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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Betting on the next Labour leader leading the party into the next general election
During Wednesday’s debate, Andy Burnham and the other contenders admitted they would stand down as leader if they were a hindrance to Labour winning in 2020, the fact we’re having this debate is down to Labour realising they may have done better at the 2010 and 2015 elections if they had taken the opportunities to remove Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband.
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(Just for you, Fluffy) x
Although some of the candidates have said they would change the rules, do we really think they'd see it as any form of priority once they are leader?
I'm beginning to think there is now no point to the Labour Party, people like Campbell hovering around and calling the shots sums it all up.
We know that the Tories will split intensely over Europe, and could have major fallout over the Brexit issue. We know that Cameron will step down and there could be a lot of leadership speculation over this, and quite possibly the Tories could put in an ineffective or divisive leader of their own.
Another recession or war may well happen, wrecking any Tory claim to be competent. An SNP triumph at Holyrood could lead to a crisis with effective UDI, perhaps using the EU issue as an excuse. The NHS deficit runs at scary levels (£800 million nationally for acute Trusts) meaning that it is very possible that one will either collapse in bankrupcy or a Stafford like disaster, due to inadequate staffing. There will be other events as yet unknown.
There is monumental hubris about at present by backers of a Tory government that has a wafer thin majority. The Tory victory of 92 looked the same at the time, but within 5 years they lost half their seats and were wiped ouf by a resurgent New Labour.
The new Labour Leader will need to manage events carefully but is likely to have more electoral success than Ed Miliband, unless it is Corbyn!
I would not take the WH odds.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11688948/The-UK-should-be-proud-of-its-foreign-aid-and-what-it-achieves.html
Having actually been to some of these places over the last 20 years I know he is right when he says Aid is making a difference, not just short term but long term. If you want to solve that migrant crisis everyone is so worried about then maybe you should accept we need to deal with the factors pushing people over here rather than just those pulling them.
Just pointing out some fairly obvious Elephat traps for the Government. Each creates opportunities to have a LOTO grow in stature, gravitas and popularity.
Labour plotted to boycott PMQs if Tories had failed to win majority (and admit they did plan to carve 'Mount Edmore')
Ed Miliband's team drew up secret plans to undermine Cameron with stunt
Miliband would address public rally at same time to try to force Tories out
Also considered carving 'Edstone' Election pledges on to cliff or quarry. Labour denied 'Mount Edmore’ plans when first revealed by MoS in May
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3132987/Ed-Miliband-plotted-boycott-PMQs-Tories-failed-win-majority-did-plan-carve-Mount-Edmore.html#ixzz3dg48bT75
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The Labour Party could come to its senses, stop trying to polarise everything between the Tories and themselves, and start constructing a much broader coalition, in which Labour would be just one player among many.
Because, of course, we still have the disfunctional FPTP voting system. Under this system, electors have to guess who the two front runners are in their own constituency, and vote tactically according to this guess. What would happen, I wonder, if an anti-Tory alliance of parties got together and decided to put up just one candidate against the sitting Tory? That is, after all, the logic of FPTP, which Conservatives defend to the bitter end. The Tories would be massacred.
An improbable scenario, perhaps. But not an impossible one. Labour this time round could end up with a candidate who puts country before party. If, as posters on here have said, Labour are currently a bit lacking in policy, then policy issues are not going to be an insurmountable barrier. Just the usual pride and vanity.
After all, the Liberal Democrats worked with the Conservatives for five years, and the Tories were happy enough to claim all the Lib Dem policies as their own in the recent election. And they still are.
Champagne socialism at its very best. Foreign aid, austerity, benefit cuts, £1.5 trillion in debt, people need to stop fawning over Gates and accept reality.
There is plenty to do in rebuilding both parties in the next year while Tories navel gaze and split over Europe. If the LD and Labour parties can together take 40 seats off the Tories then there would be an end to a Conservative government. The alternative would be an interesting coalition rather than a majority government, but very possible.
Visit working class areas and ask them if £12bn should be spent on foreign aid or domestically. I'll come with you to record the response.
There are two points that need to be considered.
1. Does the Aid make a difference? The answer here is an unequivocal Yes. Every measure shows that Aid to the poorest countries - when it is targeted in the way Gates does it -improves all the major markers for health, life expectancy and welfare.
2. Does improving lives of people in Africa help us? Again the answer is an unequivocal yes. Many if not most of those coming across the Mediterranean or piling up at Calais are trying to escape from the sorts of conditions that Aid is trying to alleviate. If you or I were in their situation we would do exactly the same thing. Making life better for these people in their home countries is the best way - indeed the only way in the long term - to stop these migrations. Clearly policies of the EU and other Western countries and companies also has to change for this to work so we stop robbing these countries of their fish or bribing their governments to grow cash crops instead of crops to feed their populations. But Aid is currently necessary and in the long term helps us as much as it helps the recipients.
The emphasis on education of girls in particular matters, for economic progress (educated women are more likely to work outside the home and also have fewer children) but also helps fight extremism. Islamists hate educated women as they are much harder to control, the reason that both ISIS and Boko Haram kidnap and enslave girls.
Your head in the sand approach to economics is the single biggest reason Labour were trounced.
My pre-race piece is up here, for those who missed it yesterday:
http://enormo-haddock.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/austriapre-race.html
I think it's understandable so many people were angry and protesting yesterday. Bloody Conservatives! What makes them think they have a mandate to enact their manifesto, apart from winning a General Election six weeks ago?!
It is possible that people do not realise how much money the Gates have pushed into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So far it is $28 billion, and they plan to give away 95% of their wealth. Whilst that will leave them very comfortable (and their children, although they appear loathed to directly give them money), the money will still do a vast amount of good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_&_Melinda_Gates_Foundation
They should be seen as a model for other billionaires. There are problems with such models (and they seem to be aware of them), but what they are doing is surely to the advantage of the world.
And then retire to the nearest champagne bar to congratulate ourselves on our generosity and benevolence. In public of course.
I'm beginning to think this site is an extension of the Westminster bubble that politicians inhabit.
I applaud Gates for donating money, now stop telling other people what to do with theirs.
Are you really against such schemes?
The Conservatives don't have many parties sympathetic to their view in the House - just some Unionists from Northern Ireland and one UKIP MP.
A 2.5% swing (small by historic standards) would deprive the Tories of a majority.
Approx. figures : Conservatives would get 309, Labour 252, SNP 57 Others 32 (mostly anti Tory)
We then have the highly undesirable situation of a rainbow coalition or minority Conservative government.
Either way - weak government.
Deary me how weak is this argument, I point out that a multi billionaire should stop hectoring hard up UK taxpayers and the handwringing begins. And I'm the one being told to face reality.
Problems will occur, whether by accident, malice, or incompetence. The key is to ensure the problem is detected, corrected, and the information about what went wrong disseminated as widely as possible so others may learn.
If this had happened at Stafford, then there would have been much better patient care much earlier. Instead they took the opposite route of covering it up: paying off or sacking whistleblowers, attacking relatives who wanted the truth, etc, etc. And all the time collecting their fat paycheques.
It was not just inadequate staffing. It was the culture from the rotten top to the rotten bottom.
It is why Burnham was utterly wrong to start a private inquiry that was flawed from the start, and why the public inquiry finally got as near to the truth as possible.
By my reckoning there are 32 Conservative held seats where adding the Labour/LibDem vote totals together would cause the Conservatives to lose the seat.
As they say a week is a long time in politics. A month is an eternity.
Cameron should enjoy his moment in the sun, because it could easily change again.
And on that point: we spent hundreds of millions on the recent outbreak, from sending out medics to treating those few who contracted it. If the outbreak had been bigger, it would have been much more. It was £330 million in Sierra Leone alone.
As an example: how much might we as a government have spent combating smallpox over the years if it had not already been eradicated?
If you are obsessed with the monetary side of things, it is short-term pain for long-term gain. If you are interested in the moral side, it is simply the right thing to do.
But I'm not sure some of the strictures for his employees would play too well nowadays. He was a stepping stone to true philanthropy. It's interesting to consider which party he would vote for today.
Gates's problem is that everybody, from Warren Buffet downwards, wants him to spend their money. Gates gets great value for his money. No govts do. When Bill has spent most of the money he has available, the British people will be happy to 'wedge-up' his foundation. Until then: foreign aid? No thanks.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3132943/Former-Archbishop-Canterbury-bans-sexist-Cambridge-jelly-wrestling-club-Magdalene-college.html
Its direct equivalent in the UK would be to claim that because the NHS is rubbish we should not have health care. Of course that is a ludicrous argument. What you do is change the systems so you can better provide the necessary result - whether that is health care in the UK or foreign aid in Africa.
That is what Gates is both advocating and achieving and it appears that he believes the UK government under the Tories is also achieving the same thing. My view is that he is right on this and we are seeing a far more effective and targeted foreign aid policy now than we had 5 years ago.
Was there this outraged bleating when in 2005 Labour got a majority four or five times larger on a lower percentage of the vote?
The 'registered voters' line is nonsense too because it includes those who didn't vote. If you can't be bothered to register your opinion by taking a short walk once every five years, your opinion doesn't matter.
What went wrong in Stafford was not simply a cover-up, and I can recall no criticism of Burnham in the report. There were multiple factors to blame and a superficial analysis such as yours is simply wrong.
There is a desire for scapegoating, and you have clearly fixated on Burnham for this. Such a simplistic and personalised analysis risks failing to address the real issues and makes another Stafford type scandal very likely.
Similar scandals have happened before: notably the Bristol Childrens Heart Scandal; or the experiences of Dr Rita Pal on ward 87 in North Staffs, and in the private sector at Winterbourne view.
Gaming of targets is also clearly still going on:
http://www.drfoster.com/updates/news/nhs-performance-management-putting-standards-of-care-at-risk/
Also reminds me of a good line I heard about Dragon Age: Inquisition, which features the returning character Leliana. Who it is possible to kill in an earlier game.
"Her decapitation was merely a setback."
And the voters have a habit of not behaving in the way some smart-arse politicos expect them. No doubt some would vote Tory, just to be contrarian against those doing the stitch-up....
Adding together the votes for Labour and Lib Dems makes no more sense than adding together the votes for Conservatives and UKIP.
Nobody claimed it was a problem for democracy when Labour got a smaller share of the vote and a majority of around 50-60.
My 'interesting seat' was a rock solid Labour seat a couple of elections ago.
The Francis report was published in full on the DoH website in early 2010, well before the GE. Not a very effective cover up!
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130107105354/http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_113018
But your point is a good one. It is just your solution that is wrong. We should be reducing the power of the parties not increasing it. Ban whipping of votes and reduce the power of the parties over candidate selection. Make the local representative properly represent their constituency rather than their party.
Do like champagne though.
Indeed, they have every right to an opinion. That said, protesting against a freshly elected government enacting its manifesto seems to be taking umbrage with democracy.
Mr. Tyndall, I agree very much on reducing the power of the parties (which would be drastically increased by the Satanic system of PR).
Hahahahahahaha. Turnips.
2015 - Conservatives 36.1% of the vote, winning a majority of 12, outraged bleating and wringing of hands
Double standards much ?
But, I don't accept the argument that the Conservatives' victory was somehow illegitimate.
Apparently it lost control due to massive over-spending. "Huge amounts of election spending were commissioned; we are talking hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds, with no money in the kitty to pay for it."
No doubt Nige will look into it and require another phalanx of party faithful to atone by falling on their swords.
What a bunch of clowns.
The Tories need to watch out for that too.
Int the meantime 4m UKIP voters can say with some justification it's not worth voting. Not good.
At the same time it is only in recent years we have started to deal with some of the underlying problems of western companies and countries bribing or coercing countries into large scale cash crop production which only benefits the elite and which leaves the majority of the population in absolute poverty unable to grow enough food to feed themselves. Further it is only a couple of decades since we had the end of the Cold War which promoted the use of Africa as a proxy battlefield for the US and Russia.
There are great success stories in Africa as a result of properly targeted aid. Botswana is one good example.
Of course people do not lose the right to moan if they do not vote. That was probably written into Magna Carta. You are probably talking about a moral right.....
But then the Tories do not have a moral right to govern, when they got 51% of the seats in the Commons, having received only 36% of the votes that were cast.
None of them look even vaguely like a PM. The hope for Labour is that one of them (ideally the winner of course) shows unexpected depths and grows into the job in a way that makes them a credible alternative to whoever the Tories put up the next time.
There is always a tendency as you get older to harp back to the giants of the past, to people who did not look particularly giantish at the time but this was the shadow cabinet after Maggie won in 1979, not a particularly high point for Labour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Cabinet_of_James_Callaghan
Callaghan, Healy, Shore, Foot, Owen, Smith, Kinnock and Hattersley amongst others. Again it may be age but all of these in their different ways made far more impact with the country and the electorate than those who are in contention now. Now we have a leading contender whose most notable achievement in government was the catastrophe of HIPs.
Labour is in a very bad place. And they know it. They have to pick the candidate who has the capacity to grow, not only themselves but to have the confidence (unlike Ed) to let others grow too. Does making the leader more vulnerable help this process? Probably not.