Best Of

I am beginning to get the sense that while the majority of the public will not accept immigration at 600k per year, neither will they accept the outright racism we're seeing mainstreamed on the political right.

Mariella Frostrup, "I just don't know when we started dehumanising people to the extent that we do now"

>Huge clap<

*In response to Nadine Dorries's long rant on leaving the ECHR and using the Royal Navy to address Farage's Brexit Small Boats Arrivals*

"I find it really shocking"

"Imagine if nobody wanted to come here then we'd really be depressed by Britain as a nation"

"Of course it is an issue. But we've decreased our budget for international development"

"We have a completely shambolic asylum system"

"You talk about people coming here illegally, but what are the legal routes?"

"We still don't have proper legal routes"

Nadine Dorries, "We do"

Mariella Frostrup, "Explain. I'm a woman in Congo. I'm one of the 80,000 women who has been raped as a result of the conflict going on there. I need to escape. My family has been wiped out. What's my legal way of applying to join my sister who is in the UK?"

*Nadine Dorries goes silent*

"It is impossible, our system is broken"

"The way we talk about people trying to come here, and the way we completely ignore the dilemmas that they face. And the fact that we have been instrumental in a lot of those conflicts"

"What happened to Afghanistan? When we were determined that people from Afghanistan could come here because of the way they supported us during that war"

"And now we're talking about them as if they're rubbish on the street"

"I think it's a shame we're allowing Reform UK to set the tone and the agenda and the way we talk about illegal immigrants"

*Nadine Dorries is now biting her lips*

Another huge clap/m
https://x.com/implausibleblog/status/1981490881862451604

Well done PC . Thank heavens we won’t have to put up with the usual media mass fellation of Farage and Reform . Thoughts and prayers for Chris Mason who must be devastated this morning !

Clearly there is such a thing as a personal vote and it is good that voters have given a chance to someone who has stood by the seat for over 40 years. That should not be under-estimated.

But a VERY BAD night for polling however it is dressed up. This can give little confidence that polling is anything more that electioneering in other ways. My guess would be that if PC had just picked a usual candidate then Reform would have come closer or even won: there would not have been as high a turn out.

Now I don't know PC like the other parties but if it is anything like Ref, Con, LD or Lab then the only reason the successful candidate was allowed to stand was because the party nationally thought the seat was a no hoper.

It will be fun to see that Nigel won't have time to do any media interviews today !!! But it does look as if some natural Labour supporters thought Ref was a vote too far, being a home for de-selected Tories.

There is more electoral turmoil to come but on this as so many things Mrs T was right. "When all else fails voters do the right thing".

I missed this (but called it ages ago)....even if they don't do it, its clear that they have no original ideas and so its just in the filing cabinet and pulling out all the treasury favs that have been worked on in the past. ID Cards, Pay Per Mile....

Rachel Reeves 'looking at' pay-per-mile car tax for 1.3 million drivers
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/motoring/motoring-news/rachel-reeves-looking-at-pay-32717948

TBF there are only so many possibilities. I'm sure that for any one proposal, some Greek philosopher thought of it 2500 years ago.

ID cards and Pay Per Mile come up as often as Home Office Isn't Fit for Purpose.....its clearly the go to when a minister goes policy, need a policy.

They have to find some way of measuring road usage by proxy. What is the alternative to pay per mile?

Make a road usage tax / congestion charge based on passing through congested intersections. Britain already has cameras everywhere so you can implement it like this:

- You need a ticket to pass through each intersection
- If you get caught passing through an intersection without a ticket you get fined, similarly to the way you get fined if you're caught by a speed camera
- Tickets are sold via an API on a government-run website, and also issued on a public blockchain so they'll still work when the government-run website is down. Once you have a ticket you can assign it to a car numberplate, again on either the government-run website via its API or a public blockchain
- Let the free market figure out the software for buying tickets and assigning them to numberplates to make sure you always have one by the time your car reaches an intersection

And my 78-year-old Mum says what, when she’s taken to court for thousands for something she didn’t know about and doesn’t understand?