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UK Politics: Electioneering


Werthead

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The Conservative candidate for South Thanet has been charged related to the 2015 election expenses scandal. Hopefully, this won't hand the seat over to UKIP.

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No it isn't. You know perfectly well what the difference is here. If you have no issues turning your country over to politicians who supported its enemies then so be it, but for right thinking people Corbyn and co's terrorist sympathies are a total disqualification for high office.

But the Conservative Party actively paying terrorists who tried to hide their past to work for it is fine and not a total disqualification from office? It's fine for the Tories to make money and get rich from selling weaponry to Middle-Eastern regimes to butcher innocents with? That is a highly dubious position.

I don't remember where, but I believe I heard someone on TV once saying, "You can only make peace with your enemies. That's why it's called making peace." And we did, in an initiative launched by the Conservatives, completed under Labour and which the Conservatives have once again put in jeopardy thanks to Brexit.

I also find the passive-aggressive assertive that to be a "right-thinking person" you must be in favour of five years more of depressing the economy through a discredited austerity scheme, talking down Britain, sending more people to food banks, not paying people properly and actively killing people on benefits and with mental health issues to be utterly hilarious.

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2 minutes ago, Wolfgang I said:

Wouldn't that be a good thing? Unless you don't won't the  conservatives to lose.

Nigel Farage is not an improvement.

This is more interesting at a nationwide level: it puts May back on the defensive at the worst possible time.

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The nuclear debate from last night is an interesting one. Is it an area where politicians absolutely have to lie? The question is "Are you willing to slaughter millions of people and potentially cause the extermination of the human race, turning the earth into a barren wasteland?"

"No" is apparently an untenable answer. I mean, I do understand the mutually assured destruction argument. It's possible that everyone's willingness to slaughter humanity is the only thing preventing that slaughter. But I don't think I could ever answer "yes" to that question.

I certainly hope that when Theresa May claims to be willing to launch a first strike, that she's lying.

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Nigel Farage isn't standing for election. UKIP do have a candidate in South Thanet, but he's not Farage and he's not going to win.

As for Corbyn, clearly he's completely unsuitable. Leaders have to be prepared to incinerate enemies of the country in a fiery nuclear holocaust at the drop of a hat, but absolutely not to talk to them. It's not as if any prominent world leaders have ever taken a different view.

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2 hours ago, Werthead said:

It's fine for the Tories to make money and get rich from selling weaponry to Middle-Eastern regimes to butcher innocents with?

While I'm as much in favour as anyone you could find of not assisting in the murder of starving, unarmed Yemeni children, Brexit is going to leave the country short of hard cold cash, and BAE's products are one of the few solid things we have left to sell.  I strongly suspect that even a hypothetical Labour government isn't going to be able to hit the ethical foreign policy button, however much they might want to.

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5 hours ago, Werthead said:

The Conservative candidate for South Thanet has been charged related to the 2015 election expenses scandal. Hopefully, this won't hand the seat over to UKIP.

It was a former Labour seat in the Blair years, apparently, so they could be the beneficiaries if the Tory voters desert the candidate.

Yougov's constituency estimates reckon Labour are the main challengers there. They say their estimates don't include local factors so the race there may be closer than the page shows.

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OK. So far two more polls - Opinium has 43-37-6, ComRes has 47-35-8. We're really looking at methodology at this point: ComRes apparently assumes youth turnout will mirror 2015 (43%), and as such produces larger Tory leads. We'll have to wait and see, I suppose.

Opinium is brutal on the Lib Dems though. That would be their worst vote share since 1959.

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10 hours ago, Slick Mongoose said:

I can't recall ever seeing such a huge variance in the polls. Survation have 40-39-8. :o

My money's still on an increased Conservative majority, but it could be an interesting election night.....

I think you are seeing a war between two methodologies:

  • YouGov, Survation, Ipsos Mori, Opinium - more self-reporting - CON +4 on average
  • Kantar, ComRes, ICM - demographic filters based on 2015 - CON +11 on average

If this electorate looks like 2015's then you get a comfortable Tory win. If it doesn't....

(My money remains on Tory majority of 40 - but I think May is doomed as leader. Corbyn will stay put).

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4 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

Bizarrely the terror incident almost certainly plays into conservative hands, when the complete opposite should be the case.  

At this point, it's really hard to tell what these things do. The Paris attack did squat to help Le Pen, and that was 48 hours before.

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Wouldn't that be a good thing? Unless you don't won't the  conservatives to lose.

 

UKIP would probably support a lot of Conservative policies, so it wouldn't make much odds, especially as they are unlikely to win any more seats.

19 hours ago, Zoë Sumra said:

While I'm as much in favour as anyone you could find of not assisting in the murder of starving, unarmed Yemeni children, Brexit is going to leave the country short of hard cold cash, and BAE's products are one of the few solid things we have left to sell.  I strongly suspect that even a hypothetical Labour government isn't going to be able to hit the ethical foreign policy button, however much they might want to.

Labour has already committed to suspending all arms sales to Saudi Arabia until an independent investigation is carried out into the use of British-made weapons in Yemen.

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Bizarrely the terror incident almost certainly plays into conservative hands, when the complete opposite should be the case.  

I don't see this one having much of an impact politically, unless it turns out these were high-profile targets already on active watch lists.

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I think it is somewhat understandable that terrorist incidents generally lead to more conservative ("law and order") support although it is also strange because the conservatives in power apparently did not enough to prevent such incidents, so why believe them that they would do better if re-elected?

The really mind-boggling thing is that even economic crises (or generally bad economic conditions) that are caused by conservative policies (like austerity measures, tax cuts for the top 1-10% etc.) often lead to more support of conservatives or at least not to anything close to the support of more leftist parties one would rationally expect. It seems that there is the factor that if people are generally frightened and insecure they tend to support the incumbent candidate (or party). And the decades old mantra that "leftists only waste other people's money" and are generally "bad for the economy" (not supported by any data on government spending by more leftist vs. more conservative governments).

Which demographic is "youth"? Until 25? or 30? Is it so hard to get more than 43% of them to the voting booths?

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Which demographic is "youth"? Until 25? or 30? Is it so hard to get more than 43% of them to the voting booths?

Speaking to lots of people in this age bracket at work (I'm an old fogey compared to most people there), yes. A lot of people don't pay attention, don't know you have to register, or just vote the way their parents vote, and get bored if you speak about politics for more than five minutes. Other people continue to play the "it doesn't matter" card. Encouragingly, some Labour policies have actually broken through in the last couple of weeks. A couple of my coworkers wanted to go to university but refused to get into debt, so Corbyn's policy on tuition fees (combined with a couple of years working in low-paid basic positions) have encouraged them to vote Labour. There are a couple of people who are quite young and passionate and vocal about politics, which is encouraging.

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20 minutes ago, denstorebog said:

At this point, it's really hard to tell what these things do. The Paris attack did squat to help Le Pen, and that was 48 hours before.

There also wasn't any discernible impact on the polls from the Manchester attack last week, I don't see why this new attack would necessarily be any different.

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The Conservatives seem to be very sensitive on their links to the Saudi regime. An investigation exposing Saudi funding of extremist hate preachers in the UK has been shelved and the government has refused to publish the results. At a local hustings, Amber Rudd censored Independent opponent Nicholas Wilson and prevented him from discussing the matter.

Definitely running scared from the questions there, which is why they must be asked.

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One of several recent claims by the police challenging the government narrative that police cuts have had no negative impact on counter-terrorism, particularly the loss of ground-level, community policing and the intelligence leads that these generated.

Peter Kirkham, a senior investigating officer in the Met, spelled it out more plainly in a TV interview on Sky News: he stated that Tory claims that they have increase police and armed police resources as a flat-out lie (which is correct: the national police service is down 22,000 staff on 2010, including 1,000 less armed response units).

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Corbyn doesn't seem to be holding back today in his criticism of Tory policing and anti-terror policies. It seems potentially risky to make a speech that could be seen as trying to make political capital from a horrific crime, on the other hand it's also difficult to deny that it's an important election issue and we should know where the parties stand on it and there's only a few days left for that to happen. It does feel to me that it's perhaps a bit soon for the speech, even if much of what he says seems reasonable.

3 hours ago, Slick Mongoose said:

It is interesting to see that a 2 point lead for the Tories in the raw data can sometimes turn into an 11 points lead once the adjustments are done. It does seem like nobody really seems to know for sure what sort of adjustment should be done, although the advice to look at the average rather than individual polls does sound reasonable (in which case the Tory margin of victory would be similar to 2015, although both parties would have increase their vote share).

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