Sunak was poor on Kunnessberg on BBC this morning then on Sky Starmer was uninspiringDon't want to go all Brecht here, but isn't the bigger problem, what the British electorate will vote for?
For the first time in my near 80 years I am politically homeless and am certain I am not alone
I will not join any political party again and frankly have no confidence we have any prospect of addressing our country's deep seated problems with the current politicians on offer
Not any more. Non-white leaders include the Prime Minister, a handful of Home Secretaries and recent Chancellors of the Exchequer and so on. Your own country's First Minister is another, and the Mayor of London.In England it is all about skin colour.Ooh, now there's a question. I was talking about what is sometimes referred to as the "Celtic nationalists" - plaid, SNP, the Shinners. But it's use in England I did not consider.Nationalist vs Unionist is an interesting one.Does unionism even exist in England? Union with whom? If the EU, then surely it is the antithesis of English nationalism, which most would identify with Brexiteers?
Clear enough in a Scottish context, but not in England, where for many unionism is effectively an expression of English nationalism.
I won't be able to answer questions until around 11am UK, so apologies. Any questions, please make them and I'll address them later. Hope that's ok. Thanks to @TSE and @rcs1000 for publishing ir
So, ideally, are we looking at 67,736,802 parties?An interesting piece. Examples of the graphs would have helped but I appreciate length is always an issue for a header.We need more than two parties of government. Far better is PR, where all strands of opinion can be voiced.
What the header, and indeed the discussion BTL, show is that it is increasingly difficult and complicated to classify someone's political beliefs in a broad category that carries a coherent meaning. One point that I think hasn't been made to date is that this is the reason that political parties have also become less coherent and disciplined.
So yesterday we had a former Tory Minister Chris Skidmore resigning because he doesn't think that the government should be issuing licences for fresh exploration in the North Sea. How do you classify that? According to Wiki he was Chairman of the Bow Group and a fellow of the Policy Exchange. He has been active in Tory politics since he was a teenager and supported Truss's Free Enterprise Group. An almost classic Tory but he has resigned the Whip and may soon be to resign his seat. If you can't create a tent big enough to include people like that how do you create a government?
Holding parties together in such an atmosphere is incredibly difficult creating governments that lack coherence, stability and a sense of purpose. I think that the politician who has proven to be the best at this in recent decades was Nicola Sturgeon but look what has happened since she left the scene. The famous SNP self discipline has collapsed and dissent is rife. This simply means that the SNP have fallen to earth and are in a similar position to most political parties.
We see this in the Commons. Both parties have an exceptional number of people who have been expelled or simply chosen to leave. In Labour's case this includes the former leader. In the last Parliament we had the likes of Ken Clarke expelled. What this means for the future is that any government elected with a small majority simply will not survive. There will be too many single issue obsessives who will split away.
One reason that I have never entered party politics for election (though have been a member of Labour 1994-2003, and Lib Dems 2013-present) is that my political views are incoherent. They really do not match any political party. I am a minority of one.
An interesting piece. Examples of the graphs would have helped but I appreciate length is always an issue for a header.We need more than two parties of government. Far better is PR, where all strands of opinion can be voiced.
What the header, and indeed the discussion BTL, show is that it is increasingly difficult and complicated to classify someone's political beliefs in a broad category that carries a coherent meaning. One point that I think hasn't been made to date is that this is the reason that political parties have also become less coherent and disciplined.
So yesterday we had a former Tory Minister Chris Skidmore resigning because he doesn't think that the government should be issuing licences for fresh exploration in the North Sea. How do you classify that? According to Wiki he was Chairman of the Bow Group and a fellow of the Policy Exchange. He has been active in Tory politics since he was a teenager and supported Truss's Free Enterprise Group. An almost classic Tory but he has resigned the Whip and may soon be to resign his seat. If you can't create a tent big enough to include people like that how do you create a government?
Holding parties together in such an atmosphere is incredibly difficult creating governments that lack coherence, stability and a sense of purpose. I think that the politician who has proven to be the best at this in recent decades was Nicola Sturgeon but look what has happened since she left the scene. The famous SNP self discipline has collapsed and dissent is rife. This simply means that the SNP have fallen to earth and are in a similar position to most political parties.
We see this in the Commons. Both parties have an exceptional number of people who have been expelled or simply chosen to leave. In Labour's case this includes the former leader. In the last Parliament we had the likes of Ken Clarke expelled. What this means for the future is that any government elected with a small majority simply will not survive. There will be too many single issue obsessives who will split away.
Mr Bates vs The Post Office: Justice secretary examining how to clear names of workers caught up in Horizon IT scandalThey showed it at exactly the right time - just after the festivities when people were still likely to be watching TV rather than being back at work and with nothing to compete. Plus some excellent marketing involving the actors - especially them saying that they didn't know anything about it, switched off on hearing "computers" but then got angry when they learnt the true story. It exactly mirrored how many people feel and was a brilliant way to get people to watch the drama.
https://news.sky.com/story/mr-bates-vs-the-post-office-justice-secretary-examines-how-to-clear-names-of-workers-caught-up-in-horizon-it-scandal-13043410
Huzzah for ITV.
On topic, I think we can still usefully divide political beliefs dichotomously, at least in the west, between people who most value Liberty and those who most value EqualityOnly if you see liberty as purely as an expression of rights around wealth and ownership. There are liberties which are valued higher in the centre and left, just as the right has a tendency to support the use of authoritarianism to protect its own liberties.
That division very roughly equals the old idea of the Right and the old idea of the Left
At extremes the desire for Liberty is reserved for certain groups, races, families, classes and becomes closer to Fascism or other far right ideas; on the left the extreme desire for Equality is allowed to trample over individual rights and becomes communism, Maoism or Wokeness
However the whole thing breaks down beyond that. Some on the right are green and europhile and religious some on the left are futurist and eurosceptic and atheist and so on
Lord knows how you organise all that. Perhaps it is a futile task
I suspect there was also a great deal of Ministerial pressure not to do anything to impact the Post Office's route to profits.My read is that when Vennells arrives she was genuinely willing to try and sort the situation out. But she surely unappreciated the scale of the disaster, assuming they were dealing with a small number of anomalies that could be resolved without diverting her from her course. Which is what she will have been told, up the line. But at some point - pretty obviously shortly before Second Sight were sacked - she realised the scale of the catastrophe she was sitting on.That is part of the explanation and an important factor. But I was responding to the claim that because it was in the public sector it had to declare its mistakes in full.But the Post Office during the key period (and since) was run by people brought in for their private sector expertise, who didn’t really understand what they were managing.It’s always heartwarming to see that some folk who have never worked in the public sector are so skilled they can instantly diagnose all the issues (which, mysteriously, always manage to conform to their personal prejudices) and propose a solution which usually involves a change to “the culture”."The big difference is that mistakes in the public sector have to be declared in full, whilst in the public sector they can usually be brushed under the carpet with the connivance of accountants and auditors."
Sigh…
The public sector is roughly as good (and as bad) at doing things as the private sector (with some minor variances, generally based on being able to offer market pay). The big difference is that mistakes in the public sector have to be declared in full, whilst in the public sector they can usually be brushed under the carpet with the connivance of accountants and auditors.
Didn't you mean the second "public sector" in that sentence to read "private sector"?
I would cite the Post Office as a riposte to that sentiment but you know that already. Plus listed companies have to make market announcement - I pile cite a few examples there too.
What we are looking at is a tragic confluence of private sector people focused on their key objective whilst not interested, or understanding, the environment they are in, supported by a load of career long public sector people trained to follow instructions and otherwise keep their heads down.
That has certainly not happened in the PO's case. If anything, partly to avoid embarrassing Ministers or at least Ministerial decisions and partly to permit the privatisation of Royal Mail, the unfolding problems were kept as quiet as possible for as long as possible, even to the extent of misleading courts and Parliament.
We can all see what the right thing to have done would have been. And I’m sure that 95% of us would swear that that’s what we would have done, in her position.
She will have found herself in a room full of senior people - long serving PO managers who understood things a lot better than her, maybe someone senior from Fuitisu still sowing misinformation, and - critically - some top lawyers who must have thought that they had a better than 50:50 chance of making the catastrophe go away with some disgraceful legal shenanigans, bankrupting the other party before the case got to a conclusion. As we can see, from both Wallis’s detailed account and the summary version dramatised by ITV, they very nearly succeeded. As it is, most of the money won by Bates and others went on legal costs.
Both the financial position of her business and her own personal reputation would have been trashed, had she come clean at that point - already being on record at the BIS SC and in the media as defending the PO position. So she had the choice between being honest and facing certain ordure, or gambling that she might make the whole thing go away.
We all know what the morally right thing to do was. But I’d bet that significantly less than 95% of us would have opted for the right path, put in her position.