Yesterday I was pointing out how little effort this would take based on polling. And today a new poll puts electoral calculuses tory seat prediction from 66 to 27....
In 32 days time we’ll all have the chance to cast a ballot to choose who runs the country - but has all the frantic campaigning done much to change your minds so far?...
The Tory general election campaign hit more trouble on Saturday as Rishi Sunak faced accusations of using levelling up funds to win votes and Labour opened its biggest poll lead since the disastrous premiership of Liz Truss....
The only reason it’s not a tax is to save older, more likely-to-vote generations (who have a higher earnings differential from their degrees than younger folk) from having to pay it too, concentrating the cost on the currently-young.
The truth is that Rishi Sunak is very happy to sacrifice the young to bad outcomes because he doesn’t think they’ll vote for him anyway so he can punch down without fear of electoral impact.
It’s only a story because it’s so incredibly rare that members of the public get the chance to criticise his crazy policies to his face, in terms ordinary folk can relate to.
OK, but he did claim he was going to stay on as an MP. Come to think of it, that’s a bit of an admission that he’s going to lose the election and then be replaced as leader of the Conservative Party.
The Conservative Party is notoriously unforgiving of leaders who lose general elections, and currently pathologically addicted to leadership elections. I’d be very surprised if he’s not gone by the end of the year even if he does exceptionally well in the general election.
And they so very badly need to learn that lesson, yes. Hopefully this nonsense motivates a new generation of young people forming a habit of voting, and of voting against the Conservative Party.
Young people don’t want to give up their weekends doing unpaid “mandatory volunteer” work either, though. There’s no actually good option here for young people.
Let them get a good education, let them build a career, let them use spare hours for extra earning or relaxation, because their property costs are astronomical. Don’t sacrifice them further just for political gain.
It’s true to form for the Conservatives, though. You were sacrificed for political gain if you were low paid, if you needed healthcare or social care, if you were disabled, if you were trans, and pretty much if you weren’t a wealthy outright property-owner.
If Rory Stewart were standing in my constituency, I would be very tempted to vote for him. In his work he’s now an advocate of alleviating many of the problems in the poorest communities globally by giving no-conditions cash. Who knew that the problems of poverty could be solved with money?!!!
He’s also a reasonable person and one who I think genuinely wants good things for the country in general rather than just for rich folk. He actually wants Britain to be governed well and in the interests of the population. He has some blind spots of course, he wouldn’t be a Conservative of he didn’t, but he’s decent and there’s hope that he can be persuaded by evidence of benefit.
I don’t see anything correct in spending £20k of their election budget on a logo. No one likes new logos and everyone thinks they’re not worth the money. Well thank goodness this one is!
It’s not just Brexit, it’s also austerity and stealth austerity, massive and chronic cuts to public services, stagnation of minimum wage, underfunded NHS and health and social care, underinvestment, Trussonimics, waste of government money on contracts for cronies (aka the VIP lane) and of course don’t forget systematic, sustained and deliberate suppression of wages in the public sector alongside deregulation and lack of regulation in the private sector in the face of the growth of the gig economy, which is just tech companies circumventing almost all laws about workers rights. But yes, definitely Brexit too.
Well in that sense, they’ve been remarkably successful. Literally billions of public money gone through the VIP lane and unrepaid business loans during covid. Nearly every tax cut giving more money to the already well off and less to below average earners. Wealth inequality soaring to help them feel superior.
There’s an old saying in London – you’re never more than 6ft from a rat and 50m from a Pret a Manger. But the popular high street sandwich chain has struggled in recent years with consumers abandoning ship. With a rising tide of debts, it has now recalled its initial founder, Sinclair Beecham, to the top table in order to...
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Betteridge’s law of headlines is an adage that states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older. It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not. The adage does not apply to questions that are more open-ended than strict yes–no questions.
History
Betteridge’s name became associated with the concept after he discussed it in a February 2009 article, which examined a previous TechCrunch article that carried the headline “Did Last . fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data to the RIAA?” (Schonfeld 2009):
This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no.” The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.
A similar observation was made by British newspaper editor Andrew Marr in his 2004 book My Trade, among Marr’s suggestions for how a reader should interpret newspaper articles:
If the headline asks a question, try answering ‘no’. Is This the True Face of Britain’s Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn’t have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means ‘don’t bother reading this bit’.
The point of Betteridge’s law isn’t really that they’re false, it’s that the editor hasn’t got the evidence that it’s true because if they did it wouldn’t be a question.
In this case it’s a hard no. The main threat to Labour isn’t the greens it’s people thinking it’s a forgone conclusion and not voting, the new constituencies that reduce the number of city seats because poor people register to vote less than others, which reduces the number of Labour MPs, voter disenfranchisement, the Conservative Party election machine which will narrow the polls as we go through the weeks and biased coverage from the print and broadcast media.
Last night a BBC report on the election has several minutes covering Rishi’s “energetic” election campaign with plenty of clips of him claiming to like talking to people, then a single soundbite from each of Labour, Lib Dems, SNP and Reform followed by a still of Keir Starmer with a voice over saying he was campaigning too and then a one minute segment on controversy once Diane Abbot. The message was “Rishi is working hard to meet lots of ordinary people, here’s some quotes for balance, and Labour are divided.” I think the Conservatives are far more divided and that Labour will work far harder for ordinary people, but I’m not a conservative donor who’s been appointed to make editorial decisions about BBC politics, so what would I know?
Poll predicts Tories lose Opposition Status (www.independent.co.uk)
Yesterday I was pointing out how little effort this would take based on polling. And today a new poll puts electoral calculuses tory seat prediction from 66 to 27....
Watchdog confirms DWP probe will not take evidence from individual claimants or relatives of those who died (www.disabilitynewsservice.com)
Sir John Curtice on undecided voters and UK election poll swings (www.bbc.co.uk)
In 32 days time we’ll all have the chance to cast a ballot to choose who runs the country - but has all the frantic campaigning done much to change your minds so far?...
Sunak suffers poll blow as levelling-up cash-for-votes row erupts (www.theguardian.com)
The Tory general election campaign hit more trouble on Saturday as Rishi Sunak faced accusations of using levelling up funds to win votes and Labour opened its biggest poll lead since the disastrous premiership of Liz Truss....
'Why Do You Hate Young People So Much?' Rishi Sunak Skewered By Student (uk.news.yahoo.com)
Starmer unveils ‘GB energy’ logo – a stock graphic for 57p that ‘looks like it’s farting’ (skwawkbox.org)
Blow for Rishi Sunak as IFS says Tories oversaw ‘worst income growth for generations’ (www.independent.co.uk)
Why Greggs is beating Pret in the battle of the lunch break (www.cityam.com)
There’s an old saying in London – you’re never more than 6ft from a rat and 50m from a Pret a Manger. But the popular high street sandwich chain has struggled in recent years with consumers abandoning ship. With a rising tide of debts, it has now recalled its initial founder, Sinclair Beecham, to the top table in order to...
Streeting announces he will "go further" than Tony Blair with NHS privatisation (www.thecanary.co)
Are Green Shoots Starting to Crack the Red Wall? (novaramedia.com)
General election: Tories announce 'Triple Lock Plus' pension allowance (www.bbc.co.uk)