Tuesday 25th August 2015

[LadyCentauria]

@ephe: Hope Show is ok and that you both got a good night's sleep –
and similarly to Mr. & Mrs. HindleA

[LadyCentauria]

Today's Labour Leadership Hustings from BBC Radio 5, this morning, for those who want to listen to it, or to listen-again.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b069xw2v
It starts at 8 minutes and 20 seconds in. I haven't listened, yet.

[tinyclanger2]

Morning.

@Tiny Clanger, I promise I will behave !

I note you don't specify which type of behaviour you'll be favouring.

[TechnicalEphemera]

"Approximately, of those found to be ineligible, 400 are members or supporters of the Conservatives and 1,900 members or supporters of the Green Party".

How many are actual members of the Green Party though I wonder. With regards those that have been excluded because they 'support' the Green Party - how is that known? Some cases it will be obvious but in others it may be something as banal as liking a Green Party post on facebook! Its been reported that people who signed Green Party candidate nomination forms are being excluded. Yet I know for a fact that locally, some of our candidate forms have been signed by supporters of other parties. Either because the signatories were personal friends of the candidate, or because they agreed in the democratic right of the candidate to stand. I'm sure this must be the case in other areas, and with other parties too.

Well, Tiz......

....there are known knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns, and things we do know and things we don't know, and things we might not unknow when we know them.... or something...

I suspect that new registered supporters, or old supporters who have re-registered, or ex-members who want to come back to vote and see who gets the win (at which point they might become full members again if their favourite wins - I know someone who's doing this) may well have voted Green last time, or said on their social media they support Green issues, and have been excluded because they are seen as Green Party members when in fact they might just have expressed a view that for once they'd not be voting Labour.

People change their minds all the time - it was Ed Miliband whose leadership convinced me to join Labour last year; obviously there will be plenty of people who may have left the party because they thought he was useless. I don't think he was left-wing enough, but as many if not more think he was moving too far off the centre. Who knows?

As the number of exclusions rises, unless one candidate romps home with more than half of the vote, then there are going to be some hard questions to answer about the legitimacy of the process. If the result is very close, there will be trouble, I think.
From what I have been reading today, the higher the number rejected the more the injustices mount - that would leave a new leader, with a win on second preferences for example, in a very difficult position and I daresay many members would not be happy.

Unless every single registration is open to public scrutiny - which isn't going to happen - those of us with a vote are taking a lot on trust; I want my vote to count, and I want the result to reflect the views of the membership as a whole, including affiliates and new supporters. Perhaps the party machine should be taking a bit more on trust too - the 60,000 quoted in the G, and the 100,000 Toby mentioned, are massive numbers of exclusions, and I find it hard to believe that so many people are not bona fide voters.

If this carries on for the next 2 weeks, the 600,000-vote eligible electorate will be much smaller; that could seriously skew the vote, and whichever of the candidates suffers the most as a result, they'd have good cause to complain.

What a mess.

The 100,000 were quickly identified as either duplicates or not on the electoral roll. The non supporting supporters are clearly much harder to find. However I am fairly sure Corbyn is going to win whatever, if he doesn't I won't be overly bothered (to put it mildly). I suspect a fair few people who joined up just to vote for him will be, but from my point of view meh. A few people would probably leave on a point of principle, which would be a shame but a decision I would respect.

More likely is he will win and drive centre left members like myself out. I guess the Lib Dems are fairly desperate for new members right now, or I could join the Free Ebola Party, less electorally toxic.

[ohsocynical]

Mark ‏@yokelbear 1 hr1 hour ago

Hold on, this Labour Purge is to stop Tories voting? And 100,000 to be purged? Does that mean over three quarters of Tory party have joined?

Some wonky figures going around in Twitterland.

[ephemerid]

@ephe: Hope Show is ok and that you both got a good night's sleep –
and similarly to Mr. & Mrs. HindleA

Thank you, Your Ladyship.

He slept fine (knackered after all the drama) and I had my (customary) insomnia. SitRep - normal, as you were, chaps.

I've just changed his dressing. Looks OK. 26 metal clips!

I do sooooo not want him to suffer when they're taken out. No, no, no. Not at all. Not even a teeny weeny bit.

(Revenge by practice nurse.....)

[TechnicalEphemera]

Mark ‏@yokelbear 1 hr1 hour ago

Hold on, this Labour Purge is to stop Tories voting? And 100,000 to be purged? Does that mean over three quarters of Tory party have joined?

Some wonky figures going around in Twitterland.

The purge is 400 Tories and about 1900 Greens or similar, actual figures provided above.

So yes 400 Tories may be 3/4 of the living Tory membership.

[ephemerid]

The 100,000 were quickly identified as either duplicates or not on the electoral roll. The non supporting supporters are clearly much harder to find. However I am fairly sure Corbyn is going to win whatever, if he doesn't I won't be overly bothered (to put it mildly). I suspect a fair few people who joined up just to vote for him will be, but from my point of view meh. A few people would probably leave on a point of principle, which would be a shame but a decision I would respect.

More likely is he will win and drive centre left members like myself out. I guess the Lib Dems are fairly desperate for new members right now, or I could join the Free Ebola Party, less electorally toxic.

Thanks - well it's good that they were duplicates and/or not on the electoral roll.

Seriously - genuine question - where would you go if you felt the need to leave Labour?

I was a Lib for decades until Clegg betrayed the pledges he'd campaigned on. I was considering the Greens, but it was Miliband who impressed me sufficiently to actually join another party. The Greens just seemed a bit too flaky for me, though I'm reconsidering that.

[ephemerid]

Mark Serwotka has been refused a vote as an affiliate member.

The reasons should be interesting......

[TechnicalEphemera]

Mark Serwotka has been refused a vote as an affiliate member.

The reasons should be interesting......

Big supporter of a rival party, how he even dared request a vote is beyond me.

This is an example of his alleged behaviour.

Is Mark Serwotka desperate or has he simply run out of options. I remember hearing him say from the rostrum of a previous annual PCS conference that while he is General Secretary there will be no affiliation to the Labour Party. Mark Serwotka personally has steered the Make Your Vote Count Campaign towards political campaigning by PCS with the option of now of putting PCS money to fund non-Labour candidates in general elections.

from Howies Corner.

[TechnicalEphemera]

The 100,000 were quickly identified as either duplicates or not on the electoral roll. The non supporting supporters are clearly much harder to find. However I am fairly sure Corbyn is going to win whatever, if he doesn't I won't be overly bothered (to put it mildly). I suspect a fair few people who joined up just to vote for him will be, but from my point of view meh. A few people would probably leave on a point of principle, which would be a shame but a decision I would respect.

More likely is he will win and drive centre left members like myself out. I guess the Lib Dems are fairly desperate for new members right now, or I could join the Free Ebola Party, less electorally toxic.

Thanks - well it's good that they were duplicates and/or not on the electoral roll.

Seriously - genuine question - where would you go if you felt the need to leave Labour?

I was a Lib for decades until Clegg betrayed the pledges he'd campaigned on. I was considering the Greens, but it was Miliband who impressed me sufficiently to actually join another party. The Greens just seemed a bit too flaky for me, though I'm reconsidering that.

To be honest it all becomes a bit pointless faced with 10+ years of Tory government. Wait to see what emerges from the wreckage that can actually beat them I guess. It won't be the Greens, I doubt the Lib Dems will ever manage it either. But a Corbyn party advocating peoples QE, exiting NATO, unilateral nuclear disarmament, nationalising everything (they would also need to leave the European Single Market) that I couldn't support, not least because it is simply ridiculous. I take enough flak for advocating centre left politics, but at least I believe that can work.

[citizenJA]

Burning in Siberia took off in springtime, when smoke from deadly fires in southern Russia crossed the Pacific Ocean and reached North America. By mid-summer, fires and smoke obscured the shoreline of Lake Baikal, as revealed in satellite imagery from July 27. Wildfires around the lake were still burning on August 8, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured the image above.

Scientists think the high intensity of fires on August 8 led to the formation of at least one pyrocumulonimbus—a high-reaching cumulonimbus cloud created by the heat from fire rather than by evaporation from sun-warmed ground.

According to news reports citing Russia’s federal forestry agency, fires in Siberia had burned 1,400 square kilometers (540 square miles) as of August 12. Many of the fires were in southern Siberia, particularly in Buryatia and Irkutsk. Straddling those two areas is Lake Baikal.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Natura ... p?id=86297" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Fires are a regular occurrence in this region during fire season.
But according to news reports, water levels in Lake Baikal—the largest freshwater lake by volume in the world—have been dropping.
As a result, the drier coastline could lead to more summertime wildfires.

[TechnicalEphemera]

In other news, despite the rally the Dow closed down on late trading.

There is quite a good article here on why market rallies don't necessarily signal the all clear.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/201 ... ket-crisis

So China seems to have issues, will falling commodity prices offset the pain of export slowdowns in the west? Given many Chinese stocks were suspended at 10% drop today in Shanghai the odds are they will open sharply down tomorrow. Since nobody really knows the fundamentals in China it is a sentiment driven market.

Very interesting, the FTSE futures market is down slightly ( yes you can bet on the future of the FTSE 100, deeply nuts) but trending slightly upwards, so our Lords and masters are betting on nothing dramatic in Shanghai and nobody noticing that the Dow didn't rally.

I call that brave, but then again I am not a rich trader.

[citizenJA]

In other news, despite the rally the Dow closed down on late trading.

There is quite a good article here on why market rallies don't necessarily signal the all clear.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/201 ... ket-crisis

So China seems to have issues, will falling commodity prices offset the pain of export slowdowns in the west? Given many Chinese stocks were suspended at 10% drop today in Shanghai the odds are they will open sharply down tomorrow. Since nobody really knows the fundamentals in China it is a sentiment driven market.

Very interesting, the FTSE futures market is down slightly ( yes you can bet on the future of the FTSE 100, deeply nuts) but trending slightly upwards, so our Lords and masters are betting on nothing dramatic in Shanghai and nobody noticing that the Dow didn't rally.

I call that brave, but then again I am not a rich trader.

Yep, the final hour erased every gain from the morning opening.
Twitchy, twitchy

[citizenJA]

Goodnight, everyone
love
cJA