Best Of

Op-ed in the Jerusalem Post.

The only way Israel can govern the Gaza Strip without becoming an external oppressor of “another people” is to remove “the other people” from the confines of the Gaza Strip itself.
https://x.com/Jerusalem_Post/status/2037794771058495738

Once all other solutions have been eliminated, then whatever is left ...

The good news is there are plenty of Muslim countries in the region people could go to. The bad news, is none of them want them.

So you’re saying this is the final solution to the Palestine question ?

No, I would not accept your implied gas chambers or executing of innocents.

But the movement of people has successfully ended many a conflict. Including the movement of Germans post WWII, and recently the exodus of Nagorno-Karabakh.

If it could be done peacefully, it might be the least worst option, considering the lack of stomach to eliminate Hamas.

I agree. If the settlers in the West Bank would agree to move to Gaza (very nice seaside location) and the Gazaians move to the West Bank to live unmolested with their brother Palestinians, it would be a good solution.

Zia Yusif confirms Reform are the NIMBY party.

Every party is the NIMBY party. They talk a game at national level. But then…

Which is why I predict that the attempts at increasing house building from Starmer will be u-turned after May.

One of the squares the Green will need to make into a circle is their strong NIMBYism locally, with the massive support for house building and infrastructure among the young.

'...the massive support for house building and infrastructure among the young.' 50% of voters aged 18-24 and 62% of voters aged 25-49 oppose building new housing on 'green belt land' not massively lower than the 76% of over 65s who oppose building new homes on the greenbelt. 64% of 2024 Green voters and 59% of 2024 Labour voters oppose building new homes on the greenbelt.

63% of 18-24s may generally support more new homes being built in their local area but even over 65s narrowly agree with that by 47% to 46%,
https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/documents/Copy_of_Internal_HouseBuilding_240709.pdf

Labour's core vote is about as YIMBY as you can get- if they can't get housebuilding happening, we really are stuffed.

(Meanwhile, of course Reform are NIMBY. Older homeowners, many of them via RTB, whose main asset is their house which was way cheaper when they bought it.)

Yimby and environmentally conscious

Which is why the Tory energy policy to be launched tomorrow is fundamentally dangerius, pointless, built on false logic and from a Party who utterly spaffed up and wasted the golden bonus from the peak North Sea days and then exacerbated their utter ineptitude by doing nothing in 14 years in power worthwhile to secure our energy future.

@Richard_Tyndall who is in the industry comprehensively debunked your comments on this

Kemi is leading on this with the support of the unions,SNP, upto 40 labour mps and others

Your anti Kemi views are well known but repeating fake news is sadly, your modus operandi

Others who are experts within the industry and with billions invested within the industry do not agree with Richard Tindall.

Thats a fact

As for Kemi, her shadow energy secretary had a polar opposite view in Government to Kemi now

Kemi is Kemi

A foghorn, she's well suited to the North Sea is is simply irrelevant.

I understand she's staying at Trumps Golf Course near Aberdeen

I hope she remembers to declare that.

I've looked up Richard Tyndall

With respect

He's made his living working on Oil Rigs

Drill baby Drill

Respect the knowledge but he's hardly likely to advocate as stopping drilling

It a bit like the guy who pulls the guillotine being pro capital punishment.

For the last few years I have made my living shutting down oil fields. I actually make a much better living shutting them down than I did drilling them. We are in the process of abandoning a field that still has 1 billion barrels of recoverable oil in it. One field. How stupid do you have to be to think that is a good idea?

And for the last 20 odd years on PB I have advocated stopping burning fossil fuels because they are too imprtant for too many other aspects of our modern life.

If you are going to go for the ad hominem attacks, again it helps if you actually get your basic facts right. You should try it some time, it might be a new experience for you.

You protesteth too nuch

Oil is a commodity that has had its time.

There could be 10 billion barrels it's still unprofoitable to drill and pump and to be sold at extortionate prices to the detriment of a climate that has been destroyed by fossil fuel extraction and burning.

Yes - the stone age didn't end when we ran out of stone.

The oil age won't end by us running out of oil.
There will still be oil left in the ground. It will be uneconomic to recover it.
That could be quite soon for most oil.
There will be a residual need for oil (pharmaceuticals, maybe plastics) just as there is a residual need for stone (roads, buildings).
But the oil age will end soon.

There will come a time when we won't burn oil and gas for energy. I hope that time is quite soon. But it is not yet and the only reason we are leaving billions of barrels of oil in the ground in the North Sea is because of idiotic government ideology which claims it is better for the environment to use foreign oil and gas than it is to use our own.

If you want to cut usage then deal with demand, not supply. All you are doing is making more pollution and paying more for the privilege.

Goodwin doubling down on his race baiting dishonesty.

In more than 2,000 schools in England today a majority of children no longer speak English as their main language. My critics might not think that tells us something important about what is happening to our country. But I do. And I will not change my view
https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/2037792677266162089

He has become the country's leading stand up philosophers.

https://youtu.be/tl4VD8uvgec?si=-zeqAGOvHiABpLhw

Incidentally I wonder whether he has checked to remove private international schools from that list?

https://www.bell-foundation.org.uk/app/uploads/2017/05/EALachievementStrand-1.pdf appears to be the primary source of this.

The study states that they included "maintained, mainstream schools"

Thanks.

That gives 1,681. Goodwin says "more than 2,000".

The study was from 2015, using data from 2013. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the number has increased by that much, given the amount if immigration in the last 13 years.

OK, and we can trust Goodwin has this data and has checked it?

I would trust Goodwin less far than I can throw him (Mental note, arm day at the gym),

But just because he is an arsehole, doesn't mean that there are not facts here.

From some googling around, it seems there is a claim that the number is 2039 - allegedly based on a FOI from the DfE. Which I can't find online.

Poor old Matt, the former Professor Goodwin.

Having written about the far right, seems to have fallen victim to some weird kind of Stockholm Syndrome through association, and signed up.

Then persuaded to fling himself into rhe furnace of the Gorton & Denton by-election. Now all that's left are the charred remains of his academic reputation and his political ambitions.

Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

An aspect underrated in all this is that it is fairly clear there are significant career opportunities on the parapolitical front. The portfolio of conferences, publications, traditional media appearances, other mainstream journalism and social media is, I suspect, a fairly prosperous one. Plus in some cases the possibility of being PM or CoE or something if you happen to get all your ducks in a row at the right time.

This is not a criticism as such, though I am otherwise critical of Goodwin and would rather he had used his academic gifts - which IMO were real - to be more like John Curtice, who seems to do both academia and quality comment brilliantly instead of Farage's tame intellectual.

When Goodwin was telling us in decent books that populism has causes, and needs to be understood, and that the mainstream political class has failed in many ways he had a genuine and decent purpose.

Goodwin doubling down on his race baiting dishonesty.

In more than 2,000 schools in England today a majority of children no longer speak English as their main language. My critics might not think that tells us something important about what is happening to our country. But I do. And I will not change my view
https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/2037792677266162089

He has become the country's leading stand up philosophers.

https://youtu.be/tl4VD8uvgec?si=-zeqAGOvHiABpLhw

Incidentally I wonder whether he has checked to remove private international schools from that list?

https://www.bell-foundation.org.uk/app/uploads/2017/05/EALachievementStrand-1.pdf appears to be the primary source of this.

The study states that they included "maintained, mainstream schools"

Included, or only included?

From page 25

"We used the School Level Database (SLD) from the ASC January 2013 to examine the
variation in the proportion of EAL students at the school level. We selected all maintained,
mainstream schools in England. Additionally we eliminated 32 very small maintained schools
(10 or fewer students on roll). The resulting population contained 20,033 schools."

Ok, thanks. So they don't know the difference between maintained schools and academies. That's a rocky start in terms of their credibility.

From a quick googling around, there were a couple of thousand academies in 2013.

Edit : the report is from 2015 and doesn't seem to have an axe to grind over immigration. More about identifying areas where support is required.

Further Edit: they say - "Almost a quarter of all schools (22.1%) have less than 1% EAL, and over half (54%) have less than 5% of student with EAL. However at the other extreme 1,681 schools (8.4%) have a majority of students with EAL. This does not support headlines such as that in the Daily Telegraph (31/01/14) that "English is no longer the first language for the majority of pupils at one in nine schools"

Right, so it's not the survey, it's Goodwin misusing it by presenting out of date material. I withdraw my slur on their credibility.

I think it entirely possible that if a study found 1681 schools were found to have a majority on non-english speakers in 2013, that in 2026 the number is higher.

Given that we have had lots of immigration in the last 13 year, probably inevitable. If you import lots of furriners, then you'll get lots of people talkiin' the furrin.

So we just need to make sure we put enough resources into getting them up to speed in English. Which, according to the report has a direct, definite and completely unsurprising effect on educational attainment.

Edit: Goodwin is still Badfail, of course.

The report is interesting, and worth reading.

And, yes, it is entirely possible -probable even- that the number of schools where English is not the first language has risen since 2013. However, what is likely to have changed significantly is who the parents are. Back in 2013, a lot of those parents (and kids) will have been from the EU Eastern European 8. Because that was where the majority of immigration was from.

13 years later, we've left the EU, and net immigration from Eastern Europe is -IIRC- currently negative.

Instead we've had the Boriswave, bringing mostly people from outside Europe. And I suspect that those immigrants have settled in different parts of the country.

So there might well be an interesting 'switch' in where the majority non-English students are.

(As an aside: I went to a majority non-English speaking school in Bedford. All my friends from there who spoke Urdu/Gujerati/etc at home when kids, speak English at home now. So their kids won't be from English as a second language kids.)

Goodwin doubling down on his race baiting dishonesty.

In more than 2,000 schools in England today a majority of children no longer speak English as their main language. My critics might not think that tells us something important about what is happening to our country. But I do. And I will not change my view
https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/2037792677266162089

He has become the country's leading stand up philosophers.

https://youtu.be/tl4VD8uvgec?si=-zeqAGOvHiABpLhw

Incidentally I wonder whether he has checked to remove private international schools from that list?

https://www.bell-foundation.org.uk/app/uploads/2017/05/EALachievementStrand-1.pdf appears to be the primary source of this.

The study states that they included "maintained, mainstream schools"

Thanks.

That gives 1,681. Goodwin says "more than 2,000".

The study was from 2015, using data from 2013. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the number has increased by that much, given the amount if immigration in the last 13 years.

OK, and we can trust Goodwin has this data and has checked it?

I would trust Goodwin less far than I can throw him (Mental note, arm day at the gym),

But just because he is an arsehole, doesn't mean that there are not facts here.

From some googling around, it seems there is a claim that the number is 2039 - allegedly based on a FOI from the DfE. Which I can't find online.

Poor old Matt, the former Professor Goodwin.

Having written about the far right, seems to have fallen victim to some weird kind of Stockholm Syndrome through association, and signed up.

Then persuaded to fling himself into rhe furnace of the Gorton & Denton by-election. Now all that's left are the charred remains of his academic reputation and his political ambitions.

Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

A skidmark on the underpants of British politics

Least surprising news of the year was the fact Police found no evidence of the electoral fraud he claimed cost him victory. Turns out the explanation of the REFUK defeat was rather easier to identify - an inept candidate who refused to meet the voters. Not that you'd have seen it on the 'news sources' that broadcast his pathetic inventions of course