Browsed by
Month: August 2006

Is Israel a bigger challenge for Blair than Iraq?

Is Israel a bigger challenge for Blair than Iraq?

Would things have been different if Robin Cook had been still alive? If this had been a normal Wednesday then at noon Tony Blair and David Cameron would have been facing each other across the house at Prime Minister’s Questions. With the Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, being in semi-open revolt against Blair’s line then there would have been a lot for the Tory leader and Ming Campbell to get their teeth into. For the one time when PMQs can really…

Read More Read More

Speed up PBC – and help reduce our costs

Speed up PBC – and help reduce our costs

Although it is the holiday period and things are a bit quieter at the moment one of the big problems we have on the site are the demands on our servers when dozens of users are trying to load and re-load very long discussions all at the same time. This can make it frustrating for users because the site seems very slow and it also means that we are using up a lot of bandwidth repeatedly sending you the same…

Read More Read More

Why I won’t be betting against the pollsters next time

Why I won’t be betting against the pollsters next time

Are we now in an era of more accurate polling? At the 2005 General Election I made several thousand pounds on a number of spread bets “selling” the projected Labour share. The spreads were very much in line with what the pollsters were reporting and I believed that they were over-stating the party. Thus one bet was at 38.5% against the actual 36.3% – meaning my winnings were the difference between the two numbers multiplied by the four figure sum…

Read More Read More