Snap UK General Election

[EnglishEdward]

Not very related, but looking at wiki for the Blair issue, i came across this gem:

Lolwut? There wasn't any "threat of a ground offensive", cause it would result in huge losses of life for nato soldiers, which is why the bombing campaign went on for an unprecedented 3 months and with no end in sight. Given this glaring lie exists on an article about a known politician, nomatter how fitting ( ) it is a bit of a nasty discovery, imo. Wiki for politics is not to be trusted :/

After very nearly three months of bombing refugee columns, dummies and irrelevant buildings etc, Bill Clinton
agreed to send in Apache helicopters, and French and British troops were being deployed to adjacent countries.

I refer you to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War

from which I extract:

In 2010, James Blunt described in an interview how his unit was given the assignment of securing Pristina during the advance of the 30,000-strong peacekeeping force and how the Russian army had moved in and taken control of the city's airport before his unit's arrival. Blunt shared a part in the difficult task of addressing the potentially violent international incident. According to Blunt's account there was a stand-off with the Russians, and the NATO Supreme Commander, Wesley Clark, gave provisional orders to over-power them. Whilst these were questioned by Blunt, they were rejected by General Jackson, with the now famous line, "I'm not having my soldiers responsible for starting World War III."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War#cite_note-160
World saved by Michael Jackson!

 

[Mise]

So May isn't like Thatcher, but like Blair.

Not really. Blair made his decisions for ideological reasons -- how else could we explain his baffling, unrepentant support for a vastly unpopular war in Iraq? That he was so unwaveringly ideologically driven was his biggest weakness, and the most popular criticism of his leadership.

 

[Samson]

Nate Silver reckons it is a risky move going to the people now:

On average, U.K. polls this far out have missed the final margin by 6 percentage points. And they don’t get all that much more accurate as you go along — the final polling average has missed the result by 5 points. The experience in Brexit last year — when the polls missed the final margin by 4 points according to the Huffington Post polling average or 6 points according to the method I described above — wasn’t a big outlier by U.K. standards. The same goes for the previous U.K. general election in 2015, when they underestimated Conservatives by around 6 points.
...
May’s Conservatives do have a massive lead, with recent polls showing them 9 to 21 points ahead of Labour and their unpopular leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Also, while the polls in the U.K. haven’t been very accurate, they’ve tended to underestimate Conservatives rather than Labour in the past. (See also: the Shy Tory Factor.)

But if polls are missing election outcomes by 5 or 6 points on average, that means the margin of error (or 95 percent confidence interval) is very large indeed. Specifically, a 6-point average error in forecasting the final margin translates to a true margin of error of plus or minus 13 to 15 percentage points, depending on how you calculate it.

 

[Kyriakos]

After very nearly three months of bombing refugee columns, dummies and irrelevant buildings etc, Bill Clinton
agreed to send in Apache helicopters, and French and British troops were being deployed to adjacent countries.

I refer you to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War

from which I extract:


World saved by Michael Jackson!

Right. Curiously there was nothing like that on the news, during the most publicized event of those times for 1/4 of an entire year, so i suppose a ground invasion of Serbia by nato was imminent cause... reasons? Let alone that Kosovo didn't have a serbian army present at the time, so how would this be sending nato soldiers to combat even if we assume they would be sent to Pristina? I was at London at the time, in the first year of university, and followed this closely on tv there.
I do recall how in the end drunken Yeltsin intervened to negotiate a deal with Milosevic, to end the bombing of Serbia by nato, but that was also pretty much a charade judging by what happened later on (trial of Milosevic at the Hague, and curious - but with good timing - death of Milosevic from unknown cause during said trial in the Netherlands).

 

[EnglishEdward]

Nate Silver reckons it is a risky move going to the people now:

Thank you for finding us those statistics.

My view is that the current conservative lead over Labour will at least halve.

This is not based upon any rigorous calculation, but the factors I consider are:

(a) Only a minority of the UK voters will regard Leave/Remain as the overriding issue for their vote.

(b) Jeremy Corbyn has abandoned new labour policy of arse licking financial services and the wealth elite;
his comments about being anti-establishment and making the rich pay rather than avoid tax will have a
great resonance with generation rent and others, not totally dissimular to Trump's anti-wall street line

(c) The shy voters will tend to vote Labour not so much because they hope for a Labour win overall,
but because they will wish to avoid a large Conservative majority, the fear factor being what
the conservatives would do with a large majority regarding austerity and government cuts etc.

 

[Takhisis]

I wonder whether the drive for tactical voting can have any success in keeping the Tories from office. One can only hope.

I don't think Theresa May succeeded because she acted like Thatcher. On the contrary: she succeeded because she didn't act like Thatcher. She was a caricature of the quiet, hard-working administrator, who sat for 6 years in the Home Office just doing that one job, while other more "high profile" politicians did all the glossy, headline-grabbing stuff. During the referendum, she was one of the most "on the fence" Remainers, who really didn't take part much in the campaign, and generally kept her mouth shut. Then, after the referendum, she once again swayed with the wind and won the Conservative leadership contest because she was the least divisive of all candidates, and most likely to unify the party around her due to her blandness.

Once in power, she became tougher on her allies and opponents, publicly reprimanding Hammond (over breaking a manifesto pledge in his budget and upsetting newspapers), and Boris (for several acts of supreme idiocy as foreign secretary). But her grand strategy is still that of a fence-sitter, swaying in the wind, saying one thing then doing another as it suits her. She is in many ways Thatcher's opposite: a lady who is very much for turning, whichever way the political winds blow. Witness the number of U-turns the government has made, or, 10 months after the referendum, the total lack of any plan or position statement for what Brexit will actually look like. She's not someone who has strong beliefs and ideals and will follow them whatever the political cost. She's guided not by principle, but by instinct.

Unfortunately it looks like her instincts are every bit as bad as were Thatcher's principles.

We still have the charade of posturing over Gibraltar with explicit references to Mags and calls for racism and the fact that her opinion is always imposed and never negotiated.

Your last line is key, though. :/

 

[really]

Corbyn has proposed four new public holidays to promote national
unity.

Putting three close together and around the same time as Easter, when the weather isn't great doesn't sound like a great idea.

Other than the unknown cost, AFAIK holiday decisions were devolved to Scotland so it isn't a national decision.

St David’s Day (1 March), St Patrick’s Day (17 March), St George’s Day (23 April) and St Andrew’s Day (30 November).

 

[Traitorfish]

It's a nice idea, although St Andrew's Day is already a public Scotland, St Patrick is not a figure usually associated with a British national identity, and nobody here gives two farts about St George or St David, so if the intent is to save the Union, it seems like a it of a dud.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I wonder whether the drive for tactical voting can have any success in keeping the Tories from office. One can only hope.

It worked in Canada. Steve was heaved, and while he did do the expected thing on election night and resigned the party leadership, he didn't have the integrity to do it in person. He handed a flunky a note, which was passed on to the news anchors.

It does take effort, though, to get the word out about strategic voting and counter the opposition's scaremongers who will inevitably try to prevent it, or steer it in the wrong direction. In the last couple of days before our federal election in 2015, there were an awful lot of suspicious posts on CBC.ca, urging people to vote NDP instead of Liberal to turf the Reformacons. I don't know how Harper's paid opinion adjusters thought they could get away with it, particularly when some of them who had been relentlessly pushing the Reformacon agenda for years suddenly had a change of political affiliation. It was actually fun calling them out on it, making sure that the more casual readers and posters knew what was really going on. By that time we pretty well knew the NDP didn't have a realistic chance of forming the government.

 

[Arakhor]

We already get two in May and two at Easter, so that clustering does seem unfortunate. I can't imagine that the weather would be an issue, if 30th Nov is a bank holiday in Scotland.

In other "keeping it classy" news, UKIP wants to fine women wearing burkas and prohibit Sharia law, because of course anyone involved has any idea what Sharia law actually entails.

 

[Traitorfish]

The one silver lining of Brexist has been watching UKIP frantically trying to find another reason to exist, and in doing so shedding even the flimsy veneer of coherence or reason they'd maintained under the Nigel. A candidate for Glasgow Council sums it up pretty well, and while few of the policies she propounds are actually deranged, and some of them even make a sort of sense, it's the blunderbuss delivery, the sheer lack of focus, which is most striking:

Spoiler a newspaper clipping, which is i guess still a thing in 2017 :

 

[Arakhor]

That's, uh, unfocused to say the least. Who is she trying to placate? She's already lost the senior citizen and single parent vote immediately and is unlikely to be picking up the xenophobe section.

 

[EnglishEdward]

Corbyn has proposed four new public holidays to promote national
unity.

Putting three close together and around the same time as Easter, when the weather isn't great doesn't sound like a great idea.

Other than the unknown cost, AFAIK holiday decisions were devolved to Scotland so it isn't a national decision.

St David’s Day (1 March), St Patrick’s Day (17 March), St George’s Day (23 April) and St Andrew’s Day (30 November).

Yes, I think that there is going to be a new brainwave every day per political party until the general election.

I fear that Jeremy does not quite seem to understand that many private companies require their employees to work on public holidays, and introducing
more during which buses and trains run reduced services and the schools are closed so they have to find both a taxi and a child minder; does not help.
As most such employers won't pay overtime, many low paid employees find working on public holidays often provides them little or no net earnings.

And I am not sure how the perceived likely outcome message, we know it is 2.5% inflation, but no more pay, just four extra holidays for public servants
instead, and by the way it no less work, so you will just have to work harder the rest of the year, will go down with public sector employees.

I am already envisioning people dressing up in a kilt on 30 November and as a green leprecaun on 17 March.

Still UKIP won't get in, so I suppose that I can economise on a single outfit, wearing a Burka for them all.

 

[EnglishEdward]

The one silver lining of Brexist has been watching UKIP frantically trying to find another reason to exist, and in doing so shedding even the flimsy veneer of coherence or reason they'd maintained under the Nigel. A candidate for Glasgow Council sums it up pretty well, and while few of the policies she propounds are actually deranged, and some of them even make a sort of sense, it's the blunderbuss delivery, the sheer lack of focus, which is most striking:

Spoiler a newspaper clipping, which is i guess still a thing in 2017 :

Thank you. It is brilliantly entertaining satire, partiularly when she reveals the master plan; leaving the EU to introduce the (French!) guillotine.

 

[Kyriakos]

The one silver lining of Brexist has been watching UKIP frantically trying to find another reason to exist, and in doing so shedding even the flimsy veneer of coherence or reason they'd maintained under the Nigel. A candidate for Glasgow Council sums it up pretty well, and while few of the policies she propounds are actually deranged, and some of them even make a sort of sense, it's the blunderbuss delivery, the sheer lack of focus, which is most striking:

Spoiler a newspaper clipping, which is i guess still a thing in 2017 :

Bringing back the guillotene?

Let them eat cake

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The one silver lining of Brexist has been watching UKIP frantically trying to find another reason to exist, and in doing so shedding even the flimsy veneer of coherence or reason they'd maintained under the Nigel. A candidate for Glasgow Council sums it up pretty well, and while few of the policies she propounds are actually deranged, and some of them even make a sort of sense, it's the blunderbuss delivery, the sheer lack of focus, which is most striking:

Spoiler a newspaper clipping, which is i guess still a thing in 2017 :

This woman is insane, which means she'd fit right in with the idiots here in Canada who want to abolish sex education in schools and think women (including the Prime Minister's wife) belong in the kitchen and nursery and have no need to ever leave the house.

 

[Cheetah]

Spoiler a newspaper clipping, which is i guess still a thing in 2017 :

Surely, like EnglishEdward said, this must be satire!?

 

[Arakhor]

If it's satire, it's not obviously satirical enough.

Thank you. It is brilliantly entertaining satire, partiularly when she reveals the master plan; leaving the EU to introduce the (French!) guillotine.

That is the thing that makes you think it's satire? You baffle me sometimes, you really do.

 

[Broken_Erika]

The one silver lining of Brexist has been watching UKIP frantically trying to find another reason to exist, and in doing so shedding even the flimsy veneer of coherence or reason they'd maintained under the Nigel. A candidate for Glasgow Council sums it up pretty well, and while few of the policies she propounds are actually deranged, and some of them even make a sort of sense, it's the blunderbuss delivery, the sheer lack of focus, which is most striking:

Spoiler a newspaper clipping, which is i guess still a thing in 2017 :

Wow, that's just, wow. Alternating between and

 

[Takhisis]

‘This is my personal view, not UKIP's’

*written right next to the UKIP logo*