British Politics Thread

Not to mention Erdogan going maximum sultan, and cruising for a serious falling-out with pretty much everyone over Syria.

Now, Dorries was suspended from the parliamentary party because she was being on that show during times where important votes were coming up in the Commons, which could be considered as disobeying the party whips.

Exactly. If she actually cared about rules, the people she was elected to represent, or anything other than her own damn self and bank balance, she'd not have done the show. She threw a temper tantrum or two over the whole thing at the time, too. No respect at all.

The reason I know about her idiotic social media restriction is because she was ranting about her own constituents. She came up with an arbitrary number of Tweets that benefit-claimants must not exceed. If they do, they'll be reported and their benefits stopped. When people pointed out that her own constituents exceed that number, she attacked her own constituents for giving benefit claimants a bad name.

I'm glad my constituency MP isn't her.

Edited to add: I just looked up her constituency. It's Mid Bedfordshire, a very traditional, safe Tory seat where UKIP is on the rise, and she got the seat in the first place because the party leaders made it clear they wanted a woman to be given the seat. She claims she got the seat on merit, however.

She's got a history of opposing Cameron and making claims that he'll be gone within a set period of time, so if he does go quickly after the referendum she'll probably be right by accident - a broken watch is right twice a day, after all.

edited 30th May '16 2:49:35 PM by Wyldchyld

Pretty big boost for Leave in the latest poll. And it's a phone poll, which have normally put Remain ahead in the double digits.

Remain: 51% (-4), Leave: 46% (+4)

That report about net migration reaching record levels in the UK seems to be a well-timed boost for Brexit, Lynton Crosby noted that it seems the Leave campaign is shifting from the economic argument that Remain was using to its advantage, to focusing on immigration, and it seems to be working very well.

Quite honestly, with how incompetent the Remain campaign has been, combined with the Tories infighting over the issue, the shift to immigration,mand the fact pro-Brexit voters are more likely to turn out think Leave is going to squeak by with a small but decisive enough margin

edited 30th May '16 6:00:35 PM by KoBB

She's a very stereotypical Tory woman. Petunia Dursley made flesh.

edited 30th May '16 5:58:42 PM by Achaemenid

The funny thing is that even with our higher-than-average net migration, our total population growth is tiny - 0.6% compared to a 1.2% global average. Immigrants are nearly all that's keeping us from a Japan-style demographic crisis.

Be careful of the OBR polls. Experts in statistical analysis and polling surveys are concerned about the quality of sample size and polling methodology used by the OBR - their polling results have fluctuated wildly on the subject of the EU Referendum and often been wildly out of step with all the other polls (usually due to having a smaller sample size than other polling organisations).

For the record, however, the phone polls don't typically put Bremain in the lead by double-digits - it has occurred a couple of times and hit the headlines whenever that happens, but usually Bremain is leading by single-digit figures (and occasionally has been trailing Brexit).

There's a good article here analysing the differences between the internet and phone polls that was published on the 25th May 2016. It doesn't comment on the quality of different polling organisations versus each other. It's focus is on the difference results we've been seeing between phone and internet polling.

The Divergence Between Phone and Internet Polls: Which Should We Believe?

The short of it is - don't take any one poll. Look at everything and the chances are the result will be somewhere in between all the results.... that's if you want to predict the outcome, that is.

It's the second highest figure on record. Brexit are using the figure in a misleading way, too. They're saying that the increase in net migration means more people immigrated in 2015 than 2014. They're wrong.

2015 immigration is 2,000 less than 2014's immigration figure (630,000 versus 632,000). 2015's emigration figure is 20,000 less than 2014 (297,000 versus 319,000). Less emigration combined with almost unchanged immigration results in an increased net migration figure (333,000 versus 313,000).

Brexit keeps ignoring the emigration figures.

edited 30th May '16 8:13:07 PM by Wyldchyld

True but you can expect Leave will be hammering that point in the coming weeks, combined with the migration deal between Turkey and the EU potentially collapsing, resulting in an on-rush of migrants prior to the poll date.

I dunno, the bookies still are predicting Britain to Remain, and there's always the factor of undecideds preferring the status quo, but the rather lackluster outreach efforts by Remain to drum up support, and turnout is going to be absolutely critical considering Leave voters are more likely to show up, the Tories infighting making it harder for Cameron and pro-EU Tories to campaign effectively, and the absolute worst timing of the referendum to coincide with the present migrant crisis not to mention security concerns due to ISIS makes me feel Leave possesses a massive advantage going into the final weeks.

edited 30th May '16 9:11:59 PM by KoBB

Another phone poll, this time by ICM puts Leave ahead by three points.

I think the odds for Remain are going to rise a few notches with the bookies soon. Is it time for them to panic?

edited 31st May '16 12:15:02 PM by KoBB

The Bremain camp have been travelling up and down the country talking to everyone they can.

The media, however, predominantly supports Brexit, so isn't covering most of the work the Bremain camp is doing unless it relates directly what Cameron is doing (and most of the Bremain effort is independent of Cameron), and then they line up a load of Brexit responses to whatever it is Cameron is doing.

It's been a very volatile week to week from the beginning. We'll have to wait for all the polls for the week to come in and see what the balance is. Even then it probably won't be accurate.

The ballpark example is the UKIP prediction in the 2015 election, which is being used as a guide for guessing the leave vote. The phone polls underestimated and the internet polls overestimated. The truth was more or less in the middle of the two predictions. So, the guess by the pollsters right now is that the reality of the Leave vote is somewhere in the middle of what the phone and internet polls are claiming (higher than the phone polls, lower than the internet polls).

It's interesting to note that these polls are showing the same trends for Conservative voting and Cameron support (versus Labour voting and Corbyn support). The Internet polls aren't just predicting a higher leave vote, they're also predicting higher Conservative voting, higher UKIP voting and lower Labour/Corbyn support. The reverse is the case for the phone polls, not just on the Remain vote, but Labour voting and Corbyn support, too.

One of the criticisms has been that the polls aren't picking up education backgrounds. They've found that class doesn't seem to be acting as a predictor of whether people will vote Remain or Leave, but there's a strong correlation with education - higher education correlates with a higher Remain vote, and lower education correlates with a higher Leave vote (but they have found that even the phone polls, which predict a higher Remain vote, are not picking up enough graduate respondents). They want to do more research on this, because there isn't enough information on it at the moment

edited 31st May '16 12:29:30 PM by Wyldchyld

In other words — (unsurprisingly) not even the pollsters know how this Referendum is going to go^note  Quite a lot of people will be making their decision in the Poll Booth, I suspect?

Which newspapers are for Brexit and are for Bremain?

As I understand, most of them a for Brexit, because they want to turn Britain into their own personal propaganda bubble?

Only two have actively declared as yet I think, Guardian for Remain and the Express for Exit.

I'd expect the Mail, and maybe the Telegraph, to go for Exit, with the Times and the Evening Standard probably going for remain.

The wildcard is the Sun. Murdoch hates the EU but also hates backing the losing side so expect it to continue attacking the EU until close to the referendum before declaring for whichever looks the most likely to win, then promptly claiming their readers were the deciding factor as per usual.

edited 31st May '16 3:16:59 PM by Marlfox24

What they're talking about is the relationship between education level and voting direction, so no, the research part isn't about the pollsters not knowing which way the vote is going to go.

You're right in that they don't know which way it's going to go, that's just not what they're talking about researching.

All the mainstream ones seem to favour Brexit, some more honestly than others. For example, the Telegraph's bias is obvious, but the Guardian is being rather dishonest. It's trying to portray a Bremain stance but by the time you finish reading the article, it feels more like a Brexit article. Meanwhile, groups like The Economist and Financial Times seem to be pro-EU, but they do have some individual Brexit-supporters writing for them.

This isn't new. The British media have been anti-EU for decades which is why it's impossible to have an informed debate on the EU in this country. A lot of things people take for granted about the EU are completely wrong because it's been pedalled by the media for so long - longer than many younger voters have been alive (examples including that there's no democratic election process in the EU or that the vast majority of British laws originate from the EU).

Actually, it looks like it's not just me who's noticed the media bias towards Brexit.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has noticed, too.

Study shows that majority of press coverage in EU referendum campaign was heavily skewed in favour of Brexit in first two months of campaign

edited 14th Jan '18 10:36:56 AM by Wyldchyld

And then you have the Express giving out window stickers describing Brexit as a righteous crusade.

Appropriate, considering (a) they have a picture of a crusading knight as part of their logo and (b) their political and religious beliefs reflect the Crusades era in history.

So I've been hearing that up to 22 Tory constiuencies are being investigated over allegations of electoral overspending, which could lead to the results being voided and by-elections to ensue.

Is it possible we might see PM Corbyn after all, and sooner than one might think?

Well, the media is trying to minimise the amount of coverage it has to give over the constituency investigation, so I don't see Labour getting into power in the near future (regardless of who was leading the party).

Still, we do have this rather lurid headline in the Independent:

Tory MP's attempt to block police investigation into election fraud allegations fails

with the by-line:

edited 1st Jun '16 3:55:17 PM by Wyldchyld

Doing the math, should these allegations actually result in enough by-elections to threaten the Tories majority, a non-Tory candidate would have to win in nine seats, and even then the Tories can still count on the DUP and UUP in N. Ireland

Well, 29 constituencies are definitely affected by this investigation. The Tories won 22 of those constituencies. It's just a question of whether or not all 29 will be investigated or just the ones the Tories won.

I don't generally read the Canary, so I don't know how reliable it is, but there's also this on the site:

A whistleblower exposes a major new allegation in the Tory election fraud scandal

The Guardian's most recent article is here (which includes a link to the above):

Why is there so little noise about the Tory election fraud claims?

Yeah, in the unlikely event that this actually does result in wide-scale bye-elections, the Tories won't lose power over it. Safe candidates will be parachuted into the key areas, and all will be well for them. Labour do not have a significantly better reputation for integrity than the Tories, so they won't lose seats over it. Not many, anyway.

I'm always reminded in such cases of the bye-election brought about by a defection of a Tory MP to UKIP. When one constituent was asked who he'd be voting for, he proudly declared UKIP, because the Tories had been utterly useless. The fact that he was voting for the same person under a different party apparently either escaped his realisation or didn't matter.

The by-election you're referring to was when mark Reckless defected in Rochester, I remember the comment being made.

Still we'll see where the investigation goes, even if it doesn't result in the breaking of the Tory majority it might whittle it down enough for us to end up with another election, assuming that's still possible? Hasn't fixed term parliaments banned the practise of a PM just calling a new election to buff his majority?