Best Of

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd7p7p4xdq9o

Shocking story. The new proposed law against drug gang cuckooing has a maximum sentence of 5 years - that is way too low, should be more, at least 20, if not life. I don't see a substantial difference to kidnapping which comes with maximum life sentencing.

I misread that as cuckolding !!

Where’s @Leon_VotedForStarmer when you need him !

Indeed, the site is much duller without him.

I beg to differ - there is nothing duller than that attention-seeker blathering on and on imo.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd7p7p4xdq9o

Shocking story. The new proposed law against drug gang cuckooing has a maximum sentence of 5 years - that is way too low, should be more, at least 20, if not life. I don't see a substantial difference to kidnapping which comes with maximum life sentencing.

I misread that as cuckolding !!

Where’s @Leon_VotedForStarmer when you need him !

Indeed, the site is much duller without him.

I beg to differ - there is nothing duller than that attention-seeker blathering on and on imo.

Well, you are free to ignore him but I find many of his observations thought provoking and interesting.

Interesting stuff in the FT about the gender divide in Makerfield polling. Notably that Survation have Burnham +3 with men and +17 with women. Which demonstrates the reason why this contest long ago stopped being competitive is because Reform picked a knobber and then tried to style it out.

Yes, but given that Farage created the Reform party and still largely owns it, they're kind of stuck with Nigel.

Oh, you meant their candidate in Makerfield?

(But seriously, folks... the question of why Reform keep picking terrible people as candidates isn't just down to bad luck or poor vetting. Something about the party systematically attracts a certain sort of worst person.

No, not every Reformer is awful, and other parties have awful people as well. But there's a definite pattern in the data.)

Not every Reformer is awful, true, but the last time I saw Kruger he was explaining Kenyon's interesting public stance towards Vorderman and looked like a hostage uncertain as to how exactly this mess had occurred to him and how on earth an upstanding Etonian evangelical finds himself temporising with a foot soldier of Geiseric.

Lots of decent people support Reform. Most of them have the limited sense required to do so at a substantial distance with a wary eye on the the exit. Potential candidates they are not.

Can you be a decent person and support Reform? Similar question to can you be a decent person and support MAGA

Yes, WRT Reform. Political imagination and scope varies. Many decent people find it hard to look at a big picture and are attracted to something which claims to be able to resolve immediate and local difficulties and appeal to a degree of legitimate self interest.

So, for example, a decent person might hear what Farage has said about ILR and be able to apply it to some notional group of benefits junkies and crooks, but not apply it to surgeons and engineers.

Politics is not most people's career or hobby. It is the job of those who seek power to communicate brilliantly to the non-political so as to keep the fanatics and extremes at bay. Which is why those in Labour who prefer power to opposition are clutching at the straw which is Burnham.

As to MAGA. No idea. Words fail me.

MAGA and Reform are the same thing. MAGA looks worse to our eyes here because its American context is alien to us. Both movements attract some people who are perfectly decent in their day to day behaviour and attitudes, just as other parties or movements that we might regard with horror now attracted support from decent enough people in the past.

A case study in why resisting reasonable development entirely can come back to bite you (if the developer ploy here works)? Work in the system to resist where you can, don't just pretend the system doesn't exist because you don't like it.

Council rejects 100 homes.

Developer wins appeal for 75 homes.

Developer then submits another 65 homes on the remaining land.

End result? Residents could get 140 homes instead of the original 100. Now they claim they’re being “picked on”.

https://nitter.poast.org/jakewg_/status/2063551764796752183#m

No sympathy for NIMBYs

What about local democracy?

Sadly I seem to repeat the same issue

we have the same population as France but 7 million fewer homes..

We've arrived at this point almost entirely by virtually unrestricted immigration and given the birth rate we could very easily shrink our population back again by making further immigration almost impossible.

That is a much better deal for almost everyone than continually concreting over the country to build horrible Barratt new builds without any accompanying infrastructure.

No more immigration, almost no more new housing, and in 15 years time housing will be affordable again. As a bonus, we can fill in the various holes in our labour force by redeployment of the people who are building houses to cope with immigration.

Here’s 170 you can redeploy already.

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/170-jobs-lost-historic-gateshead-34087173

Where to start;

No one is building homes to cope with immigration, we aren’t building enough homes because not enough people can afford new ones. Largely flatlining wages after inflation , higher prices and supply and demand mean there are too few buyers who can afford them.

If we stop immigration the average age will be 45 in 2040 with far too few young people and a rapidly ageing population. Are the pensioners going to build their own houses.


In this scenario under sixteens would drop from 18% to 14%, the working population from 62% to 55% and the over 67’s would grow from about 19% to 29%…

So dependency would go from roughly 2:1 to close to 1:1.

Hey Presto not only no need for new houses with a collapsed economy no money to build them either!

Peter.

We've spent 25 years trying the approach of allowing mass immigration to increase the working age population in the face of what would otherwise be a natural decline and it has led to poor productivity growth, stagnant wages, inflated asset values and political instability. It's about time the people who advocated it learned to have some humility.

We have had 25 years of large scale immigration.
We have increased the working age population.
We have so far managed to avoid the economic cliff edge of a naturally declining population.
We have had low productivity and low wage growth.

And you have abjectly failed to establish a causal link between them.

Other Countries with high immigration have had productivity growth; the US for one.

Developed Countries like Japan have had slow wage growth and little immigration.

Peter.

The onus isn't on me to prove a causal link. I have democracy on my side.

No you have Populism and what’s popular isn’t always right and what’s right isn’t always popular.

Essential you are adopting the Trumpian logic, that for something to be true the majority just has to believe it.

Much like his Meet the Press walk out. His evidence consisted of only what he believed, nothing more.

I am old fashioned, I like evidence based argument and still believe in objective truth.

Peter.

That’s not Trumpoan logic. It’s politics.

We’ve had governance by opinion poll for many years.

It hasn't worked very well.

So, you don't like democracy then?

The problem is people having factually wrong opinions. On immigration for example you can legitimately want less of it, or be comfortable with a high level. But it's a problem if people think that immigration is currently very high when it isn't, or that most new housing goes to immigrants when it doesn't, and politicians devise policies based on those demonstrably wrong perceptions.

I think your biggest problem (and that of your liberal ilk) is that you think you're always right - and any contrary opinion is therefore "wrong" - and are totally blind to the fact you have an ideology of your own; you genuinely think the facts support it.

I'd anchor that ideology around the complete fungibility of all individuals, and championing things like choosing your own identity and free movement regardless of any evidence of the social problems this causes.

We all suffer from cognitive bias, whether we are liberal or illiberal.
We get comfort from people who think like us and get frustrated by people who don't.
We all look for evidence that supports our views and ignore evidence that doesn't.
We all do.

The remedy is to be aware of that behaviour and actively manage it when it comes to evidence.

But our opinions also depend on our values and these are not evidence based but deeply and emotionally ingrained. It takes a lot to shift them.

So we can amicably disagree when it comes to values, but we shouldn't accept "alternative facts" when the evidence contradicts them.

My wife likes to say that I always think I am right, which she appears to find irritating. My response is always, of course I think I am right. Everybody thinks they are right. If I thought I was wrong I would have changed my mind. This is a criticism I really can't understand.

There is more than one way of thinking you are right, to do with both personality and underlying philosophy. Some people think they are right in ways which appear as if they are unchallengeable because of their personality. Others think they are right because they don't believe that the truths they have decided on are falsifiable in principle so not open to discussion.

Wives are probably the best judges of which faults we are most guilty of.

...

Your final comment: yes, that’s what I was thinking when I read those Labour MPs’ claims.

Much easier to blame a football match than admit the reality - they were not popular enough to win because they had overseen a total mess up of the economy. (Which was, in fairness, not entirely their fault.)

Just as the Labour left constantly blame the Falklands War for 1983, when actually it was mostly due to their own terrible mistakes.

The Longest Suicide Note In History was what created 1983.

I remember, as a child, a trade union activist on stage at the (televised) Labour conference arguing that the U.K. should leave NATO and the EEC and join COMECON and the Warsaw Pact.

The Falklands War made the Conservative majority a bit bigger.

Classic correlation not causation.

Is that the Falklands, Labour’s manifesto, or the size of the bribe paid to the official in question by Moscow?

Thank goodness with Labour jettisoning socialism we no longer have any politicians left who would trouser dirty Russian money.

There's plenty of socialism that isn’t like the comic Suicide Note manifesto.

It’s not a choice between unfettered capitalism and East Germany. As large numbers of social democratic parties have proved, around the world.

If the Labour Party had been selling the politics of, say, the German SPD, in 1983, them there would have been no split. And they might well have won a majority at the election.

Instead they chose East Germany.

Thatcher clearly led best PM polls in 1983 so likely would have won anyway

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd7p7p4xdq9o

Shocking story. The new proposed law against drug gang cuckooing has a maximum sentence of 5 years - that is way too low, should be more, at least 20, if not life. I don't see a substantial difference to kidnapping which comes with maximum life sentencing.

I misread that as cuckolding !!

Where’s @Leon_VotedForStarmer when you need him !

Indeed, the site is much duller without him.

I beg to differ - there is nothing duller than that attention-seeker blathering on and on imo.

Your final comment: yes, that’s what I was thinking when I read those Labour MPs’ claims.

Much easier to blame a football match than admit the reality - they were not popular enough to win because they had overseen a total mess up of the economy. (Which was, in fairness, not entirely their fault.)

Just as the Labour left constantly blame the Falklands War for 1983, when actually it was mostly due to their own terrible mistakes.

The Longest Suicide Note In History was what created 1983.

I remember, as a child, a trade union activist on stage at the (televised) Labour conference arguing that the U.K. should leave NATO and the EEC and join COMECON and the Warsaw Pact.

The Falklands War made the Conservative majority a bit bigger.

Classic correlation not causation.

Or post hoc ergo propter hoc as we say around here.

In Dundee?