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From penumbra to umbra? – politicalbetting.com
From penumbra to umbra? – politicalbetting.com
A new Ipsos in the UK poll reveals that the British public is slightly more likely to consider Reform UK the main opposition and believe that Nigel Farage is now more likely to become Prime Minister than Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. This is as dissatisfaction with the Labour government and Prime Minister Keir Starmer remains high
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If they do fade a bit before the election this will be due to increased scrutiny but it may be that people simply don't care about their gaffes and experience and may even see it as a sign they're not professional politicians.
I can probably guarantee that Nonny Nonny Nigel will not be removed from the Reform Leader position without his own consent.
I suppose it passes the time until, 'I can't believe the Tories won'.
They’ve given their opponents maximum time to respond and then show progress. If you’re Labour are you going to give up and go home for four years?
Ultimately the people that have deserted Labour now will decide in 2029 if they want Labour again or not. Who would the Green and Lib Dem voters prefer?
That wasn't the case with the Brexit Party or UKIP, but it is with Reform.
Back in 1985, I joined the Young Conservatives as soon as I turned 18, and Exeter University Conservatives when I went there. Now, after decades of disappointment, I couldn’t care less what happens to them. And, I bet that’s a journey that many people have travelled.
F1: latest Undercutters podcast episode is up, looking ahead to Imola and covering quite a bit of news.
Might be especially interesting for the betting-inclined as I'm comparing the odds of the frontrunners and how they've shifted from pre-season to now (quarter into the season). Plus, there are some very lovely pie charts in the transcript.
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/f1-2025-imola-grand-prix-preview-and-predictions/
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/f1-2025-imola-grand-prix-preview-and-predictions/id1786574257?i=1000708276102
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1vqDlQsXV1uw7CtcC3kWlp
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/bcfe213b-55fb-408a-a823-dc6693ee9f78/episodes/b0316646-af0b-4af4-bde4-078f128becbb/undercutters---f1-podcast-f1-2025-imola-grand-prix-preview-and-predictions
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2025/05/f1-2025-imola-grand-prix-preview-and.html
Labour have given up already. They are a lame duck government now, the only question being what form of carnage follows.
The problem for the Conservatives is that they are now in a similar tactical position to the SDP, and very vulnerable to being squeezed from both left and right.
The only way out I can see is to attack Reform for lack of pragmatism, but I don't think that works that well. Partly because of the Conservatives' recent record, and partly because a lot of the relevant voters don't want pragmatism.
One thing I would like to get a handle on is just who it is running the Councils they control - how many will be ex-Tories and Turnip Taliban, and with what experience? Will many be ex-Labour?
Is there a possibility of competence? And will the Britain First types have any influence above drawing allowances and causing embarrassment?
And how will it all play with the minigarchs (I need a better word) who run the party?
It's no wonder loyal supporters have progressively disappeared over 25-30 years given that was lost or, worse, thinking that provoking them is part of a sensible political strategy to demonstrate change to others.
We’re now going to be subjected to 4 days of wall to wall coverage of his visit to the Middle East . Does anyone care ?
Executive Order with the background:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/addressing-egregious-actions-of-the-republic-of-south-africa/
The Episcopal Church (mainline, liberal / inclusive in its views) has pulled the plug on its cooperation:
In a striking move that ends a nearly four-decades-old relationship between the federal government and the Episcopal Church, the denomination announced on Monday that it is terminating its partnership with the government to resettle refugees, citing moral opposition to resettling white Afrikaners from South Africa who have been classified as refugees by President Trump's administration.
...
The request, Rowe said, crossed a moral line for the Episcopal Church, which is part of the global Anglican Communion, which boasts among its leaders the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a celebrated and vocal opponent of apartheid in South Africa.
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/12/g-s1-65988/episcopal-church-white-afrikaners-ends-partnership-u-s-government
Trump will posture. It may be more to him if the Conservative Evangelical denominations follow suit.
That has lots of positives, and it's hard to see how the genie is squeezed beck into the lamp. But it does have downsides, and one is the splintering of political parties. The wets and dries of the 1980s can't bear being in the same party any more. Something similar seems to be happening on the left. There's also the "I'd rather my party lost than the wrong faction of my party won." That used to be limited to the right-on left, now it's everywhere.
In contrast, the Alliance was a party of the centre, and Labour managed both to hang on to some of its centrists, and its union backers.
While maintaining its hold of the ground on the left.
The Tories, having already driven out many of their centrists, are directly competing with Reform for the same political ground. And Reform (somewhat unfairly given their leader's involvement in the Brexit clusterfuck) carry none if the baggage if the last decade of government.
But somehow, once I was in a constituency where Labour had a chance, the party had moved away from my values.
There's no party now that matches my values, and hasn't been for some time.
Good morning, everyone.
Probably deliberately engineered the locals fckup so he could manage the Powellite pivot which apparently reflects his true (albeit well concealed) opinions on the subject all along. Trebles all round!
I'm going to talk this stuff through with a counsellor so that I can cement it all in place, but I can look back over some of the things I have said and done in the midst of what had been a crisis for months and think "hmmmm". A few repairs needed here and there which I'm now getting on with.
You can't instantly declare yourself better - and I'm not. But having spent ages pogoing up and down with increasing speed into the mental crash stops at top and bottom, this feels completely different, and its quite exciting to now hope that I can be past my funky worst. I've identified a list of changes I needed to make and they're in place.
I may not have been quite with it with some of the more reactive stuff I have posted on here so apologies to anyone who was on the receiving end. And hat-tip to @Leon who could could see it from a mile off even when I couldn't.
Nevertheless political parties can and still do enthuse members, activists and voters if they get their pitch right, and deliver.
Much of being a politician is telling stories people can buy into.
The Nigel is a black hole, whose political gravity has always dragged the Tory party below its event horizon and is now inevitably dragging Labour in as well...
If the latter, Starmer should beware that Reform is NOTA.
Is TSE saying that Reform are casting a darker shadow over UK politics, or that they might eclipse the Tories ?
Or is it an obscure reference to US constitutional law ?
Badenoch leads the Tories, she's going to be replaced before too long, and the party doesn't do retreads.
Meanwhile Farage is more like methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus. No matter how repulsive he is, it seems he's impossible to get rid of him completely and leave any trace and he keeps coming back to cause even more damage.
I really respect your post and having had family members with serious PTSD and other mental health issues you must be kind to yourself and hopefully benefit from counselling
You do give me the impression you have an awful lot of commitments. and managing everything you do must be stressful at times
All the best
As Starmer shreds his principles one still hasn’t met a grisly end in his chase for Reform voters.
So far staying in the ECHR has survived ! And not that I want to tempt fate but leaving that might be a bridge too far for his party and would result in cabinet resignations and a collapse of what’s left of his coalition of voters .
We are still looking at around 240,000 net migration a year. Hardly insubstantial.
We are looking at the Boriswave being given ILR after five years with the net burden to the taxpayer that brings.
We are looking at controlling migration, not stopping it. Of course there is nothing wrong with that as there is nothing wrong with those who want unlimited mass inward migration like the handful on here crying about the speech yesterday.
It’s hardly an act worth of the Far right or Enoch Powell. The speech was measured and balanced. From the responses of some you’d think we were deporting people and going for net negative migration.
However what we do need to do is plan and out the jnfrastructure in place to accommodate our new citizens.
Is that going to be retrospective or not? The last time it was changed (by Blair's New Labour) it was made retrospective.
"Farage is right, don't vote for him" is not a winning strategy for anyone other than Farage.
This is, or might be, news. The trouble is, especially overnight and at weekends when the BBC's most junior trainees run the shop, we are inundated with what are, and ought to remain, American domestic stories.
With a good article on the betrayal of the young, really from Blair, on University.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/13/young-people-degrees-labour-market-ai
Solution. Far fewer degrees, slim down the universities.
His attempts to outdo Farage will never succeed and he needs to understand his comment is more likely to send his voters to the Lib Dems, Green, Plaid and SNP while not winning one Reform voter to his policies
Citizens of nowhereIsland of strangers.Takes some workshopping for someone as precise and fearful and cautious as SKS to roll that out.
He must really be frit although with everyone from John McDonnell to Michael Rosen crying outrage I'm not 100% sure the constituency. Would never have happened with Mandy on the scene. Which I suppose is a lament for the likes of Tone and Dave.
As long as you committed to maintaining (or better, increasing) the number of people being granted asylum, I think you could get broad support for it. Massively increase the proportion that are children, for example, and restrict it to "applications from within a dangerous country or closest neighbouring safe countries."
If the man who paints over children's cartoons lest it bring troubled children some joy is the answer, what is the question?
Trump - and the hysteria around him - is an incredibly dull soap opera.
Like 80s Scot-opiate, “Take the High Road” meets “The West Wing”.
The BBC should sack all their trainees and start again.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/us/politics/white-south-africans-refugees.html?unlocked_article_code=1.G08.YXUQ.pih81BCOJmcN&smid=url-share
I don't think Trump will be bothered if the Churches refuse to cooperate. Some groups are continuing to cooperate.
I think a lot of the arrivals might also have some resources to resettle themselves in the USA & wouldn't need to rely as much on charitable support as South American asylum seekers.
I am down the end of a Wealden Way so remote there is no internet apart from Starlink.
David Cameron spent many years working hard to argue the NHS was safe in his hands, using his personal family circumstances to do so too. Nobody (rightly) said this was a winning strategy for Labour since the NHS is Labour's ground.
If Starmer can neutralise the immigration issue, then it makes it less likely that Farage will be PM, which can only be a good thing.
They should have told potential voters not to hate the government until 2027 at the earliest
I wonder what the equivalent figures would have been 10, 20, 40 years ago?
*actually not really a comparison of course - because American figures aren't shown. But still.
It's a bit like asking bus and ferry companies to be profitable. Nah - maximise passenger numbers and facilitate profit elsewhere.
No-one on PB yesterday called for "unlimited mass inward migration". That's a bit of straw man.
Corrie went downhill from about 1990 if you ask me.
There is a progressive answer based on building international peace, aid to refugees in or near their home countries, development aid, education and sponsoring tolerance, so more people are protected and safe - but I don't hear SKS making it.
That seems…sub-optimal.
- Young people in line for good degrees from good Russell Group universities, who have for years obediently jumped through every hoop provided, are working in bars, going travelling, or despondently...
- It’s the betrayal that hurts. We drilled it into them that if they worked hard at school and made it into university then the world could be their oyster...
This is essentially the point I was making the other day in relation to Americans and increasingly Britons who have, to the best of their beliefs and abilities, played by the rules in order to advance, only to find the game is rigged against them.An important but separate point that @Leon might have made, or anyone in relation to WFH as well as AI is this:-
And all the time, AI is stealthily creeping up on the entry-level jobs they’re chasing. The tasks companies tend to give to young, green trainees – the routine grunt work they can’t easily mess up, which can be swiftly checked by someone more senior – are most vulnerable to automation precisely because they’re routine. Baby lawyers learn the ropes by drawing up endless contracts, but AI can do that in seconds. It’s probably capable of many things young journalists start out by doing too, like turning a simple press release into a story (or more depressingly, scraping clickbait content off rival websites). But if companies automate away the bottom rung of the ladder, how do you reach the next rung up?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/13/young-people-degrees-labour-market-ai
To claim the taxes from work (not that there is much on minimum wage) but not the liabilities from pension accruals is totally dishonest. Accruals need to be counted any true accounting.
People said that they were peaking at 10% in the polls, 12% in the polls, 18% in the polls, 23% in the polls, 26% in the polls... They are now at 32%.
I didn't think they would get this far, but I see nothing particularly magical about 32% that means they can't go higher, particularly as the Tories remain in freefall, and Starmer is continuing to flounder.
"How many gangs have you 'smashed' so far?"
Victoria Derbyshire asks Skills Minister Baroness Smith what the government have done to crack down on small boat crossings.
#Newsnight
https://x.com/bbcnewsnight/status/1922052291378504076?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
There's no way most progressive people would go along with a reform like that unless there was some sort of commitment to maintain or increase the numbers, which is relatively very small compared to overall migration. A focus on increasing children would be difficult to oppose even for Reform.
Braverman's interview on the Popcon podcast shows she will absolutely defect to Reform before the next election unless something radical happens - she refused even to offer the most half-hearted cricitism of them. I don't really blame her, and she'll be a pretty good signing for them in terms of Ministerial experience.
Since, I somehow managed to use my brain and general diligence to escape a reasonably impoverished childhood and reach a pretty decent station in life.
It’s been the case for some time, in my view, in the UK at least, that even the smartest working class kids can longer realistically aspire to a middle class life, largely because of the vast gulf between those with property and those without.
Hence GenZ’s bizarre interest in “manifesting” and other hoo-doo.
Yes, people get pensions. That's true whether they are immigrants or born in the UK. Given, by and large, the country's finances break even, it's clearly not the case that pension accruals turn everyone into net burdens.
Now some argue that's justified because of the wrongs of apartheid. Others say two wrongs don't make a right.
But either way, it is legitimate to be concerned by people getting discriminated against or their assets and land seized without compensation. It is not unreasonable for those facing that to seek refuge elsewhere, just as others elsewhere do.
The hypocrisy here is that Trump opposes all non-white refugees and doesn't give a shit about refugees otherwise. That's what makes it blatant hypocrisy and racism.
It depends on how stubborn the current Tory vote is. I simply can't think of a reason to support them at the moment, so I sense that core is very sticky. The same, to a lesser extent, for Labour.
Some are beneficiaries, some are burdens. That's why we should seek high-skilled, high-wage migrants that grow our skill base and our GDP per capita, not rely upon minimum wage unskilled people to "fill vacancies" they never fill, because lump of labour is a fallacy.
And good morning from a beautiful sunny Broad street in Oxford, freshly car free thanks to the Oxford low traffic zone and much the better for it, where I’m having a coffee before heading home. I was here yesterday at an event at the business school and then a nice dinner at Balliol sitting next to Paul Johnson who’s retiring from the IFS and taking up a new role as provost of the Queens college.
2 observations:
1. There are few experiences more satisfying to me than a coffee outside on the street on a cool but bright morning. It’s up there with a beer garden on a hazy afternoon. But crucially it must be a bit cool. The temperature here is cool enough, just. Is it just me?
2. Why does Oxford feel so different from almost all other British towns? Not the murder rate - Midsomer is worse - nor the fact it’s Oxbridge (Cambridge is very different - more on that later). I think it’s that Oxford is basically a French town.
The golden limestone buildings. The monuments, the tourist hordes. The mix of mediaeval and 18th century architecture, and vast amounts of 19th century mediaeval pastiche so accurate that most tourists assume it’s old. The mix of wide boulevards and narrow walled streets. It could be Beaune or Uzes or any number of provincial French towns.
Cambridge on the other hand is basically a Flemish town on the Bruges-Gent-Antwerp model, only without the vast heavy industry in the outskirts.
Also, nobody actually likes Starmer.
This is a grown up problem which requires grown up solutions. I don't mind Casino's approach, it is the only sustainable and coherent one, albeit it will take years if not decades to achieve.
You are absolutely right about queue jumping. Brits hate it, as I may indeed have mentioned in a recent post. Likewise control. It's not that a few thousand are coming over via small boats, is that this route is a visible manifestation of the governments lack of control in this instance of its own borders. That is what gets people upset.
Why another, longer, post (still good) about this latter can be found here:
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/03/16/sunak-and-stopping-the-boats/
I think he is on the right track for all of that, Labour's electoral prospect now depend on delivery, on immigration and the NHS, and luck with the economy.
"The US has criticised domestic South African policy, accusing the government of seizing land from white farmers without any compensation.
"In January President Ramaphosa signed a controversial law allowing the government to seize privately owned land without compensation in certain circumstances, when it is deemed "equitable and in the public interest".
"But the government says no land has yet been seized under the act."
She’s about as popular as head lice.
'OK I've passed a law saying I can take your assets without compensation, but I've not done so yet, so why are you seeking refuge before I can take your assets?'
Ley replaces right-winger Peter Dutton after his defeat in the Australian election earlier this month
"Federal politics live: Sussan Ley rejects her Liberal leadership victory is a 'glass cliff' appointment - ABC News" https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-13/federal-politics-live-blog-albanese-ministry-liberal-leadership/105285002
He could take the some of the sting out of it buy giving Ukrainians a pathway to ILR on their existing visas that they have to beg to renew every 18 months.
Most of the early arrivals from the East (and the Russians masquerading as Ukrainian for immigration/GRU purposes) are never going back anyway and will just disappear into the black economy/identity fraud if it gets too hard.
Ours have had to switch to Student Visas to get on the ILR/citizenship route.
Something in Labour's favour is the general ire is focused on Starmer personally, which is why disagreeable opponents are setting fire to HIS property. When he goes, which might be sooner than we all thought, maybe his replacement can work a Johnsonesque revival, post Theresa May.
Considering we have a £75 billion budget deficit, a deficit that averages over £1000 per capita, then yes it seems safe to say that minimum wage is net negative. Especially since you can't just magic wand away pension liability accruals or other costs as if they don't exist.
Find Out Now has Cons 16%, Reform 33%, Lab 20%.
Possibly, they might get 1% from Labour & then it's a question of how low the Tories can go. Maybe to 12% ? So, Reform peak is 38%.
For me, it was weird hearing such rhetoric from a Lab leader, who one would imagine is in favour of immigration (certainly senior leftists on twitter seem to be).
But also it is def a tanks on your lawn we can't be in a leftist bubble move imo. People might hear this and think - well they might be cr*p but at least they're listening to us.
We have clearly crossed paths.
I came down from Oxford yesterday, and was stuck on the M40 for TWO HOURS due to a lorry overturning near Stokenchurch.
I am somewhere on the Sussex-Kent border.
Hardly know how to describe where. Not far from Bodiam Castle.