Best Of

Morning all

I may be in a minority of one on here but I think Kemi Badenoch is growing into the role a little and her poor start has been replaced by a more competent performance of late.

Unfortunately, the inepititude and incompetence of the last Conservative Government is as several millstones round her neck and as Thursday's by-election results showed, the challenge of Reform has left her party looking out of touch, out of date and out of time with such activists as remain demoralised. Look at the numbers from Woking and Wealden - two areas which were strongly Conservative not too long ago.

She is further hampered by having been part of the problem and it's hard when you've been part of the problem to be part of the solution. It took the election of David Cameron for the Conservative Party to escape the shadow of what had gone before.

As others have said, there's a space for a party to be honest with the electorate about the public finances but that honesty has to start with a substantial mea culpa regarding how we got into this mess and that includes the Covid response from Sunak and Hunt's pre-election NI cuts. Acknowledging you got things wrong is the first stage toward getting things right but Stride has to explain, if we are to balance the books, how this will happen, what will be cut, which taxes will be raised, the future of the Triple Lock, commitments on defence expenditure etc and that will involve saying a lot of things people don't want to hear now.

Hunt’s NI cuts were the most egregious piece of governmental electioneering since ... the previous piece of governmental electioneering.

But they do significantly damage Conservative claims to be the party of fiscal discipline: What fiscal discipline exactly?

Labour should have called the NI shit out on day one and reversed it there and then. That was their first test and they blew it.

Which brings us to a problem. Despite promising no increase to NI, IT or VAT Labour got just 33.7% of the vote.

Had they promised to increase taxes pretty sure they would have been sub 30%, at which point they may no longer have won a majority.

The public are quite clear, we want low taxes and high spending.

She quite frequently sets the agenda. Her problem is that whenever she does, it is on topics that remind voters that the Tories also failed to resolve them

From header: Rob J this week unleashed his inner Boris with a tweet surely conceived for the side of a bus:-

Yesterday a young man was murdered in broad daylight for his watch.

And now Starmer is on the verge of giving killers a 70% reduction on the full sentence.

The Tory government were warned that they would run out of prison places by the end of the year unless they did something to fix the problem. All they did was make a speech. The reason Starmer is having to reduce sentences is because the Tories did nothing to fix the prisons problem.

Labour have been in office for over a year now. What have they actually done in that time to build more prison places?

You think its just housing, infrastructure, investment and development that our ridiculous planning system holds up? Interesting.

There was a bit on PM on Thursday, I think, which explained that the additional regulator brought in after Grenfell to check buildings more than 18m high was holding up all such developments UK wide for more than a year because the regulator was "under resourced". We are our own worse enemies so often.

I've just come back from ten days in Montenegro. Apart from being marred by various small frustrations like cheating taxi drivers and triple digit temperatures in Podogrica, it was an improbably fascinating trip - a country, like so many in Eastern Europe, apparently split down the middle between following its heart, towards its Slavic brethren Serbia and Russia, and its head, towards NATO and civilised Europe.

As some commenters seem to appreciate my occasional postcards from foreign parts, I thought I'd share some thoughts:

- they use the Euro, and this has clearly trapped them in an unsustainably strong currency. Things feel much more expensive than they should for a developing country at the back end of Europe, unemployment is obviously very high (14% officially, youth unemployment 26%, in reality probably significantly higher)
- Russian influence EVERYWHERE. The most common petrol stations were Lukoil, many Russian banks (Sberbank etc) have branches in the towns, lots of signs in tourist areas where in Russian and the usual quota of Russian men obviously drunk by noon on the beaches
- but every Montenegrin ministry in the capital flies an EU flag alongside the Montenegrin one, and some fly NATO flags as well. So it's an odd mix. Their national symbol is the double-headed eagle, simultaneously facing west and east, which seems somehow appropriate to the country.
- the language situation is just as confused. Montenegrin itself is sort of a dialect of Serbian but sort of its own language. It only formally separated from Serbian in the 1990s. Most of the signs use the Latin script but some are in modified Cyrillic and a few are in English.
- the people I talked to are also a mix - they look Mediterranean rather than Slavic, though their language and culture are obviously basically Serbian. They drive better than you'd expect for a country that's next to Albania, and actually stop at pedestrian crossings, which was unexpected
- the US embassy in Podgorica is staggeringly ugly and larger than the former embassy in London on Grosvenor Square. For an obscure country of 600k, not a world power of 70m. God knows what Uncle Sam is thinking.
- the food is good if uninspired - classic Balkan fare of grilled meat, potatoes, sauces, soups, etc.

Anyway it was a good trip, though unfortunately I had to cut it short because of work. They won't become another Belarus as they are too far - geographically and culturally - from Russia but I will be interested to see if they can maintain their precarious national balancing act over the next couple of decades or if they will embrace the free world with all its problems and disappointments wholeheartedly.

Hmmm. Raynor Winn reverse ferret beginning ...

https://news.sky.com/story/the-salt-path-author-raynor-winns-fourth-book-delayed-13395448

One missing piece of information in the story is what on earth the husband was doing for income? If the illness is fake, he should have been working. Keeping up the mortgage on a 250000 house shouldn't have been too hard even with two low incomes - and recoverable even with the alleged fraud.

Middle class people with low incomes are a fascinating breed.

I don't know - I had never heard of them, despite seven figures of sales since 2018.

The latest book has been delayed. The statement is very blurb:

On Winter Hill sees Winn undertake the Coast to Coast walk in northern England, this time alone. “Despite 45 years of walking together, setbacks in her husband, Moth’s, health have led him to see his decline as inevitable, which Raynor refuses to accept”, according to the publisher’s description. “Feeling trapped, she is drawn north, like a migratory bird, seeking the peace and hope that walking brings her”.

The Coast to Coast is a great walk, but it's only 70 miles. Was not @JosiasJessop planning to do it on a pushbike in one day?

Nah, and certainly not on a pushbike!

For some reason the C-to-c is one trail I've got little interest in doing. I've walked all the national trails, aside from the Southern Upland, the Yorkshire Wolds, and a couple of recentish extensions to other trails, but the coast-to-coast leaves me cold. I don't know why.

When I was walking past St Bees Head on my coastal walk, I met some people descending the cliffs. They said proudly they'd just walked from Robin Hood's Bay in a couple of weeks. I replied I'd just come from there in ?five? months, but had come around the long way...

The question is whether I need to do the English Coastal Path when it opens - I've walked the coast before, but that wouldn't have been the 'official' trail, so probably doesn't count...

As it hapoens, I am currently walking the Cumbrian part with a friend (who is doing the whole thing). It's 190 miles coast to coast. The Cumbrian section has a lot of climbing up onto high moorland passes and then often steep descents. Often it is just you and the Herdwicks. You can go slightly off piste and do a few Wainwrights if you want to. Stunning scenery. My friend gets to Shap tonight, I'll be on my way home.