Films from the 1960’s and 1970’s show Afghan women dressing and behaving much like women in the West. Not all women, of course. As in many countries, older attitudes were found in rural or isolated communities. Changes are never evenly distributed in a country. The same could be said of Iran. It seemed as if emancipation of women and what this meant for their ability to decide for themselves what to do with their lives was happening in countries far…
Should punters be be ruling out a second term? There’s is little doubt that the events in Afghanistan with the Taliban having now taken over just about all the major areas is going to hurt Biden politically. The big danger now is that he will go down as the one who “lost” and the consequences of that will be blamed on him. His strategy over the past month is in shambles particularly some of the optimistic statements he was making…
Just 33% of Scots want Team Scotland to represent them at the Olympics. This poll contrasts strongly with a Survation poll back in early January which showed 47% of Scots wanted a Team Scotland at the Olympics rather than be a part Team GB as happens in the Commonwealth Games whereas 42% of Scots wanted Scots to keep on representing Team GB (which translates as 53% v. 47% excluding don’t knows.) I suspect the difference between the pollster is the…
Those tweets from Ryan Struyk are quite worrying. I’ve pointed out for a while that this partisan divide on vaccines in America has the potential to swing American politics to the Democratic Party’s advantage for the next few electoral cycles. It has to change the demand and expectation of the health services in the United States, which also has to upend politics in America. Long Covid may make the GOP supporters of ObamaCare. This fits into a wider Covid-19 denialism…
At the last election what was then Corbyn’s party came out with 203 MPs and since then Hartlepool has been lost. So to win on this bet what is now Starmer’s party has to gain 124 seats. That I would suggest is a huge ask and would be even if LAB was enjoying poll leads which of course it doesn’t have. This is one of those political bets that punters have got wrong. The main opposition party has a much…
Bookies will give you just 1/2 on the next election being in 2024, but longer than evens on Starmer being Labour leader that long. That doesn’t add up… Clearly the market thinks there is a significant chance (implied by these odds as being at least 20%) that Starmer never makes it to the next election. That risk is being massively overstated. History Let’s start with a simple question: How many Labour/Tory leaders have their been in the last 20 years…
But the Tories retain their 8% VI lead
Following on from the latest Ipsos-MORI voting poll we now have the full dataset which highlights what looks like being a big divide in public opinion – the choice of those who are graduates against those who are not. In some ways this represents the fact that the proportion of grads has increased sharply since the Robbins report came out in the early 1960s and paved the way for the huge expansion in higher education. What is interesting is that…