Best Of

In May 2026, if the Tories get pummelled, but Labour gets eviscerated, will that give Kemi more breathing space?

The issue in May is how the Conservatives do against Reform. If there is some evidence that Reform is stalling against the Tories but making headway still against Labour, the Conservative Party should give her another year.

How would you identify that - reality is the Tories are going to lose a pile of seats (most of them) and reform are going to win a whole lot of councils..

The only upside is that our local elections are in 2027 by which time it should be obvious that Reforms local authority management isn't exactly improving things elsewhere,

London has all out elections next year most of England doesn't. Reform do worst in London and the Stamp Duty cut will go down well there.

Scotland and Wales have elections too but while Reform will do well in Wales they are unlikely to do as well in Scotland

Yes, the problem is these are local council elections and the last time I looked it wasn't Newham or Bromley or Richmond Councils who set the stamp duty rate. There's also the other small problem a) Labour might shoot the Conservatie fox and abolish Stamp Duty themselves and b) even if they don't, the implementation of the Stamp Duty abolition might not be until 2029 so why should people vote for a party promising something they have no power to enact for another three years?

Spurious logic at best.

Worth remembering you can still get a starter property in parts of London for under £300k which is the threshold for the levying of stamp duty on purchases for first time buyers. For example, there are one bedroom flats in East Ham and Beckton available for £200-£250k (10 years ago, they were barely £100k which tells you a lot).

I'd also add a lot of first time buyers in London are looking for rental property and anecdotally I think we are seeing some demographic and ethnic changes in my part of the world as a result of the new developments of leasehold flats going up in Barking and Ilford.

Just a question about the Badenoch proposal - is it only on the purchase of primary residences? I assume so but of course that won't stop those wishing to accumulate property buying them in the name of relatives etc.

Labour are of course whacking
up taxes further in their Budget this autumn not cutting them.
East Ham and Barking never elect Tory councillors anyway, it is voters in areas like Westminster, Wandsworth, Barnet, Richmond upon Thames Kemi will have targeted with her Stamp Duty cut and yes it is focused on primary residences

Why do you only ever look at policies for their political benefit, rather than what’s good for the country? Maybe that’s part of our national malaise.

Any party which ignores its own core vote and does not put its people first is doomed to extinction

Which is why as I pointed out in the first post of this thread - the Tories are headed for extinction... Since 2016 they've ignored their core vote to deliver Brexit regardless of everything else..

The reason the Tories are heading for extinction has nothing to do with Brexit imo.

Hard to say. The Tories are heading for extinction because of their psychodramas mostly about Europe rather than focusing on what-works policies, and the related rise of Farage.

If they hadn't destroyed themselves with Brexit would they have invented something else? Maybe.

It wasn't Brexit which destroyed them, it was removing Boris before the last GE.

Even when Boris resigned as PM the Conservatives were polling 30% and ReformUK were polling at less than 5% in the polls

How many times

Boris destroyed Boris all by himself and you need to move on

Huzzah, I already do this with some Royal Mail, Amazon, and DPD parcels/deliveries/returns.

Why Royal Mail could axe stamps and addresses on letters

Handwritten envelopes may become a thing of the past as the new boss moves to modernise the business

In a world of supercomputers, artificial intelligence and social media, writing a postal address feels something of an anachronism.

Martin Seidenberg says that technology is evolving and that could revolutionise the sending of letters and parcels. Customers are already able to buy postage online, but in future customers may be able to input a recipient’s address and then an alpha-numeric code could be spat out that can be popped on any given letter or parcel.

Will you need to write the address as well? “For now, yes,” responds the boss of Royal Mail’s parent company. He clams up when asked for further details, but it’s too late. Seidenberg has given the game away with the “for now” — but then this is all very early stage thinking.

https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/companies/article/royal-mail-stamps-addresses-letters-ts7vrhtf2

HANDWRITING.

Already machine readable, usually. Postcode plus street number does the job.

Yet another enshittification to make life more miserable for many old, ill, poor, or incapacitated people, if it's anything like compulsory. How many people have printers that do sticky labels?

Like it seems to cost more to post from a post office than online already.

And at the receiving end, how does one know if one has the right post, and what neighbour to give it to when misdelivered?

Loss of a key redundancy (in the positive sense of back-up) in the system.

We don't often agree, but we do here.

We need more humanity and human interaction, not more smartphones and AI.

I'm not a luddite, but it does feel like we're at a point in many areas where people are having to mould to fit the convenience of systems and algorithms, rather than the other way around.

Good morning

This is a very good and profound article by the Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/12/france-crisis-political-faith-belief-democratic-world-vanishing?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

It's a good part 1 of an article. It defines the problem well; the sort of steady improvement that defined the postwar years and made government relatively easy has slowed or stopped in most of the western world.

What's happening now is much much harder to manage. Even if it's not really a loss, it sure feels that way, and we're not used to it, and aren't yet ready to vote for it.

Hence the siren calls of populism, whether that's Polanski or Farage or Trump or Sultana. One weird trick to make everything right, and the only people who will suffer deserve it really. Which would be great, except it never blooming works.

So what might work? Wish I knew, because it would save western democracy. The nearest I have to a conclusion is that we have a duty to each other and to the future, that taxes are how those of us who are successful repay our debt to the society and the fates who made us that way, and that is best expressed politically as a mix of liberal conservatism and mild social democracy. It's not perfect (if it were, we wouldn't be having this problem) but everything else is objectively worse.

That's the hard bit, the part two that's missing. Deep down, most of us know what needs to be done. How to get people to vote for it... that's another matter.

Happy news! The BBC are showing the 112min version of "Alien", which was the theatrical release, not the 116min version which the BFI were showing some days ago. The theatrical release doesn't contain the cocooned Dallas scene which I hate.

(PS Good article @MoonRabbit . I enjoyed it but was surprised it came from a Conservative. People are always surprising. )

It was easy to write. It’s defending an act that not only is working well, but is a Conservative creation in the Conservative Party’s guardians of the environment as well as businesses best friend image. Cameron strengthened the original bill, both with opposition amendments when LOTO and as PM, May renewed it from 80% to 100% (net zero).

It was easy to write as my dad clearly a One Nation Conservative Party Member, and we have been discussing it together all week and I completely agree with him - axing it is mindless vandalism.

It was very difficult to write despite knowing what I wanted to say, but use English Grammer correctly to write it. I didn’t bother to go into English Gramma lessons, I knocked off those to watch horse racing with gran. It was hours of chopping and changing it. I’m pleased it kick started strong “on topic” discussion with interesting new learning points coming from all different angles on the subject.

I see Haaland has done his bit to support the World Cup boycott of Israel by scoring a hat trick against them.

Israel contributed two own goals.

Classic Jewish guilt.

The absolute best Jewish joke (because whatever you think of them they have a mean line in humour) is the one they use in “Coming to America”.

I was in a restaurant and the waiter brought me my soup. I called him back and said, Waiter there’s something wrong with my soup. The waiter said, “it’s chicken broth like you ordered sir” and I said no, it’s wrong. The waiter said, “sir your soup is perfectly fine and what you ordered” I said no, you are wrong. So the waiter said “ok sir, pass me a spoon” and I said “ah-ha”.

This person needs the joke explained, I'm afraid.

The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.

@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.

Talking of fundamentally dishonest, here’s a global SSTA history from the 19th century to now.



The banning of marine sulphates occurred in 2020. It’s clearly had a very impressive retrospective effect on temperatures since 1900.

1900-2020 being of course a period during which marine sulphate emissions increased exponentially. Yet still the oceans warmed. Weird, eh! I wonder what on earth might have caused that?

I don't doubt the trend, but I do have some scepticism about data sets that proclaim accuracy back to the 1850s for this sort of data, especially globally.

If only the 19th Century had a global power stationing scientists all around the world. Oh wait, it did – Britain.

Indeed we did. They were not necessarily out at sea all the time measuring sea temperatures to within a fraction of a degree. And the people that were measuring water temperatures - e.g. steamships via the bucket method - were not interested in fractions of a degree. Or even to the nearest degree.

I am not saying that water temperatures are not increasing. I just wish there was some realism about historic data in this sort of context.

This is a *fascinating* study on the accuracy of bucket sampling.
https://os.copernicus.org/articles/9/683/2013/os-9-683-2013.pdf

From the conclusion:
"Accurate temperatures can be obtained with either the bucket or intake method. However, measurements cannot be expected to be of high accuracy or precision when obtained by untrained sailors using poorly-calibrated, low-resolution thermometers"

Does it matter exactly what the temperatures are? Surely it's the trend which matters?

Yes and no. The trend does indeed matter; but the trend can be obscured if the data is obtained by a different, more accurate method. That link's quite interesting for showing the way that buckets (including different bucket types) and engine intake temperatures can vary - and that's in a modernish context.

Again, I'm not saying ocean temperatures are not rising.

Partly it's a question of when people formed their ideas on all this climate stuff.

Until... 2000 or so? it was just about possible to squint at the data and say "variations, cycles, uncertainty" and conclude that there might not be a problem. (It was a stretch, but not an impossible one).

Add the points since then and that is infinitely less credible. Even if sulfate reduction has given a bit more of an uptick in the last few years.

Another thing. The Bjørn Lomborg thesis boiled down to the idea that the world should get richer, so it could afford to deal with global warming. Sort of arguable then, but less so now.

The trouble is you only need the weakest counter arguments, the tiniest bit of grit in the system, and the status quo will reassert itself. Combating climate change is like trying to build HS2. There’s always a reason to curtail it or delay it. We’re heading for the net zero equivalent of terminating at Old Oak Common.

Every time one denialist talking point is debunked, another one comes along. Often a recycled one that was already debunked.

Marc Seguin’s - inventor of the wire-cable suspension bridge - famous bridge over the Rhone, now pedestrians only, with the renowned Hermitage vineyards on the hillside behind. Sadly, DFS doesn’t like wooden bridges where you can see water below between the planks, and does look rather terrified here.

Why did you name your dog after a sofa shop that has constantly got a sale running?

Crap sofas as well; we bought one years back, and had to dump it just a few years later. So we then invested in some handmade Ilford sofas, which are still going strong twenty years later…mind you, I rarely use them as sitting on the floor is way more healthy, especially for us older folks

The sofa in our lounge is one my parents' bought in the early 80s; I remember buying it, as we had to drive to Nottingham to order it, and I was worried we would not be back in time for "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century". It is quite heavy, with a solid frame, and has been reupholstered at least once. Quality lasts.

We're still using the Ercol suite my parents got as a wedding present, getting on for sixty years ago. Which does feed back into the energy conversation. Something in the British psyche is really bad at processing "this is pricey upfront, but will save loads over decades."

If I may rant for a minute, we've had two appliances, a dishwasher and a washing machine, break irreparably in the last two yeas, just outside their warranties. One was Bosch, so should be reasonable quality. I'm generally a positive person, but it does sometimes feel like there's a general enshittification of consumer goods.

Whenever my dishwasher breaks down I dump her and pull a new one.