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Post 21 Oct 2015, 3:21 pm

It remains to be seen how badly the tax credit thing will damage the Tories. I've seen some rough figures which suggest that most recipients are Labour voters anyway (with the usual caveats that you can't especially trust this kind of polling data). It also seems to be the case that cutting the welfare budget is actually quite popular. From a purely anecdotal standpoint I can tell you that almost every conversation about the subject that I've had has been with people who are quite stridently anti-welfare. Keep in mind that I live in Sheffield and I'm just about the only Tory voter I know. Another common attitude that I've found among the traditional working classes is a belief that you shouldn't have children if you can't afford them. It's a much more hard-headed attitude than you tend to see reflected in the media. My suspicion is that Osborne can ride out the storm from cutting the tax credits budget quite easily. Far more damaging to the Tories will be the dispute over the junior doctors contract, but they'll inevitably cave in over that in the end so it shouldn't be too much of an issue.
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Post 21 Oct 2015, 3:31 pm

(Re the above debate on trade unionists:) geeze, look what I started . :laugh:
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Post 21 Oct 2015, 3:43 pm

Sassenach wrote:It remains to be seen how badly the tax credit thing will damage the Tories. I've seen some rough figures which suggest that most recipients are Labour voters anyway (with the usual caveats that you can't especially trust this kind of polling data).
Yes, but if a significant number are 2015 Tory voters who become vocal about this, such as the lady on TV last week, that is where an effect may come in.

It also seems to be the case that cutting the welfare budget is actually quite popular. From a purely anecdotal standpoint I can tell you that almost every conversation about the subject that I've had has been with people who are quite stridently anti-welfare. Keep in mind that I live in Sheffield and I'm just about the only Tory voter I know.
Well yes, we all support cuts in welfare to people we think don't deserve to get the benefits. And we can all see cases (which may be extremes rather than typical exemplars) of such unworthiness to help back up that view.

But of course, those same people would not be anti-welfare if they had to rely on it themselves, and in the case of Tax Credits, or other provisions, may not actually recognise it as welfare until it is cut. People on benefits even often support cuts assuming that it doesn't mean to the "deserving". Systems are not clever enough to tell the difference, often.

Another common attitude that I've found among the traditional working classes is a belief that you shouldn't have children if you can't afford them. It's a much more hard-headed attitude than you tend to see reflected in the media.
In reality those people probably don't realise that if their parents had taken that attitude they would not be here. Hard-headed is indeed a way to describe it. And of course what about people who were able to afford kids when they had them, but later on had a change to their circumstances (lost job, seperation/divorce, deteriorating health, having a disabled kid)?

My suspicion is that Osborne can ride out the storm from cutting the tax credits budget quite easily. Far more damaging to the Tories will be the dispute over the junior doctors contract, but they'll inevitably cave in over that in the end so it shouldn't be too much of an issue.
The BMA may well cave in, but if the junior doctors vote with their feet it won't go away as an issue. Especially with other NHS issues like a growing set of deficits and being overstretched at wintertime.

He may be able to ride it out. Or it may become like the 10p tax rate thing under Brown, a symbol of a government hitting poor people through a hamfisted tinkering with taxes. I wonder how many Labour voters defected to the Tories over that, and are now waiting to see what the letters say before Xmas.

The measure of this is also in what happens between the Lords and Commons over it - and whether Osborne comes up with a hot fix to it in the Autumn Statement.
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Post 21 Oct 2015, 10:17 pm

What I meant was that the government will cave in to the doctors. Doctors rarely fail to get their way in the end.

The tax credits thing is overblown in my opinion. Yes, some of the losers will be Tory voters and these people may be a little pissed off that some of their free money is being withdrawn, but I very much doubt that it'll prove to be decisive. We shouldn't be subsidising employers who pay low wages anyway. Tax credits are an inherently stupid system.
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Post 22 Oct 2015, 9:19 am

Sassenach wrote:What I meant was that the government will cave in to the doctors. Doctors rarely fail to get their way in the end.

The tax credits thing is overblown in my opinion. Yes, some of the losers will be Tory voters and these people may be a little pissed off that some of their free money is being withdrawn, but I very much doubt that it'll prove to be decisive. We shouldn't be subsidising employers who pay low wages anyway. Tax credits are an inherently stupid system.

They are a useful transition. And if we have a minimum wage increasing faster (Osborne's "living wage" is still short of the actual Living wage and slow to get there), then tax credits at a static point would eventually phase out. What the government is doing is halving the threshold and reducing the effect, which means it will more than eat up any pay rises for NMW or low incomes.

In principle I agree we should reduce their scope over time in favour of higher wages and better support. In practice this is about a quick saving to the Treasury and they have not considered the impact.

It is similar to the devolution process. In principle, with consideration, consultation and consent I agree we should devolve to regions, metropolitans or whatever. But the Osborne version is with imposed Treasury rules, secrecy and it is obviously about passing on cuts and hoping the devolved entities get blamed rather than the government.
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Post 22 Oct 2015, 11:53 am

I suspect they'll find a way to offset the worst impacts. Ultimately this is the kind of policy change that has to be pushed through early in a parliament or not at all. There's 4 more years to iron out the difficulties with it.

Tbh I have more of an issue with some of the plans for the savings than I do with the cuts. If it were all going into paying down the deficit that would be one thing, but since some of this money will effectively be used to make up the shortfall caused by cuts in inheritance tax then it inevitably looks like a transfer payment from the poor to the affluent. I don't have an issue with cutting inheritance tax per se, but I do think that it's the sort of policy that should only be looked at after the deficit has been eliminated.
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Post 02 Dec 2015, 12:58 pm

So apparently the bookies odds have shortened dramatically on a UKIP win in the Oldham West by-election tomorrow. Now I must say I find it very hard to believe that this could possibly happen and I certainly wouldn't take them up on it, but it's still an interesting development. This is after all a rock solid Labour constituency which returned Michael Meacher only 7 months ago with a 15000 majority. Difficult to see Corbyn surviving if they do lose tomorrow.

I don't expect that will happen though, it would be catastrophic and utterly unprecedented for a non-governing party to suffer such a swing in a by-election. More likely we'll see a much reduced majority but still a pretty handy one. The question is how big of a swing can Corbyn survive ?
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Post 04 Dec 2015, 12:08 am

Sassenach wrote:So apparently the bookies odds have shortened dramatically on a UKIP win in the Oldham West by-election tomorrow. Now I must say I find it very hard to believe that this could possibly happen and I certainly wouldn't take them up on it, but it's still an interesting development. This is after all a rock solid Labour constituency which returned Michael Meacher only 7 months ago with a 15000 majority. Difficult to see Corbyn surviving if they do lose tomorrow.

I don't expect that will happen though, it would be catastrophic and utterly unprecedented for a non-governing party to suffer such a swing in a by-election. More likely we'll see a much reduced majority but still a pretty handy one. The question is how big of a swing can Corbyn survive ?
Majority was down about 4000, but with a low turnout Labour increased vote share to 62%

Now the media claiming it is a surprise win!
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Post 04 Dec 2015, 1:13 pm

I think the low turnout probably helped Labour here. Postal votes are unaffected by the persistent rain.

Obviously there was never any danger of Labour losing this seat, and fair play to them, they exceeded expectations (although I suspect there was a certain amount of expectation management going on with the news stories). I do think that something ought to be done about postal voting though. There were stories circulating about 57 Labour votes coming from one house. I don't know if this will turn out to be nonsense, but it is pretty clear that postal voting is a) open to abuse on a much greater scale than ordinary voting and b) open to patriarchal bloc voting in the asian community. I don't really agree with the current system of giving anybody a postal vote who asks for one.

Don't want to make too big a deal out of this though, there's no way Labour would have lost this seat regardless of the postal voting system that was in place.
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Post 04 Dec 2015, 2:03 pm

"stories" about 57 voters in one house?

Very easy to check using the electoral register.

Mind you it was 49 last night. Farage was also making stuff up about 99% of a box being Labour votes - it was based not on counting votes but an overheard quip.

I know there are concerns about postal voting, but UKIP today have been making unfounded and bizarre allegations. They overhyped their position (as they have done before) and have to blame a stich-up rather than fess up that they were exaggerating.
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Post 04 Dec 2015, 2:05 pm

By the way, 40% is a good turnout for a winter by-election in a seat with high deprivation.
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Post 04 Dec 2015, 2:20 pm

Farage seems to have gotten carried away and come to believe that he had a chance. He must have had some kind of basis for that though, presumably from favourable canvassing returns which didn't translate into actual votes. He wrote a very bullish article in the Telegraph on Wednesday, which I thought at the time was a hostage to fortune and which in the event proved to have been a major embarrassment (not that anybody in Oldham will have read it). He must have seen some kind of data that encouraged him to do that.

My guess is that we'll find a very high turnout among the Asian community and a very low turnout from everybody else. Predictable, and something that Farage ought to have considered before he started making noises about how UKIP could win. He should also have figured that people who still voted Labour when Ed Miliband was in charge are probably locked-in tribal voters who wouldn't be likely to abandon them 7 months later. The bookies missed a trick here as well.
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Post 17 Jan 2016, 6:45 am

So Dan, what's your opinion on the Trident debacle that Corbyn is dragging your party into ? The latest I've seen is this:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... r-warheads

You seriously couldn't make it up, he's now suggesting that we could still go ahead and build the subs but not have any warheads on board. That has to be the most ludicrous proposal I've ever seen. The case that anti-Trident people have been banging on and on about for years is that it's going to cost a fortune (figures seem to be largely plucked out of the air and vary from week to week, but they normally round it to £100bn) which would be better spent on other things (which again varies with the news cycle, most recently it was all going to go on flood defences). Then all of a sudden we start to hear rumblings that some of the big unions are unhappy with Corbyn's unilateralism because of the implications for the jobs of their members, so what does he do ? Oh, I know, let's continue to spend £100bn on the submarines anyway, that way all of those jobs can be spared. Genius ! So now we'd end up with all of the costs associated with renewing our nuclear deterrent but at the end of it all we wouldn't actually have a nuclear deterrent.

Now I'm sure that this ideas will never end up becoming Labour policy. The very fact that it's being considered at all ought to be profoundly worrying for any Labour supporter though. It strongly suggests that Jeremy Corbyn is a deeply stupid man. I did a quick google for the number of jobs potentially at risk if Trident is cancelled and the estimate seems to be about 15000. Corbyn could write each and every one of those sacked workers a cheque for £1m each as compensation and it would work out cheaper than renewing the subs only to then not have any missiles for them. In fact, if we take his claimed costs at face value (which we shouldn't since it's almost certainly a load of old bollocks, but still...) doing as I suggest would save the nation £75bn while also making a lot of Unite members deliriously happy.

I seriously can't recall a more ridiculous policy idea than this one, and I certainly can't recall a more ridiculous party leader. Apparently in the same interview he floated the idea of ceding joint sovereignty of the Falklands against the wishes of the islanders. This follows hard on the heels of his appointing Emily Thornberry as his defence spokesman, a woman who apparently sees no conflict in holding that role while receiving thousands of pounds in contributions from a law firm who have previously tried to sue British soldiers on fictitious torture charges (and who clearly despises the working class in general and anybody with a military background in particular). Dan Jarvis must wake up every morning bitterly regretting his decision not to stand...
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Post 24 Jan 2016, 6:43 am

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016 ... -argentina

Oh dear... It keeps getting worse. Corbyn seemingly can't allow a week to go by without doing something epically stupid. Funny how the 'new style of politics' apparently involved ignoring the democratically expressed will of 99.8% of the Falkland Islanders...
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Post 24 Jan 2016, 7:41 am

On Trident:

The submarines are capable of carrying other weapons. Indeed, they do. And the US has a programme to convert Trident missiles to deliver conventional warheads.

And whatever Corbyn says, there is a policy review under way.

On the Falklands:

We need at some point to resolve the issue with Argentina. The Islanders are of course important, and their wishes to remain British should be paramount. But we have not really discussed it with Argentina since the conflict.