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Sleazy does it – politicalbetting.com
Sleazy does it – politicalbetting.com
Boris Johnson has said the UK is "not remotely a corrupt country", but the British public resoundingly disagree. 80% think corruption is either fairly (40%) or very (40%) present in British politics. Only 1% think there is no corruption at allhttps://t.co/SZd3FDoiiN pic.twitter.com/0oI36OWpgP
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Though difficult for him, I guess.
A week or two?
So reform must begin with a more open electoral system. If greater competition benefits the economy, why would it not be a good thing in politics? In the House of Commons we have the ultimate closed shop with the most extreme Spanish practices and which delivers huge "majorities" often regardless of how the voters actually vote. Unless this is changed then the system will continue to deliver sub par MPs and these MPs neither offer accountability for themselves nor can they themselves hold Whitehall or Downing St to account. The fact that neither the Monarchy not the House of Lords has democratic accountability (which is a deliberate feature, not a bug) means that a PM with a solid majority has untramelled power to do what they like. Again, an open electoral system would mean that Downing St would have to account for itself.
Any constitutional or political reform without reform to the voting system is a pointless distraction.
A great narrative piece in the ft (free to read) about suicide. 3x as many people die from suicide vs road accidents.
Come on Britain. We can do better than this.
If Einstein was right in his theory of General relativity then the centre of the Earth is two and a half years younger than the surface.
I've got a holiday booked in London for the end of the month.
Or maybe Harry.
Ok. Maybe not the second.
So few of us can remember what it is like when a monarch passes.
eg Do we all immediately switch to "God Save the King"? Or do we wait until Chuck is crowned, or what?
It is automatic.
The crowning bit is largely irrelevant. Although certain oaths need to be said in order to cement it regarding upholding church of england iirc.
The Queen is Dead, Long Live the King
I kind of like the instant automaticity of it. But I am a monarchist
Of course, people hadn’t been expecting it, and the Heir was young and represented something new.
I met a chap at a gig in London about 15 years ago called Weston Gavin. He's a folk musician and an actor. I've met him at least 20 times since, mostly at gigs but have also met up with him for drinks, met his daughters with him, sung with him on the streets in Soho (just for fun but some people thought we were busking!), and cooked for him once. He's a really lovely old guy and has the most amazing stories.
He was born in 1935, and when he was three years old folk music legend Woody Guthrie stayed with his parents for a while, and he consequently grew up knowing Guthrie well which got him seriously into music. He signed for Epic in the mid 50s and released a few songs under the name Jimmy Gavin.
This one is called Hitchhiking Man, and was released in 1956 - the year before Buddy Holly released That'll Be The Day, his first big hit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBwyf6hcQnQ
He was performing in clubs in Greenwich Village into the early 60s (he shared a bill with John Lee Hooker in 1960 for a couple of weeks), when Dylan moved to New York to meet Woody Guthrie who was very ill in hospital. Weston is sure that Dylan came to at least two of his shows before anyone knew who Dylan was, and he went to Dylan's first NYC show (he wasn't impressed, and thought him a rather derivative Guthrie impersonator, but luckily Dylan got better!)
Still under the name Jimmy, he was in a folk music/comedy duo called Turtles who in 1964 shared a bill at the Bitter End club with Cass Elliot and the Three Ts (which evolved into the Mugwumps, which split into the Lovin Spoonful and the Mamas and the Papas, the story of which is told in the Ms&Ps Creeque Alley). He released another song that was a minor hit in the UK in the mid 60s called I Sit In My Window, but then got more into his acting.
He's probably most famous as the mugger in Superman who mugs Clark and Lois, and shoots at Clark who catches the bullet. But he's been in quite a lot of other stuff, including a fair bit of British TV; he was in a couple of episodes of a show from 1986 called Lost Empires with Colin Firth.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0310545/
I haven't seen him in a few years but we're friends on facebook and I'll definitely be letting him know when I'm next going to a gig in London as it'd be great to catch up.
The Rozzers will be needed elsewhere.
But just because that might be so does not mean lower level stuff and the collapse of standards should be treated complacently - because if we allow people to get away with that it makes to more blatant stuff much more likely to occur.
Meghan can't skip this one. Awks
Say an announcement was made next Saturday at noon. And I'm on the motorway going to Anfield. Should I turn around and go home?
10% ?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens-when-queen-elizabeth-dies-london-bridge
Thank goodness for avid viewers of BBC 3, whatever the heck plays on that.
I've just realised that we are going to get horrible videos of Republicans and Irish loons and Britophobes doing celebrations
We must prepare to drone them
*old French expression for boozing. I may have got it wrong
The contrast of the pandering to Cox compared with threats to MPs who didn't want to support Paterson must make Mark Spencer a contender for worst Chief Whip ever.
At least with HMQ she's a very old lady towards the end of a very active life, so sad, but hardly a surprise.
George VII sounds better than Charles III.....
And although he's not limited to his given names there's a Philip and an Arthur in there too...
When people my age were little, you still had old shillings and two shillingses in circulation, as some strange connection to the past. Coins had a monarch on them, but not necessarily our current one.
But for about twenty thirty years, all our coins have had Elizabeth II on them. It will be odd when that changes.
(Edit to correct my dodgy maths. How embarrassing.)
But a bit more so that a few others.
What is has is a tolerance of misconduct for 'people like us' and a censorious of 'people like them'.
But for an Evertonian that always applies.
This is an insightful passage
"In 1972, the writer Brian Masters estimated that around a third of us have dreamed about the Queen – she stands for authority and our mothers. People who are not expecting to cry will cry."
Reckon that's absolutely bang on. The Queen is Mummy. She has always been there, a fixed point in the British heavens, even hardened Republicans will be shaken, perhaps to the point of tears
As I opined on here yesterday evening and thanks to @Fairliered for the kind word, the sleaze, in and of itself, isn't the problem. What Paterson did, though bad, wasn't a hanging offence and not even the Standards Committee thought that.
Paterson could have accepted his punishment, served his suspension with a few words of contrition and it's unlikely any recall petition in his constituency would have got off the ground.
Instead, claiming he hadn't the opportunity to defend himself, which seems implausible, Paterson and his "friends" decided the only way to put a stop to it would be to have Parliament overturn the Standards Committee so they trooped off to No.10 and others and in what I can only conclude was a moment of insanity, the Prime Minister and said others decided with a majority of nearly 80, they could, to quote St Trinians, "do as they damn well please" and not only would they overturn the recommendation of the Standards Committee, they would whip the Conservative Parliamentary Party to ensure that happened.
Courageously, a dozen or so of the more thoughtful members of the Conservative Parliamentary Party eschewed the invitation to follow the rest of the sheep into the mud but the damage was done.
It looked bad not because the sleaze was bad but because it smacked of Boris Johnson and others in the Conservative Parliamentary Party looking as though they were no longer bound by the rules and would throw away said rules in order to protect themselves. It was more than an extension of "one rule for you, another for us" and more a case of "we'll do as we like and there's nothing you can do about it".
The electorate may have given Johnson his majority in December 2019 but that was not carte blanche to treat the checks and balances within our democracy with impunity. As we've seen before, hubris invites nemesis and we now see Owen Paterson's political career in ruins, by-elections in safe seats now looking risky and for the first time the notion of "good old Boris, he's one of us" coming under some serious pressure.
It breaks the illusion Johnson is "different" - it turns out he's the same, perhaps they are all the same (many think that unwisely) and however contrite the Prime Minister may be from now on, the suspicion will always linger and even for the loyalists who will continue to support him, the notion must now be, as a wise man once said, in Boris Johnson's case "greater love hath no man than this, that he should lay down his friends for his life".
Unlike quite a few of my pre-pandemic habits, bloody hell that is summat I have missed.
Though that would fit in with suggestions that people in Westminster would be happy to switch PPE purchases away from factories somewhere up the M1 back to dubious places in Asia and to be arranged by sleazy middle men.
A third is a vast underestimate for British people. But Masters was writing in 1972, and the Queen has grown mightily in stature and significance in the 50 years (!!) since then
I have French friends that will cry when she dies
Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future ...
That instinctively seemed entirely reasonable to this bunch of shysters.
He was revered, even adored. Also respected. He saw the country through near civil war and coups aplenty, and was always dignified in a quiet, shy way. Flawless in execution of the job. The similarities with QE2 are quite striking.
Thais wore black for about a year. Of course we won't do that but there will be real grief.
Luckily for us we have the dutiful if slightly dreary Charles to take over. He will do OK. The Thais got their version of Prince Andrew. Actually even worse than Andrew
"Thailand threatens to prosecute Facebook for running a video of the country's heavily tattooed king walking through a shopping mall in a tiny yellow crop-top"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imm9adAf5g0&t=7s
My bet
Boris
All of the Ulster Unionists
Starmer will try and fake it
Ruth Davidson
Priti Patel
Someone from Plaid Cymru, to their own surprise
Dunno, grief can do funny things to folk.
If he sticks with his own name he'll be known as King William V, but he'll only be the fourth William to be king in Scotland. Cue a tremendous amount of aggrieved wailing.
"Largely overlooked amid the party’s dismal suburban results in Virginia and New Jersey last week, Republicans regained ground in the vote-rich Philly suburbs after years of losses under Trump. The GOP flipped multiple row offices in populous Bucks County, carried a state Supreme Court race there, and even came close to winning seats on the county council in Delaware County, where Biden romped by nearly 30 points in 2020.
...
"From April to October, Biden’s approval rating fell 14 points among suburban voters in Pennsylvania, according to surveys by Morning Consult. Biden’s favorability saw similar drops in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina and Florida.
"Biden’s suburban fade is no small matter. The big margins produced by the suburban Philadelphia counties of Montgomery, Bucks, Delaware, and Chester — where Biden outperformed Hillary Clinton — allowed him to win the state back from Trump in 2020.
"The most recent election results, however, suggested the GOP is on much favorable footing in these areas now that Trump is out of office. From Loudoun County, Va., to Bucks County, Pa., suburban voters appeared to reject the idea that every Republican candidate is a Trump foot soldier. Just as Virginia Democrats sought to paint Youngkin as a Trump acolyte, Pennsylvania Democrats sought to tie local Republican candidates to the former GOP president — and there were few signs that it worked." [my bold]
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/14/gop-trump-pennsylvania-suburbs-521655
They convinced themselves that because they had the numbers to do it with a bullshit justification, that people would believe it. As it is, it was immediately apparent that even those who did vote for it didn't buy the explanation (and one of the few non ministers to talk about it admitted it was about what was felled 'owed' to Paterson).
If she makes it that far - God willing - then methinks she will think she's really achieved something, that she - and her mum - can be proud of.