30-SEP 2023 : LAB 39% / CON 29% / LDM 12% / GRN 7%

[Mr Poppy]

Might also be some LAB MPs from the Socialist Campaign Group that give Starmer an excuse to purge them. Israel is breaking International law but if a LAB MP from the Far-Left faction mentions that, they'd give Starmer the excuse he needs to purge them. So RLB is choosing her words as carefully as she can..

Where as McDonnell is pushing his luck by saying: "UK party leaders cannot in all conscience stand on one side.."

[lululemonmustdobetter]

Hi neilj , that all looks good for Starmer/Labour. With polls like that, makes you wonder why he would listen to people saying he should do things differently. With all of the Tory/Sunak policy initiatives/re-branding over the last couple of months, they must be disheartened by the lack of progress they seem to be making. The Tories may get a morale boost on Thursday in Mid-Beds, but that will be down much more to a spilt opposition vote rather than an increase in their appeal. Its also highly likely to be cons in a GE irrespective of what happens this week.

Wellingborough is a more interesting seat. Once upon a time it was a marginal, then solid Tory followed by being part of Labour's landslides in '97 & '01. Post that its been Tory with ever increasing majorities - at the last election fuelled by Brexit. Wellingborough itself has a sizable BAME population. It's a seat that if Labour were to win it, they would probably have a better chance of retaining it than Mid-Beds.

[neilj]

Redfield Wilton

[Mr Poppy]

So LAB lead and Starmer approval up with Deltapoll and down with R&W. Polldrums...

[Deleted]

Oct 16, 2023 13:01:46 GMT domjg said:

Oct 16, 2023 11:07:45 GMT somerjohn said:

 But of course the Arab world is little interested in the fate of actual Palestinians it just wants to use them in revenge against the world for it's violent inferiority complex.

Nor , it seems, is their leader :-

"The leader of Hamas, whose fortune is estimated at about $4 billion while many in Gaza struggle on $1 a day, rarely gives interviews. So when I met him in Istanbul for The Times a year ago, he did not pull any punches. “We are ready for war,” he said. “We are always ready for war.”
However the war Hamas has started over the past week now threatens to bring even more misery to the 2.3 million people living under his brutal rule in Gaza. Yet Haniyeh, 61, appears determined to stay the course.

The Iranians are bankrolling Hamas and are working ever more closely with them and their Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, along with other Iran-backed Palestinian factions such as Islamic Jihad and Lions’ Den. Over the weekend Haniyeh met Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, the Iranian foreign minister, in Doha.
In a sign that Iran will remain Hamas’s paymaster — Tehran is estimated to provide $100 million a year to the rulers of Gaza — Amir-Abdollahian was seen embracing Haniyeh when they met. Though Iran has denied helping plan or knowing about Hamas’s action in Israel, it has been celebrated by Tehran.
Amir-Abdollahian’s meeting in Doha took place during his regional tour to Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Last week he met with the Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut. He has warned Israel through the UN that Iran will intervene if Israel does not call off its looming ground incursion into Gaza.
Haniyeh has celebrated the terrorist attacks on Israel, claiming they showed the “battle moved into the heart of the Zionist entity”. The man who now holds court with the Middle East’s most feared leaders was groomed from a young age by the Hamas movement’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was finally assassinated by Israel in 2004. Haniyeh learnt his hate from the best."


"He appears, however, to be capitalising on the atrocities in Israel. Polling of Palestinians show that he is the firm favourite to take over from the ageing president, Mahmoud Abbas, at the head of the Palestinian Authority. The Palestine Centre For Policy And Research survey last month shows that if new elections were held, Haniyeh would take 58 per cent of the vote and Abbas just 37 per cent.
Haniyeh was re-elected as leader of the Palestinian Islamist group in 2021 after becoming Hamas chief in 2017. He controls the terror group’s political activities in Gaza, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the diaspora from exile in Turkey and Qatar.

His income is as opaque as his group’s funding. He is alleged to have embezzled charitable funds and levied taxes on tunnel use for passage in and out of Gaza. He even has businesses operating outside Gaza, including one in the United Arab Emirates.
Though Gaza may provide his income, he shows little signs of caring for its people. When Israel warned those living in the north last week that they must move south to avoid military action, Haniyeh hit out. “No to displacement from Gaza,” he said, “and no to displacement from Gaza to Egypt”. When he said that, he was staying at the Four Seasons hotel in Doha, paid for by Qatar, according to reports."

(from) "A well-trodden script of hatred — how leader of Hamas prepared for war"
Times
today

[neilj]

Redfield Wilton best PM

At this moment, which of the following do Britons think would be the better Prime Minister for the UK? (15 October)

Keir Starmer 43% (+1)
Rishi Sunak 32% (–)

[Mr Poppy]

EC currently reckon LAB would comfortably win the new seat of Wellingborough and Rushden in GE'24 (and it's mostly made up of the current seat of Wellingborough), even though they break the seat down as:

Economic position: 10° Right
National Position: 15° Nationalist
Social Position: 7° conservative

Packaged together as 'Strong Right' tribe

65% homeowners in a fairly rural seat with 83% car owners and 87% ethnic white. I can take a guess at CON's local campaign in that kind of seat and if punters on Betfair only give CON 21% chance of winning it (as per EC's model) then I'll put a few quid on the Blue horse (assuming they pick a properly local candidate, which I assume they will). Only other thing to consider is that LDEM clearly have no chance in that seat but will they give it a go anyway - noting they like to consider themselves as the 'by-election' specialists?

www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/calcwork23.py?seat=Wellingborough%20and%20Rushden

[mercian]

Oct 16, 2023 14:52:17 GMT Mr Poppy said:

Stats for Lefties obviously has a bias but they do seem to post some interesting stuff (IMO). A lot of the 'lower ranks' within LAB are clearly miffed with Starmer's pro-Israel view and some are voting with their feet. LAB HQ might see that as 'self-purging' but it might have implications in some LAs and see less 'ground troops' in GE'24 campaign?

I've said before that most inner-city areas are Labour, and that's where most recent immigrants and their descendants live. As these tend to be socially-conservative there is a potential split with the woke stuff that the leaders come out with. In this particular situation, many Muslims obviously sympathise with the Palestinians and that could be a threat to their Labour loyalty.
 Lots of other folks sympathise with Palestinians of course, but are perhaps less likely to change their vote on that one issue. 

[crossbat11]

Surprised to see not even a dead cat MOE bounce for the Tories in that Deltapoll survey but R&W have duly obliged with a trusty old +/- 3% deceased feline rebound.

😇🤔

[Deleted]

Oct 16, 2023 13:01:46 GMT domjg said:

Oct 16, 2023 11:07:45 GMT somerjohn said:

 But of course the Arab world is little interested in the fate of actual Palestinians it just wants to use them in revenge against the world for it's violent inferiority complex.

The Arab legacy in Science & the Arts is astounding. But it is one taken up by Europe.

And in the history and analysis linked to below , inferiority complex is not the reason why the Arab world has turned its back on its own past.:-

"There is a final reason why it makes little sense to exhort Muslims to their own past: while there are many things that the Islamic world lacks, pride in heritage is not one of them. What is needed in Islam is less self-pride and more self-criticism. Today, self-criticism in Islam is valued only insofar as it is made as an appeal to be more pious and less spiritually corrupt. And yet most criticism in the Muslim world is directed outward, at the West. This prejudice — what Fouad Ajami has called (referring to the Arab world) “a political tradition of belligerent self-pity” — is undoubtedly one of Islam’s biggest obstacles. It makes information that contradicts orthodox belief irrelevant, and it closes off debate about the nature and history of Islam."


www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science

[neilj]

mercian
"I've said before that most inner-city areas are Labour, and that's where most recent immigrants and their descendants live. As these tend to be socially-conservative there is a potential split with the woke stuff that the leaders come out with. In this particular situation, many Muslims obviously sympathise with the Palestinians and that could be a threat to their Labour loyalty"

Stroud is over 98% white and is by no means an inner city, it's a Gloucestershire Market town

[Mr Poppy]

Oct 16, 2023 16:24:45 GMT mercian said:

Oct 16, 2023 14:52:17 GMT Mr Poppy said:

Stats for Lefties obviously has a bias but they do seem to post some interesting stuff (IMO). A lot of the 'lower ranks' within LAB are clearly miffed with Starmer's pro-Israel view and some are voting with their feet. LAB HQ might see that as 'self-purging' but it might have implications in some LAs and see less 'ground troops' in GE'24 campaign?

I've said before that most inner-city areas are Labour, and that's where most recent immigrants and their descendants live. As these tend to be socially-conservative there is a potential split with the woke stuff that the leaders come out with. In this particular situation, many Muslims obviously sympathise with the Palestinians and that could be a threat to their Labour loyalty.
 Lots of other folks sympathise with Palestinians of course, but are perhaps less likely to change their vote on that one issue. 

Stroud is a town of approx 13,500 people but I think the DC is close to the Westminster seat boundaries? 

I agree the point you're making and Stroud is perhaps an outlier WRT the LAB councillors issue. It was one of the seats my model got wrong in GE'17 but I'm still not sure why it was/is so Corbynista 

Starmer can purge/defang the Far-Left MPs from the PLP but LAs and Mayors are different beasts who get their mandate from local people. If Starmer-LAB go a bit OTT on the pro-Israel stuff (noting how Israel are very likely to go way OTT in their response) then likes of 'Gorgeous George' (Galloway) might take a crack at somewhere like Hodge Hill, Birmingham??

commonslibrary.parliament.uk/constituency-data-religion/#compare_constituencies

Some FLoC types like to be offended on behalf of others so a lot of the pro-Palestinian types are not Muslims but like a cause to fight for (IMO - based on some 'anecdotes' and the 'Hipster Marxist' view)


 

[mercian]

Oct 16, 2023 16:34:39 GMT neilj said:

mercian
"I've said before that most inner-city areas are Labour, and that's where most recent immigrants and their descendants live. As these tend to be socially-conservative there is a potential split with the woke stuff that the leaders come out with. In this particular situation, many Muslims obviously sympathise with the Palestinians and that could be a threat to their Labour loyalty"

Stroud is over 98% white and is by no means an inner city, it's a Gloucestershire Market town

I'm a bit confused now. I never mentioned Stroud and I do know it quite well. I was just making a general point.

[neilj]

Oct 16, 2023 17:38:37 GMT mercian said:

Oct 16, 2023 16:34:39 GMT neilj said:

mercian
"I've said before that most inner-city areas are Labour, and that's where most recent immigrants and their descendants live. As these tend to be socially-conservative there is a potential split with the woke stuff that the leaders come out with. In this particular situation, many Muslims obviously sympathise with the Palestinians and that could be a threat to their Labour loyalty"

Stroud is over 98% white and is by no means an inner city, it's a Gloucestershire Market town

I'm a bit confused now. I never mentioned Stroud and I do know it quite well.

The tweet you responded to was about councillors in Stroud leaving Labour over Starmer’s response to the situation in Israel and Gaza
I repeat the tweet below to help your recollection

[bedknobsandboomstick]

Watching the ITV News, I do wonder what sort of weird bubble the government live in if they think that the general public are watching all this and thinking that we need to be supporting Israel unequivocally.

The cognitive dissonance is a chasm.

[Danny]

Oct 16, 2023 8:32:07 GMT johntel said:

"I am somewhat amazed that on a site dedicated to opinion polling on the basis of stratified sampling quite so many people seem to take gambling odds seriously".

The paper I quoted concludes that betting markets are more accurate than opinion polls. 

Perhaps bookmakers reckon they arent any better at spotting a good horse than anyone else, so their business model is all about watching the behaviour of their clients and calculating odds so the house has an advantage, without assuming any knowledge of watever it is they are betting on. But then that would imply there is a 'wisdom of crowds' at least when it comes to predicting elections.

Regarding horse racing, I gather it is possible to become sufficiently expert on form to beat the house and win consistently. But to do that, it must be that the house odds are not perfect. Which would be the case if the odds reflect what the crowds are doing, which actually isnt perfectly correct. So having adjusted the odds to the punters, someone who is well informed stands a chance of using those odds calculated to match the bets rather than reality.

[neilj]

A few weeks ago Suella Braverman said it was "completely unacceptable" that criminals are often "effectively free to break certain laws".
Today

[hireton]

Interesting article by John Denham:

labourlist.org/2023/10/snp-conference-aberdeen-labour-party-scotland-by-election/

[catmanjeff]

Oct 16, 2023 15:02:24 GMT Mr Poppy said:

Might also be some LAB MPs from the Socialist Campaign Group that give Starmer an excuse to purge them. Israel is breaking International law but if a LAB MP from the Far-Left faction mentions that, they'd give Starmer the excuse he needs to purge them. So RLB is choosing her words as carefully as she can..

Where as McDonnell is pushing his luck by saying: "UK party leaders cannot in all conscience stand on one side.."

So the tweets unconditionally condemn Hamas, and then go onto say that the killing Palestinian children is also wrong.

They talk about getting humanitarian aid in to give relief to civilian populations.

They talk about needing peace and ceasefires to stop more suffering.

Who could disagree?

If that leads to expulsion, then Starmer's Labour control freakery has gone OTT.
 

[Danny]

Oct 16, 2023 8:55:07 GMT c-a-r-f-r-e-w said:

Oct 16, 2023 8:41:58 GMT somerjohn said:

I keep an eye on the covid debates here without commenting, because I'm not qualified to do so. But I think I must have been influenced, by Alec's strenuous efforts, in the direction of thinking covid remains a serious potential threat.

So the following entirely dismissive BBC article came as a surprise. Is it really as simple as that covid has fizzled out to the extent that it's just another form of cold? Or is the BBC spreading government-inspired complacency?

www.bbc.com/news/health-66994137

The short answer is that Covid has some differences compared with colds, which we have been through in the past, though some of it on the side thread, but also it’s possible that even colds might be worse for us than some might think. alec may elaborate on this. There is another issue that these infections can worsen the effects of each other: so Covid can worsen RSV, RSV can worsen Flu etc. 

And they talk about deaths in article, but there is also the impact of long Covid, and how Covid may impact other deaths due to cardiovascular ailments etc. There is also the economic impact of Covid even when people aren’t dying of it, alongside disruption to things like education and indeed healthcare. And the problem of going into hospital for a routine check up then dying due to contracting Covid while there, which doesn’t tend to happen with non-infectious diseases so much. To give a quick summary…

Covid was never as dangerous as it was portrayed. To be fair, it might have turned out so, but it didnt.  Sure, bad enough,  but there was a huge propaganda campaign deliberately aimed at scaring people so as to boost compliance with regulations.

Had we known in particular about the age distribution of deaths (the old) and most of the cases (the young), then expert advice might have been very different. much more like happened in Sweden.  Where indeed the decisive issue why they acted differently to most other countries seems to have been doctors not politicians chose what to do.  Which rather implies the doctors already knew it was milder than portrayed and it was political logic not medical logic which dictated what happened.

As to long covid, yes, there aere already colds caused by corona viruses related to covid. Its not so different. If there is long covid, then there will very likey be long everything else. The good news is we already experienced the 'long' effects of similar diseases and they are already factored into our normal lives. The bottom line remains there really isnt anything we can do to prevent spread of covid, so its academic whether if we could end all those diseases it would be net beneficial.

[Mr Poppy]

Oct 16, 2023 18:10:55 GMT catmanjeff said:

Oct 16, 2023 15:02:24 GMT Mr Poppy said:

Might also be some LAB MPs from the Socialist Campaign Group that give Starmer an excuse to purge them. Israel is breaking International law but if a LAB MP from the Far-Left faction mentions that, they'd give Starmer the excuse he needs to purge them. So RLB is choosing her words as carefully as she can..
..
Where as McDonnell is pushing his luck by saying: "UK party leaders cannot in all conscience stand on one side.."

So the tweets unconditionally condemn Hamas, and then go onto say that the killing Palestinian children is also wrong.

They talk about getting humanitarian aid in to give relief to civilian populations.

They talk about needing peace and ceasefires to stop more suffering.

Who could disagree?

If that leads to expulsion, then Starmer's Labour control freakery has gone OTT.
 

Need I remind people about the way Abbott was treated, compared to other LAB MPs who have made far worse comments than she did. She also quickly apologised but I doubt many people genuinely believe she lost the whip for anything other than being in the 'wrong' LAB faction as Starmer-LAB seek to cleanse the PLP of any and all remnants of the Far-Left and Corbynism. 

Elsewhere then a cartoonist has been sacked as the Guardian has over reacted by conflating antisemitism with any 'pop' at the State of Israel or its leaders.

Steve Bell ‘sacked’ by Guardian in antisemitism row over Netanyahu cartoon
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/steve-bell-cartoons-sacked-guardian-antisemitism-b2430568.html

TBC of course but IMO Starmer is looking for any excuse to get rid of certain MPs and I did say RLB chose her words carefully where as McDonnell is pushing his luck. I haven't checked all SCG MPs twitter feeds but most of them were pro-Palestinian or at least supportive of a two state solution (which is NOT the same thing as being antisemitic). I expect most are finding it very difficult to tow* Starmer-LAB's party line 
 
* deliberately misspelt as whilst likes of Thornberry and Lammy will drag that line around the news studios then others will find it very difficult to support Starmer-LAB's pro-Israel views.

[Danny]

Oct 16, 2023 9:47:55 GMT alec said:

But the most laughably idiotic part of the article is that it quotes the winter covid deaths as evidence of emerging seasonality, without even mentioned that Covid officially killed 38,000 across the whole of last year. How the f@ck can something be a 'normal winter seasonal virus' when three times more deaths occur outwith winter It's killing 300 a week in September.

Its a very interesting question whether the massive vaccination campaign is what turned covid from being a winter only disease into an all year round one.

There was also no mention of declining immunity as the variant landscape grows ever more complex. This is known to have resulted in a shortening of the period between infections. With the original strain, immunity lasted at least 12 months in most cases, and has progressively shortened with each new major variant, with several confirmed cases now of reinfection at the current time of 5 - 8 weeks.

Again, was this a consequence of the vaccine campaign, and the the phenomenon you kindly brought to our attention, of 'immune imprinting' (in this case on an imperfectly effective vaccine)

[Mr Poppy]

I posted some polling on the 'Hamas-Israel' thread but I'll repost one of findings here as it shows a bit of a partisan divide:

As events unfold in a manner that was IMO highly predictable when the 'West' gave Israel 'carte blanche' to avenge the Hamas attack then I hope YG rerun that question in the near future. I can't see how UK's approach (from CON, LAB and most of the media) could have been any more supportive of Israel than it has been but as events unfold will we see a shift in either UK's approach of voters view of the mostly one-sided support of the State of Israel?

NB commenting on Israel's actions is NOT antisemitic, although some people (like the Guardian) seem to think it is. 

[neilj]

catmanjeff
"If that leads to expulsion, then Starmer's Labour control freakery has gone OTT."

I think 'if' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there

[catmanjeff]

Oct 16, 2023 18:47:15 GMT neilj said:

catmanjeff
"If that leads to expulsion, then Starmer's Labour control freakery has gone OTT."

I think 'if' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there

I genuinely hope there are no expulsions about this.

I've got no evidence to say  it will happen.

[Danny]

Oct 16, 2023 10:11:52 GMT colin said:

So many accounts of the Hamas credo , and interviews with them, indicate that they reject the identity of "civilian" for those they killed. They are settlers on stolen land. The young people at Supernova , soldiers in waiting. Is this the rationale for their otherwise unfathomable acts of violence and barbarity?

The Israeli response is bound to cause civilian deaths when Hamas operates from their midst. Is this more , or less unacceptable than the Supernova/Kibbutz killings? If the kibuttzim are not civilians how can Gazans be civilians.?

Soldiers are just civilians with better training in how to conduct warfare. Soldiers, on the whole, are trained meticulously to obey orders, whatever they are, which has always raised questions about how much they should be held responsible for actions they took part in. Israel for one, believes in its part time army, and one of the reasons historically for national service was so that every citizen would have received training ready for the next war. I guess historically in a war you would kill all the men and capture the women as breeding stock. I gather this fell out of fashion maybe around 1200 with the invention of chivalry.

[jib]

Oct 16, 2023 18:26:22 GMT Danny said:

Covid was never as dangerous as it was portrayed.

I know of several "young" "healthy" people whose good health was pulverised by Covid. Don't let that interrupt the magical thinking down there though.

[neilj]

I would have thought following the findings of Parliament's Independent Expert Panel that Peter Bone broke Parliament's sexual misconduct rules by indecently exposing himself to the staffer during an overseas trip and upholding five allegations of bullying, that the tories would have withdrawn the Whip from him by now?

[Mr Poppy]

At least one CON MP who understands the need for UK's approach to change:

"If you know that a party is going to commit a war crime - and this forcible transfer of people is a precise breach of one of the statutes that governs international law and all states in this area - then you are making yourself complicit," he said.

Israel-Hamas war: UK could be complicit in Gaza war crimes, Tory MP warns
news.sky.com/story/israel-hamas-war-uk-could-be-complicit-in-gaza-war-crimes-tory-mp-warns-12984255

NB Crispin Blunt is pro-Palestinian but is not antisemitic. I doubt he'll face any disciplinary action from CON for speaking the truth. TBC on LAB MPs but to be crystal clear then given most of the SCG faction of LAB MPs were pro-Palestinian and given how Abbott was treated then it is IMO understandable to think that any SCG LAB MP who makes pro-Palestinian comments might well find that was just the excuse Starmer was looking for to expel them from LAB. 

[steve]

"BBC gets 1,500 complaints over Israel-Hamas coverage, split 50-50 on each side
Objections divided almost evenly between those who say there is bias against Israel and those who think it is against Palestinians"

Of course they could have been biased against both.