ml1dch

23 minutes ago, bickster said:

I was wrong about the polling not being done very often and you'll see the problem in these figures

12–15 Jan 2024	Deltapoll	N/A	2,136	46%	38%	15%	8%
11–12 Jan 2024	Omnisis	N/A	1,161	50%	33%	17%	17%
4–5 Jan 2024	Omnisis	N/A	1,226	48%	32%	20%	16%
2–3 Jan 2024	YouGov	N/A	2,016	51%	36%	13%	15%
28–30 Dec 2023	Omnisis	N/A	1,181	49%	33%	18%	16%
22–29 Dec 2023	Deltapoll	Daily Mirror	1,642	47%	39%	14%	8%
20–22 Dec 2023	Omnisis	N/A	1,177	48%	34%	18%	14%
14–15 Dec 2023	Omnisis	N/A	1,065	46%	34%	20%	12%
10–11 Dec 2023	Redfield & Wilton Strategies	UK in a Changing Europe	2,000	52%	40%	8%	12%
8–11 Dec 2023	Deltapoll	N/A	1,005	44%	41%	15%	3%
7–8 Dec 2023	Omnisis	N/A	1,201	46%	34%	20%	12%
1–4 Dec 2023	Deltapoll	N/A	1,000	45%	40%	15%	5%
30 Nov – 1 Dec 2023	Omnisis	N/A	1,123	46%	31%	23%	15%

Wiki has a page dedicated to it

End columns are Sample Size / Rejoin / Stay Out / Don't Know

Also, take a quick glance at the polling for "rejoin EU" and "rejoin EU if required to adopt the Euro" and they are wildly different.

The second of those points (whether we should / whether we would have to promise to / whether we actually would) is something with a lot of nuance - but you can bet now what the other side of any future "rejoin or not" campaign is going to be based around.

35 minutes ago, sidcow said:

Yes, I'm assuming the EU would allow us back in but I think it highly unlikely they wouldn't like us back, especially when we're not being run by a bunch of xenophobic arseholes.  We've still got the 6th largest economy in the world.  We would strengthen the EU immeasurably. 

And I don't at all buy that we can't have another referendum.   It's been 8 years since the referendum. I think a decade to reflect on what it's brought us is a reasonable length of time. Twice the term of a General Election. 

Nobody is disputing that they wouldn't welcome back a stable, united version of the UK back into the fold. And everything suggests that will happen within a couple of electoral cycles.

But they will take the current (massively imbalanced in their favour anyway) relationship over constant accession / secession talks with every new government who sees it as an easy wedge issue to squeeze an extra half dozen seats out of Lancashire and Cumbria.

And have whatever referendum you like. As long as you know what is in the Government's power to offer in the question that they ask. 

4 minutes ago, sidcow said:

Why could we absolutely not? 

Because it's not up the voters of the UK whether we are members or not. 

And while it is a subject that could be flipped every five years on the whim of an electorate that is happy to judge EU = good / bad as lazy shorthand for what they think of the Prime Minister of the day, they're comfortable leaving us to sort that shit out until there is consensus, one way or the other.

There is no "referendum to go back in". There is plausibly something like "general election manifesto commitment to negotiate accession terms, subject to future confirmatory referendum". Probably in six or eleven years time. 

Don't hold your breath, either way.

18 minutes ago, sidcow said:

Depends what you mean. We could have another referendum go back in. 

We absolutely could not.

On 20/01/2024 at 09:45, Chindie said:

Lost a Hackney council election handily. Safe seat, completely bungled it, Tories swept in.

Perhaps Starmer can be stopped.

It's a glorious mess of a seat. It's only happening due to the resignation of the former (Labour) councillor after he was pictured consoling another former (Labour) councillor after he'd been found with child porn (the latter has since been convicted of said offence).

Then the new Labour candidate goes on a big anti-trans rant online (not really popular with your average Labour council voter) so they suspend her. Then realise that there is no time to get a new candidate, so unsuspend her the day before the election.

So the other guy, (16 years of being a Lib Dem councillor in the same ward and appearing to know everyone) decides that he may as well now be a Tory, having previously been a Labour councillor on top of his Lib Dem history. He stands on a Tory "we hate ULEZ" campaign, sweeping up the dozen Tories in Hackney, all his Lib Dem mates from the last two decades he's been a councillor and all the Labour voters upset at all the stuff in the first two paragraphs. 

Lib Dems, who normally share the seat with Labour drop to 3% of the vote because the guy that the Lib Dem voters have liked for twenty years now wears a blue tie. Labour mired in every scandal possible.

Massive turnout too - 32% for a local council by-election, more than some parliamentary by-elections.

It's silly that Iannuci didn't follow up TTOI with a Vicar Of Dibley / Yes, Minister type crossover thing about local government. Absolutely mental stuff.

4 hours ago, Straggler said:

Yet to suggest reversing this decision despite it being proven beyond doubt to be based on lies, is still heresy in mainstream politics.

It's not heresy, it's just pointless to say it. Given it can't be "reversed" even if there were the political will to do so.

2 minutes ago, foreveryoung said:

£100k each!!

I can really see the arguments from both sides to be fair.

Oh yes? Care to share the £169k per person arguments?

3 minutes ago, Genie said:

Versus about £100k if they stayed. 

They are staying. 

6 minutes ago, desensitized43 said:

Throbbers gonna throb.

The dead man walking has called a news conference sowe may get our wish 

No, it's just to whine at the House Of Lords not to change his silly Rwanda bill. 

If repeated at a General Election, would leave them on circa 30 seats.

7 hours ago, StefanAVFC said:

**** me

Tory social media pricks: "is there any way that we could give him both a slightly cool anti-hero vibe while also using a slogan that makes him sound extremely competent at what he does?"

1 minute ago, bickster said:

I also expect that by the time they can manage that, it'll be attractive to a very small minority of the population, which will also be the small minority of the population voting for them

It's interesting that there has even been a recent shift in the over 65 demographic on "The European Question" which will certainly be of some relevance here

Yup. Never rule out any UK-voting-public craziness, but if you offered Labour the opportunity to fight the election-after-next with the Tories running on "we need to leave the ECHR" as their main policy they'd absolutely bite your hand off. 

2 hours ago, desensitized43 said:

I highly doubt they’ll lose the vote on the actual bill. If they do then the policy is effectively dead along with the prospect of removing us from the echr the hardliners want

There is no possibility of that happening in this Parliament. I fully expect it'll form part of a Tory election manifesto at some point in the next decade, but it's not a 2024 issue to worry about. 

19 minutes ago, Jonesy7211 said:

For those that are more politically savvy than I, and most who post here are, if the government lose the vote on Rwanda tomorrow would that be the end of Sunak? With all the Tory (extreme) right wing in favour of more Draconian amendments, and the resignations today, is this something that really could happen?

I read in the guardian that it's a possibility, but I think that's more in hope than actuality.

All the stuff that Chindie said, but also they're not going to lose it unless something really odd happens. 

The number of people who voted for the amendment was almost certainly not enough to vote against the bill to make it fail. 

And if there is any risk, they'll just pull the vote and say how they've heard the voices of colleagues and know that there are changes they need to make etc, precisely to avoid the embarrassment. 

Good lads, get that bill voted down.

9 minutes ago, magnkarl said:

So SA have just fired their u19 cricket captain, ‘for security reasons.’ He’s Jewish.

No no, nothing to see here. Impeccable country.

It happened last week - I nearly posted it in the anti-semitism thread, but when you scratch below the surface it's not as alarming a decision as it might first appear.

It's a bit of an uncomfortable situation all round, but it's probably not the brightest or most diplomatic move to dedicate an award that he recently won to the IDF. He's still in the squad, he's just no longer the guy who will be doing all the interviews. Because that's all he would be asked about now. 

Loads of fun numbers coming out of the Telegraph / YouGov MRP data if you dig below the headlines (or read other people who do digging below the headlines)
 

7 hours ago, Chindie said:

Does anyone really think Starmer's Labour Party is going to make major changes to their lives for the better?

Not at all. But crucially, I don't think anyone, leading any political party can promise or do things that will changes lives (significantly) for the better. I don't want Johnson or Corbyn saying that all the problems can fixed by being knobs towards Brussels or bankers. As you allude to, the country has deep, structural problems which aren't solved by a new guy with a vision of how to fix everything. Because there isn't a unifying, ideological solution at the moment, fixing one thing will break another.

So you have to manage all the bits into a boring, structural place where eg nationalising major industry doesn't screw pension funds. Or building entire new towns doesn't leave new schools and hospitals without qualified people to staff them. Or introducing massive new taxes on the bits of the country that currently make all the money without them going somewhere else and you getting no tax from them instead. Or how you promote an ethical foreign policy while your net zero commitments are reliant on Lithium and Cobalt mined by children in central Africa. It's a complicated world where taking one Jenga block out screws up something else, and any politician who is comfortable enough saying "if we just do this then we're fine" is probably a bad person to be in politics. 

I get people want to be inspired, but I'll be pretty comfortable with the novelty of thinking that those in charge are doing it because they at least think they're trying to make things better for the country rather than seeing it as an opportunity for themselves. While bleak and not going to get the crowds at Glastonbury, that's still better than we've seen for while. And I'm quite happy that the guys five years ago had that same motivation, which is why (while it would have been internationally shambolic) it would have been miles better than what we actually have had. In five years time things will almost certainly be as bad as they are now. But any politician who might have the nous to be able to do something about it is stuck with the Catch-22 situation of being aware enough to know that, while having to sell something to the country to get elected. And the best slogan I've got for Starmer is that I think he gets that there isn't a button to press (either labelled "tax more and nationalise stuff" or "tax less and kick the foreigners out") that magically fixes it all. And if he does get that, that's a good thing, not a bad thing. 

It's a bit like people demanding an Emery and for us to sign Moussa Diaby for £50m when we sacked Di Matteo. The country isn't at the Emery stage. Starmer isn't even Smith, he's Steve Bruce. He's the boring one that nobody likes, nobody wanted in the first place and nobody is sad to see the back of. But at least he's not setting fire to the dressing room, and (hopefully) when you look back the others bits don't happen without him signing Ahmed El-Mohamedy and Robert Snodgrass. There will absolutely be a Henri Lansbury style screw-up along the way (and probably even a Scott Hogan), but at least there might be a modicum of sense to the bad decisions for a change. 

While I'm stream-of-consciousnessing on the topic:

Gerrard - Johnson. Minor success with a similar but smaller role and massive public profile which meant loads of people thought it would be a triumph, but even a cursory glance below the surface, and his personality meant it was always going to be a disaster. It was always about him, not the thing he was responsible for. 

Sherwood - Truss: Speaks for itself.

Cameron - Lambert: The few bits that he got right and the shiny, initial popularity mask the fact that it was all a facade for gross institutional decline behind the scenes which led to far greater failings later.

O'Neill - Blair - the great hope after two decades of bleakness. Only to make really obvious mistakes which sour his legacy and make all the people who really liked him at the time, now hate him. Yet, they can't escape the fact that what he did was still better than the fifteen years either before or after. Around fifty percent of people will always hold his decisions around Europe against him.

Houllier - Brown - was always going to be a bit deflating after what went before, and it always felt like the end of an era. But there was a bit of logic in why it might have worked. Bit tin-earned to why people weren't on board with what he was trying to do, and it always felt a bit weird to see him there given he'd always been around doing something else for much of the previous decade. 

Sunak - Di Matteo - when the last "season" was a disaster, why not roll the dice on a guy in a suit who could at least point to a time when people thought (albeit wrongly, and in extreme circumstances when their minds were on other things) he was good a few years back?

There's probably an essay in that Prime Ministers vs Villa managers somewhere. Or at least a fanzine article.

1 hour ago, blandy said:

People are so hacked off after 14 years of shit that they seem to think it can’t get better, that they’re all the same. They’re not…though they could do with getting the air time to explain how they’re not and what they’ll do, and finding a pair.

Yup. For all the talk of "if you take away all the incompetence, take away the criminality, take away the political vandalism, take away the factional psychodrama, then what will they really do differently...?", there's probably a massive chunk of the country that would take that option quite happily. 

6 minutes ago, Jareth said:

Yep

Why?

3 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

Wow.

what a fascinating trajectory this place is on, we don’t need the EU, we don’t need human rights, we don’t need parliament

 

Not sure that anyone had said that, have they?

There are thousands of decisions that the government makes every day without consulting parliament and legally this is one that is within their right to make. 

Parliament's job is to then scrutinise the executive and hold them to account for the decisions that they make. As they will do on this issue. 

And the scrutiny will amount to "all good, we're fine with it". 

26 minutes ago, Jareth said:

It’s not an attack on us, come to parliament first. 

It would definitely have been a nice courtesy, but he doesn't legally have to.

And given parliament will overwhelmingly back the decision does it matter that much? 

6 hours ago, Jareth said:

So Starmer is fully on board the Tory train, support what they do at all costs. Including Yemen.

I don't think there has ever been a Prime Minister from any party who would respond to a drone attack on a Navy ship with anything other than retaliation. 

Particularly as this isn't really a hand-wringing, "faults on both sides" situation (like most of the other thread is). It's an Iranian militia chucking missiles at merchant shipping and hijacking civilian boats. It's pretty sensible to try and do something about it, given three months of asking them nicely to stop hasn't done the trick.