vote shares of 47-20 with FPTP.
Remember that in 2010, the Lib Dems received 23% of the vote, were only 6pp behind Labour and only 13.1pp behind the Tories, but won only 57 seats - and that only thanks to two decades of local campaigning to concentrate their vote enough to win seats.
If the Tories really do end up 27pp behind then it is almost inevitable that FPTP will produce something approaching a wipeout.
It's going to be hard to predict exactly what happens, the precedents don't really help us.
Attlee's 1945 landslide was based on a twelve point lead.
Thatcher beat Foot by fifteen percent.
Blair beat Major by twelve points and Hague by about nine.
We simply don't know what FPTP does at a lead in the high teens, let alone the twenties. But it's unlikely to be pretty.
London St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway goes from one gleaming new station to another gleaming new station
And it takes…. 24 minutes
And Luton Airport is ideally placed to serve an Oxford-Cambridge traffic corridor.
It’s now an excellent airport
Small enough to be easy to get around. Yet now modernised so it has nice shops and bars. Special gin bar! And ridiculously close to London’s best station - St Pancras. 24 minutes!l
😶😎
Does any other great global city have TWO airports less than 25 minutes by fast train from the centre?
We do moan about British infrastructure and HS2 is a planet sized calamity yet quietly we also get things done. Luton Airport is an example
Having said all that I will now probably suffer a 6 hour delay
We moan about British infrastructure, yes. And we wonder why London seems to get priority in almost every project and gets things done.
So move to london?! Get a nice airy garden flat in Primrose Hill or a little mews house near Portobello Road. It’s not like some clever trick we’re playing on everyone else - just get a nice gaff in The Smoke. Marylebone is also nice for townhouses or you could try a loft in Borough if you like that steampunk feel
Then you’d have all the benefits of London’s excellent infrastructure - plus galleries and restaurants and museums and the glorious parks
Derrrr. Yet you all decide to live in Newent or “Macclesfield” or Wick and then you moan
Come on, the Russian bots do better quality trolling than this drivel
Not sure Truss should be doing what she’s doing but also not sure that the histrionic pearl clutching response from Jess is helpful. Although I get that she is just burnishing her brand credentials.
I would hope a party leader would make clear to their MPs that they should not get mixed up with conspiracy theorists. I don't see Phillips' letter as "histrionic pearl clutching". We should take these things seriously. This is also not Truss's first offence.
Of course, it is also a partisan act. It's an election campaign: what do you expect?
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
The Diane Abbott thing is definitely a screw up. It really should have been a polite we are happy to have you back but you are not well and 70 years old, there is a peerage of you retire quietly..
Should it be though? Abbott is understandably given leeway given her status as a historic figure - rightly in many senses. But what she said was egregious, it was hardly a first offence in terms of antisemitism denial, and though there was an apology, I'm not sure many on those on the wrong end of her comments think it was overly sincere. Plus, she really does hold views Labour shouldn't be associating itself with - look at what she said when Russia was invading Ukraine.
You couldn't really give her a peerage without it looking grubby in another way.
Yes, they've handled it badly. But let's not pretend this is someone who is entirely blameless getting the boot for factional reasons rather than someone who holds some pretty dismal views that are now, thankfully, not acceptable within Labour. Who Labour were in a quandary about dealing with in the harsh way might otherwise have done because she holds significance for other reasons.
Abbott's was not intended as antisemitism denial so much as claiming a special place for anti-Black racism. That is not to say it was not ill-advised or offensive but there is no mens rea as SKS might say.
Intent is difficult to judge. She apologised quite quickly - and maybe she was being truthful about it being an early draft. But I am sceptical.
The letter said this in relation to prejudice against Jews, travellers and the Irish: “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism”
That is a terrible view. I am a ginger and have been picked on at school (and still see and her slurs against redheads in the media). But at no point would I consider those minor barbs akin to those suffered by Jews, travellers and the Irish for simply existing. Which is what the letter seems to suggests. What a ridiculous view. I appreciate that there is an argument about where race begins (and so racism - I don’t buy it, but there is an argument), but I am certain my experience as ginger is not the same as those with the characteristics noted at the top of the letter.
Each racial characteristic that suffers from prejudices has its own history of disgraceful behaviour. For blacks I would see slavery as that key original crime. For Jews the holocaust. You could play the game of rating each other’s past suffering and playing it off against each other. But what would be the point of that? I also think different forms of racism manifest themselves in the modern world in different ways. But I think I could say that without doing down different types of racism. I would have hoped that Diane Abbot could have done that too.
As others have noted she is showing signs of dementia. I hope I’m wrong but the way the story was reported this morning seemed to confirm that - “friends say they have no idea how she feels or what she will do” - quite odd for an outspoken politician but quite explicable if she is indeed suffering some early form of dementia
Very sad if so. I find her politics objectionable but I quite admire her pugnacity and courage - she has surely suffered from misogyny AND racism throughout her career
If she has dementia that also explains her really weird letter referencing redheads
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
The Diane Abbott thing is definitely a screw up. It really should have been a polite we are happy to have you back but you are not well and 70 years old, there is a peerage of you retire quietly..
Should it be though? Abbott is understandably given leeway given her status as a historic figure - rightly in many senses. But what she said was egregious, it was hardly a first offence in terms of antisemitism denial, and though there was an apology, I'm not sure many on those on the wrong end of her comments think it was overly sincere. Plus, she really does hold views Labour shouldn't be associating itself with - look at what she said when Russia was invading Ukraine.
You couldn't really give her a peerage without it looking grubby in another way.
Yes, they've handled it badly. But let's not pretend this is someone who is entirely blameless getting the boot for factional reasons rather than someone who holds some pretty dismal views that are now, thankfully, not acceptable within Labour. Who Labour were in a quandary about dealing with in the harsh way might otherwise have done because she holds significance for other reasons.
Abbott's was not intended as antisemitism denial so much as claiming a special place for anti-Black racism. That is not to say it was not ill-advised or offensive but there is no mens rea as SKS might say.
Intent is difficult to judge. She apologised quite quickly - and maybe she was being truthful about it being an early draft. But I am sceptical.
The letter said this in relation to prejudice against Jews, travellers and the Irish: “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism”
That is a terrible view. I am a ginger and have been picked on at school (and still see and her slurs against redheads in the media). But at no point would I consider those minor barbs akin to those suffered by Jews, travellers and the Irish for simply existing. Which is what the letter seems to suggests. What a ridiculous view. I appreciate that there is an argument about where race begins (and so racism - I don’t buy it, but there is an argument), but I am certain my experience as ginger is not the same as those with the characteristics noted at the top of the letter.
Each racial characteristic that suffers from prejudices has its own history of disgraceful behaviour. For blacks I would see slavery as that key original crime. For Jews the holocaust. You could play the game of rating each other’s past suffering and playing it off against each other. But what would be the point of that? I also think different forms of racism manifest themselves in the modern world in different ways. But I think I could say that without doing down different types of racism. I would have hoped that Diane Abbot could have done that too.
You need to ask yourself the question if you had a forced choice between being Jewish or black in this country, which would you choose? If one is obviously preferable to the other, she surely has a point
No one is putting armed guards outside “black” schools in Britain
There are security guards outside at least one of the schools round here and it is neither Black nor Jewish. One of the Black churches near where I used to work had two ginormous bouncers outside during services. I'm not sure what your point is but doubt it is well-founded.
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
The Diane Abbott thing is definitely a screw up. It really should have been a polite we are happy to have you back but you are not well and 70 years old, there is a peerage of you retire quietly..
Should it be though? Abbott is understandably given leeway given her status as a historic figure - rightly in many senses. But what she said was egregious, it was hardly a first offence in terms of antisemitism denial, and though there was an apology, I'm not sure many on those on the wrong end of her comments think it was overly sincere. Plus, she really does hold views Labour shouldn't be associating itself with - look at what she said when Russia was invading Ukraine.
You couldn't really give her a peerage without it looking grubby in another way.
Yes, they've handled it badly. But let's not pretend this is someone who is entirely blameless getting the boot for factional reasons rather than someone who holds some pretty dismal views that are now, thankfully, not acceptable within Labour. Who Labour were in a quandary about dealing with in the harsh way might otherwise have done because she holds significance for other reasons.
Abbott's was not intended as antisemitism denial so much as claiming a special place for anti-Black racism. That is not to say it was not ill-advised or offensive but there is no mens rea as SKS might say.
Intent is difficult to judge. She apologised quite quickly - and maybe she was being truthful about it being an early draft. But I am sceptical.
The letter said this in relation to prejudice against Jews, travellers and the Irish: “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism”
That is a terrible view. I am a ginger and have been picked on at school (and still see and her slurs against redheads in the media). But at no point would I consider those minor barbs akin to those suffered by Jews, travellers and the Irish for simply existing. Which is what the letter seems to suggests. What a ridiculous view. I appreciate that there is an argument about where race begins (and so racism - I don’t buy it, but there is an argument), but I am certain my experience as ginger is not the same as those with the characteristics noted at the top of the letter.
Each racial characteristic that suffers from prejudices has its own history of disgraceful behaviour. For blacks I would see slavery as that key original crime. For Jews the holocaust. You could play the game of rating each other’s past suffering and playing it off against each other. But what would be the point of that? I also think different forms of racism manifest themselves in the modern world in different ways. But I think I could say that without doing down different types of racism. I would have hoped that Diane Abbot could have done that too.
You need to ask yourself the question if you had a forced choice between being Jewish or black in this country, which would you choose? If one is obviously preferable to the other, she surely has a point
No one is putting armed guards outside “black” schools in Britain
There are security guards outside at least one of the schools round here and it is neither Black nor Jewish. One of the Black churches near where I used to work had two ginormous bouncers outside during services. I'm not sure what your point is but doubt it is well-founded.
My point is obvious and you are either being stupid or wilfully stupid
I presume Harry Cole was ramping this one earlier today? Or maybe not...
NEW. The Labour Party has EXTENDED its lead over the Conservatives, according to the first exclusive YouGov poll of the campaign for Sky News
The Great Britain poll - conducted on Mon and Tue this week - puts Labour on 47%, the Tories on 20%, Reform on 12%, the LibDems on 9% and Greens on 7%.
There was lots of moronic poll ramping yesterday both on here and on Twitter. It needs to stop.
Hopium.
"No, it can't be true. I can't be so massively disconnected from what most people think.
The polls must all be wrong."
YouGov today Baxters to Tories 29 seats. The real puzzle is who is disconnected from what? Am I disconnected because I don't think this or something a bit like it will happen despite the evidence? "It can't be true" (though I don't mind if it is) is running through a multitude of PB minds.
I doubt Baxters model can cope with the current levels of Tory support, it's a given that there are some constituencies that will only ever elect a conservative no matter how low their overall support and that's more than 29, circa 100 feels a more likely rock bottom. It's also unlikely to be able to account for voter confusion over which party is the realistic challenger, voters won't be helped there by misinformation, whether that is deliberate bias or poor analysis.
Yeah, if your model is telling you "29 tory seats" you should be suspecting "model has been pushed outside its valid range" rather than "historically unprecedented wipeout incoming". It *could* be the latter, but the former is more likely to be what's going on.
I think 29 seats is a reasonable prediction for vote shares of 47-20 with FPTP.
Remember that in 2010, the Lib Dems received 23% of the vote, were only 6pp behind Labour and only 13.1pp behind the Tories, but won only 57 seats - and that only thanks to two decades of local campaigning to concentrate their vote enough to win seats.
If the Tories really do end up 27pp behind then it is almost inevitable that FPTP will produce something approaching a wipeout.
It's going to be hard to predict exactly what happens, the precedents don't really help us.
Attlee's 1945 landslide was based on a twelve point lead.
Thatcher beat Foot by fifteen percent.
Blair beat Major by twelve points and Hague by about nine.
We simply don't know what FPTP does at a lead in the high teens, let alone the twenties. But it's unlikely to be pretty.
What were the percentages in Canada when the Conservatives were wiped out? I’m too lazy to look them up myself!
London St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway goes from one gleaming new station to another gleaming new station
And it takes…. 24 minutes
And Luton Airport is ideally placed to serve an Oxford-Cambridge traffic corridor.
It’s now an excellent airport
Small enough to be easy to get around. Yet now modernised so it has nice shops and bars. Special gin bar! And ridiculously close to London’s best station - St Pancras. 24 minutes!l
😶😎
Does any other great global city have TWO airports less than 25 minutes by fast train from the centre?
We do moan about British infrastructure and HS2 is a planet sized calamity yet quietly we also get things done. Luton Airport is an example
Having said all that I will now probably suffer a 6 hour delay
We moan about British infrastructure, yes. And we wonder why London seems to get priority in almost every project and gets things done.
So move to london?! Get a nice airy garden flat in Primrose Hill or a little mews house near Portobello Road. It’s not like some clever trick we’re playing on everyone else - just get a nice gaff in The Smoke. Marylebone is also nice for townhouses or you could try a loft in Borough if you like that steampunk feel
Then you’d have all the benefits of London’s excellent infrastructure - plus galleries and restaurants and museums and the glorious parks
Derrrr. Yet you all decide to live in Newent or “Macclesfield” or Wick and then you moan
Not sure Truss should be doing what she’s doing but also not sure that the histrionic pearl clutching response from Jess is helpful. Although I get that she is just burnishing her brand credentials.
She's right. Pity she's not leader. She's got a touch of authenticity about her which I'm starting to think SKS hasn't.
I presume Harry Cole was ramping this one earlier today? Or maybe not...
NEW. The Labour Party has EXTENDED its lead over the Conservatives, according to the first exclusive YouGov poll of the campaign for Sky News
The Great Britain poll - conducted on Mon and Tue this week - puts Labour on 47%, the Tories on 20%, Reform on 12%, the LibDems on 9% and Greens on 7%.
There was lots of moronic poll ramping yesterday both on here and on Twitter. It needs to stop.
Hopium.
"No, it can't be true. I can't be so massively disconnected from what most people think.
The polls must all be wrong."
YouGov today Baxters to Tories 29 seats. The real puzzle is who is disconnected from what? Am I disconnected because I don't think this or something a bit like it will happen despite the evidence? "It can't be true" (though I don't mind if it is) is running through a multitude of PB minds.
I doubt Baxters model can cope with the current levels of Tory support, it's a given that there are some constituencies that will only ever elect a conservative no matter how low their overall support and that's more than 29, circa 100 feels a more likely rock bottom. It's also unlikely to be able to account for voter confusion over which party is the realistic challenger, voters won't be helped there by misinformation, whether that is deliberate bias or poor analysis.
Yeah, if your model is telling you "29 tory seats" you should be suspecting "model has been pushed outside its valid range" rather than "historically unprecedented wipeout incoming". It *could* be the latter, but the former is more likely to be what's going on.
I think 29 seats is a reasonable prediction for vote shares of 47-20 with FPTP.
Remember that in 2010, the Lib Dems received 23% of the vote, were only 6pp behind Labour and only 13.1pp behind the Tories, but won only 57 seats - and that only thanks to two decades of local campaigning to concentrate their vote enough to win seats.
If the Tories really do end up 27pp behind then it is almost inevitable that FPTP will produce something approaching a wipeout.
It's going to be hard to predict exactly what happens, the precedents don't really help us.
Attlee's 1945 landslide was based on a twelve point lead.
Thatcher beat Foot by fifteen percent.
Blair beat Major by twelve points and Hague by about nine.
We simply don't know what FPTP does at a lead in the high teens, let alone the twenties. But it's unlikely to be pretty.
What were the percentages in Canada when the Conservatives were wiped out? I’m too lazy to look them up myself!
2 seats on 16% of the vote. Reform got 52 seats on 19% of the vote. Bloc Québécois got 54 seats on 14% of the vote. The NDP got 9 seats on 7% of the vote. Classic FPTP.
London St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway goes from one gleaming new station to another gleaming new station
And it takes…. 24 minutes
And Luton Airport is ideally placed to serve an Oxford-Cambridge traffic corridor.
It’s now an excellent airport
Small enough to be easy to get around. Yet now modernised so it has nice shops and bars. Special gin bar! And ridiculously close to London’s best station - St Pancras. 24 minutes!l
😶😎
Does any other great global city have TWO airports less than 25 minutes by fast train from the centre?
We do moan about British infrastructure and HS2 is a planet sized calamity yet quietly we also get things done. Luton Airport is an example
Having said all that I will now probably suffer a 6 hour delay
We moan about British infrastructure, yes. And we wonder why London seems to get priority in almost every project and gets things done.
So move to london?! Get a nice airy garden flat in Primrose Hill or a little mews house near Portobello Road. It’s not like some clever trick we’re playing on everyone else - just get a nice gaff in The Smoke. Marylebone is also nice for townhouses or you could try a loft in Borough if you like that steampunk feel
Then you’d have all the benefits of London’s excellent infrastructure - plus galleries and restaurants and museums and the glorious parks
Derrrr. Yet you all decide to live in Newent or “Macclesfield” or Wick and then you moan
Come on, the Russian bots do better quality trolling than this drivel
London St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway goes from one gleaming new station to another gleaming new station
And it takes…. 24 minutes
And Luton Airport is ideally placed to serve an Oxford-Cambridge traffic corridor.
It’s now an excellent airport
Small enough to be easy to get around. Yet now modernised so it has nice shops and bars. Special gin bar! And ridiculously close to London’s best station - St Pancras. 24 minutes!l
😶😎
Does any other great global city have TWO airports less than 25 minutes by fast train from the centre?
We do moan about British infrastructure and HS2 is a planet sized calamity yet quietly we also get things done. Luton Airport is an example
Having said all that I will now probably suffer a 6 hour delay
We moan about British infrastructure, yes. And we wonder why London seems to get priority in almost every project and gets things done.
So move to london?! Get a nice airy garden flat in Primrose Hill or a little mews house near Portobello Road. It’s not like some clever trick we’re playing on everyone else - just get a nice gaff in The Smoke. Marylebone is also nice for townhouses or you could try a loft in Borough if you like that steampunk feel
Then you’d have all the benefits of London’s excellent infrastructure - plus galleries and restaurants and museums and the glorious parks
Derrrr. Yet you all decide to live in Newent or “Macclesfield” or Wick and then you moan
mews A middle class terrace.
Julie Andrews voice mews A noise, a noise a feline makes.
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
The Diane Abbott thing is definitely a screw up. It really should have been a polite we are happy to have you back but you are not well and 70 years old, there is a peerage of you retire quietly..
Should it be though? Abbott is understandably given leeway given her status as a historic figure - rightly in many senses. But what she said was egregious, it was hardly a first offence in terms of antisemitism denial, and though there was an apology, I'm not sure many on those on the wrong end of her comments think it was overly sincere. Plus, she really does hold views Labour shouldn't be associating itself with - look at what she said when Russia was invading Ukraine.
You couldn't really give her a peerage without it looking grubby in another way.
Yes, they've handled it badly. But let's not pretend this is someone who is entirely blameless getting the boot for factional reasons rather than someone who holds some pretty dismal views that are now, thankfully, not acceptable within Labour. Who Labour were in a quandary about dealing with in the harsh way might otherwise have done because she holds significance for other reasons.
Abbott's was not intended as antisemitism denial so much as claiming a special place for anti-Black racism. That is not to say it was not ill-advised or offensive but there is no mens rea as SKS might say.
Intent is difficult to judge. She apologised quite quickly - and maybe she was being truthful about it being an early draft. But I am sceptical.
The letter said this in relation to prejudice against Jews, travellers and the Irish: “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism”
That is a terrible view. I am a ginger and have been picked on at school (and still see and her slurs against redheads in the media). But at no point would I consider those minor barbs akin to those suffered by Jews, travellers and the Irish for simply existing. Which is what the letter seems to suggests. What a ridiculous view. I appreciate that there is an argument about where race begins (and so racism - I don’t buy it, but there is an argument), but I am certain my experience as ginger is not the same as those with the characteristics noted at the top of the letter.
Each racial characteristic that suffers from prejudices has its own history of disgraceful behaviour. For blacks I would see slavery as that key original crime. For Jews the holocaust. You could play the game of rating each other’s past suffering and playing it off against each other. But what would be the point of that? I also think different forms of racism manifest themselves in the modern world in different ways. But I think I could say that without doing down different types of racism. I would have hoped that Diane Abbot could have done that too.
Tbh I do not think Abbott meant any of that. Sfaict she was saying only that racists can identify Black people at a glance but have to be told who are Jewish or Travellers or Irish. The problem is it is both banal and easily susceptible to misinterpretation, which are just two reasons why it should never have been written (or drafted) let alone sent.
More in Common out at 4 today, will be interesting to see if the Adjusters/Forcers and Nowcasters continue to diverge or if Forcing does not show closing (in which case you 'might' argue adjusting looks iffy at this stage)
Just seen Liz Truss is 1/4 to retain her seat. Obviously there's a lot of negativity towards her but it's one of the safest seats in the country. Surely that price is a gift?
Yes. It's a safe seat for good reason - lots of homeowners, strong support of Brexit and social conservatism.
I expect it would be one of the surviving 29 seats were the Tories to be reduced that far.
London St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway goes from one gleaming new station to another gleaming new station
And it takes…. 24 minutes
And Luton Airport is ideally placed to serve an Oxford-Cambridge traffic corridor.
It’s now an excellent airport
Small enough to be easy to get around. Yet now modernised so it has nice shops and bars. Special gin bar! And ridiculously close to London’s best station - St Pancras. 24 minutes!l
😶😎
Does any other great global city have TWO airports less than 25 minutes by fast train from the centre?
We do moan about British infrastructure and HS2 is a planet sized calamity yet quietly we also get things done. Luton Airport is an example
Having said all that I will now probably suffer a 6 hour delay
We moan about British infrastructure, yes. And we wonder why London seems to get priority in almost every project and gets things done.
So move to london?! Get a nice airy garden flat in Primrose Hill or a little mews house near Portobello Road. It’s not like some clever trick we’re playing on everyone else - just get a nice gaff in The Smoke. Marylebone is also nice for townhouses or you could try a loft in Borough if you like that steampunk feel
Then you’d have all the benefits of London’s excellent infrastructure - plus galleries and restaurants and museums and the glorious parks
Derrrr. Yet you all decide to live in Newent or “Macclesfield” or Wick and then you moan
mews A middle class terrace.
Exactly. It’s middle class. Pleasant. Not beyond the dreams of avarice, not some aristocratic pile. Just buy a little 3 bed mews in Holland Park or Bayswater, then you too can enjoy the 24 minute rail journey to Luton airport instead of living in “the north” and moaning
🔴 HACKNEY HORTH & STOKE NEWINGTON (Lab 18th safest): I'm told that Hackney councillor & deputy mayor Anntoinette Bramble is the Starmerites' chosen candidate for Diane Abbott's seat. So Luke Akehurst may have to look elsewhere.
London St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway goes from one gleaming new station to another gleaming new station
And it takes…. 24 minutes
And Luton Airport is ideally placed to serve an Oxford-Cambridge traffic corridor.
It’s now an excellent airport
Small enough to be easy to get around. Yet now modernised so it has nice shops and bars. Special gin bar! And ridiculously close to London’s best station - St Pancras. 24 minutes!l
😶😎
Does any other great global city have TWO airports less than 25 minutes by fast train from the centre?
We do moan about British infrastructure and HS2 is a planet sized calamity yet quietly we also get things done. Luton Airport is an example
Having said all that I will now probably suffer a 6 hour delay
We moan about British infrastructure, yes. And we wonder why London seems to get priority in almost every project and gets things done.
So move to london?! Get a nice airy garden flat in Primrose Hill or a little mews house near Portobello Road. It’s not like some clever trick we’re playing on everyone else - just get a nice gaff in The Smoke. Marylebone is also nice for townhouses or you could try a loft in Borough if you like that steampunk feel
Then you’d have all the benefits of London’s excellent infrastructure - plus galleries and restaurants and museums and the glorious parks
Derrrr. Yet you all decide to live in Newent or “Macclesfield” or Wick and then you moan
Come on, the Russian bots do better quality trolling than this drivel
dă-te dracu’ cu prostuțul nemțotic
Whatever.
But to call your current output 'Poundshop Jeremy Clarkson' would be an insult to both the Poundshop and Clarkson.
I presume Harry Cole was ramping this one earlier today? Or maybe not...
NEW. The Labour Party has EXTENDED its lead over the Conservatives, according to the first exclusive YouGov poll of the campaign for Sky News
The Great Britain poll - conducted on Mon and Tue this week - puts Labour on 47%, the Tories on 20%, Reform on 12%, the LibDems on 9% and Greens on 7%.
There was lots of moronic poll ramping yesterday both on here and on Twitter. It needs to stop.
Hopium.
"No, it can't be true. I can't be so massively disconnected from what most people think.
The polls must all be wrong."
YouGov today Baxters to Tories 29 seats. The real puzzle is who is disconnected from what? Am I disconnected because I don't think this or something a bit like it will happen despite the evidence? "It can't be true" (though I don't mind if it is) is running through a multitude of PB minds.
I doubt Baxters model can cope with the current levels of Tory support, it's a given that there are some constituencies that will only ever elect a conservative no matter how low their overall support and that's more than 29, circa 100 feels a more likely rock bottom. It's also unlikely to be able to account for voter confusion over which party is the realistic challenger, voters won't be helped there by misinformation, whether that is deliberate bias or poor analysis.
Yeah, if your model is telling you "29 tory seats" you should be suspecting "model has been pushed outside its valid range" rather than "historically unprecedented wipeout incoming". It *could* be the latter, but the former is more likely to be what's going on.
I think 29 seats is a reasonable prediction for vote shares of 47-20 with FPTP.
Remember that in 2010, the Lib Dems received 23% of the vote, were only 6pp behind Labour and only 13.1pp behind the Tories, but won only 57 seats - and that only thanks to two decades of local campaigning to concentrate their vote enough to win seats.
If the Tories really do end up 27pp behind then it is almost inevitable that FPTP will produce something approaching a wipeout.
It's going to be hard to predict exactly what happens, the precedents don't really help us.
Attlee's 1945 landslide was based on a twelve point lead.
Thatcher beat Foot by fifteen percent.
Blair beat Major by twelve points and Hague by about nine.
We simply don't know what FPTP does at a lead in the high teens, let alone the twenties. But it's unlikely to be pretty.
What were the percentages in Canada when the Conservatives were wiped out? I’m too lazy to look them up myself!
16%. Reform only got nineteen, but it was much more efficient. One of RefUK's problems is not really having a geographic base. Worse, to the extent that they do (Kent to Essex to Lincolnshire), it's where the Conservatives are also most likely to survive.
The airline I am trying to use is even worse than Wizz
Virtual PB points to anyone who can guess
Flyone - enjoy Chișinău and Moldova...
Spot on
Felicitări
Are the Gazette sending you to do a piece in Moldova? Will you be comparing the Moldova of today to that portrayed in what is I think the classic (indeed, possibly, only) example of Moldovan travel writing: Tony Hawks' "Playing the Moldovans at Tennis"?
I am an Official Guest of the Moldovan Government
Seat: 1A
HAS ANY OTHER PB-ER BEEN AN OFFICIAL GUEST OF THE MOLDOVAN GOVERNMENT SO THEY GOT SEAT 1A TO CHISINAU?!
And having been mean about Flyone just now (and they cancelled a plane on me last year at the last moment and never refunded) this is all going smoothly. Well done Flyone - probably the best airline in Europe
I once was given seat "1A" on a KLM flight. 1A didn't exist - it was the wardrobe for business passenger's coats. Luckily another business section seat was free.
London St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway goes from one gleaming new station to another gleaming new station
And it takes…. 24 minutes
And Luton Airport is ideally placed to serve an Oxford-Cambridge traffic corridor.
It’s now an excellent airport
Small enough to be easy to get around. Yet now modernised so it has nice shops and bars. Special gin bar! And ridiculously close to London’s best station - St Pancras. 24 minutes!l
😶😎
Does any other great global city have TWO airports less than 25 minutes by fast train from the centre?
We do moan about British infrastructure and HS2 is a planet sized calamity yet quietly we also get things done. Luton Airport is an example
Having said all that I will now probably suffer a 6 hour delay
We moan about British infrastructure, yes. And we wonder why London seems to get priority in almost every project and gets things done.
So move to london?! Get a nice airy garden flat in Primrose Hill or a little mews house near Portobello Road. It’s not like some clever trick we’re playing on everyone else - just get a nice gaff in The Smoke. Marylebone is also nice for townhouses or you could try a loft in Borough if you like that steampunk feel
Then you’d have all the benefits of London’s excellent infrastructure - plus galleries and restaurants and museums and the glorious parks
Derrrr. Yet you all decide to live in Newent or “Macclesfield” or Wick and then you moan
Come on, the Russian bots do better quality trolling than this drivel
dă-te dracu’ cu prostuțul nemțotic
Whatever.
But to call your current output 'Poundshop Jeremy Clarkson' would be an insult to both the Poundshop and Clarkson.
I'm sure you can do better.
Let’s face it. You did Google translate didn’t you?
The air stewardesses on Flyone are outstandingly lovely. It’s probably the most glamorous job in Moldova
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
The Diane Abbott thing is definitely a screw up. It really should have been a polite we are happy to have you back but you are not well and 70 years old, there is a peerage of you retire quietly..
Should it be though? Abbott is understandably given leeway given her status as a historic figure - rightly in many senses. But what she said was egregious, it was hardly a first offence in terms of antisemitism denial, and though there was an apology, I'm not sure many on those on the wrong end of her comments think it was overly sincere. Plus, she really does hold views Labour shouldn't be associating itself with - look at what she said when Russia was invading Ukraine.
You couldn't really give her a peerage without it looking grubby in another way.
Yes, they've handled it badly. But let's not pretend this is someone who is entirely blameless getting the boot for factional reasons rather than someone who holds some pretty dismal views that are now, thankfully, not acceptable within Labour. Who Labour were in a quandary about dealing with in the harsh way might otherwise have done because she holds significance for other reasons.
Abbott's was not intended as antisemitism denial so much as claiming a special place for anti-Black racism. That is not to say it was not ill-advised or offensive but there is no mens rea as SKS might say.
Intent is difficult to judge. She apologised quite quickly - and maybe she was being truthful about it being an early draft. But I am sceptical.
The letter said this in relation to prejudice against Jews, travellers and the Irish: “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism”
That is a terrible view. I am a ginger and have been picked on at school (and still see and her slurs against redheads in the media). But at no point would I consider those minor barbs akin to those suffered by Jews, travellers and the Irish for simply existing. Which is what the letter seems to suggests. What a ridiculous view. I appreciate that there is an argument about where race begins (and so racism - I don’t buy it, but there is an argument), but I am certain my experience as ginger is not the same as those with the characteristics noted at the top of the letter.
Each racial characteristic that suffers from prejudices has its own history of disgraceful behaviour. For blacks I would see slavery as that key original crime. For Jews the holocaust. You could play the game of rating each other’s past suffering and playing it off against each other. But what would be the point of that? I also think different forms of racism manifest themselves in the modern world in different ways. But I think I could say that without doing down different types of racism. I would have hoped that Diane Abbot could have done that too.
Tbh I do not think Abbott meant any of that. Sfaict she was saying only that racists can identify Black people at a glance but have to be told who are Jewish or Travellers or Irish. The problem is it is both banal and easily susceptible to misinterpretation, which are just two reasons why it should never have been written (or drafted) let alone sent.
It was a mistake on her part for sure but equally I don't think anyone on here can even imagine the sheer volume of shit that she has had to deal with for decades simply for having the temerity to be an outspoken black woman in public life. Personally I think she has been treated rather shabbily, a victim of Labour factionalism, blowback from Corbyn's disastrous leadership, and a country that is still in denial about the extent of anti-black prejudice.
London St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway goes from one gleaming new station to another gleaming new station
And it takes…. 24 minutes
And Luton Airport is ideally placed to serve an Oxford-Cambridge traffic corridor.
It’s now an excellent airport
Small enough to be easy to get around. Yet now modernised so it has nice shops and bars. Special gin bar! And ridiculously close to London’s best station - St Pancras. 24 minutes!l
😶😎
Does any other great global city have TWO airports less than 25 minutes by fast train from the centre?
We do moan about British infrastructure and HS2 is a planet sized calamity yet quietly we also get things done. Luton Airport is an example
Having said all that I will now probably suffer a 6 hour delay
We moan about British infrastructure, yes. And we wonder why London seems to get priority in almost every project and gets things done.
So move to london?! Get a nice airy garden flat in Primrose Hill or a little mews house near Portobello Road. It’s not like some clever trick we’re playing on everyone else - just get a nice gaff in The Smoke. Marylebone is also nice for townhouses or you could try a loft in Borough if you like that steampunk feel
Then you’d have all the benefits of London’s excellent infrastructure - plus galleries and restaurants and museums and the glorious parks
Derrrr. Yet you all decide to live in Newent or “Macclesfield” or Wick and then you moan
mews A middle class terrace.
Exactly. It’s middle class. Pleasant. Not beyond the dreams of avarice, not some aristocratic pile. Just buy a little 3 bed mews in Holland Park or Bayswater, then you too can enjoy the 24 minute rail journey to Luton airport instead of living in “the north” and moaning
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
The Diane Abbott thing is definitely a screw up. It really should have been a polite we are happy to have you back but you are not well and 70 years old, there is a peerage of you retire quietly..
Should it be though? Abbott is understandably given leeway given her status as a historic figure - rightly in many senses. But what she said was egregious, it was hardly a first offence in terms of antisemitism denial, and though there was an apology, I'm not sure many on those on the wrong end of her comments think it was overly sincere. Plus, she really does hold views Labour shouldn't be associating itself with - look at what she said when Russia was invading Ukraine.
You couldn't really give her a peerage without it looking grubby in another way.
Yes, they've handled it badly. But let's not pretend this is someone who is entirely blameless getting the boot for factional reasons rather than someone who holds some pretty dismal views that are now, thankfully, not acceptable within Labour. Who Labour were in a quandary about dealing with in the harsh way might otherwise have done because she holds significance for other reasons.
Abbott's was not intended as antisemitism denial so much as claiming a special place for anti-Black racism. That is not to say it was not ill-advised or offensive but there is no mens rea as SKS might say.
Intent is difficult to judge. She apologised quite quickly - and maybe she was being truthful about it being an early draft. But I am sceptical.
The letter said this in relation to prejudice against Jews, travellers and the Irish: “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism”
That is a terrible view. I am a ginger and have been picked on at school (and still see and her slurs against redheads in the media). But at no point would I consider those minor barbs akin to those suffered by Jews, travellers and the Irish for simply existing. Which is what the letter seems to suggests. What a ridiculous view. I appreciate that there is an argument about where race begins (and so racism - I don’t buy it, but there is an argument), but I am certain my experience as ginger is not the same as those with the characteristics noted at the top of the letter.
Each racial characteristic that suffers from prejudices has its own history of disgraceful behaviour. For blacks I would see slavery as that key original crime. For Jews the holocaust. You could play the game of rating each other’s past suffering and playing it off against each other. But what would be the point of that? I also think different forms of racism manifest themselves in the modern world in different ways. But I think I could say that without doing down different types of racism. I would have hoped that Diane Abbot could have done that too.
Tbh I do not think Abbott meant any of that. Sfaict she was saying only that racists can identify Black people at a glance but have to be told who are Jewish or Travellers or Irish. The problem is it is both banal and easily susceptible to misinterpretation, which are just two reasons why it should never have been written (or drafted) let alone sent.
It was a mistake on her part for sure but equally I don't think anyone on here can even imagine the sheer volume of shit that she has had to deal with for decades simply for having the temerity to be an outspoken black woman in public life. Personally I think she has been treated rather shabbily, a victim of Labour factionalism, blowback from Corbyn's disastrous leadership, and a country that is still in denial about the extent of anti-black prejudice.
The lengthy delay to her investigation makes no sense. What was there to investigate? They had Abbott's letter and her apology. You talk to her. You make a decision. Why did this take longer than a month?
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
The Diane Abbott thing is definitely a screw up. It really should have been a polite we are happy to have you back but you are not well and 70 years old, there is a peerage of you retire quietly..
Should it be though? Abbott is understandably given leeway given her status as a historic figure - rightly in many senses. But what she said was egregious, it was hardly a first offence in terms of antisemitism denial, and though there was an apology, I'm not sure many on those on the wrong end of her comments think it was overly sincere. Plus, she really does hold views Labour shouldn't be associating itself with - look at what she said when Russia was invading Ukraine.
You couldn't really give her a peerage without it looking grubby in another way.
Yes, they've handled it badly. But let's not pretend this is someone who is entirely blameless getting the boot for factional reasons rather than someone who holds some pretty dismal views that are now, thankfully, not acceptable within Labour. Who Labour were in a quandary about dealing with in the harsh way might otherwise have done because she holds significance for other reasons.
Abbott's was not intended as antisemitism denial so much as claiming a special place for anti-Black racism. That is not to say it was not ill-advised or offensive but there is no mens rea as SKS might say.
Intent is difficult to judge. She apologised quite quickly - and maybe she was being truthful about it being an early draft. But I am sceptical.
The letter said this in relation to prejudice against Jews, travellers and the Irish: “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism”
That is a terrible view. I am a ginger and have been picked on at school (and still see and her slurs against redheads in the media). But at no point would I consider those minor barbs akin to those suffered by Jews, travellers and the Irish for simply existing. Which is what the letter seems to suggests. What a ridiculous view. I appreciate that there is an argument about where race begins (and so racism - I don’t buy it, but there is an argument), but I am certain my experience as ginger is not the same as those with the characteristics noted at the top of the letter.
Each racial characteristic that suffers from prejudices has its own history of disgraceful behaviour. For blacks I would see slavery as that key original crime. For Jews the holocaust. You could play the game of rating each other’s past suffering and playing it off against each other. But what would be the point of that? I also think different forms of racism manifest themselves in the modern world in different ways. But I think I could say that without doing down different types of racism. I would have hoped that Diane Abbot could have done that too.
Tbh I do not think Abbott meant any of that. Sfaict she was saying only that racists can identify Black people at a glance but have to be told who are Jewish or Travellers or Irish. The problem is it is both banal and easily susceptible to misinterpretation, which are just two reasons why it should never have been written (or drafted) let alone sent.
And I suspect, to her credit, she is "taking the rap" for an incompetent/over-zealous/inexperienced member of her staff.
I presume Harry Cole was ramping this one earlier today? Or maybe not...
NEW. The Labour Party has EXTENDED its lead over the Conservatives, according to the first exclusive YouGov poll of the campaign for Sky News
The Great Britain poll - conducted on Mon and Tue this week - puts Labour on 47%, the Tories on 20%, Reform on 12%, the LibDems on 9% and Greens on 7%.
There was lots of moronic poll ramping yesterday both on here and on Twitter. It needs to stop.
Hopium.
"No, it can't be true. I can't be so massively disconnected from what most people think.
The polls must all be wrong."
YouGov today Baxters to Tories 29 seats. The real puzzle is who is disconnected from what? Am I disconnected because I don't think this or something a bit like it will happen despite the evidence? "It can't be true" (though I don't mind if it is) is running through a multitude of PB minds.
I doubt Baxters model can cope with the current levels of Tory support, it's a given that there are some constituencies that will only ever elect a conservative no matter how low their overall support and that's more than 29, circa 100 feels a more likely rock bottom. It's also unlikely to be able to account for voter confusion over which party is the realistic challenger, voters won't be helped there by misinformation, whether that is deliberate bias or poor analysis.
Yeah, if your model is telling you "29 tory seats" you should be suspecting "model has been pushed outside its valid range" rather than "historically unprecedented wipeout incoming". It *could* be the latter, but the former is more likely to be what's going on.
I think 29 seats is a reasonable prediction for vote shares of 47-20 with FPTP.
Remember that in 2010, the Lib Dems received 23% of the vote, were only 6pp behind Labour and only 13.1pp behind the Tories, but won only 57 seats - and that only thanks to two decades of local campaigning to concentrate their vote enough to win seats.
If the Tories really do end up 27pp behind then it is almost inevitable that FPTP will produce something approaching a wipeout.
It's going to be hard to predict exactly what happens, the precedents don't really help us.
Attlee's 1945 landslide was based on a twelve point lead.
Thatcher beat Foot by fifteen percent.
Blair beat Major by twelve points and Hague by about nine.
We simply don't know what FPTP does at a lead in the high teens, let alone the twenties. But it's unlikely to be pretty.
The 1931 general election is the nearest we have. Labour, on 30.6% of the vote won only 52 seats, 24.4pp behind the Tories - but it was messy. The Tories only stood in 518 of the 615 candidates, because they stood aside for some of the National Liberal/Labour/etc candidates, but there were 694 candidates from parties in the National government, and Labour only stood in 516 seats, if you include the Independent Labour Party, etc.
I would say that, in general, the Labour vote is more concentrated than the Tory vote - i.e. at equal national vote shares I would expect Labour to have a large majority of the seats with the highest vote share for any one party. So this would mean Labour would cope better in such a wipeout scenario.
Just seen Liz Truss is 1/4 to retain her seat. Obviously there's a lot of negativity towards her but it's one of the safest seats in the country. Surely that price is a gift?
Yes. It's a safe seat for good reason - lots of homeowners, strong support of Brexit and social conservatism.
I expect it would be one of the surviving 29 seats were the Tories to be reduced that far.
Maybe, if she is one of the only ones left, Ms Truss will take up the banner and lead the Conservative Party once again.....
London St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway goes from one gleaming new station to another gleaming new station
And it takes…. 24 minutes
And Luton Airport is ideally placed to serve an Oxford-Cambridge traffic corridor.
It’s now an excellent airport
Small enough to be easy to get around. Yet now modernised so it has nice shops and bars. Special gin bar! And ridiculously close to London’s best station - St Pancras. 24 minutes!l
😶😎
Does any other great global city have TWO airports less than 25 minutes by fast train from the centre?
We do moan about British infrastructure and HS2 is a planet sized calamity yet quietly we also get things done. Luton Airport is an example
Having said all that I will now probably suffer a 6 hour delay
We moan about British infrastructure, yes. And we wonder why London seems to get priority in almost every project and gets things done.
So move to london?! Get a nice airy garden flat in Primrose Hill or a little mews house near Portobello Road. It’s not like some clever trick we’re playing on everyone else - just get a nice gaff in The Smoke. Marylebone is also nice for townhouses or you could try a loft in Borough if you like that steampunk feel
Then you’d have all the benefits of London’s excellent infrastructure - plus galleries and restaurants and museums and the glorious parks
Derrrr. Yet you all decide to live in Newent or “Macclesfield” or Wick and then you moan
mews A middle class terrace.
Exactly. It’s middle class. Pleasant. Not beyond the dreams of avarice, not some aristocratic pile. Just buy a little 3 bed mews in Holland Park or Bayswater, then you too can enjoy the 24 minute rail journey to Luton airport instead of living in “the north” and moaning
YouGov have the Tories on 8% with under 50s. That's.... that's a bold call. Even Techne with their 19% VI were way above this The results will shed some real light on where the pollsters are on to something and where they're flailing. There are some fascinating discrepancies - Techne and R&W flatter age curve with Lab winning over 65s, YouGov Tory under 50 extinction, the adjusters...... there's a lot going on
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
The Diane Abbott thing is definitely a screw up. It really should have been a polite we are happy to have you back but you are not well and 70 years old, there is a peerage of you retire quietly..
Should it be though? Abbott is understandably given leeway given her status as a historic figure - rightly in many senses. But what she said was egregious, it was hardly a first offence in terms of antisemitism denial, and though there was an apology, I'm not sure many on those on the wrong end of her comments think it was overly sincere. Plus, she really does hold views Labour shouldn't be associating itself with - look at what she said when Russia was invading Ukraine.
You couldn't really give her a peerage without it looking grubby in another way.
Yes, they've handled it badly. But let's not pretend this is someone who is entirely blameless getting the boot for factional reasons rather than someone who holds some pretty dismal views that are now, thankfully, not acceptable within Labour. Who Labour were in a quandary about dealing with in the harsh way might otherwise have done because she holds significance for other reasons.
Abbott's was not intended as antisemitism denial so much as claiming a special place for anti-Black racism. That is not to say it was not ill-advised or offensive but there is no mens rea as SKS might say.
Intent is difficult to judge. She apologised quite quickly - and maybe she was being truthful about it being an early draft. But I am sceptical.
The letter said this in relation to prejudice against Jews, travellers and the Irish: “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism”
That is a terrible view. I am a ginger and have been picked on at school (and still see and her slurs against redheads in the media). But at no point would I consider those minor barbs akin to those suffered by Jews, travellers and the Irish for simply existing. Which is what the letter seems to suggests. What a ridiculous view. I appreciate that there is an argument about where race begins (and so racism - I don’t buy it, but there is an argument), but I am certain my experience as ginger is not the same as those with the characteristics noted at the top of the letter.
Each racial characteristic that suffers from prejudices has its own history of disgraceful behaviour. For blacks I would see slavery as that key original crime. For Jews the holocaust. You could play the game of rating each other’s past suffering and playing it off against each other. But what would be the point of that? I also think different forms of racism manifest themselves in the modern world in different ways. But I think I could say that without doing down different types of racism. I would have hoped that Diane Abbot could have done that too.
Tbh I do not think Abbott meant any of that. Sfaict she was saying only that racists can identify Black people at a glance but have to be told who are Jewish or Travellers or Irish. The problem is it is both banal and easily susceptible to misinterpretation, which are just two reasons why it should never have been written (or drafted) let alone sent.
It was a mistake on her part for sure but equally I don't think anyone on here can even imagine the sheer volume of shit that she has had to deal with for decades simply for having the temerity to be an outspoken black woman in public life. Personally I think she has been treated rather shabbily, a victim of Labour factionalism, blowback from Corbyn's disastrous leadership, and a country that is still in denial about the extent of anti-black prejudice.
The lengthy delay to her investigation makes no sense. What was there to investigate? They had Abbott's letter and her apology. You talk to her. You make a decision. Why did this take longer than a month?
Again - dementia might explain this weirdness. I sincerely hope I’m totally wrong
I have a question. In Hitchin, there are two serving MPs running for election. I assume that has happened before, but I can't seem to find any articles about it on the internet. Can anyone think of any examples?
A few examples spring to mind.
Islington North 1983 Islington in the 1970s and early 1980s was fraught with differences between a left-wing activist base and centrist Labour MPs. All three Islington Labour MPs, Michael O'Halloran (North), John Grant (Central) and George Cunningham (South and Finsbury) defected to the SDP in 1981 and 1982. Unfortunately for them there were boundary changes in 1983 and Islington was reduced from three seats down to two with Central being split up between the others. Cunningham was selected for Islington South and Finsbury, to lose to Chris Smith by less than 400 votes, and Grant was selected for Islington North. This left O'Halloran out in the cold and he decided to quit the SDP and stand in North as Independent Labour. The split of the vote didn't cause Corbyn's win, Labour's 14,900 was still more than Grant's 8,200 and O'Halloran's 4,100 put together. This is the only one I can think of where two sitting MPs have stood against each other and they have both lost.
South Hams 1987 This election resulted in a change in the rules for retiring MPs. Willie Hamilton was the famously republican Labour MP for Central Fife, first elected to Parliament in 1950. Coming up to the 1987 election he was now 70 and looking to retire. But if you just stood down you didn't get the loss-of-office payment you got if you were defeated at the election. There was no chance of losing in Central Fife so Hamilton looked for the most hopeless seat possible and found it in South Hams in Devon. The local CLP adopted him as their candidate and he did quite well, increasing the Labour vote to over 5,000 but still a very distant 3rd behind the sitting MP Anthony Steen and the Liberal candidate. Hamilton got his extra payment, mission accomplished and moved into retirement. The rules were then changed to prevent that happening again, now MPs only get loss-of-office if they stand and lose in their own seat. This was something that annoyed Angela Smith (the Yorkshire one) when she moved via Change UK to the Liberal Democrats in 2019, the Lib Dems already had selected a candidate for her Penistone and Stockbridge seat so she fought and lost in Altrincham and Sale West without getting the loss-of-office payment.
Brent Central 2010 A more mundane one to finish and there must be several examples of this post boundary changes. Brent and Camden moved from five seats to four and so Sarah Teather, Liberal Democrat MP for Brent East, faced off against Dawn Butler, Labour MP for Brent South in the new Brent Central seat. Teather won, with 20,000 votes versus Butler's 18,600. Butler then won the seat after Teather stood down in 2015.
Some of you are a wee bit harsh about JL Partners. They aren't just a US firm who have done only 3 polls in the UK. They very much have British roots - indeed their research was responsible in many ways for the timing and nature of Theresa May's 2017 campaign. Ah....
Having said that - JLP's methods and headline numbers might be wrong but that shouldn't impact their trend. That is a movement to the Cons which most other pollsters do not match. (Opinium being the highly clutchable straw for those wishing to do so). A movement which would be welcome for the Govt but is far too little to save them.
The Clutch Brompton view is that the Lab lead is somewhere between 12 and 27%. You are all welcome - perhaps I should set up a Patreon?
London St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway goes from one gleaming new station to another gleaming new station
And it takes…. 24 minutes
And Luton Airport is ideally placed to serve an Oxford-Cambridge traffic corridor.
It’s now an excellent airport
Small enough to be easy to get around. Yet now modernised so it has nice shops and bars. Special gin bar! And ridiculously close to London’s best station - St Pancras. 24 minutes!l
😶😎
Does any other great global city have TWO airports less than 25 minutes by fast train from the centre?
We do moan about British infrastructure and HS2 is a planet sized calamity yet quietly we also get things done. Luton Airport is an example
Having said all that I will now probably suffer a 6 hour delay
We moan about British infrastructure, yes. And we wonder why London seems to get priority in almost every project and gets things done.
So move to london?! Get a nice airy garden flat in Primrose Hill or a little mews house near Portobello Road. It’s not like some clever trick we’re playing on everyone else - just get a nice gaff in The Smoke. Marylebone is also nice for townhouses or you could try a loft in Borough if you like that steampunk feel
Then you’d have all the benefits of London’s excellent infrastructure - plus galleries and restaurants and museums and the glorious parks
Derrrr. Yet you all decide to live in Newent or “Macclesfield” or Wick and then you moan
mews A middle class terrace.
Exactly. It’s middle class. Pleasant. Not beyond the dreams of avarice, not some aristocratic pile. Just buy a little 3 bed mews in Holland Park or Bayswater, then you too can enjoy the 24 minute rail journey to Luton airport instead of living in “the north” and moaning
Just announced: Sweden will donate a new military capability to strengthen Ukraine’s air defence. Package 16 will be the largest 🇸🇪 military aid package yet at €1,16bln. Sweden will donate Airborne Surveillance and Control aircraft (ASC 890) to 🇺🇦. (1/6) https://x.com/PlJonson/status/1795717608010105241
If the west had done all this shit a year earlier, and decided to give F16s back when DuraAce first started saying it would be futile, Russia wouldn't be able to get within glide-bomb distance of the the front line. And would probably be thinking of giving up by now.
London St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway goes from one gleaming new station to another gleaming new station
And it takes…. 24 minutes
And Luton Airport is ideally placed to serve an Oxford-Cambridge traffic corridor.
It’s now an excellent airport
Small enough to be easy to get around. Yet now modernised so it has nice shops and bars. Special gin bar! And ridiculously close to London’s best station - St Pancras. 24 minutes!l
😶😎
Does any other great global city have TWO airports less than 25 minutes by fast train from the centre?
We do moan about British infrastructure and HS2 is a planet sized calamity yet quietly we also get things done. Luton Airport is an example
Having said all that I will now probably suffer a 6 hour delay
I'm old enough to remember, just, when you were complaining that it took 24 mins. (And that doesn't count the Brio toy railway they call a shuttle.)
The airline I am trying to use is even worse than Wizz
Virtual PB points to anyone who can guess
Flyone - enjoy Chișinău and Moldova...
Spot on
Felicitări
Are the Gazette sending you to do a piece in Moldova? Will you be comparing the Moldova of today to that portrayed in what is I think the classic (indeed, possibly, only) example of Moldovan travel writing: Tony Hawks' "Playing the Moldovans at Tennis"?
I am an Official Guest of the Moldovan Government
Seat: 1A
HAS ANY OTHER PB-ER BEEN AN OFFICIAL GUEST OF THE MOLDOVAN GOVERNMENT SO THEY GOT SEAT 1A TO CHISINAU?!
And having been mean about Flyone just now (and they cancelled a plane on me last year at the last moment and never refunded) this is all going smoothly. Well done Flyone - probably the best airline in Europe
Ahem. :-) Calatorie placuta. Bucurați-vă de vinuri, dar nu în exces, și descoperiți cât de ușor este limba română
Some of you are a wee bit harsh about JL Partners. They aren't just a US firm who have done only 3 polls in the UK. They very much have British roots - indeed their research was responsible in many ways for the timing and nature of Theresa May's 2017 campaign. Ah....
Having said that - JLP's methods and headline numbers might be wrong but that shouldn't impact their trend. That is a movement to the Cons which most other pollsters do not match. (Opinium being the highly clutchable straw for those wishing to do so). A movement which would be welcome for the Govt but is far too little to save them.
The Clutch Brompton view is that the Lab lead is somewhere between 12 and 27%. You are all welcome - perhaps I should set up a Patreon?
Except each model has it's own model so is it really valid to follow the trend when their model is both inconsistent and displays a trend that is counter to what others (albeit nowcasts) are showing.
Don’t knows are imputed “within survey” meaning that each survey has its own bespoke model This allows us to leverage policy based questions within each survey which can be a better indicator and previous vote The basic principle is to build a random forest model which models vote intention for those who have or would not vote. The model takes into account individuals age, gender, qualifications, socio-economic group, tenure well as their responses to survey questions and then model their voting intention. This implicitly assumes that those who say they don’t know can be imputed from their policy stance demographics factors “In survey” methods are used at the moment as we do not have a homogeneous set of policy questions doing a good job as PM) As we move to a set of questions we ask consistently we can build a model which runs over multiple However, we will use a sliding window of data to run such models as it is assumed that “don’t know” time-dependent and we want to capture this as the election progresses. This is something we can track on a weekly basis and show how those who reply “don’t know” are Ultimately, we would hope to have a sliding window of 4 weeks worth of data to build the don’t know Note that the model can amplify panel based effects, e.g. it imputes Yonder as more Labour-y, so using panels would be best in order to mitigate any amplification of biases. Turnout This model does not use policy questions - we need to run the census data through it so we are limited we can control for This model begins by taking self-reported propensity to vote and imposes a hard cut-off at 9 such 9 or 10 are classed as “voters” - 0 representing those scoring 8 or below and 1 for those scoring 9 A random forest classifier is then built using this 0/1 variable as the value we try to predict This model controls for a variety of constituency level effects as well as age, gender, qualifications, group, tenure and previous vote. We do not include vote intention as an indicator as this will introduce increased computational complexity calculations and there is not much evidence that it improves the model. The model returns a predicted class for each person (0 or 1) as well as the probability of being in a turnout figure we use is the probability of the model predicting 1. For example, we may predict a young woman living in London who rents, is in SEG AB and voted Labour previously is 0. But the probability the turnout for this group of people would be estimated at 43%. This model appears to give a reasonable estimate of turnout as a % of the total voting population The model also predicts that Labour voters are less likely to vote and Conservatives are more likely to vote.
I have a question. In Hitchin, there are two serving MPs running for election. I assume that has happened before, but I can't seem to find any articles about it on the internet. Can anyone think of any examples?
A few examples spring to mind.
Islington North 1983 Islington in the 1970s and early 1980s was fraught with differences between a left-wing activist base and centrist Labour MPs. All three Islington Labour MPs, Michael O'Halloran (North), John Grant (Central) and George Cunningham (South and Finsbury) defected to the SDP in 1981 and 1982. Unfortunately for them there were boundary changes in 1983 and Islington was reduced from three seats down to two with Central being split up between the others. Cunningham was selected for Islington South and Finsbury, to lose to Chris Smith by less than 400 votes, and Grant was selected for Islington North. This left O'Halloran out in the cold and he decided to quit the SDP and stand in North as Independent Labour. The split of the vote didn't cause Corbyn's win, Labour's 14,900 was still more than Grant's 8,200 and O'Halloran's 4,100 put together. This is the only one I can think of where two sitting MPs have stood against each other and they have both lost.
South Hams 1987 This election resulted in a change in the rules for retiring MPs. Willie Hamilton was the famously republican Labour MP for Central Fife, first elected to Parliament in 1950. Coming up to the 1987 election he was now 70 and looking to retire. But if you just stood down you didn't get the loss-of-office payment you got if you were defeated at the election. There was no chance of losing in Central Fife so Hamilton looked for the most hopeless seat possible and found it in South Hams in Devon. The local CLP adopted him as their candidate and he did quite well, increasing the Labour vote to over 5,000 but still a very distant 3rd behind the sitting MP Anthony Steen and the Liberal candidate. Hamilton got his extra payment, mission accomplished and moved into retirement. The rules were then changed to prevent that happening again, now MPs only get loss-of-office if they stand and lose in their own seat. This was something that annoyed Angela Smith (the Yorkshire one) when she moved via Change UK to the Liberal Democrats in 2019, the Lib Dems already had selected a candidate for her Penistone and Stockbridge seat so she fought and lost in Altrincham and Sale West without getting the loss-of-office payment.
Brent Central 2010 A more mundane one to finish and there must be several examples of this post boundary changes. Brent and Camden moved from five seats to four and so Sarah Teather, Liberal Democrat MP for Brent East, faced off against Dawn Butler, Labour MP for Brent South in the new Brent Central seat. Teather won, with 20,000 votes versus Butler's 18,600. Butler then won the seat after Teather stood down in 2015.
In 1983 Frank Hooley, MP for Sheffield Healey, was deselected by Labour and so ran in Stratford on Avon in order to get his redundancy payment, but he wasn't opposing a sitting MP there.
London St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway goes from one gleaming new station to another gleaming new station
And it takes…. 24 minutes
And Luton Airport is ideally placed to serve an Oxford-Cambridge traffic corridor.
It’s now an excellent airport
Small enough to be easy to get around. Yet now modernised so it has nice shops and bars. Special gin bar! And ridiculously close to London’s best station - St Pancras. 24 minutes!l
😶😎
Does any other great global city have TWO airports less than 25 minutes by fast train from the centre?
We do moan about British infrastructure and HS2 is a planet sized calamity yet quietly we also get things done. Luton Airport is an example
Having said all that I will now probably suffer a 6 hour delay
I'm old enough to remember, just, when you were complaining that it took 24 mins. (And that doesn't count the Brio toy railway they call a shuttle.)
I’m not sure you do. Because it’s never been this quick I don’t think - it seems like they’ve cut out all stops between. But I might be wrong.
London St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway goes from one gleaming new station to another gleaming new station
And it takes…. 24 minutes
And Luton Airport is ideally placed to serve an Oxford-Cambridge traffic corridor.
It’s now an excellent airport
Small enough to be easy to get around. Yet now modernised so it has nice shops and bars. Special gin bar! And ridiculously close to London’s best station - St Pancras. 24 minutes!l
😶😎
Does any other great global city have TWO airports less than 25 minutes by fast train from the centre?
We do moan about British infrastructure and HS2 is a planet sized calamity yet quietly we also get things done. Luton Airport is an example
Having said all that I will now probably suffer a 6 hour delay
We moan about British infrastructure, yes. And we wonder why London seems to get priority in almost every project and gets things done.
So move to london?! Get a nice airy garden flat in Primrose Hill or a little mews house near Portobello Road. It’s not like some clever trick we’re playing on everyone else - just get a nice gaff in The Smoke. Marylebone is also nice for townhouses or you could try a loft in Borough if you like that steampunk feel
Then you’d have all the benefits of London’s excellent infrastructure - plus galleries and restaurants and museums and the glorious parks
Derrrr. Yet you all decide to live in Newent or “Macclesfield” or Wick and then you moan
mews A middle class terrace.
Exactly. It’s middle class. Pleasant. Not beyond the dreams of avarice, not some aristocratic pile. Just buy a little 3 bed mews in Holland Park or Bayswater, then you too can enjoy the 24 minute rail journey to Luton airport instead of living in “the north” and moaning
Ugh no. Not some modern mews. This is one of the major problems of the day. Fake mews
You want something Victorian or even Georgian
Perhaps, but sometimes any mews is good mews.
Assuming that Starmer is going to get more homes built, doing a copy-improve insulation standards-paste of Holland Park to multiple locations near cities isn't the worst idea. If you must copy, at least copy something good.
(And I'd include the shabbier bits of green belt between Romford and the M25 in that.)
In the event of a hung parliament expect C and S rather than a formal coalition.
I am sorry, but you shouldn't be taking hits off a crack pipe before posting. Look at the polling - the labour lead is widening after the GE was called. The low low quality of the tory campaign, message fragmentation and targeting of very narrow voting segments and the conservative organization in a state of disrepair. The numbers are the numbers (within a 2-3% marging of error) and this is going to be a landslide. Talk of hung parliaments is kubler-Ross grief management. Let me remind you the stages: denial, anger, negotiation, despair, acceptance.
To be fair to @Foxy , he did say "in the event". Future events have non-zero probabilities. The Kubler-Ross stuff is largely coming from Conservative supporters.
And it's a fair point to note that the polling is saying something crazy. In the British system, parties don't win elections by over twenty points. Even Maggie in 1983 only won by fifteen.
And yet... The numbers are the numbers, across many polls by multiple companies. And they are backed up by the other data we have. I think it's now OK to say that the act of calling the election hasn't caused a "minds concentrated, this is now for real" bounce for the government.
They've got five weeks, and counting.
It's worth remembering that Theresa May had a 20% lead as late as the ICM with fieldwork on 12-14th May - 25 days before polling day, and 26 days after the election was announced. We still have 36 days to go, and we're only 7 days post election announcement.
It is also worth remembering that even before the 'dementia tax' nonsense May's campaign was making a number of serious gaffes. Grammar schools and fox hunting spring to mind. The idiots behind her (looks hard at Nick Timothy) believed they were inviolable and therefore could propose a hit list of Tory wet dreams to go with what they expected to be a huge mandate.
Starmer, by contrast, seems wary of any hubris and is intent on avoiding giving new hostages to fortune. The only really silly things he's done so far are VAT on private school fees and Diane Abbott's in and out situation.
The Diane Abbott thing is definitely a screw up. It really should have been a polite we are happy to have you back but you are not well and 70 years old, there is a peerage of you retire quietly..
Should it be though? Abbott is understandably given leeway given her status as a historic figure - rightly in many senses. But what she said was egregious, it was hardly a first offence in terms of antisemitism denial, and though there was an apology, I'm not sure many on those on the wrong end of her comments think it was overly sincere. Plus, she really does hold views Labour shouldn't be associating itself with - look at what she said when Russia was invading Ukraine.
You couldn't really give her a peerage without it looking grubby in another way.
Yes, they've handled it badly. But let's not pretend this is someone who is entirely blameless getting the boot for factional reasons rather than someone who holds some pretty dismal views that are now, thankfully, not acceptable within Labour. Who Labour were in a quandary about dealing with in the harsh way might otherwise have done because she holds significance for other reasons.
Abbott's was not intended as antisemitism denial so much as claiming a special place for anti-Black racism. That is not to say it was not ill-advised or offensive but there is no mens rea as SKS might say.
Intent is difficult to judge. She apologised quite quickly - and maybe she was being truthful about it being an early draft. But I am sceptical.
The letter said this in relation to prejudice against Jews, travellers and the Irish: “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism”
That is a terrible view. I am a ginger and have been picked on at school (and still see and her slurs against redheads in the media). But at no point would I consider those minor barbs akin to those suffered by Jews, travellers and the Irish for simply existing. Which is what the letter seems to suggests. What a ridiculous view. I appreciate that there is an argument about where race begins (and so racism - I don’t buy it, but there is an argument), but I am certain my experience as ginger is not the same as those with the characteristics noted at the top of the letter.
Each racial characteristic that suffers from prejudices has its own history of disgraceful behaviour. For blacks I would see slavery as that key original crime. For Jews the holocaust. You could play the game of rating each other’s past suffering and playing it off against each other. But what would be the point of that? I also think different forms of racism manifest themselves in the modern world in different ways. But I think I could say that without doing down different types of racism. I would have hoped that Diane Abbot could have done that too.
Tbh I do not think Abbott meant any of that. Sfaict she was saying only that racists can identify Black people at a glance but have to be told who are Jewish or Travellers or Irish. The problem is it is both banal and easily susceptible to misinterpretation, which are just two reasons why it should never have been written (or drafted) let alone sent.
It was a mistake on her part for sure but equally I don't think anyone on here can even imagine the sheer volume of shit that she has had to deal with for decades simply for having the temerity to be an outspoken black woman in public life. Personally I think she has been treated rather shabbily, a victim of Labour factionalism, blowback from Corbyn's disastrous leadership, and a country that is still in denial about the extent of anti-black prejudice.
The lengthy delay to her investigation makes no sense. What was there to investigate? They had Abbott's letter and her apology. You talk to her. You make a decision. Why did this take longer than a month?
The only decision they could make as far as I can see was Abbott had no case to answer. The delay was while they were trying to find a face saving out, but Abbott wasn't playing ball on that.
London St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway goes from one gleaming new station to another gleaming new station
And it takes…. 24 minutes
And Luton Airport is ideally placed to serve an Oxford-Cambridge traffic corridor.
It’s now an excellent airport
Small enough to be easy to get around. Yet now modernised so it has nice shops and bars. Special gin bar! And ridiculously close to London’s best station - St Pancras. 24 minutes!l
😶😎
Does any other great global city have TWO airports less than 25 minutes by fast train from the centre?
We do moan about British infrastructure and HS2 is a planet sized calamity yet quietly we also get things done. Luton Airport is an example
Having said all that I will now probably suffer a 6 hour delay
We moan about British infrastructure, yes. And we wonder why London seems to get priority in almost every project and gets things done.
So move to london?! Get a nice airy garden flat in Primrose Hill or a little mews house near Portobello Road. It’s not like some clever trick we’re playing on everyone else - just get a nice gaff in The Smoke. Marylebone is also nice for townhouses or you could try a loft in Borough if you like that steampunk feel
Then you’d have all the benefits of London’s excellent infrastructure - plus galleries and restaurants and museums and the glorious parks
Derrrr. Yet you all decide to live in Newent or “Macclesfield” or Wick and then you moan
mews A middle class terrace.
Exactly. It’s middle class. Pleasant. Not beyond the dreams of avarice, not some aristocratic pile. Just buy a little 3 bed mews in Holland Park or Bayswater, then you too can enjoy the 24 minute rail journey to Luton airport instead of living in “the north” and moaning
Ugh no. Not some modern mews. This is one of the major problems of the day. Fake mews
You want something Victorian or even Georgian
Perhaps, but sometimes any mews is good mews.
Assuming that Starmer is going to get more homes built, doing a copy-improve insulation standards-paste of Holland Park to multiple locations near cities isn't the worst idea. If you must copy, at least copy something good.
(And I'd include the shabbier bits of green belt between Romford and the M25 in that.)
I presume Harry Cole was ramping this one earlier today? Or maybe not...
NEW. The Labour Party has EXTENDED its lead over the Conservatives, according to the first exclusive YouGov poll of the campaign for Sky News
The Great Britain poll - conducted on Mon and Tue this week - puts Labour on 47%, the Tories on 20%, Reform on 12%, the LibDems on 9% and Greens on 7%.
There was lots of moronic poll ramping yesterday both on here and on Twitter. It needs to stop.
Hopium.
"No, it can't be true. I can't be so massively disconnected from what most people think.
The polls must all be wrong."
YouGov today Baxters to Tories 29 seats. The real puzzle is who is disconnected from what? Am I disconnected because I don't think this or something a bit like it will happen despite the evidence? "It can't be true" (though I don't mind if it is) is running through a multitude of PB minds.
I doubt Baxters model can cope with the current levels of Tory support, it's a given that there are some constituencies that will only ever elect a conservative no matter how low their overall support and that's more than 29, circa 100 feels a more likely rock bottom. It's also unlikely to be able to account for voter confusion over which party is the realistic challenger, voters won't be helped there by misinformation, whether that is deliberate bias or poor analysis.
Yeah, if your model is telling you "29 tory seats" you should be suspecting "model has been pushed outside its valid range" rather than "historically unprecedented wipeout incoming". It *could* be the latter, but the former is more likely to be what's going on.
I think 29 seats is a reasonable prediction for vote shares of 47-20 with FPTP.
Remember that in 2010, the Lib Dems received 23% of the vote, were only 6pp behind Labour and only 13.1pp behind the Tories, but won only 57 seats - and that only thanks to two decades of local campaigning to concentrate their vote enough to win seats.
If the Tories really do end up 27pp behind then it is almost inevitable that FPTP will produce something approaching a wipeout.
It's going to be hard to predict exactly what happens, the precedents don't really help us.
Attlee's 1945 landslide was based on a twelve point lead.
Thatcher beat Foot by fifteen percent.
Blair beat Major by twelve points and Hague by about nine.
We simply don't know what FPTP does at a lead in the high teens, let alone the twenties. But it's unlikely to be pretty.
What were the percentages in Canada when the Conservatives were wiped out? I’m too lazy to look them up myself!
The Conservatives in Canada 1993 fell to third in the national vote, on 16%, behind Reform on 18.7% and the Liberals on 41.2% - so it is definitely a good example of where geographical concentration of the vote makes a big difference, because Reform won 52 seats compared to 2 for the Conservatives.
If you want to understand why the country is in the state it is in, just look at the tory campaign. The same level of skill and competence and organisation evident in the campaign has been at the heart of governing this country. When you think of it that way... it is actually terrifying.
I presume Harry Cole was ramping this one earlier today? Or maybe not...
NEW. The Labour Party has EXTENDED its lead over the Conservatives, according to the first exclusive YouGov poll of the campaign for Sky News
The Great Britain poll - conducted on Mon and Tue this week - puts Labour on 47%, the Tories on 20%, Reform on 12%, the LibDems on 9% and Greens on 7%.
There was lots of moronic poll ramping yesterday both on here and on Twitter. It needs to stop.
Hopium.
"No, it can't be true. I can't be so massively disconnected from what most people think.
The polls must all be wrong."
YouGov today Baxters to Tories 29 seats. The real puzzle is who is disconnected from what? Am I disconnected because I don't think this or something a bit like it will happen despite the evidence? "It can't be true" (though I don't mind if it is) is running through a multitude of PB minds.
I doubt Baxters model can cope with the current levels of Tory support, it's a given that there are some constituencies that will only ever elect a conservative no matter how low their overall support and that's more than 29, circa 100 feels a more likely rock bottom. It's also unlikely to be able to account for voter confusion over which party is the realistic challenger, voters won't be helped there by misinformation, whether that is deliberate bias or poor analysis.
Yeah, if your model is telling you "29 tory seats" you should be suspecting "model has been pushed outside its valid range" rather than "historically unprecedented wipeout incoming". It *could* be the latter, but the former is more likely to be what's going on.
I think 29 seats is a reasonable prediction for vote shares of 47-20 with FPTP.
Remember that in 2010, the Lib Dems received 23% of the vote, were only 6pp behind Labour and only 13.1pp behind the Tories, but won only 57 seats - and that only thanks to two decades of local campaigning to concentrate their vote enough to win seats.
If the Tories really do end up 27pp behind then it is almost inevitable that FPTP will produce something approaching a wipeout.
It's going to be hard to predict exactly what happens, the precedents don't really help us.
Attlee's 1945 landslide was based on a twelve point lead.
Thatcher beat Foot by fifteen percent.
Blair beat Major by twelve points and Hague by about nine.
We simply don't know what FPTP does at a lead in the high teens, let alone the twenties. But it's unlikely to be pretty.
What were the percentages in Canada when the Conservatives were wiped out? I’m too lazy to look them up myself!
The Conservatives in Canada 1993 fell to third in the national vote, on 16%, behind Reform on 18.7% and the Liberals on 41.2% - so it is definitely a good example of where geographical concentration of the vote makes a big difference, because Reform won 52 seats compared to 2 for the Conservatives.
And the NDP getting more seats on a lot fewer votes too.
PC were third on votes, but fifth on seats. 16% of the votes for <1% of the seats.
The Liberals got 60% of the seats on 41% of the vote.
That's the worst result amongst this age group I've see yet. Equal third with Reform.
Kind of astonishing - and I think leads to an IRL echo chamber as well as a virtual one, where working age people are very broadly anti-conservative, with pretty much 5/6 being LLG and probably leading to an assumption therefore that 'everyone' is voting the Tories out, from conversations over lunch breaks, pub after work and whatnot. Suspect a fair few people will end up being astonished that their seat has stayed blue come the 5th July.
The MiC poll out at 4 was Fieldwork Mon to this morning so post NatServ and partially post Mega Bonus Hyper Pension Lock. Tryl tight lipped about its showings but MiC have been The most stable pollster generally so any big move either way would be interesting. They were Lab +16 before annoucement and +17 after 1 or 2 days campaigning
London St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway goes from one gleaming new station to another gleaming new station
And it takes…. 24 minutes
And Luton Airport is ideally placed to serve an Oxford-Cambridge traffic corridor.
It’s now an excellent airport
Small enough to be easy to get around. Yet now modernised so it has nice shops and bars. Special gin bar! And ridiculously close to London’s best station - St Pancras. 24 minutes!l
😶😎
Does any other great global city have TWO airports less than 25 minutes by fast train from the centre?
We do moan about British infrastructure and HS2 is a planet sized calamity yet quietly we also get things done. Luton Airport is an example
Having said all that I will now probably suffer a 6 hour delay
We moan about British infrastructure, yes. And we wonder why London seems to get priority in almost every project and gets things done.
So move to london?! Get a nice airy garden flat in Primrose Hill or a little mews house near Portobello Road. It’s not like some clever trick we’re playing on everyone else - just get a nice gaff in The Smoke. Marylebone is also nice for townhouses or you could try a loft in Borough if you like that steampunk feel
Then you’d have all the benefits of London’s excellent infrastructure - plus galleries and restaurants and museums and the glorious parks
Derrrr. Yet you all decide to live in Newent or “Macclesfield” or Wick and then you moan
mews A middle class terrace.
Exactly. It’s middle class. Pleasant. Not beyond the dreams of avarice, not some aristocratic pile. Just buy a little 3 bed mews in Holland Park or Bayswater, then you too can enjoy the 24 minute rail journey to Luton airport instead of living in “the north” and moaning
That's the worst result amongst this age group I've see yet. Equal third with Reform.
Kind of astonishing - and I think leads to an IRL echo chamber as well as a virtual one, where working age people are very broadly anti-conservative, with pretty much 5/6 being LLG and probably leading to an assumption therefore that 'everyone' is voting the Tories out, from conversations over lunch breaks, pub after work and whatnot. Suspect a fair few people will end up being astonished that their seat has stayed blue come the 5th July.
Young (and other under 50) people are not anti-conservative, they are anti this chaotic government, its attacks on young people economically and its involvement in the culture wars. In many ways they are quite conservative, hard working, entrepreneurial, healthier lifestyles and wanting to conserve our environment.
Too what end? I assume that the government can't resolve the dispute now we are in the election period? So naked politics from them? I'm not sure Starmer will have much leeway to pay them what they want.
Junior Doctors strking from June 27th to July 2nd - timed for maximum election impact.
Good luck with that. Wes Streeting might want to end the strikes but he has no money to give them directly. The doctors will have to hope for locum shifts at the private hospitals Streeting wants to give all the money to in order to cut the queues.
@DM_Andy - Thanks for that, very interesting. The 66/1 on the Lib Dems in Hitchin is perhaps a fair price given what you say about two sitting MPs losing in the same seat.
London St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway goes from one gleaming new station to another gleaming new station
And it takes…. 24 minutes
And Luton Airport is ideally placed to serve an Oxford-Cambridge traffic corridor.
It’s now an excellent airport
Small enough to be easy to get around. Yet now modernised so it has nice shops and bars. Special gin bar! And ridiculously close to London’s best station - St Pancras. 24 minutes!l
😶😎
Does any other great global city have TWO airports less than 25 minutes by fast train from the centre?
We do moan about British infrastructure and HS2 is a planet sized calamity yet quietly we also get things done. Luton Airport is an example
Having said all that I will now probably suffer a 6 hour delay
We moan about British infrastructure, yes. And we wonder why London seems to get priority in almost every project and gets things done.
So move to london?! Get a nice airy garden flat in Primrose Hill or a little mews house near Portobello Road. It’s not like some clever trick we’re playing on everyone else - just get a nice gaff in The Smoke. Marylebone is also nice for townhouses or you could try a loft in Borough if you like that steampunk feel
Then you’d have all the benefits of London’s excellent infrastructure - plus galleries and restaurants and museums and the glorious parks
Derrrr. Yet you all decide to live in Newent or “Macclesfield” or Wick and then you moan
mews A middle class terrace.
Exactly. It’s middle class. Pleasant. Not beyond the dreams of avarice, not some aristocratic pile. Just buy a little 3 bed mews in Holland Park or Bayswater, then you too can enjoy the 24 minute rail journey to Luton airport instead of living in “the north” and moaning
Comments
Seat: 1A
HAS ANY OTHER PB-ER BEEN AN OFFICIAL GUEST OF THE MOLDOVAN GOVERNMENT SO THEY GOT SEAT 1A TO CHISINAU?!
And having been mean about Flyone just now (and they cancelled a plane on me last year at the last moment and never refunded) this is all going smoothly. Well done Flyone - probably the best airline in Europe
Go much further east and we will start calling you Borat !
For the Tories, if they are 27pp behind and on 20%, then the number of seats they win will be a function of (a) how concentrated that 20% is in their ~100 safest seats, and, (b) to what extent the anti-Tory vote coalesces behind one party in each seat.
I would expect an MRP to do a reasonably good job of modelling (a), but (b) would be very difficult to predict. 29 seats is definitely within the range of plausible outcomes, and not, a priori evidence that the model producing the prediction is definitely wrong.
The letter said this in relation to prejudice against Jews, travellers and the Irish: “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism”
That is a terrible view. I am a ginger and have been picked on at school (and still see and her slurs against redheads in the media). But at no point would I consider those minor barbs akin to those suffered by Jews, travellers and the Irish for simply existing. Which is what the letter seems to suggests. What a ridiculous view. I appreciate that there is an argument about where race begins (and so racism - I don’t buy it, but there is an argument), but I am certain my experience as ginger is not the same as those with the characteristics noted at the top of the letter.
Each racial characteristic that suffers from prejudices has its own history of disgraceful behaviour. For blacks I would see slavery as that key original crime. For Jews the holocaust. You could play the game of rating each other’s past suffering and playing it off against each other. But what would be the point of that? I also think different forms of racism manifest themselves in the modern world in different ways. But I think I could say that without doing down different types of racism. I would have hoped that Diane Abbot could have done that too.
And we wonder why London seems to get priority in almost every project and gets things done.
To my mind, it's a sad situation, and a disappointing end to a distinguished career.
Then you’d have all the benefits of London’s excellent infrastructure - plus galleries and restaurants and museums and the glorious parks
Derrrr. Yet you all decide to live in Newent or “Macclesfield” or Wick and then you moan
The thing is a mess, but given the intention all along presumably was to get rid of Abbott, they got the result they wanted. These messy situations happen a lot in the business world.
https://x.com/jessphillips/status/1795744506664689920?s=61
Not sure Truss should be doing what she’s doing but also not sure that the histrionic pearl clutching response from Jess is helpful. Although I get that she is just burnishing her brand credentials.
What matters are how concentrated your voters are, whether you get over the line in lots of narrow contests that could go either way, and how well your opponents coalesce to maximise your defeats.
A 'tipping point' is arguably what terrified Labour into offering a second referendum in 2019 as the smarter aides knew that although offering one meant they couldn't win, it took the disastrous scenario of both them and the Lib Dems polling in the 20s and a catastrophe where they were wiped out outside inner London and the North West, off the table.
Lived experiences can be different and change over time and context. At my school and where I grew up I think it would be better to be black than Romany or Irish Traveller stock (for some reason they came in for a lot of stick when I grew up). But I don’t think that is the case everywhere.
Obviously there's a lot of negativity towards her but it's one of the safest seats in the country.
Surely that price is a gift?
But none of those things are true. And the Palestine obsessives think their issue is the only issue - and for a large majority of voters it isn't an issue at all.
What really doesn't help is that the pro-Palestine groups / protests rapidly descend into being pro-Terror and antisemitism. "Yemen Yemen make us proud, turn those ships around" as was being chanted in Aberdeen last week is support for terrorism. So if you support Iranian terrorism how can you object to Israeli terrorism?
Attlee's 1945 landslide was based on a twelve point lead.
Thatcher beat Foot by fifteen percent.
Blair beat Major by twelve points and Hague by about nine.
We simply don't know what FPTP does at a lead in the high teens, let alone the twenties. But it's unlikely to be pretty.
Of course, it is also a partisan act. It's an election campaign: what do you expect?
https://x.com/UKLabour/status/1795559943304613904
Very sad if so. I find her politics objectionable but I quite admire her pugnacity and courage - she has surely suffered from misogyny AND racism throughout her career
If she has dementia that also explains her really weird letter referencing redheads
mews A noise, a noise a feline makes.
I expect it would be one of the surviving 29 seats were the Tories to be reduced that far.
https://x.com/tomorrowsmps/status/1795737431393943835
But to call your current output 'Poundshop Jeremy Clarkson' would be an insult to both the Poundshop and Clarkson.
I'm sure you can do better.
16%. Reform only got nineteen, but it was much more efficient. One of RefUK's problems is not really having a geographic base. Worse, to the extent that they do (Kent to Essex to Lincolnshire), it's where the Conservatives are also most likely to survive.
Luckily another business section seat was free.
And then all the neighbours came out, applauded for an hour and broke bread together
The air stewardesses on Flyone are outstandingly lovely. It’s probably the most glamorous job in Moldova
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/145988738#/?channel=RES_BUY
I would say that, in general, the Labour vote is more concentrated than the Tory vote - i.e. at equal national vote shares I would expect Labour to have a large majority of the seats with the highest vote share for any one party. So this would mean Labour would cope better in such a wipeout scenario.
This morning's YouGov for people under 50 only:
Labour 59%
Greens 12%
Cons 8%
Reform 8%
LD 6%
That's the worst result amongst this age group I've see yet. Equal third with Reform.
You want something Victorian or even Georgian
The results will shed some real light on where the pollsters are on to something and where they're flailing.
There are some fascinating discrepancies - Techne and R&W flatter age curve with Lab winning over 65s, YouGov Tory under 50 extinction, the adjusters...... there's a lot going on
Labour 597
LibDem 14
Conservative 5
Green 2
ReformUK 0
SNP 12
PC 2
Northern Ireland 18
Islington North 1983
Islington in the 1970s and early 1980s was fraught with differences between a left-wing activist base and centrist Labour MPs. All three Islington Labour MPs, Michael O'Halloran (North), John Grant (Central) and George Cunningham (South and Finsbury) defected to the SDP in 1981 and 1982. Unfortunately for them there were boundary changes in 1983 and Islington was reduced from three seats down to two with Central being split up between the others. Cunningham was selected for Islington South and Finsbury, to lose to Chris Smith by less than 400 votes, and Grant was selected for Islington North. This left O'Halloran out in the cold and he decided to quit the SDP and stand in North as Independent Labour. The split of the vote didn't cause Corbyn's win, Labour's 14,900 was still more than Grant's 8,200 and O'Halloran's 4,100 put together. This is the only one I can think of where two sitting MPs have stood against each other and they have both lost.
South Hams 1987
This election resulted in a change in the rules for retiring MPs. Willie Hamilton was the famously republican Labour MP for Central Fife, first elected to Parliament in 1950. Coming up to the 1987 election he was now 70 and looking to retire. But if you just stood down you didn't get the loss-of-office payment you got if you were defeated at the election. There was no chance of losing in Central Fife so Hamilton looked for the most hopeless seat possible and found it in South Hams in Devon. The local CLP adopted him as their candidate and he did quite well, increasing the Labour vote to over 5,000 but still a very distant 3rd behind the sitting MP Anthony Steen and the Liberal candidate. Hamilton got his extra payment, mission accomplished and moved into retirement. The rules were then changed to prevent that happening again, now MPs only get loss-of-office if they stand and lose in their own seat. This was something that annoyed Angela Smith (the Yorkshire one) when she moved via Change UK to the Liberal Democrats in 2019, the Lib Dems already had selected a candidate for her Penistone and Stockbridge seat so she fought and lost in Altrincham and Sale West without getting the loss-of-office payment.
Brent Central 2010
A more mundane one to finish and there must be several examples of this post boundary changes. Brent and Camden moved from five seats to four and so Sarah Teather, Liberal Democrat MP for Brent East, faced off against Dawn Butler, Labour MP for Brent South in the new Brent Central seat. Teather won, with 20,000 votes versus Butler's 18,600. Butler then won the seat after Teather stood down in 2015.
Having said that - JLP's methods and headline numbers might be wrong but that shouldn't impact their trend. That is a movement to the Cons which most other pollsters do not match. (Opinium being the highly clutchable straw for those wishing to do so). A movement which would be welcome for the Govt but is far too little to save them.
The Clutch Brompton view is that the Lab lead is somewhere between 12 and 27%. You are all welcome - perhaps I should set up a Patreon?
https://www.primelocation.com/for-sale/details/66158926/?search_identifier=1118a0d8b8b517fd31ef9ef6a21bf194
https://x.com/PlJonson/status/1795717608010105241
If the west had done all this shit a year earlier, and decided to give F16s back when DuraAce first started saying it would be futile, Russia wouldn't be able to get within glide-bomb distance of the the front line.
And would probably be thinking of giving up by now.
As it is, it's going to be another year at least.
Better late than never, though.
Except each model has it's own model so is it really valid to follow the trend when their model is both inconsistent and displays a trend that is counter to what others (albeit nowcasts) are showing.
Assuming that Starmer is going to get more homes built, doing a copy-improve insulation standards-paste of Holland Park to multiple locations near cities isn't the worst idea. If you must copy, at least copy something good.
(And I'd include the shabbier bits of green belt between Romford and the M25 in that.)
https://youtu.be/GlfSa2BU3ZE?si=X_uTTLoc3zix-nl3
PC were third on votes, but fifth on seats. 16% of the votes for <1% of the seats.
The Liberals got 60% of the seats on 41% of the vote.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy2jmaMImDw
They were Lab +16 before annoucement and +17 after 1 or 2 days campaigning
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-69072640
Meanwhile over at silly old twit central........
The LD activists in his path showing great optimism and courage though, in apparently believing him competent enough on a bike to keep them safe