Slightly seriously, the Carrie problem for Johnson is that people have heard of her.
No one outside the pages of Private Eye had really heard of Marina Wheeler. Boris breaks up with her? Big deal. Boris abandons an unspecified number of kids? Well, heh, “that’s just Boris”.
If/when he welches on Carrie, that’s front page news in the tabloids. For days. And there’s a “PM abandons little Wilfrid and Romy” angle. He might want to go and sow his wild oats as he has done countless times before, but it would finish him politically when it was found out.
So whatever buyer’s remorse he may have, he’s tethered to Carrie as long as he remains PM.
(Incidentally, call me slow, but I hadn’t realised Carrie is the daughter of Matthew Symonds, co-founder of the Independent.)
Of course she is. Part of the born to rule metropolitan elite, same as her husband.
Liz Truss, on the other hand, attended state schools and grew up in Paisley and Leeds (plus Canada for a while).
Mr. Sandpit, just so. Fragmenting political parties so they no longer need to appeal to a broad swathe of the electorate to enter high office is not a step in the right direction, particularly when the move is made simply to sate those who believe in participation awards.
And that's before we get to the government being determined by politicians after the electorate have cast their votes and without the need to consult the pesky public any further.
Once we've voted any government is free to do what it likes until the electorate have the chance to pass their verdict at the next election.
This is no different with PR than with FPTP.
For what it's worth, I'd discourage coalitions, have the largest party form the Executive and provide much more Parliamentary time for the debate and passage of Bills proposed by non-government parties/backbench MPs.
Some clever - and sophisticated - analyses indicating that the Omicron wave may be significantly milder than all previous ones, also in the UK (i.e. London). For the first time during the pandemic, there is a clear 'decorrelation' between case numbers and hospital admissions."
Incidentally, I was surprised by the news today that Omicron is not only already dominant in the USA, but is estimated to account for 73% of SARS-CoV-s infections there.
The infection rate is stated to be about one third of the UK's, but seen in the context of the doubling time, that represents only a lag of about three or four days.
Omicron is hitting the USA much sooner than expected.
In a country where only 61% of the population have had two doses of the vaccine, and close to 100m people are completely unvaccinated.
We will get a fantastic demonstration of how mild or not it is for the unvaccinated. There is some evidence out of Florida that it may be very mild indeed. Waste water samples in Orlando are strongly Omicron but only Delta patients are turning up at hospitals
Former President Donald J. Trump, who for years falsely claimed vaccines were dangerous and pointedly declined to be seen getting vaccinated against Covid-19 while in office, was booed at an event in Houston after saying publicly for the first time that he had received a booster shot.
Mr. Trump was in Texas on Sunday as part of a speaking tour with Bill O’Reilly, the author and former Fox News host
NY Times
Not the first time he's been booed by his supporters for advocating a Covid jab.
I leave the data modelling and the statistical tomfoolery to others on here - I've had my fill of graphs and spreadsheets, many of which, I suspect, are hugely inaccurate and are a part of the weaponising (terrible word but accurate) of data which has been an integral part of this crisis though perhaps a by-product of the technological progress which has enabled us to respond in the way we have.
The responses of Governments to Omicron are, rather like Boris Johnson on Sky last night, bordering on the incoherent. The problem is Governments have a duty to all their citizens, not just the ones who voted in the right box or those who are responsible but to those who don't support them and those who are irresponsible.
It may chaff with many on here but sometimes Government has an obligation to protect people from their own stupidity or bad decisions or poor lifestyle choices and that can mean the responsible carrying the can for the irresponsible.
Hospitals and health services exist for us all not just those who live well or do the right thing. If you choose not to be vaccinated, that doesn't mean you're denied treatment if you require it. The consequence of that, given the high rate of transmission is others who are in hospital for other reasons may become vulnerable.
Back to the weaponising of data and the London Evening Standard continues to put forward the notion one third of all adult Londoners have had no vaccination and are therefore relying on immunity via infection which presumably doesn't last forever (any more than immunity by vaccination to be fair). How that figure is derived is never explained and of course no one knows if and when and how many of the unvaccinated have that infection-based protection.
So, on the one hand, we have a plethora of information and on the other we are missing some key clues which would better inform our response so in this fog of confusion Governments either hesitate or push to the extreme and that seems to be where we are complicated by the whole "Christmas" notion which further informs people's responses, actions and thoughts.
I don't know what should be done - oddly enough, there are times when indecision is the right decision.
If you thought the arrogance, incompetence, selfishness, laziness and entitlement of the Prime Minister was only a Westminster Bubble story, then here is the definitive proof that you are 100% wrong. You don’t get better cut-through than this nowadays:
Daily Mail (yes, Daily Mail) headline:
- “He's lost the room! Darts fans sing 'Stand up if you hate Boris' in unison at the World Championships while football fans chant expletives about him as the fallout from the No10 Christmas party rows continues”
His only way out now retaining a modicum of dignity is the Long Covid explanation. Up with your hands Boris and admit the decades of overeating, over drinking and promiscuity had left you woefully ill-prepared for a nasty viral infection. You are not well and you need to focus on your many, many children, and your own health. About 25% of the population will feel sorry for you and wish you well. The other 75% will shout Fuck Off and Good Riddance. The Conservative parliamentary group is in the latter category.
It’s fun to laugh at everyone singing songs about the prime minister - but under almost any other PM, and certainly under a PM from any other party, there wouldn’t be a crowd of 3,000 people at the darts.
1) I’m not laughing.
2) It’s not fun.
3) “3,000 people at the darts” actually gets to the very heart of the problem(s)
At what point Sandpit have you had enough? You’re a good Tory. You are within Johnson’s “constituency” (as in his support base rather than geographically). You share his ideology. You are one of his “season ticket holders”, as @dixiedean put it upthread. So, at what point do you simply have to call it a day for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, aka Binky the Clown?
I’ve never been a fan of Boris Johnson, but he was a necessary part of getting something that looked like Brexit through.
Happy to see him replaced in the new year - unless he can quickly steady the ship with a new Cummings, there will be a rout in the local elections which will likely be the trigger.
I do laugh at all the people shouting about the PM at an event, unaware of the irony that if the other lot were in charge it would be being held behind closed doors.
Cummings never steadied any ship. All his qualities were essentially destructive.
The issue is, that Cummings’ departure has left a massive hole where there needs to be someone actually running the show in No.10.
The problem, as discussed a couple of days ago, is that no-one who’s going to be any good wants the job - because of the wife. How do you solve a problem like Carrie?
The wife, the chief of staff, the press spokesperson and the mayoral candidate. Only one person to blame as the others are all overrated in importance. He rode a wave of populism with a wholly unsustainable coalition on a cause he never really believed in. The damage he will have done to the Tories in ridding it of its one nation wing will take at least a decade to unravel by which time a more sophisticated metropolitan and fairly angry electorate will have facilitated some changes to stop that happening again.
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR as a liberal I could easily work with centre right Tories and Social Democrats, but what I hadn't thought of is my liberal views (reduced state interference, disestablishment of the church, universal basic income, etc, etc) would make me an extremist within that group. Never thought of myself as an extremist.
Ultra-liberal Sweden is actually an extremist country, if you take a global perspective. India and Cyprus are about in the middle, ie typical human beings.
If you thought the arrogance, incompetence, selfishness, laziness and entitlement of the Prime Minister was only a Westminster Bubble story, then here is the definitive proof that you are 100% wrong. You don’t get better cut-through than this nowadays:
Daily Mail (yes, Daily Mail) headline:
- “He's lost the room! Darts fans sing 'Stand up if you hate Boris' in unison at the World Championships while football fans chant expletives about him as the fallout from the No10 Christmas party rows continues”
His only way out now retaining a modicum of dignity is the Long Covid explanation. Up with your hands Boris and admit the decades of overeating, over drinking and promiscuity had left you woefully ill-prepared for a nasty viral infection. You are not well and you need to focus on your many, many children, and your own health. About 25% of the population will feel sorry for you and wish you well. The other 75% will shout Fuck Off and Good Riddance. The Conservative parliamentary group is in the latter category.
It’s fun to laugh at everyone singing songs about the prime minister - but under almost any other PM, and certainly under a PM from any other party, there wouldn’t be a crowd of 3,000 people at the darts.
1) I’m not laughing.
2) It’s not fun.
3) “3,000 people at the darts” actually gets to the very heart of the problem(s)
At what point Sandpit have you had enough? You’re a good Tory. You are within Johnson’s “constituency” (as in his support base rather than geographically). You share his ideology. You are one of his “season ticket holders”, as @dixiedean put it upthread. So, at what point do you simply have to call it a day for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, aka Binky the Clown?
I’ve never been a fan of Boris Johnson, but he was a necessary part of getting something that looked like Brexit through.
Happy to see him replaced in the new year - unless he can quickly steady the ship with a new Cummings, there will be a rout in the local elections which will likely be the trigger.
I do laugh at all the people shouting about the PM at an event, unaware of the irony that if the other lot were in charge it would be being held behind closed doors.
Cummings never steadied any ship. All his qualities were essentially destructive.
The issue is, that Cummings’ departure has left a massive hole where there needs to be someone actually running the show in No.10.
The problem, as discussed a couple of days ago, is that no-one who’s going to be any good wants the job - because of the wife. How do you solve a problem like Carrie?
The wife, the chief of staff, the press spokesperson and the mayoral candidate. Only one person to blame as the others are all overrated in importance. He rode a wave of populism with a wholly unsustainable coalition on a cause he never really believed in. The damage he will have done to the Tories in ridding it of its one nation wing will take at least a decade to unravel by which time a more sophisticated metropolitan and fairly angry electorate will have facilitated some changes to stop that happening again.
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR Labour would also split, with Corbynites starting a new far left party and maybe a new Blairite party too. A few Tories might join RefUK, I doubt a new far right party would be formed however although it is possible the likes of For Britain or Britain First could win a seat or two under PR
I expect we would see a new centerist bloc of the right of labour, the left of the Tories and the Lib dems.
Wouldn't be terrible.
They would each be separate parties but could come together to form centrist government coalitions, a bit like has been seen in Germany.
However at the same time more extremist parties on left and right could win seats in Parliament under PR they would not win under FPTP.
As nations with PR like Germany, Sweden, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Spain and New Zealand have also discovered PR shifts the formation of a government to post election coalition negotiations, parties hardly ever winning an outright majority at the election itself
If you thought the arrogance, incompetence, selfishness, laziness and entitlement of the Prime Minister was only a Westminster Bubble story, then here is the definitive proof that you are 100% wrong. You don’t get better cut-through than this nowadays:
Daily Mail (yes, Daily Mail) headline:
- “He's lost the room! Darts fans sing 'Stand up if you hate Boris' in unison at the World Championships while football fans chant expletives about him as the fallout from the No10 Christmas party rows continues”
His only way out now retaining a modicum of dignity is the Long Covid explanation. Up with your hands Boris and admit the decades of overeating, over drinking and promiscuity had left you woefully ill-prepared for a nasty viral infection. You are not well and you need to focus on your many, many children, and your own health. About 25% of the population will feel sorry for you and wish you well. The other 75% will shout Fuck Off and Good Riddance. The Conservative parliamentary group is in the latter category.
It’s fun to laugh at everyone singing songs about the prime minister - but under almost any other PM, and certainly under a PM from any other party, there wouldn’t be a crowd of 3,000 people at the darts.
1) I’m not laughing.
2) It’s not fun.
3) “3,000 people at the darts” actually gets to the very heart of the problem(s)
At what point Sandpit have you had enough? You’re a good Tory. You are within Johnson’s “constituency” (as in his support base rather than geographically). You share his ideology. You are one of his “season ticket holders”, as @dixiedean put it upthread. So, at what point do you simply have to call it a day for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, aka Binky the Clown?
I’ve never been a fan of Boris Johnson, but he was a necessary part of getting something that looked like Brexit through.
Happy to see him replaced in the new year - unless he can quickly steady the ship with a new Cummings, there will be a rout in the local elections which will likely be the trigger.
I do laugh at all the people shouting about the PM at an event, unaware of the irony that if the other lot were in charge it would be being held behind closed doors.
Cummings never steadied any ship. All his qualities were essentially destructive.
The issue is, that Cummings’ departure has left a massive hole where there needs to be someone actually running the show in No.10.
The problem, as discussed a couple of days ago, is that no-one who’s going to be any good wants the job - because of the wife. How do you solve a problem like Carrie?
The wife, the chief of staff, the press spokesperson and the mayoral candidate. Only one person to blame as the others are all overrated in importance. He rode a wave of populism with a wholly unsustainable coalition on a cause he never really believed in. The damage he will have done to the Tories in ridding it of its one nation wing will take at least a decade to unravel by which time a more sophisticated metropolitan and fairly angry electorate will have facilitated some changes to stop that happening again.
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR Labour would also split, with Corbynites starting a new far left party and maybe a new Blairite party too. A few Tories might join RefUK, I doubt a new far right party would be formed however although it is possible the likes of For Britain or Britain First could win a seat or two under PR
I expect we would see a new centerist bloc of the right of labour, the left of the Tories and the Lib dems.
Wouldn't be terrible.
They would each be separate parties but could come together to form centrist government coalitions.
However at the same time more extremist parties on left and right could win seats in Parliament under PR they would not win under FPTP
FPTP is arguably better at keeping extremists out of politics than the alternative voting systems.
If you thought the arrogance, incompetence, selfishness, laziness and entitlement of the Prime Minister was only a Westminster Bubble story, then here is the definitive proof that you are 100% wrong. You don’t get better cut-through than this nowadays:
Daily Mail (yes, Daily Mail) headline:
- “He's lost the room! Darts fans sing 'Stand up if you hate Boris' in unison at the World Championships while football fans chant expletives about him as the fallout from the No10 Christmas party rows continues”
His only way out now retaining a modicum of dignity is the Long Covid explanation. Up with your hands Boris and admit the decades of overeating, over drinking and promiscuity had left you woefully ill-prepared for a nasty viral infection. You are not well and you need to focus on your many, many children, and your own health. About 25% of the population will feel sorry for you and wish you well. The other 75% will shout Fuck Off and Good Riddance. The Conservative parliamentary group is in the latter category.
It’s fun to laugh at everyone singing songs about the prime minister - but under almost any other PM, and certainly under a PM from any other party, there wouldn’t be a crowd of 3,000 people at the darts.
1) I’m not laughing.
2) It’s not fun.
3) “3,000 people at the darts” actually gets to the very heart of the problem(s)
At what point Sandpit have you had enough? You’re a good Tory. You are within Johnson’s “constituency” (as in his support base rather than geographically). You share his ideology. You are one of his “season ticket holders”, as @dixiedean put it upthread. So, at what point do you simply have to call it a day for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, aka Binky the Clown?
I’ve never been a fan of Boris Johnson, but he was a necessary part of getting something that looked like Brexit through.
Happy to see him replaced in the new year - unless he can quickly steady the ship with a new Cummings, there will be a rout in the local elections which will likely be the trigger.
I do laugh at all the people shouting about the PM at an event, unaware of the irony that if the other lot were in charge it would be being held behind closed doors.
Cummings never steadied any ship. All his qualities were essentially destructive.
The issue is, that Cummings’ departure has left a massive hole where there needs to be someone actually running the show in No.10.
The problem, as discussed a couple of days ago, is that no-one who’s going to be any good wants the job - because of the wife. How do you solve a problem like Carrie?
The wife, the chief of staff, the press spokesperson and the mayoral candidate. Only one person to blame as the others are all overrated in importance. He rode a wave of populism with a wholly unsustainable coalition on a cause he never really believed in. The damage he will have done to the Tories in ridding it of its one nation wing will take at least a decade to unravel by which time a more sophisticated metropolitan and fairly angry electorate will have facilitated some changes to stop that happening again.
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR Labour would also split, with Corbynites starting a new far left party and maybe a new Blairite party too. A few Tories might join RefUK, I doubt a new far right party would be formed however although it is possible the likes of For Britain or Britain First could win a seat or two under PR
I expect we would see a new centerist bloc of the right of labour, the left of the Tories and the Lib dems.
Wouldn't be terrible.
Sounds like Sweden’s Social Democratic party. They happily work with 6 out of the 7 other parliamentary parties. It’s good for everyone.
I leave the data modelling and the statistical tomfoolery to others on here - I've had my fill of graphs and spreadsheets, many of which, I suspect, are hugely inaccurate and are a part of the weaponising (terrible word but accurate) of data which has been an integral part of this crisis though perhaps a by-product of the technological progress which has enabled us to respond in the way we have.
The responses of Governments to Omicron are, rather like Boris Johnson on Sky last night, bordering on the incoherent. The problem is Governments have a duty to all their citizens, not just the ones who voted in the right box or those who are responsible but to those who don't support them and those who are irresponsible.
It may chaff with many on here but sometimes Government has an obligation to protect people from their own stupidity or bad decisions or poor lifestyle choices and that can mean the responsible carrying the can for the irresponsible.
Hospitals and health services exist for us all not just those who live well or do the right thing. If you choose not to be vaccinated, that doesn't mean you're denied treatment if you require it. The consequence of that, given the high rate of transmission is others who are in hospital for other reasons may become vulnerable.
Back to the weaponising of data and the London Evening Standard continues to put forward the notion one third of all adult Londoners have had no vaccination and are therefore relying on immunity via infection which presumably doesn't last forever (any more than immunity by vaccination to be fair). How that figure is derived is never explained and of course no one knows if and when and how many of the unvaccinated have that infection-based protection.
So, on the one hand, we have a plethora of information and on the other we are missing some key clues which would better inform our response so in this fog of confusion Governments either hesitate or push to the extreme and that seems to be where we are complicated by the whole "Christmas" notion which further informs people's responses, actions and thoughts.
I don't know what should be done - oddly enough, there are times when indecision is the right decision.
"It may chaff with many on here but sometimes Government has an obligation to protect people from their own stupidity or bad decisions or poor lifestyle choices and that can mean the responsible carrying the can for the irresponsible."
If you thought the arrogance, incompetence, selfishness, laziness and entitlement of the Prime Minister was only a Westminster Bubble story, then here is the definitive proof that you are 100% wrong. You don’t get better cut-through than this nowadays:
Daily Mail (yes, Daily Mail) headline:
- “He's lost the room! Darts fans sing 'Stand up if you hate Boris' in unison at the World Championships while football fans chant expletives about him as the fallout from the No10 Christmas party rows continues”
His only way out now retaining a modicum of dignity is the Long Covid explanation. Up with your hands Boris and admit the decades of overeating, over drinking and promiscuity had left you woefully ill-prepared for a nasty viral infection. You are not well and you need to focus on your many, many children, and your own health. About 25% of the population will feel sorry for you and wish you well. The other 75% will shout Fuck Off and Good Riddance. The Conservative parliamentary group is in the latter category.
It’s fun to laugh at everyone singing songs about the prime minister - but under almost any other PM, and certainly under a PM from any other party, there wouldn’t be a crowd of 3,000 people at the darts.
1) I’m not laughing.
2) It’s not fun.
3) “3,000 people at the darts” actually gets to the very heart of the problem(s)
At what point Sandpit have you had enough? You’re a good Tory. You are within Johnson’s “constituency” (as in his support base rather than geographically). You share his ideology. You are one of his “season ticket holders”, as @dixiedean put it upthread. So, at what point do you simply have to call it a day for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, aka Binky the Clown?
I’ve never been a fan of Boris Johnson, but he was a necessary part of getting something that looked like Brexit through.
Happy to see him replaced in the new year - unless he can quickly steady the ship with a new Cummings, there will be a rout in the local elections which will likely be the trigger.
I do laugh at all the people shouting about the PM at an event, unaware of the irony that if the other lot were in charge it would be being held behind closed doors.
Cummings never steadied any ship. All his qualities were essentially destructive.
The issue is, that Cummings’ departure has left a massive hole where there needs to be someone actually running the show in No.10.
The problem, as discussed a couple of days ago, is that no-one who’s going to be any good wants the job - because of the wife. How do you solve a problem like Carrie?
The wife, the chief of staff, the press spokesperson and the mayoral candidate. Only one person to blame as the others are all overrated in importance. He rode a wave of populism with a wholly unsustainable coalition on a cause he never really believed in. The damage he will have done to the Tories in ridding it of its one nation wing will take at least a decade to unravel by which time a more sophisticated metropolitan and fairly angry electorate will have facilitated some changes to stop that happening again.
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR as a liberal I could easily work with centre right Tories and Social Democrats, but what I hadn't thought of is my liberal views (reduced state interference, disestablishment of the church, universal basic income, etc, etc) would make me an extremist within that group. Never thought of myself as an extremist.
Disestablishment? That makes you a raving subversive and treasonous enemy of the state, by the standards of some folk on here. Yet the Scots achieved that a century ago. Different polities, indeed.
Who could you be thinking of?
Emphasising Disestablishment makes you someone withh a bee in your bonnet
Some clever - and sophisticated - analyses indicating that the Omicron wave may be significantly milder than all previous ones, also in the UK (i.e. London). For the first time during the pandemic, there is a clear 'decorrelation' between case numbers and hospital admissions."
Former President Donald J. Trump, who for years falsely claimed vaccines were dangerous and pointedly declined to be seen getting vaccinated against Covid-19 while in office, was booed at an event in Houston after saying publicly for the first time that he had received a booster shot.
Mr. Trump was in Texas on Sunday as part of a speaking tour with Bill O’Reilly, the author and former Fox News host
NY Times
Not the first time he's been booed by his supporters for advocating a Covid jab.
Florida Governor De Santis however has refused to even say if he had the booster unlike Trump and affirmed his firm opposition to vaccine mandates. If De Santis survives a challenge from likely Democrat candidate Charlie Crist next year and is re elected, Trump could even end up the moderate candidate in the 2024 GOP primaries against De Santis
My understanding is that warrant or no warrant debt enforcers have no power to break into a house through a locked over an unpaid energy bill, especially not in the absence of the owner, and if they do they are committing the crime of breaking and entering.
So how come these people have not been named and prosecuted? £500 goodwill gesture doesn't begin to address the gravity of what they've done.
And how come the CEO and the payments division are not also in the dock for conspiring to gain unlawful entry and pervert the course of justice?
Because that's what it will take to stop this nonsense.
Edit - I'm sure I've asked this question before, but I've forgotten the answer. At the same time, the mere fact it's still ongoing is pretty outrageous.
Normal people don't have enough access to the law to enforce their rights. In this case the poor woman was being harassed by this company over a debt she didn't owe, and she should have been able to use the courts to force them to desist when contacting them directly failed to have the desired effect.
We need to dramatically widen access to the courts, so that the law can protect ordinary people from abuses of power by large companies and the government.
I had a constituent whose door was broken down without warning by a team of helmeted police with batons. They were trying to arrest a major drug dealer but got the streets mixed up. After 2 MONTHS she came to me to say that she'd not yet had more than a brief apology and a promise to pay for the repairs at some future point. I contacted them and they coughed up within two weeks and gave a proper fulsome apology, but it shouldn't need an MP's intervention.
She wasn't even especially traumatised - she reckoned that "the police sometimes behave like that, what can one do?" It wasn't an especially rough area, just a largely WWC village.
I had a constituent who was an elderly Tory member, whose door was broken down by the Police, called after a Tory canvasser and candidate became worried that he wasn't answering his door. Reason being, it transpired, that he'd gone out shopping.
Anyhow the Tories made themselves scarce, the Police nailed some corrugated metal where the glass in his front door had been, and he was left with no explanation or redress other than a "sorry, our mistake" note from the Police. Until he phoned me a week later, as his local LibDem councillor for help; I managed to get his door mended gratis by the Council (which had been the telephone intermediary between the canvasser, a Tory cabinet member, and the Police) and was the first to explain to him what had happened. Which I only discovered because I had overhead Tory councillors re-telling the story with much hilarity at the idiocy of their candidate, Stratton-style, at the Town Hall.
I don't think he voted Tory that time! Sadly, that election turned out to be his last.
My understanding is that warrant or no warrant debt enforcers have no power to break into a house through a locked over an unpaid energy bill, especially not in the absence of the owner, and if they do they are committing the crime of breaking and entering.
So how come these people have not been named and prosecuted? £500 goodwill gesture doesn't begin to address the gravity of what they've done.
And how come the CEO and the payments division are not also in the dock for conspiring to gain unlawful entry and pervert the course of justice?
Because that's what it will take to stop this nonsense.
Edit - I'm sure I've asked this question before, but I've forgotten the answer. At the same time, the mere fact it's still ongoing is pretty outrageous.
Normal people don't have enough access to the law to enforce their rights. In this case the poor woman was being harassed by this company over a debt she didn't owe, and she should have been able to use the courts to force them to desist when contacting them directly failed to have the desired effect.
We need to dramatically widen access to the courts, so that the law can protect ordinary people from abuses of power by large companies and the government.
I had a constituent whose door was broken down without warning by a team of helmeted police with batons. They were trying to arrest a major drug dealer but got the streets mixed up. After 2 MONTHS she came to me to say that she'd not yet had more than a brief apology and a promise to pay for the repairs at some future point. I contacted them and they coughed up within two weeks and gave a proper fulsome apology, but it shouldn't need an MP's intervention.
She wasn't even especially traumatised - she reckoned that "the police sometimes behave like that, what can one do?" It wasn't an especially rough area, just a largely WWC village.
It's a common occurrence. They often get the wrong house, just as an electricity company switched next door's meter rather than mine when I requested a switch.
If you thought the arrogance, incompetence, selfishness, laziness and entitlement of the Prime Minister was only a Westminster Bubble story, then here is the definitive proof that you are 100% wrong. You don’t get better cut-through than this nowadays:
Daily Mail (yes, Daily Mail) headline:
- “He's lost the room! Darts fans sing 'Stand up if you hate Boris' in unison at the World Championships while football fans chant expletives about him as the fallout from the No10 Christmas party rows continues”
His only way out now retaining a modicum of dignity is the Long Covid explanation. Up with your hands Boris and admit the decades of overeating, over drinking and promiscuity had left you woefully ill-prepared for a nasty viral infection. You are not well and you need to focus on your many, many children, and your own health. About 25% of the population will feel sorry for you and wish you well. The other 75% will shout Fuck Off and Good Riddance. The Conservative parliamentary group is in the latter category.
It’s fun to laugh at everyone singing songs about the prime minister - but under almost any other PM, and certainly under a PM from any other party, there wouldn’t be a crowd of 3,000 people at the darts.
1) I’m not laughing.
2) It’s not fun.
3) “3,000 people at the darts” actually gets to the very heart of the problem(s)
At what point Sandpit have you had enough? You’re a good Tory. You are within Johnson’s “constituency” (as in his support base rather than geographically). You share his ideology. You are one of his “season ticket holders”, as @dixiedean put it upthread. So, at what point do you simply have to call it a day for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, aka Binky the Clown?
I’ve never been a fan of Boris Johnson, but he was a necessary part of getting something that looked like Brexit through.
Happy to see him replaced in the new year - unless he can quickly steady the ship with a new Cummings, there will be a rout in the local elections which will likely be the trigger.
I do laugh at all the people shouting about the PM at an event, unaware of the irony that if the other lot were in charge it would be being held behind closed doors.
Cummings never steadied any ship. All his qualities were essentially destructive.
The issue is, that Cummings’ departure has left a massive hole where there needs to be someone actually running the show in No.10.
The problem, as discussed a couple of days ago, is that no-one who’s going to be any good wants the job - because of the wife. How do you solve a problem like Carrie?
The wife, the chief of staff, the press spokesperson and the mayoral candidate. Only one person to blame as the others are all overrated in importance. He rode a wave of populism with a wholly unsustainable coalition on a cause he never really believed in. The damage he will have done to the Tories in ridding it of its one nation wing will take at least a decade to unravel by which time a more sophisticated metropolitan and fairly angry electorate will have facilitated some changes to stop that happening again.
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR Labour would also split, with Corbynites starting a new far left party and maybe a new Blairite party too. A few Tories might join RefUK, I doubt a new far right party would be formed however although it is possible the likes of For Britain or Britain First could win a seat or two under PR
I expect we would see a new centerist bloc of the right of labour, the left of the Tories and the Lib dems.
Wouldn't be terrible.
They would each be separate parties but could come together to form centrist government coalitions.
However at the same time more extremist parties on left and right could win seats in Parliament under PR they would not win under FPTP
FPTP is arguably better at keeping extremists out of politics than the alternative voting systems.
Depends on methodology, thresholds and constituency sizes - as demonstrated below Denmark with a 2% threshold ends up with 6-7 parties..
If you look at how the Uk seats were split in EU Parliament elections I suspect that would give you a decent overview of the possible results and the extremists elected there were the obvious anti-EU ones.
My understanding is that warrant or no warrant debt enforcers have no power to break into a house through a locked over an unpaid energy bill, especially not in the absence of the owner, and if they do they are committing the crime of breaking and entering.
So how come these people have not been named and prosecuted? £500 goodwill gesture doesn't begin to address the gravity of what they've done.
And how come the CEO and the payments division are not also in the dock for conspiring to gain unlawful entry and pervert the course of justice?
Because that's what it will take to stop this nonsense.
Edit - I'm sure I've asked this question before, but I've forgotten the answer. At the same time, the mere fact it's still ongoing is pretty outrageous.
Normal people don't have enough access to the law to enforce their rights. In this case the poor woman was being harassed by this company over a debt she didn't owe, and she should have been able to use the courts to force them to desist when contacting them directly failed to have the desired effect.
We need to dramatically widen access to the courts, so that the law can protect ordinary people from abuses of power by large companies and the government.
I had a constituent whose door was broken down without warning by a team of helmeted police with batons. They were trying to arrest a major drug dealer but got the streets mixed up. After 2 MONTHS she came to me to say that she'd not yet had more than a brief apology and a promise to pay for the repairs at some future point. I contacted them and they coughed up within two weeks and gave a proper fulsome apology, but it shouldn't need an MP's intervention.
She wasn't even especially traumatised - she reckoned that "the police sometimes behave like that, what can one do?" It wasn't an especially rough area, just a largely WWC village.
I would make incidents like that subject to instant £10,000 compensation payments, with the cheque signed by the Chief Constable and paid out of the police budget.
If we are to give certain people extraordinary powers, we should expect them to be held accountable for exercising them reasonably.
It may well be that the Cabinet has made the right decision, since what many scientists have suggested that the structure of coronovirus makes it likely that if it is more transmissable then it may be less virulent. Certainly the Astra Zeneca team were saying it was a good working hypothesis even before the Omicron varient was identified. However when looking at thousands of lives, the scientists are paid to be cautious and in the real world nobody can be sure.
[Snip]
"The scientists are paid to be cautious". No they are not.
The makers of policy may wish to err on the side of caution.
But, that is nothing to do with the science which is concerned only with the robust analysis and presentation of the data, and its interpretation.
My understanding is that warrant or no warrant debt enforcers have no power to break into a house through a locked over an unpaid energy bill, especially not in the absence of the owner, and if they do they are committing the crime of breaking and entering.
So how come these people have not been named and prosecuted? £500 goodwill gesture doesn't begin to address the gravity of what they've done.
And how come the CEO and the payments division are not also in the dock for conspiring to gain unlawful entry and pervert the course of justice?
Because that's what it will take to stop this nonsense.
Edit - I'm sure I've asked this question before, but I've forgotten the answer. At the same time, the mere fact it's still ongoing is pretty outrageous.
Normal people don't have enough access to the law to enforce their rights. In this case the poor woman was being harassed by this company over a debt she didn't owe, and she should have been able to use the courts to force them to desist when contacting them directly failed to have the desired effect.
We need to dramatically widen access to the courts, so that the law can protect ordinary people from abuses of power by large companies and the government.
I had a constituent whose door was broken down without warning by a team of helmeted police with batons. They were trying to arrest a major drug dealer but got the streets mixed up. After 2 MONTHS she came to me to say that she'd not yet had more than a brief apology and a promise to pay for the repairs at some future point. I contacted them and they coughed up within two weeks and gave a proper fulsome apology, but it shouldn't need an MP's intervention.
She wasn't even especially traumatised - she reckoned that "the police sometimes behave like that, what can one do?" It wasn't an especially rough area, just a largely WWC village.
Everybody makes mistakes. I understand that databases are riddled with bad data. People can be very forgiving if mistakes are acknowledged and rectified.
All too often there's no mechanism for identifying and correcting mistakes. That drives people to despair.
My understanding is that warrant or no warrant debt enforcers have no power to break into a house through a locked over an unpaid energy bill, especially not in the absence of the owner, and if they do they are committing the crime of breaking and entering.
So how come these people have not been named and prosecuted? £500 goodwill gesture doesn't begin to address the gravity of what they've done.
And how come the CEO and the payments division are not also in the dock for conspiring to gain unlawful entry and pervert the course of justice?
Because that's what it will take to stop this nonsense.
Edit - I'm sure I've asked this question before, but I've forgotten the answer. At the same time, the mere fact it's still ongoing is pretty outrageous.
Normal people don't have enough access to the law to enforce their rights. In this case the poor woman was being harassed by this company over a debt she didn't owe, and she should have been able to use the courts to force them to desist when contacting them directly failed to have the desired effect.
We need to dramatically widen access to the courts, so that the law can protect ordinary people from abuses of power by large companies and the government.
I had a constituent whose door was broken down without warning by a team of helmeted police with batons. They were trying to arrest a major drug dealer but got the streets mixed up. After 2 MONTHS she came to me to say that she'd not yet had more than a brief apology and a promise to pay for the repairs at some future point. I contacted them and they coughed up within two weeks and gave a proper fulsome apology, but it shouldn't need an MP's intervention.
She wasn't even especially traumatised - she reckoned that "the police sometimes behave like that, what can one do?" It wasn't an especially rough area, just a largely WWC village.
I had a constituent who was an elderly Tory member, whose door was broken down by the Police, called after a Tory canvasser and candidate became worried that he wasn't answering his door. Reason being, it transpired, that he'd gone out shopping.
Anyhow the Tories made themselves scarce, the Police nailed some corrugated metal where the glass in his front door had been, and he was left with no explanation or redress other than a "sorry, our mistake" note from the Police. Until he phoned me a week later, as his local LibDem councillor for help; I managed to get his door mended gratis by the Council (which had been the telephone intermediary between the canvasser, a Tory cabinet member, and the Police) and was the first to explain to him what had happened.
I don't think he voted Tory the next time! Sadly, that election turned out to be his last.
On the other hand: people were concerned for his welfare. The alternative was perhaps just to ignore the fact this elderly man was not answering his door.
Leaving the party-political aspect out of this, perhaps everyone did the correct thing from what they knew, even if it turned out to the wrong thing in reality.
I leave the data modelling and the statistical tomfoolery to others on here - I've had my fill of graphs and spreadsheets, many of which, I suspect, are hugely inaccurate and are a part of the weaponising (terrible word but accurate) of data which has been an integral part of this crisis though perhaps a by-product of the technological progress which has enabled us to respond in the way we have.
The responses of Governments to Omicron are, rather like Boris Johnson on Sky last night, bordering on the incoherent. The problem is Governments have a duty to all their citizens, not just the ones who voted in the right box or those who are responsible but to those who don't support them and those who are irresponsible.
It may chaff with many on here but sometimes Government has an obligation to protect people from their own stupidity or bad decisions or poor lifestyle choices and that can mean the responsible carrying the can for the irresponsible.
Hospitals and health services exist for us all not just those who live well or do the right thing. If you choose not to be vaccinated, that doesn't mean you're denied treatment if you require it. The consequence of that, given the high rate of transmission is others who are in hospital for other reasons may become vulnerable.
Back to the weaponising of data and the London Evening Standard continues to put forward the notion one third of all adult Londoners have had no vaccination and are therefore relying on immunity via infection which presumably doesn't last forever (any more than immunity by vaccination to be fair). How that figure is derived is never explained and of course no one knows if and when and how many of the unvaccinated have that infection-based protection.
So, on the one hand, we have a plethora of information and on the other we are missing some key clues which would better inform our response so in this fog of confusion Governments either hesitate or push to the extreme and that seems to be where we are complicated by the whole "Christmas" notion which further informs people's responses, actions and thoughts.
I don't know what should be done - oddly enough, there are times when indecision is the right decision.
"It may chaff with many on here but sometimes Government has an obligation to protect people from their own stupidity or bad decisions or poor lifestyle choices and that can mean the responsible carrying the can for the irresponsible."
Not sure everyone on here will agree with this...
I instinctively don't agree with that. The NHS throws up a Moral Hazard problem for obesity etc.
OTOH, the US doesn't have funded healthcare and still had insanely high obesity levels. So who knows.
We had a really good debate here a few days ago about taxes on cigarettes, alcohol, food etc.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
My understanding is that warrant or no warrant debt enforcers have no power to break into a house through a locked over an unpaid energy bill, especially not in the absence of the owner, and if they do they are committing the crime of breaking and entering.
So how come these people have not been named and prosecuted? £500 goodwill gesture doesn't begin to address the gravity of what they've done.
And how come the CEO and the payments division are not also in the dock for conspiring to gain unlawful entry and pervert the course of justice?
Because that's what it will take to stop this nonsense.
Edit - I'm sure I've asked this question before, but I've forgotten the answer. At the same time, the mere fact it's still ongoing is pretty outrageous.
Normal people don't have enough access to the law to enforce their rights. In this case the poor woman was being harassed by this company over a debt she didn't owe, and she should have been able to use the courts to force them to desist when contacting them directly failed to have the desired effect.
We need to dramatically widen access to the courts, so that the law can protect ordinary people from abuses of power by large companies and the government.
I had a constituent whose door was broken down without warning by a team of helmeted police with batons. They were trying to arrest a major drug dealer but got the streets mixed up. After 2 MONTHS she came to me to say that she'd not yet had more than a brief apology and a promise to pay for the repairs at some future point. I contacted them and they coughed up within two weeks and gave a proper fulsome apology, but it shouldn't need an MP's intervention.
She wasn't even especially traumatised - she reckoned that "the police sometimes behave like that, what can one do?" It wasn't an especially rough area, just a largely WWC village.
I would make incidents like that subject to instant £10,000 compensation payments, with the cheque signed by the Chief Constable and paid out of the police budget.
If we are to give certain people extraordinary powers, we should expect them to be held accountable for exercising them reasonably.
It would take about half an hour for someone to work out how to game that…
My understanding is that warrant or no warrant debt enforcers have no power to break into a house through a locked over an unpaid energy bill, especially not in the absence of the owner, and if they do they are committing the crime of breaking and entering.
So how come these people have not been named and prosecuted? £500 goodwill gesture doesn't begin to address the gravity of what they've done.
And how come the CEO and the payments division are not also in the dock for conspiring to gain unlawful entry and pervert the course of justice?
Because that's what it will take to stop this nonsense.
Edit - I'm sure I've asked this question before, but I've forgotten the answer. At the same time, the mere fact it's still ongoing is pretty outrageous.
Normal people don't have enough access to the law to enforce their rights. In this case the poor woman was being harassed by this company over a debt she didn't owe, and she should have been able to use the courts to force them to desist when contacting them directly failed to have the desired effect.
We need to dramatically widen access to the courts, so that the law can protect ordinary people from abuses of power by large companies and the government.
I had a constituent whose door was broken down without warning by a team of helmeted police with batons. They were trying to arrest a major drug dealer but got the streets mixed up. After 2 MONTHS she came to me to say that she'd not yet had more than a brief apology and a promise to pay for the repairs at some future point. I contacted them and they coughed up within two weeks and gave a proper fulsome apology, but it shouldn't need an MP's intervention.
She wasn't even especially traumatised - she reckoned that "the police sometimes behave like that, what can one do?" It wasn't an especially rough area, just a largely WWC village.
It's depressing to read things like this. The police only doing the right thing when someone powerful intervenes.
If this is happening everywhere, why is it not being officially reported?
All the stories of hospitals full of the unvaxxed are anecdotes from staff. I believe these anecdotes, but I can't figure out why they aren't using official statistics to scare the 'hesitant'.
Mr. Sandpit, just so. Fragmenting political parties so they no longer need to appeal to a broad swathe of the electorate to enter high office is not a step in the right direction, particularly when the move is made simply to sate those who believe in participation awards.
And that's before we get to the government being determined by politicians after the electorate have cast their votes and without the need to consult the pesky public any further.
Recognising you aren't a fan of PR and at least you are consistent, the truth is PR wouldn't change things that much (I did tell this to some LDs once and they weren't at all happy).
You'd have as @NickPalmer suggests, a "centre-right" bloc of parties and a "centre left" bloc. You might get one group which oscillates between the two but tends to be a lot rarer than you might think. The fragmentation of the Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green and other parties would sit along these lines.
You might also argue PR legislates against radical policies which might be required at certain points - that's a more reasonable point but other countries with PR have followed Thatcherite policies (you don't need a 144 seat majority to be radical or indeed a 179 seat majority not to be radical). It's likely extreme parties at both ends of the spectrum would be excluded (much as AfD is out in the cold in Germany).
PR is two words - proportional and representation. Too much stress is placed on the first but the key word is the second. I am more equivocal about PR at Westminster elections for the reasons I've cited above but I am more strongly in favour of PR at local level.
I quote my own Borough, Newham, as an example. In 2018, 65% voted Labour and that delivered 100% of the seats - all 60. The 35% who voted for other parties got nothing, no voice at all. I don't dispute Labour's right to govern with a 65% vote but I do dispute the notion the 35% of non-Labour voices are utterly unrepresented on the Council.
Representation isn't just about fairness - it's about the provision of scrutiny, accountability and transparency - but about the notion that in a plural democracy, as many voices as possible should be heard. The electoral system shouldn't be used as a tool for silencing other voices but that's how FPTP works.
If this is happening everywhere, why is it not being officially reported?
All the stories of hospitals full of the unvaxxed are anecdotes from staff. I believe these anecdotes, but I can't figure out why they aren't using official statistics to scare the 'hesitant'.
Not a clue - I'll repeat the white house comment from Sunday
And we really really should be telling the unvaccinated what reality really is - as they continue to listen to the scare stories of the 52 year old mate of a mate of a mate to the power of 12 who died of a heart attack during sex after being vaccinated 4 weeks earlier.
If this is happening everywhere, why is it not being officially reported?
All the stories of hospitals full of the unvaxxed are anecdotes from staff. I believe these anecdotes, but I can't figure out why they aren't using official statistics to scare the 'hesitant'.
If that is correct, it’s really the sort of thing that should be leading the evening news.
Coal currently generating double the power wind is, and we've turned on every back-up gas turbine which is normally paid to sit unused. Another win for renewables.
My understanding is that warrant or no warrant debt enforcers have no power to break into a house through a locked over an unpaid energy bill, especially not in the absence of the owner, and if they do they are committing the crime of breaking and entering.
So how come these people have not been named and prosecuted? £500 goodwill gesture doesn't begin to address the gravity of what they've done.
And how come the CEO and the payments division are not also in the dock for conspiring to gain unlawful entry and pervert the course of justice?
Because that's what it will take to stop this nonsense.
Edit - I'm sure I've asked this question before, but I've forgotten the answer. At the same time, the mere fact it's still ongoing is pretty outrageous.
Normal people don't have enough access to the law to enforce their rights. In this case the poor woman was being harassed by this company over a debt she didn't owe, and she should have been able to use the courts to force them to desist when contacting them directly failed to have the desired effect.
We need to dramatically widen access to the courts, so that the law can protect ordinary people from abuses of power by large companies and the government.
I had a constituent whose door was broken down without warning by a team of helmeted police with batons. They were trying to arrest a major drug dealer but got the streets mixed up. After 2 MONTHS she came to me to say that she'd not yet had more than a brief apology and a promise to pay for the repairs at some future point. I contacted them and they coughed up within two weeks and gave a proper fulsome apology, but it shouldn't need an MP's intervention.
She wasn't even especially traumatised - she reckoned that "the police sometimes behave like that, what can one do?" It wasn't an especially rough area, just a largely WWC village.
It's depressing to read things like this. The police only doing the right thing when someone powerful intervenes.
But also the importance of constituency MPs. Vital to have an independent person whose interests are aligned with their constituents (by re-election) who can go in and put the pressure on.
Thanks to @NickPalmer and others who take/took that bit of the job seriously.
My understanding is that warrant or no warrant debt enforcers have no power to break into a house through a locked over an unpaid energy bill, especially not in the absence of the owner, and if they do they are committing the crime of breaking and entering.
So how come these people have not been named and prosecuted? £500 goodwill gesture doesn't begin to address the gravity of what they've done.
And how come the CEO and the payments division are not also in the dock for conspiring to gain unlawful entry and pervert the course of justice?
Because that's what it will take to stop this nonsense.
Edit - I'm sure I've asked this question before, but I've forgotten the answer. At the same time, the mere fact it's still ongoing is pretty outrageous.
Normal people don't have enough access to the law to enforce their rights. In this case the poor woman was being harassed by this company over a debt she didn't owe, and she should have been able to use the courts to force them to desist when contacting them directly failed to have the desired effect.
We need to dramatically widen access to the courts, so that the law can protect ordinary people from abuses of power by large companies and the government.
I had a constituent whose door was broken down without warning by a team of helmeted police with batons. They were trying to arrest a major drug dealer but got the streets mixed up. After 2 MONTHS she came to me to say that she'd not yet had more than a brief apology and a promise to pay for the repairs at some future point. I contacted them and they coughed up within two weeks and gave a proper fulsome apology, but it shouldn't need an MP's intervention.
She wasn't even especially traumatised - she reckoned that "the police sometimes behave like that, what can one do?" It wasn't an especially rough area, just a largely WWC village.
I had a constituent who was an elderly Tory member, whose door was broken down by the Police, called after a Tory canvasser and candidate became worried that he wasn't answering his door. Reason being, it transpired, that he'd gone out shopping.
Anyhow the Tories made themselves scarce, the Police nailed some corrugated metal where the glass in his front door had been, and he was left with no explanation or redress other than a "sorry, our mistake" note from the Police. Until he phoned me a week later, as his local LibDem councillor for help; I managed to get his door mended gratis by the Council (which had been the telephone intermediary between the canvasser, a Tory cabinet member, and the Police) and was the first to explain to him what had happened.
I don't think he voted Tory the next time! Sadly, that election turned out to be his last.
On the other hand: people were concerned for his welfare. The alternative was perhaps just to ignore the fact this elderly man was not answering his door.
Leaving the party-political aspect out of this, perhaps everyone did the correct thing from what they knew, even if it turned out to the wrong thing in reality.
I don't think running off and leaving the Police to sort the situation was the right thing to do, nor keeping clear and not going back to explain or apologise, nor turning it into a joke being spread around the Town Hall? Tory councillors were having a good laugh at this guy's accidental misfortune while he was sitting in his house with a cold draught blowing through his ruined front door.
When the guy found out that it was the Tory candidate who had called the Police, and that they'd simply run off and disappeared, he was appalled. I managed to get his door re-glazed the day after he phoned me; something they could and should have arranged themselves. The council was embarrassed at the whole episode and its role in it, and agreed to pay up straight away.
If this is happening everywhere, why is it not being officially reported?
All the stories of hospitals full of the unvaxxed are anecdotes from staff. I believe these anecdotes, but I can't figure out why they aren't using official statistics to scare the 'hesitant'.
If that is correct, it’s really the sort of thing that should be leading the evening news.
I’ve not been following the debate about the models, but I’ve assumed that for us to have a catastrophe it would need significant vaccine escape. Doesn’t sound like it’s happening.
If a single party government breaks a manifesto promise you can legitimately be annoyed or even angered, especially if that's why you voted for them. If you vote Lib Dem because you love their education policy and that gets jettisoned in coalition talks then they've banked your vote and abandoned the policy that earned it, and you can't even be legitimately annoyed because coalitions turn manifestos from (hopefully) serious promises made to the electorate into a pick and mix menu for political negotiators after all the votes have been cast and the political class is deciding who gets to be in charge.
It may chaff with many on here but sometimes Government has an obligation to protect people from their own stupidity or bad decisions or poor lifestyle choices and that can mean the responsible carrying the can for the irresponsible.
"It may chaff with many on here but sometimes Government has an obligation to protect people from their own stupidity or bad decisions or poor lifestyle choices and that can mean the responsible carrying the can for the irresponsible."
Not sure everyone on here will agree with this...
Which I think is pretty much what I said. Unfortunately, it's true. If we all have to go into a new round of restrictions because the hospitals are filling up with seriously ill unvaccinated individuals or if those requiring other medical care have to wait even longer because their ICU bed is occupied by an unvaccinated individual on a ventilator, what's the choice?
If this is happening everywhere, why is it not being officially reported?
All the stories of hospitals full of the unvaxxed are anecdotes from staff. I believe these anecdotes, but I can't figure out why they aren't using official statistics to scare the 'hesitant'.
If that is correct, it’s really the sort of thing that should be leading the evening news.
See my post earlier today Sandpit. R4 this morning a Doctor representing ICU doctors reported the level to be 80 - 90% in ICU are unvaccinated.
If this is happening everywhere, why is it not being officially reported?
All the stories of hospitals full of the unvaxxed are anecdotes from staff. I believe these anecdotes, but I can't figure out why they aren't using official statistics to scare the 'hesitant'.
Because the vaccinated wouldn't then accept any restrictions.
It is easier to remove a Tory leader if they get a majority of Tory MPs to do so, while Labour needs a majority of members for an alternative too. However it is less easy to remove a Tory leader than it used to be. Thatcher for example would have survived in 1990 probably for at least another year as just over 50% of Tory MPs backed her, even if she would have lost a second round to Heseltine most likely under the old rules had she not pulled out
Technically 50% +1 of those casting ballots in a confidence motion have to vote against a Tory leader to remove them, but they'd probably decide not to carry on if, well, maybe around 40% voted against. Theresa May had 37% voting against her in December 2018 and decided to carry on of course but didn't last 12 months until the next potential confidence motion.
Some might but Boris is stubborn and arrogant and thick skinned enough he would probably carry on even if he only won a confidence vote 51% to 49%.
Coal currently generating double the power wind is, and we've turned on every back-up gas turbine which is normally paid to sit unused. Another win for renewables.
Far better to have these power stations used for one week in the year than every week. Go renewables!
If a single party government breaks a manifesto promise you can legitimately be annoyed or even angered, especially if that's why you voted for them. If you vote Lib Dem because you love their education policy and that gets jettisoned in coalition talks then they've banked your vote and abandoned the policy that earned it, and you can't even be legitimately annoyed because coalitions turn manifestos from (hopefully) serious promises made to the electorate into a pick and mix menu for political negotiators after all the votes have been cast and the political class is deciding who gets to be in charge.
You are however at the mercy of whoever the winning party's selection committee chooses to put up in your seat, who may have different views from your own or from the manifesto that you are so keen to support. And, as we've seen, the manifesto turns out to be work in progress and large parts of it can be negotiated away inside the party with the majority that - lo and behold - turns out to be a coalition all by itself.
Politics is the process of making decisions and resolving differences through discussion and compromise - pretending it's a simple game of elections, winners and losers, and nothing more, is naive.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
I took HYUFD's post more as thoroughly, carefully pointing out that the OP didn't have a clue how the Oxford Union operated.
Coal currently generating double the power wind is, and we've turned on every back-up gas turbine which is normally paid to sit unused. Another win for renewables.
Far better to have these power stations used for one week in the year than every week. Go renewables!
Just don't pretend they're cheaper when people show figures for wind power which ignore the 1 for 1 back up capacity required to make it functional.
Coal currently generating double the power wind is, and we've turned on every back-up gas turbine which is normally paid to sit unused. Another win for renewables.
Far better to have these power stations used for one week in the year than every week. Go renewables!
Yeah, I’m not sure what argument they are making. It’s surely better that coal-fired stations sit idle for the vast majority of the time.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
How many candidates from Manchester University have even stood for PM or party leader? It is no surprise the best universities in the land produce the most PMs as do the best schools, though we have had an Edinburgh graduate PM in Brown more recently than a Cambridge graduate, the last was Baldwin and from 1964-1997 all our PMs went to state schools, mostly grammars.
Personally I went to private school, Warwick and Aber, my wife though has a postgrad from Oxford but did her undergrad at Durham
Coal currently generating double the power wind is, and we've turned on every back-up gas turbine which is normally paid to sit unused. Another win for renewables.
Far better to have these power stations used for one week in the year than every week. Go renewables!
Yeah, I’m not sure what argument they are making. It’s surely better that coal-fired stations sit idle for the vast majority of the time.
When I studied this at uni there was a compelling argument that building an extra gas turbine instead of some wind turbines plus keeping an old coal powered one going was both more cost effective and environmentally friendly.
If a single party government breaks a manifesto promise you can legitimately be annoyed or even angered, especially if that's why you voted for them. If you vote Lib Dem because you love their education policy and that gets jettisoned in coalition talks then they've banked your vote and abandoned the policy that earned it, and you can't even be legitimately annoyed because coalitions turn manifestos from (hopefully) serious promises made to the electorate into a pick and mix menu for political negotiators after all the votes have been cast and the political class is deciding who gets to be in charge.
But people did get annoyed at the Lib Dems, and they've been suffering the electoral consequences for more than a decade afterwards. The same happens in, for example, Ireland.
When the Tories junk manifesto commitments, or behave like a bunch of scoundrels, FPTP means you are pretty trapped into voting for them if you are opposed to the Labour end of the dichotomy.
FPTP means that most of the time people vote against things, motivated by fear and anger. With PR people are encouraged to vote for things, motivated by hope and optimism.
My understanding is that warrant or no warrant debt enforcers have no power to break into a house through a locked over an unpaid energy bill, especially not in the absence of the owner, and if they do they are committing the crime of breaking and entering.
So how come these people have not been named and prosecuted? £500 goodwill gesture doesn't begin to address the gravity of what they've done.
And how come the CEO and the payments division are not also in the dock for conspiring to gain unlawful entry and pervert the course of justice?
Because that's what it will take to stop this nonsense.
Edit - I'm sure I've asked this question before, but I've forgotten the answer. At the same time, the mere fact it's still ongoing is pretty outrageous.
Normal people don't have enough access to the law to enforce their rights. In this case the poor woman was being harassed by this company over a debt she didn't owe, and she should have been able to use the courts to force them to desist when contacting them directly failed to have the desired effect.
We need to dramatically widen access to the courts, so that the law can protect ordinary people from abuses of power by large companies and the government.
I had a constituent whose door was broken down without warning by a team of helmeted police with batons. They were trying to arrest a major drug dealer but got the streets mixed up. After 2 MONTHS she came to me to say that she'd not yet had more than a brief apology and a promise to pay for the repairs at some future point. I contacted them and they coughed up within two weeks and gave a proper fulsome apology, but it shouldn't need an MP's intervention.
She wasn't even especially traumatised - she reckoned that "the police sometimes behave like that, what can one do?" It wasn't an especially rough area, just a largely WWC village.
I had a constituent who was an elderly Tory member, whose door was broken down by the Police, called after a Tory canvasser and candidate became worried that he wasn't answering his door. Reason being, it transpired, that he'd gone out shopping.
Anyhow the Tories made themselves scarce, the Police nailed some corrugated metal where the glass in his front door had been, and he was left with no explanation or redress other than a "sorry, our mistake" note from the Police. Until he phoned me a week later, as his local LibDem councillor for help; I managed to get his door mended gratis by the Council (which had been the telephone intermediary between the canvasser, a Tory cabinet member, and the Police) and was the first to explain to him what had happened.
I don't think he voted Tory the next time! Sadly, that election turned out to be his last.
On the other hand: people were concerned for his welfare. The alternative was perhaps just to ignore the fact this elderly man was not answering his door.
Leaving the party-political aspect out of this, perhaps everyone did the correct thing from what they knew, even if it turned out to the wrong thing in reality.
I don't think running off and leaving the Police to sort the situation was the right thing to do, nor keeping clear and not going back to explain or apologise, nor turning it into a joke being spread around the Town Hall? Tory councillors were having a good laugh at this guy's accidental misfortune while he was sitting in his house with a cold draught blowing through his ruined front door.
When the guy found out that it was the Tory candidate who had called the Police, and that they'd simply run off and disappeared, he was appalled. I managed to get his door re-glazed the day after he phoned me; something they could and should have arranged themselves. The council was embarrassed at the whole episode and its role in it, and agreed to pay up straight away.
I'm afraid this sounds more like a biased anti-Tory story than anything else. It'd be good to hear the other side of your anecdote.
If he had been ill, then they did the right thing. The police, council etc generally don't just break down doors for LOLs.
If you thought the arrogance, incompetence, selfishness, laziness and entitlement of the Prime Minister was only a Westminster Bubble story, then here is the definitive proof that you are 100% wrong. You don’t get better cut-through than this nowadays:
Daily Mail (yes, Daily Mail) headline:
- “He's lost the room! Darts fans sing 'Stand up if you hate Boris' in unison at the World Championships while football fans chant expletives about him as the fallout from the No10 Christmas party rows continues”
His only way out now retaining a modicum of dignity is the Long Covid explanation. Up with your hands Boris and admit the decades of overeating, over drinking and promiscuity had left you woefully ill-prepared for a nasty viral infection. You are not well and you need to focus on your many, many children, and your own health. About 25% of the population will feel sorry for you and wish you well. The other 75% will shout Fuck Off and Good Riddance. The Conservative parliamentary group is in the latter category.
It’s fun to laugh at everyone singing songs about the prime minister - but under almost any other PM, and certainly under a PM from any other party, there wouldn’t be a crowd of 3,000 people at the darts.
1) I’m not laughing.
2) It’s not fun.
3) “3,000 people at the darts” actually gets to the very heart of the problem(s)
At what point Sandpit have you had enough? You’re a good Tory. You are within Johnson’s “constituency” (as in his support base rather than geographically). You share his ideology. You are one of his “season ticket holders”, as @dixiedean put it upthread. So, at what point do you simply have to call it a day for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, aka Binky the Clown?
I’ve never been a fan of Boris Johnson, but he was a necessary part of getting something that looked like Brexit through.
Happy to see him replaced in the new year - unless he can quickly steady the ship with a new Cummings, there will be a rout in the local elections which will likely be the trigger.
I do laugh at all the people shouting about the PM at an event, unaware of the irony that if the other lot were in charge it would be being held behind closed doors.
Cummings never steadied any ship. All his qualities were essentially destructive.
The issue is, that Cummings’ departure has left a massive hole where there needs to be someone actually running the show in No.10.
The problem, as discussed a couple of days ago, is that no-one who’s going to be any good wants the job - because of the wife. How do you solve a problem like Carrie?
The wife, the chief of staff, the press spokesperson and the mayoral candidate. Only one person to blame as the others are all overrated in importance. He rode a wave of populism with a wholly unsustainable coalition on a cause he never really believed in. The damage he will have done to the Tories in ridding it of its one nation wing will take at least a decade to unravel by which time a more sophisticated metropolitan and fairly angry electorate will have facilitated some changes to stop that happening again.
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR Labour would also split, with Corbynites starting a new far left party and maybe a new Blairite party too. A few Tories might join RefUK, I doubt a new far right party would be formed however although it is possible the likes of For Britain or Britain First could win a seat or two under PR
I expect we would see a new centerist bloc of the right of labour, the left of the Tories and the Lib dems.
Wouldn't be terrible.
They would each be separate parties but could come together to form centrist government coalitions, a bit like has been seen in Germany.
However at the same time more extremist parties on left and right could win seats in Parliament under PR they would not win under FPTP.
As nations with PR like Germany, Sweden, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Spain and New Zealand have also discovered PR shifts the formation of a government to post election coalition negotiations, parties hardly ever winning an outright majority at the election itself
That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. Prevents, or at least discourages (Berlusconi says Hi), megalomaniac leaders.
Iain Martin @iainmartin1 · 36m A week ago today the extraordinary number given to the health secretary by UKHSA - 200k infections in one day - drove a lot of scary stories + Labour demands for restrictions. Has been quietly withdrawn. Happens, but still, shouldn't it give the restrictions enthusiasts pause?
If this is happening everywhere, why is it not being officially reported?
All the stories of hospitals full of the unvaxxed are anecdotes from staff. I believe these anecdotes, but I can't figure out why they aren't using official statistics to scare the 'hesitant'.
Because the vaccinated wouldn't then accept any restrictions.
If the vaccinated are not going to collapse the health system, why should they accept restrictions?
Sam Coates Sky @SamCoatesSky · 1h No10 are stressing this morning Boris Johnson has not definitively ruled out restrictions before Xmas - via @tamcohen below
Iain Martin @iainmartin1 · 36m A week ago today the extraordinary number given to the health secretary by UKHSA - 200k infections in one day - drove a lot of scary stories + Labour demands for restrictions. Has been quietly withdrawn. Happens, but still, shouldn't it give the restrictions enthusiasts pause?
If this is happening everywhere, why is it not being officially reported?
All the stories of hospitals full of the unvaxxed are anecdotes from staff. I believe these anecdotes, but I can't figure out why they aren't using official statistics to scare the 'hesitant'.
Because the vaccinated wouldn't then accept any restrictions.
Iain Martin @iainmartin1 · 36m A week ago today the extraordinary number given to the health secretary by UKHSA - 200k infections in one day - drove a lot of scary stories + Labour demands for restrictions. Has been quietly withdrawn. Happens, but still, shouldn't it give the restrictions enthusiasts pause?
It was that this 200k of O infections was only 20% of the total which was more laughable, especially as UKHSA went out of their way to deny when the correction that this was active infections, not new infections was made.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
How many candidates from Manchester University have even stood for PM or party leader? It is no surprise the best universities in the land produce the most PMs as do the best schools, though we have had an Edinburgh graduate PM in Brown more recently than a Cambridge graduate, the last was Baldwin and from 1964-1997 all our PMs went to state schools, mostly grammars.
Personally I went to private school, Warwick and Aber, my wife though has a postgrad from Oxford but did her undergrad at Durham
If you thought the arrogance, incompetence, selfishness, laziness and entitlement of the Prime Minister was only a Westminster Bubble story, then here is the definitive proof that you are 100% wrong. You don’t get better cut-through than this nowadays:
Daily Mail (yes, Daily Mail) headline:
- “He's lost the room! Darts fans sing 'Stand up if you hate Boris' in unison at the World Championships while football fans chant expletives about him as the fallout from the No10 Christmas party rows continues”
His only way out now retaining a modicum of dignity is the Long Covid explanation. Up with your hands Boris and admit the decades of overeating, over drinking and promiscuity had left you woefully ill-prepared for a nasty viral infection. You are not well and you need to focus on your many, many children, and your own health. About 25% of the population will feel sorry for you and wish you well. The other 75% will shout Fuck Off and Good Riddance. The Conservative parliamentary group is in the latter category.
It’s fun to laugh at everyone singing songs about the prime minister - but under almost any other PM, and certainly under a PM from any other party, there wouldn’t be a crowd of 3,000 people at the darts.
1) I’m not laughing.
2) It’s not fun.
3) “3,000 people at the darts” actually gets to the very heart of the problem(s)
At what point Sandpit have you had enough? You’re a good Tory. You are within Johnson’s “constituency” (as in his support base rather than geographically). You share his ideology. You are one of his “season ticket holders”, as @dixiedean put it upthread. So, at what point do you simply have to call it a day for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, aka Binky the Clown?
I’ve never been a fan of Boris Johnson, but he was a necessary part of getting something that looked like Brexit through.
Happy to see him replaced in the new year - unless he can quickly steady the ship with a new Cummings, there will be a rout in the local elections which will likely be the trigger.
I do laugh at all the people shouting about the PM at an event, unaware of the irony that if the other lot were in charge it would be being held behind closed doors.
Cummings never steadied any ship. All his qualities were essentially destructive.
The issue is, that Cummings’ departure has left a massive hole where there needs to be someone actually running the show in No.10.
The problem, as discussed a couple of days ago, is that no-one who’s going to be any good wants the job - because of the wife. How do you solve a problem like Carrie?
The wife, the chief of staff, the press spokesperson and the mayoral candidate. Only one person to blame as the others are all overrated in importance. He rode a wave of populism with a wholly unsustainable coalition on a cause he never really believed in. The damage he will have done to the Tories in ridding it of its one nation wing will take at least a decade to unravel by which time a more sophisticated metropolitan and fairly angry electorate will have facilitated some changes to stop that happening again.
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR Labour would also split, with Corbynites starting a new far left party and maybe a new Blairite party too. A few Tories might join RefUK, I doubt a new far right party would be formed however although it is possible the likes of For Britain or Britain First could win a seat or two under PR
I expect we would see a new centerist bloc of the right of labour, the left of the Tories and the Lib dems.
Wouldn't be terrible.
They would each be separate parties but could come together to form centrist government coalitions, a bit like has been seen in Germany.
However at the same time more extremist parties on left and right could win seats in Parliament under PR they would not win under FPTP.
As nations with PR like Germany, Sweden, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Spain and New Zealand have also discovered PR shifts the formation of a government to post election coalition negotiations, parties hardly ever winning an outright majority at the election itself
That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. Prevents, or at least discourages (Berlusconi says Hi), megalomaniac leaders.
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR as a liberal I could easily work with centre right Tories and Social Democrats, but what I hadn't thought of is my liberal views (reduced state interference, disestablishment of the church, universal basic income, etc, etc) would make me an extremist within that group. Never thought of myself as an extremist.
Very few people are extremists in their own minds - it's mostly a classic "eye of the beholder" thing, though there are some types of behaviour (e.g. violence and abuse) which most of us would immediately call extremist even if they were committed by a centrist. Because, as someone else said, one century's extremism is another's obvious truth, one shouldn't be afraid of it per se. Most of us are extreme about something, aren't we, even if it's pineapple on pizza?
I think to be useful one has to distinguish between opinions and personality. Richard Tyndall has sharply-defined views, some of which I agree with, but nobody would regard him as other than sensible and moderate in the way he puts them forward. Leon has variable views, immoderately expressed - I quite like him but he's temperamentally an extremist. I'm interested in reading the opinions of anyone who puts their case rationally; anyone else is mostly best heard for amusement.
HYUFD is certainly right that PR would lead to a spread of parties - in most PR countries, you get about 5 (far left, social democrat, liberal, conservative, nationalist), though with a low threshold to enter Parliament you get more. Denmark's threshold is 2%, so they have 10 parties, and you can choose fine distinctions of flavour - for instance, there's a party which favours liberal economics but is quite keen on social justice and pacifism. It works pretty well, and everyone more or less gets on and accepts the broad coalitions that necessarily result.
Yes I agree there would be more parties. I think everyone accepts that. Not sure where I would fit in.
I remember once in a local election Labour put two young lads up in the ward I lived in. They were bright and dynamic but young and naïve. I thought they would be absolutely great on the council to shake it up a bit with new ideas and not just accepting the norms. However I also thought a council made up of them from day 1 would be a chaotic disaster.
So I would like to see a centrists Government but I would like to see a real liberal input to shake up the ideas. Not sure how an out and out liberal Government would handle the day to day boring stuff from day 1 though.
If you thought the arrogance, incompetence, selfishness, laziness and entitlement of the Prime Minister was only a Westminster Bubble story, then here is the definitive proof that you are 100% wrong. You don’t get better cut-through than this nowadays:
Daily Mail (yes, Daily Mail) headline:
- “He's lost the room! Darts fans sing 'Stand up if you hate Boris' in unison at the World Championships while football fans chant expletives about him as the fallout from the No10 Christmas party rows continues”
His only way out now retaining a modicum of dignity is the Long Covid explanation. Up with your hands Boris and admit the decades of overeating, over drinking and promiscuity had left you woefully ill-prepared for a nasty viral infection. You are not well and you need to focus on your many, many children, and your own health. About 25% of the population will feel sorry for you and wish you well. The other 75% will shout Fuck Off and Good Riddance. The Conservative parliamentary group is in the latter category.
It’s fun to laugh at everyone singing songs about the prime minister - but under almost any other PM, and certainly under a PM from any other party, there wouldn’t be a crowd of 3,000 people at the darts.
1) I’m not laughing.
2) It’s not fun.
3) “3,000 people at the darts” actually gets to the very heart of the problem(s)
At what point Sandpit have you had enough? You’re a good Tory. You are within Johnson’s “constituency” (as in his support base rather than geographically). You share his ideology. You are one of his “season ticket holders”, as @dixiedean put it upthread. So, at what point do you simply have to call it a day for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, aka Binky the Clown?
I’ve never been a fan of Boris Johnson, but he was a necessary part of getting something that looked like Brexit through.
Happy to see him replaced in the new year - unless he can quickly steady the ship with a new Cummings, there will be a rout in the local elections which will likely be the trigger.
I do laugh at all the people shouting about the PM at an event, unaware of the irony that if the other lot were in charge it would be being held behind closed doors.
Cummings never steadied any ship. All his qualities were essentially destructive.
The issue is, that Cummings’ departure has left a massive hole where there needs to be someone actually running the show in No.10.
The problem, as discussed a couple of days ago, is that no-one who’s going to be any good wants the job - because of the wife. How do you solve a problem like Carrie?
The wife, the chief of staff, the press spokesperson and the mayoral candidate. Only one person to blame as the others are all overrated in importance. He rode a wave of populism with a wholly unsustainable coalition on a cause he never really believed in. The damage he will have done to the Tories in ridding it of its one nation wing will take at least a decade to unravel by which time a more sophisticated metropolitan and fairly angry electorate will have facilitated some changes to stop that happening again.
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR Labour would also split, with Corbynites starting a new far left party and maybe a new Blairite party too. A few Tories might join RefUK, I doubt a new far right party would be formed however although it is possible the likes of For Britain or Britain First could win a seat or two under PR
I expect we would see a new centerist bloc of the right of labour, the left of the Tories and the Lib dems.
Wouldn't be terrible.
They would each be separate parties but could come together to form centrist government coalitions, a bit like has been seen in Germany.
However at the same time more extremist parties on left and right could win seats in Parliament under PR they would not win under FPTP.
As nations with PR like Germany, Sweden, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Spain and New Zealand have also discovered PR shifts the formation of a government to post election coalition negotiations, parties hardly ever winning an outright majority at the election itself
That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. Prevents, or at least discourages (Berlusconi says Hi), megalomaniac leaders.
Netanyahu also says hi.
I'm not seeing any substantiation to your theory.
Another famous example, but I don’t want to Godwin the thread.
If a single party government breaks a manifesto promise you can legitimately be annoyed or even angered, especially if that's why you voted for them. If you vote Lib Dem because you love their education policy and that gets jettisoned in coalition talks then they've banked your vote and abandoned the policy that earned it, and you can't even be legitimately annoyed because coalitions turn manifestos from (hopefully) serious promises made to the electorate into a pick and mix menu for political negotiators after all the votes have been cast and the political class is deciding who gets to be in charge.
But people did get annoyed at the Lib Dems, and they've been suffering the electoral consequences for more than a decade afterwards. The same happens in, for example, Ireland.
When the Tories junk manifesto commitments, or behave like a bunch of scoundrels, FPTP means you are pretty trapped into voting for them if you are opposed to the Labour end of the dichotomy.
FPTP means that most of the time people vote against things, motivated by fear and anger. With PR people are encouraged to vote for things, motivated by hope and optimism.
Exactly.
The same process of discussion and compromise takes place in both systems. With negotiations between parties, everything is normally more overt (as both sides want to tell their story) and transparent for the public and media. In our system a lot is left to rumour, gossip and speculation - i.e. right now we can guess what is going on behind closed doors between Tory lockdown-mongers and lockdown-sceptics, but it's all speculation. If there was a PR coalition between a pro-lockdown and an anti-lockdown party, we'd have a much better idea.
If a single party government breaks a manifesto promise you can legitimately be annoyed or even angered, especially if that's why you voted for them. If you vote Lib Dem because you love their education policy and that gets jettisoned in coalition talks then they've banked your vote and abandoned the policy that earned it, and you can't even be legitimately annoyed because coalitions turn manifestos from (hopefully) serious promises made to the electorate into a pick and mix menu for political negotiators after all the votes have been cast and the political class is deciding who gets to be in charge.
But people did get annoyed at the Lib Dems, and they've been suffering the electoral consequences for more than a decade afterwards. The same happens in, for example, Ireland.
When the Tories junk manifesto commitments, or behave like a bunch of scoundrels, FPTP means you are pretty trapped into voting for them if you are opposed to the Labour end of the dichotomy.
FPTP means that most of the time people vote against things, motivated by fear and anger. With PR people are encouraged to vote for things, motivated by hope and optimism.
The Nazis won their first seats in the Reichstag in the 1920s via PR. 12 seats on just 2.6% of the vote in 1928. Not much hope and optimism there
If this is happening everywhere, why is it not being officially reported?
All the stories of hospitals full of the unvaxxed are anecdotes from staff. I believe these anecdotes, but I can't figure out why they aren't using official statistics to scare the 'hesitant'.
Because the vaccinated wouldn't then accept any restrictions.
If the vaccinated are not going to collapse the health system, why should they accept restrictions?
If only there were some way of making it visible who is vaccinated and unvaccinated so that it would be easy to ban them from public transport and the like....?
If you thought the arrogance, incompetence, selfishness, laziness and entitlement of the Prime Minister was only a Westminster Bubble story, then here is the definitive proof that you are 100% wrong. You don’t get better cut-through than this nowadays:
Daily Mail (yes, Daily Mail) headline:
- “He's lost the room! Darts fans sing 'Stand up if you hate Boris' in unison at the World Championships while football fans chant expletives about him as the fallout from the No10 Christmas party rows continues”
His only way out now retaining a modicum of dignity is the Long Covid explanation. Up with your hands Boris and admit the decades of overeating, over drinking and promiscuity had left you woefully ill-prepared for a nasty viral infection. You are not well and you need to focus on your many, many children, and your own health. About 25% of the population will feel sorry for you and wish you well. The other 75% will shout Fuck Off and Good Riddance. The Conservative parliamentary group is in the latter category.
It’s fun to laugh at everyone singing songs about the prime minister - but under almost any other PM, and certainly under a PM from any other party, there wouldn’t be a crowd of 3,000 people at the darts.
1) I’m not laughing.
2) It’s not fun.
3) “3,000 people at the darts” actually gets to the very heart of the problem(s)
At what point Sandpit have you had enough? You’re a good Tory. You are within Johnson’s “constituency” (as in his support base rather than geographically). You share his ideology. You are one of his “season ticket holders”, as @dixiedean put it upthread. So, at what point do you simply have to call it a day for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, aka Binky the Clown?
I’ve never been a fan of Boris Johnson, but he was a necessary part of getting something that looked like Brexit through.
Happy to see him replaced in the new year - unless he can quickly steady the ship with a new Cummings, there will be a rout in the local elections which will likely be the trigger.
I do laugh at all the people shouting about the PM at an event, unaware of the irony that if the other lot were in charge it would be being held behind closed doors.
Cummings never steadied any ship. All his qualities were essentially destructive.
The issue is, that Cummings’ departure has left a massive hole where there needs to be someone actually running the show in No.10.
The problem, as discussed a couple of days ago, is that no-one who’s going to be any good wants the job - because of the wife. How do you solve a problem like Carrie?
The wife, the chief of staff, the press spokesperson and the mayoral candidate. Only one person to blame as the others are all overrated in importance. He rode a wave of populism with a wholly unsustainable coalition on a cause he never really believed in. The damage he will have done to the Tories in ridding it of its one nation wing will take at least a decade to unravel by which time a more sophisticated metropolitan and fairly angry electorate will have facilitated some changes to stop that happening again.
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR Labour would also split, with Corbynites starting a new far left party and maybe a new Blairite party too. A few Tories might join RefUK, I doubt a new far right party would be formed however although it is possible the likes of For Britain or Britain First could win a seat or two under PR
I expect we would see a new centerist bloc of the right of labour, the left of the Tories and the Lib dems.
Wouldn't be terrible.
They would each be separate parties but could come together to form centrist government coalitions, a bit like has been seen in Germany.
However at the same time more extremist parties on left and right could win seats in Parliament under PR they would not win under FPTP.
As nations with PR like Germany, Sweden, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Spain and New Zealand have also discovered PR shifts the formation of a government to post election coalition negotiations, parties hardly ever winning an outright majority at the election itself
That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. Prevents, or at least discourages (Berlusconi says Hi), megalomaniac leaders.
Netanyahu also says hi.
I'm not seeing any substantiation to your theory.
Not to go all Godwin on your asses, but Hitler also says hi.
I would happily defend the proposition that PR legitimises and magnifies fringe views to a level that is both unhealthy and unnecessary. In addition to all the other things it's bad at.
Eloquent from Hague. The chances of Johnson going next year are imo slimmer than most seem to think. I'm long of him for an enormousish sum at an average 1.9 to still be PM at the next Tory Party Conf. Apart from the money it's a bet I'd like to lose but I don't think it will.
Coal currently generating double the power wind is, and we've turned on every back-up gas turbine which is normally paid to sit unused. Another win for renewables.
Far better to have these power stations used for one week in the year than every week. Go renewables!
Just don't pretend they're cheaper when people show figures for wind power which ignore the 1 for 1 back up capacity required to make it functional.
It's not always going to require that backup when we have a large excess that can be stored. And as rcs1000 has said, the fossil fuel plants are generally cheap to build and expensive to fuel, so having them as mostly idle backup isn't as expensive as you might think.
When I own my home again one of my priorities will be installing a battery with capacity for a week's use, so that I'll be protected from the grid failures caused by Storm Arwen, and it would also mean I could take advantage of a variable tariff to charge the battery when wind electricity was plentiful and cheap, and use my battery when grid electricity was expensive when the wind wasn't blowing.
Coal currently generating double the power wind is, and we've turned on every back-up gas turbine which is normally paid to sit unused. Another win for renewables.
Far better to have these power stations used for one week in the year than every week. Go renewables!
Just don't pretend they're cheaper when people show figures for wind power which ignore the 1 for 1 back up capacity required to make it functional.
It's not always going to require that backup when we have a large excess that can be stored. And as rcs1000 has said, the fossil fuel plants are generally cheap to build and expensive to fuel, so having them as mostly idle backup isn't as expensive as you might think.
When I own my home again one of my priorities will be installing a battery with capacity for a week's use, so that I'll be protected from the grid failures caused by Storm Arwen, and it would also mean I could take advantage of a variable tariff to charge the battery when wind electricity was plentiful and cheap, and use my battery when grid electricity was expensive when the wind wasn't blowing.
Technology is leaving fossil fuels behind.
Do those batteries need to be protected from frost? I'm thinking in terms of an outhouse in a not particularly warm corner of Scotland.
If a single party government breaks a manifesto promise you can legitimately be annoyed or even angered, especially if that's why you voted for them. If you vote Lib Dem because you love their education policy and that gets jettisoned in coalition talks then they've banked your vote and abandoned the policy that earned it, and you can't even be legitimately annoyed because coalitions turn manifestos from (hopefully) serious promises made to the electorate into a pick and mix menu for political negotiators after all the votes have been cast and the political class is deciding who gets to be in charge.
But people did get annoyed at the Lib Dems, and they've been suffering the electoral consequences for more than a decade afterwards. The same happens in, for example, Ireland.
When the Tories junk manifesto commitments, or behave like a bunch of scoundrels, FPTP means you are pretty trapped into voting for them if you are opposed to the Labour end of the dichotomy.
FPTP means that most of the time people vote against things, motivated by fear and anger. With PR people are encouraged to vote for things, motivated by hope and optimism.
The Nazis won their first seats in the Reichstag in the 1920s via PR. 12 seats on just 2.6% of the vote in 1928. Not much hope and optimism there
I think its fantastic that we have a trade deal with Australia that opens up our agricultural sector to even more competition. Competition is a good thing, protectionism doesn't work.
What do you think Scott? Are you in favour of protectionism or competition?
My understanding is that warrant or no warrant debt enforcers have no power to break into a house through a locked over an unpaid energy bill, especially not in the absence of the owner, and if they do they are committing the crime of breaking and entering.
So how come these people have not been named and prosecuted? £500 goodwill gesture doesn't begin to address the gravity of what they've done.
And how come the CEO and the payments division are not also in the dock for conspiring to gain unlawful entry and pervert the course of justice?
Because that's what it will take to stop this nonsense.
Edit - I'm sure I've asked this question before, but I've forgotten the answer. At the same time, the mere fact it's still ongoing is pretty outrageous.
Normal people don't have enough access to the law to enforce their rights. In this case the poor woman was being harassed by this company over a debt she didn't owe, and she should have been able to use the courts to force them to desist when contacting them directly failed to have the desired effect.
We need to dramatically widen access to the courts, so that the law can protect ordinary people from abuses of power by large companies and the government.
I had a constituent whose door was broken down without warning by a team of helmeted police with batons. They were trying to arrest a major drug dealer but got the streets mixed up. After 2 MONTHS she came to me to say that she'd not yet had more than a brief apology and a promise to pay for the repairs at some future point. I contacted them and they coughed up within two weeks and gave a proper fulsome apology, but it shouldn't need an MP's intervention.
She wasn't even especially traumatised - she reckoned that "the police sometimes behave like that, what can one do?" It wasn't an especially rough area, just a largely WWC village.
I had a constituent who was an elderly Tory member, whose door was broken down by the Police, called after a Tory canvasser and candidate became worried that he wasn't answering his door. Reason being, it transpired, that he'd gone out shopping.
Anyhow the Tories made themselves scarce, the Police nailed some corrugated metal where the glass in his front door had been, and he was left with no explanation or redress other than a "sorry, our mistake" note from the Police. Until he phoned me a week later, as his local LibDem councillor for help; I managed to get his door mended gratis by the Council (which had been the telephone intermediary between the canvasser, a Tory cabinet member, and the Police) and was the first to explain to him what had happened.
I don't think he voted Tory the next time! Sadly, that election turned out to be his last.
On the other hand: people were concerned for his welfare. The alternative was perhaps just to ignore the fact this elderly man was not answering his door.
Leaving the party-political aspect out of this, perhaps everyone did the correct thing from what they knew, even if it turned out to the wrong thing in reality.
I don't think running off and leaving the Police to sort the situation was the right thing to do, nor keeping clear and not going back to explain or apologise, nor turning it into a joke being spread around the Town Hall? Tory councillors were having a good laugh at this guy's accidental misfortune while he was sitting in his house with a cold draught blowing through his ruined front door.
When the guy found out that it was the Tory candidate who had called the Police, and that they'd simply run off and disappeared, he was appalled. I managed to get his door re-glazed the day after he phoned me; something they could and should have arranged themselves. The council was embarrassed at the whole episode and its role in it, and agreed to pay up straight away.
I'm afraid this sounds more like a biased anti-Tory story than anything else. It'd be good to hear the other side of your anecdote.
If he had been ill, then they did the right thing. The police, council etc generally don't just break down doors for LOLs.
That sounds like a reverse ferret of your earlier attempt at defending what was clearly very bad behaviour.
Coal currently generating double the power wind is, and we've turned on every back-up gas turbine which is normally paid to sit unused. Another win for renewables.
Far better to have these power stations used for one week in the year than every week. Go renewables!
Just don't pretend they're cheaper when people show figures for wind power which ignore the 1 for 1 back up capacity required to make it functional.
It's not always going to require that backup when we have a large excess that can be stored. And as rcs1000 has said, the fossil fuel plants are generally cheap to build and expensive to fuel, so having them as mostly idle backup isn't as expensive as you might think.
When I own my home again one of my priorities will be installing a battery with capacity for a week's use, so that I'll be protected from the grid failures caused by Storm Arwen, and it would also mean I could take advantage of a variable tariff to charge the battery when wind electricity was plentiful and cheap, and use my battery when grid electricity was expensive when the wind wasn't blowing.
Technology is leaving fossil fuels behind.
The idea the excess can be stored is a total pipe dream. The largest battery storage plan in the world could power the UK for 130 seconds.
An entirely typical winter high pressure front leading to cold days and low wind can last 2-3 weeks.
It's a lovely idea, but the technology does not exist and will not for quite a while.
If you thought the arrogance, incompetence, selfishness, laziness and entitlement of the Prime Minister was only a Westminster Bubble story, then here is the definitive proof that you are 100% wrong. You don’t get better cut-through than this nowadays:
Daily Mail (yes, Daily Mail) headline:
- “He's lost the room! Darts fans sing 'Stand up if you hate Boris' in unison at the World Championships while football fans chant expletives about him as the fallout from the No10 Christmas party rows continues”
His only way out now retaining a modicum of dignity is the Long Covid explanation. Up with your hands Boris and admit the decades of overeating, over drinking and promiscuity had left you woefully ill-prepared for a nasty viral infection. You are not well and you need to focus on your many, many children, and your own health. About 25% of the population will feel sorry for you and wish you well. The other 75% will shout Fuck Off and Good Riddance. The Conservative parliamentary group is in the latter category.
It’s fun to laugh at everyone singing songs about the prime minister - but under almost any other PM, and certainly under a PM from any other party, there wouldn’t be a crowd of 3,000 people at the darts.
1) I’m not laughing.
2) It’s not fun.
3) “3,000 people at the darts” actually gets to the very heart of the problem(s)
At what point Sandpit have you had enough? You’re a good Tory. You are within Johnson’s “constituency” (as in his support base rather than geographically). You share his ideology. You are one of his “season ticket holders”, as @dixiedean put it upthread. So, at what point do you simply have to call it a day for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, aka Binky the Clown?
I’ve never been a fan of Boris Johnson, but he was a necessary part of getting something that looked like Brexit through.
Happy to see him replaced in the new year - unless he can quickly steady the ship with a new Cummings, there will be a rout in the local elections which will likely be the trigger.
I do laugh at all the people shouting about the PM at an event, unaware of the irony that if the other lot were in charge it would be being held behind closed doors.
Cummings never steadied any ship. All his qualities were essentially destructive.
The issue is, that Cummings’ departure has left a massive hole where there needs to be someone actually running the show in No.10.
The problem, as discussed a couple of days ago, is that no-one who’s going to be any good wants the job - because of the wife. How do you solve a problem like Carrie?
The wife, the chief of staff, the press spokesperson and the mayoral candidate. Only one person to blame as the others are all overrated in importance. He rode a wave of populism with a wholly unsustainable coalition on a cause he never really believed in. The damage he will have done to the Tories in ridding it of its one nation wing will take at least a decade to unravel by which time a more sophisticated metropolitan and fairly angry electorate will have facilitated some changes to stop that happening again.
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR Labour would also split, with Corbynites starting a new far left party and maybe a new Blairite party too. A few Tories might join RefUK, I doubt a new far right party would be formed however although it is possible the likes of For Britain or Britain First could win a seat or two under PR
I expect we would see a new centerist bloc of the right of labour, the left of the Tories and the Lib dems.
Wouldn't be terrible.
They would each be separate parties but could come together to form centrist government coalitions, a bit like has been seen in Germany.
However at the same time more extremist parties on left and right could win seats in Parliament under PR they would not win under FPTP.
As nations with PR like Germany, Sweden, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Spain and New Zealand have also discovered PR shifts the formation of a government to post election coalition negotiations, parties hardly ever winning an outright majority at the election itself
That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. Prevents, or at least discourages (Berlusconi says Hi), megalomaniac leaders.
Netanyahu also says hi.
I'm not seeing any substantiation to your theory.
Not to go all Godwin on your asses, but Hitler also says hi.
I would happily defend the proposition that PR legitimises and magnifies fringe views to a level that is both unhealthy and unnecessary. In addition to all the other things it's bad at.
Hmm, we'rte in a website where we have seen the eloquent advocation of ignoring a majority of voters and never even trying to get them to vote Tory because the Tories can always be reelected under FPTP with a targeted minority of mostly elderly houseowners.
If a single party government breaks a manifesto promise you can legitimately be annoyed or even angered, especially if that's why you voted for them. If you vote Lib Dem because you love their education policy and that gets jettisoned in coalition talks then they've banked your vote and abandoned the policy that earned it, and you can't even be legitimately annoyed because coalitions turn manifestos from (hopefully) serious promises made to the electorate into a pick and mix menu for political negotiators after all the votes have been cast and the political class is deciding who gets to be in charge.
But people did get annoyed at the Lib Dems, and they've been suffering the electoral consequences for more than a decade afterwards. The same happens in, for example, Ireland.
When the Tories junk manifesto commitments, or behave like a bunch of scoundrels, FPTP means you are pretty trapped into voting for them if you are opposed to the Labour end of the dichotomy.
FPTP means that most of the time people vote against things, motivated by fear and anger. With PR people are encouraged to vote for things, motivated by hope and optimism.
The Nazis won their first seats in the Reichstag in the 1920s via PR. 12 seats on just 2.6% of the vote in 1928. Not much hope and optimism there
Once again you've deliberately missed the point.
No, that is a point that has to be considered under PR. It will likely elect far right MPs at some point who would never have got elected under FPTP. You may not like that point but you cannot dismiss it.
Even the BNP in 2009 elected some MEPs under PR but we have never had a BNP MP under FPTP
My understanding is that warrant or no warrant debt enforcers have no power to break into a house through a locked over an unpaid energy bill, especially not in the absence of the owner, and if they do they are committing the crime of breaking and entering.
So how come these people have not been named and prosecuted? £500 goodwill gesture doesn't begin to address the gravity of what they've done.
And how come the CEO and the payments division are not also in the dock for conspiring to gain unlawful entry and pervert the course of justice?
Because that's what it will take to stop this nonsense.
Edit - I'm sure I've asked this question before, but I've forgotten the answer. At the same time, the mere fact it's still ongoing is pretty outrageous.
Normal people don't have enough access to the law to enforce their rights. In this case the poor woman was being harassed by this company over a debt she didn't owe, and she should have been able to use the courts to force them to desist when contacting them directly failed to have the desired effect.
We need to dramatically widen access to the courts, so that the law can protect ordinary people from abuses of power by large companies and the government.
I had a constituent whose door was broken down without warning by a team of helmeted police with batons. They were trying to arrest a major drug dealer but got the streets mixed up. After 2 MONTHS she came to me to say that she'd not yet had more than a brief apology and a promise to pay for the repairs at some future point. I contacted them and they coughed up within two weeks and gave a proper fulsome apology, but it shouldn't need an MP's intervention.
She wasn't even especially traumatised - she reckoned that "the police sometimes behave like that, what can one do?" It wasn't an especially rough area, just a largely WWC village.
I had a constituent who was an elderly Tory member, whose door was broken down by the Police, called after a Tory canvasser and candidate became worried that he wasn't answering his door. Reason being, it transpired, that he'd gone out shopping.
Anyhow the Tories made themselves scarce, the Police nailed some corrugated metal where the glass in his front door had been, and he was left with no explanation or redress other than a "sorry, our mistake" note from the Police. Until he phoned me a week later, as his local LibDem councillor for help; I managed to get his door mended gratis by the Council (which had been the telephone intermediary between the canvasser, a Tory cabinet member, and the Police) and was the first to explain to him what had happened.
I don't think he voted Tory the next time! Sadly, that election turned out to be his last.
On the other hand: people were concerned for his welfare. The alternative was perhaps just to ignore the fact this elderly man was not answering his door.
Leaving the party-political aspect out of this, perhaps everyone did the correct thing from what they knew, even if it turned out to the wrong thing in reality.
I don't think running off and leaving the Police to sort the situation was the right thing to do, nor keeping clear and not going back to explain or apologise, nor turning it into a joke being spread around the Town Hall? Tory councillors were having a good laugh at this guy's accidental misfortune while he was sitting in his house with a cold draught blowing through his ruined front door.
When the guy found out that it was the Tory candidate who had called the Police, and that they'd simply run off and disappeared, he was appalled. I managed to get his door re-glazed the day after he phoned me; something they could and should have arranged themselves. The council was embarrassed at the whole episode and its role in it, and agreed to pay up straight away.
I'm afraid this sounds more like a biased anti-Tory story than anything else. It'd be good to hear the other side of your anecdote.
If he had been ill, then they did the right thing. The police, council etc generally don't just break down doors for LOLs.
That sounds like a reverse ferret of your earlier attempt at defending what was clearly very bad behaviour.
???
What 'very bad behaviour' ? Calling for assistance when they thought someone who was elderly needed help?
Yes, they were mistaken. But the 'very bad behaviour' would have been walking away and doing nothing.
Coal currently generating double the power wind is, and we've turned on every back-up gas turbine which is normally paid to sit unused. Another win for renewables.
Far better to have these power stations used for one week in the year than every week. Go renewables!
Just don't pretend they're cheaper when people show figures for wind power which ignore the 1 for 1 back up capacity required to make it functional.
It's not always going to require that backup when we have a large excess that can be stored. And as rcs1000 has said, the fossil fuel plants are generally cheap to build and expensive to fuel, so having them as mostly idle backup isn't as expensive as you might think.
When I own my home again one of my priorities will be installing a battery with capacity for a week's use, so that I'll be protected from the grid failures caused by Storm Arwen, and it would also mean I could take advantage of a variable tariff to charge the battery when wind electricity was plentiful and cheap, and use my battery when grid electricity was expensive when the wind wasn't blowing.
Technology is leaving fossil fuels behind.
The idea the excess can be stored is a total pipe dream. The largest battery storage plan in the world could power the UK for 130 seconds.
An entirely typical winter high pressure front leading to cold days and low wind can last 2-3 weeks.
It's a lovely idea, but the technology does not exist and will not for quite a while.
Well… it could be done. If rather than using batteries you converted the electricity into H2. It’s lossy but perfectly feasible.
Coal currently generating double the power wind is, and we've turned on every back-up gas turbine which is normally paid to sit unused. Another win for renewables.
Far better to have these power stations used for one week in the year than every week. Go renewables!
Just don't pretend they're cheaper when people show figures for wind power which ignore the 1 for 1 back up capacity required to make it functional.
It's not always going to require that backup when we have a large excess that can be stored. And as rcs1000 has said, the fossil fuel plants are generally cheap to build and expensive to fuel, so having them as mostly idle backup isn't as expensive as you might think.
When I own my home again one of my priorities will be installing a battery with capacity for a week's use, so that I'll be protected from the grid failures caused by Storm Arwen, and it would also mean I could take advantage of a variable tariff to charge the battery when wind electricity was plentiful and cheap, and use my battery when grid electricity was expensive when the wind wasn't blowing.
Technology is leaving fossil fuels behind.
The idea the excess can be stored is a total pipe dream. The largest battery storage plan in the world could power the UK for 130 seconds.
An entirely typical winter high pressure front leading to cold days and low wind can last 2-3 weeks.
It's a lovely idea, but the technology does not exist and will not for quite a while.
Well… it could be done. If rather than using batteries you converted the electricity into H2. It’s lossy but perfectly feasible.
Green Hydrogen is one solution another is https://www.energyvault.com/ - which uses gravity to return the energy stored (I've posted about them before).
I should add that Green Hydrogen makes a lot more sense for HGVs than all electric vehicles - the time taken to refuel the HGV will be minutes rather than hours / days.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
A surprising number of early twentieth century PMs did not go to University -- Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Winston Churchill, Ramsey Macdonald.
The Great Cult of Oxford seems to begin with Eden and Wilson. There have been 10 Oxford PMs since Eden.
As British society became more equal (allegedly), so Oxford University has maintained a remorseless grip on the PM-ship.
And it is getting worse. Since 1997, only 3 years have been non-Oxford (Gordon Brown).
And after Boris, it will presumably be either Starmer, Truss, Hunt or Sunak (all Oxford).
There is just no end of Oxford mediocrities wanting to be PM.
If a single party government breaks a manifesto promise you can legitimately be annoyed or even angered, especially if that's why you voted for them. If you vote Lib Dem because you love their education policy and that gets jettisoned in coalition talks then they've banked your vote and abandoned the policy that earned it, and you can't even be legitimately annoyed because coalitions turn manifestos from (hopefully) serious promises made to the electorate into a pick and mix menu for political negotiators after all the votes have been cast and the political class is deciding who gets to be in charge.
But people did get annoyed at the Lib Dems, and they've been suffering the electoral consequences for more than a decade afterwards. The same happens in, for example, Ireland.
When the Tories junk manifesto commitments, or behave like a bunch of scoundrels, FPTP means you are pretty trapped into voting for them if you are opposed to the Labour end of the dichotomy.
FPTP means that most of the time people vote against things, motivated by fear and anger. With PR people are encouraged to vote for things, motivated by hope and optimism.
The Nazis won their first seats in the Reichstag in the 1920s via PR. 12 seats on just 2.6% of the vote in 1928. Not much hope and optimism there
Maybe, but there were a whole lot of special circumstances then, like awarding a party an MP for every 60000 votes, leading to massive fragmentation within the parliament. I think also the poor Versailles deal that Germany got, along with the private army which Hitler etc built up had some influence there as well. It was quite easy for a Party to bully it's way to power, subjugating it's people to mindless acceptance of barbaric practices (anti-Jewish etc). It was no coincidence that after the war, the vast majority of the German people denied all knowledge of the camps, (though they were very eager to inform on jews and other minorities).
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
A surprising number of early twentieth century PMs did not go to University -- Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Winston Churchill, Ramsey Macdonald.
The Great Cult of Oxford seems to begin with Eden and Wilson. There have been 10 Oxford PMs since Eden.
As British society became more equal (allegedly), so Oxford University has maintained a remorseless grip on the PM-ship.
And it is getting worse. Since 1997, only 3 years have been non-Oxford (Gordon Brown).
And after Boris, it will presumably be either Starmer, Truss, Hunt or Sunak (all Oxford).
There is just no end of Oxford mediocrities wanting to be PM.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
A surprising number of early twentieth century PMs did not go to University -- Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Winston Churchill, Ramsey Macdonald.
The Great Cult of Oxford seems to begin with Eden and Wilson. There have been 10 Oxford PMs since Eden.
As British society became more equal (allegedly), so Oxford University has maintained a remorseless grip on the PM-ship.
And it is getting worse. Since 1997, only 3 years have been non-Oxford (Gordon Brown).
And after Boris, it will presumably be either Starmer, Truss, Hunt or Sunak (all Oxford).
There is just no end of Oxford mediocrities wanting to be PM.
Starmer's main degree was Leeds, not Oxford.
I understand -- but remember if we do it this way, Neil Mostyn Hamilton becomes Cambridge's responsibility, not Aber's.
Mr. Sandpit, just so. Fragmenting political parties so they no longer need to appeal to a broad swathe of the electorate to enter high office is not a step in the right direction, particularly when the move is made simply to sate those who believe in participation awards.
And that's before we get to the government being determined by politicians after the electorate have cast their votes and without the need to consult the pesky public any further.
Once we've voted any government is free to do what it likes until the electorate have the chance to pass their verdict at the next election.
This is no different with PR than with FPTP....
Free to do what it likes, subject to commanding a parliamentary majority. Which is a very different matter indeed with PR than FPTP. To pretend otherwise is silly.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
A surprising number of early twentieth century PMs did not go to University -- Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Winston Churchill, Ramsey Macdonald.
The Great Cult of Oxford seems to begin with Eden and Wilson. There have been 10 Oxford PMs since Eden.
As British society became more equal (allegedly), so Oxford University has maintained a remorseless grip on the PM-ship.
And it is getting worse. Since 1997, only 3 years have been non-Oxford (Gordon Brown).
And after Boris, it will presumably be either Starmer, Truss, Hunt or Sunak (all Oxford).
There is just no end of Oxford mediocrities wanting to be PM.
Starmer's main degree was Leeds, not Oxford.
I understand -- but remember if we do it this way, Neil Mostyn Hamilton becomes Cambridge's responsibility, not Aber's.
Equally, we would also have to accept responsibility for Hyufd.
I think its fantastic that we have a trade deal with Australia that opens up our agricultural sector to even more competition. Competition is a good thing, protectionism doesn't work.
What do you think Scott? Are you in favour of protectionism or competition?
It's a great thing. But the point is that is not what was promised to those people.
Mr. Sandpit, just so. Fragmenting political parties so they no longer need to appeal to a broad swathe of the electorate to enter high office is not a step in the right direction, particularly when the move is made simply to sate those who believe in participation awards.
And that's before we get to the government being determined by politicians after the electorate have cast their votes and without the need to consult the pesky public any further.
Once we've voted any government is free to do what it likes until the electorate have the chance to pass their verdict at the next election.
This is no different with PR than with FPTP....
Free to do what it likes, subject to commanding a parliamentary majority. Which is a very different matter indeed with PR than FPTP. To pretend otherwise is silly.
I think a while ago in Ireland the progressive democrats were published at the election following a pact. (2007 I think)
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR Labour would also split, with Corbynites starting a new far left party and maybe a new Blairite party too. A few Tories might join RefUK, I doubt a new far right party would be formed however although it is possible the likes of For Britain or Britain First could win a seat or two under PR
I expect we would see a new centerist bloc of the right of labour, the left of the Tories and the Lib dems.
Wouldn't be terrible.
They would each be separate parties but could come together to form centrist government coalitions, a bit like has been seen in Germany.
However at the same time more extremist parties on left and right could win seats in Parliament under PR they would not win under FPTP.
As nations with PR like Germany, Sweden, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Spain and New Zealand have also discovered PR shifts the formation of a government to post election coalition negotiations, parties hardly ever winning an outright majority at the election itself
That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. Prevents, or at least discourages (Berlusconi says Hi), megalomaniac leaders.
Netanyahu also says hi.
I'm not seeing any substantiation to your theory.
Not to go all Godwin on your asses, but Hitler also says hi.
I would happily defend the proposition that PR legitimises and magnifies fringe views to a level that is both unhealthy and unnecessary. In addition to all the other things it's bad at.
I'm astonished that anyone is arguing PR legitimises fringe views when FPTP has given us the current government, in thrall to the ERG and a Tory Party membership that is far to the right of the 43% (just 29% of the registered electorate) that voted Conservative.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
A surprising number of early twentieth century PMs did not go to University -- Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Winston Churchill, Ramsey Macdonald.
The Great Cult of Oxford seems to begin with Eden and Wilson. There have been 10 Oxford PMs since Eden.
As British society became more equal (allegedly), so Oxford University has maintained a remorseless grip on the PM-ship.
And it is getting worse. Since 1997, only 3 years have been non-Oxford (Gordon Brown).
And after Boris, it will presumably be either Starmer, Truss, Hunt or Sunak (all Oxford).
There is just no end of Oxford mediocrities wanting to be PM.
Starmer's main degree was Leeds, not Oxford.
I understand -- but remember if we do it this way, Neil Mostyn Hamilton becomes Cambridge's responsibility, not Aber's.
Equally, we would also have to accept responsibility for Hyufd.
But, HYUFD has not yet reached a position of any power.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
How many candidates from Manchester University have even stood for PM or party leader? It is no surprise the best universities in the land produce the most PMs as do the best schools, though we have had an Edinburgh graduate PM in Brown more recently than a Cambridge graduate, the last was Baldwin and from 1964-1997 all our PMs went to state schools, mostly grammars.
Personally I went to private school, Warwick and Aber, my wife though has a postgrad from Oxford but did her undergrad at Durham
Do you think Eton has the best pupils or pupils with the richest parents? Do you think Eton pupils succeed over other schools' pupils because the Eton ex-pupils are brighter or because they went to Eton?
If a single party government breaks a manifesto promise you can legitimately be annoyed or even angered, especially if that's why you voted for them. If you vote Lib Dem because you love their education policy and that gets jettisoned in coalition talks then they've banked your vote and abandoned the policy that earned it, and you can't even be legitimately annoyed because coalitions turn manifestos from (hopefully) serious promises made to the electorate into a pick and mix menu for political negotiators after all the votes have been cast and the political class is deciding who gets to be in charge.
But people did get annoyed at the Lib Dems, and they've been suffering the electoral consequences for more than a decade afterwards. The same happens in, for example, Ireland.
When the Tories junk manifesto commitments, or behave like a bunch of scoundrels, FPTP means you are pretty trapped into voting for them if you are opposed to the Labour end of the dichotomy.
FPTP means that most of the time people vote against things, motivated by fear and anger. With PR people are encouraged to vote for things, motivated by hope and optimism.
The Nazis won their first seats in the Reichstag in the 1920s via PR. 12 seats on just 2.6% of the vote in 1928. Not much hope and optimism there
Once again you've deliberately missed the point.
No, that is a point that has to be considered under PR. It will likely elect far right MPs at some point who would never have got elected under FPTP. You may not like that point but you cannot dismiss it.
Even the BNP in 2009 elected some MEPs under PR but we have never had a BNP MP under FPTP
Yes, that is a bit unfair, you must admit. If they want to get elected under the present system, they have to join the Conservative Party.
Eloquent from Hague. The chances of Johnson going next year are imo slimmer than most seem to think. I'm long of him for an enormousish sum at an average 1.9 to still be PM at the next Tory Party Conf. Apart from the money it's a bet I'd like to lose but I don't think it will.
My view - and I know no more than you do! - is that the party has decided it is best off shot of him and is now just considering the timing. It's a balance of getting him to own any difficult moments coming up (winter covid / local elections) and moving before he taints the party any more than he has to. There is an obvious fallacy in this argument in that 'the party' isn't one brain but many, with many views, but don't look too hard and I think the point still stands.
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR Labour would also split, with Corbynites starting a new far left party and maybe a new Blairite party too. A few Tories might join RefUK, I doubt a new far right party would be formed however although it is possible the likes of For Britain or Britain First could win a seat or two under PR
I expect we would see a new centerist bloc of the right of labour, the left of the Tories and the Lib dems.
Wouldn't be terrible.
They would each be separate parties but could come together to form centrist government coalitions, a bit like has been seen in Germany.
However at the same time more extremist parties on left and right could win seats in Parliament under PR they would not win under FPTP.
As nations with PR like Germany, Sweden, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Spain and New Zealand have also discovered PR shifts the formation of a government to post election coalition negotiations, parties hardly ever winning an outright majority at the election itself
That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. Prevents, or at least discourages (Berlusconi says Hi), megalomaniac leaders.
Netanyahu also says hi.
I'm not seeing any substantiation to your theory.
Not to go all Godwin on your asses, but Hitler also says hi.
I would happily defend the proposition that PR legitimises and magnifies fringe views to a level that is both unhealthy and unnecessary. In addition to all the other things it's bad at.
I'm astonished that anyone is arguing PR legitimises fringe views when FPTP has given us the current government, in thrall to the ERG and a Tory Party membership that is far to the right of the 43% (just 29% of the registered electorate) that voted Conservative.
So apparently this Tory government are no worse than far right Nazis who could get elected under PR.
Coal currently generating double the power wind is, and we've turned on every back-up gas turbine which is normally paid to sit unused. Another win for renewables.
Far better to have these power stations used for one week in the year than every week. Go renewables!
Just don't pretend they're cheaper when people show figures for wind power which ignore the 1 for 1 back up capacity required to make it functional.
It's not always going to require that backup when we have a large excess that can be stored. And as rcs1000 has said, the fossil fuel plants are generally cheap to build and expensive to fuel, so having them as mostly idle backup isn't as expensive as you might think.
When I own my home again one of my priorities will be installing a battery with capacity for a week's use, so that I'll be protected from the grid failures caused by Storm Arwen, and it would also mean I could take advantage of a variable tariff to charge the battery when wind electricity was plentiful and cheap, and use my battery when grid electricity was expensive when the wind wasn't blowing.
Technology is leaving fossil fuels behind.
The idea the excess can be stored is a total pipe dream. The largest battery storage plan in the world could power the UK for 130 seconds.
An entirely typical winter high pressure front leading to cold days and low wind can last 2-3 weeks.
It's a lovely idea, but the technology does not exist and will not for quite a while.
Well… it could be done. If rather than using batteries you converted the electricity into H2. It’s lossy but perfectly feasible.
Green Hydrogen is one solution another is https://www.energyvault.com/ - which uses gravity to return the energy stored (I've posted about them before).
I should add that Green Hydrogen makes a lot more sense for HGVs than all electric vehicles - the time taken to refuel the HGV will be minutes rather than hours / days.
Not really. The inefficiencies in producing (and storing/transporting) hydrogen are pretty large, and while likely to improve over the next decade or so, are not going to disappear.
Meanwhile, the power architectures for EVs are rapidly improving. HGVs are likely to be 1200V and upwards, so it won't take days to recharge.
Comments
This is no different with PR than with FPTP.
For what it's worth, I'd discourage coalitions, have the largest party form the Executive and provide much more Parliamentary time for the debate and passage of Bills proposed by non-government parties/backbench MPs.
https://cbs12.com/news/local/omicron-is-dominant-in-wastewater-samples-in-florida-county
So Omicron might be the saviour of the South or we could be drawing conclusions too early and Florida is about to be fucked right in the ear.
Just don't know. That's the fun of Covid.
The responses of Governments to Omicron are, rather like Boris Johnson on Sky last night, bordering on the incoherent. The problem is Governments have a duty to all their citizens, not just the ones who voted in the right box or those who are responsible but to those who don't support them and those who are irresponsible.
It may chaff with many on here but sometimes Government has an obligation to protect people from their own stupidity or bad decisions or poor lifestyle choices and that can mean the responsible carrying the can for the irresponsible.
Hospitals and health services exist for us all not just those who live well or do the right thing. If you choose not to be vaccinated, that doesn't mean you're denied treatment if you require it. The consequence of that, given the high rate of transmission is others who are in hospital for other reasons may become vulnerable.
Back to the weaponising of data and the London Evening Standard continues to put forward the notion one third of all adult Londoners have had no vaccination and are therefore relying on immunity via infection which presumably doesn't last forever (any more than immunity by vaccination to be fair). How that figure is derived is never explained and of course no one knows if and when and how many of the unvaccinated have that infection-based protection.
So, on the one hand, we have a plethora of information and on the other we are missing some key clues which would better inform our response so in this fog of confusion Governments either hesitate or push to the extreme and that seems to be where we are complicated by the whole "Christmas" notion which further informs people's responses, actions and thoughts.
I don't know what should be done - oddly enough, there are times when indecision is the right decision.
https://www.iffs.se/en/news/sweden-the-extreme-country/
However at the same time more extremist parties on left and right could win seats in Parliament under PR they would not win under FPTP.
As nations with PR like Germany, Sweden, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Spain and New Zealand have also discovered PR shifts the formation of a government to post election coalition negotiations, parties hardly ever winning an outright majority at the election itself
Not sure everyone on here will agree with this...
https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1472586019077767170?s=20
Anyhow the Tories made themselves scarce, the Police nailed some corrugated metal where the glass in his front door had been, and he was left with no explanation or redress other than a "sorry, our mistake" note from the Police. Until he phoned me a week later, as his local LibDem councillor for help; I managed to get his door mended gratis by the Council (which had been the telephone intermediary between the canvasser, a Tory cabinet member, and the Police) and was the first to explain to him what had happened. Which I only discovered because I had overhead Tory councillors re-telling the story with much hilarity at the idiocy of their candidate, Stratton-style, at the Town Hall.
I don't think he voted Tory that time! Sadly, that election turned out to be his last.
Difficult to untangle usually.
If you look at how the Uk seats were split in EU Parliament elections I suspect that would give you a decent overview of the possible results and the extremists elected there were the obvious anti-EU ones.
If we are to give certain people extraordinary powers, we should expect them to be held accountable for exercising them reasonably.
The makers of policy may wish to err on the side of caution.
But, that is nothing to do with the science which is concerned only with the robust analysis and presentation of the data, and its interpretation.
All too often there's no mechanism for identifying and correcting mistakes. That drives people to despair.
Leaving the party-political aspect out of this, perhaps everyone did the correct thing from what they knew, even if it turned out to the wrong thing in reality.
OTOH, the US doesn't have funded healthcare and still had insanely high obesity levels. So who knows.
We had a really good debate here a few days ago about taxes on cigarettes, alcohol, food etc.
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
@medichulston
Every single patient in our respiratory support unit is unvaccinated. #vaccineswork
8:29 AM · Dec 21, 2021
https://twitter.com/medichulston/status/1473209102138490886
If this is happening everywhere, why is it not being officially reported?
All the stories of hospitals full of the unvaxxed are anecdotes from staff. I believe these anecdotes, but I can't figure out why they aren't using official statistics to scare the 'hesitant'.
Te;egraph blog
You'd have as @NickPalmer suggests, a "centre-right" bloc of parties and a "centre left" bloc. You might get one group which oscillates between the two but tends to be a lot rarer than you might think. The fragmentation of the Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green and other parties would sit along these lines.
You might also argue PR legislates against radical policies which might be required at certain points - that's a more reasonable point but other countries with PR have followed Thatcherite policies (you don't need a 144 seat majority to be radical or indeed a 179 seat majority not to be radical). It's likely extreme parties at both ends of the spectrum would be excluded (much as AfD is out in the cold in Germany).
PR is two words - proportional and representation. Too much stress is placed on the first but the key word is the second. I am more equivocal about PR at Westminster elections for the reasons I've cited above but I am more strongly in favour of PR at local level.
I quote my own Borough, Newham, as an example. In 2018, 65% voted Labour and that delivered 100% of the seats - all 60. The 35% who voted for other parties got nothing, no voice at all. I don't dispute Labour's right to govern with a 65% vote but I do dispute the notion the 35% of non-Labour voices are utterly unrepresented on the Council.
Representation isn't just about fairness - it's about the provision of scrutiny, accountability and transparency - but about the notion that in a plural democracy, as many voices as possible should be heard. The electoral system shouldn't be used as a tool for silencing other voices but that's how FPTP works.
And we really really should be telling the unvaccinated what reality really is - as they continue to listen to the scare stories of the 52 year old mate of a mate of a mate to the power of 12 who died of a heart attack during sex after being vaccinated 4 weeks earlier.
Thanks to @NickPalmer and others who take/took that bit of the job seriously.
When the guy found out that it was the Tory candidate who had called the Police, and that they'd simply run off and disappeared, he was appalled. I managed to get his door re-glazed the day after he phoned me; something they could and should have arranged themselves. The council was embarrassed at the whole episode and its role in it, and agreed to pay up straight away.
If a single party government breaks a manifesto promise you can legitimately be annoyed or even angered, especially if that's why you voted for them. If you vote Lib Dem because you love their education policy and that gets jettisoned in coalition talks then they've banked your vote and abandoned the policy that earned it, and you can't even be legitimately annoyed because coalitions turn manifestos from (hopefully) serious promises made to the electorate into a pick and mix menu for political negotiators after all the votes have been cast and the political class is deciding who gets to be in charge.
There is one of course.
Politics is the process of making decisions and resolving differences through discussion and compromise - pretending it's a simple game of elections, winners and losers, and nothing more, is naive.
Anyway, OUSU presidents go on to mediocre political careers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anneliese_Dodds
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Straw
etc
etc
Personally I went to private school, Warwick and Aber, my wife though has a postgrad from Oxford but did her undergrad at Durham
https://twitter.com/juliamacfarlane/status/1473234137540886528
Exc: Australia post-Brexit trade deal to cause £94m hit to UK farming, forestry and fishing, Government’s own impact assessment says
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/brexit-australia-trade-deal-94m-hit-uk-farming-forestry-and-fishing-government-study-reveals-1361797?ito=twitter_share_article-top
https://twitter.com/singharj/status/1473058561949564934
Not sure if that is still the case.
When the Tories junk manifesto commitments, or behave like a bunch of scoundrels, FPTP means you are pretty trapped into voting for them if you are opposed to the Labour end of the dichotomy.
FPTP means that most of the time people vote against things, motivated by fear and anger. With PR people are encouraged to vote for things, motivated by hope and optimism.
If he had been ill, then they did the right thing. The police, council etc generally don't just break down doors for LOLs.
@iainmartin1
·
36m
A week ago today the extraordinary number given to the health secretary by UKHSA - 200k infections in one day - drove a lot of scary stories + Labour demands for restrictions. Has been quietly withdrawn. Happens, but still, shouldn't it give the restrictions enthusiasts pause?
@SamCoatesSky
·
1h
No10 are stressing this morning Boris Johnson has not definitively ruled out restrictions before Xmas - via
@tamcohen
below
I'm not seeing any substantiation to your theory.
I remember once in a local election Labour put two young lads up in the ward I lived in. They were bright and dynamic but young and naïve. I thought they would be absolutely great on the council to shake it up a bit with new ideas and not just accepting the norms. However I also thought a council made up of them from day 1 would be a chaotic disaster.
So I would like to see a centrists Government but I would like to see a real liberal input to shake up the ideas. Not sure how an out and out liberal Government would handle the day to day boring stuff from day 1 though.
Ah, bum.
The same process of discussion and compromise takes place in both systems. With negotiations between parties, everything is normally more overt (as both sides want to tell their story) and transparent for the public and media. In our system a lot is left to rumour, gossip and speculation - i.e. right now we can guess what is going on behind closed doors between Tory lockdown-mongers and lockdown-sceptics, but it's all speculation. If there was a PR coalition between a pro-lockdown and an anti-lockdown party, we'd have a much better idea.
I would happily defend the proposition that PR legitimises and magnifies fringe views to a level that is both unhealthy and unnecessary. In addition to all the other things it's bad at.
When I own my home again one of my priorities will be installing a battery with capacity for a week's use, so that I'll be protected from the grid failures caused by Storm Arwen, and it would also mean I could take advantage of a variable tariff to charge the battery when wind electricity was plentiful and cheap, and use my battery when grid electricity was expensive when the wind wasn't blowing.
Technology is leaving fossil fuels behind.
Jumped before he was pushed I reckon.
https://twitter.com/bumblecricket/status/1473233508709670915
What do you think Scott? Are you in favour of protectionism or competition?
An entirely typical winter high pressure front leading to cold days and low wind can last 2-3 weeks.
It's a lovely idea, but the technology does not exist and will not for quite a while.
Even the BNP in 2009 elected some MEPs under PR but we have never had a BNP MP under FPTP
What 'very bad behaviour' ? Calling for assistance when they thought someone who was elderly needed help?
Yes, they were mistaken. But the 'very bad behaviour' would have been walking away and doing nothing.
I should add that Green Hydrogen makes a lot more sense for HGVs than all electric vehicles - the time taken to refuel the HGV will be minutes rather than hours / days.
The Great Cult of Oxford seems to begin with Eden and Wilson. There have been 10 Oxford PMs since Eden.
As British society became more equal (allegedly), so Oxford University has maintained a remorseless grip on the PM-ship.
And it is getting worse. Since 1997, only 3 years have been non-Oxford (Gordon Brown).
And after Boris, it will presumably be either Starmer, Truss, Hunt or Sunak (all Oxford).
There is just no end of Oxford mediocrities wanting to be PM.
Which is a very different matter indeed with PR than FPTP. To pretend otherwise is silly.
Westminster Voting Intention (Wales):
LAB: 39% (+2)
CON: 26% (-5)
PLC: 13% (-2)
RFM: 7% (+1)
GRN: 6% (+1)
LDM: 3% (-1)
Via @YouGov, 13-16 Dec.
Changes w/ 13-16 Sep.
https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1472942653792784387
The Welsh will never forsake the Drake(ford).
I agree, if he does ....
There is an obvious fallacy in this argument in that 'the party' isn't one brain but many, with many views, but don't look too hard and I think the point still stands.
The inefficiencies in producing (and storing/transporting) hydrogen are pretty large, and while likely to improve over the next decade or so, are not going to disappear.
Meanwhile, the power architectures for EVs are rapidly improving. HGVs are likely to be 1200V and upwards, so it won't take days to recharge.