I think the nicest thing that can be said about Sunak is that he wasn’t as bad as Truss or Johnson. The Northern Leg of HS2 was scrapped to keep Sunak positive and lift him out of his funk. By the end of June, Sunak was in a deep funk. A senior adviser said: “At that point, Rishi was punch drunk. He spent a lot of his time in a very bad place. He goes through long periods of just…
Next year one of the major elections will be the 45th Canadian federal election which has to be held on or by the 20th of October 2025 and the betting from Ladbrokes shows the expected trend of incumbents getting clobbered senseless. If you can spot any value in this market then share your wisdom in the comments. TSE
This is not an age split I was expecting to see. TSE
I thought the appointments of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General and Tulsi Gabbard as DNI were bad but the appointment of RFK Jr as Health & Human Services Secretary seems to be even worse. I suppose we should brace ourselves for Marjorie Taylor Greene as CIA Director. It’s going to be an rather wild four years, buckle up. TSE
The other day I noted the voters are pretty ambivalent about Christianity, this is further proof of that. 73% say the Church of England has little to influence in the lives of Brits, support for separation of church and state and the UK to stop being like Iran and expel unelected clergy from our parliament is high. This polling was conducted before the calls on Justin Welby to resign so I’d expect the polling to get worse for God botherers…
As a Tory activist going back twenty-five years I know first hand how badly anti-Tory tactical voting is for the party. This sort of polling was commonplace before July’s election and why I felt confident that the Tories were going to be shellacked like never before. It explains why Labour could win a stonking majority on such a low vote share and why the Lib Dems are within 49 seats of the Tories. Kemi Badenoch has nearly five years to…
This is why I prefer net positives rather than gross positives as it only shows one side rather than a fuller picture, in a broader context Badenoch isn’t as bad as Truss, yet. Sir Keir Starmer had some poor ratings at the start of his leadership which he eventually improved upon which something Kemi Badenoch has plenty of time to do as well but the axiom that oppositions do not win elections governments lose them. TSE
In Britain since the 1961 Suicide Act, a person can choose the time and manner of their death without being criminalised (if they fail). Plenty (mostly men) do so: 6,069 suicides in 2023, up on 5,642 in 2022, the highest rate since 1999. The data and analysis can be found here and here. There are some people who are unable to do so because of their almost total physical incapacity. Worth noting that all the very sad court cases brought to change the…