pjw1961
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Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
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Post by pjw1961 on Aug 6, 2022 20:37:23 GMT
In polling matters, I saw an Electoral Calculus 'thing' that predicts that BOURNEMOUTH EAST (home of AFC Bournemouth, top of the League) would be a Labour seat under current trends. Must be wrong. Why not, things can change. If you had said to someone in 1989 that in 30 years time there would be a Labour MP for Canterbury in the same election as a Tory MP for Ashfield I doubt they would have believed you but it happened.
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Post by isa on Aug 6, 2022 20:59:56 GMT
crossbat11 We have our fair share of poverty in Hemel, it's just that some of the shit holes people live in here are absurdly expensive both to rent and buy. Money sent here might unfortunately end up in the hands of those who need it. Now if you had said Harpenden average house price £850,000 you'd be talking about the genuinely deserving I lived in Harpenden for a time in the late 80s/early 90s. A very wealthy place, even then. Eric Morecambe was previously a resident. It always struck me how much of a contrast it was to its neighbour just 5 miles up the road, Luton. Two more strikingly different communities, so close together, you would be hard pushed to match, I reckon.
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c-a-r-f-r-e-w
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A step on the way toward the demise of the liberal elite? Or just a blip…
Posts: 5,638
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Post by c-a-r-f-r-e-w on Aug 6, 2022 21:04:21 GMT
I was talking to crossbat11 the other day about how he thought Villa would get on this season. He said probably 2nd from bottom and go out in a replay in the 3rd round of the FA Cup. So I was saying I thought Wigan would win all 46 games (apart from the two they've already drawn), win the Championship and FA Cup, and then next season win the Premier League and Europa Cup. He said that's ridiculously optimistic and I said well you're the one that started it... good luck to Wigan playing the mighty Sky Blues at the Arena in ten days time, and congrats on the promotion! PUSB
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c-a-r-f-r-e-w
Member
A step on the way toward the demise of the liberal elite? Or just a blip…
Posts: 5,638
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Post by c-a-r-f-r-e-w on Aug 6, 2022 21:14:37 GMT
I think it might be more realistic if, instead of levelling up, we see it as them simply meaning “levelling”, as in levelling a city
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Post by crossbat11 on Aug 6, 2022 21:15:31 GMT
GRAHAM Hello to you. I well remember hearing about the early results in 1992 at a pub session' off the Unthank Rd[ the Beehive. (Lose, Lose, Lose and Lose- quoting Peter M Hello Chris
I was commentating on BBC Radio Norfolk that night as their psephologist. The Exit poll carried out on the day suggested a Hung Parliament - but the first results failed to confirm that. Labour needed a 4.3% swing just to remove the Tory majority and bring about a Hung Parliament. The first four results were - Sunderland South - swing to Labour 2.4% Torbay - swing to Labour 2.6% Basildon - swing to Labour 1.3% Guildford - swing to Labour 0.4%
After ten results I informed listeners that the Exit Poll was wrong - that I expected the Tories to form the next Government and to do so with an overall majority. In personal terms I had a successful night as a psephologist and pundit but felt utterly miserable.The anchor man was rather impressed that I 'called' the result 3 hours before it was implied by adjustments to the BBC forecast as the real results gradually undermined the early predictions!
Nice anecdote, Graham. We have our very own David Butler on here, obviously. Curtice wasn't touring the studios in 1992 as a polling guru, hence my Butler reference. He was in those days, along with fellow psephologists like Anthony King. Butler used to pop up as a poster from time to time on the old UKPR. We were sometimes in rarefied company on that site. Maybe we are here too. Who knows who is out there in political cyberspace? I have to ask you though, didn't Alan Partridge work for Radio Norfolk at one time? I remember him falling out with the Norfolk farmers once when he claimed that the local beef was riddled with BSE. They dropped a dead cow from a bridge on to a boat he was on in an act of revenge. He was shooting a promotional video for a boating cruise company at the time. The incident caused quite a stir, as it did when Partridge was caught stealing traffic cones from some long standing road works on the edge of Norwich.
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Post by isa on Aug 6, 2022 21:21:36 GMT
How did Redditch get in the SOUTHERN league? I do appreciate that all of England is southern to our attention seeking Scottish members. Well Gloucester City play in National League North. Gloucester wouldn't be everybody's idea of the North.
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Post by crossbat11 on Aug 6, 2022 21:29:16 GMT
SDA
The geographical references attributed to junior football leagues have always been somewhat vague and generic. For many years, there were Northern and Southern leagues, and divisions therein, that seperated England more or less in half. Redditch sits pretty close to the dividing line between these leagues and they have featured in the past in both the old Conference North, playing Barrow and Blyth Spartans, and also in the Southern Premier, playing sides on the South Coast of England.
The formation of the Southern Premier Central League was an attempt to regionalise the seventh tier of English football a little more sensibly, preventing sides like Redditch playing teams in Kent, Sussex, Dorset and Devon. That said,the Mighty Reds play a few sides in Suffolk now. Leiston, Needham Market and Lowestoft! Also some teams on the outskirts of London like Royston Town.
There aren't enough clubs in the Midlands to sustain a division of 22 clubs able to play seventh tier football. Accordingly the leagues cast their nets fairly wide.
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Post by isa on Aug 6, 2022 21:30:40 GMT
GRAHAM Hello to you. I well remember hearing about the early results in 1992 at a pub session' off the Unthank Rd[ the Beehive. (Lose, Lose, Lose and Lose- quoting Peter M Hello Chris
I was commentating on BBC Radio Norfolk that night as their psephologist. The Exit poll carried out on the day suggested a Hung Parliament - but the first results failed to confirm that. Labour needed a 4.3% swing just to remove the Tory majority and bring about a Hung Parliament. The first four results were - Sunderland South - swing to Labour 2.4% Torbay - swing to Labour 2.6% Basildon - swing to Labour 1.3% Guildford - swing to Labour 0.4%
After ten results I informed listeners that the Exit Poll was wrong - that I expected the Tories to form the next Government and to do so with an overall majority. In personal terms I had a successful night as a psephologist and pundit but felt utterly miserable.The anchor man was rather impressed that I 'called' the result 3 hours before it was implied by adjustments to the BBC forecast as the real results gradually undermined the early predictions!
It's a serious post, I know, but I was irresistibly reminded of Alan Partridge there. Ooops! I see crossbat11 has already noted this.
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Post by crossbat11 on Aug 6, 2022 21:35:13 GMT
How did Redditch get in the SOUTHERN league? I do appreciate that all of England is southern to our attention seeking Scottish members. Well Gloucester City play in National League North. Gloucester wouldn't be everybody's idea of the North. isa - you give a classic example of how Midlands football clubs can compete in regional leagues that defy geographical logic. Promotions and relegations sometimes means Midlands teams are force fitted into illogical leagues. Many seasons ago, Redditch played in the Conference North while Worcester City played in the Conference South! Gloucester City's old ground usually resided under the River Severn most winters, didn't it??
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oldnat
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Extremist - Undermining the UK state and its institutions
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Post by oldnat on Aug 6, 2022 21:36:21 GMT
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c-a-r-f-r-e-w
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A step on the way toward the demise of the liberal elite? Or just a blip…
Posts: 5,638
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Post by c-a-r-f-r-e-w on Aug 6, 2022 21:43:05 GMT
It's a serious post, I know, but I was irresistibly reminded of Alan Partridge there. “Wings? They're only the band The Beatles could have been” “Smell my cheese!” (possibly a Liz Truss reference) “That was ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ by Joni Mitchell, a song in which Joni complains they ‘Paved paradise to put up a parking lot’, a measure which actually would have alleviated traffic congestion on the outskirts of paradise, something which Joni singularly fails to point out, perhaps because it doesn’t quite fit in with her blinkered view of the world. Nevertheless, nice song.” “‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’. What a great song. It really encapsulates the frustration of a Sunday, doesn’t it?”
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Post by alec on Aug 6, 2022 21:44:34 GMT
Anthony Seldon describing Johnson's last days in office as a "hive of inactivity". While Gordon Brown call for an emergency budget to alleviate the cost of living crisis, Johnson sits there, picking his nails and holding parties, with a complete indifference to the state of the nation.
No one, I think, can ever have occupied such a high office, with such low morality. He is truly awful.
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Post by jib on Aug 6, 2022 21:56:57 GMT
Anthony Seldon describing Johnson's last days in office as a "hive of inactivity". While Gordon Brown call for an emergency budget to alleviate the cost of living crisis, Johnson sits there, picking his nails and holding parties, with a complete indifference to the state of the nation. No one, I think, can ever have occupied such a high office, with such low morality. He is truly awful. We all knew he was truly awful before he became PM. Nothing much happens in politics over the summer anyway, and the Government was zombified as soon as he effectively resigned.
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Post by laszlo4new on Aug 6, 2022 22:23:48 GMT
Indeed. The Briefing Room programme I've just linked to said China gets 80% of its chips from Taiwan. It's complicated, which is why one of the commentators said China was willing to bide its time for the medium term. The medium term was defined as 50 years! I believe that the USA is putting pressure on TSMC to set up a foundry in the USA. These days there are many companies that design chips but almost all the manufacture is either in Taiwan or South Korea. It would be very tricky for TSMC - it uses open innovation for the whole supply chain and the Taiwanese government does some of facilitation of it (industrial park, for example). It is true that many of the key partners also operate in the US (like ASML - a very interesting Dutch company), but the open innovation model has some legal problems in the US (or competitors can make it such). In chip manufacturing you are dealing with three issues: the design and testing and the yield. Then you obviously have the market segmentation by users as Intel learnt it in the hard way. As supply and demand and price emerged earlier in the context of housing. For a good 25-30 years the demand for microchips exceeded supply, yet prices fell (half of Moore's law). It was large due to the profit model of Samsung, but it hasn't been sustainable for about 15 years now.
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Post by pete on Aug 6, 2022 22:32:31 GMT
Try coconut oil and pickled walnuts. You what?
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Post by shevii on Aug 6, 2022 22:41:39 GMT
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Post by isa on Aug 6, 2022 22:44:04 GMT
Well Gloucester City play in National League North. Gloucester wouldn't be everybody's idea of the North. isa - you give a classic example of how Midlands football clubs can compete in regional leagues that defy geographical logic. Promotions and relegations sometimes means Midlands teams are force fitted into illogical leagues. Many seasons ago, Redditch played in the Conference North while Worcester City played in the Conference South! Gloucester City's old ground usually resided under the River Severn most winters, didn't it?? Absolutely, crossbat11 . The Midlands is a bit of a geographical minefield non-league fitba-wise. I well remember my team, Yeovil, playing a Southern League fixture against Worcester City in 1970 when tickets were on sale for an impending 3rd Round FA Cup tie against Arsenal and the attendance was over 8,000, the highest home league attendance for about 15 years! Funnily enough, many moons ago, I used to have a client with premises adjoining Gloucester's ground, and it was not unusual to see a small lake where the pitch normally was!
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Post by isa on Aug 6, 2022 22:53:15 GMT
In polling matters, I saw an Electoral Calculus 'thing' that predicts that BOURNEMOUTH EAST (home of AFC Bournemouth, top of the League) would be a Labour seat under current trends. Must be wrong. Why not, things can change. If you had said to someone in 1989 that in 30 years time there would be a Labour MP for Canterbury in the same election as a Tory MP for Ashfield I doubt they would have believed you but it happened. Well quite. I think you'd have got pretty good odds in 1989 that LAB would take Hove, actually, in six of the next eight general elections with majorities of up to 18,000.
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Post by mercian on Aug 6, 2022 23:10:45 GMT
The China/Taiwan situation is very worrying. I get a sense that, with the West fully engaged with Russia/Ukraine, China will jump at any excuse to invade - and I don’t really see how they can be stopped. China also has a good argument that Taiwan isn't an independent country and is actually part of China (or at least has been since 1945). To believe otherwise you would have to be of the opinion that the KMT continued to govern the whole of China from Taiwan after the Communist Revolution in China. Essentially, you would have to believe that the seat of the Chinese government (and the whole of 1945 China) rests in Taiwan. That's a huge distinction with the position in Ukraine, which clearly is an independent country to Russia. Will China seek by force to reintegrate Taiwan directly under mainland China's control? I actually doubt it, especially as the US has a defence pact with Taiwan. IIRC China was one of the first members of the UN Security Council because they were one of the Allies (fighting against Japanese occupation). Then there was the Communist revolution and the Nationalist forces ended up retreating to Taiwan (which up until then had been part of China). As they were still seen as the legitimate government still residing in a part of their own country, they stayed on the Security Council for many years after the revolution and it caused a bit of a stir when they were eventually replaced by Communist China, which is obviously the more important. So as with Putin and the Ukraine, I can see where the Communist Chinese are coming from, even if I don't agree with their methods.
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Post by mercian on Aug 6, 2022 23:16:29 GMT
Maybe. But Taiwan is a major foreign trade partner of China (the 7th) and a major investor in China. China can manage these, but not so easily (especially semiconductors - TSMC). Indeed. The Briefing Room programme I've just linked to said China gets 80% of its chips from Taiwan. It's complicated, which is why one of the commentators said China was willing to bide its time for the medium term. The medium term was defined as 50 years! The Chinese have always played a long game. It probably helps nowadays that as they're not democratic they don't have to think how to bribe the electorate every few years. But I think it goes way back into imperial times.
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Post by mercian on Aug 6, 2022 23:31:52 GMT
SDA The geographical references attributed to junior football leagues have always been somewhat vague and generic. For many years, there were Northern and Southern leagues, and divisions therein, that seperated England more or less in half. Redditch sits pretty close to the dividing line between these leagues and they have featured in the past in both the old Conference North, playing Barrow and Blyth Spartans, and also in the Southern Premier, playing sides on the South Coast of England. The formation of the Southern Premier Central League was an attempt to regionalise the seventh tier of English football a little more sensibly, preventing sides like Redditch playing teams in Kent, Sussex, Dorset and Devon. That said,the Mighty Reds play a few sides in Suffolk now. Leiston, Needham Market and Lowestoft! Also some teams on the outskirts of London like Royston Town. There aren't enough clubs in the Midlands to sustain a division of 22 clubs able to play seventh tier football. Accordingly the leagues cast their nets fairly wide. The anomaly occurs because higher leagues are national, and they become regional lower down, which is obviously sensible. I believe (though it's in a state of flux) that the system for the National League for instance is to relegate 4 teams and promote two each from the National League North and NL South. So what happens if four northern teams are relegated for instance? Obviously a bit of shuffling has to occur, and the Midland clubs will be the ones to be shifted about. EDIT: I see a few other posters have made similar points.
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Post by graham on Aug 6, 2022 23:37:29 GMT
Hello Chris
I was commentating on BBC Radio Norfolk that night as their psephologist. The Exit poll carried out on the day suggested a Hung Parliament - but the first results failed to confirm that. Labour needed a 4.3% swing just to remove the Tory majority and bring about a Hung Parliament. The first four results were - Sunderland South - swing to Labour 2.4% Torbay - swing to Labour 2.6% Basildon - swing to Labour 1.3% Guildford - swing to Labour 0.4%
After ten results I informed listeners that the Exit Poll was wrong - that I expected the Tories to form the next Government and to do so with an overall majority. In personal terms I had a successful night as a psephologist and pundit but felt utterly miserable.The anchor man was rather impressed that I 'called' the result 3 hours before it was implied by adjustments to the BBC forecast as the real results gradually undermined the early predictions!
Nice anecdote, Graham. We have our very own David Butler on here, obviously. Curtice wasn't touring the studios in 1992 as a polling guru, hence my Butler reference. He was in those days, along with fellow psephologists like Anthony King. Butler used to pop up as a poster from time to time on the old UKPR. We were sometimes in rarefied company on that site. Maybe we are here too. Who knows who is out there in political cyberspace? I have to ask you though, didn't Alan Partridge work for Radio Norfolk at one time? I remember him falling out with the Norfolk farmers once when he claimed that the local beef was riddled with BSE. They dropped a dead cow from a bridge on to a boat he was on in an act of revenge. He was shooting a promotional video for a boating cruise company at the time. The incident caused quite a stir, as it did when Partridge was caught stealing traffic cones from some long standing road works on the edge of Norwich. I am afraid I cannot help there in that I was never directly employed by Radio Norfolk beyond being paid a fee for my election night commentaries.For quite a few years they used to send their Radio Car around to my home or workplace when they needed a quick commentary on events related to politics or economics. The ERM crisis in September 1992 sticks in my mind - though I was never paid for these incidental radio appearances!
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Post by moby on Aug 7, 2022 6:05:19 GMT
Anthony Seldon describing Johnson's last days in office as a "hive of inactivity". While Gordon Brown call for an emergency budget to alleviate the cost of living crisis, Johnson sits there, picking his nails and holding parties, with a complete indifference to the state of the nation. No one, I think, can ever have occupied such a high office, with such low morality. He is truly awful. Nothing much happens in politics over the summer anyway, and the Government was zombified as soon as he effectively resigned. I'm sure the well oiled engine of Truss' Govmt will roar into action in Sept with a detailed plan to protect us from the further energy price spike in October.
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steve
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Post by steve on Aug 7, 2022 6:09:34 GMT
![](//storage.proboards.com/7248232/thumbnailer/CjwgXdMozqqcmvWVqijP.png) As energy bills are about to rise by 70% and cosplay Maggie is determined to cut taxes and services spare a thought for the forgotten 1%
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Post by moby on Aug 7, 2022 6:10:50 GMT
Nice anecdote, Graham. We have our very own David Butler on here, obviously. Curtice wasn't touring the studios in 1992 as a polling guru, hence my Butler reference. He was in those days, along with fellow psephologists like Anthony King. Butler used to pop up as a poster from time to time on the old UKPR. We were sometimes in rarefied company on that site. Maybe we are here too. Who knows who is out there in political cyberspace? I have to ask you though, didn't Alan Partridge work for Radio Norfolk at one time? I remember him falling out with the Norfolk farmers once when he claimed that the local beef was riddled with BSE. They dropped a dead cow from a bridge on to a boat he was on in an act of revenge. He was shooting a promotional video for a boating cruise company at the time. The incident caused quite a stir, as it did when Partridge was caught stealing traffic cones from some long standing road works on the edge of Norwich. I am afraid I cannot help there in that I was never directly employed by Radio Norfolk beyond being paid a fee for my election night commentaries.For quite a few years they used to send their Radio Car around to my home or workplace when they needed a quick commentary on events related to politics or economics. The ERM crisis in September 1992 sticks in my mind - though I was never paid for these incidental radio appearances! Did they ask you for your view on the pedestrianisation of Norwich city centre though? I mean don't traders need access to Dixon's?
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steve
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Post by steve on Aug 7, 2022 6:47:45 GMT
Attachment Deleted While Truss is of course wrong in that you can't be imprisoned for not paying the tv licence fee she is sort of correct without knowing it in that you can be imprisoned for non payment of a fine. Given that a fine is a non custodial penalty and should be based on the ability to pay it , the alternative penalty should be an alternative non custodial penalty. Thousands are imprisoned each year for non payment of fines the vast majority are male. It's a disgraceful use of custodial sentencing for those who pose no risk to the public.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Aug 7, 2022 8:26:25 GMT
Two interesting opinions in ST today-from both LOC and ROC.
First Steve Richards. He used to be on telly a lot and I always enjoyed and respected his opinions and analysis.
His ST piece is titled :-
"If Starmer wants to be PM, he could learn a lot from Truss the insurgent"
Extracts :- "The weird and fantastical Conservative leadership contest should be a gift to Sir Keir Starmer. The Labour leader should be on a high as the two candidates row over when to deliver uncosted tax cuts as the economy heads for the cliff’s edge. Yet in a bizarre twist Starmer has had a troubled few weeks too.
In terms of the rail strikes, Starmer is not acting as a union leader but as the alternative prime minister. If he supported one side wholly he would not be much use as a prime ministerial mediating force. Starmer must speak for the users of public services as well as acknowledging the case the strikers are making, at a time of raging inflation. He has more or less pulled off the balancing act.
The same applies to Brexit. In a recent speech he outlined incremental ways in which the UK would creep a little closer to the EU but ruled out joining the single market and customs union. At this point, partly as a result of his own caution, he has no space to say more about a new relationship with the EU even though one is urgently needed. The hard, unglamorous grind of another balancing act was more or less accomplished.
Yet there is unease across Labour, from frustrated shadow cabinet members to backbenchers, about Labour’s direction — or lack of it. To learn some lessons, Starmer could do worse than note the rise of Liz Truss.
As one of the more perceptive shadow cabinet members observed to me recently, he sensed that Truss was going to win when he heard a confident interview on the Today programme a week or so ago. She declared herself the change-maker who was challenging 20 years of economic policy and Treasury orthodoxy. Her remedies are reckless or impulsively shallow. But the positioning is smart, even if it takes some chutzpah to be the longest-serving minister in the current cabinet while posing as the insurgent.
In this topsy-turvy contest Truss is the candidate who breaks with the recent past even though she is still foreign secretary. Rishi Sunak is trapped as the candidate for the status quo, in spite of resigning from the cabinet partly because he wanted to move on from Boris Johnson’s “cakeism” that Truss follows. Yet in terms of positioning, Sunak is in the wrong place, not just for the Tory membership but the wider electorate. After the financial crash, Brexit, the pandemic, this is an era when those claiming to be radical change-makers tend to win.
Starmer needs to be more Truss-like in framing arguments for change."
He goes on to suggest more specific policy statements by Starmer on Rail , Economy and EU trade relationships.:-
"In 1997 the essence of New Labour’s cautious pitch was “this creaking mansion is falling apart . . . we plan to change the ashtrays”. As Truss has recognised, that will not work now as a tonal message. The next general election should be over who is the most effective change-maker."
This analysis rests on his contention that the voters are looking for another "change" candidate.
I wonder if that is true.
A view from a ROC analyst -about the Tory Party electorate follows.
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Post by crossbat11 on Aug 7, 2022 8:28:11 GMT
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Post by crossbat11 on Aug 7, 2022 8:33:23 GMT
That could be just about the longest hyperlink address ever posted. Apologies.
Colin - isn't Richards really saying, in a roundabout way, that Starmer should be competing more with Truss in the bullshit stakes?
Haven't we all had enough of that sort of politics over the last three years?
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Post by Deleted on Aug 7, 2022 8:40:49 GMT
The regular Robert Colville piece in ST today is titled "They may not realise it yet, but the Tories are actually choosing Boris Johnson over David Cameron"
Extracts :-
"The race to be the next prime minister hasn’t exactly been under-analysed. But pretty much all the pundits have missed its most significant consequence. The Conservatives haven’t actually been choosing a leader, but a strategy. And they seem to have done so without any of them noticing.
Ever since the Brexit referendum in 2016, the Conservatives have been facing in two directions: towards their old voters and towards their new ones. That vote hugely accelerated the trend towards the party becoming more working-class, more provincial, more united by culture than by class — more Leave, in other words.
The big question for Tory strategists in the years since has been whether they can keep riding both horses — and if not, which one they should stick with, if push comes to shove. And this leadership contest has delivered exactly that shove.
To see what I mean, you just have to look at the polling over the course of the campaign — both of Conservative Party members and of the general public.The most striking feature of the former, of course, is the extent of Liz Truss’s lead. Surveying Tory members is notoriously difficult, because there just aren’t that many of them, but two out of three recent surveys — by YouGov and ConservativeHome — put her far out in front.
But when you look at the detail, another pattern emerges. In that YouGov poll, commissioned by The Times, Rishi Sunak was winning 46-41 among Tory members who voted Remain (the remainder are undecided or abstaining). But Truss wiped the floor with him (70-16) among those who voted Leave. And of course, there are a lot more of the latter than the former. As I said, polling of party members is always inexact. But the broad shape of these findings exactly matches YouGov’s surveys of the wider electorate.
Over the past few weeks, the polling firm and its rivals have asked voters a host of questions about Truss and Sunak: which they like more; which they would prefer as prime minister; whether that would make them more or less likely to vote Tory. Again and again, the same patterns emerge. Despite being a Remain voter and former Liberal Democrat, Truss is strikingly unpopular with both her former tribes compared with Sunak. Given the choice, just 9 per cent of Lib Dem voters would prefer her to become PM, against 51 per cent for him. But he is less popular with Conservative and Leave voters: almost a quarter of Brexiteers, 24 per cent, say they would be less likely to vote Tory with the former chancellor as leader. Sunak does much better in London and the south, but Truss pulls level as you move north. He is ahead with the middle classes; she is ahead with the workers.
In other words, the choice between Truss and Sunak is not just about policy or personality. It is, in effect, a choice between doubling down on the electoral realignment that took place under Johnson and Theresa May, or returning to a Tory vote that looks more like David Cameron’s. And it is one that dictates the electoral battleground. A Tory party that scraps with Labour for working-class Leavers in the north will find it harder to keep middle-class Remainers in the south from drifting to the Lib Dems — and of course vice versa.
For Sunak, this may seem particularly unfair. He did actually vote for Brexit, as he has been constantly reminding the Tory members at hustings. But as Janan Ganesh pointed out in the Financial Times, Sunak doesn’t give off that vibe. I wrote when he was first appointed chancellor that he felt like Britain’s first post-Brexit politician. Whereas Truss, who has backed Brexit with the zeal of the convert, now feels like “one of us” to Leavers — but scrapes on Remainer nerves for precisely that reason. This is probably also why a blizzard of Sunak policy announcements designed to out-Truss Truss have, if we believe those polls, failed to move the needle: the party members he’s been targeting have been those who are already keenest on her.
To put it another way, the Tory selectorate have indeed been making a choice between Johnsonism and Cameronism in this contest — but it has been one in which the odds were always in favour of the former, simply because the party’s transformation was already so far advanced"
THis analysis rests on the proposal the the "Working Class Brexit" vote is still there for Truss. I'm not convinced-for reasons Colville goes on to outline :-
"If the public end up blaming the Conservatives for their ( economic) hardships — if the new government does not find a way to blunt the pain, does not focus absolutely on delivery and cost of living — then it won’t matter who becomes prime minister, or which set of voters they appeal to. When the wave comes in, it doesn’t matter where you built your sandcastles."
Colville neatly explains the choice Tory members seem about to make in the following way :-
".....the choice facing the Tories is encapsulated by the two constituencies where the party holds its hustings this week.
On Tuesday, the candidates will be in Cheltenham, captured from the Lib Dems in 2015. On Thursday, the circus moves up to Darlington, taken from Labour in 2019. Both are held with slim majorities, and have gone back and forth over the decades.
Sunak is the candidate you pick if you want to keep the former, Truss the latter. And if those polls are right, the Conservative members have made their choice — even if they didn’t realise they were making it."
He doesn't give an opinion on what happens to and within the Tory Party if both those seats are lost.
I await that analysis from him after the next GE !
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