Best Of

Ben Stokes is, by some measures one of England's greatest ever Test cricket captains.

I'm amazed that we seem to be poised to throw that away over an issue with alcohol.

Clearly Ben Stokes and Gus Atkinson are the victims and should not be punished.

Full story on Stokes-Saracens incident

* Rugby player understood to have thrown a punch at Gus Atkinson but connected with ECB security guard supervising the players

* ECB sources are adamant the cricketers were “not the aggressors” at Chelsea nightclub

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2026/06/08/ben-stokes-gus-atkinson-nightclub-incident-new-zealand-test/

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.

Nato is not defensive. It is responsible for the destruction of Afghanistan and Libya and a key tool of US imperialism, the greatest threat to peace in the world.


Discuss!

https://socialistworker.co.uk/in-depth/why-britain-should-leave-nato/

As Afghanistan and Libya were such beautiful paradises of human rights under the Taliban and Bin Laden and Gaddafi of course

You missed the comment on Polanski. He's certainly tacking leftwards at a rate of knots.

The Labour Party is outraged that newly-elected Green leader Zack Polanski “seeks to undermine our membership of Nato”. Here’s hoping he does.

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.

Totally, my contention is that category of people think they're someone immune from it.

A bit more humility wouldn't go amiss.

My contention is that there should be a greater respect for demonstrable measurable facts. "Humility" in accepting incorrect facts because people believing them are somehow deemed more sincere than I am is not something I subscribe to. Guilty as charged I suppose.

I agree with that, and yet it is insufficient.

People generally do not make decisions or choices on the basis of a rational evaluation of well-attested facts. They make a judgement, based on part on facts, or perceptions of them, at least, but in a greater part on other factors. On feelings, values and belief.

One of the corrosive impacts on political disorder has been the attempt but politicians to frame debate in terms of fact so that disagreement with them is impossible. But it's rare that the facts are such that a specific policy response is unavoidable. There are almost always choices based on values, or some degree of a guess about how the future might unfold.

I suspect the impact of the 1970 world cup on the General Election is a myth.

Immigration and economics drove it. And the inaccurate opinion polls probably depressed Labour voter turnout a little bit.

It's possible that the national euphoria of a win might have won a few more votes, but the height of hubris for a government to expect the win as their due, in any event.

The anecdotes in the header suggest a naive (or in Jenkin's case, arrogant) belief about how interested the average person is in politics:
..On the Monday morning Howell and home secretary and aesthete Roy Jenkins, held a massed factory-gate meeting in Birmingham: “Roy was totally bemused that no question concerned either trade figures nor immigration, but solely the football..

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?

The Labour Party, at that point was on a course to merry self destruction, based on a spiral of ideological purity to ever more socialism. Completely ignoring the wishes of the voters.

Hence the SDP.

The main opposition party self destructing was the reason the main opposition party got a rather low vote in the general election.

The official in question almost certainly wasn’t paid by Moscow. The KGB called such people Useful Idiots. They would do whatever Moscow wanted, without instruction or pay.

Thank goodness there's nobody like that now.

It would be terrible to have a Useful Idiot running a powerful country.

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.

Totally, my contention is that category of people think they're someone immune from it.

A bit more humility wouldn't go amiss.

My contention is that there should be a greater respect for demonstrable measurable facts. "Humility" in accepting incorrect facts because people believing them are somehow deemed more sincere than I am is not something I subscribe to. Guilty as charged I suppose.

That sentiment reminds me of the fantastic novella "The Machine Stops". Well worth reading. Predates WWI yet predicts instant communication, over reliance on technology, and a sedentary lifestyle with more interaction with strangers (ahem) than people we know and see in reality.

Adapted by the BBC in 1966.

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?

The Labour Party, at that point was on a course to merry self destruction, based on a spiral of ideological purity to ever more socialism. Completely ignoring the wishes of the voters.

Hence the SDP.

The main opposition party self destructing was the reason the main opposition party got a rather low vote in the general election.

The official in question almost certainly wasn’t paid by Moscow. The KGB called such people Useful Idiots. They would do whatever Moscow wanted, without instruction or pay.

Thank goodness there's nobody like that now.

It would be terrible to have a Useful Idiot running a powerful country.

Trump’s not really that useful.

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.

Totally, my contention is that category of people think they're someone immune from it.

A bit more humility wouldn't go amiss.

My contention is that there should be a greater respect for demonstrable measurable facts. "Humility" in accepting incorrect facts because people believing them are somehow deemed more sincere than I am is not something I subscribe to. Guilty as charged I suppose.

That sentiment reminds me of the fantastic novella "The Machine Stops". Well worth reading. Predates WWI yet predicts instant communication, over reliance on technology, and a sedentary lifestyle with more interaction with strangers (ahem) than people we know and see in reality.