"Tory and UKIP voters are all thick" vs "Universities are hot-beds of leftie brainwashing"

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Another goodie from the BBC:

We know that almost three million extra people turned out to vote in the EU referendum [compared to the General Election in the previous year]. Saying who they are - and what happens if they reappear - is where it gets difficult...

The real mystery is whether those additional voters in 2016 will come out again to vote in the 2017 general election - and what difference they could make... Are they people who are totally dissatisfied with the political system and became serial non-voters but were unable to resist the chance to give the establishment a thoroughly good kicking at the referendum?

I suspect that's correct. Although I have only missed voting in one election in twenty four years (it was a local election and I simply forgot), I voted 'Leave' largely for the fun of stirring up the hornets' nest.

General Election 2017 - call for candidates

If anybody is willing to stand as a YPP candidate in their constituency and has a few hours to spare to get all the signatures and form filling done, please get in touch.

YPP has £1,000 in the kitty which we will divide up between people willing to stand and use to pay towards their £500 deposits (which has to be paid in cash in advance).

We have previously gone to the bother and expense of getting leaflets approved, printed and taken to the Post Office. This costs another £1,500 - £2,000 per constituency and doesn't seem to make any difference.

Life copies satire

The Daily Mash, 21 November 2014:

TACTICAL voters no longer have any idea who they are meant to be voting for or who they are trying to keep out, they have admitted...

Political blogger Susan Traherne said: “UKIP’s growing power, the Greens overtaking the Lib Dems and the willingness of every party to go into coalition with every other means tactical voting is over.

“Voters are now advised simply to cast their vote for the party they would most like to see actually running the county. Which admittedly doesn’t make the choice any easier.”

The Daily Mail, 30 April 2015:

Baffled voters are switching between all of the main parties or giving up on the election altogether, pollsters have warned...

Gideon Skinner, from IpsosMori, said: "Swing is a very useful concept, but never forget that it is now a misleadingly simple name for a very complex business. Most of the shift in votes these days is unlikely to involve many people who voted Conservative five years ago now having decided to vote Labour instead.

‘Today, most of the movement is between the two big parties and the smaller parties, of 2010 voters thinking they will not turn out this time (or vice versa), or people moving between the smaller parties. Rather than thinking of a swing, it is probably more useful to picture a roundabout - or as an overlapping flow of voters between multiple parties, as we show here."

Almost as if the whole thing had been scripted.

14 November 2014:

This is the time of year that NHS bosses - and their political masters for that matter - start to look at the weather forecasts.

A bad winter can make a huge difference to the health service. A cold snap increases the number of falls and amount of respiratory illness, while the vomiting bug norovirus can take hold on hospital wards.

And this year, the stakes could not be higher. With little more than six months to a general election, all eyes are on how the health service copes, particularly in England.

15 November 2014:

The alert was issued to people across north east Essex after Colchester General Hospital declared a "major incident".

It came after a surprise inspection by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) on Wednesday where the health regulator raised "safeguarding concerns". It also found that staff were struggling to cope with "unprecedented demand".

17 November 2014:

A number of other hospitals in England are likely to be facing severe problems of staff shortages and patient-demand of the scale that prompted the declaration of a major incident at Colchester hospital last week, one of the country’s most senior doctors has warned.

20 November 2014:

Hospitals have reached record levels of crowding, according to official figures which have sparked fears that the NHS is standing on the brink of a winter crisis.

Experts said hospitals were “full to bursting,” with latest quarterly statistics showing hospitals operating at the highest capacity levels recorded for the time of year. NHS leaders said that many hospitals had become so busy that it would take little more than “a gust of wind” to bring some to collapse.

21 November 2014:

Accident and emergency departments in England saw 92.9% of patients within four hours last week - the lowest percentage since April 2013, NHS data shows.

The government sets a quarterly target for hospitals to see 95% of emergency cases within four hours. A&E waits have been below that level since the end of September.

22 November 2014:

The NHS is heading into an A&E crisis even before winter has begun, patient leaders said after figures showed that thousands more people waited more than four hours to be seen last week.

Emergency units are overflowing and thousands of patients are enduring long waits on trolleys because hospitals are too full to admit them, official data showed yesterday.

24 November 2014:

NHS workers, including nurses, midwives and ambulance staff, have staged a four-hour strike in England as part of a pay dispute.

They were protesting about the decision not to implement a 1% rise for all staff recommended by a pay review body. Members of nine unions walked out at 07:00 GMT in England and at 08:00 GMT in Northern Ireland.

25 November 2014:

The Health Secretary has spoken numerous times to urge the public to avoid A&E departments in all but the most urgent cases and turn to pharmacies, doctors’ surgeries and walk-in centres instead.

But speaking during today’s health questions in the House of Commons, he appeared to go against his own advice. Mr Hunt said: “I took my own children to an A&E department at the weekend precisely because I did not want to wait until later on to take them to see a GP.”

26 November 2014:

Senior consultants in the NHS have told ITV News that the accident and emergency service is heading for a winter crisis.

Four doctors say around 50 hospitals are already struggling - and as the winter weather worsens, they predict the crisis will worsen too unless urgent action is taken.

27 November 2014:

Ambulances could be turned away from a hospital to try ease the strain on a casualty department which is struggling to cope.

The Accident and Emergency department at Northwick Park Hospital in north London has been under pressure following the closure of two other A&E units.

And that's just the second half of November, the ante was upped considerably throughout December, when the scripted predicted A&E crises actually happened - despite the fact that the winter weather was pretty mild and there were no terrible flu outbreaks or natural disasters or anything.

Fun Online Polls: Global cooling & the next general election

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Global average temperatures have not changed for 17 years. What's your initial response?

That's because "global warming" was all bunkum anyway - 90%
That's thanks to the fine efforts of world governments to reduce CO2 emissions - 0%
Other, please specify - 10% (12 votes)

Thanks to everybody who took part, it was a good turnout (over 100 votes) but you really are a heartless bunch.

I almost wish that I'd voted for the second option to save them the embarrassment of getting no votes at all.
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Just for a bit of light relief and in the context of nothing in particular, who do you think will be the government after the next General Election, due in two years at the latest?

Vote here or use the widget in the side bar.

Nick! Stop it! My husband might be watching!

Fun Online Polls: The Next General Election & Land Ownership

Having caught snippets of the details of the 'negotiations' between the Lib Dems and the Tories on the telly over the weekend, it strikes me that all the big three parties must have known for weeks that a hung Parliament was a very real prospect, so I would have expected each party to have sent off a small delegation to haggle with the others over what the terms of a possible coalition would be, just in case. From where I am sitting, their overall policies are so similar, that it can't be too difficult to go through their manifestos line-by-line and find a compromise on each one.

So either:

a) They are reasonably competent, have thrashed this out in advance and are now just playing to the gallery (which makes them unfit to run a country, this is not a game), or

b) They are in fact totally incompetent and vain, and lived in a fantasy world where 'their' Party was going to win an outright majority (again making them unfit to run a country).

Whichever answer is closest to the truth, what the public (i.e. me) really wants to know is, how long will they stumble along, playing to the gallery and/or living in a fantasy world, until they throw in the towel and call another General Election.

Place your bet here or use the widget in the sidebar.
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As to last week's Fun Online Poll, "Is landownership possible in the absence of a 'state'?" I was heartily relieved to see that 62% chose "No, of course not. The two are synonymous.", but perturbed in equal measure by the 38% who chose "Yes, and I have left a comment explaining how it would work."

Out of the 36 who said they'd leave a comment explaining how it would work, only five bothered to actually try and explain how it would work. These answers fell into two categories:

a) The usual faux-libertarian "land ownership can be protected by force", which is self-defeating - whoever has the biggest army, or can call on the compliance of the most people IS the state, so that is just replacing one state with another, and

b) The other faux-libertarian favourite "land can be bought and sold by private contract", which completely misses the point. Of course it is quite possible for land to be bought and sold by private contract, but that does not address the subject matter of the contract.

I tried to illustrate the point here, by referring to broadcasting licences, it may be just as useful to look at the opposite extreme and consider things which are totally illegal in most countries, like drugs.

If I had asked "Is the ownership of drugs possible in the absence of a 'state'?" then the answer must quite clearly be yes. We know that people grow and manufacture drugs, smuggle them into the country, wholesale and retail them, and the user buys them from his local dealer and consumes them. The state goes to all manner of lengths to try and prevent this at every step of the way.

Ownership of drugs, in a legal sense, is more or less impossible - if they catch you at customs with half a kilo of coke, then they will take it off you, whether you can show proof or purchase or not. But when you go to your dealer for an ounce of dope, he expects hard cash there and then - there is little point you pointing out to him that in legal/criminal terms, he does not own what he is selling - in a very real and practical sense he does.

When you are buying drugs, you are paying for the drugs themselves - the physical stuff, which in turn the dealer and everybody else in the supply chain has created from scratch, and so on.

Compare and contrast this with 'land ownership'. What are you paying for when you buy land (apart from the buildings perched on it)? You are paying for exclusive occupation of a certain plot of land (or part thereof, in the case of a block of flats), which, within your budget constraint, you have chosen because it is near to your place of work or a train station, has a nice view, is near the shops, in a low crime area, in the catchment area of a good state school etc etc.

Some of these things happen of their own accord, some of these things are paid for out of taxation (separate topic). You are not paying for the physical land - you are paying for a bundle of things which the vendor has not had any hand in creating.

Further, unlike illegal drugs, land ownership is only possible with the state's blessing - it has to be recorded at HM Land Registry (or in olden times, backed up by title deeds which would be recognised in court) - and is only worth something because the state is prepared to guarantee exclusive possession, by evicting squatters if need be. Again, you can contrast this with drugs - they still have value, even though the state will not protect your title or guarantee exclusive possession - if somebody nicks them off you, you can hardly go to the police, and if they are of inferior quality, you cannot go to the local Trading Standards Officer.

Sure, in theory, the state/the police protect ownership of all physical goods, but even with higher value items like cars, the chances are, if your car is stolen, the police will give you a crime number and go back to watching television in the canteen. The reason why so few cars are stolen is because of locks and immobilisers and so on, and if your car is stolen or vandalised, most people will just claim it back on the insurance rather then expecting the car to be returned to them. But car ownership still 'works', even though it is far more privatised than the system of landownership.

If the state had the same lackadaisical attitude to land as it did to cars, i.e. if you get squatters, just claim on the insurance, then things would look a lot different - insurance premiums would be colossal, and land values would be correspondingly low.

Just sayin', is all.

Ah well. I'm sure she'll choose lovely curtains.

Other bloggers lose deposits as well - shock

Old Holborn
Robin Smith
Dr Rohen Kapur
Pseudonymous blogger
and, as mentioned, little old me (to be fair, I was standing for UKIP, so probably nobody voted for me personally, they just voted for the party with the best policies - very few people will know that they voted for a blogger).

If I missed anybody off, then please leave a comment and I'll add you to the list.

Blogger loses deposit - shock

Oh dear. Yours truly ended up in fifth place with 2.7% of the vote.

Vote early, vote often, vote UKIP!

Tactical Voting

This whole pseudo debate about the pro's and con's of tactical voting, which the leaders of the three main parties now officially oppose is all rather arid, and of course begs the question of why we don't move to some form of PR*.

My view is, sod it.

Vote for the party whose policies you like best, in my case UKIP. Will UKIP win any seats? Possible but unlikely. Will it make a difference to how our government behaves if ten per cent of people vote UKIP (i.e. if 2.5 million people vote for us as did at the EU Parliament elections last summer)? I very much think it would.

Would it make a bigger difference if our share of the popular vote was the same as last summer (i.e. about 16.5%)? Yes, of course. None of these votes would be 'wasted', every additional one per cent of people who vote for us has a small, but measurable impact on what will happen over the next five years. Maybe we'll even get an in-out referendum or something...

* Having looked at all the options, it strikes me that the simplest and best being multi-member constituencies, where every voter casts one vote (or several votes, in the case of some people) for one named candidate; the candidate with the highest number of personal votes chooses which of the sub-constituencies (i.e. an existing constituency) he or she wishes to represent, and then the candidates with the second and third highest number of votes choose one of the other two sub-constituencies.

Whether three or four or five is the right number of existing constituencies to be merged into a super-constituency or a multi-member constituency is a separate debate.

HA HA HA HA HA!

Robin Smith, Independent candidate for Wokingham*

* Obviously, if you live in Wokingham, you should vote for UKIP candidate. But we can't dispute that he is standing for Parliament next week.

Fun Online Polls: Who was the real winner of the 'Prime Minister's Debates'?

For the sake of topicality, I shall put last week's Fun Online Poll on hold and sound out 'real' opinion: Who was the real winner of the 'Prime Minister's Debates'?

Vote here and choose from: Alistair Stewart; Adam Boulton; one or other of the Dimblebys; one of the cardboard cutouts on stage with a brightly coloured tie. Or use the widget in the sidebar, obviously.

PS, I had a lovely time at the Adam Smith Institute 'bloggers bash. Thanks to everybody who turned up.

Buckingham Fun

Via Trixy, more heartening news for the real anti-sleaze candidate in Buckingham.

The guy sitting down at the front aced it

Fun Online Polls: UKIP's new slogan and paedophiles

After two day's polling, that's a pretty conclusive response, 89% of us like UKIP's new slogan "Sod the lot" which doesn't appear to have done us any harm. Gawain has the round up of the press coverage.
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Right. The Roman Catholics have now had the temerity to link homosexuality and paedophilia. So my next Fun Online Poll is largely subjective (I don't think anybody has the worldwide statistics) and asks "Who is more likely to sexually molest a child: A Roman Catholic priest or an adoptive gay couple?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

The Kingmaker

Fun Online Polls: House Prices and UKIP's new slogan

I think I shall have to call this one a score-draw after extra-time. After one week and 114 votes, there are 57 "Yes" and 57 "No" responses to the question "Would you vote for a party which has the manifesto aim of making house prices affordable again?"

As to how I would do it, that's quite simple - I'd go back to what we were doing until 1963. Tried and tested. Can't fail.

More to the point, most of the major parties have policies which would tend to prop up house prices, as they think that most voters see high and rising house prices as an unalloyed good. But the "Yes" vote is being split three or four ways. If one party had the nerve to swim against the tide, it would probably be able to garner most of the "No" vote for itself, so would tend to romp home in elections. Ah well.
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On a more light-hearted note, do you like UKIP's new slogan 'Sod the lot' which will (hopefully) appear on billboards round the country in the next few weeks (see top of this sidebar)?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.