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Scotland it appears is a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.

I think PMQs could be entertaining tomorrow. I expect Murphy to feature prominently

dr_spyn said:

Murphy and Abbott - new contemporary comedy on Radio 4.

http://order-order.com/2015/01/06/red-on-red-audio-of-murphy-v-abbott-mansion-tax-bunfight/

Along the lines of?
Do you know who I am... said Murph.
Skeletor? said Abbot.

OGH "LAB had a very different election in Scotland in 2010 compared with England and Wales"
Yes, the UK Labour Leader was Scottish.

Good point, Labour overachieved in Scotland in 2010, they outperformed the final Scottish polls by 5%+. A fall from the late thirties to early thirties (if that's where they end up) wouldn't have sounded quite as bad.

@thetimes: David Miliband hints at a political comeback after saying he misses Britain http://t.co/vqww1Zb4OH (PA) http://t.co/Hde0fNsJxe

He thinks Ed is going to lose...

@MShapland: The Idea David Miliband could come back will make some Labour rank and file WANT to lose 2015....

Day 1 fought on Labour's terrain...

@BuzzFeedUK: Labour is “boasting” about cutting the arts budget
http://t.co/QB5z1yQ6vn http://t.co/HjjJwr5ASt

@ScotTories: What did Jim Murphy fail to mention during his interview on Scotland 2015 last night? It's almost like the phrase is banned. #wheresmili

@ScotTories: He gets through an entire seven minute interview without uttering the words "Ed Miliband". #wheresmili
http://t.co/Q6XR4l3XtW

TheScreamingEagles said:

Scotland it appears is a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.

Scotland has a very different land ownership pattern and legal history, and historically more heavy industry, which tends to skew it to the Left IMHO. It also clearly has a distinct cultural identity and sense of nationhood.

On the other hand, we all live on the same island and share the same propensity to moan about the weather, some cultural traditions (pubs, fish & chips etc.) currency, language, a Protestant reformed national church, and an acerbic sense of humour.

RobD said:

Off to a flying start! It doesn't fill you with confidence about their competence (yes, story and Labour are bad, but not that bad!).

It seems to be fine - looks as though UKIP didn't screw up (it is registered in their name until March 16th) but there was (deliberate or accidental) fooling around with the DNS servers.

Richard_Nabavi said:

RobD said:

Off to a flying start! It doesn't fill you with confidence about their competence (yes, story and Labour are bad, but not that bad!).

It seems to be fine - looks as though UKIP didn't screw up (it is registered in their name until March 16th) but there was (deliberate or accidental) fooling around with the DNS servers.

Ah, thanks! I hope it isn't deliberate, that wouldn't be kosher.

Labour can appear as disunited, crazed and incompetent as they like, but as of yet there is no real 'poll pressure' on them.

They are still doing OK there.

Osborne's economy hits the brakes in election year and everyone wants to talk about websites ?

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jan/06/uk-services-sector-growth-slows-december

Alanbrooke said:

Osborne's economy hits the brakes

You mean the rate of growth has returned to trend, right?

@Mr_Eugenides: Day 2 of the Labour general election campaign. How’s it going so far? Well, let’s just call it “up and down” and leave it at that.

Casino_Royale said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

Scotland it appears is a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.

Scotland has a very different land ownership pattern and legal history, and historically more heavy industry, which tends to skew it to the Left IMHO. It also clearly has a distinct cultural identity and sense of nationhood.

On the other hand, we all live on the same island and share the same propensity to moan about the weather, some cultural traditions (pubs, fish & chips etc.) currency, language, a Protestant reformed national church, and an acerbic sense of humour.

More unites Scotland and England than divides it.

Alanbrooke said:

Osborne's economy hits the brakes in election year and everyone wants to talk about websites ?

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jan/06/uk-services-sector-growth-slows-december

Already discussed and put into context this morning.

TheScreamingEagles said:

Casino_Royale said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

Scotland it appears is a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.

Scotland has a very different land ownership pattern and legal history, and historically more heavy industry, which tends to skew it to the Left IMHO. It also clearly has a distinct cultural identity and sense of nationhood.

On the other hand, we all live on the same island and share the same propensity to moan about the weather, some cultural traditions (pubs, fish & chips etc.) currency, language, a Protestant reformed national church, and an acerbic sense of humour.

More unites Scotland and England than divides it.

I agree with you.

Scott_P said:

@thetimes: David Miliband hints at a political comeback after saying he misses Britain http://t.co/vqww1Zb4OH (PA) http://t.co/Hde0fNsJxe

He thinks Ed is going to lose...

@MShapland: The Idea David Miliband could come back will make some Labour rank and file WANT to lose 2015....

Goodness, everytime I'm exasperated by Ed, I get a reminder of how it could've been even worse. David really has nothing to offer but his own vanity.

rottenborough said:

8,000 GPs. When? It takes years and years to train a doctor. This is a promise that cannot be met by 2020 election.

Hire immigrants.

Oh, wait...

Incidentally Jim Murphy has pissed off Scottish rugby fans by calling the privileged middle-class elitists a few days ago

Scott_P said:

@thetimes: David Miliband hints at a political comeback after saying he misses Britain http://t.co/vqww1Zb4OH (PA) http://t.co/Hde0fNsJxe

He thinks Ed is going to lose...

@MShapland: The Idea David Miliband could come back will make some Labour rank and file WANT to lose 2015....

Again a hint. We had this 'King over the water' story a few weeks before Xmas.

RobD said:

dr_spyn said:

Ed has been busy today.

Ed Miliband ‏@Ed_Miliband 10m10 minutes ago
Labour will make sure the NHS in England has the time to care. With Labour:
20,000 nurses
8,000 GPs
5,000 care workers
3,000 midwives

More tractor stats comrades.

Nurses paid for by mansion tax, what about the others?

The banker bonus tax which is almost infinitely plentiful.

rottenborough said:

Again a hint. We had this 'King over the water' story a few weeks before Xmas.

Well Ed's already been written out of the Scottish campaign. Many will write him out of their English campaign too

dr_spyn said:

rottenborough said:

RobD said:

dr_spyn said:

Ed has been busy today.

Ed Miliband ‏@Ed_Miliband 10m10 minutes ago
Labour will make sure the NHS in England has the time to care. With Labour:
20,000 nurses
8,000 GPs
5,000 care workers
3,000 midwives

More tractor stats comrades.

Nurses paid for by mansion tax, what about the others?

8,000 GPs. When? It takes years and years to train a doctor. This is a promise that cannot be met by 2020 election.

Has Ed promised more places at Medical Schools?

He left out the bit about 1,000 free owls.

Isn't this already DH policy? I mean the GP expansion and not the owls bit.

Have a look at: http://hee.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/321/2014/07/GP-Taskforce-report.pdf

"Despite the longstanding Department of Health policy to increase GP training numbers in
England to 3,250 per annum, GP recruitment has remained stubbornly below this target, at
around 2,700 per annum, for the last four years. This cumulative recruitment shortfall is
being compounded by increasing numbers of trained GPs leaving the workforce, most
significantly GPs approaching retirement, but perhaps more worryingly women in their 30s.
GP recruitment and retention is a much bigger problem in some parts of the country and
often in those areas which have the worst health outcomes."

Scott_P said:

@LadPolitics: Correction! (had them the wrong way round)
Rochester & Strood latest odds:
8/15 @KellyTolhurst (Con)
6/4 @MarkReckless (UKIP)

Kippers can fill their boots...

No takers for the 8/11 I offered about the conservatives here

isam said:

Scott_P said:

rottenborough said:

8,000 GPs. When? It takes years and years to train a doctor. This is a promise that cannot be met by 2020 election.

Hire immigrants.

Oh, wait...

Why not hire immigrants?

Why isn't there enough British talent in the NHS. That's the fundamental question.

isam said:

Scott_P said:

rottenborough said:

8,000 GPs. When? It takes years and years to train a doctor. This is a promise that cannot be met by 2020 election.

Hire immigrants.

Oh, wait...

Why not hire immigrants?

NHS already does. In spades. Senior consultant on Today programme this morning was talking about his Trust being about to fly out to Spain on a big nurse recruitment drive.

Danny565 said:

Business leaders and bankers are less trusted than trade union leaders are.

twitter.com/TheStaggers/status/552175588375801857

#leftyconspiracy

Would be interesting to see what the margin of error is, they are probably within it! The police don't seem to be faring too well, and disappointed not to see an entry for PB Tories.

Danny565 said:

Business leaders and bankers are less trusted than trade union leaders are.

Clearly there are potential opportunities for independent doctors and scientists to make an impact on politics (like Sarah Wollaston) if they can elbow the PPE folk out of the way.

A clever political party would actively recruit more of them.

Casino_Royale said:

Danny565 said:

Scott_P said:

@thetimes: David Miliband hints at a political comeback after saying he misses Britain http://t.co/vqww1Zb4OH (PA) http://t.co/Hde0fNsJxe

He thinks Ed is going to lose...

@MShapland: The Idea David Miliband could come back will make some Labour rank and file WANT to lose 2015....

Goodness, everytime I'm exasperated by Ed, I get a reminder of how it could've been even worse. David really has nothing to offer but his own vanity.

I think he would have had better election winning policies, for Labour. But he clearly lacks the killer instinct and I'd therefore have a question around his robustness as a leader.

Also, whilst more articulate than Ed, he also had a unfortunate tendency to come across in a lecturing and slightly pompous manner. I think that might have grated on some people.

To be honest, I question whether he would've even been more articulate. I went to a leadership hustings back in 2010, and taking policies out of the equation (they weren't really saying much different on policies anyway, apart from Iraq), Ed really did seem to me the more charismatic of the two, incredible though that sounds now.

TheScreamingEagles said:

Ukip's website is currently down amid claims that a small record label from Oxford has bought up its current domain.

The issues were first noticed this morning, when the ukip.org address showed a page that often appears when ownership of a domain expires - in this instance offering links to walk in showers and subscriptions to the Telegraph newspaper.

Soon after, a mischievous record label claimed to have purchased the the address for a year - tweeting what the company claimed was a recent for their order.

http://www.itv.com/news/2015-01-06/ukip-website-down-as-record-label-claims-to-have-bought-domain/

Another hoax. Dear dear

This is getting to be a habit!

Mind you I was first on here with the news that The Jam had reformed and supporting the libertines.. Easily done

Mr. Roger, problem with that line is that Cameron's more popular in Scotland than Miliband.

MarqueeMark said:

dr_spyn said:

Ed has been busy today.

Ed Miliband ‏@Ed_Miliband 10m10 minutes ago
Labour will make sure the NHS in England has the time to care. With Labour:
20,000 nurses
8,000 GPs
5,000 care workers
3,000 midwives

More tractor stats comrades.

Of course, Labour left the NHS woefully under-resourced for the level of population increase it silently engineered. Same with school places. And housing.

They really were a most scummy Government. And an even scummier Opposition, denying any of it is anything to do with them.

Perhaps he will start a cloning operation. It really is quite pathetic stuff to pretend that by writing a tweet something can be done.

Not sure how David Miliband comes back to save the day if his kid brother has trashed brand Milband....

Morris_Dancer said:

Mr. Eagles, I hope Mr. Palmer can immediately and unambiguously refute that suggested policy commitment, which strikes at the very heart of all that is good and true and civilised in this world.

Also get them to rule out a tax on poor knowledge of history, or you'd be hit by a double whammy.

Mr. Eagles, au contraire, I'd be entitled to a rebate.

I fear that you, on the other hand, would be reduced to the vile state of penury.

What happens when Tories run the NHS.

https://twitter.com/Ed_Miliband/status/552480466805489665

Smarmeron said:

@Scott_P
Any reason why it wouldn't be fair?

Ask Diane

@Scott_P
I was asking you.
However, I did so without much hope.

NickPalmer said:

Casino_Royale said:

Question is: to what degree will Labour recover in England? I can see it doing ok in London. I'm not sure about everywhere else.

I'm willing to bet (and have) that they will fall short of expectations in the key Middle England marginals.

Seems to be going well in my patch and a couple of others that I know of - are you going by gut feeling? The thing about the marginals is that they vary a lot - some have big chunks of Labour and Tory territory glaring at each other and there the key issue may be UKIP impact, , but more usually they're quite mixed suburbs and small towns, often with lots of former LibDems (17% in my patch - if we get a third of those, as I'd suggest is realistic, we'll need to do quite badly in other ways to lose).

I think you're an exception, Nick. You've put in a consistently high level of ground effort week-in-week out across the whole parliament, in a seat in which you only narrowly lost last time, against a not uncontroversial Tory incumbent. You're also in the top 10 Labour target seats, and I'd expect almost all of those to fall to you.

Where I'm less clear is Labour targets 20-40, where I expect an underperformance. So you will win seats off the Tories, but I think they'll be <30 seats in total, and possibly fewer.

@BenM - I suppose Labour are making worst of a good job in the circumstances, given that this winter's crop of NHS scare stories has been unusually thin.

If only you'd had a major 'flu epidemic, eh? How much happier you'd be. Oh well, I suppose you have to make do with what you can find by selective use of statistics.

Morris_Dancer said:

Mr. Eagles, I hope Mr. Palmer can immediately and unambiguously refute that suggested policy commitment, which strikes at the very heart of all that is good and true and civilised in this world.

Hear hear.

BenM said:

What happens when Tories run the NHS.

https://twitter.com/Ed_Miliband/status/552480466805489665

I may be misremembering but didn't Labour fail to pledge to not cut the NHS during this parliament, whilst the Tories pledged to maintain the budget in real terms?

I'm not a fan of the NHS concept as a state funded healthcare provider anyway, but all other things being equal, it's hard to see how healthcare performance would have been better under Labour given that policy.

I shall be putting up a post extending my data-based guesses either late on this evening or first thing tomorrow. My rough and ready rules produce results that look both weird and strangely plausible.

To be clear, I place very little store in them, but they do help illustrate one possible way that the referendum might have created new facts on the ground.

OblitusSumMe said:

At the hospital in Exeter, the out-of-hours GP service is co-located with the A&E department so that the A&E triage nurses can send people to the out-of-hours service if they don't need to be in A&E.

Same thing in Edinburgh