I think the value might be with the Greens – politicalbetting.com
I think the value might be with the Greens – politicalbetting.com
Who will win the upcoming by-election in Gorton and Denton? (Must take place in 2026)Labour – 1/2Reform UK – 15/8Greens – 6/1Lib Dems – 100/1Conservatives – 100/1https://t.co/nakHgF38Xb
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And its a first. I want to thank the support I get from my wife, my family and friends. I couldn't have done it without them.
I think Polanski in Parliament would be very bad new for Starmer. If it takes Burnham to stop him he should be cheering him on.
Polanski in parliament, OTOH, brings a bigger platform to the Greens but also more scrutiny and provides Labour more opportunity to kick against the Greens.
Best for Starmer is, of course, Burnham stands but loses.
Polanski will give voters options and line the Greens up as the next None of the previously tried (and failed) option after Reform
Interesting set of local by elections last night, The Lib Dems nicely won a four way dust up in the Cotswolds with the Greens collapsing and Reform behind the Tories.
SNP a solid hold on mid forties in Glenrothes with only Reform reallytroubling the scorers otherwise and Labour falling apart
Reform picked up Leeswood in Flintshire on 22% with Labour in freefall and the indies doing well
Tories held in the Wirral/Willaston on a very solid 53% Labour and Reform distant in second and third
And locally in Norfolk for me a Tory hold in Wymondham on 31% from the Greens with Reform third. Labour collapsed to fifth. Both the Greens (who got 30% in 2023) and Reform will have fancied this one. Wymondham is classic small market town Tory Norfolk but certainly not the strongest part of the county and it will encourage them to hold here. It makes South Norfolk one to watch as a Tory snaffle at the GE as Labour arent holding it and Reform not looking dominant here. But watch the Greens - not a big chance but outside Norwich, S Norfolk is probably their strongest (wholly, not like partial Waveney) Norfolk seat
https://bsky.app/profile/financialtimes.com/post/3md2xpol6ld2e
And December's retail beat expectations up 0.4% in December.
* What happened 10 years ago to destry consumer confidence? 🤔
I think that's great value.
Powerful and much needed framing from Andy Burnham in the Guardian..should be repeated every day by ministers or they will find they are blamed for ‘broken Britain’:
“If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit.
In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.”
https://x.com/steverichards14/status/2014612676777779396?s=20
Also, there are already Greens in parliament.
Burnham should hold it as the popular Greater Manchester Mayor. It looks though like Starmer and the NEC will impose an all BAME shortlist to keep out Burnham for the Labour nomination which would benefit Reform
Just a pity that environmentalism doesn't get a look in with today's Green Party.
"Popular *Greater* Manchester mqyor" means nothing if you decide you're going to leave that job for another one. Popular footballers don't tend to remain popular when they leave for another job
Labour have nothing to lose. They are sleepwalking to possible defeat at the hands of Farage. There is no form of REJOIN that would be a worse fate for this country than that.
If Burnham stands, I think he wins. Relatively comfortably.
If he doesn’t I could see each of Reform, Labour or the Greens nabbing it.
But what is more significant is some on the right are coming round to the view that many of our problems stem from the Thatcher government's measures they used to applaud – right-to-buy; spending (especially defence) cuts; deindustrialisation and over-reliance on a service economy. (Of course, they might blame Thatcher's successors rather than the lady herself, or details rather than principles.)
Even if what you propose is possible domestically, there is the small matter of negotiating and getting the approval of 27 Member States each of which, quite apart from other concerns/selfish reasons for veto, might just be just a little concerned that Nige or Kemiwill walk us straight back out again. All that in 3.5 years (tops) without a manifesto commitment. They’ve other priorities than our psychodrama.
I appreciate your passion but shit like this Leon levels of trolling. Customs Union possibly, Single Market at an unlikely stretch, but rejoin in 3.5 years (again, tops) is for the birds.
For the first time, I think, the results are running below the OBR forecast for the year. The damage done by the run up to the budget was horrendous and a completely unenforced error but there is a chance things might just calm down a bit for a while.
Thatcher forged a new consensus. It is no good the Labour Party trying to turn the clock back to those debates, just as it is no good Farage trying to appeal to a mythical Britain of the 1940s and 1950s. A new social contract needs to be forged.
We might also consider whether prominent Reform ex-MPs will fancy getting back into Parliament while Farage is building his shadow cabinet.
Only yesterday in Davos Reeves rejected a customs union saying Labour now have US, India, and other trade deals and praised our membership of the trans pacific partnership
I am not saying we should not draw closer which should be the objective but rejoin is far away as ever
Would it stop a catastrophic Labour defeat? My view is that it wouldn't - it may enthuse Roger and those like him, but it will also massively get the vote out for Reform. But on the other hand, Labour are in nothing-to-lose territory.
As to whether it would be the right thing for Britain or indeed for Europe - well, that's not the point!
But any amount of framing (and Starmer wouldn't argue with much of that either) doesn't provide solutions.
Another example of what has "broken Britain" is a chronically inefficient process state.
Burnham's framing suggests he'd put more, not less reliance on that.
We need rather more effective pragmatism, and rather less "framing", IMO.
About forty years too late, but well done.
They may show in second place for this seat in that ElectionMaps modelling - but no-one knows what assumptions that young guy is using to come up with his predictions, and modelling isn't the same as local polling.
When the Tory MP Danny Kruger defected to Reform UK last autumn, he argued that he would “continue to be the MP that I was elected to be at the last election”. His constituents, in other words, would have to lump it. Farage stayed silent.
In the past week, Robert Jenrick and Andrew Rosindell have followed Kruger’s path in both leaving the Tories for Reform and refusing to countenance a by-election. Rosindell said it would “just annoy people” and be a waste of time. Jenrick said voters in Newark “know what they get with me” and cited his “independent-minded stances” as one of the reasons he held his seat at the last election. For a party howling in outrage at the government’s decision to cancel a bunch of local elections, its MPs are treating democracy somewhat flippantly.
https://www.thetimes.com/article/dbd509d2-6f99-42a8-a14b-27e6f7cb550c?shareToken=beb114f005e357b2a1274ea7198e135b
"Privatisation is good", for all its successes, meant we had decades of monopoly utilities ripping off customers and failing to invest, before anyone woke up to it.
Popular council house sales were also part of the evisceration of local government resources.
The problem with the consensus was not the ideas themselves, but that the consensus served to prevent consideration any of the downsides associated with them.
In that respect, Thatcherism was as much a brainless ideology as is socialism.
1) We would be asked to follow the process that all applicants to the are do. The politics of Europe will not slow a special exemption - too many countries would get upset
2) So we would be signing up to “full fat” Europe
3) This means signing up for the Euro. Since this would remove a huge chunk of the mucking around with the economy the politicians love, this would be a matter of
I) Signing up to the Euro joining process
II) Never actually meeting he requirements and joining
https://www.gooutdoors.co.uk/collections/tents-sale
It's perfectly possible that the application would just get held up forever, and it's also possible that some countries would say they don't think it'll last and they're not going to play the hokey cokey but the Euro wouldn't be the blocker.
We were all pleased with the result but in retrospect it was the wrong thing to do. Same with Zak. His appeal is his optimism and freshness. He doesn't hate people of different shades. He ridicules people who do. He looks for the best sides of ourselves. Think Mamdani. It works particularly well against the doomsters of Reform. His message is 'We're better than that' and it's a message people like to hear. Just tune into Question Time
2. Putting it another way, as did the District Tribunal Judge when giving the Secretary of State permission to appeal to the Upper Tribunal, “these appeals essentially turn on the issue as to whether a person engaged in criminal activity (handling stolen goods) which is fuelled by substance abuse and addiction issues can be said to be self-employed for the purposes of permitted work whilst in receipt of Income Related Employment and Support Allowance.”
3. The position of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) was that the claimant was still engaged in a trade, albeit an illicit one, and so was to all intents and purposes a self-employed person. Furthermore, the DWP argued, the cash payments he received qualified as ‘income’ under the ESA regime. In short, however, the First-tier Tribunal (FTT) found that the claimant’s criminal activity
did not amount to ‘work’ and neither did his cash receipts count as ‘income’ under the relevant regulations.
To be filed under Bureaucracy empire strikes back. They agreed he was self-employed and the income did count for benefit calculation purposes. Not sure of the HMRC's position yet.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6657397916cf36f4d63ebbad/UA_2022_001764_001765_ESA.pdf
The idea that Council Houses are the very centre of the housing crisis is.... interesting.
Not going the Euro by not actually ever getting round to it is perfectly possible. And within the rules.
Hence Al Capone.
If you are running a large scale criminal enterprise, you can be done on Employers NI, pensions, minimum wage etc etc..
You can create housing by
1) Building it
2) Reducing the time and cost of travel to places where there is a surplus of housing
2) has largely been mined out, for the effected areas of the UK. We either need population reduction (see the more insane Reformat suggestions), or to build enough that the prices drop.
Council Houses would only answer 1) if the government (local or national) was prepared to
i) Build council houses and not charge for them - the rent would have to be a fraction of the market rate
ii) Aggressively evict sub tenants. In London, the proportion of Council Housing that is illegally sublet is staggering.
There is absolutely no possibility that the Government will exempt itself from the rules and regulations that have resulted in a massive escalation in building costs. Said rules are generally fairly pointless, since there is no effective enforcement.
Where are the tram systems in every single one of our smaller cities? Where are the integrated bus services? Where is the road building in the north to fill in the gaps between the major cities? Why hasn’t the government run out HS2 to Crewe / Manchester to free up the other lines for commuter rail into Birmingham? etc etc etc.
Every single city in this country gets poorer economic returns from agglomeration than equivalently sized cities on the continent because the local transport networks are so poor. The only exception to this rule is London & that’s because London is the city with an integrated public transport network run by a single unified authority & is the place that has received the lion’s share of investment over the last fifty years.
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/52523-western-europeans-would-support-the-uk-rejoining-the-eu
thanks for the message about Radio 6 Depeche Mode item last night - unfortunately, I only just saw the message!
Speaking of Afghanistan, it was remarked at the time that we were burning through the defence budget firing our stocks of American-made missiles at American-selected targets, and that it would be cheaper to cut out the middleman.
Various parties think the accretion of villages into towns and suburbs must be prevented.
https://bsky.app/profile/greenparty.org.uk/post/3mczv2ixlhq2i
I believe the phrase was "part of the evisceration of local government resources", which is true. So no straw men, please.
Incidentally, if you rebase you graph to start at 1980, and consider what might have been the case had councils been allowed to keep the proceeds to reinvest in housing, then you might see things slightly differently.
In the original, the Judge system from Judge Dredd was imposed in.... 2027
I think we should get ahead of this. Insist on British Bikes For British Judges. Also, get Accuracy International to build the Lawgivers.
Farage's willingness to pucker up to Trump is shaping up to be a real electoral problem. Reform's poll lead is already flatlining/ shrinking and Politico @moreincommonuk.bsky.social piece shows it could cost them votes in suburbia. And that was before he decided to slag off UK troops
Noticeable that Robert Jenrick has already seen which way the wind is blowing on this
https://bsky.app/profile/davidtwilcock.bsky.social/post/3md3fbtw42c2c
And the only solution is building more. A lot more.
There is much to not like about privatisation, but there was very much not to like about the state of state run stuff before the 1980's revolution. But you have to be older generation with a decent memory to remember how bad it could be.
You can't consider deindustrialisation without also considering the areas of economic activity that grew at the same time. It's like farming which is only a tiny % of GDP but still essential but we have grown rich in other ways. Industry remains essential and we have grown in other ways.
Austerity: State spending remains, and remained during the so called austerity period, gigantic; as did and does borrowing.
Brexit: The vote to leave left the future open to parliament to steer. If Burnham's party had focussed on joining with moderates to get a Norway/Swiss type deal, out of the political but in the economic union, things would be different.
The more unevenly that wealth is distributed, the more the wealthy are able to buy additional and larger properties. This might have the effect of squeezing supply for the less wealthy and thus inflating prices. The corollory of that would be to weaken the effect on prices of building additional housing since it will tend to be snapped up by the rich. It also implies that another way to reduce house prices would be to introduce a more progressive tax regime.
Thatcher undoubtedly made mistakes.
Her policies which directly disastrous for the north of England.
But she also did quite a lot of necessary stuff, and I don't think she did all that much which wasn't capable of remediation, had her successors diagnosed and addressed where she went wrong.
The reason it can still be "dragged out" is that they have never been addressed.
The next GE will likely be shortly after the next American Presidential election. Which should be interesting.
Best ignored.
Sections of the left are as guilty as sections of the right at seeing recent history as a journey from Eden to Hell.
Had you been alive in 1970, you might have been the young professional who could buy a house in Notting Hill for £3,000. But, the greater likelihood is you’d be the guy dying of enphysema in some slum owned by the NCB, at the age of 48.