Best Of

Massive, if true.


Ailbhe Rea
@PronouncedAlva
·
7m
It was Angela Rayner who pushed for today's major U-turn to be made, when it became clear the govt was going to lose the vote.

Extraordinary that a govt with a working majority of 165 was on course to lose - and that it only stopped it two and a half hours before the vote

Like I said. Rayner is good at politics.

She's good at a small part of politics - she understands the internal dynamics and neuroses of the Labour Party. Like Prescott under Blair. But also like Prescott under Blair, she's utterly crap at anything else - she doesn't understand the other parties, calling them scum, and has no clue about anything necessary to be in government - economics, foreign affairs, social policy, etc., etc.

Of course, Starmer is so totally clueless about any part of politics that even her bit of insight makes her necessary to this clown show of a government.

I have a memory of my parents shipping me off to my Aunt's for an end of the Sixties Party on New year's Eve.
I would have been three and a month.
The same thing happened when our kid was born. Three and a half.

But what's your first memory of a non-personal event? Something in the news? Or something that happened in your town, but not personally witnessed? Perhaps discussed in front of you

For me, as I say, it is Apollo 11. Age 6

My dad always claimed he could remember his Dad and a friend discussing Peace in Our Time, and Munich, when he was 4

Yes, that too.
I was thinking of overtly political events, so had excluded that.

I had an Airfix kit of the Lunar module.
I think my older brother got the Saturn V...

I was born in 1975.
I certainly had no memory of male Prime Ministers before Major and remember thinking the concept an musing oddity when it was pointed out to me aged about 6 that such things were possible.
I think I remember the party on the playing field at the back of the estate for the silver jubilee when I had just turned two, though I am probably conflating it with the same thing for the ChazzleDizzle in 1981, which I definitely remember.
I certainly remember the Falklands War.
My first political memory is off Michael Foot's wife being knocked over by a low-hanging branch in an open-topped bus.
My first sporting memory is of the foul by Harald Schumacher on Patrick Battison in the 1982 Football World Cup. Even then, I remember thinking it a fundamentally stupid sport.
My first cultural memory is of my parents listening to Abba in the car, though my first I would claim of my own is my fondness for the Vapor's 'Turning Japanese'. I can't imagine how I accessed this. Not necessarily a massively appropriate song for a five year old.
I have numerous snippets of memories from 2, 3, 4 years old - but they are like tiny context-free vignettes, viewed through a keyhole: seeing a thunderstorm, sitting in the paddling pool on a hot day (probably in the summer of 77), arguing over the lyrics to 'all things bright and beautiful' (I was right, btw), children's television, playgroups. Toys. Trains (and suddenly, unbidden, the smell of trains in the 70s...)

If, as a writer or moviemaker, one could capture that weird "keyhole" effect of super-early childhood memories, it would be a powerful thing

We are actually getting something close to that with this scattergun of very small children's views of life in the 60s, 70s and 80s right now. I am enjoying it.

I find most of them profoundly moving

Eg “walking to school in the snow and putting my feet in my father’s snowy footprints”

These memories are intrinsically poetic. Focused on tiny but poignant and immortal details. Perhaps we are all born poets but then lose the knack over time…

Always moving when we remember our childhood. Even gnarled and ruined wretches like me long to glimpse back through the mists to when Dad was as big as the fiercest of bears and Mum could perform miracles before breakfast. It was safe and warm because they made it safe and warm.
I guess when we have the chance to remember that we are lucky, we had the ones to protect us who made it worth looking back longingly.
Its funny, whenever I look back and remember Mum I can hear her telling me I need to go forward, and somewhere there I'll see her again.
Now I'm all wistful

On recent polling; Labour are having a terrible time but are not losing further ground; Reform have peaked for now and are not gaining from Labour's woes. Four years to go.

I think the bookies are right in making Labour favourite for most seats. Such a result almost certainly excludes a Reform/Reform led government.

It is not easy (though possible) - to imagine Labour being worse in the next four years than they have been so far.

Payroll/public sector vote, benefits class vote, liberal middle class vote, BAME vote/stop Farage vote/young people vote/Tory vote splitting Reform + me should see Labour home.

Spanner in this works: the biggest by far is a Tory/Reform electoral pact.

Bet accordingly. DYOR.

Four years like the last 12 months, might see public patience with Labour completely exhausted.

That said, I’d expect Reform to be winning 150-200 or so seats, next time, with Labour winning somewhat more.

That's the unknown.

How far will this government continue to drown after being thrown in the deep end? Or will some of its members start to do a fair approximation of swimming?

How much will some of the longer term bets (energy, planning, Europe) be seen to have paid off by 2028/9?

The electorate are far less patient than in the past. But with no election imminent, that doesn't matter. And most governments would be happy with second place and a single-figure deficit at this stage.

It didn't get thrown, it jumped in. And, unlike Cameron and Osborne who laid out austerity (such as it was) from the start, Starmer and Reeves didn't bother with anything like that. Which may not have been terribly clever.

I won't argue Starmer and Reeves seemed ill-prepared for coming into Government - perhaps they didn't brlieve the polls (some on here didn't) but we all knew the Conservatives were exhausted after 14 years running the Government - they were out of ideas and were reduced to kicking the poor old can down the poorly-maintained road.

Across a range of issues, it wasn't that the Conservatives tried things and got them wrong - they simply gave up trying, perhaps understandable after Covid but nonetheless countries can't drift on inertia which is why you change Government but the new Government faces the same problems and has to come up with responses if not solutions.

The problem is across a range of inter-connected and inter-dependent issues there are no easy solutions - at best, there are costly and unpopular schemes which might pay dividends a decade or more down the road but that's not how modern politics functions and so frustration sets in.

Adult social care is an enormous issue but neither Labour nor Conservatives have felt willing or able to tackle it despite big Parliamentary majorities. That's a damning indictment of where we are or rather where we aren't.