Tactical voting may not be Farage’s friend – politicalbetting.com
Tactical voting may not be Farage’s friend – politicalbetting.com
Our latest poll with @FindoutnowUK, featured in @thetimes, reveals strong anti-Reform tactical voting which could cost Farage 60 seats and the possibility of an outright majority at the next general election.Read our full analysis ??https://t.co/vFXGMH6PMF https://t.co/Z1Fvugrzoo
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Edit: and first.
If Reform were a threat in my seat, I would certainly vote for whichever party was most likely to keep them out. A Reform government would be utterly disastrous for the country and the majority of its people, including Reform voters.
EXCL: Keir Starmer’s head of communications, Steph Driver, has announced she is leaving Downing Street, the latest in a series of trusted aides to the prime minister who have left No 10 in recent months.
So I am now officially against Northern Powerhouse Rail. I was all for it, till I read this fairly damning account of it, which is basically that it's not going to do anything for the North, because it's basically more of the HS2 project, just gussied up by Obsborne to look like his own genius levelling up scheme.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/its-time-to-admit-that-high-speed-rail-is-a-dead-end/
Osborne did that a lot. The OBR for example was meant to be a great way to ensure Tory style fiscal rectitude, but it wasn't - it was actually a quango designed to ready us for monetary union. Northern Powerhouse Rail sounds brilliant, but it turns out:
So until another, better take comes along, I'm adopting Gilligan's view that NPR is shite and we should do a Queen Elizabeth line for Northern England instead. We're out of the EU now, we can do what the populace actually needs, not continue with their ludicrous grand projets and have to pretend they're working for people.
And Trump is disastrous if you don't have $100m in the bank.
https://x.com/LeftieStats/status/1971206520319963364?s=19
Holyrood also polled and is in the archive in their website, I'll fish out the figures......
SNP 37
Labour 20
Reform 18
Con 11
LD 7
Green 5
Alba 1
List vote
SNP 31
Lab 18
Reform 15
Con 13
LD 11
Green 8
Alba 2
My mother, for example, does not have a smartphone, and with her troubles with eyesight and Parkinson's, is certainly never going to have one, so she's not going to be carrying around a mandatory digital ID.
I guess we'll wait and see what the details are.
Meanwhile, Burnham's stuffed it hasn't he. (Again) I'll be honest I much prefer virtual cards on my phone compared to physical ones.
How will a politician understand an objection when it is on a facet of character (principle) that is both missing and noncompatible with the majority of politicians?
1) The Gilligan reiterates the old chestnut about journey times. NPR isn't primarily about journey times: it's about frequency and reliability. And a holistic network. Yes, you can get in 31 minutes from Lime Street to Victoria - but not desperately reliably, and at the expense of suburban services on the line.
2) The report says there are already two lines from Liverpool to Manchester (three if you include Headbolt Lane - which you can, but seems a stretch, because you'd need to reinstate a short bit of track for that to count). But that's normal between adjacent big cities - I think there are five routes between Glasgow and Edinburgh.
3) Prioritise local services, says Gilligan. But then suggests filling up the existing network with city to city links, which can only be done at the expense of local services.
4) But actually, better local services are what we all want. And that's the point of new high speed alignments: we provide new capacity, run the high speed services on that, and you can therefore run far more local services on the old network. A moment's thought will demonstrate this: with a mix of fast and slow trains, you need to leave a massive gap after the slow train leaves before you set the fast train off. If all your trains are of the same speed, you can run 15tph along a route, assuming sufficient capacity at stations. If it's a mix of fast and slow, it might be half that or less. NPR allows much better suburban services to run. This is the outcome Gilligan claims to want.
...(cont)...
5) You CAN'T get 30tph on a two-track underground railway. You just can't. The Castlefield corridor is creaking at 13-14. Thameslink gets no more than 18.
6) Yes, the Airport station is a short distance from the Airport - this is normal, Airports are large - but you don't need a bus link, there are already powers for extending the tram. (cf the Piccadilly line at Heathrow). This is a better outcome for those travelling from further afield eg Liverpool, Leeds, N. Wales than changing at Piccadilly.
6) All that said, actually, the SE-W tunnel Gilligan proposes, along with the regular radial routes out of Manchester, would be welcome. Indeed, rumour has it Network Rail are considering a similar (albeit smaller scale) thing as a potential solution to the Central Manchester rail bottleneck. But the thing to note is that this wouldn't be a cheap solution: all the good stuff which Gilligan lists as 'do instead' is likely to add up to far more than NPR. Less tunnelling, sure - but underground junctions, electrification, grade separated junctions, four-tracking and work on operational railways will be far more complex and expensive than a new alignment. That's why the 'use the Chat Moss' option kept getting filtered out when NPR has considered it in the past.
Gilligan clearly knows a bit. But it is amazing what he either doesn't know or pretends not to know.
"The crown court backlog in England and Wales has risen by 10% to a new record of almost 80,000 cases, while wait times for trial dates have reached up to four years.
Figures from the Ministry of Justice showed the open caseload was 78,329 at the end of June, up 2% from 76,957 at the end of March, the first time the backlog passed 75,000. It is also up 10% from 70,893 a year earlier, the figures show.
...
There is also a new record backlog in magistrates’ courts of 361,027 cases, up 25% on 289,595 a year earlier."
This is a big problem, but is it even in the top five big problems for the government?
It’s a friend in the NSA.
Will Your Party get their act together before next May? I think not but if they did and came out with an indy curious offer they might do okay, ie a seat or two. Lot of ifs there of course.
There's another, more fundamental, problem here: HS2 suffered massively from the naysayers because of the 'high speed' aspect, when it is actually about capacity between four urban centres (now, sadly, just one-and-a-half). A significant issue with NPR is that there are far too many separate population centres that need serving, often too close together to allow high speed between them, and too geographically disparate to be served by the same line. This is why NPR is a much better moniker than HS3. But it should perhaps be made clear that journeys will be faster because of deconfliction of services rather than massively high speeds.
"But the thing to note is that this wouldn't be a cheap solution: all the good stuff which Gilligan lists as 'do instead' is likely to add up to far more than NPR."
A very common feature of idiots like Gilligan during lines on maps. I still recall with joy the "Reopen the GCR" muppets wrt HS2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLhr7V0MNHo
Which is a long way away. Although reading this site you’d think it was next week.
Seriously, if you're still within you're 6 minutes, see if you can delete that comment.
Personally I think one should vote positively, if one can find a candidate who one genuinely feels positive about. Tactical voting backfires too often. I do see the temptation if Reform stands to gain, though.
It was quite revolting and in pleasant contrast to Ed Davey's PPB and the Lib Dems general civility. My feeing is that like the football thugs of the 80's which were heavily intermixed with the xenophobes is the model for what we're seeing now.. i'm confident this will pass and the ones carrying the banners when it does -the Farage Jenrick Robinsons -will forfeit everything and end up no more than a footnote
https://www.encyclis.com/news/encyclis-and-uk-government-sign-landmark-agreement-for-uks-first-full-scale-carbon-capture-project-for-energy-from-waste/
https://www.heidelbergmaterials.co.uk/en/news-and-events/construction-to-start-on-world-leading-padeswood-ccs-project
This alone should be enough to reduce his support amongst those who want a strong Labour government. And in the very unlikely event he becomes PM or party leader, he can expect exactly the same sort of 'help' from others.
And almost ahead of Labour.
If you don't believe in the right of women to have single sex spaces then you don't believe in women's rights.
It's interesting that this is to capture emissions at a cement plant: concrete being a surprisingly large contributor to CO2 release (8% globally). But I do wonder if the money might better be spent on chemically low-carbon cement instead.
Incidentally, a girl I knew at uni was doing Masters research into the use of flyash as a component in cement manufacture, to see how it affected the strength and other characteristics of the concrete. It's odd that flyash is now seen as an interesting option, just as the flyash production (from coal power stations) is coming to an end...
Hello God, it's me, Viewcode. I don't like Reform and I don't want them to win. But Labour keep doing things that I don't want them to do and in fact should be physically stopped from doing. Can you please send somebody who is half-assed decent with a chance of winning? Because this is getting me down. Amen, Viewcode.
Let me ask a question: why should someone who has been through full gender transition for decades, and has been using women's facilities for those decades, now have to use male, or disabled if available, facilities? What has changed?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSWqr-Vt-kw&t=1433s
TL/DR; shifting 150,000 hardbacks is impressive but does not quite cover the £2M advance.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-ice-shooters-motive
They just give their airforce commanders authority to shoot down military aircraft trespassing in Romanian airspace, without having first to consult the politicians.
In UK terms, Catherine Connolly seems to have Corbynite views. If the vote was FPTP, she would have a good chance of winning Eire's fortcoming presidential election, but as it is AV, I suspect that either the FF or FG candidate will win.
Even though polling shows a majority in favour this could change and turn into Labours poll tax moment .
I have every sympathy for transwomen. And they have the same rights as everyone else, but just as they cannot become a horse they cannot become a woman.
If Reform tried to implement their more racist and Trumpist policies, a large number of people wouldn’t accept it, and would violently protest. A number of Reform supporters would also violently counter-protest. The resulting conflict would be extremely bad for all of us.
But I can't help feel that the country which has been following that policy in the Ukraine - you know invade, treat the locals like shit - is actually Russia.
He was right: models have outperformed radiologists on benchmarks for ~a decade.
Yet radiology jobs are at record highs, with an average salary of $520k.
https://x.com/deenamousa/status/1971211372190106029
I wonder how long this will last.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp98kepmj9lo
If so, is five years jail time for a Timelord an eternity, or nothing?
I note that the UN has deemed that trans is not a mental illness (no doubt after significant pressure from pro trans lobbying). Yet body dysmorphia is still a mental illness.
I do not seek to tell anyone who to live their lives, who they can have sex with, how they can dress. I merely wish the law respected and that women's single sex spaces remain for women, not for anyone who the law regards as a man.
A you know what - this is a dangerous thing to say. People have been hounded out of work because of this belief.
Carbon credits, programmable money
We really need them here in the Seattle area.
But it's tighter now with labour as well. Perhaps a LD breakthrough.
There is a tipping point when it flips.
The push to ban is massively being driven by Spain and it seems Spain has a massive beef about Israel/Gaza, more so than any European con try apart from Ireland as far as I can see and like Ireland they seem to be not pulling their weight when it comes to Ukraine, at least Ireland can hide behind neutrality but Spain is also being a big refusenik on increasing defence spending in line with NATO targets.