Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

Yeah it seems pretty likely Labour will hold. I read a really interesting profile of the constituency somewhere but can't remember where.

But Labour made the opposite decision they did in Hartlepool. Instead of parachuting in a former MP, they've chosen who lives locally and especially because of her links to Jo Cox has close associations with the community.

There is, I think, a little risk if George Galloway does well in Muslim areas that the Labour vote splits - but I think (and hope) that Galloway's powers of persuasion are much diminished nowadays.

[alfred russel]

Has anyone run opinion polling for Batley and Spen?

[Sheilbh]

I don't think any of the media has. By-election constituency opinion polling is pretty rare - I think it's normally quite difficult for the pollsters and too expensive for the media.

[alfred russel]

Huh. Well the betting site I'm on has the odds of conservatives winning at about 80%. I may toss a few dollars on this.

[Sheilbh]

That almost tempts me to get involved.

It is nowhere near that level of certain for the Tories and I'd say the consensus is Labour will probably win (Galloway is a potential spoiler).

[OttoVonBismarck]

My friend who does a lot of election gambling (to the tune of $50k+ many Presidential years), has always said he won't touch British elections because they just aren't polled as rigorously as American ones so it makes it much harder to build any kind of logical "edge."

[Josquius]

Apparently the brexit party aren't running.
So there is always the chance of the ass-hat vote rallying around the Tory candidate whilst the sane vote is split 6 ways.
There do seem to be a  number of other nutty options available however which could hopefully lessen this. UKIP for instance. The localists could also fill that hole, they seem to around here.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Looking at the wiki I see the Tories won the seat throughout the 1980s and in the '92 election. It went Labour in 1997 but never with a particularly enormous majority (apart from the unopposed byelection after Jo Cox's murder) 

So not really a traditional Labour seat like the ones in say, county Durham, that were Labour throughout the 1980s (well the past century really) and changed tack really recently.

Apparently a fifth of the electorate are muslims and becoming increasingly disenchanted with Labour over Islamophobia and Palestine. This is important as George Galloway is taking part and is genuinely popular amongst muslims.

I'm pessimistic.

[Sheilbh]

Interesting first take following Cummings and Hancock's evidence by Jeremy Hunt who is now Chair of the Health Select Committee which is joint leading the current parliamentary inquiry into covid:

Jeremy Hunt
@Jeremy_Hunt
2h
Here's an early take on our two bumper select committee grillings over the last two weeks - Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock. A thread...
There was more melodrama than normal but it is not possible to stack up the most sensational revelations without evidence. Today's new @Dominic2306 tweets show the PM's total frustration ('f***ing useless' etc.) but do not prove anyone 'lied.'
Personal accusations are of course the most media-friendly but should not expose the much more serious failures in the functioning of the state in a national emergency, including  key revelations about both scientific advice/herd immunity and test and trace.
It's clear ministers were offered two extreme options - suppression (lockdowns) or mitigation (let the virus spread but protect the vulnerable). The East Asian way (close borders, hi tech test & trace) was not modeled by SAGE until April when we were well into lockdown.
Given that most East Asian countries had fewer lockdowns (in Korea's case no lockdowns) this was a serious failing in our structures, perhaps caused by a 'pandemic flu' mindset although to the credit of our scientists this did not extend to vaccine R & D.
This delay meant infections were > 2000 cases/day by the time T&T got going, much higher than in Asia, which set it up to fail, alongside central rather than local contact tracing (which has now been sensibly reversed) and not offering a blanket salary replacement guarantee.
I also think (I was part of this groupthink) that we were over-focused on testing targets (100k, then 500k, then 1m/day) so didn't focus on the one metric that matters in a pandemic: proportion of potentially infectious isolating. At times 20-40% of those meant to isolate weren't
Set against this must be our national vaccine triumph: not just securing 400m doses before we knew they'd work, but a flawless NHS roll. So the paradox is that the biggest failures in the performance of the state have to be balanced against some of its most stunning achievements.
Our joint report will set out key lessons to be learned and I won't pre-empt. But for me two early lessons stand out: being as nimble, searching and pragmatic in our pandemic response as we were in our vaccine response is one...
...and much earlier transparency on the scientific advice being given to ministers is the other, so we allow more peer-review and quicker course correction.
The public inquiry will have the last word, but realistically it will take at least two years to report. I hope our joint recommendations will give the govt some ideas to implement much earlier than that. Watch this space....

[Sheilbh]

My friend who does a lot of election gambling (to the tune of $50k+ many Presidential years), has always said he won't touch British elections because they just aren't polled as rigorously as American ones so it makes it much harder to build any kind of logical "edge."

I think this was also Nate Silver's view - although his projections were always ouliers that were wildly different than anything produced by UK forecasters and then he stopped doing UK elections

Admittedly he, I think, came into the UK market in 2010 and 2015 - 2010 was probably the most difficult election in years to predict and in 2015 there was a big polling failure. The pollsters seem to have broadly fixed the issues they had (they commissioned a massive public report on what went wrong) and the polls have been pretty accurate in 2017 and 19 - but they've not been trusted by journalists/the discourse because they really struggled to believe Corbyn's surge in 2017 which was real and then wondered if they were missing a similar surge in 2019 which they weren't.

One polling gap in the UK compared to the US has been polling of minorities I understand so this developing series by Peston is important and interesting. Latest released tonight and I imagine there'll be more of a breakdown coming out later.:

[Tamas]

In terms of minorities do you know if East Europeans are included or like in America by ethnic minorities they mean "people who are not white"?

[Sheilbh]

In terms of minorities do you know if East Europeans are included or like in America by ethnic minorities they mean "people who are not white"?

I don't know - they've only released the headline numbers so far.

Edit: But given it's "ethnic minorities" my suspicion would be that it's people who are not white - I'd guess it's BME.

[Tamas]

In terms of minorities do you know if East Europeans are included or like in America by ethnic minorities they mean "people who are not white"?

I don't know - they've only released the headline numbers so far.

Edit: But given it's "ethnic minorities" my suspicion would be that it's people who are not white - I'd guess it's BME.

Fair enough, but of course the definition of ethnicity is
"the fact or state of belonging to a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition." 

[Valmy]

In terms of minorities do you know if East Europeans are included or like in America by ethnic minorities they mean "people who are not white"?

I don't know - they've only released the headline numbers so far.

Edit: But given it's "ethnic minorities" my suspicion would be that it's people who are not white - I'd guess it's BME.

Weird. Because I would draw the opposite conclusion. Is "ethnic" a code word for race in the UK? And why does it also exclude Asians?

If you were going to include, say, Germans or Poles or whatever what would you say?

[Duque de Bragança]

In terms of minorities do you know if East Europeans are included or like in America by ethnic minorities they mean "people who are not white"?

I don't know - they've only released the headline numbers so far.

Edit: But given it's "ethnic minorities" my suspicion would be that it's people who are not white - I'd guess it's BME.

Weird. Because I would draw the opposite conclusion. Is "ethnic" a code word for race in the UK? And why does it also exclude Asians?

If you were going to include, say, Germans or Poles or whatever what would you say?

Yes to the first, not just in the UK, and not the second, it includes Asians, South Asians being more important in the UK for obvious reasons.