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Good morning

The first question is will there be a vacancy and no doubt Reeves will have to go first

Miliband is not the answer, indeed I am not sure anyone is

Mahmood seems the only one will real determination but as with the conservatives how can you trust the members to make the right choice ?

Morning Big_G. You are spot on - Reeves would be ousted first. Well, McSweeney first in the hope he can draw the poison, then Reeves. And finally Starmer.

The scenario is that Labour get routed in May. LibDem, Green, SNP, Reform, Plaid. They're losing to everyone bar the Tories. The slideaway is unmistakable and unavoidable. A change has to happen so that new leadership can turn the ship around.

I am not going to make predictions as to who that would be - my 25 years of Labour party membership tells me that members are capable of making major missteps.

For me Labour have two obvious threats - the Greens, and Reform. Ironically both of these parties speak to the same reality - the country is broken and why won't anyone do SOMETHING to fix it?

Polanski and Farage have the advantage of not thinking they will be the next government. Even Farage - he doesn't want to be PM, he doesn't think he can win hence telling donors a deal with the Tories is needed which he knows he won't get.

Labour? The government? Much harder. They need the Vision Thing. And the only person who has it is Ed Milliband. I know he is divisive, but a Britain refounded as a green industrial titan is something we could do. Become a leading exporter of clean energy and with it the technology that harnesses it.

Hello pb.
Apologies for the off-threadery, but I've just been out for a night out in Stockport.


The thing is, Stockport was always not-shit. It just needed people to realise. When I was small, Stockport was rough, but still beautiful if you blurred your eyes and imagined quite hard. And heroic people have. And the empty Victoriana is now a busy bar and restaurant, and the pub which saw fights at lunchtimes has been spruced up sympathetically and is now splendid. Stockport is, up to a point, now a very nice place to be. And you now get attractive people there in a way which didn't used to happen.
In part it's happened because Manchester has got too splendid to manage, and if you're going to spill out to adjacent towns, Stockport is going to be ahead of Ashton or Oldham or Rochdale in the queue. But still, it's very gratifying to see.
It's urban Britain writ small. The bars catering to the new young overspill from Manchester rub up against those catering to those who were always here. Foodie nights at the market hall exist alongside Al's Halal Meats. But it thrives in a way it didn't used to. And it's not just Manchester overspill. It thrives on its own merits. It's brilliant.
Come to Stockport and feel optimistic for the future.

BBCQT last night was interesting.

How Zia Yousef could lose the room on an immigration special in Dover was a new level of uselessness. Here he is insulting an audience member:

https://bsky.app/profile/implausibleblog.bsky.social/post/3m774ugj4e22s

Got to say the BBC putting illegal immigrants in the audience allows him to focus on something else - attacking the BBC for pulling that stunt.

They were not illegal immigrants, they were successful asylum seekers with ILR, so by definition not illegal.

Having a debate on immigration without any immigrants having a say would be rather odd. It wasn't these that gave Zia a hard time (indeed both came over fairly poorly) it was the white British in the audience that were giving him a hard time.

Credit to Polanski and Cooper for winning that audience.

"Having a debate on immigration without any immigrants having a say would be rather odd. "

Would it? It would be odder to include voices on an issue who had a vested interest, a bias, in one direction.

Also a little odd to include people who can't (yet) vote in national elections, where immigration policy is decided. Though I suppose it does no harm.

Next Question Time is a law 'n' order special. Let's fill the seats with ex-cons.

(Actually, that ain't a bad idea...)

27% of working age adults have a criminal record. There will be plenty of ex-cons.

Gosh. I’d have guessed less than 5%.

It is the most surprising stat I have learnt on here. For men it is 33%.

This report is a bit lower but official at 22-23%. 27% was from Personnel Today quoting another MoJ report I can't quickly find.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/671a27f0da8fb5e23e65a435/Estimate_of_the_number_of_working_age_people_with_a_nominal_record_on_the_Police_National_Computer_pdf.pdf

Obvs people are discreet about it, but AFAIK none of my close acquaintances have a criminal record.

How do you know? Especially if spent, speeding, not paying a train fare, careless driving, drink driving, forgetting to pay for something in a shop, not paying enough tax, smoking cannabis, taking cocaine etc can all be criminal offences

You've changed "shoplifting" into "forgetting to pay for something in a shop"! Do you have something to hide??

You could just as easily have said "forgetting to buy a train ticket, failing to see a speed limit sign, getting your maths wrong on your tax form...."

Well shoplifiting could be forgetting to pay for something in a shop.

It could and I'm sure it happens, but it isn't. Forgetting to pay for something isn't shoplifting. It is an honest mistake. Obviously you may have to convince someone of that.

We joke that my wife is a thief. Several days after being at a restaurant she found a knife from the restaurant in her bag. She has no idea how it got there (so she says).

Having said that I take @hyufd's point. It is easy to have had a minor offence. I think I am completely clean, but I have had one speeding offence sometime ago from a camera. Does that count? I don't think it does.

Good morning

Last week when I returned to my car with my shopping I discovered an item that I had overlooked

I immediately returned and paid for it

That is the first time in my 81 years I have made that error

I do not accept shoplifting is forgetting to pay, it is a deliberate act to steal

On Wednesday I popped into a pub in Cambridge and ordered a single Jamesons no ice. My card took exception to their device and refused to work. Tried several times, no dice, by which point I'd finished the drink. They apologised for their device and asked if I had cash. I said no, was there a cashpoint nearby? There was one in the Sainsburys opposite, they said. Me and the barman exchanged a knowing look as I left. It was goodbye. Except it wasn't! I did go to the cashpoint in Sainsburys and I did get some cash (£20) and I went back to the pub. You should have seen the astonished grin on the guy's face as I approached brandishing the note. Not just him either, some of the punters had been following the saga. Single Jamesons no ice £5.95, restoring everybody's faith in human nature - priceless.

I keep trying to convince my wife that driving on a motorway is safer and much less stressful than driving on a winding country road that isn't always wide enough for two vehicles to pass.

We'll never agree on this.

A few months back I was driving and we ended up taking a ridiculous route to end up at a destination about half a mile from a junction of the M62. I was not pleased!

I often take one route to go somewhere and a different route back. I don't know why.

I prefer winding roads to motorways as I enjoy driving them and hate motorways. If I'm on a long journey I use the motorway but get very bored very quickly. I am not capable of driving long distances on a motorway and don't know how people manage that.

In the past I drove quite often from Llandudno to Lossiemouth in the day using motorways, the infamous A9, and county roads from Aviemore

A distance of 456 miles and I could do all of that and back to Perth on a tank of diesel

It is now way beyond my ability

I think the furthest I've driven in one day is SE London to Campbelltown, about 550 miles.

My dad drove us from Ilford (east London) to Aviemore in a single day, back in 1989.

We used to regularly drive from Ayrshire to Felixstowe in one day. That was before we realised that Yorkshire was too good to drive through without stopping overnight.

The thing about driving from London to the further reaches of Scotland is that it immediately illustrates how ludicrous the notion of Yorkshire being in 'the north' is. We're usually passing through Yorkhire sometime after breakfast!