It’s like actors and ‘the Scottish play’ 
IMO from several thousand miles away from the scene of the crime …
That would be a sign of May’s massive overconfidence and of the distinct separation between the party policy offices who’d be doing that missing costing and the “Can’t mention which party we’re affiliated with” re-election spin-doctors surrounding May.
She seems to be taking a lesson from US elections in the 20+ years prior to this most recent weird one: If you avoid anything of substance, either pro or con, you’re much more able to steer the narrative. All you need then is an electorate unable to tell pure BS from realistic achievable policy proposals. With enough cynicism they’re indistinguishable on a practical level, so if you can pump up the cynicism high enough the rest is easy.
IMO Gyrate nailed it with the comment about meaningless puff-phrases.
She does have clear policies (88 pages in yesterday’s manifesto including only 2 on Brexit), they’re are just - unusually, if not uniquely - not costed. The general understanding of that is as you suggest, born of confidence; her internal polling apparently tells the Conservatives she is virtually bomb proof.
Indeed, some of what is proposed isn’t popular, esp. with the older crowd.
She has so much wriggle room though it hardly matters, though obv. the 20% superiority has become 13% and momentum is not with her yet.
“Suicide subsidy”
You’re 71. You bought your council house in the early 80s for £60K and its now worth £300K. You also have some savings. Recently, you’ve started to notice that you keep calling your grandchildren by your children’s names, and you can’t seem to keep track of details like you used to. You’re not a fool, so you suspect this might be the beginning of dementia. But you are in good physical health. So you have two choices:
-
Live on with the dementia, which will get progressively worse and demand greater and greater levels of care, in home or residential. This will costs first hundreds then thousands of pounds a month. At that rate, it won’t take long before your savings are gone and you have to remortgage the house. Their are a load of financial services firms offering all kind of deals - some quite confusing! - but the upshot is that the house will pass to them on your death. Your dreams of passing on a substantial inheritance to your kids are severely threatened - about £200K of the potential inheritance is going to disappear on bills for care that you won’t even know you’re receiving while your healthy body carries on and your mind disintegrates. And without that inheritance, they’re never going to own their own home, or build up any kind of savings for their retirement.
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Make it look like an accident. The kids will be sad but this way you’ll give them the inheritance you’ve been planning for 40 years. Ever since the Tories offered you the chance to become a homeowner, promising a new future for your family.
I am slightly surprised - given the on going debate of increasing care costs - assisted suicide hasn’t yet reappeared. Putting aside the moral/dignity case, the economic argument is pretty powerful now …
I suppose it can’t under this PM given her CoE upbringing.
Or there’s option 3, which has been the default for most of human history, which is that the children care for their parents in old age, and earn their inheritance that way. Passing that burden of care to the state, whilst being unwilling to pay for it, is typical left wing entitlement.
Also, the idea that people are relying on an inheritance to buy a house is hardly realistic. Most people will be in their 50s or thereabouts when their parents die, and if they were going to own a house would have done so by then.
That’s a very good line.
Whilst middle class entitlement is more characterised by passing on the bulk of your estate as a gift at least seven years before your death in order to (a) avoid Inheritance Tax altogether and (b) pay the grand kids private school fees.
I think Brexit put paid to the idea that people think about economic utility. It’s all about gut.
I think that the appropriate organ is lower down the intestinal tract. 
Most of human history has been shitty subsistence agriculture. Models that worked perfectly well when we lived in small villages and couldn’t be kept alive for years of poor health don’t really translate to the modern world. We pass at least some of the burden of care for cancer, heart disease, pneumonia, falls, arthritis other age-related health conditions on to the state - why are we carving out an exception for dementia?
As things stand, the Tories are proposing inheritance tax by genetic lottery. Some homeowners will die quick and thus rich. Others will die slow and poor. This will not be due to any bad decisions on their part. Pooling that risk is not typical left wing entitlement, any more than the NHS is typical left wing entitlement. In fact, my instinctive left-wing response is that if you’re rich you can just pay for your care and if you’re poor the state can pay it for you. But I don’t apply that logic to cancer treatment, so the fair thing is to either use the tax system or develop an insurance market that allows people to manage their risk.
ETA: Actually, what I’m really in favour of is massive inheritance tax, but that’s a non-flyer so…
There’s an interesting analysis by YouGov(complete with *animated *Sankey diagrams!) on whre Corbyn’s polling improvements have come from. Two sources: pro-Corbyn folk who didn’t vote Labour in 2015 but like what they see now, and anti-Corbyn Labour voters who are coming back the fold/gritting their teeth. The big story for me there is the relative softness of this vote: 75% of people who say they’ll vote Tory say they will “definitely” do so, compared to only 66% of folk who say they’ll vote Labour. Translating that polling sentiment into actual votes will make all the difference to Labour and Corbyn in this election.
We’re all about Sankey!
I don’t think this is answerable but let me pose this: rather like in the US election, how are UK pollsters taking into acount people who have been inspired to return to the voting booth by a radical candidat (Trump, now Corbyn) i.e. if these voters have been, in voting terms, off the grid how do pollsters know they are returning?
The answer in the US was ‘they didn’t’ and so the pollsters undercooked the Trump vote …
Fwiw, I am VERY pleased to see ‘Unknown’ represented for the first time - I even contacted YouGov about it 
- because there is gold in understanding them thar votes …
Interesting question. Looking at the full tablesin the latest YouGov poll, their weighting data suggests that approx 23% of the sample did not vote in 2015. So they are there, but typically not reported on.
That sounds very big. I’ve looked through the tables, can you show me your working
Interesting for me that 31% are undecided on who would make the best leader … much to play for.
I scrolled down to the appendix tables on how they set quotas for the data. One of those is regionx2015 vote so you get e.g. South Con, South Labour, South LD… and South DNV. Adding up all the DNV in my head, I got 23%. Checking, turnout was 66% so it should be 33% or it is and I need to go back to primary school.
Excellent, thanks.
I presume YouGov are getting to previously off the gridders because their polls are online.
So if 11% of the DNV group are ‘Didn’t vote in 2015, pro-Corbyn’ (see Sankey) why on earth are some voting for other than Corbyn …
I take comfort in the data, actually. The Tories have the UKIppers but Labour may well firm up in the mid-30%. God knows how that translates into regional variance …
No, they’re allowing people to make a choice whether to look after their own parents or pay someone else to do it, if the parents are wealthy. Worst case scenario, there’s only an inheritance of £100,000 pounds left for them.
Perhaps that threshold is too low, and should be set at the average value of a house or whatever, but the principle is sound.
I don’t like the idea of people being forced from their homes. And what happens to houses that are the homes of multiple people? If A & B each own half a house and B needs care, is A going to be forced from the house?
But if the Tories do get in and do push this idea, it should be the value set in Inheritance Tax.
I agree. This proposal is to take money from the estate, not to make people sell their homes while still living there.
This goes back to my original point. Traditionally, we would expect A to care for B in this situation - but for a number of reasons (many of them good reasons) that’s no longer expected, or even possible. But it needs to be paid for somehow, and expecting wealthier people to use their assets to pay for it seems reasonable. I would hope and expect that would only happen after all the owners have died, though.
Ultimately, there should be a limit to how much the government should subsidise people living in houses far larger than they need.
Not necessarily, this isn’t a tax, it’s a payment for services. There’s no reason the thresholds should be the same.