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Re: The traditional CF voting intentions thread, week 2
Quote:
Originally Posted by peanut
These American style TV debates are stupid. They're too frustrating. Even more so with the 45 seconds to answer format that just doesn't work. You can't base anything on them and they're just too chaotic, it's all about point scoring against each other and nothing else. No one really wins. You have to wait for everything to be fact checked but they end up with everyone wanting to vote for 'none of the above'.
Pointless except for viewing figures, which I guess is why the have such farces on. Describe a complicated policy in 20 seconds whilst being interrupted by an opponent with a non-fact-checked allegation. Washed down with a question that sidelines Scotland in the Euros for good measure.
Better an in-depth grilling of the leaders individually with strong follow-up questions.
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Re: The traditional CF voting intentions thread, week 2
Quote:
Originally Posted by 1andrew1
Pointless except for viewing figures, which I guess is why the have such farces on. Describe a complicated policy in 20 seconds whilst being interrupted by an opponent with a non-fact-checked allegation. Washed down with a question that sidelines Scotland in the Euros for good measure.
Better an in-depth grilling of the leaders individually with strong follow-up questions.
Pretty much the argument for not doing these TV debates at all, that held sway for many years. They face off weekly at PMQs. Facing off in a TV studio doesn’t add anything, especially when you encourage interruptions by leaving the politicians standing, miked up, at their podiums when it’s not their turn to speak (which doesn’t happen in the Commons, they have to sit down and the broadcasters are not allowed to whack the gain up to catch any of the barracking they might do).
Next week will be worse because it is the left of UK politics that’s most fractured, so in a 7-way debate the voices are overwhelmingly stacked to one side. You don’t have to be a fan of Sunak or this present Tory government to appreciate that’s just a recipe for a pile-on, not a fair or illuminating debate.
An intense one-on-one at the hands of Andrew Neil or similar is what we need.
On Sunak’s maths, Tories will lift taxes by £3,000 per household
My colleague Ross Clark has shown how the Tories cooked up that £2,000 figure. They worked out the total cost of what they think Labour will do, using standard HM Treasury costings. Then, they divided that by the number of in-work households (18.4 million). This is a subset of the 21.4 million total UK households, so no pensioners or workless households. By choosing a smaller denominator, you concentrate the increase and conjure up a scarier figure. Then they quadruple-counted. So they took each year’s estimate for tax rise and then added them together over four years and – presto! – you end up with £2,000.
But let’s apply a similar method to the published plans of the Conservative government. We don’t need to guess what the cost of government would be: the projected tax haul figures were published by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) and updated in March after the Budget. It will be £1.02 trillion in the current financial year. That’s with the tax/GDP ratio at 36.5 per cent. Let’s use that as our baseline. The OBR says the Tories plan to increase taxes to 37.1 per cent of GDP by 2028/29. So the 0.6-point increase works out at £20 billion more tax raised in that year than if the tax/GDP ratio (below) had stayed flat.
Add up all four years (as the Tories did for their Labour calculation) and you end up with a £320 rise in year one, £620 in year two, £930 in year three and £1,150 in the final year. So: a sum of £3,020 per working household. Except this would be just as misleading as the £2,000 figure that Sunak used so often in the debate last night.
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There is an interesting discussion that Starmer only contested this lie late on in the debate and so looked potentially weak. However, some (online KC's) point out that this was deliberate to allow the "defendant" to repeat, over and over again, the lie i.e. to let Sunak hang himself. Nice if true ...
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Re: The traditional CF voting intentions thread, week 2
Quote:
Originally Posted by ianch99
There is an interesting discussion that Starmer only contested this lie late on in the debate and so looked potentially weak. However, some (online KC's) point out that this was deliberate to allow the "defendant" to repeat, over and over again, the lie i.e. to let Sunak hang himself. Nice if true ...
Unlikely to be true, given how long he allowed the Diane Abbot nonsense to go on before making a slightly less than equivocal statement about it. There is a pattern here and it’s not good.
For whatever reason he seems to have a problem with speaking quickly and clearly. His instincts are to stop, chew things over, and then form carefully worded sentences. He is going to be PM, no doubt about that, so he is going to have to learn PDQ that sometimes you need to stand up and speak clearly and forcefully. You don’t always get to chew it over for a week. He might as well learn that now, rather than the next time we face a national disaster.
Re: The traditional CF voting intentions thread, week 2
I'm with Chris on this one. Unlike Trump, Sunak's not going on trial for presenting false numbers.
There was no advantage for Starmer in letting him repeat the £2k figure unchallenged, so many times. A viewer who didn't watch to the end could have concluded that Starmer accepted the figure as he didn't challenge it.
---------- Post added at 21:50 ---------- Previous post was at 21:48 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by denphone
Rishi Sunak said he he would lead a government of “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level”.
That's why he deserves your vote! He's not done it so far, so he needs another chance to do so!
Re: The traditional CF voting intentions thread, week 2
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
Unlikely to be true, given how long he allowed the Diane Abbot nonsense to go on before making a slightly less than equivocal statement about it. There is a pattern here and it’s not good.
For whatever reason he seems to have a problem with speaking quickly and clearly. His instincts are to stop, chew things over, and then form carefully worded sentences. He is going to be PM, no doubt about that, so he is going to have to learn PDQ that sometimes you need to stand up and speak clearly and forcefully. You don’t always get to chew it over for a week. He might as well learn that now, rather than the next time we face a national disaster.
He did the same in Rochdale. It was clear to everyone that the candidate needed to be dropped; instead, it took two days. It's probably his biggest weakness but thankfully for him, it's not an especially easy one for the Tories to attack. Indecisive would cut though as a term for him I think.
The debate I don't think is the same thing. It's a piece of theatre that doesn't represent the job. In PMQs, he isn't as bad. He also did pick up on it but wasn't forceful enough to press it when the moderator cut him off. He took the tact of not interrupting her to forcefully hit back.
Re: The traditional CF voting intentions thread, week 2
I'm coming round to the idea that the £2k tax hit statement is this elections equivalent of the £350k a week on the Brexit bus. Both are made up figures but end up successfully putting the opponent on the back foot.
Re: The traditional CF voting intentions thread, week 2
Quote:
Originally Posted by 1andrew1
I'm coming round to the idea that the £2k tax hit statement is this elections equivalent of the £350k a week on the Brexit bus. Both are made up figures but end up successfully putting the opponent on the back foot.
I'm sure I saw last night on Peston that under the Tories we'd be £3000 worse off.
Re: The traditional CF voting intentions thread, week 2
Quote:
Originally Posted by peanut
I'm sure I saw last night on Peston that under the Tories we'd be £3000 worse off.
The £2k for a household over four years is quite modest - we've paid £13k per household in more tax since the Conservatives came to power according to some calculations I've seen.
I think the issue currently is that the larger parties have not published their detailed manifestos. Until these are published, it's a case of he said, she said.
Re: The traditional CF voting intentions thread, week 2
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
Unlikely to be true, given how long he allowed the Diane Abbot nonsense to go on before making a slightly less than equivocal statement about it. There is a pattern here and it’s not good.
For whatever reason he seems to have a problem with speaking quickly and clearly. His instincts are to stop, chew things over, and then form carefully worded sentences. He is going to be PM, no doubt about that, so he is going to have to learn PDQ that sometimes you need to stand up and speak clearly and forcefully. You don’t always get to chew it over for a week. He might as well learn that now, rather than the next time we face a national disaster.
Starmer indecisive? I am not really sure .. maybe he is and maybe he isn't What I am sure of is that allowing a lie to be be repeated so much, as Andrew and others have pointed out, has the risk of baking it in, right or wrong. There are enough people out there who do not think too hard about decisions that change the country.
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