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He was plausible as a politician it’s just his party became infested with the terminally stupid.

I don’t think so it’s just a ‘what is there to lose’? I mean Joe has been president. He’s in his 80’s. His party just got crushed in the election. He won’t be part of any comeback and likely won’t live to see one. Politically and morally a dreadful and appalling thing to do. But why would Joe Biden care at this point? He has little skin in that game anymore. So he saved his son.

Clearly he thought appealing to reform dominated incel X was a good idea. I don’t know why he thought that but I bet his legal team are slowly weeping into their Sunday roasts.

Sure. But I think that was allowable. I knew he was miles off with it. I think he knew too. Back in August he was basically saying Harris would be destroyed for all the reasons I thought she would. He got swept up in it I think when he went to DNC. But nobody is going to get everything right. What I like about him is that he’s prepared to say ‘nobody knows why this is happening’ rather than deciding that whatever cheap ideology he’s trying to peddle has the answer to why something is happening. Labour blame the Tories. The Tories blame minorities. Reform blame everyone who isn’t them. The cycle of political failure is in part because people aren’t prepared to properly examine the evidence. Rory is someone who does and will and put that above their own ideology.

Saw a bit of question time - Rory Stewart is one of the few politicians who makes real sense these days. Says it how it is not how people would like it to be. No place for reality it seems.

I mean to an extent any online poll is self selecting purely by the fact that regardless of your recruitment method people need to be online and willing to complete it online. But I’m also struggling to believe it was an invite only poll with invites sent to a demographically representative sample of his constituency electorate. As such it’s not a good way to determine opinion. Thats even before we get into the fact that it’s quite nuanced. What about if you asked his constituency ‘do you think adequate safeguarding is in place to safely support assisted dying’? And then asked them ‘should we vote for assisted dying without certainty on adequate safeguards in place’? I think you could very easily see different results to those questions. Which is why it’s not how an MP should conduct business. Listen to constituents sure. But that’s quite a different situation to silly survey gimmicks and making such huge decisions off the back of them.

That’s margin of error on the sample. If you are not sampling correctly margin of error is meaningless.

I do this for a living and it’s not going to be representative - since it appears to be a self selecting poll. He’s not taken a representative sample of his constituency. It’s a small sample but the size would be ok if you had a genuinely representative cross section across his constituency. But it doesn’t. It’s meaningless as such. Without any bother I could have in 2016 set up a poll in every constituency and sampled 2000 people in each to show remain was ahead by a large margin. It would have been meaningless as this is.

I’m not. Just pointing out that he was always in favour of it and promised the debate pre election.

He’s been a proponent of it for a long while. It’s pretty clear he has wanted this bill to pass. He hasn’t said due to government neutrality - but has repeatedly said his views on the matter are on public record, he voted for it previously. Pre election having ‘the debate’ was his personal promise to Esther Rantzen.

The will of the power can hardly be determined by a survey of a tiny percentage of his constituency can it?

The not rights clubbed together against it. Which makes me think it was probably right it got through!

Yes it’s ’her bill’ but it’s pretty clear that this was encouraged by Starmer. It was the only route to do it.

Yes - exactly this. Quality debate - whichever way it went it took all the politics out of it.

I’d seen a breakdown with no ahead on declarations but the debate to me sounded like it was edging to a no. I know a few who expected it to be narrowly defeated. I think it’s a good thing it’s not shut down but there is a lot of work to do on this I feel. Long way to go yet.