If Tories win London, then that is a big victory. Acting like holding a mayor with a much smaller share of the vote as a big victory is making them look desperate.
Kind of glad the Tories managed a couple of mayoral wins because now they're going to dig themselves in even deeper by confidently telling a public who despises them that everything is fine.
Mayorals are a funny one, they get a lot of publicity and prominence in the narrative, but because they are so heavily reliant on individual factors, they do very little to change the fundamentals on the ground. A Tory bussed in from HQ would have been demolished in TV or WM. Doesn't help that Houchen and Street (if he wins) are so different that it's nigh impossible to build any sort of strategy around both of them.
They were hoping to, but it was a target not an expectation. Talk of expectations was just spin. Came very close to pulling it off, though it remains to be seen if it will happen elsewhere. Local elections won't give any insight into this since Reform are standing far fewer candidates.
Worth bearing in mind that the UK really doesn't do one-term governments. There's been literally one case of it since WW2, which was Heath in 1970. The pendulum will eventually swing against Labour as it always does, but it's too soon to start writing obituaries yet.
As usual, I'll point out that yougov is the most accurate pollster overall, having gotten several recent election results right where other pollsters were way off. This includes the last two general elections.
I don't think I'm ready to say which pollster is most accurate at the moment, Yougov have done well in the past but this is an almost unprecedented political environment and pollsters are really sticking their necks out on how they think things will play out. In a few days we will almost certainly have a poll from Savanta or More In Common with the Tories at 26-27% or so.
They made it as the very last episode of the Suchet TV series. Interestingly the book was the last to be released, but was written something like 30 years before and kept in a safe. Christie wanted to keep writing but also wanted to give the character a proper sendoff, so she kept it ready until she was no longer able to write another (think it was released only a year or two before her death).
We've reached the stage where the Tories losing a by-election isn't even a story. This one was a small majority anyway and with the MP stepping down in scandal, the Tories have essentially written it off. It's led to a paradoxical position where it's being treated as if it were a routine Labour hold in a safe seat instead of what it actually is.
Tories have been underperforming polls more than they've been overperforming recently. Given margins of error will be higher in a mayoral election, there's plenty of scope for this to be a clear win in either direction without going into "shy xxx" narratives or similar.
Obviously this is blatant cherrypicking, but there is a wider point here. Journalism is notoriously white, private schooled, oxbridge and so on. It's one of the most heavily private school-dominated professions in the UK. A lot of this is because in order to get in the profession you need connections, knowing the right people, but also being able to work on London on a pittance until you get a proper position. So it isn't the least bit surprising that an apprenticeship course would avoid this demographic by design. However they also need to make sure they aren't throwing the baby out with the bathwater, since the biggest demographic of all excluded is poorer non-Londoners regardless of race or gender.
Not technically studio interference, but Damon and Affleck were so frustrated with studios not bothering to read their script when they were trying to get a buyer that they added in a completely non-sequitor oral sex scene to the script to see if anyone noticed. They went with Harvey Weinstein (needless to say, not of good a reputation nowadays as back then) because he was the only one to tell them to take it out.
The idea for a long was ‘hold your nose until independence; it’s just around the corner.‘ which works until folk realise it isn’t just around the corner.
It's absurd to keep having referenda until you get the result you want. Should there be another referendum in 10 years time on unification if there was one this year that showed a narrow majority for independence? The logic is identical to what the SNP use now, but something tells me they wouldn't agree to it.
It's the quintessential example of a policy that looks good on paper and is broadly popular when described to the public, but has disastrous flaws in practice. The basic principle of moving release dates from judges to parole boards sounds reasonable on the surface, but only if the route is actually viable. But there were never enough prisoners on this system for the parole and rehabilitation processes to adapt, meaning the routes to release simply didn't work. Scrapping the approach but not retroactively changing sentences (under the Tory government) made this problem utterly insurmountable, leaving the remaining prisoners trapped in a Kafkaesque limbo.
As with a lot of cities (with the general exception of London), what stations are in the present day can be quite different to when they were built. Back in the 19th century there were three big terminuses in Manchester - Victoria, Piccadilly (originally known as London Road) and Central, plus Oxford Road which was smaller and for Liverpool and Altrincham trains. Because they were run by competing companies that often ran to the same place on different routes, there was incentive to make terminals look fancy to get more customers.
If not now, when? Getting in before the locals after the Tories have had a comparatively ok week and during a quiet weekend when it dominates the headlines seems pretty optimal to me.
Civil service recruitment (specifically anything related to the fast stream or any other centralised recruitment) has been a complete fiasco as well over the last year or so from what I've heard. Two examples I recall being told about included mixing up the interviewer and interviewee packs and committing a blatant privacy breach by using cc instead of bcc on an email.
Thing with the FOI rules is that they are both broad and narrow at the same time. Broad in that anyone can ask for info, narrow in that there are lots of reasons for not giving it. I had a look through the
The problem with Sunak "announcing" the election date is that unless it is for June there's absolutely nothing to stop him changing his mind later. It's one interesting side-effect of the 2019 vote - it broke a 40 year convention of it being April-June, and whie that was never a firm rule it was like that for long enough that for many people that was when talk of an election would be. Now that mirage has been shattered, the talk never goes away.
Entirely down to some distinctly Scottish febrility. Aside from that, Westminster trundled on, another disaster poll to add to all the others, Tory was a plank on QT, the usual Thursday stuff.
One good reason for there being three spots is that otherwise the final round would be less important than the semis. Winning the World Cup is all well and good but the big prize is a Candidates spot. With three entries, you make the final meaningful because, well it's the final, and the third place playoff meaningful because of the Candidates spot. One spot is too few for such a big tournament, and if it were two spots then you can easily see the coverage bigging up the semis and the third placed match being a bit of a dead rubber at least from the pubic interest point of view.
I'm not convinced. It wouldn't have fundamentally changed the long-term dial economically, and it wasn't even the only scandal doing the rounds. I also get the sense that pundits underestimated the amount to which people were sick of the polarisation and for someone to fill the gaping hole in the centre. Impossible to ever know.
This wasn't an ordinary bugfix. The bug here was hardware, a chip had failed and was no longer storing memory. Needless to say, they can't replace a broken piece of hardware. So they created a software patch to fix a hardware patch, by rewriting the code usually sent to that chip, splitting it up and allowing it to be sent to other chips.
I honestly have no idea. However the probe will stop transmitting in a few years anyway as its nuclear batteries will fail - it's too far away to use solar any more - and there's nothing anyone can do about that. So there's not much need to worry about long-term life of other components.
If Tories win London, then that is a big victory. Acting like holding a mayor with a much smaller share of the vote as a big victory is making them look desperate.
I'll believe it when I see it. There's been no reliable indicators of this beyond some wild anonymous spin last night that quickly got discredited.
Kind of glad the Tories managed a couple of mayoral wins because now they're going to dig themselves in even deeper by confidently telling a public who despises them that everything is fine.
Mayorals are a funny one, they get a lot of publicity and prominence in the narrative, but because they are so heavily reliant on individual factors, they do very little to change the fundamentals on the ground. A Tory bussed in from HQ would have been demolished in TV or WM. Doesn't help that Houchen and Street (if he wins) are so different that it's nigh impossible to build any sort of strategy around both of them.
Didn't Reform expect being second in the by-election? Nonetheless it's an impressive one for them and a screwed up for the Tories
They were hoping to, but it was a target not an expectation. Talk of expectations was just spin. Came very close to pulling it off, though it remains to be seen if it will happen elsewhere. Local elections won't give any insight into this since Reform are standing far fewer candidates.
Worth bearing in mind that the UK really doesn't do one-term governments. There's been literally one case of it since WW2, which was Heath in 1970. The pendulum will eventually swing against Labour as it always does, but it's too soon to start writing obituaries yet.
How credible is the source?
As credible as any source at a party HQ before anyone has counted a single vote.
As usual, I'll point out that yougov is the most accurate pollster overall, having gotten several recent election results right where other pollsters were way off. This includes the last two general elections.
I don't think I'm ready to say which pollster is most accurate at the moment, Yougov have done well in the past but this is an almost unprecedented political environment and pollsters are really sticking their necks out on how they think things will play out. In a few days we will almost certainly have a poll from Savanta or More In Common with the Tories at 26-27% or so.
They made it as the very last episode of the Suchet TV series. Interestingly the book was the last to be released, but was written something like 30 years before and kept in a safe. Christie wanted to keep writing but also wanted to give the character a proper sendoff, so she kept it ready until she was no longer able to write another (think it was released only a year or two before her death).
I dont' see the value in selling a bad story about yourself
Lawrence was a complicated person to say the least. It's very hard to know where the line between fantasy and reality was drawn in anything he said.
Houchen and Street both lose, and Tories lose 800+ councillors
800 isn't realistic even in a worst case scenario. 500+ is generally considered the threshold of bad this time, towards 600 gets messy.
Wow, I had absolutely no idea that was this Thursday. Am I just extremely ignorant or has the media just not mentioned that fact all that much?
We've reached the stage where the Tories losing a by-election isn't even a story. This one was a small majority anyway and with the MP stepping down in scandal, the Tories have essentially written it off. It's led to a paradoxical position where it's being treated as if it were a routine Labour hold in a safe seat instead of what it actually is.
Shy Tories mean this is probably a con hold I reckon.
Tories have been underperforming polls more than they've been overperforming recently. Given margins of error will be higher in a mayoral election, there's plenty of scope for this to be a clear win in either direction without going into "shy xxx" narratives or similar.
tl;dr a tossup
He’s acting like he’s hot shit and it pisses me off
Galloway has made a career out of this. There's no reason to assume his latest bout of fame will go any different to the others.
Obviously this is blatant cherrypicking, but there is a wider point here. Journalism is notoriously white, private schooled, oxbridge and so on. It's one of the most heavily private school-dominated professions in the UK. A lot of this is because in order to get in the profession you need connections, knowing the right people, but also being able to work on London on a pittance until you get a proper position. So it isn't the least bit surprising that an apprenticeship course would avoid this demographic by design. However they also need to make sure they aren't throwing the baby out with the bathwater, since the biggest demographic of all excluded is poorer non-Londoners regardless of race or gender.
There’s an entire additional act in Good Will Hunting where he becomes…a secret agent?!?
Not technically studio interference, but Damon and Affleck were so frustrated with studios not bothering to read their script when they were trying to get a buyer that they added in a completely non-sequitor oral sex scene to the script to see if anyone noticed. They went with Harvey Weinstein (needless to say, not of good a reputation nowadays as back then) because he was the only one to tell them to take it out.
I always thought that it was mutual that the first actor just didn't work for the part? I definitely might be mistaken though.
Townsend said he was unceremoniously fired. Jackson said that it didn't work and he screwed up.
The idea for a long was ‘hold your nose until independence; it’s just around the corner.‘ which works until folk realise it isn’t just around the corner.
It's absurd to keep having referenda until you get the result you want. Should there be another referendum in 10 years time on unification if there was one this year that showed a narrow majority for independence? The logic is identical to what the SNP use now, but something tells me they wouldn't agree to it.
It's the quintessential example of a policy that looks good on paper and is broadly popular when described to the public, but has disastrous flaws in practice. The basic principle of moving release dates from judges to parole boards sounds reasonable on the surface, but only if the route is actually viable. But there were never enough prisoners on this system for the parole and rehabilitation processes to adapt, meaning the routes to release simply didn't work. Scrapping the approach but not retroactively changing sentences (under the Tory government) made this problem utterly insurmountable, leaving the remaining prisoners trapped in a Kafkaesque limbo.
It's not particularly grand, just a typical terminal station. You should have a look at Antwerp station if you want to see grand
I think the point is that it is grand for its size, which is explained by the fact it used to be a lot bigger.
As with a lot of cities (with the general exception of London), what stations are in the present day can be quite different to when they were built. Back in the 19th century there were three big terminuses in Manchester - Victoria, Piccadilly (originally known as London Road) and Central, plus Oxford Road which was smaller and for Liverpool and Altrincham trains. Because they were run by competing companies that often ran to the same place on different routes, there was incentive to make terminals look fancy to get more customers.
Labour must be feeling pretty confident about the Monday announcement to do this now, right? A defection would be pointless in purdah.
If not now, when? Getting in before the locals after the Tories have had a comparatively ok week and during a quiet weekend when it dominates the headlines seems pretty optimal to me.
Polling wasn't ok though . He said more unpopular stuff, forced through the Rwanda Bill and gained nothing. It shows the trouble they are in really .
Everything is relative. The polling wasn't new, and the Rwanda bill was at least "something" for the shrinking base that supports it.
Some of the recruitment processes in this country are atrocious.
Civil service recruitment (specifically anything related to the fast stream or any other centralised recruitment) has been a complete fiasco as well over the last year or so from what I've heard. Two examples I recall being told about included mixing up the interviewer and interviewee packs and committing a blatant privacy breach by using cc instead of bcc on an email.
Thing with the FOI rules is that they are both broad and narrow at the same time. Broad in that anyone can ask for info, narrow in that there are lots of reasons for not giving it. I had a look through the
Two rumours doing the rounds:
The problem with Sunak "announcing" the election date is that unless it is for June there's absolutely nothing to stop him changing his mind later. It's one interesting side-effect of the 2019 vote - it broke a 40 year convention of it being April-June, and whie that was never a firm rule it was like that for long enough that for many people that was when talk of an election would be. Now that mirage has been shattered, the talk never goes away.
How did we get to almost 800 comments? Anyway, did Vince Cable ever confirm if he'd sat on a table?
Entirely down to some distinctly Scottish febrility. Aside from that, Westminster trundled on, another disaster poll to add to all the others, Tory was a plank on QT, the usual Thursday stuff.
Today's hot take - SNP so keen to ensure a popular Labour policy is pushed out of the headlines they collapse their own government.
One good reason for there being three spots is that otherwise the final round would be less important than the semis. Winning the World Cup is all well and good but the big prize is a Candidates spot. With three entries, you make the final meaningful because, well it's the final, and the third place playoff meaningful because of the Candidates spot. One spot is too few for such a big tournament, and if it were two spots then you can easily see the coverage bigging up the semis and the third placed match being a bit of a dead rubber at least from the pubic interest point of view.
Without Partygate he would have done.
I'm not convinced. It wouldn't have fundamentally changed the long-term dial economically, and it wasn't even the only scandal doing the rounds. I also get the sense that pundits underestimated the amount to which people were sick of the polarisation and for someone to fill the gaping hole in the centre. Impossible to ever know.
*Nasa sent a software update to Voyager 1 to fix it.
This wasn't an ordinary bugfix. The bug here was hardware, a chip had failed and was no longer storing memory. Needless to say, they can't replace a broken piece of hardware. So they created a software patch to fix a hardware patch, by rewriting the code usually sent to that chip, splitting it up and allowing it to be sent to other chips.
I wonder if that would accelerate aging on those other chips.
I honestly have no idea. However the probe will stop transmitting in a few years anyway as its nuclear batteries will fail - it's too far away to use solar any more - and there's nothing anyone can do about that. So there's not much need to worry about long-term life of other components.