British Politics

ooof

Tories totally lost plot over legal immigration and seemed to address it with their ridiculous Rwanda ideas and nothing else (such as, I dunno, increase local resourcing to areas that have the highest influxes), and such inaction/ineptitude from the government opens door to extreme/single-issue parties

But they were absolutely on point with Brexit, which did nothing for single issue parties at all, right?

i am concerned about the consequences of reform recording more votes than the tories and yet having one fiftieth of the representation in parliament. der markt estimates the chances of this at 25%

knitted jumper wearing lib dems whining that they have 15 MPs rather than 65 is easy to ignore and frankly who cares, but a large working class white group of voters whipped up by farage, none of whom have ever spent their sunday making artisan sourdough bread, is another matter. and they'd have a point.

its an issue which could dominate the parliament

They were obviously completely off point when it comes to delivering what a lot of people chose to vote for brexit about (ie immigration). And so we get to this point, where a single issue party has so much clout.

How much influence on the future direction of uk politics do you think reform would have if they get a significant %age of the vote?

It's almost like they promised a load of stuff that they can't deliver, or even if they could, would be enormously detrimental to the UK.

it wasn't so much 'can't', more 'are too inept to be able to'

I’d love to hear what diebitters policy on immigration would be.

On second thoughts though maybe I wouldn’t.

dont know. could be anything from business as usual to Prime Minister Farage

one thing that makes me suspect the former is that their manifesto is quite strange in places

they talk about legislating against the creation of a CBDC to prevent a transition to a cashless society, and that they will save £35 billion a year by stopping the practice of paying interest on central bank QE reserves. I know 0 about these things, except that they are frequently discussed by facebook loons who like to talk central banks and (((central bankers)))

There are probably a lot of shy Tory votes undeclared.. My guess is that with the tabloids unconvinced by Starmer the attacks will intensify, mud and some facts will stick, and the Tories will get between 25 and 30 percent of the vote.

I don’t know the current level of QE but it was about 860Bn at one point. I used to look at the reserve accounts of some banks and goggle at the number of digits.

Interest on those sums is a huge amount of course, but I don’t think that effectively reducing the reserve balances is very sensible. It’s just the sort of nonsense you’d expect from a fledgling party of chancers and misfits.

No, it was can't. But even if you are correct, it was pretty obvious that those dim enough to sponsor such an idea would lack the ability to deliver anything worth talking about.

'dim enough to sponsor such an idea'.... yeah, sure, staying in the EU would have meant it would have been all fine and rosy, and not at all pretty much exactly the same as now (except many thousands more dead because of inept EU covid management).

As you are I'm sure well aware, the UK had the right to opt out of the vaccine scheme, so I don't see how it would have made much difference. And we wouldn't be as we are now, we'd be wealthier, and not have a border within our own country. So, yes, "dim enough to sponsor such an idea".

Feel free to start wanging on about trade deals whenever you want.

lol

But for diebitter it was always about "sovereignty". Allegedly. And conveniently ignoring the sacrifice of major "sovereignty" in being part of the UN.

The entire logic of his stupidly contrived position falls apart when you think about how he was against membership of the EU because apparently it made it impossible to leave. Now we have left, and proved that in fact it's quite possible to exercise sovereignty by leaving, by his own "logic" we should rejoin safe in the knowledge that our sovereignty is intact.

The interest paid on QE reserves isn't necessarily extra money than what the government would have paid on the gilts to the market anyway.

It was less money for a long while (ie the gvmnt saved a lot for a while) and now it's a bit of extra money.

Idea is your government issues 100 BLN GBP to the market at par coupon let's say 4% (that's what the market clears at), 10y duration.

Absent QE the gvmnt spends 4 bln GBP per year.

With QE the gvmnt (BoE) prints 100 blns and buys them.

Now the banking system has 100 BLM excess reserves, remunerated at a variable rate (the BoE "Bank Rate" for the UK).

Today that rate is 5.25% so the gvmnt in aggregate pays 1.25 bln more per year on those bonds that it would have absent QE. But it spent less for a decent while and presumably will spend less later on in time.

Over the lifetime of all the bonds bought and hold through the QE my hunch is that the government almost certainly saves money but it isn't guaranteed .

But anyway any analysis that only looks at the cash paid on excess reserves is completely ****ed up.

That said a purely digital currency is to be avoided for security, privacy, and centralized risks reasons (risks of the government being able to just kill you financially with a click) but it's a completely different matter

This is clearly the case and reform voters even without winning a seat are applying huge political pressure with their vote. The right wing of uk polics is adjusting fast and will continue to as long as the pressure remains.

My point unsuprisingly is that you dont win political change by winning seats for a status quo inclined party. The pressure for change can be irresistable and can come from voting for candidates who may well not win anything much in terms of seats.

I'm not against STV at all (am against any form of party list) but we must address the huge whopper that voting for other than the main parties is a wasted vote.

More power of refusing to vote for what we dont want. May actualy achieve something quicky and concrete with the UK recoginising a Palestinian state. Of course it's KS so he may well find a very good reason why he can't do it.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/art...

some betfair implied probabilities. all of these are pretty liquid markets in which you could get a few hundred quid down if you feel strongly about them

tories to get LESS than 22.0% of the vote is slightly better than a coinflip
tories are slightly worse than a coinflip to win 100 or more seats
tories have an 80% chance to win more than 50 seats, and therefore a 20% chance to fall short of 51
tories have a 25% chance to win 140 seats or more

reform > tories in vote share is slightly better than one in three (!)
the chance of zero reform seats is 18%
the chance of more than two reform seats is slightly worse than a coinflip

labour have a 70% chance to win 419 or more seats
labout have a 45% chance to win more than 43.0% of the vote

the lib dems have a two in three chance of winning more than 41 seats

the SNP are slightly better than a coinflip to win 20 or more seats
labour have an 83% chance to win the most seats in scotland

there is a one in four chance that the tories are not the second largest party in the next parliament in terms of seats (!)

At those odds I think there is significant EV to bet the Tories get between 51 and 139 seats.

If I read correctly you make around 45 percent of your bet size when you are correct, I think actual odds would be like half that.

It's going to be a massacre but these odds are crazy and like 5 years ago, people are betting "good stories" that go well beyond what the polls say is going to happen.

I have the Tories to get 100 or more seats, which is currently about a coinflip.

Yes the odds are wrong as things stand imo. I also had a bet on lots of shy(ster) Tories.

Not sure how much sway this organisation has but

Oh dear, he's not taking the D-Day criticism well...