London-based writer. Often climbing.
- 45 Posts
- 292 Comments
5·2 days agoIs the message here supposed to be, both men did photoshoots at potteries, therefore they are politically aligned? Because if so I think you need a few more steps to actually make this case.
That’s about one tenth of the annual MP’s salary. So, he has a far greater financial motive to remain an MP than he does to lose and collect the bet.
Even if his only incentives were financial, he will make more money by winning than by losing, because an MP’s salary and expenses are pretty good. So, even taking into account the innumeracy of your average MP, he does not have a financial incentive to lose.
“In the 2005 election, I busted a gut to win. I expected to lose. I had a bet on myself to lose in the 2005 election, and my bet went down the pan.”
He didn’t throw the '05 election, even when he bet against himself.
Right, but they weren’t doing that. There’s no evidence they were and no motive for them to do so. The comparison with athletes is not apt. A pro footballer who bets on himself and manipulates the outcome is still a pro-footballer afterwards. A politician who bets on themselves and deliberately loses is not a politician afterwards. It does not make sense to do it.
In Britain, being nominated as a local election candidate simply involves signing some forms
They’re not local election candidates.
It requires huge amounts of work to be a candidate. I know people who’ve run for parliament. One of them had previously run as a total no-hoper on multiple occasions, in order to prove he knew how to campaign well enough to get selected for a seat where he had a chance. He was so burned out by the selection process that having won the selection, he actually turned down the nomination, then quit politics altogether. The idea that he’d have deliberatey thrown any of those elections is ridiculous.
The idea that anyone would put in all the work to get selected as a candidate, then decide it was a smart move to place a bet against themselves and throw the election to make a quick buck is ridiculous. There’s no way you could make enough money from the bet to make it worthwhile.
There is no indication that any of the politicians who bet against themselves intended to throw the election. Politics is not sport.
This idiot might well be the difference between Sunak holding his seat and losing it.
See, I don’t care about this at all. There’s no suggestion he was going to deliberately throw the election. He didn’t have any inside information. He’s allowed to place bets!
Takes a while before he gets to his actual suggestions, which are as stupid as you’d expect:
We know what a coherent right-wing agenda would look like: Net Zero immigration, energy sanity, a massive programme of planning reform, and housebuilding. We also know how to get there: identify, train, and promote talented people, primarily from the private sector, and smash the barriers to governing.
- ‘Net zero immigration’ - dystopian, unworkable, self-destructive
- ‘Energy sanity’ - meaningless, nobody thinks of themselves as proposing energy insanity, do they? I assume what he means is ‘Keep exploiting fossil fuels even though revenues are falling, prices are rising, there are obvious alternatives and climate change is accelerating’, which doesn’t strike me as ‘sane’. In any case, Labour’s plans are sane: accelerate the transition to the cheapest, cleanest forms of energy and keep using fossil fuels to keep the lights on while we’re managing the transition
- ‘massive programme of planning reform, and housebuilding’ - exactly what the Tories have failed to deliver and what Labour are proposing, which he assumes they’ll fail at for no discernible reason
And his plans for how to get there are just as asinine:
- ‘identify, train, and promote talented people’ - again, meaningless. Who could oppose this?
- ‘primarily from the private sector’ - why? Because. Sunak is ‘from the private sector’. So was Boris Johnson. How’s that worked out? And notice the weaselly ‘primarily’, too. Is that most? Some? All?
- ‘smash the barriers to governing’ - again, just meaningless waffle, something the Tories have continuously promised and found themselves unable to deliver. Brexit was meant to do this. It didn’t. Is this because, perhaps, the main ‘barriers to governing’ are that the Tories are totally detached from reality?
If you’re worried about this, the best way to prevent it is to donate to and volunteer with the Labour party. Yes, there’s a few places where voting for a different party is the better anti-Tory tactic if that is your priority, BUT:
- it’s hard to know for sure who the best vote is because the various tactical tools, polls, etc., often don’t agree
- very nearly everywhere Labour is your best bet anyway
A great example of someone who seemingly logged into Twitter one day and said, It’d be neat if I let this website drive me completely insane.
Why only some?
True, and worth noting. But what he says is inarguably true: no votes have been cast and if people assume they don’t need to bother voting, that could have a dramatic effect on the final result.
I don’t see how this can be the case. Labour were miles behind the Tories for the entire campaign on every metric, having been behind for virtually the entirety of the previous five (or more) years!
This is the kind of thing I mean when I say that some of the Tories’ own goals should be partly credited to Starmer.
It’s similar to all the ridiculous flag shagging: that suddenly paid off when Sunak made the unforced error of bailing on the D-Day celebrations, which left Labour an open goal but only because Labour had set themselves up well in the first place. There’s suddenly an obviously ‘patriotic’ party for the people who think that matters (and that it’s indicated primarily by flag shagging). Ditto the Truss budget. Labour wouldn’t have benefited from that if they hadn’t already been banging on about fiscal responsibility.
Sorry the proles aren’t behaving the way you’d like, boss.