EU referendum are you in or out

[Dio]

Labour always poll worse than reality prior to balanced reporting restrictions with a right wing press.

That's completely wrong. Up until 2017 the rule was that Labour always polled much better than they delivered in the elections - consider the exit poll predictions of solid Labour victories in 1992, a Labour-majority hung parliament in 2010 and a hung parliament in 2015 when May actually won a majority.

The 'Shy Tory' factor even has its own wikipedia page

2017 did confound expectations - Labour performed vastly better in seats than all polls predicted, which analysis puts down to very heavy tactical voting in that election, while not really performing that much better in votes, taking only 80% as many votes as the Tories. Let's not forget that despite that effect they still lost, and not by a little. Exceeding expectations but still losing is still fuck all use to anyone.

The chances of a Labour overall majority are slim to none. Even a Labour lead in a hung parliament looks a very long way away.

[Ratsoap]

Remember 2015, when the polls basically guaranteed a hung parliament, and the tories got a majority?

Sorry to say, Labour don't stand a chance this time. Possibly the Brexit party might split the vote, and hand a few seats to Labour or Libdem. Doubt it will do much good though.

In several seats in Scotland the SNP majority is wafer thin and with the various schisms going on, and the fact that the Greens are running in those seats, the tories could well gain 5 or more seats up here.

I'm not feeling too hopeful, although I look forward to being proved wrong.

edit:comma abuse.

[Cloudane]

I keep hoping, but yeah. I expect a hung parliament, then Con/BXP deal of some sort

[Little stoned kiwi]

Or Santa. This is the best opportunity the UK will have to elect him.

[KlaxonCow]

Indeed, there's a very real possibility that rather than break the deadlock, a general election will only entrench it further.

Because we already have a hung Parliament with a minority government.

But you've now also got the Brexit party splitting the Brexit vote from the Tories, and the Lib Dems splitting the Remain vote from Labour.

The "extremists" who're offering the polar extremes - "no deal" Brexit, where we sever it all immediately, or revoking Article 50 and cancelling Brexit outright, as if none of this ever happened. They're dangling the golden carrots at the extremes of opinion, so that's going to pull votes from the moderate and more nuanced positions (because if we go by "vote for what you want", then both conclude Brexit - one way or the other).

More runners in the race - and polling has shown that both Labour and the Tories have been electorally eviscerating themselves with the public over Brexit anyway, even before all that, as disillusioned voters are just not "tribal voting" to their party loyalties anymore and their votes now apparently can go anywhere.

Add in that both have expelled / lost MPs, that there's yet another runner in the race in the form of the Independent Group to further split votes here and there.

So it's entirely possible that this fixes nothing, as it actually makes the Parliamentary arithmetic even worse.

Which might lead to a needed second referendum to break the deadlock. But why do we think that'll solve anything either? It was pretty much 50 / 50 within a margin of error last time and polling has not shown any significant amount of mind-changing has occurred since.

If it goes 52 / 48 in the opposite direction of Remain, then though that's a technical victory, what does it morally mean? And if the numbers don't flip, and we end up with a confirmation of "Leave" by the electorate, then what then? As we're still stuck with a Parliamentary deadlock over how.

And we have to consider the consequences, even if it resolved.

So Remain wins, Article 50 is revoked and we remain in the EU. Great, but what influence do we now have in the club? We can't threaten to leave anymore, as they've seen exactly how impossible that threat is to carry out. If the UK wants to move the agenda in a particular way, then who's really going to listen now?

So Leave wins and "gets Brexit done", with or without a deal. We'll all be living in the economic doldrums for decades to come. To get out of this self-dug hole, then we'll concede like crazy. Sell off the NHS, invite Commonwealth immigration, burn down all standards and be eating American limbless chlorinated chickens. There's no rainbows and unicorns over here. It's just a mountain of shit.

And in terms of influence, we're renegotiating with the entire planet, with our begging bowl - for any scraps whatsoever - asking "please, sir, can I have some more?".

Yes, we'll be free to negotiate our own deals. But they'll be utter shit, because we're a small bunch of islands versus the largest trading bloc on the planet. If the EU couldn't get strong arm something out of others, the UK alone will stand no chance. And - negotiation 101 - if you walk into trade deals with the other party knowing that you've got fuck all and are desperate for anything, they're not remotely going to give better terms. It'll be decades of bending over and taking it up the arse, from every country on planet Earth one-by-one - and, in our self-imposed economic hole, we'll be grateful for it.

I've mentioned it before, but it's worth repeating. Even with a deal, that gives us one trade deal with a bloc of 27 countries. There's still 160+ countries left in the world, who aren't the EU, for whom we won't have any trade deals whatsoever upon Brexit day.

In neurotically concentrating on the small print of our EU deal, everyone's forgetting the big picture of the whole rest of the planet, for whom it's 100% guaranteed that, on Brexit Day, we'll definitely have "no deal" with all of them.

There's no scenario where this improves anything.

[Harlequin]

Boris is changing seats to Alan Duncan's old seat.

Rutland?

[tufty]

Boris is changing seats to Alan Duncan's old seat.

Rutland?

It's got a big ditch.

[zip accident]

Boris is changing seats to Alan Duncan's old seat.

Rutland?

I remember that county ceasing to exist (Monty Python's "the Ruttles" was sort of almost about that disappearance), I wasn't aware it had been reinstated.

[snaff]

Jezza's bro talks a bit about Labour's innards.

[gravy]

Boris is changing seats to Alan Duncan's old seat.

Rutland?

Dominic Greave’s Beaconsfield constituency is a safer bet (assuming Grieve doesn’t stand) and just next door to Uxbridge.

[Harlequin]

Boris is changing seats to Alan Duncan's old seat.

Rutland?

I remember that county ceasing to exist (Monty Python's "the Ruttles" was sort of almost about that disappearance), I wasn't aware it had been reinstated.

The county of Rutland became a district of Leicestershire in 1974, when it also ceased to be a postal county. It became a unitary authority with its own County Council again in 1997 and a postal county again in 2008. Duncan's only seat has been that of the Rutland and Melton constituency, which he gained in 1992.

Rutland Weekend Television did not have much connection to Monty Python beyond Eric Idle and Neil Innes. The spun off Rutles were wonderful, though, and their albums are in my standard playlist.

[tufty]

Boris is changing seats to Alan Duncan's old seat.

Rutland?

Dominic Greave’s Beaconsfield constituency is a safer bet (assuming Grieve doesn’t stand) and just next door to Uxbridge.

Grieve is standing (or, at least, he was last I heard), but as an independent. I think the suggestion that Boris would stand there was so that he could (potentially) rub salt into Grieve's wounds. That's a bloody risky call to make, though:

Beaconsfield is split 50/50 on Brexit, but a relatively rich Conservative safe seat. Grieve stands for core Conservative values, and would re-integrate a more moderate Conservative party, so he'll pick up the conservative remain vote. He's a very public arch-remainer, and pretty well liked in the constituency, he's probably pick up a fair amount of the non-part-aligned remain vote as an independent. Which would leave Boris betting on getting all teh remain vote, but a fair amount of that will be Labour <nope>, and UKIP/Brexit Party <maybe>.

http://democraticdashboard.com/constitu ... aconsfield

[Absolute_Zero]

^ "a relatively rich Conservative safe seat" - growing up nearby, we'd say that 'sex' is what they have their coal delivered in.

Wilson: A week is a long time in politics. [seems like a month]

The Liberal Democrats and the SNP have proposed a short amendment to the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, which would specify the polling day for the next election as 9 December.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... l-election

Over to Boris Johnson.

[Dio]

Yeah, Boris would be crazy to take on Grieve - especially with the danger of a Farage spoiler in place to split the leave vote.

[KlaxonCow]

I've just been reading an article by "Best for Britain" in the Guardian.

These guys have attempted to work out, from their own recently-taken polling data, which candidate you should tactically vote for in order to best avoid Brexit:

https://www.bestforbritain.org/

But, anyway, the actual reason for my post here is that they've calculated, from that polling data, that where the two main parties had 82.4% of the vote last time, they'll struggle to reach 66% of the vote this time.

Being a bit of mathematical confirmation of my suspicions, that this general election likely won't "break the deadlock" in Parliament, but will possibly help to just entrench it even further.

As we now have "extremist" vote splitters on both side. The "no deal" Brexit party, and the "revoke Article 50 completely" Lib Dems. Who I call "extremists" here because they're dangling the golden carrots at either extreme of the divide. To either go "all in" on Brexit, or to cancel it completely.

And, anyway, there's the simple logic of "first past the post" that the more runners there are, the less share of the vote everyone gets and the more it gets split all over the place.

But if that polling prediction holds, then it's quite a major - historical - election for the two main parties, if they'll struggle to even grab two thirds of the vote between them. It does, indeed, jeopardise the very idea of us calling them "the two main parties" in the first place.

My suspicion is that a general election won't break the deadlock at all - that it has every chance to make it worse and will almost certainly demand a coalition / confidence and supply arrangement to get anything done at all (which means that one has to consider that if you're voting Conservative, you're really voting Conservative + Brexit coalition, or if you're voting Labour then it's a Labour + Lib Dems + SNP / Plaid Cymru vote, in truth).

And then my further suspicion is that if a second referendum happens, to break this further entrenchment of the deadlock of Parliament, that this won't actually solve anything much either. In that we either get a confirmation of the Leave vote - so that essentially tells us nothing, as that's where we are right now - or we get a Remain victory - which might be a technical victory, but it's a moral confusion, as we already went the other way in the previous referendum, so what really does that mean? Particularly if it only flips over to, say, 52 / 48 % in the opposite direction. A resounding victory for either side in the referendum seems impossible, as this is very much a "coin toss" issue with the public.

Mind you, we don't have any other levers or mechanisms here, so we might as well go through the motions, in the hope that something more solid might result. But, well, it probably won't do much, and definitely won't be convincing or satisfactory to anyone.

Basically, as has been the case throughout Brexit, "fuck knows" still holds the majority.