The reason I want Johnson gone is that his staying demeans our country. I do also worry that he might bounce back, but again largely because of what that would say about us as a country.
He does demean Britain but to my mind he's also the perfect poster boy PM for post-Brexit Britain.
Some rather surprising stuff on my Facebook feed today. Normally there isn't much politics on it other than what the few very vocal left-wingers who have for years been putting our messages to bash the Tories (and more recently how we should be wearing masks forever).
Today an old work colleague based in the North put out a message saying to stop making such a fuss about birthday cake when there are more important things. Also mentioned if it weren't for Boris getting is out the EU then we would all still be waiting for vaccines. Even as a Brexiteer that's a bunch of rubbish as they are just as well vaxxed now as we are, just a bit later. Even more surprising to me was the number of people who commented to support them.
I am very surprised that there are so many people who are willing to give Boris a pass on all this recent news.
I'm not sure it is a pass, but having a massive media circus about a cake and where exactly Sue's document is stored at this precise minute whilst Russia is preparing an invasion on European soil might be beginning to grate.
The whole thing is starting to look like a confection, even if at its base is a truth about what No 10 is currently like.
It is the 24 hour news problem again.
While the build-up of Russian forces is very concerning, there have been Russian troops in Ukraine, and Moldova and Georgia, for years. Russia has already invaded European soil and they're still there, in occupation. It's occasionally puzzling when you see people only waking up to the problem this month.
Can't argue with that, although the problem creeps ever nearer. Though with the energy prices as they are, it will have a direct effect on many, not just 'a small piece of land somewhere east'.
[Does anyone who opposed fracking ever wonder if just possibly it might have been better to have an independent supply, even if only in the short term?]
Fracking would have taken too long, and wasn't reliably feasible - strata too shattered and intruded and cooked compared with the classic areas of the North American interior basins.
New: Hearing the prime minister is telling MPs (who say they are getting more time with the PM than they ever imagined) that this is a media / Labour witch-hunt, that he’s been through worse before and that he’s bounced back before and will do so again
No. Starting watching it, but he seems to be saying lots of words very quickly, and not clearly clear was his central criticism is.
The easiest criticism of jpeg NFTs is the actual image isn't even stored on the blockchain at the moment, only a link to a decentralised image storage system. In 99.9999% of cases you are just buying a link with possibly some IP claim to the image, maybe....
As I said before, there is something in the idea, but current stuff is tulip mania.
I think the central criticism is it's a scam. But maybe there is some interesting tech in there.
Like a lot of crypto stuff, I compare it to first dot com bubble. There are some interesting ideas, but vast majority of implementation are poor or poorly thought through and will blow up.
The idea of instant virtually cost fee worldwide electronic transactions, well yes that's obviously the future compared to something like Western Union, banking the unbanked, being able to get finance etc. If that is say Solana, well that's a different matter.
NFTs are the same. The idea you can have an instantly provable digital token, that's perfectly sensible idea for say tickets to a gig, the bands can cut out a load of middle men and people can trade without worrying about fraud. But the current stuff of buying some profile picture as a digital flex with some vacuous nonsense about getting access to an elite online club, is bollocks in 99.99999999% of cases.
Some rather surprising stuff on my Facebook feed today. Normally there isn't much politics on it other than what the few very vocal left-wingers who have for years been putting our messages to bash the Tories (and more recently how we should be wearing masks forever).
Today an old work colleague based in the North put out a message saying to stop making such a fuss about birthday cake when there are more important things. Also mentioned if it weren't for Boris getting is out the EU then we would all still be waiting for vaccines. Even as a Brexiteer that's a bunch of rubbish as they are just as well vaxxed now as we are, just a bit later. Even more surprising to me was the number of people who commented to support them.
I am very surprised that there are so many people who are willing to give Boris a pass on all this recent news.
I'm not that surprised. The whole affair is not very important compared to what's going on in Ukraine, and also the related gas price crisis.
Having a Prime Minister who thinks he's above the law is definitely a problem.
Given that that point is too subtle for some here, is it any wonder that it's too subtle for many more in the world at large?
Some rather surprising stuff on my Facebook feed today. Normally there isn't much politics on it other than what the few very vocal left-wingers who have for years been putting our messages to bash the Tories (and more recently how we should be wearing masks forever).
Today an old work colleague based in the North put out a message saying to stop making such a fuss about birthday cake when there are more important things. Also mentioned if it weren't for Boris getting is out the EU then we would all still be waiting for vaccines. Even as a Brexiteer that's a bunch of rubbish as they are just as well vaxxed now as we are, just a bit later. Even more surprising to me was the number of people who commented to support them.
I am very surprised that there are so many people who are willing to give Boris a pass on all this recent news.
I'm not sure it is a pass, but having a massive media circus about a cake and where exactly Sue's document is stored at this precise minute whilst Russia is preparing an invasion on European soil might be beginning to grate.
The whole thing is starting to look like a confection, even if at its base is a truth about what No 10 is currently like.
It is the 24 hour news problem again.
It has been headline news for far too long and people are fed up with it. The cake thing yesterday was just stupid. People may be beginning to feel sorry for Johnson. Murders get hardly any news coverage yet a man eating a slice of cake on his birthday 20 months ago got wall to wall coverage
My better half put it well yesterday: try and deny me a slice of birthday cake on someone's birthday and you and I are not going to be friends anymore.
She's been extremely irate about the partying and alcohol stories but the "cake on a birthday in the office" was up there with saying "and they had coffee in the office" as far as non-stories go.
No. Starting watching it, but he seems to be saying lots of words very quickly, and not clearly clear was his central criticism is.
The easiest criticism of jpeg NFTs is the actual image isn't even stored on the blockchain at the moment, only a link to a decentralised image storage system. In 99.9999% of cases you are just buying a link with possibly some IP claim to the image, maybe....
As I said before, there is something in the idea, but current stuff is tulip mania.
I think the central criticism is it's a scam. But maybe there is some interesting tech in there.
On which some people might want to have some fun with - the concept of money that has a smell.
That is, it would be possible to use a crypto currency to provide a history of the actual currency in a transaction. Including attaching "tax paid" to it's history.
Or literally block money that has been used for certain purposes....
Constitutionally there was no need for a ballot at all. The PM remains in office until a VONC in Parliament. Thatcher could have ignored her party's 'local poll' and stood her ground. "I'm staying until HoC passes a VONC'" she might well have said. How many Tory MPs would have failed to support her?
This is not irrelevant to the current situation. The Conservative Party is nothing more than a voluntary association. It has no constitutional significance at all.
If the Conservative Party elects a new leader and the PM doesn't resign, HMQ will be having a word.
There is no point the incumbent PM not resigning as there would shortly be a confidence vote in the Commons and they would lose. The only point would be if there is some doubt about the state of the House or just bloody mindlessness.
There was speculation around the time Johnson took over that he would be able to ignore a vote of no confidence going against him in the Commons, wait out the two weeks, and force an election in preference to allowing a different PM take over.
That might be the scenario he would suggest in an attempt to keep MPs fearful of losing their seats in line.
That appears to be what happens under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. It isn't a mechanism to force the PM to resign and it's unclear whether the result of codifying the form of confidence motion has been to make it impossible for the house to indicate its support for a successor (they can only stave off an election 14 days after a no confidence vote by voting confidence in HM Government, not a notional alternative government - so the previous government has to have resigned first).
Another instance of the FTPA messing up the constitution.
I think in such a scenario (renegade PM holding the house to hostage) the only way to prevent a GE would be for the house to vote confidence in HMG. I don’t think the FTPA has messed with the convention that a PM who loses the confidence of the house has to tender his or her resignation to the monarch, though it is unclear at what point the confidence is lost (I.e at the point of the VONC or the 14 days elapsing).
Whatever the confusion in that situation, I think a monarch is correctly executing their powers to dismiss the PM if they were to establish that an alternative government could be formed. So if the Tory Party MPs were to notify her that they would get behind an alternative figure as PM, and there were enough of them to sustain a majority in the HoC, whatever Boris’ position on the matter I suspect the dismissal would take place and a new PM would take over, to table a vote of confidence in HMG and stop the 14 days elapsing.
Of course all of this would be a complete mess and in many ways our crisis moment just like the storming of the Capitol. Our constitution does rely on the PM of the day having a sense of fair play and knowing when the game is up, for the most part.
I don't think it's confusing, beyond the fact that the name of the act isn't really what it does. The old system gave the PM a weird prerogative that they could abuse, and the FTPA fixes this.
Without FTPA: PM can call an election whenever they like, technically they're within their rights to call an election to prevent themselves from being replaced by a new leader.
With FTPA: Parliament is in the driving seat, so if the majority of MPs want to kick out their PM and substitute someone else, they can. The mechanism is: Vote of confidence to dismiss the old PM, indicate to The Queen (by a formal vote or a letter or whatever) that they support someone else, and that person becomes PM.
If MPs go ahead and vote to repeal the FTPA, they're writing a blank cheque to their PM, who they know only cares about himself, to send them on a kamikaze run to save his own job. It's probably not in their best interests to let him do that.
Under FTPA a vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM - it simply sets the clock ticking for a GE.
That's what I said: The vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM (likewise under the old system). Doing that *then finding somebody else who can command a majority* dismisses the old PM. The difference is that with the FTPA, MPs unambiguously get a chance to do that, whereas without it the rejected PM may be able to dissolve parliament instead.
But under FTPA the only thing that stops an election is a vote of confidence in "HM Government" - not "somebody else". You can't vote confidence in them until they are appointed, and they can't be appointed unless the PM resigns or is dismissed. Agree that the rejected PM can't dissolve parliament, but that's what happens automatically 14 days later.
If MPs find someone they support the PM resigns or is dismissed. What do you think the 14-day period is for, just to give everyone a chance to see if they change their minds?
FTPA isn't a great bit of legislation and I think it was drafted assuming that a PM would behave honourably in line with convention and resign. The 14 days are to allow time to find someone who can command the confidence of the house - I've not gone back to Hansard or the explanatory notes to the Bill to check but my best guess is that nobody raised the question if what would happen if a PM refused to resign. There might be some other authority that makes it sufficiently clear that a PM has to go in that case such that HMQ would dismiss him if he doesn't resign, but I've not seen anything to that effect.
The thing is that, in principle, a PM might be able to assemble a new coalition of MPs to support them, after losing a confidence vote, so I don't think you'd necessarily want it to be automatic that they had to resign.
You could imagine a scenario where a Labour PM was reliant on the Lib Dems for a majority, lost their support, but was able to form a new majority by doing a deal with the SNP.
The key missing link is for the Commons to have a way of indicating whether they do have confidence in anyone else, so that person can take over.
That’s where HMQ comes in.
Anyway, your point isn’t really relevant here. Not even the DUP are daft enough to prop up a lame-duck liar, who has totally shafted them in the last two years.
FuckYourDeadMotherInLawUlsterPlebGate was the final straw.
HMQ demonstrated over prorogation that she is a paper tiger and will not act contrary to the advice of the PM.
I’m sure she’s sick to the back teeth with the lot of them.
So fed up she might go after her now-tainted jubilee?
Leaving aside her probably genuine belief that the job is her God-given duty, the only thing worse for her than dealing with the politicians would be seeing her son balls the whole thing up.
I think a King Charles would get on quite well with Starmer, an eco warrior who wants to modernise the monarchy and probably I suspect a Remainer though he accepts the result like Starmer allegedly now does. Charles also getting more woke, see his apology for slavery in Barbados.
The Queen however was probably a Leaver, she is more suited to Boris' Tories
Only on Europe rather than social policy, I think. Remember Thatcher's bust-up with her.
The Queen is economically centrist and One Nation, remember she got on far better with John Major, Ted Heath and Harold Wilson and Macmillan than she ever did with Thatcher certainly.
However she is also a traditionalist and was not a great fan of Blair I suspect. Given the fact she was well over 65 in 2016 and a non graduate she would almost certainly have voted Leave had she had a vote.
Charles and William and Kate I suspect would have voted Remain. Harry pre Meghan would have probably voted Leave, post Meghan would be a staunch Remainer. Camilla I suspect would have been a Leaver too, as would Philip (the Queen Mother certainly, she was a huge Thatcher fan, far more than her daughter and was wary of the Germans until her death)
'she was well over 65 in 2016 and a non graduate she would almost certainly have voted Leave had she had a vote'
A classic of the genre!
I think there's actually some polling to suggest the over 65 age group strongly leaned towards Leave, but that the oldest age group within that (90+, which the Queen was, just, in June 2016) were the other way. The suggested logic is that they were adults during the Second World War, and remembered the lead up to it quite well. As such, they tended to weigh unity more heavily than sovereignty.
But I don't pretend to be able to guess the Queen's personal view from that - she's not exactly your average nonagenarian.
Yep, there was something of a vet war during the Brexit campaign. The WWII vets seemed to be more In while recent ones (Falklands, Afghanistan) tended Out. The Daily Mail had a bit of a moment, tellingly they held up that raging dimwit Richard Kemp as an exemplar of an Out veteran.
"'David Cameron has forgotten his history': Furious veterans turn on the PM for 'horrific decision to put words in the mouths of Second World War soldiers' in his bid to keep Britain in the EU"
In day to day life most peoples engagement with lawyers is bewildering. They seem to find endless problems. We bought our first flat a few years ago and the lawyer found so many problems with the lease etc that it sounded like we were heading towards catastrophe and financial ruin if we went ahead with the purchase. But it was a cheap flat and we needed somewhere to live and now it has doubled in value, along with rents in the area, which we would have needed to keep paying if we were cowed by her dire predictions, none of which were ever realised.
Professionally I have dealt with all parts of the legal profession from high street basement lawyers right up to leading QC's. Their main shortcoming is that they are not doers. But Starmer can't be criticised on this front, being DPP there were clearly a lot of difficult decision making involved. It is harder to think of a better background to prepare someone for the role of PM.
Some of his decisions at the DPP were not the best, though For instance, prosecutions of journalists under some very peculiar old statutes, all of which were thrown out by the courts and criticised in excoriating terms.
And he massively failed in the Jummy Saville situation.
It wasn't just Saville, there was some absolutely disastrous handling of cases by the CPS after all that blew up.
William Roche, how his case got to court, it was embarrassing for the prosecution as it was found the witness accounts just couldn't possibly be true e.g. he was on set when he was supposed to have committed offences, he never owned or had access to a car and property that were allegedly used. Also one witness account, it was their partner who basically answered all the questions during the police interviews, which soon got pulled apart by the defence. The CPS hadn't done even the most basic of checks around the facts.
And the other end, Rolf Harris. He nearly got away with it, because again the prosecution again had done such a shit job preparing the case. They hadn't found any proof he was at an event where it was claimed he abused a young girl. It was only a member of the public who sent in footage half way through the trial to ensured he got convicted. If the judge hadn't allowed that new evidence to be admitted, he more than likely would have been found innocent.
Isn’t there some question mark over Starmer’s reluctance to prosecute cases like Rotherham?
I recall some allegations to that effect. I should probably google to find out but I can’t be arsed as I am impatiently waiting for the first gin martini of the evening to arrive
That is more iffy ground......The likes of Nadine Dorries have tried that line of attack and it doesn't really stand up to examination.
My martini has arrived - with my only solid nutrition of the day, three pitted olives - so I am now happy to withdraw that allegation, if it is bollocks
No. Starting watching it, but he seems to be saying lots of words very quickly, and not clearly clear was his central criticism is.
The easiest criticism of jpeg NFTs is the actual image isn't even stored on the blockchain at the moment, only a link to a decentralised image storage system. In 99.9999% of cases you are just buying a link with possibly some IP claim to the image, maybe....
As I said before, there is something in the idea, but current stuff is tulip mania.
wait, really? I had assumed the image was at least encoded in the blockchain!
Nope....It would make transaction costs on Etherenum unworkable at the moment (and they are already too high). All it is encoding is a link to a IPFS storage.
The NFT project I have ownership of is quite different. It is a token to use a bespoke AI generator to create paintings (which I also get physical copies of at a large discount).
Some rather surprising stuff on my Facebook feed today. Normally there isn't much politics on it other than what the few very vocal left-wingers who have for years been putting our messages to bash the Tories (and more recently how we should be wearing masks forever).
Today an old work colleague based in the North put out a message saying to stop making such a fuss about birthday cake when there are more important things. Also mentioned if it weren't for Boris getting is out the EU then we would all still be waiting for vaccines. Even as a Brexiteer that's a bunch of rubbish as they are just as well vaxxed now as we are, just a bit later. Even more surprising to me was the number of people who commented to support them.
I am very surprised that there are so many people who are willing to give Boris a pass on all this recent news.
I'm not sure it is a pass, but having a massive media circus about a cake and where exactly Sue's document is stored at this precise minute whilst Russia is preparing an invasion on European soil might be beginning to grate.
The whole thing is starting to look like a confection, even if at its base is a truth about what No 10 is currently like.
It is the 24 hour news problem again.
It has been headline news for far too long and people are fed up with it. The cake thing yesterday was just stupid. People may be beginning to feel sorry for Johnson. Murders get hardly any news coverage yet a man eating a slice of cake on his birthday 20 months ago got wall to wall coverage
Yes, we're all really cross with him for eating a slice of cake. As opposed to lying through his teeth about rules which the rest of us were expected to follow.
You might also consider that choices about news are made by Johnson's fellow... journalists.
My point was that the continued negative news coverage may be turing into a positive for Johnson.
It may be shoring up his diehard defenders, yes. To paraphrase Dura Ace earlier though. Can't see anyone thinking I am disgusted with him for lying 82 times. But this 83rd one is really too much negative coverage. It has moved me back to voting for him.
As has been said earlier in the latest poll Labour are below 40% and the tories are only 7% behind with the gap narrowing this week. I can only think the continued excessive news coverage is having the reverse effect that one would expect.
A Muslim from Chechnya might well have claimed asylum in this country - the behaviour of Russia (and their puppet regime) in Chechnya is staggering in its brutality. And there is clear, graphic and extreme racism towards Muslim by the Russian state.
New: Hearing the prime minister is telling MPs (who say they are getting more time with the PM than they ever imagined) that this is a media / Labour witch-hunt, that he’s been through worse before and that he’s bounced back before and will do so again
In day to day life most peoples engagement with lawyers is bewildering. They seem to find endless problems. We bought our first flat a few years ago and the lawyer found so many problems with the lease etc that it sounded like we were heading towards catastrophe and financial ruin if we went ahead with the purchase. But it was a cheap flat and we needed somewhere to live and now it has doubled in value, along with rents in the area, which we would have needed to keep paying if we were cowed by her dire predictions, none of which were ever realised.
Professionally I have dealt with all parts of the legal profession from high street basement lawyers right up to leading QC's. Their main shortcoming is that they are not doers. But Starmer can't be criticised on this front, being DPP there were clearly a lot of difficult decision making involved. It is harder to think of a better background to prepare someone for the role of PM.
Some of his decisions at the DPP were not the best, though For instance, prosecutions of journalists under some very peculiar old statutes, all of which were thrown out by the courts and criticised in excoriating terms.
And he massively failed in the Jummy Saville situation.
It wasn't just Saville, there was some absolutely disastrous handling of cases by the CPS after all that blew up.
William Roche, how his case got to court, it was embarrassing for the prosecution as it was found the witness accounts just couldn't possibly be true e.g. he was on set when he was supposed to have committed offences, he never owned or had access to a car and property that were allegedly used. Also one witness account, it was their partner who basically answered all the questions during the police interviews, which soon got pulled apart by the defence. The CPS hadn't done even the most basic of checks around the facts.
And the other end, Rolf Harris. He nearly got away with it, because again the prosecution again had done such a shit job preparing the case. They hadn't found any proof he was at an event where it was claimed he abused a young girl. It was only a member of the public who sent in footage half way through the trial to ensured he got convicted. If the judge hadn't allowed that new evidence to be admitted, he more than likely would have been found innocent.
Isn’t there some question mark over Starmer’s reluctance to prosecute cases like Rotherham?
I recall some allegations to that effect. I should probably google to find out but I can’t be arsed as I am impatiently waiting for the first gin martini of the evening to arrive
That is more iffy ground......The likes of Nadine Dorries have tried that line of attack and it doesn't really stand up to examination.
Although I have not looked in detail at SKS's role in the matter, I thought the criticism was over the Worboys case
Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions when the (bad) decision was made not to pursue further charges against Mr Worboys following his first conviction.
Some rather surprising stuff on my Facebook feed today. Normally there isn't much politics on it other than what the few very vocal left-wingers who have for years been putting our messages to bash the Tories (and more recently how we should be wearing masks forever).
Today an old work colleague based in the North put out a message saying to stop making such a fuss about birthday cake when there are more important things. Also mentioned if it weren't for Boris getting is out the EU then we would all still be waiting for vaccines. Even as a Brexiteer that's a bunch of rubbish as they are just as well vaxxed now as we are, just a bit later. Even more surprising to me was the number of people who commented to support them.
I am very surprised that there are so many people who are willing to give Boris a pass on all this recent news.
I'm not sure it is a pass, but having a massive media circus about a cake and where exactly Sue's document is stored at this precise minute whilst Russia is preparing an invasion on European soil might be beginning to grate.
The whole thing is starting to look like a confection, even if at its base is a truth about what No 10 is currently like.
It is the 24 hour news problem again.
While the build-up of Russian forces is very concerning, there have been Russian troops in Ukraine, and Moldova and Georgia, for years. Russia has already invaded European soil and they're still there, in occupation. It's occasionally puzzling when you see people only waking up to the problem this month.
Can't argue with that, although the problem creeps ever nearer. Though with the energy prices as they are, it will have a direct effect on many, not just 'a small piece of land somewhere east'.
[Does anyone who opposed fracking ever wonder if just possibly it might have been better to have an independent supply, even if only in the short term?]
Fracking would have taken too long, and wasn't reliably feasible - strata too shattered and intruded and cooked compared with the classic areas of the North American interior basins.
Fair enough, it was fault lines that did for many deep mines too. Though I'd have expected at least some return. At current gas prices it might have seemed cheap.
I don't disagree that alternative energy sources would be much better, but I expect we will be using gas for a long time to come.
Constitutionally there was no need for a ballot at all. The PM remains in office until a VONC in Parliament. Thatcher could have ignored her party's 'local poll' and stood her ground. "I'm staying until HoC passes a VONC'" she might well have said. How many Tory MPs would have failed to support her?
This is not irrelevant to the current situation. The Conservative Party is nothing more than a voluntary association. It has no constitutional significance at all.
If the Conservative Party elects a new leader and the PM doesn't resign, HMQ will be having a word.
There is no point the incumbent PM not resigning as there would shortly be a confidence vote in the Commons and they would lose. The only point would be if there is some doubt about the state of the House or just bloody mindlessness.
There was speculation around the time Johnson took over that he would be able to ignore a vote of no confidence going against him in the Commons, wait out the two weeks, and force an election in preference to allowing a different PM take over.
That might be the scenario he would suggest in an attempt to keep MPs fearful of losing their seats in line.
That appears to be what happens under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. It isn't a mechanism to force the PM to resign and it's unclear whether the result of codifying the form of confidence motion has been to make it impossible for the house to indicate its support for a successor (they can only stave off an election 14 days after a no confidence vote by voting confidence in HM Government, not a notional alternative government - so the previous government has to have resigned first).
Another instance of the FTPA messing up the constitution.
I think in such a scenario (renegade PM holding the house to hostage) the only way to prevent a GE would be for the house to vote confidence in HMG. I don’t think the FTPA has messed with the convention that a PM who loses the confidence of the house has to tender his or her resignation to the monarch, though it is unclear at what point the confidence is lost (I.e at the point of the VONC or the 14 days elapsing).
Whatever the confusion in that situation, I think a monarch is correctly executing their powers to dismiss the PM if they were to establish that an alternative government could be formed. So if the Tory Party MPs were to notify her that they would get behind an alternative figure as PM, and there were enough of them to sustain a majority in the HoC, whatever Boris’ position on the matter I suspect the dismissal would take place and a new PM would take over, to table a vote of confidence in HMG and stop the 14 days elapsing.
Of course all of this would be a complete mess and in many ways our crisis moment just like the storming of the Capitol. Our constitution does rely on the PM of the day having a sense of fair play and knowing when the game is up, for the most part.
I don't think it's confusing, beyond the fact that the name of the act isn't really what it does. The old system gave the PM a weird prerogative that they could abuse, and the FTPA fixes this.
Without FTPA: PM can call an election whenever they like, technically they're within their rights to call an election to prevent themselves from being replaced by a new leader.
With FTPA: Parliament is in the driving seat, so if the majority of MPs want to kick out their PM and substitute someone else, they can. The mechanism is: Vote of confidence to dismiss the old PM, indicate to The Queen (by a formal vote or a letter or whatever) that they support someone else, and that person becomes PM.
If MPs go ahead and vote to repeal the FTPA, they're writing a blank cheque to their PM, who they know only cares about himself, to send them on a kamikaze run to save his own job. It's probably not in their best interests to let him do that.
Under FTPA a vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM - it simply sets the clock ticking for a GE.
That's what I said: The vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM (likewise under the old system). Doing that *then finding somebody else who can command a majority* dismisses the old PM. The difference is that with the FTPA, MPs unambiguously get a chance to do that, whereas without it the rejected PM may be able to dissolve parliament instead.
But under FTPA the only thing that stops an election is a vote of confidence in "HM Government" - not "somebody else". You can't vote confidence in them until they are appointed, and they can't be appointed unless the PM resigns or is dismissed. Agree that the rejected PM can't dissolve parliament, but that's what happens automatically 14 days later.
If MPs find someone they support the PM resigns or is dismissed. What do you think the 14-day period is for, just to give everyone a chance to see if they change their minds?
FTPA isn't a great bit of legislation and I think it was drafted assuming that a PM would behave honourably in line with convention and resign. The 14 days are to allow time to find someone who can command the confidence of the house - I've not gone back to Hansard or the explanatory notes to the Bill to check but my best guess is that nobody raised the question if what would happen if a PM refused to resign. There might be some other authority that makes it sufficiently clear that a PM has to go in that case such that HMQ would dismiss him if he doesn't resign, but I've not seen anything to that effect.
The thing is that, in principle, a PM might be able to assemble a new coalition of MPs to support them, after losing a confidence vote, so I don't think you'd necessarily want it to be automatic that they had to resign.
You could imagine a scenario where a Labour PM was reliant on the Lib Dems for a majority, lost their support, but was able to form a new majority by doing a deal with the SNP.
The key missing link is for the Commons to have a way of indicating whether they do have confidence in anyone else, so that person can take over.
That’s where HMQ comes in.
Anyway, your point isn’t really relevant here. Not even the DUP are daft enough to prop up a lame-duck liar, who has totally shafted them in the last two years.
FuckYourDeadMotherInLawUlsterPlebGate was the final straw.
HMQ demonstrated over prorogation that she is a paper tiger and will not act contrary to the advice of the PM.
I’m sure she’s sick to the back teeth with the lot of them.
So fed up she might go after her now-tainted jubilee?
Leaving aside her probably genuine belief that the job is her God-given duty, the only thing worse for her than dealing with the politicians would be seeing her son balls the whole thing up.
I think a King Charles would get on quite well with Starmer, an eco warrior who wants to modernise the monarchy and probably I suspect a Remainer though he accepts the result like Starmer allegedly now does. Charles also getting more woke, see his apology for slavery in Barbados.
The Queen however was probably a Leaver, she is more suited to Boris' Tories
I doubt this. As head of the CoE you'd expect HMQ to be broadly aligned politically with Jesus - a social democrat as we agreed earlier.
No, as I said earlier Jesus was a social conservative, although yes he might be a social democrat economically but focused on work and helping the poor in a practical way not just welfare dependency. Jesus would likely be Brownite Labour economically.
The Old Testament however is more Tory than the Tories
"As God once said, and I think rightly ..."
OK let’s do major religious figures
God: Leave (He is an Englishman, after all) Jesus: Remain, probably a 2nd voter, he does like dramatic revivals Holy Ghost: Abstained, mysteriously Mohammad: Leave, also slaughter the Remainers Buddha: Remain, but Leave in the next life Satan: Remain The Sumerian Wind-Demon Pazuzu: Remain Noah: Leave, ASAP! Abraham: Stay. Stay the blade. Verily Zeus: Remain. So I can RAPE europa in the form of a bull
I didn't realise New Zealand isolation period for household contacts of positive cases is 24 days!!!!!
That's insane.
New Zealand is a horror story of how not to handle a pandemic post-vaccines.
Pre-vaccines they used their isolation well to keep the pandemic to a minimum, which would have been laudable had that been reversed post-vaccines but instead it seems their pre-vaccine success is just broken clock syndrome.
No. Starting watching it, but he seems to be saying lots of words very quickly, and not clearly clear was his central criticism is.
The easiest criticism of jpeg NFTs is the actual image isn't even stored on the blockchain at the moment, only a link to a decentralised image storage system. In 99.9999% of cases you are just buying a link with possibly some IP claim to the image, maybe....
As I said before, there is something in the idea, but current stuff is tulip mania.
I think the central criticism is it's a scam. But maybe there is some interesting tech in there.
Like a lot of crypto stuff, I compare it to first dot com bubble. There are some interesting ideas, but vast majority of implementation are poor or poorly thought through and will blow up.
The idea of instant virtually cost fee worldwide electronic transactions, well yes that's obviously the future compared to something like Western Union, banking the unbanked, being able to get finance etc. If that is say Solana, well that's a different matter.
NFTs are the same. The idea you can have an instantly provable digital token, that's perfectly sensible idea for say tickets to a gig, the bands can cut out a load of middle men and people can trade without worrying about fraud. But the current stuff of buying some profile picture as a digital flex with some vacuous nonsense about getting access to an elite online club, is bollocks in 99.99999999% of cases.
Love to know what crypto stuff you think can provide cheaper worldwide electronic transfers than the current market leaders..
Mind you I'm still looking for use of blockchain that wouldn't be better and more easily served by a trusted 3rd party and a database.
New: Hearing the prime minister is telling MPs (who say they are getting more time with the PM than they ever imagined) that this is a media / Labour witch-hunt, that he’s been through worse before and that he’s bounced back before and will do so again
Witch hunt, eh? I wonder if there are any other high profile pols that have used that defence?
Also is getting more time with BJ necessarily going to make mps feel more warmly towards him, unless they're very shallow? Ah, ok, fair enough.
The 'Britain Trump' parallels are starting to really proliferate. The delight in lying, the laziness and high tolerance for chaos, the capricious abuse of power, a casual disregard for detail and for rules norms standards, a chauvinistic view of women, the brutish simpleton slogans, the crass 'humour' and spraying around of nicknames, the refusal to relinquish office regardless of events, the bullying and intimidation and general gangster vibe, and another that's just occurred to me - the humouring of young female close family members. Because the BJ/Carrie dynamic reminds me a little of the DT/Ivanka one. Johnson evacuates some dogs from a war zone because Carrie hears about their plight on the radio, Trump bombs Syria after Ivanka runs in sobbing about chemical weapons.
Constitutionally there was no need for a ballot at all. The PM remains in office until a VONC in Parliament. Thatcher could have ignored her party's 'local poll' and stood her ground. "I'm staying until HoC passes a VONC'" she might well have said. How many Tory MPs would have failed to support her?
This is not irrelevant to the current situation. The Conservative Party is nothing more than a voluntary association. It has no constitutional significance at all.
If the Conservative Party elects a new leader and the PM doesn't resign, HMQ will be having a word.
There is no point the incumbent PM not resigning as there would shortly be a confidence vote in the Commons and they would lose. The only point would be if there is some doubt about the state of the House or just bloody mindlessness.
There was speculation around the time Johnson took over that he would be able to ignore a vote of no confidence going against him in the Commons, wait out the two weeks, and force an election in preference to allowing a different PM take over.
That might be the scenario he would suggest in an attempt to keep MPs fearful of losing their seats in line.
That appears to be what happens under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. It isn't a mechanism to force the PM to resign and it's unclear whether the result of codifying the form of confidence motion has been to make it impossible for the house to indicate its support for a successor (they can only stave off an election 14 days after a no confidence vote by voting confidence in HM Government, not a notional alternative government - so the previous government has to have resigned first).
Another instance of the FTPA messing up the constitution.
I think in such a scenario (renegade PM holding the house to hostage) the only way to prevent a GE would be for the house to vote confidence in HMG. I don’t think the FTPA has messed with the convention that a PM who loses the confidence of the house has to tender his or her resignation to the monarch, though it is unclear at what point the confidence is lost (I.e at the point of the VONC or the 14 days elapsing).
Whatever the confusion in that situation, I think a monarch is correctly executing their powers to dismiss the PM if they were to establish that an alternative government could be formed. So if the Tory Party MPs were to notify her that they would get behind an alternative figure as PM, and there were enough of them to sustain a majority in the HoC, whatever Boris’ position on the matter I suspect the dismissal would take place and a new PM would take over, to table a vote of confidence in HMG and stop the 14 days elapsing.
Of course all of this would be a complete mess and in many ways our crisis moment just like the storming of the Capitol. Our constitution does rely on the PM of the day having a sense of fair play and knowing when the game is up, for the most part.
I don't think it's confusing, beyond the fact that the name of the act isn't really what it does. The old system gave the PM a weird prerogative that they could abuse, and the FTPA fixes this.
Without FTPA: PM can call an election whenever they like, technically they're within their rights to call an election to prevent themselves from being replaced by a new leader.
With FTPA: Parliament is in the driving seat, so if the majority of MPs want to kick out their PM and substitute someone else, they can. The mechanism is: Vote of confidence to dismiss the old PM, indicate to The Queen (by a formal vote or a letter or whatever) that they support someone else, and that person becomes PM.
If MPs go ahead and vote to repeal the FTPA, they're writing a blank cheque to their PM, who they know only cares about himself, to send them on a kamikaze run to save his own job. It's probably not in their best interests to let him do that.
Under FTPA a vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM - it simply sets the clock ticking for a GE.
That's what I said: The vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM (likewise under the old system). Doing that *then finding somebody else who can command a majority* dismisses the old PM. The difference is that with the FTPA, MPs unambiguously get a chance to do that, whereas without it the rejected PM may be able to dissolve parliament instead.
But under FTPA the only thing that stops an election is a vote of confidence in "HM Government" - not "somebody else". You can't vote confidence in them until they are appointed, and they can't be appointed unless the PM resigns or is dismissed. Agree that the rejected PM can't dissolve parliament, but that's what happens automatically 14 days later.
If MPs find someone they support the PM resigns or is dismissed. What do you think the 14-day period is for, just to give everyone a chance to see if they change their minds?
FTPA isn't a great bit of legislation and I think it was drafted assuming that a PM would behave honourably in line with convention and resign. The 14 days are to allow time to find someone who can command the confidence of the house - I've not gone back to Hansard or the explanatory notes to the Bill to check but my best guess is that nobody raised the question if what would happen if a PM refused to resign. There might be some other authority that makes it sufficiently clear that a PM has to go in that case such that HMQ would dismiss him if he doesn't resign, but I've not seen anything to that effect.
The thing is that, in principle, a PM might be able to assemble a new coalition of MPs to support them, after losing a confidence vote, so I don't think you'd necessarily want it to be automatic that they had to resign.
You could imagine a scenario where a Labour PM was reliant on the Lib Dems for a majority, lost their support, but was able to form a new majority by doing a deal with the SNP.
The key missing link is for the Commons to have a way of indicating whether they do have confidence in anyone else, so that person can take over.
That’s where HMQ comes in.
Anyway, your point isn’t really relevant here. Not even the DUP are daft enough to prop up a lame-duck liar, who has totally shafted them in the last two years.
FuckYourDeadMotherInLawUlsterPlebGate was the final straw.
HMQ demonstrated over prorogation that she is a paper tiger and will not act contrary to the advice of the PM.
I’m sure she’s sick to the back teeth with the lot of them.
So fed up she might go after her now-tainted jubilee?
Leaving aside her probably genuine belief that the job is her God-given duty, the only thing worse for her than dealing with the politicians would be seeing her son balls the whole thing up.
I think a King Charles would get on quite well with Starmer, an eco warrior who wants to modernise the monarchy and probably I suspect a Remainer though he accepts the result like Starmer allegedly now does. Charles also getting more woke, see his apology for slavery in Barbados.
The Queen however was probably a Leaver, she is more suited to Boris' Tories
I doubt this. As head of the CoE you'd expect HMQ to be broadly aligned politically with Jesus - a social democrat as we agreed earlier.
No, as I said earlier Jesus was a social conservative, although yes he might be a social democrat economically but focused on work and helping the poor in a practical way not just welfare dependency. Jesus would likely be Brownite Labour economically.
The Old Testament however is more Tory than the Tories
"As God once said, and I think rightly ..."
OK let’s do major religious figures
God: Leave (He is an Englishman, after all) Jesus: Remain, probably a 2nd voter, he does like dramatic revivals Holy Ghost: Abstained, mysteriously Mohammad: Leave, also slaughter the Remainers Buddha: Remain, but Leave in the next life Satan: Remain The Sumerian Wind-Demon Pazuzu: Remain Noah: Leave, ASAP! Abraham: Stay. Stay the blade. Verily Zeus: Remain. So I can RAPE europa in the form of a bull
"No, I think BJ stays and BJ goes are about the same from a Labour POV. Johnson is the Tory's best campaigner as you say and has a proven ability to reach parts of the electorate his rivals can't. But, he has been severely compromised by current events. By contrast, replacing him now with someone credible like Sunak would give the Tories a bounce now but their ability to recover further might be more limited. To put it another way, I think the distribution of outcomes for the Tories under Johnson has a lower mean but fatter tails. The probability of staying in office after the next election might be more or less similar, but the chances of a huge defeat under Johnson are bigger and the average outcome is worse."
++++
That's a fair analysis. But my point is less about logic than emotion. Labour, and the Remainery centre and left, have been brutally duffed up by Boris more than once. He is the man that won the Brexit referendum AND then won the Brexit election, forcing it through (it is remarkable to remember how close we came to the moral catastrophe of a 2nd vote)
Boris, therefore, is like the guy who beat you senseless, in a bewildering and extremely painful way, several times.
Now he lies sprawled in the dust, leaking blood. Your brain says: He's finished. But your muscle memory, your subconscious, says Go over there and stamp on his head. Then shoot him. Then dump him in a river. Like Rasputin. Make sure he's bloody dead this time
One hint of a twitch of Boris reviving, and all the jangling nerves return.....
Not sure how you can say that Boris is the best campaigner the Tories have. He might be, but we know nothing about nearly all of them, except May and I grant you he is better than her, but then so is everyone. How do you know how others will perform? It is not as if he didn't have the campaign set up for him on a plate namely 'Get Brexit Done' and against Corbyn for goodness sake.
Without Brexit and Corbyn I'm not sure he would get away with hiding in a fridge and refusing to be interviewed by Neil. There might be others much better than him at campaigning.
No. Starting watching it, but he seems to be saying lots of words very quickly, and not clearly clear was his central criticism is.
The easiest criticism of jpeg NFTs is the actual image isn't even stored on the blockchain at the moment, only a link to a decentralised image storage system. In 99.9999% of cases you are just buying a link with possibly some IP claim to the image, maybe....
As I said before, there is something in the idea, but current stuff is tulip mania.
I think the central criticism is it's a scam. But maybe there is some interesting tech in there.
Like a lot of crypto stuff, I compare it to first dot com bubble. There are some interesting ideas, but vast majority of implementation are poor or poorly thought through and will blow up.
The idea of instant virtually cost fee worldwide electronic transactions, well yes that's obviously the future compared to something like Western Union, banking the unbanked, being able to get finance etc. If that is say Solana, well that's a different matter.
NFTs are the same. The idea you can have an instantly provable digital token, that's perfectly sensible idea for say tickets to a gig, the bands can cut out a load of middle men and people can trade without worrying about fraud. But the current stuff of buying some profile picture as a digital flex with some vacuous nonsense about getting access to an elite online club, is bollocks in 99.99999999% of cases.
Love to know what crypto stuff you think can provide cheaper worldwide electronic transfers than the current market leaders..
What's the cheapest a "legacy" market leader can send $100 from say US to Africa at the moment and the individual in Africa can instantly spend that money? In particular if they don't have access to a physical bank account?
"No, I think BJ stays and BJ goes are about the same from a Labour POV. Johnson is the Tory's best campaigner as you say and has a proven ability to reach parts of the electorate his rivals can't. But, he has been severely compromised by current events. By contrast, replacing him now with someone credible like Sunak would give the Tories a bounce now but their ability to recover further might be more limited. To put it another way, I think the distribution of outcomes for the Tories under Johnson has a lower mean but fatter tails. The probability of staying in office after the next election might be more or less similar, but the chances of a huge defeat under Johnson are bigger and the average outcome is worse."
++++
That's a fair analysis. But my point is less about logic than emotion. Labour, and the Remainery centre and left, have been brutally duffed up by Boris more than once. He is the man that won the Brexit referendum AND then won the Brexit election, forcing it through (it is remarkable to remember how close we came to the moral catastrophe of a 2nd vote)
Boris, therefore, is like the guy who beat you senseless, in a bewildering and extremely painful way, several times.
Now he lies sprawled in the dust, leaking blood. Your brain says: He's finished. But your muscle memory, your subconscious, says Go over there and stamp on his head. Then shoot him. Then dump him in a river. Like Rasputin. Make sure he's bloody dead this time
One hint of a twitch of Boris reviving, and all the jangling nerves return.....
Not sure how you can say that Boris is the best campaigner the Tories have. He might be, but we know nothing about nearly all of them, except May and I grant you he is better than her, but then so is everyone. How do you know how others will perform? It is not as if he didn't have the campaign set up for him on a plate namely 'Get Brexit Done' and against Corbyn for goodness sake.
Without Brexit and Corbyn I'm not sure he would get away with hiding in a fridge and refusing to be interviewed by Neil. There might be others much better than him at campaigning.
We know Boris is REALLY good because he won two London mayorals, against the grain, the Brexit referendum, against expectations, and then a large majority, against all the predictions
He is just very good at it. Now, the magic may have totally deserted him (or it may not), but that is an excellent track record. Better than anyone else in modern British politics with the possible exception of Blair, but he has basically left politics
Around Boris there is nullity, as you say. The bare and boundless sands.
If you were a havering Tory MP about to sack Boris, this CV of his would give you pause, especially when compared to his rivals, who are at best entirely unproven
New: Hearing the prime minister is telling MPs (who say they are getting more time with the PM than they ever imagined) that this is a media / Labour witch-hunt, that he’s been through worse before and that he’s bounced back before and will do so again
Witch hunt, eh? I wonder if there are any other high profile pols that have used that defence?
Also is getting more time with BJ necessarily going to make mps feel more warmly towards him, unless they're very shallow? Ah, ok, fair enough.
The 'Britain Trump' parallels are starting to really proliferate. The delight in lying, the laziness and high tolerance for chaos, the capricious abuse of power, a casual disregard for detail and for rules norms standards, a chauvinistic view of women, the brutish simpleton slogans, the crass 'humour' and spraying around of nicknames, the refusal to relinquish office regardless of events, the bullying and intimidation and general gangster vibe, and another that's just occurred to me - the humouring of young female close family members. Because the BJ/Carrie dynamic reminds me a little of the DT/Ivanka one. Johnson evacuates some dogs from a war zone because Carrie hears about their plight on the radio, Trump bombs Syria after Ivanka runs in sobbing about chemical weapons.
A notable difference is perhaps that Trump seems to be relatively proud and caring of his progeny (no doubt connected to his narcissm), while BJ moves on from one bowlful of the fruit of his loins to the next, even reluctant to acknowledge their existence in some cases.
"No, I think BJ stays and BJ goes are about the same from a Labour POV. Johnson is the Tory's best campaigner as you say and has a proven ability to reach parts of the electorate his rivals can't. But, he has been severely compromised by current events. By contrast, replacing him now with someone credible like Sunak would give the Tories a bounce now but their ability to recover further might be more limited. To put it another way, I think the distribution of outcomes for the Tories under Johnson has a lower mean but fatter tails. The probability of staying in office after the next election might be more or less similar, but the chances of a huge defeat under Johnson are bigger and the average outcome is worse."
++++
That's a fair analysis. But my point is less about logic than emotion. Labour, and the Remainery centre and left, have been brutally duffed up by Boris more than once. He is the man that won the Brexit referendum AND then won the Brexit election, forcing it through (it is remarkable to remember how close we came to the moral catastrophe of a 2nd vote)
Boris, therefore, is like the guy who beat you senseless, in a bewildering and extremely painful way, several times.
Now he lies sprawled in the dust, leaking blood. Your brain says: He's finished. But your muscle memory, your subconscious, says Go over there and stamp on his head. Then shoot him. Then dump him in a river. Like Rasputin. Make sure he's bloody dead this time
One hint of a twitch of Boris reviving, and all the jangling nerves return.....
Not sure how you can say that Boris is the best campaigner the Tories have. He might be, but we know nothing about nearly all of them, except May and I grant you he is better than her, but then so is everyone. How do you know how others will perform? It is not as if he didn't have the campaign set up for him on a plate namely 'Get Brexit Done' and against Corbyn for goodness sake.
Without Brexit and Corbyn I'm not sure he would get away with hiding in a fridge and refusing to be interviewed by Neil. There might be others much better than him at campaigning.
We know Boris is REALLY good because he won two London mayorals, against the grain, the Brexit referendum, against expectations, and then a large majority, against all the predictions
He is just very good at it. Now, the magic may have totally deserted him (or it may not), but that is an excellent track record. Better than anyone else in modern British politics with the possible exception of Blair, but he has basically left politics
Around Boris there is nullity, as you say. The bare and boundless sands.
If you were a havering Tory MP about to sack Boris, this CV of his would give you pause, especially when compared to his rivals, who are at best entirely unproven
Wavering surely. True meaning of havering = talking nonsense.
But yes, a dilemma. Though one has to begin somewhere.
Some rather surprising stuff on my Facebook feed today. Normally there isn't much politics on it other than what the few very vocal left-wingers who have for years been putting our messages to bash the Tories (and more recently how we should be wearing masks forever).
Today an old work colleague based in the North put out a message saying to stop making such a fuss about birthday cake when there are more important things. Also mentioned if it weren't for Boris getting is out the EU then we would all still be waiting for vaccines. Even as a Brexiteer that's a bunch of rubbish as they are just as well vaxxed now as we are, just a bit later. Even more surprising to me was the number of people who commented to support them.
I am very surprised that there are so many people who are willing to give Boris a pass on all this recent news.
I'm not sure it is a pass, but having a massive media circus about a cake and where exactly Sue's document is stored at this precise minute whilst Russia is preparing an invasion on European soil might be beginning to grate.
The whole thing is starting to look like a confection, even if at its base is a truth about what No 10 is currently like.
It is the 24 hour news problem again.
While the build-up of Russian forces is very concerning, there have been Russian troops in Ukraine, and Moldova and Georgia, for years. Russia has already invaded European soil and they're still there, in occupation. It's occasionally puzzling when you see people only waking up to the problem this month.
Can't argue with that, although the problem creeps ever nearer. Though with the energy prices as they are, it will have a direct effect on many, not just 'a small piece of land somewhere east'.
[Does anyone who opposed fracking ever wonder if just possibly it might have been better to have an independent supply, even if only in the short term?]
Fracking would have taken too long, and wasn't reliably feasible - strata too shattered and intruded and cooked compared with the classic areas of the North American interior basins.
Fair enough, it was fault lines that did for many deep mines too. Though I'd have expected at least some return. At current gas prices it might have seemed cheap.
I don't disagree that alternative energy sources would be much better, but I expect we will be using gas for a long time to come.
What did for the deep mines was they were mining coal seams a few feat across deep underground.
Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, coal was being mined by drag line excavators in open cast mines, loading dump trucks the size of a house.
I remember a documentary, long time ago.. they took a UK ex-coal miner - I *think* Yorkshire - round the world to see how coal production worked in other countries. His reaction to an opencast coal mine was watching a mind expanding - apparently his shift had never produced as much coal as one of those trucks. And they were rolling by in a convoy.....
Constitutionally there was no need for a ballot at all. The PM remains in office until a VONC in Parliament. Thatcher could have ignored her party's 'local poll' and stood her ground. "I'm staying until HoC passes a VONC'" she might well have said. How many Tory MPs would have failed to support her?
This is not irrelevant to the current situation. The Conservative Party is nothing more than a voluntary association. It has no constitutional significance at all.
If the Conservative Party elects a new leader and the PM doesn't resign, HMQ will be having a word.
There is no point the incumbent PM not resigning as there would shortly be a confidence vote in the Commons and they would lose. The only point would be if there is some doubt about the state of the House or just bloody mindlessness.
There was speculation around the time Johnson took over that he would be able to ignore a vote of no confidence going against him in the Commons, wait out the two weeks, and force an election in preference to allowing a different PM take over.
That might be the scenario he would suggest in an attempt to keep MPs fearful of losing their seats in line.
That appears to be what happens under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. It isn't a mechanism to force the PM to resign and it's unclear whether the result of codifying the form of confidence motion has been to make it impossible for the house to indicate its support for a successor (they can only stave off an election 14 days after a no confidence vote by voting confidence in HM Government, not a notional alternative government - so the previous government has to have resigned first).
Another instance of the FTPA messing up the constitution.
I think in such a scenario (renegade PM holding the house to hostage) the only way to prevent a GE would be for the house to vote confidence in HMG. I don’t think the FTPA has messed with the convention that a PM who loses the confidence of the house has to tender his or her resignation to the monarch, though it is unclear at what point the confidence is lost (I.e at the point of the VONC or the 14 days elapsing).
Whatever the confusion in that situation, I think a monarch is correctly executing their powers to dismiss the PM if they were to establish that an alternative government could be formed. So if the Tory Party MPs were to notify her that they would get behind an alternative figure as PM, and there were enough of them to sustain a majority in the HoC, whatever Boris’ position on the matter I suspect the dismissal would take place and a new PM would take over, to table a vote of confidence in HMG and stop the 14 days elapsing.
Of course all of this would be a complete mess and in many ways our crisis moment just like the storming of the Capitol. Our constitution does rely on the PM of the day having a sense of fair play and knowing when the game is up, for the most part.
I don't think it's confusing, beyond the fact that the name of the act isn't really what it does. The old system gave the PM a weird prerogative that they could abuse, and the FTPA fixes this.
Without FTPA: PM can call an election whenever they like, technically they're within their rights to call an election to prevent themselves from being replaced by a new leader.
With FTPA: Parliament is in the driving seat, so if the majority of MPs want to kick out their PM and substitute someone else, they can. The mechanism is: Vote of confidence to dismiss the old PM, indicate to The Queen (by a formal vote or a letter or whatever) that they support someone else, and that person becomes PM.
If MPs go ahead and vote to repeal the FTPA, they're writing a blank cheque to their PM, who they know only cares about himself, to send them on a kamikaze run to save his own job. It's probably not in their best interests to let him do that.
Under FTPA a vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM - it simply sets the clock ticking for a GE.
That's what I said: The vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM (likewise under the old system). Doing that *then finding somebody else who can command a majority* dismisses the old PM. The difference is that with the FTPA, MPs unambiguously get a chance to do that, whereas without it the rejected PM may be able to dissolve parliament instead.
But under FTPA the only thing that stops an election is a vote of confidence in "HM Government" - not "somebody else". You can't vote confidence in them until they are appointed, and they can't be appointed unless the PM resigns or is dismissed. Agree that the rejected PM can't dissolve parliament, but that's what happens automatically 14 days later.
If MPs find someone they support the PM resigns or is dismissed. What do you think the 14-day period is for, just to give everyone a chance to see if they change their minds?
FTPA isn't a great bit of legislation and I think it was drafted assuming that a PM would behave honourably in line with convention and resign. The 14 days are to allow time to find someone who can command the confidence of the house - I've not gone back to Hansard or the explanatory notes to the Bill to check but my best guess is that nobody raised the question if what would happen if a PM refused to resign. There might be some other authority that makes it sufficiently clear that a PM has to go in that case such that HMQ would dismiss him if he doesn't resign, but I've not seen anything to that effect.
The thing is that, in principle, a PM might be able to assemble a new coalition of MPs to support them, after losing a confidence vote, so I don't think you'd necessarily want it to be automatic that they had to resign.
You could imagine a scenario where a Labour PM was reliant on the Lib Dems for a majority, lost their support, but was able to form a new majority by doing a deal with the SNP.
The key missing link is for the Commons to have a way of indicating whether they do have confidence in anyone else, so that person can take over.
That’s where HMQ comes in.
Anyway, your point isn’t really relevant here. Not even the DUP are daft enough to prop up a lame-duck liar, who has totally shafted them in the last two years.
FuckYourDeadMotherInLawUlsterPlebGate was the final straw.
HMQ demonstrated over prorogation that she is a paper tiger and will not act contrary to the advice of the PM.
I’m sure she’s sick to the back teeth with the lot of them.
So fed up she might go after her now-tainted jubilee?
Leaving aside her probably genuine belief that the job is her God-given duty, the only thing worse for her than dealing with the politicians would be seeing her son balls the whole thing up.
I think a King Charles would get on quite well with Starmer, an eco warrior who wants to modernise the monarchy and probably I suspect a Remainer though he accepts the result like Starmer allegedly now does. Charles also getting more woke, see his apology for slavery in Barbados.
The Queen however was probably a Leaver, she is more suited to Boris' Tories
I doubt this. As head of the CoE you'd expect HMQ to be broadly aligned politically with Jesus - a social democrat as we agreed earlier.
No, as I said earlier Jesus was a social conservative, although yes he might be a social democrat economically but focused on work and helping the poor in a practical way not just welfare dependency. Jesus would likely be Brownite Labour economically.
The Old Testament however is more Tory than the Tories
"As God once said, and I think rightly ..."
OK let’s do major religious figures
God: Leave (He is an Englishman, after all) Jesus: Remain, probably a 2nd voter, he does like dramatic revivals Holy Ghost: Abstained, mysteriously Mohammad: Leave, also slaughter the Remainers Buddha: Remain, but Leave in the next life Satan: Remain The Sumerian Wind-Demon Pazuzu: Remain Noah: Leave, ASAP! Abraham: Stay. Stay the blade. Verily Zeus: Remain. So I can RAPE europa in the form of a bull
At risk of exacerbating your maniacal obsession with Brexit I must applaud the humour!
Well, if it is said that Satan has all the best tunes, (and almost certainly likes prog metal), and if he has the good sense to be a remainer too, it has to be said that he can't be all bad.
As for God, if He IS an Englishman I doubt he would be a Leave supporter. After all, He is supposed to be omnipotent and a super intelligence, so I doubt would want to be on the same side as Nigel Farage, the BNP and Boris Johnson. Unless He just has a sick sense of humour. I doubt also that He would want to be seen as a useful idiot to Mad Vlad.
Good post though Leon, you haven't lost your touch!
It's the specificness of the NZ 24 day isolation period. Not 20 days, not 21 days, not 25 days...24 days. I would love to know where that came from.
It certainly isn't following any science, especially with Omicron, where the vast bulk of people are through it in less than a week.
Even if you worked on the premise that it take a bit of time to pass from one member of a household to another, again with Omicron we know this will happen pretty swiftly.
I'm sure there are things which are more futile than trying to ascribe personal political views to members of the Royal Family, but I can't immediately think of any.
If we ruled out futile political speculations on PB we’d have about 3 comments a day
My bet:
Queen: Leave The Late D of E: Leave Charles: Remain Andrew: Remoaner, wanted a 2nd vote Anne: Leave Edward: Remain Wills: Remain Kate: Leave Harry: Leave Megan: Not sure how Brexit benefits her, so probably Remain
Queen: definitely L D of E: probably L, but he'd want Greece and the UK tied together, so not a definite Charles: R Andrew: he'd want as much young 'totty' in the UK as possible, so R Anne: L Edward: genuinely no idea Wills: R Kate: R (because she knows that she has to support her husband, even when he's mistaken) Harry: Where's the party? Meghan: My friend Oprah said that Brexit was a terrible thing
Surely everyone has worked out where the party is by now?
In day to day life most peoples engagement with lawyers is bewildering. They seem to find endless problems. We bought our first flat a few years ago and the lawyer found so many problems with the lease etc that it sounded like we were heading towards catastrophe and financial ruin if we went ahead with the purchase. But it was a cheap flat and we needed somewhere to live and now it has doubled in value, along with rents in the area, which we would have needed to keep paying if we were cowed by her dire predictions, none of which were ever realised.
Professionally I have dealt with all parts of the legal profession from high street basement lawyers right up to leading QC's. Their main shortcoming is that they are not doers. But Starmer can't be criticised on this front, being DPP there were clearly a lot of difficult decision making involved. It is harder to think of a better background to prepare someone for the role of PM.
Some of his decisions at the DPP were not the best, though For instance, prosecutions of journalists under some very peculiar old statutes, all of which were thrown out by the courts and criticised in excoriating terms.
And he massively failed in the Jummy Saville situation.
It wasn't just Saville, there was some absolutely disastrous handling of cases by the CPS after all that blew up.
William Roche, how his case got to court, it was embarrassing for the prosecution as it was found the witness accounts just couldn't possibly be true e.g. he was on set when he was supposed to have committed offences, he never owned or had access to a car and property that were allegedly used. Also one witness account, it was their partner who basically answered all the questions during the police interviews, which soon got pulled apart by the defence. The CPS hadn't done even the most basic of checks around the facts.
And the other end, Rolf Harris. He nearly got away with it, because again the prosecution again had done such a shit job preparing the case. They hadn't found any proof he was at an event where it was claimed he abused a young girl. It was only a member of the public who sent in footage half way through the trial to ensured he got convicted. If the judge hadn't allowed that new evidence to be admitted, he more than likely would have been found innocent.
Isn’t there some question mark over Starmer’s reluctance to prosecute cases like Rotherham?
I recall some allegations to that effect. I should probably google to find out but I can’t be arsed as I am impatiently waiting for the first gin martini of the evening to arrive
That is more iffy ground......The likes of Nadine Dorries have tried that line of attack and it doesn't really stand up to examination.
Isn't it an axiom that anything Nadine says doesn't stand up to examination.
"No, I think BJ stays and BJ goes are about the same from a Labour POV. Johnson is the Tory's best campaigner as you say and has a proven ability to reach parts of the electorate his rivals can't. But, he has been severely compromised by current events. By contrast, replacing him now with someone credible like Sunak would give the Tories a bounce now but their ability to recover further might be more limited. To put it another way, I think the distribution of outcomes for the Tories under Johnson has a lower mean but fatter tails. The probability of staying in office after the next election might be more or less similar, but the chances of a huge defeat under Johnson are bigger and the average outcome is worse."
++++
That's a fair analysis. But my point is less about logic than emotion. Labour, and the Remainery centre and left, have been brutally duffed up by Boris more than once. He is the man that won the Brexit referendum AND then won the Brexit election, forcing it through (it is remarkable to remember how close we came to the moral catastrophe of a 2nd vote)
Boris, therefore, is like the guy who beat you senseless, in a bewildering and extremely painful way, several times.
Now he lies sprawled in the dust, leaking blood. Your brain says: He's finished. But your muscle memory, your subconscious, says Go over there and stamp on his head. Then shoot him. Then dump him in a river. Like Rasputin. Make sure he's bloody dead this time
One hint of a twitch of Boris reviving, and all the jangling nerves return.....
Not sure how you can say that Boris is the best campaigner the Tories have. He might be, but we know nothing about nearly all of them, except May and I grant you he is better than her, but then so is everyone. How do you know how others will perform? It is not as if he didn't have the campaign set up for him on a plate namely 'Get Brexit Done' and against Corbyn for goodness sake.
Without Brexit and Corbyn I'm not sure he would get away with hiding in a fridge and refusing to be interviewed by Neil. There might be others much better than him at campaigning.
We know Boris is REALLY good because he won two London mayorals, against the grain, the Brexit referendum, against expectations, and then a large majority, against all the predictions
He is just very good at it. Now, the magic may have totally deserted him (or it may not), but that is an excellent track record. Better than anyone else in modern British politics with the possible exception of Blair, but he has basically left politics
Around Boris there is nullity, as you say. The bare and boundless sands.
If you were a havering Tory MP about to sack Boris, this CV of his would give you pause, especially when compared to his rivals, who are at best entirely unproven
Congrats on being one of his few (in the literal sense) apologists on this platform. It is normally the mad or the childish that point out that the Emperor has no clothes. Clearly not always true.
No. Starting watching it, but he seems to be saying lots of words very quickly, and not clearly clear was his central criticism is.
The easiest criticism of jpeg NFTs is the actual image isn't even stored on the blockchain at the moment, only a link to a decentralised image storage system. In 99.9999% of cases you are just buying a link with possibly some IP claim to the image, maybe....
As I said before, there is something in the idea, but current stuff is tulip mania.
I think the central criticism is it's a scam. But maybe there is some interesting tech in there.
Like a lot of crypto stuff, I compare it to first dot com bubble. There are some interesting ideas, but vast majority of implementation are poor or poorly thought through and will blow up.
The idea of instant virtually cost fee worldwide electronic transactions, well yes that's obviously the future compared to something like Western Union, banking the unbanked, being able to get finance etc. If that is say Solana, well that's a different matter.
NFTs are the same. The idea you can have an instantly provable digital token, that's perfectly sensible idea for say tickets to a gig, the bands can cut out a load of middle men and people can trade without worrying about fraud. But the current stuff of buying some profile picture as a digital flex with some vacuous nonsense about getting access to an elite online club, is bollocks in 99.99999999% of cases.
Love to know what crypto stuff you think can provide cheaper worldwide electronic transfers than the current market leaders..
What's the cheapest a "legacy" market leader can send $100 from say US to Africa at the moment and the individual in Africa can instantly spend that money? In particular if they don't have access to a physical bank account?
Legacy banks will charge you insane sums.
Money transfer outfits a lot less.
NuBanks even less. But their coverage, worldwide is lower.
Those who are criticising Starmer for bad decisions as DPP are really missing the point. He has been in a job, outside of politics, where he had to make very significant decisions. He went beyond the performance of being a barrister, taking the leap to be a decision maker. And not in the form a Judge, but as a prosecutor, under continuous public scrutiny. I just find that really impressive.
What did all these other people in Parliament do? Opinion writing columnist, novelist, councillor, a few years in an investment bank, think tankers... I don't think anyone is in the same league as Starmer. Just compare him to Braverman and Raab - both failed at magic circle careers, with their careers dissolving in to mid rate jobs where they failed to make any real impact; and now they seem to be being used to provide a front to provide credibility for what they and everyone else knows is bad law.
Even people like Emily Thornberry, Bob Neill, and Geoffrey Cox don't come close to Starmer, he is in a league of his own because of his background. That isn't a criticism of the other people in Parliament, experience shows that all different kinds of people can be good decision makers, and I am not exactly a fan of the Labour Party. But I do think that Starmer is exceptional in this one regard.
An important question, to which I don't know the answer but some here (@rcs1000 perhaps?) may do:
The US and EU are trying to set up alternative supplies of gas to Europe if Russia cuts off the pipeline supplies. The only possibility for getting a lot more gas in a hurry is bringing in LNG by ship. I gather there's quite a lot of capacity for supplying LNG, but is there the capacity in Europe for handling the ships as they arrive, and are the ports sufficiently connected to the intra-European gas distribution networks?
Denmark is still worrying. I wish it wasn’t, but it is
“OMICRON, BA2 sub-variant, Denmark: admissions soar 1.4x HIGHER than any other wave. Babies are absolutely surging right now: more admitted than 80 years olds.”
"No, I think BJ stays and BJ goes are about the same from a Labour POV. Johnson is the Tory's best campaigner as you say and has a proven ability to reach parts of the electorate his rivals can't. But, he has been severely compromised by current events. By contrast, replacing him now with someone credible like Sunak would give the Tories a bounce now but their ability to recover further might be more limited. To put it another way, I think the distribution of outcomes for the Tories under Johnson has a lower mean but fatter tails. The probability of staying in office after the next election might be more or less similar, but the chances of a huge defeat under Johnson are bigger and the average outcome is worse."
++++
That's a fair analysis. But my point is less about logic than emotion. Labour, and the Remainery centre and left, have been brutally duffed up by Boris more than once. He is the man that won the Brexit referendum AND then won the Brexit election, forcing it through (it is remarkable to remember how close we came to the moral catastrophe of a 2nd vote)
Boris, therefore, is like the guy who beat you senseless, in a bewildering and extremely painful way, several times.
Now he lies sprawled in the dust, leaking blood. Your brain says: He's finished. But your muscle memory, your subconscious, says Go over there and stamp on his head. Then shoot him. Then dump him in a river. Like Rasputin. Make sure he's bloody dead this time
One hint of a twitch of Boris reviving, and all the jangling nerves return.....
Not sure how you can say that Boris is the best campaigner the Tories have. He might be, but we know nothing about nearly all of them, except May and I grant you he is better than her, but then so is everyone. How do you know how others will perform? It is not as if he didn't have the campaign set up for him on a plate namely 'Get Brexit Done' and against Corbyn for goodness sake.
Without Brexit and Corbyn I'm not sure he would get away with hiding in a fridge and refusing to be interviewed by Neil. There might be others much better than him at campaigning.
We know Boris is REALLY good because he won two London mayorals, against the grain, the Brexit referendum, against expectations, and then a large majority, against all the predictions
He is just very good at it. Now, the magic may have totally deserted him (or it may not), but that is an excellent track record. Better than anyone else in modern British politics with the possible exception of Blair, but he has basically left politics
Around Boris there is nullity, as you say. The bare and boundless sands.
If you were a havering Tory MP about to sack Boris, this CV of his would give you pause, especially when compared to his rivals, who are at best entirely unproven
I grant you that I had forgotten about London mayor, which was very silly of me. I wasn't actually suggesting that the rest were rubbish, just that we don't know if they are any good at leading a campaign because we have never seen most of them in action. Even though I am not a Tory, I accept there are some good ones.
Some rather surprising stuff on my Facebook feed today. Normally there isn't much politics on it other than what the few very vocal left-wingers who have for years been putting our messages to bash the Tories (and more recently how we should be wearing masks forever).
Today an old work colleague based in the North put out a message saying to stop making such a fuss about birthday cake when there are more important things. Also mentioned if it weren't for Boris getting is out the EU then we would all still be waiting for vaccines. Even as a Brexiteer that's a bunch of rubbish as they are just as well vaxxed now as we are, just a bit later. Even more surprising to me was the number of people who commented to support them.
I am very surprised that there are so many people who are willing to give Boris a pass on all this recent news.
I'm not sure it is a pass, but having a massive media circus about a cake and where exactly Sue's document is stored at this precise minute whilst Russia is preparing an invasion on European soil might be beginning to grate.
The whole thing is starting to look like a confection, even if at its base is a truth about what No 10 is currently like.
It is the 24 hour news problem again.
It has been headline news for far too long and people are fed up with it. The cake thing yesterday was just stupid. People may be beginning to feel sorry for Johnson. Murders get hardly any news coverage yet a man eating a slice of cake on his birthday 20 months ago got wall to wall coverage
Yes, we're all really cross with him for eating a slice of cake. As opposed to lying through his teeth about rules which the rest of us were expected to follow.
You might also consider that choices about news are made by Johnson's fellow... journalists.
My point was that the continued negative news coverage may be turing into a positive for Johnson.
It may be shoring up his diehard defenders, yes. To paraphrase Dura Ace earlier though. Can't see anyone thinking I am disgusted with him for lying 82 times. But this 83rd one is really too much negative coverage. It has moved me back to voting for him.
As has been said earlier in the latest poll Labour are below 40% and the tories are only 7% behind with the gap narrowing this week. I can only think the continued excessive news coverage is having the reverse effect that one would expect.
"No, I think BJ stays and BJ goes are about the same from a Labour POV. Johnson is the Tory's best campaigner as you say and has a proven ability to reach parts of the electorate his rivals can't. But, he has been severely compromised by current events. By contrast, replacing him now with someone credible like Sunak would give the Tories a bounce now but their ability to recover further might be more limited. To put it another way, I think the distribution of outcomes for the Tories under Johnson has a lower mean but fatter tails. The probability of staying in office after the next election might be more or less similar, but the chances of a huge defeat under Johnson are bigger and the average outcome is worse."
++++
That's a fair analysis. But my point is less about logic than emotion. Labour, and the Remainery centre and left, have been brutally duffed up by Boris more than once. He is the man that won the Brexit referendum AND then won the Brexit election, forcing it through (it is remarkable to remember how close we came to the moral catastrophe of a 2nd vote)
Boris, therefore, is like the guy who beat you senseless, in a bewildering and extremely painful way, several times.
Now he lies sprawled in the dust, leaking blood. Your brain says: He's finished. But your muscle memory, your subconscious, says Go over there and stamp on his head. Then shoot him. Then dump him in a river. Like Rasputin. Make sure he's bloody dead this time
One hint of a twitch of Boris reviving, and all the jangling nerves return.....
Not sure how you can say that Boris is the best campaigner the Tories have. He might be, but we know nothing about nearly all of them, except May and I grant you he is better than her, but then so is everyone. How do you know how others will perform? It is not as if he didn't have the campaign set up for him on a plate namely 'Get Brexit Done' and against Corbyn for goodness sake.
Without Brexit and Corbyn I'm not sure he would get away with hiding in a fridge and refusing to be interviewed by Neil. There might be others much better than him at campaigning.
We know Boris is REALLY good because he won two London mayorals, against the grain, the Brexit referendum, against expectations, and then a large majority, against all the predictions
He is just very good at it. Now, the magic may have totally deserted him (or it may not), but that is an excellent track record. Better than anyone else in modern British politics with the possible exception of Blair, but he has basically left politics
Around Boris there is nullity, as you say. The bare and boundless sands.
If you were a havering Tory MP about to sack Boris, this CV of his would give you pause, especially when compared to his rivals, who are at best entirely unproven
Wavering surely. True meaning of havering = talking nonsense.
But yes, a dilemma. Though one has to begin somewhere.
Whavering?
Vacillating between options AND talking nonsense at the same time
In day to day life most peoples engagement with lawyers is bewildering. They seem to find endless problems. We bought our first flat a few years ago and the lawyer found so many problems with the lease etc that it sounded like we were heading towards catastrophe and financial ruin if we went ahead with the purchase. But it was a cheap flat and we needed somewhere to live and now it has doubled in value, along with rents in the area, which we would have needed to keep paying if we were cowed by her dire predictions, none of which were ever realised.
Professionally I have dealt with all parts of the legal profession from high street basement lawyers right up to leading QC's. Their main shortcoming is that they are not doers. But Starmer can't be criticised on this front, being DPP there were clearly a lot of difficult decision making involved. It is harder to think of a better background to prepare someone for the role of PM.
Some of his decisions at the DPP were not the best, though For instance, prosecutions of journalists under some very peculiar old statutes, all of which were thrown out by the courts and criticised in excoriating terms.
And he massively failed in the Jummy Saville situation.
It wasn't just Saville, there was some absolutely disastrous handling of cases by the CPS after all that blew up.
William Roche, how his case got to court, it was embarrassing for the prosecution as it was found the witness accounts just couldn't possibly be true e.g. he was on set when he was supposed to have committed offences, he never owned or had access to a car and property that were allegedly used. Also one witness account, it was their partner who basically answered all the questions during the police interviews, which soon got pulled apart by the defence. The CPS hadn't done even the most basic of checks around the facts.
And the other end, Rolf Harris. He nearly got away with it, because again the prosecution again had done such a shit job preparing the case. They hadn't found any proof he was at an event where it was claimed he abused a young girl. It was only a member of the public who sent in footage half way through the trial to ensured he got convicted. If the judge hadn't allowed that new evidence to be admitted, he more than likely would have been found innocent.
Isn’t there some question mark over Starmer’s reluctance to prosecute cases like Rotherham?
I recall some allegations to that effect. I should probably google to find out but I can’t be arsed as I am impatiently waiting for the first gin martini of the evening to arrive
That is more iffy ground......The likes of Nadine Dorries have tried that line of attack and it doesn't really stand up to examination.
Isn't it an axiom that anything Nadine says doesn't stand up to examination.
I am not sure she has sat down to many either, certainly not successfully.
"No, I think BJ stays and BJ goes are about the same from a Labour POV. Johnson is the Tory's best campaigner as you say and has a proven ability to reach parts of the electorate his rivals can't. But, he has been severely compromised by current events. By contrast, replacing him now with someone credible like Sunak would give the Tories a bounce now but their ability to recover further might be more limited. To put it another way, I think the distribution of outcomes for the Tories under Johnson has a lower mean but fatter tails. The probability of staying in office after the next election might be more or less similar, but the chances of a huge defeat under Johnson are bigger and the average outcome is worse."
++++
That's a fair analysis. But my point is less about logic than emotion. Labour, and the Remainery centre and left, have been brutally duffed up by Boris more than once. He is the man that won the Brexit referendum AND then won the Brexit election, forcing it through (it is remarkable to remember how close we came to the moral catastrophe of a 2nd vote)
Boris, therefore, is like the guy who beat you senseless, in a bewildering and extremely painful way, several times.
Now he lies sprawled in the dust, leaking blood. Your brain says: He's finished. But your muscle memory, your subconscious, says Go over there and stamp on his head. Then shoot him. Then dump him in a river. Like Rasputin. Make sure he's bloody dead this time
One hint of a twitch of Boris reviving, and all the jangling nerves return.....
Not sure how you can say that Boris is the best campaigner the Tories have. He might be, but we know nothing about nearly all of them, except May and I grant you he is better than her, but then so is everyone. How do you know how others will perform? It is not as if he didn't have the campaign set up for him on a plate namely 'Get Brexit Done' and against Corbyn for goodness sake.
Without Brexit and Corbyn I'm not sure he would get away with hiding in a fridge and refusing to be interviewed by Neil. There might be others much better than him at campaigning.
We know Boris is REALLY good because he won two London mayorals, against the grain, the Brexit referendum, against expectations, and then a large majority, against all the predictions
He is just very good at it. Now, the magic may have totally deserted him (or it may not), but that is an excellent track record. Better than anyone else in modern British politics with the possible exception of Blair, but he has basically left politics
Around Boris there is nullity, as you say. The bare and boundless sands.
If you were a havering Tory MP about to sack Boris, this CV of his would give you pause, especially when compared to his rivals, who are at best entirely unproven
Congrats on being one of his few (in the literal sense) apologists on this platform. It is normally the mad or the childish that point out that the Emperor has no clothes. Clearly not always true.
Its not really about being an apologist for Boris. It is just reality. Who replaces him? What he achieved in 2019 was such a unique and personal triumph, there is no obvious successor. Things could easily descend to the chaos that existed towards the end of Theresa May's unfortunate rule, where it looked like the Conservative party were finished. Perhaps tailing Labour by 7% in the middle of a massive scandal isn't such a bad place to be?
No. Starting watching it, but he seems to be saying lots of words very quickly, and not clearly clear was his central criticism is.
The easiest criticism of jpeg NFTs is the actual image isn't even stored on the blockchain at the moment, only a link to a decentralised image storage system. In 99.9999% of cases you are just buying a link with possibly some IP claim to the image, maybe....
As I said before, there is something in the idea, but current stuff is tulip mania.
I think the central criticism is it's a scam. But maybe there is some interesting tech in there.
Like a lot of crypto stuff, I compare it to first dot com bubble. There are some interesting ideas, but vast majority of implementation are poor or poorly thought through and will blow up.
The idea of instant virtually cost fee worldwide electronic transactions, well yes that's obviously the future compared to something like Western Union, banking the unbanked, being able to get finance etc. If that is say Solana, well that's a different matter.
NFTs are the same. The idea you can have an instantly provable digital token, that's perfectly sensible idea for say tickets to a gig, the bands can cut out a load of middle men and people can trade without worrying about fraud. But the current stuff of buying some profile picture as a digital flex with some vacuous nonsense about getting access to an elite online club, is bollocks in 99.99999999% of cases.
Love to know what crypto stuff you think can provide cheaper worldwide electronic transfers than the current market leaders..
What's the cheapest a "legacy" market leader can send $100 from say US to Africa at the moment and the individual in Africa can instantly spend that money? In particular if they don't have access to a physical bank account?
Legacy banks will charge you insane sums.
Money transfer outfits a lot less.
NuBanks even less. But their coverage, worldwide is lower.
Where as I can send $100 via say Solana instantly for something 0.0000001 cents, and both parties can trust the transaction (which in many countries obviously corruption is rife and easier said than done).
I am not really a mega crypto evangelist, but the world is going to worldwide digital currency with transactions via your smart phone in split second or you can take out a micro-loan at very small percentage etc.
How that is done, well that tech is still being developed. All this stuff is mostly going to be Pets.com, but somewhere among everything somebody will build the Amazon of this.
"No, I think BJ stays and BJ goes are about the same from a Labour POV. Johnson is the Tory's best campaigner as you say and has a proven ability to reach parts of the electorate his rivals can't. But, he has been severely compromised by current events. By contrast, replacing him now with someone credible like Sunak would give the Tories a bounce now but their ability to recover further might be more limited. To put it another way, I think the distribution of outcomes for the Tories under Johnson has a lower mean but fatter tails. The probability of staying in office after the next election might be more or less similar, but the chances of a huge defeat under Johnson are bigger and the average outcome is worse."
++++
That's a fair analysis. But my point is less about logic than emotion. Labour, and the Remainery centre and left, have been brutally duffed up by Boris more than once. He is the man that won the Brexit referendum AND then won the Brexit election, forcing it through (it is remarkable to remember how close we came to the moral catastrophe of a 2nd vote)
Boris, therefore, is like the guy who beat you senseless, in a bewildering and extremely painful way, several times.
Now he lies sprawled in the dust, leaking blood. Your brain says: He's finished. But your muscle memory, your subconscious, says Go over there and stamp on his head. Then shoot him. Then dump him in a river. Like Rasputin. Make sure he's bloody dead this time
One hint of a twitch of Boris reviving, and all the jangling nerves return.....
Not sure how you can say that Boris is the best campaigner the Tories have. He might be, but we know nothing about nearly all of them, except May and I grant you he is better than her, but then so is everyone. How do you know how others will perform? It is not as if he didn't have the campaign set up for him on a plate namely 'Get Brexit Done' and against Corbyn for goodness sake.
Without Brexit and Corbyn I'm not sure he would get away with hiding in a fridge and refusing to be interviewed by Neil. There might be others much better than him at campaigning.
We know Boris is REALLY good because he won two London mayorals, against the grain, the Brexit referendum, against expectations, and then a large majority, against all the predictions
He is just very good at it. Now, the magic may have totally deserted him (or it may not), but that is an excellent track record. Better than anyone else in modern British politics with the possible exception of Blair, but he has basically left politics
Around Boris there is nullity, as you say. The bare and boundless sands.
If you were a havering Tory MP about to sack Boris, this CV of his would give you pause, especially when compared to his rivals, who are at best entirely unproven
Congrats on being one of his few (in the literal sense) apologists on this platform. It is normally the mad or the childish that point out that the Emperor has no clothes. Clearly not always true.
Its not really about being an apologist for Boris. It is just reality. Who replaces him? What he achieved in 2019 was such a unique and personal triumph, there is no obvious successor. Things could easily descend to the chaos that existed towards the end of Theresa May's unfortunate rule, where it looked like the Conservative party were finished. Perhaps tailing Labour by 7% in the middle of a massive scandal isn't such a bad place to be?
Oh dear. I now understand your name. You are where Bozo would like to take the Conservative Party.
Constitutionally there was no need for a ballot at all. The PM remains in office until a VONC in Parliament. Thatcher could have ignored her party's 'local poll' and stood her ground. "I'm staying until HoC passes a VONC'" she might well have said. How many Tory MPs would have failed to support her?
This is not irrelevant to the current situation. The Conservative Party is nothing more than a voluntary association. It has no constitutional significance at all.
If the Conservative Party elects a new leader and the PM doesn't resign, HMQ will be having a word.
There is no point the incumbent PM not resigning as there would shortly be a confidence vote in the Commons and they would lose. The only point would be if there is some doubt about the state of the House or just bloody mindlessness.
There was speculation around the time Johnson took over that he would be able to ignore a vote of no confidence going against him in the Commons, wait out the two weeks, and force an election in preference to allowing a different PM take over.
That might be the scenario he would suggest in an attempt to keep MPs fearful of losing their seats in line.
That appears to be what happens under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. It isn't a mechanism to force the PM to resign and it's unclear whether the result of codifying the form of confidence motion has been to make it impossible for the house to indicate its support for a successor (they can only stave off an election 14 days after a no confidence vote by voting confidence in HM Government, not a notional alternative government - so the previous government has to have resigned first).
Another instance of the FTPA messing up the constitution.
I think in such a scenario (renegade PM holding the house to hostage) the only way to prevent a GE would be for the house to vote confidence in HMG. I don’t think the FTPA has messed with the convention that a PM who loses the confidence of the house has to tender his or her resignation to the monarch, though it is unclear at what point the confidence is lost (I.e at the point of the VONC or the 14 days elapsing).
Whatever the confusion in that situation, I think a monarch is correctly executing their powers to dismiss the PM if they were to establish that an alternative government could be formed. So if the Tory Party MPs were to notify her that they would get behind an alternative figure as PM, and there were enough of them to sustain a majority in the HoC, whatever Boris’ position on the matter I suspect the dismissal would take place and a new PM would take over, to table a vote of confidence in HMG and stop the 14 days elapsing.
Of course all of this would be a complete mess and in many ways our crisis moment just like the storming of the Capitol. Our constitution does rely on the PM of the day having a sense of fair play and knowing when the game is up, for the most part.
I don't think it's confusing, beyond the fact that the name of the act isn't really what it does. The old system gave the PM a weird prerogative that they could abuse, and the FTPA fixes this.
Without FTPA: PM can call an election whenever they like, technically they're within their rights to call an election to prevent themselves from being replaced by a new leader.
With FTPA: Parliament is in the driving seat, so if the majority of MPs want to kick out their PM and substitute someone else, they can. The mechanism is: Vote of confidence to dismiss the old PM, indicate to The Queen (by a formal vote or a letter or whatever) that they support someone else, and that person becomes PM.
If MPs go ahead and vote to repeal the FTPA, they're writing a blank cheque to their PM, who they know only cares about himself, to send them on a kamikaze run to save his own job. It's probably not in their best interests to let him do that.
Under FTPA a vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM - it simply sets the clock ticking for a GE.
That's what I said: The vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM (likewise under the old system). Doing that *then finding somebody else who can command a majority* dismisses the old PM. The difference is that with the FTPA, MPs unambiguously get a chance to do that, whereas without it the rejected PM may be able to dissolve parliament instead.
But under FTPA the only thing that stops an election is a vote of confidence in "HM Government" - not "somebody else". You can't vote confidence in them until they are appointed, and they can't be appointed unless the PM resigns or is dismissed. Agree that the rejected PM can't dissolve parliament, but that's what happens automatically 14 days later.
If MPs find someone they support the PM resigns or is dismissed. What do you think the 14-day period is for, just to give everyone a chance to see if they change their minds?
FTPA isn't a great bit of legislation and I think it was drafted assuming that a PM would behave honourably in line with convention and resign. The 14 days are to allow time to find someone who can command the confidence of the house - I've not gone back to Hansard or the explanatory notes to the Bill to check but my best guess is that nobody raised the question if what would happen if a PM refused to resign. There might be some other authority that makes it sufficiently clear that a PM has to go in that case such that HMQ would dismiss him if he doesn't resign, but I've not seen anything to that effect.
The thing is that, in principle, a PM might be able to assemble a new coalition of MPs to support them, after losing a confidence vote, so I don't think you'd necessarily want it to be automatic that they had to resign.
You could imagine a scenario where a Labour PM was reliant on the Lib Dems for a majority, lost their support, but was able to form a new majority by doing a deal with the SNP.
The key missing link is for the Commons to have a way of indicating whether they do have confidence in anyone else, so that person can take over.
That’s where HMQ comes in.
Anyway, your point isn’t really relevant here. Not even the DUP are daft enough to prop up a lame-duck liar, who has totally shafted them in the last two years.
FuckYourDeadMotherInLawUlsterPlebGate was the final straw.
HMQ demonstrated over prorogation that she is a paper tiger and will not act contrary to the advice of the PM.
I’m sure she’s sick to the back teeth with the lot of them.
So fed up she might go after her now-tainted jubilee?
Leaving aside her probably genuine belief that the job is her God-given duty, the only thing worse for her than dealing with the politicians would be seeing her son balls the whole thing up.
I think a King Charles would get on quite well with Starmer, an eco warrior who wants to modernise the monarchy and probably I suspect a Remainer though he accepts the result like Starmer allegedly now does. Charles also getting more woke, see his apology for slavery in Barbados.
The Queen however was probably a Leaver, she is more suited to Boris' Tories
I doubt this. As head of the CoE you'd expect HMQ to be broadly aligned politically with Jesus - a social democrat as we agreed earlier.
No, as I said earlier Jesus was a social conservative, although yes he might be a social democrat economically but focused on work and helping the poor in a practical way not just welfare dependency. Jesus would likely be Brownite Labour economically.
The Old Testament however is more Tory than the Tories
"As God once said, and I think rightly ..."
OK let’s do major religious figures
God: Leave (He is an Englishman, after all) Jesus: Remain, probably a 2nd voter, he does like dramatic revivals Holy Ghost: Abstained, mysteriously Mohammad: Leave, also slaughter the Remainers Buddha: Remain, but Leave in the next life Satan: Remain The Sumerian Wind-Demon Pazuzu: Remain Noah: Leave, ASAP! Abraham: Stay. Stay the blade. Verily Zeus: Remain. So I can RAPE europa in the form of a bull
John 14:6 And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever.
Forgive me if the point has already been made (it's a long thread and I'm late to it), but I'm very much for having prime ministers who understand what a law is. It would certainly make a refreshing change right now.
Some rather surprising stuff on my Facebook feed today. Normally there isn't much politics on it other than what the few very vocal left-wingers who have for years been putting our messages to bash the Tories (and more recently how we should be wearing masks forever).
Today an old work colleague based in the North put out a message saying to stop making such a fuss about birthday cake when there are more important things. Also mentioned if it weren't for Boris getting is out the EU then we would all still be waiting for vaccines. Even as a Brexiteer that's a bunch of rubbish as they are just as well vaxxed now as we are, just a bit later. Even more surprising to me was the number of people who commented to support them.
I am very surprised that there are so many people who are willing to give Boris a pass on all this recent news.
I'm not sure it is a pass, but having a massive media circus about a cake and where exactly Sue's document is stored at this precise minute whilst Russia is preparing an invasion on European soil might be beginning to grate.
The whole thing is starting to look like a confection, even if at its base is a truth about what No 10 is currently like.
It is the 24 hour news problem again.
While the build-up of Russian forces is very concerning, there have been Russian troops in Ukraine, and Moldova and Georgia, for years. Russia has already invaded European soil and they're still there, in occupation. It's occasionally puzzling when you see people only waking up to the problem this month.
Can't argue with that, although the problem creeps ever nearer. Though with the energy prices as they are, it will have a direct effect on many, not just 'a small piece of land somewhere east'.
[Does anyone who opposed fracking ever wonder if just possibly it might have been better to have an independent supply, even if only in the short term?]
Fracking would have taken too long, and wasn't reliably feasible - strata too shattered and intruded and cooked compared with the classic areas of the North American interior basins.
Fair enough, it was fault lines that did for many deep mines too. Though I'd have expected at least some return. At current gas prices it might have seemed cheap.
I don't disagree that alternative energy sources would be much better, but I expect we will be using gas for a long time to come.
What did for the deep mines was they were mining coal seams a few feat across deep underground.
Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, coal was being mined by drag line excavators in open cast mines, loading dump trucks the size of a house.
I remember a documentary, long time ago.. they took a UK ex-coal miner - I *think* Yorkshire - round the world to see how coal production worked in other countries. His reaction to an opencast coal mine was watching a mind expanding - apparently his shift had never produced as much coal as one of those trucks. And they were rolling by in a convoy.....
Well, eventually, yes. I believe some of those monster trucks are even self driving these days...at least as far as the quarry boundary.
We did have some opencast here, although the one next to the River Aire was probably not a good idea!
Prior to the 1980s though, I understood that a lot of closures were due to geological conditions. Perhaps they just made it uneconomic in comparison with the next pit rather than shipping from Australia.
NuBanks even less. But their coverage, worldwide is lower.
The actual cost of transfer to the banks themselves is tiny, though. Crypto technology doesn't give any advantage, actually much the reverse.
But the point crypto people would argue is exactly the problem, the bank has all the power and as an individual you just get shafted. They can move some numbers around for very low cost, but then charge you an arm and a leg to send $100.
Also, in the developing world people aren't banked or don't have easy access to a bank, nor do they trust them.
New: Hearing the prime minister is telling MPs (who say they are getting more time with the PM than they ever imagined) that this is a media / Labour witch-hunt, that he’s been through worse before and that he’s bounced back before and will do so again
Witch hunt, eh? I wonder if there are any other high profile pols that have used that defence?
Also is getting more time with BJ necessarily going to make mps feel more warmly towards him, unless they're very shallow? Ah, ok, fair enough.
The 'Britain Trump' parallels are starting to really proliferate. The delight in lying, the laziness and high tolerance for chaos, the capricious abuse of power, a casual disregard for detail and for rules norms standards, a chauvinistic view of women, the brutish simpleton slogans, the crass 'humour' and spraying around of nicknames, the refusal to relinquish office regardless of events, the bullying and intimidation and general gangster vibe, and another that's just occurred to me - the humouring of young female close family members. Because the BJ/Carrie dynamic reminds me a little of the DT/Ivanka one. Johnson evacuates some dogs from a war zone because Carrie hears about their plight on the radio, Trump bombs Syria after Ivanka runs in sobbing about chemical weapons.
A notable difference is perhaps that Trump seems to be relatively proud and caring of his progeny (no doubt connected to his narcissm), while BJ moves on from one bowlful of the fruit of his loins to the next, even reluctant to acknowledge their existence in some cases.
Trump has a solid grass-roots base in his party, a huge mass of voters who are deeply devoted to him. As a result, something like this for him would be easily, easily brushed off. Johnson can't fall back on this level of support.
New: Hearing the prime minister is telling MPs (who say they are getting more time with the PM than they ever imagined) that this is a media / Labour witch-hunt, that he’s been through worse before and that he’s bounced back before and will do so again
Appearing before the Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) on Tuesday, Ben Wallace said: “No-one lobbied me… The Prime Minister didn’t ring up. At no stage, at any stage, did the Prime Minister ask me to make a way for those pets. Not at all. Never.”
New: Hearing the prime minister is telling MPs (who say they are getting more time with the PM than they ever imagined) that this is a media / Labour witch-hunt, that he’s been through worse before and that he’s bounced back before and will do so again
Constitutionally there was no need for a ballot at all. The PM remains in office until a VONC in Parliament. Thatcher could have ignored her party's 'local poll' and stood her ground. "I'm staying until HoC passes a VONC'" she might well have said. How many Tory MPs would have failed to support her?
This is not irrelevant to the current situation. The Conservative Party is nothing more than a voluntary association. It has no constitutional significance at all.
If the Conservative Party elects a new leader and the PM doesn't resign, HMQ will be having a word.
There is no point the incumbent PM not resigning as there would shortly be a confidence vote in the Commons and they would lose. The only point would be if there is some doubt about the state of the House or just bloody mindlessness.
There was speculation around the time Johnson took over that he would be able to ignore a vote of no confidence going against him in the Commons, wait out the two weeks, and force an election in preference to allowing a different PM take over.
That might be the scenario he would suggest in an attempt to keep MPs fearful of losing their seats in line.
That appears to be what happens under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. It isn't a mechanism to force the PM to resign and it's unclear whether the result of codifying the form of confidence motion has been to make it impossible for the house to indicate its support for a successor (they can only stave off an election 14 days after a no confidence vote by voting confidence in HM Government, not a notional alternative government - so the previous government has to have resigned first).
Another instance of the FTPA messing up the constitution.
I think in such a scenario (renegade PM holding the house to hostage) the only way to prevent a GE would be for the house to vote confidence in HMG. I don’t think the FTPA has messed with the convention that a PM who loses the confidence of the house has to tender his or her resignation to the monarch, though it is unclear at what point the confidence is lost (I.e at the point of the VONC or the 14 days elapsing).
Whatever the confusion in that situation, I think a monarch is correctly executing their powers to dismiss the PM if they were to establish that an alternative government could be formed. So if the Tory Party MPs were to notify her that they would get behind an alternative figure as PM, and there were enough of them to sustain a majority in the HoC, whatever Boris’ position on the matter I suspect the dismissal would take place and a new PM would take over, to table a vote of confidence in HMG and stop the 14 days elapsing.
Of course all of this would be a complete mess and in many ways our crisis moment just like the storming of the Capitol. Our constitution does rely on the PM of the day having a sense of fair play and knowing when the game is up, for the most part.
I don't think it's confusing, beyond the fact that the name of the act isn't really what it does. The old system gave the PM a weird prerogative that they could abuse, and the FTPA fixes this.
Without FTPA: PM can call an election whenever they like, technically they're within their rights to call an election to prevent themselves from being replaced by a new leader.
With FTPA: Parliament is in the driving seat, so if the majority of MPs want to kick out their PM and substitute someone else, they can. The mechanism is: Vote of confidence to dismiss the old PM, indicate to The Queen (by a formal vote or a letter or whatever) that they support someone else, and that person becomes PM.
If MPs go ahead and vote to repeal the FTPA, they're writing a blank cheque to their PM, who they know only cares about himself, to send them on a kamikaze run to save his own job. It's probably not in their best interests to let him do that.
Under FTPA a vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM - it simply sets the clock ticking for a GE.
That's what I said: The vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM (likewise under the old system). Doing that *then finding somebody else who can command a majority* dismisses the old PM. The difference is that with the FTPA, MPs unambiguously get a chance to do that, whereas without it the rejected PM may be able to dissolve parliament instead.
But under FTPA the only thing that stops an election is a vote of confidence in "HM Government" - not "somebody else". You can't vote confidence in them until they are appointed, and they can't be appointed unless the PM resigns or is dismissed. Agree that the rejected PM can't dissolve parliament, but that's what happens automatically 14 days later.
If MPs find someone they support the PM resigns or is dismissed. What do you think the 14-day period is for, just to give everyone a chance to see if they change their minds?
FTPA isn't a great bit of legislation and I think it was drafted assuming that a PM would behave honourably in line with convention and resign. The 14 days are to allow time to find someone who can command the confidence of the house - I've not gone back to Hansard or the explanatory notes to the Bill to check but my best guess is that nobody raised the question if what would happen if a PM refused to resign. There might be some other authority that makes it sufficiently clear that a PM has to go in that case such that HMQ would dismiss him if he doesn't resign, but I've not seen anything to that effect.
The thing is that, in principle, a PM might be able to assemble a new coalition of MPs to support them, after losing a confidence vote, so I don't think you'd necessarily want it to be automatic that they had to resign.
You could imagine a scenario where a Labour PM was reliant on the Lib Dems for a majority, lost their support, but was able to form a new majority by doing a deal with the SNP.
The key missing link is for the Commons to have a way of indicating whether they do have confidence in anyone else, so that person can take over.
That’s where HMQ comes in.
Anyway, your point isn’t really relevant here. Not even the DUP are daft enough to prop up a lame-duck liar, who has totally shafted them in the last two years.
FuckYourDeadMotherInLawUlsterPlebGate was the final straw.
HMQ demonstrated over prorogation that she is a paper tiger and will not act contrary to the advice of the PM.
I’m sure she’s sick to the back teeth with the lot of them.
So fed up she might go after her now-tainted jubilee?
Leaving aside her probably genuine belief that the job is her God-given duty, the only thing worse for her than dealing with the politicians would be seeing her son balls the whole thing up.
I think a King Charles would get on quite well with Starmer, an eco warrior who wants to modernise the monarchy and probably I suspect a Remainer though he accepts the result like Starmer allegedly now does. Charles also getting more woke, see his apology for slavery in Barbados.
The Queen however was probably a Leaver, she is more suited to Boris' Tories
I doubt this. As head of the CoE you'd expect HMQ to be broadly aligned politically with Jesus - a social democrat as we agreed earlier.
No, as I said earlier Jesus was a social conservative, although yes he might be a social democrat economically but focused on work and helping the poor in a practical way not just welfare dependency. Jesus would likely be Brownite Labour economically.
The Old Testament however is more Tory than the Tories
"As God once said, and I think rightly ..."
OK let’s do major religious figures
God: Leave (He is an Englishman, after all) Jesus: Remain, probably a 2nd voter, he does like dramatic revivals Holy Ghost: Abstained, mysteriously Mohammad: Leave, also slaughter the Remainers Buddha: Remain, but Leave in the next life Satan: Remain The Sumerian Wind-Demon Pazuzu: Remain Noah: Leave, ASAP! Abraham: Stay. Stay the blade. Verily Zeus: Remain. So I can RAPE europa in the form of a bull
John 14:6 And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever.
Definite remain vibes there.
The choice should have been FORSAKE or ABIDE
I’m a Forsaker. I choose to Abide. So much more poetic. Also ABIDE doesn’t have unfortunate associations, REMAIN always sounded uncomfortably close to “Remains”
Those who are criticising Starmer for bad decisions as DPP are really missing the point. He has been in a job, outside of politics, where he had to make very significant decisions. He went beyond the performance of being a barrister, taking the leap to be a decision maker. And not in the form a Judge, but as a prosecutor, under continuous public scrutiny. I just find that really impressive.
What did all these other people in Parliament do? Opinion writing columnist, novelist, councillor, a few years in an investment bank, think tankers... I don't think anyone is in the same league as Starmer. Just compare him to Braverman and Raab - both failed at magic circle careers, with their careers dissolving in to mid rate jobs where they failed to make any real impact; and now they seem to be being used to provide a front to provide credibility for what they and everyone else knows is bad law.
Even people like Emily Thornberry, Bob Neill, and Geoffrey Cox don't come close to Starmer, he is in a league of his own because of his background. That isn't a criticism of the other people in Parliament, experience shows that all different kinds of people can be good decision makers, and I am not exactly a fan of the Labour Party. But I do think that Starmer is exceptional in this one regard.
This is not how modern politics works
It is far, far more dangerous for a party leader to have held a job under continuous public scrutiny. Because there is plenty to criticise.
As director of public prosecutions, Starmer refused to prosecute the police officers accused of killing Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson.
I'm sure there are things which are more futile than trying to ascribe personal political views to members of the Royal Family, but I can't immediately think of any.
If we ruled out futile political speculations on PB we’d have about 3 comments a day
My bet:
Queen: Leave The Late D of E: Leave Charles: Remain Andrew: Remoaner, wanted a 2nd vote Anne: Leave Edward: Remain Wills: Remain Kate: Leave Harry: Leave Megan: Not sure how Brexit benefits her, so probably Remain
Queen: definitely L D of E: probably L, but he'd want Greece and the UK tied together, so not a definite Charles: R Andrew: he'd want as much young 'totty' in the UK as possible, so R Anne: L Edward: genuinely no idea Wills: R Kate: R (because she knows that she has to support her husband, even when he's mistaken) Harry: Where's the party? Meghan: My friend Oprah said that Brexit was a terrible thing
Harry surely Leave: back then he was a lairy lad in the army. They are all Leave
Er, apart from 100% of the sample ex-HMF on PB that is (me, Dura and Carnyx IIRC - any more for any more?)
And HCav in particular generally are 50:50 Remain:Leave as of the sample I come into contact with. Much like the rest of the population.
Here's a list of people I like who I think would have voted the same way as me because how could they not? They're nice and I'm nice and I'm right so they must be right too. [super_good_guys.txt]
And here's a list of paedophiles and genocidal psychos who I'm pretty sure would have voted the opposite way to me. Because boooo, paedophiles and genocide, boooo. [good_for_nothings.txt]
Constitutionally there was no need for a ballot at all. The PM remains in office until a VONC in Parliament. Thatcher could have ignored her party's 'local poll' and stood her ground. "I'm staying until HoC passes a VONC'" she might well have said. How many Tory MPs would have failed to support her?
This is not irrelevant to the current situation. The Conservative Party is nothing more than a voluntary association. It has no constitutional significance at all.
If the Conservative Party elects a new leader and the PM doesn't resign, HMQ will be having a word.
There is no point the incumbent PM not resigning as there would shortly be a confidence vote in the Commons and they would lose. The only point would be if there is some doubt about the state of the House or just bloody mindlessness.
There was speculation around the time Johnson took over that he would be able to ignore a vote of no confidence going against him in the Commons, wait out the two weeks, and force an election in preference to allowing a different PM take over.
That might be the scenario he would suggest in an attempt to keep MPs fearful of losing their seats in line.
That appears to be what happens under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. It isn't a mechanism to force the PM to resign and it's unclear whether the result of codifying the form of confidence motion has been to make it impossible for the house to indicate its support for a successor (they can only stave off an election 14 days after a no confidence vote by voting confidence in HM Government, not a notional alternative government - so the previous government has to have resigned first).
Another instance of the FTPA messing up the constitution.
I think in such a scenario (renegade PM holding the house to hostage) the only way to prevent a GE would be for the house to vote confidence in HMG. I don’t think the FTPA has messed with the convention that a PM who loses the confidence of the house has to tender his or her resignation to the monarch, though it is unclear at what point the confidence is lost (I.e at the point of the VONC or the 14 days elapsing).
Whatever the confusion in that situation, I think a monarch is correctly executing their powers to dismiss the PM if they were to establish that an alternative government could be formed. So if the Tory Party MPs were to notify her that they would get behind an alternative figure as PM, and there were enough of them to sustain a majority in the HoC, whatever Boris’ position on the matter I suspect the dismissal would take place and a new PM would take over, to table a vote of confidence in HMG and stop the 14 days elapsing.
Of course all of this would be a complete mess and in many ways our crisis moment just like the storming of the Capitol. Our constitution does rely on the PM of the day having a sense of fair play and knowing when the game is up, for the most part.
I don't think it's confusing, beyond the fact that the name of the act isn't really what it does. The old system gave the PM a weird prerogative that they could abuse, and the FTPA fixes this.
Without FTPA: PM can call an election whenever they like, technically they're within their rights to call an election to prevent themselves from being replaced by a new leader.
With FTPA: Parliament is in the driving seat, so if the majority of MPs want to kick out their PM and substitute someone else, they can. The mechanism is: Vote of confidence to dismiss the old PM, indicate to The Queen (by a formal vote or a letter or whatever) that they support someone else, and that person becomes PM.
If MPs go ahead and vote to repeal the FTPA, they're writing a blank cheque to their PM, who they know only cares about himself, to send them on a kamikaze run to save his own job. It's probably not in their best interests to let him do that.
Under FTPA a vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM - it simply sets the clock ticking for a GE.
That's what I said: The vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM (likewise under the old system). Doing that *then finding somebody else who can command a majority* dismisses the old PM. The difference is that with the FTPA, MPs unambiguously get a chance to do that, whereas without it the rejected PM may be able to dissolve parliament instead.
But under FTPA the only thing that stops an election is a vote of confidence in "HM Government" - not "somebody else". You can't vote confidence in them until they are appointed, and they can't be appointed unless the PM resigns or is dismissed. Agree that the rejected PM can't dissolve parliament, but that's what happens automatically 14 days later.
If MPs find someone they support the PM resigns or is dismissed. What do you think the 14-day period is for, just to give everyone a chance to see if they change their minds?
FTPA isn't a great bit of legislation and I think it was drafted assuming that a PM would behave honourably in line with convention and resign. The 14 days are to allow time to find someone who can command the confidence of the house - I've not gone back to Hansard or the explanatory notes to the Bill to check but my best guess is that nobody raised the question if what would happen if a PM refused to resign. There might be some other authority that makes it sufficiently clear that a PM has to go in that case such that HMQ would dismiss him if he doesn't resign, but I've not seen anything to that effect.
The thing is that, in principle, a PM might be able to assemble a new coalition of MPs to support them, after losing a confidence vote, so I don't think you'd necessarily want it to be automatic that they had to resign.
You could imagine a scenario where a Labour PM was reliant on the Lib Dems for a majority, lost their support, but was able to form a new majority by doing a deal with the SNP.
The key missing link is for the Commons to have a way of indicating whether they do have confidence in anyone else, so that person can take over.
That’s where HMQ comes in.
Anyway, your point isn’t really relevant here. Not even the DUP are daft enough to prop up a lame-duck liar, who has totally shafted them in the last two years.
FuckYourDeadMotherInLawUlsterPlebGate was the final straw.
HMQ demonstrated over prorogation that she is a paper tiger and will not act contrary to the advice of the PM.
I’m sure she’s sick to the back teeth with the lot of them.
So fed up she might go after her now-tainted jubilee?
Leaving aside her probably genuine belief that the job is her God-given duty, the only thing worse for her than dealing with the politicians would be seeing her son balls the whole thing up.
I think a King Charles would get on quite well with Starmer, an eco warrior who wants to modernise the monarchy and probably I suspect a Remainer though he accepts the result like Starmer allegedly now does. Charles also getting more woke, see his apology for slavery in Barbados.
The Queen however was probably a Leaver, she is more suited to Boris' Tories
I doubt this. As head of the CoE you'd expect HMQ to be broadly aligned politically with Jesus - a social democrat as we agreed earlier.
Thanks for that. You just made me squirt coffee out my nose.
So what's the betting that Johnson is delaying the release of the report to go on a 'charm offensive' with various MP's, with various specific details of the report in mind, to anticipate and soften the reactions first. That's what I expect is probably going on.
I'm sure there are things which are more futile than trying to ascribe personal political views to members of the Royal Family, but I can't immediately think of any.
If we ruled out futile political speculations on PB we’d have about 3 comments a day
My bet:
Queen: Leave The Late D of E: Leave Charles: Remain Andrew: Remoaner, wanted a 2nd vote Anne: Leave Edward: Remain Wills: Remain Kate: Leave Harry: Leave Megan: Not sure how Brexit benefits her, so probably Remain
Queen: definitely L D of E: probably L, but he'd want Greece and the UK tied together, so not a definite Charles: R Andrew: he'd want as much young 'totty' in the UK as possible, so R Anne: L Edward: genuinely no idea Wills: R Kate: R (because she knows that she has to support her husband, even when he's mistaken) Harry: Where's the party? Meghan: My friend Oprah said that Brexit was a terrible thing
Harry surely Leave: back then he was a lairy lad in the army. They are all Leave
Er, apart from 100% of the sample ex-HMF on PB that is (me, Dura and Carnyx IIRC - any more for any more?)
And HCav in particular generally are 50:50 Remain:Leave as of the sample I come into contact with. Much like the rest of the population.
But, with all due respect, you are all old (like me)
Younger military types are much Leavier. Especially the boozy laddish types like Harry (as was, RIP)
The unending supply of cnuts you've never heard of that the Tory party has in parliament never ceases to amaze me. At least in this time of crises he's concerning himself with the big issues.
The big thing I really don't get about "web3" is all the metaverse stuff. VR has been about for ages and it really doesn't have that widespread adoption, but all these people like Meta think everybody will soon want to spend all their time sitting looking through their VR goggles at virtual worlds?
New: Hearing the prime minister is telling MPs (who say they are getting more time with the PM than they ever imagined) that this is a media / Labour witch-hunt, that he’s been through worse before and that he’s bounced back before and will do so again
Witch hunt, eh? I wonder if there are any other high profile pols that have used that defence?
Also is getting more time with BJ necessarily going to make mps feel more warmly towards him, unless they're very shallow? Ah, ok, fair enough.
The 'Britain Trump' parallels are starting to really proliferate. The delight in lying, the laziness and high tolerance for chaos, the capricious abuse of power, a casual disregard for detail and for rules norms standards, a chauvinistic view of women, the brutish simpleton slogans, the crass 'humour' and spraying around of nicknames, the refusal to relinquish office regardless of events, the bullying and intimidation and general gangster vibe, and another that's just occurred to me - the humouring of young female close family members. Because the BJ/Carrie dynamic reminds me a little of the DT/Ivanka one. Johnson evacuates some dogs from a war zone because Carrie hears about their plight on the radio, Trump bombs Syria after Ivanka runs in sobbing about chemical weapons.
A notable difference is perhaps that Trump seems to be relatively proud and caring of his progeny (no doubt connected to his narcissm), while BJ moves on from one bowlful of the fruit of his loins to the next, even reluctant to acknowledge their existence in some cases.
Trump has a solid grass-roots base in his party, a huge mass of voters who are deeply devoted to him. As a result, something like this for him would be easily, easily brushed off. Johnson can't fall back on this level of support.
As far as I am concerned there is no comparisons between Trump and Boris. Trump is properly evil and I don't believe Boris is at all. I still want him to go for the sake of the nation so we can concentrate on things like Ukraine, inflation, actually getting Brexit done properly, etc, but I don't think he is evil.
However both of those 2 posts have come up with redeeming factors Trump has that Boris doesn't, namely loyalty to his family and a loyal following, even if that family maybe evil also and the followers deluded.
Here's a list of people I like who I think would have voted the same way as me because how could they not? They're nice and I'm nice and I'm right so they must be right too. [super_good_guys.txt]
And here's a list of paedophiles and genocidal psychos who I'm pretty sure would have voted the opposite way to me. Because boooo, paedophiles and genocide, boooo. [good_for_nothings.txt]
"No, I think BJ stays and BJ goes are about the same from a Labour POV. Johnson is the Tory's best campaigner as you say and has a proven ability to reach parts of the electorate his rivals can't. But, he has been severely compromised by current events. By contrast, replacing him now with someone credible like Sunak would give the Tories a bounce now but their ability to recover further might be more limited. To put it another way, I think the distribution of outcomes for the Tories under Johnson has a lower mean but fatter tails. The probability of staying in office after the next election might be more or less similar, but the chances of a huge defeat under Johnson are bigger and the average outcome is worse."
++++
That's a fair analysis. But my point is less about logic than emotion. Labour, and the Remainery centre and left, have been brutally duffed up by Boris more than once. He is the man that won the Brexit referendum AND then won the Brexit election, forcing it through (it is remarkable to remember how close we came to the moral catastrophe of a 2nd vote)
Boris, therefore, is like the guy who beat you senseless, in a bewildering and extremely painful way, several times.
Now he lies sprawled in the dust, leaking blood. Your brain says: He's finished. But your muscle memory, your subconscious, says Go over there and stamp on his head. Then shoot him. Then dump him in a river. Like Rasputin. Make sure he's bloody dead this time
One hint of a twitch of Boris reviving, and all the jangling nerves return.....
Not sure how you can say that Boris is the best campaigner the Tories have. He might be, but we know nothing about nearly all of them, except May and I grant you he is better than her, but then so is everyone. How do you know how others will perform? It is not as if he didn't have the campaign set up for him on a plate namely 'Get Brexit Done' and against Corbyn for goodness sake.
Without Brexit and Corbyn I'm not sure he would get away with hiding in a fridge and refusing to be interviewed by Neil. There might be others much better than him at campaigning.
We know Boris is REALLY good because he won two London mayorals, against the grain, the Brexit referendum, against expectations, and then a large majority, against all the predictions
He is just very good at it. Now, the magic may have totally deserted him (or it may not), but that is an excellent track record. Better than anyone else in modern British politics with the possible exception of Blair, but he has basically left politics
Around Boris there is nullity, as you say. The bare and boundless sands.
If you were a havering Tory MP about to sack Boris, this CV of his would give you pause, especially when compared to his rivals, who are at best entirely unproven
Congrats on being one of his few (in the literal sense) apologists on this platform. It is normally the mad or the childish that point out that the Emperor has no clothes. Clearly not always true.
Its not really about being an apologist for Boris. It is just reality. Who replaces him? What he achieved in 2019 was such a unique and personal triumph, there is no obvious successor. Things could easily descend to the chaos that existed towards the end of Theresa May's unfortunate rule, where it looked like the Conservative party were finished. Perhaps tailing Labour by 7% in the middle of a massive scandal isn't such a bad place to be?
Oh dear. I now understand your name. You are where Bozo would like to take the Conservative Party.
Eh? Its a betting website. I've been saying for days that there is a high likelihood that Boris will stay, this is why. Its ultimately tory MP's that make the decision, you and I have almost zero influence over it. The odds of Boris sticking around for another year at least are very tempting, however catastrophic that may be for the country.
Mr. Urquhart, apparently (not my area of interest either) Facebook want everything to occur via their portal/apps etc so they get a percentage of tons of online activity. A little bit how Amazon and others act as marketplaces for many online shops.
Those who are criticising Starmer for bad decisions as DPP are really missing the point. He has been in a job, outside of politics, where he had to make very significant decisions. He went beyond the performance of being a barrister, taking the leap to be a decision maker. And not in the form a Judge, but as a prosecutor, under continuous public scrutiny. I just find that really impressive.
What did all these other people in Parliament do? Opinion writing columnist, novelist, councillor, a few years in an investment bank, think tankers... I don't think anyone is in the same league as Starmer. Just compare him to Braverman and Raab - both failed at magic circle careers, with their careers dissolving in to mid rate jobs where they failed to make any real impact; and now they seem to be being used to provide a front to provide credibility for what they and everyone else knows is bad law.
Even people like Emily Thornberry, Bob Neill, and Geoffrey Cox don't come close to Starmer, he is in a league of his own because of his background. That isn't a criticism of the other people in Parliament, experience shows that all different kinds of people can be good decision makers, and I am not exactly a fan of the Labour Party. But I do think that Starmer is exceptional in this one regard.
This is not how modern politics works
It is far, far more dangerous for a party leader to have held a job under continuous public scrutiny. Because there is plenty to criticise.
As director of public prosecutions, Starmer refused to prosecute the police officers accused of killing Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson.
He did not cover himself in glory.
Did he?
The Jean Charles de Menezes stuff was before his time, as this article states it was in 2006, and he only became DPP in 2008.
Those who are criticising Starmer for bad decisions as DPP are really missing the point. He has been in a job, outside of politics, where he had to make very significant decisions. He went beyond the performance of being a barrister, taking the leap to be a decision maker. And not in the form a Judge, but as a prosecutor, under continuous public scrutiny. I just find that really impressive.
What did all these other people in Parliament do? Opinion writing columnist, novelist, councillor, a few years in an investment bank, think tankers... I don't think anyone is in the same league as Starmer. Just compare him to Braverman and Raab - both failed at magic circle careers, with their careers dissolving in to mid rate jobs where they failed to make any real impact; and now they seem to be being used to provide a front to provide credibility for what they and everyone else knows is bad law.
Even people like Emily Thornberry, Bob Neill, and Geoffrey Cox don't come close to Starmer, he is in a league of his own because of his background. That isn't a criticism of the other people in Parliament, experience shows that all different kinds of people can be good decision makers, and I am not exactly a fan of the Labour Party. But I do think that Starmer is exceptional in this one regard.
Whilst your general point is true that there are a lot of people in politics with “average” careers I would suggest from my own experience in finance that the guys running the regulators (and often management) are generally (if not totally) those who didn’t have startling careers or ability in their roles in their area of finance.
The absolute best stockbroker I knew, an absolute legend in ability and the size and quality of clients could have been CEO of the business worldwide, brilliantly clever and able (and a qualified lawyer, natch) but he had no desire to get involved of the management and control because he loved what he did and did it brilliantly and made a very healthy fortune.
So to suggest that say Starmer has more ability and a better career than say Cox is pushing it - the heads of the CPS, banks etc aren’t always the best lawyers or bankers but people who find their place in the management or regulatory side.
I would imagine that Cox isn’t paid the sort of money he is because he’s just ok and I doubt Starmer (although I could be wrong obviously) was the sort of barrister who would have been first on the list for many big clients.
I doubt General Sir Nick Carter was the “best soldier” but he followed the staff route which inevitably puts you into a position where you are going to be “head” of something.
And I also think that from personal experience and anecdotes re the CPS, being head of it isn’t that great a deal - a giant amongst pygmies maybe.
If I’m wrong then I withdraw about Starmer’s genius but I wouldn’t go as far as a hagiography as you wrote.
NuBanks even less. But their coverage, worldwide is lower.
The actual cost of transfer to the banks themselves is tiny, though. Crypto technology doesn't give any advantage, actually much the reverse.
But the point crypto people would argue is exactly the problem, the bank has all the power and as an individual you just get shafted. They can move some numbers around for very low cost, but then charge you an arm and a leg to send $100.
Also, in the developing world people aren't banked or don't have easy access to a bank, nor do they trust them.
So you wish to provide them with a mobile device that say provides banking.
Something a lot of the African mobile phone networks have been providing at very low cost (but rather profitably) for the last 11 or so years.
Here's a list of people I like who I think would have voted the same way as me because how could they not? They're nice and I'm nice and I'm right so they must be right too. [super_good_guys.txt]
And here's a list of paedophiles and genocidal psychos who I'm pretty sure would have voted the opposite way to me. Because boooo, paedophiles and genocide, boooo. [good_for_nothings.txt]
Constitutionally there was no need for a ballot at all. The PM remains in office until a VONC in Parliament. Thatcher could have ignored her party's 'local poll' and stood her ground. "I'm staying until HoC passes a VONC'" she might well have said. How many Tory MPs would have failed to support her?
This is not irrelevant to the current situation. The Conservative Party is nothing more than a voluntary association. It has no constitutional significance at all.
If the Conservative Party elects a new leader and the PM doesn't resign, HMQ will be having a word.
There is no point the incumbent PM not resigning as there would shortly be a confidence vote in the Commons and they would lose. The only point would be if there is some doubt about the state of the House or just bloody mindlessness.
There was speculation around the time Johnson took over that he would be able to ignore a vote of no confidence going against him in the Commons, wait out the two weeks, and force an election in preference to allowing a different PM take over.
That might be the scenario he would suggest in an attempt to keep MPs fearful of losing their seats in line.
That appears to be what happens under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. It isn't a mechanism to force the PM to resign and it's unclear whether the result of codifying the form of confidence motion has been to make it impossible for the house to indicate its support for a successor (they can only stave off an election 14 days after a no confidence vote by voting confidence in HM Government, not a notional alternative government - so the previous government has to have resigned first).
Another instance of the FTPA messing up the constitution.
I think in such a scenario (renegade PM holding the house to hostage) the only way to prevent a GE would be for the house to vote confidence in HMG. I don’t think the FTPA has messed with the convention that a PM who loses the confidence of the house has to tender his or her resignation to the monarch, though it is unclear at what point the confidence is lost (I.e at the point of the VONC or the 14 days elapsing).
Whatever the confusion in that situation, I think a monarch is correctly executing their powers to dismiss the PM if they were to establish that an alternative government could be formed. So if the Tory Party MPs were to notify her that they would get behind an alternative figure as PM, and there were enough of them to sustain a majority in the HoC, whatever Boris’ position on the matter I suspect the dismissal would take place and a new PM would take over, to table a vote of confidence in HMG and stop the 14 days elapsing.
Of course all of this would be a complete mess and in many ways our crisis moment just like the storming of the Capitol. Our constitution does rely on the PM of the day having a sense of fair play and knowing when the game is up, for the most part.
I don't think it's confusing, beyond the fact that the name of the act isn't really what it does. The old system gave the PM a weird prerogative that they could abuse, and the FTPA fixes this.
Without FTPA: PM can call an election whenever they like, technically they're within their rights to call an election to prevent themselves from being replaced by a new leader.
With FTPA: Parliament is in the driving seat, so if the majority of MPs want to kick out their PM and substitute someone else, they can. The mechanism is: Vote of confidence to dismiss the old PM, indicate to The Queen (by a formal vote or a letter or whatever) that they support someone else, and that person becomes PM.
If MPs go ahead and vote to repeal the FTPA, they're writing a blank cheque to their PM, who they know only cares about himself, to send them on a kamikaze run to save his own job. It's probably not in their best interests to let him do that.
Under FTPA a vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM - it simply sets the clock ticking for a GE.
That's what I said: The vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM (likewise under the old system). Doing that *then finding somebody else who can command a majority* dismisses the old PM. The difference is that with the FTPA, MPs unambiguously get a chance to do that, whereas without it the rejected PM may be able to dissolve parliament instead.
But under FTPA the only thing that stops an election is a vote of confidence in "HM Government" - not "somebody else". You can't vote confidence in them until they are appointed, and they can't be appointed unless the PM resigns or is dismissed. Agree that the rejected PM can't dissolve parliament, but that's what happens automatically 14 days later.
If MPs find someone they support the PM resigns or is dismissed. What do you think the 14-day period is for, just to give everyone a chance to see if they change their minds?
FTPA isn't a great bit of legislation and I think it was drafted assuming that a PM would behave honourably in line with convention and resign. The 14 days are to allow time to find someone who can command the confidence of the house - I've not gone back to Hansard or the explanatory notes to the Bill to check but my best guess is that nobody raised the question if what would happen if a PM refused to resign. There might be some other authority that makes it sufficiently clear that a PM has to go in that case such that HMQ would dismiss him if he doesn't resign, but I've not seen anything to that effect.
The thing is that, in principle, a PM might be able to assemble a new coalition of MPs to support them, after losing a confidence vote, so I don't think you'd necessarily want it to be automatic that they had to resign.
You could imagine a scenario where a Labour PM was reliant on the Lib Dems for a majority, lost their support, but was able to form a new majority by doing a deal with the SNP.
The key missing link is for the Commons to have a way of indicating whether they do have confidence in anyone else, so that person can take over.
That’s where HMQ comes in.
Anyway, your point isn’t really relevant here. Not even the DUP are daft enough to prop up a lame-duck liar, who has totally shafted them in the last two years.
FuckYourDeadMotherInLawUlsterPlebGate was the final straw.
HMQ demonstrated over prorogation that she is a paper tiger and will not act contrary to the advice of the PM.
I’m sure she’s sick to the back teeth with the lot of them.
So fed up she might go after her now-tainted jubilee?
Leaving aside her probably genuine belief that the job is her God-given duty, the only thing worse for her than dealing with the politicians would be seeing her son balls the whole thing up.
I think a King Charles would get on quite well with Starmer, an eco warrior who wants to modernise the monarchy and probably I suspect a Remainer though he accepts the result like Starmer allegedly now does. Charles also getting more woke, see his apology for slavery in Barbados.
The Queen however was probably a Leaver, she is more suited to Boris' Tories
I doubt this. As head of the CoE you'd expect HMQ to be broadly aligned politically with Jesus - a social democrat as we agreed earlier.
No, as I said earlier Jesus was a social conservative, although yes he might be a social democrat economically but focused on work and helping the poor in a practical way not just welfare dependency. Jesus would likely be Brownite Labour economically.
The Old Testament however is more Tory than the Tories
"As God once said, and I think rightly ..."
OK let’s do major religious figures
God: Leave (He is an Englishman, after all) Jesus: Remain, probably a 2nd voter, he does like dramatic revivals Holy Ghost: Abstained, mysteriously Mohammad: Leave, also slaughter the Remainers Buddha: Remain, but Leave in the next life Satan: Remain The Sumerian Wind-Demon Pazuzu: Remain Noah: Leave, ASAP! Abraham: Stay. Stay the blade. Verily Zeus: Remain. So I can RAPE europa in the form of a bull
John 14:6 And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever.
Definite remain vibes there.
The choice should have been FORSAKE or ABIDE
I’m a Forsaker. I choose to Abide. So much more poetic. Also ABIDE doesn’t have unfortunate associations, REMAIN always sounded uncomfortably close to “Remains”
Boris is also a forsaker (except for the bit in the marriage service about forsaking all others, of course).
But the point crypto people would argue is exactly the problem, the bank has all the power and as an individual you just get shafted. They can move some numbers around for very low cost, but then charge you an arm and a leg to send $100.
Also, in the developing world people aren't banked or don't have easy access to a bank, nor do they trust them.
The banks give you security, reliability and an audit trail; you know, to a very, very high degree of confidence, that the $100 you hand over in New Zealand is not going to disappear on its way to Malawi, and in the vanishingly small number of cases where it does, you've got someone to complain to, and ultimately a regulator to enforce it. No doubt that could all be done for less cost, but crypto is irrelevant.
On your second point, I'm not sure that really true any more. Mobile phone money transfers (where basically the phone company acts as the bank and guarantor of the integrity of the transfer) are now very widely and cheaply available, and someone receiving a crypto payment directly needs a mobile phone anyway.
Edit: I see that @eek has already made the same point, better than I did.
New: Hearing the prime minister is telling MPs (who say they are getting more time with the PM than they ever imagined) that this is a media / Labour witch-hunt, that he’s been through worse before and that he’s bounced back before and will do so again
Witch hunt, eh? I wonder if there are any other high profile pols that have used that defence?
Also is getting more time with BJ necessarily going to make mps feel more warmly towards him, unless they're very shallow? Ah, ok, fair enough.
The 'Britain Trump' parallels are starting to really proliferate. The delight in lying, the laziness and high tolerance for chaos, the capricious abuse of power, a casual disregard for detail and for rules norms standards, a chauvinistic view of women, the brutish simpleton slogans, the crass 'humour' and spraying around of nicknames, the refusal to relinquish office regardless of events, the bullying and intimidation and general gangster vibe, and another that's just occurred to me - the humouring of young female close family members. Because the BJ/Carrie dynamic reminds me a little of the DT/Ivanka one. Johnson evacuates some dogs from a war zone because Carrie hears about their plight on the radio, Trump bombs Syria after Ivanka runs in sobbing about chemical weapons.
A notable difference is perhaps that Trump seems to be relatively proud and caring of his progeny (no doubt connected to his narcissm), while BJ moves on from one bowlful of the fruit of his loins to the next, even reluctant to acknowledge their existence in some cases.
Score one for the Donald there then. Otoh Boris isn't *quite* such a dog whistler to racists. Whatever, I'm developing quite an acute dislike of the man which is completely uncoupled from his politics. My betting view is he survives but I've rarely wished so fervently for my take on something to be proven wildly wrong.
Here's a list of people I like who I think would have voted the same way as me because how could they not? They're nice and I'm nice and I'm right so they must be right too. [super_good_guys.txt]
And here's a list of paedophiles and genocidal psychos who I'm pretty sure would have voted the opposite way to me. Because boooo, paedophiles and genocide, boooo. [good_for_nothings.txt]
Mr. Urquhart, apparently (not my area of interest either) Facebook want everything to occur via their portal/apps etc so they get a percentage of tons of online activity. A little bit how Amazon and others act as marketplaces for many online shops.
Its not just them though, lots of people are throwing resources into this concept. I just don't see it. How fast did people get really peed off with Zoom etc during lockdown. Now you are telling me everybody is going to choose all their leisure time sitting through through some wanky goggles and pay for a lot of money for the privilege.
The tech isn't even there with VR, its miles off being really good (and you still need a mega PC).
NuBanks even less. But their coverage, worldwide is lower.
The actual cost of transfer to the banks themselves is tiny, though. Crypto technology doesn't give any advantage, actually much the reverse.
But the point crypto people would argue is exactly the problem, the bank has all the power and as an individual you just get shafted. They can move some numbers around for very low cost, but then charge you an arm and a leg to send $100.
Also, in the developing world people aren't banked or don't have easy access to a bank, nor do they trust them.
Indeed, this is a point often missed.
Blockchain tech wasn't designed as a speculative asset, it was designed as a decentralised and personal alternative to the old ways of having bank act as gatekeeper and intermediary and demand a cut (some might say extort a cut) at every stage.
In many respects crypto is to banking as blogging was to journalism, a completely new technology that takes power out of the hands of the old gatekeepers and allows anyone to self publish, or in this case, be their own bank.
Constitutionally there was no need for a ballot at all. The PM remains in office until a VONC in Parliament. Thatcher could have ignored her party's 'local poll' and stood her ground. "I'm staying until HoC passes a VONC'" she might well have said. How many Tory MPs would have failed to support her?
This is not irrelevant to the current situation. The Conservative Party is nothing more than a voluntary association. It has no constitutional significance at all.
If the Conservative Party elects a new leader and the PM doesn't resign, HMQ will be having a word.
There is no point the incumbent PM not resigning as there would shortly be a confidence vote in the Commons and they would lose. The only point would be if there is some doubt about the state of the House or just bloody mindlessness.
There was speculation around the time Johnson took over that he would be able to ignore a vote of no confidence going against him in the Commons, wait out the two weeks, and force an election in preference to allowing a different PM take over.
That might be the scenario he would suggest in an attempt to keep MPs fearful of losing their seats in line.
That appears to be what happens under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. It isn't a mechanism to force the PM to resign and it's unclear whether the result of codifying the form of confidence motion has been to make it impossible for the house to indicate its support for a successor (they can only stave off an election 14 days after a no confidence vote by voting confidence in HM Government, not a notional alternative government - so the previous government has to have resigned first).
Another instance of the FTPA messing up the constitution.
I think in such a scenario (renegade PM holding the house to hostage) the only way to prevent a GE would be for the house to vote confidence in HMG. I don’t think the FTPA has messed with the convention that a PM who loses the confidence of the house has to tender his or her resignation to the monarch, though it is unclear at what point the confidence is lost (I.e at the point of the VONC or the 14 days elapsing).
Whatever the confusion in that situation, I think a monarch is correctly executing their powers to dismiss the PM if they were to establish that an alternative government could be formed. So if the Tory Party MPs were to notify her that they would get behind an alternative figure as PM, and there were enough of them to sustain a majority in the HoC, whatever Boris’ position on the matter I suspect the dismissal would take place and a new PM would take over, to table a vote of confidence in HMG and stop the 14 days elapsing.
Of course all of this would be a complete mess and in many ways our crisis moment just like the storming of the Capitol. Our constitution does rely on the PM of the day having a sense of fair play and knowing when the game is up, for the most part.
I don't think it's confusing, beyond the fact that the name of the act isn't really what it does. The old system gave the PM a weird prerogative that they could abuse, and the FTPA fixes this.
Without FTPA: PM can call an election whenever they like, technically they're within their rights to call an election to prevent themselves from being replaced by a new leader.
With FTPA: Parliament is in the driving seat, so if the majority of MPs want to kick out their PM and substitute someone else, they can. The mechanism is: Vote of confidence to dismiss the old PM, indicate to The Queen (by a formal vote or a letter or whatever) that they support someone else, and that person becomes PM.
If MPs go ahead and vote to repeal the FTPA, they're writing a blank cheque to their PM, who they know only cares about himself, to send them on a kamikaze run to save his own job. It's probably not in their best interests to let him do that.
Under FTPA a vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM - it simply sets the clock ticking for a GE.
That's what I said: The vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM (likewise under the old system). Doing that *then finding somebody else who can command a majority* dismisses the old PM. The difference is that with the FTPA, MPs unambiguously get a chance to do that, whereas without it the rejected PM may be able to dissolve parliament instead.
But under FTPA the only thing that stops an election is a vote of confidence in "HM Government" - not "somebody else". You can't vote confidence in them until they are appointed, and they can't be appointed unless the PM resigns or is dismissed. Agree that the rejected PM can't dissolve parliament, but that's what happens automatically 14 days later.
If MPs find someone they support the PM resigns or is dismissed. What do you think the 14-day period is for, just to give everyone a chance to see if they change their minds?
FTPA isn't a great bit of legislation and I think it was drafted assuming that a PM would behave honourably in line with convention and resign. The 14 days are to allow time to find someone who can command the confidence of the house - I've not gone back to Hansard or the explanatory notes to the Bill to check but my best guess is that nobody raised the question if what would happen if a PM refused to resign. There might be some other authority that makes it sufficiently clear that a PM has to go in that case such that HMQ would dismiss him if he doesn't resign, but I've not seen anything to that effect.
The thing is that, in principle, a PM might be able to assemble a new coalition of MPs to support them, after losing a confidence vote, so I don't think you'd necessarily want it to be automatic that they had to resign.
You could imagine a scenario where a Labour PM was reliant on the Lib Dems for a majority, lost their support, but was able to form a new majority by doing a deal with the SNP.
The key missing link is for the Commons to have a way of indicating whether they do have confidence in anyone else, so that person can take over.
That’s where HMQ comes in.
Anyway, your point isn’t really relevant here. Not even the DUP are daft enough to prop up a lame-duck liar, who has totally shafted them in the last two years.
FuckYourDeadMotherInLawUlsterPlebGate was the final straw.
HMQ demonstrated over prorogation that she is a paper tiger and will not act contrary to the advice of the PM.
I’m sure she’s sick to the back teeth with the lot of them.
So fed up she might go after her now-tainted jubilee?
Leaving aside her probably genuine belief that the job is her God-given duty, the only thing worse for her than dealing with the politicians would be seeing her son balls the whole thing up.
I think a King Charles would get on quite well with Starmer, an eco warrior who wants to modernise the monarchy and probably I suspect a Remainer though he accepts the result like Starmer allegedly now does. Charles also getting more woke, see his apology for slavery in Barbados.
The Queen however was probably a Leaver, she is more suited to Boris' Tories
Only on Europe rather than social policy, I think. Remember Thatcher's bust-up with her.
The Queen is economically centrist and One Nation, remember she got on far better with John Major, Ted Heath and Harold Wilson and Macmillan than she ever did with Thatcher certainly.
However she is also a traditionalist and was not a great fan of Blair I suspect. Given the fact she was well over 65 in 2016 and a non graduate she would almost certainly have voted Leave had she had a vote.
Charles and William and Kate I suspect would have voted Remain. Harry pre Meghan would have probably voted Leave, post Meghan would be a staunch Remainer. Camilla I suspect would have been a Leaver too, as would Philip (the Queen Mother certainly, she was a huge Thatcher fan, far more than her daughter and was wary of the Germans until her death)
'she was well over 65 in 2016 and a non graduate she would almost certainly have voted Leave had she had a vote'
"No, I think BJ stays and BJ goes are about the same from a Labour POV. Johnson is the Tory's best campaigner as you say and has a proven ability to reach parts of the electorate his rivals can't. But, he has been severely compromised by current events. By contrast, replacing him now with someone credible like Sunak would give the Tories a bounce now but their ability to recover further might be more limited. To put it another way, I think the distribution of outcomes for the Tories under Johnson has a lower mean but fatter tails. The probability of staying in office after the next election might be more or less similar, but the chances of a huge defeat under Johnson are bigger and the average outcome is worse."
++++
That's a fair analysis. But my point is less about logic than emotion. Labour, and the Remainery centre and left, have been brutally duffed up by Boris more than once. He is the man that won the Brexit referendum AND then won the Brexit election, forcing it through (it is remarkable to remember how close we came to the moral catastrophe of a 2nd vote)
Boris, therefore, is like the guy who beat you senseless, in a bewildering and extremely painful way, several times.
Now he lies sprawled in the dust, leaking blood. Your brain says: He's finished. But your muscle memory, your subconscious, says Go over there and stamp on his head. Then shoot him. Then dump him in a river. Like Rasputin. Make sure he's bloody dead this time
One hint of a twitch of Boris reviving, and all the jangling nerves return.....
Not sure how you can say that Boris is the best campaigner the Tories have. He might be, but we know nothing about nearly all of them, except May and I grant you he is better than her, but then so is everyone. How do you know how others will perform? It is not as if he didn't have the campaign set up for him on a plate namely 'Get Brexit Done' and against Corbyn for goodness sake.
Without Brexit and Corbyn I'm not sure he would get away with hiding in a fridge and refusing to be interviewed by Neil. There might be others much better than him at campaigning.
We know Boris is REALLY good because he won two London mayorals, against the grain, the Brexit referendum, against expectations, and then a large majority, against all the predictions
He is just very good at it. Now, the magic may have totally deserted him (or it may not), but that is an excellent track record. Better than anyone else in modern British politics with the possible exception of Blair, but he has basically left politics
Around Boris there is nullity, as you say. The bare and boundless sands.
If you were a havering Tory MP about to sack Boris, this CV of his would give you pause, especially when compared to his rivals, who are at best entirely unproven
Congrats on being one of his few (in the literal sense) apologists on this platform. It is normally the mad or the childish that point out that the Emperor has no clothes. Clearly not always true.
Surely Boris's limitation is that he's only a salesman. With Cummings or some other hard bastard in the back room pulling the le(a)vers which actually make things happen and steam-rollering obstacles, he's very happy to deliver a pool clip reassuring the nation that lying to the Queen (or whatever) is absolutely fine, and anyway.. look at me in my union jack pants.
But when the backroom intellect is delivered by Nadine Dorries wanting to cancel Match of the Day - or even at its best a Cummingsless Gove struggling to define levelling up - the sales pitch just looks vacuous.
As much as any wrongdoing, he's just run out of steam. The administration's like some insect in metamorphosis which expends all its energy on its raison d'etre (either Brexit or becoming a butterfly), then dies next day because it's knackered.
Those who are criticising Starmer for bad decisions as DPP are really missing the point. He has been in a job, outside of politics, where he had to make very significant decisions. He went beyond the performance of being a barrister, taking the leap to be a decision maker. And not in the form a Judge, but as a prosecutor, under continuous public scrutiny. I just find that really impressive.
What did all these other people in Parliament do? Opinion writing columnist, novelist, councillor, a few years in an investment bank, think tankers... I don't think anyone is in the same league as Starmer. Just compare him to Braverman and Raab - both failed at magic circle careers, with their careers dissolving in to mid rate jobs where they failed to make any real impact; and now they seem to be being used to provide a front to provide credibility for what they and everyone else knows is bad law.
Even people like Emily Thornberry, Bob Neill, and Geoffrey Cox don't come close to Starmer, he is in a league of his own because of his background. That isn't a criticism of the other people in Parliament, experience shows that all different kinds of people can be good decision makers, and I am not exactly a fan of the Labour Party. But I do think that Starmer is exceptional in this one regard.
This is not how modern politics works
It is far, far more dangerous for a party leader to have held a job under continuous public scrutiny. Because there is plenty to criticise.
As director of public prosecutions, Starmer refused to prosecute the police officers accused of killing Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson.
He did not cover himself in glory.
I am not a Labour supporter so can maybe come at this from a neutralist position. The DPP has a HUGE remit. There will be cases that can be looked at negatively for every single person who has held the post.
Secondly, one of the things I like about Starmer is that he has done a proper job, rather than the joker/polemicist currently in No10. And not just A job, it is a serious job.
Constitutionally there was no need for a ballot at all. The PM remains in office until a VONC in Parliament. Thatcher could have ignored her party's 'local poll' and stood her ground. "I'm staying until HoC passes a VONC'" she might well have said. How many Tory MPs would have failed to support her?
This is not irrelevant to the current situation. The Conservative Party is nothing more than a voluntary association. It has no constitutional significance at all.
If the Conservative Party elects a new leader and the PM doesn't resign, HMQ will be having a word.
There is no point the incumbent PM not resigning as there would shortly be a confidence vote in the Commons and they would lose. The only point would be if there is some doubt about the state of the House or just bloody mindlessness.
There was speculation around the time Johnson took over that he would be able to ignore a vote of no confidence going against him in the Commons, wait out the two weeks, and force an election in preference to allowing a different PM take over.
That might be the scenario he would suggest in an attempt to keep MPs fearful of losing their seats in line.
That appears to be what happens under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. It isn't a mechanism to force the PM to resign and it's unclear whether the result of codifying the form of confidence motion has been to make it impossible for the house to indicate its support for a successor (they can only stave off an election 14 days after a no confidence vote by voting confidence in HM Government, not a notional alternative government - so the previous government has to have resigned first).
Another instance of the FTPA messing up the constitution.
I think in such a scenario (renegade PM holding the house to hostage) the only way to prevent a GE would be for the house to vote confidence in HMG. I don’t think the FTPA has messed with the convention that a PM who loses the confidence of the house has to tender his or her resignation to the monarch, though it is unclear at what point the confidence is lost (I.e at the point of the VONC or the 14 days elapsing).
Whatever the confusion in that situation, I think a monarch is correctly executing their powers to dismiss the PM if they were to establish that an alternative government could be formed. So if the Tory Party MPs were to notify her that they would get behind an alternative figure as PM, and there were enough of them to sustain a majority in the HoC, whatever Boris’ position on the matter I suspect the dismissal would take place and a new PM would take over, to table a vote of confidence in HMG and stop the 14 days elapsing.
Of course all of this would be a complete mess and in many ways our crisis moment just like the storming of the Capitol. Our constitution does rely on the PM of the day having a sense of fair play and knowing when the game is up, for the most part.
I don't think it's confusing, beyond the fact that the name of the act isn't really what it does. The old system gave the PM a weird prerogative that they could abuse, and the FTPA fixes this.
Without FTPA: PM can call an election whenever they like, technically they're within their rights to call an election to prevent themselves from being replaced by a new leader.
With FTPA: Parliament is in the driving seat, so if the majority of MPs want to kick out their PM and substitute someone else, they can. The mechanism is: Vote of confidence to dismiss the old PM, indicate to The Queen (by a formal vote or a letter or whatever) that they support someone else, and that person becomes PM.
If MPs go ahead and vote to repeal the FTPA, they're writing a blank cheque to their PM, who they know only cares about himself, to send them on a kamikaze run to save his own job. It's probably not in their best interests to let him do that.
Under FTPA a vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM - it simply sets the clock ticking for a GE.
That's what I said: The vote of confidence doesn't dismiss the old PM (likewise under the old system). Doing that *then finding somebody else who can command a majority* dismisses the old PM. The difference is that with the FTPA, MPs unambiguously get a chance to do that, whereas without it the rejected PM may be able to dissolve parliament instead.
But under FTPA the only thing that stops an election is a vote of confidence in "HM Government" - not "somebody else". You can't vote confidence in them until they are appointed, and they can't be appointed unless the PM resigns or is dismissed. Agree that the rejected PM can't dissolve parliament, but that's what happens automatically 14 days later.
If MPs find someone they support the PM resigns or is dismissed. What do you think the 14-day period is for, just to give everyone a chance to see if they change their minds?
FTPA isn't a great bit of legislation and I think it was drafted assuming that a PM would behave honourably in line with convention and resign. The 14 days are to allow time to find someone who can command the confidence of the house - I've not gone back to Hansard or the explanatory notes to the Bill to check but my best guess is that nobody raised the question if what would happen if a PM refused to resign. There might be some other authority that makes it sufficiently clear that a PM has to go in that case such that HMQ would dismiss him if he doesn't resign, but I've not seen anything to that effect.
The thing is that, in principle, a PM might be able to assemble a new coalition of MPs to support them, after losing a confidence vote, so I don't think you'd necessarily want it to be automatic that they had to resign.
You could imagine a scenario where a Labour PM was reliant on the Lib Dems for a majority, lost their support, but was able to form a new majority by doing a deal with the SNP.
The key missing link is for the Commons to have a way of indicating whether they do have confidence in anyone else, so that person can take over.
That’s where HMQ comes in.
Anyway, your point isn’t really relevant here. Not even the DUP are daft enough to prop up a lame-duck liar, who has totally shafted them in the last two years.
FuckYourDeadMotherInLawUlsterPlebGate was the final straw.
HMQ demonstrated over prorogation that she is a paper tiger and will not act contrary to the advice of the PM.
I’m sure she’s sick to the back teeth with the lot of them.
So fed up she might go after her now-tainted jubilee?
Leaving aside her probably genuine belief that the job is her God-given duty, the only thing worse for her than dealing with the politicians would be seeing her son balls the whole thing up.
Er, which son?
Hard to see Charles making a bigger balls up of his life than Andrew. He can be as incompetent as he likes, he’ll never be the black sheep.
Those who are criticising Starmer for bad decisions as DPP are really missing the point. He has been in a job, outside of politics, where he had to make very significant decisions. He went beyond the performance of being a barrister, taking the leap to be a decision maker. And not in the form a Judge, but as a prosecutor, under continuous public scrutiny. I just find that really impressive.
What did all these other people in Parliament do? Opinion writing columnist, novelist, councillor, a few years in an investment bank, think tankers... I don't think anyone is in the same league as Starmer. Just compare him to Braverman and Raab - both failed at magic circle careers, with their careers dissolving in to mid rate jobs where they failed to make any real impact; and now they seem to be being used to provide a front to provide credibility for what they and everyone else knows is bad law.
Even people like Emily Thornberry, Bob Neill, and Geoffrey Cox don't come close to Starmer, he is in a league of his own because of his background. That isn't a criticism of the other people in Parliament, experience shows that all different kinds of people can be good decision makers, and I am not exactly a fan of the Labour Party. But I do think that Starmer is exceptional in this one regard.
Enlightened sunny post from the often torrid darkage here.
"No, I think BJ stays and BJ goes are about the same from a Labour POV. Johnson is the Tory's best campaigner as you say and has a proven ability to reach parts of the electorate his rivals can't. But, he has been severely compromised by current events. By contrast, replacing him now with someone credible like Sunak would give the Tories a bounce now but their ability to recover further might be more limited. To put it another way, I think the distribution of outcomes for the Tories under Johnson has a lower mean but fatter tails. The probability of staying in office after the next election might be more or less similar, but the chances of a huge defeat under Johnson are bigger and the average outcome is worse."
++++
That's a fair analysis. But my point is less about logic than emotion. Labour, and the Remainery centre and left, have been brutally duffed up by Boris more than once. He is the man that won the Brexit referendum AND then won the Brexit election, forcing it through (it is remarkable to remember how close we came to the moral catastrophe of a 2nd vote)
Boris, therefore, is like the guy who beat you senseless, in a bewildering and extremely painful way, several times.
Now he lies sprawled in the dust, leaking blood. Your brain says: He's finished. But your muscle memory, your subconscious, says Go over there and stamp on his head. Then shoot him. Then dump him in a river. Like Rasputin. Make sure he's bloody dead this time
One hint of a twitch of Boris reviving, and all the jangling nerves return.....
Not sure how you can say that Boris is the best campaigner the Tories have. He might be, but we know nothing about nearly all of them, except May and I grant you he is better than her, but then so is everyone. How do you know how others will perform? It is not as if he didn't have the campaign set up for him on a plate namely 'Get Brexit Done' and against Corbyn for goodness sake.
Without Brexit and Corbyn I'm not sure he would get away with hiding in a fridge and refusing to be interviewed by Neil. There might be others much better than him at campaigning.
We know Boris is REALLY good because he won two London mayorals, against the grain, the Brexit referendum, against expectations, and then a large majority, against all the predictions
He is just very good at it. Now, the magic may have totally deserted him (or it may not), but that is an excellent track record. Better than anyone else in modern British politics with the possible exception of Blair, but he has basically left politics
Around Boris there is nullity, as you say. The bare and boundless sands.
If you were a havering Tory MP about to sack Boris, this CV of his would give you pause, especially when compared to his rivals, who are at best entirely unproven
Congrats on being one of his few (in the literal sense) apologists on this platform. It is normally the mad or the childish that point out that the Emperor has no clothes. Clearly not always true.
Surely Boris's limitation is that he's only a salesman. With Cummings or some other hard bastard in the back room pulling the le(a)vers which actually make things happen and steam-rollering obstacles, he's very happy to deliver a pool clip reassuring the nation that lying to the Queen (or whatever) is absolutely fine, and anyway.. look at me in my union jack pants.
But when the backroom intellect is delivered by Nadine Dorries wanting to cancel Match of the Day - or even at its best a Cummingsless Gove struggling to define levelling up - the sales pitch just looks vacuous.
As much as any wrongdoing, he's just run out of steam. The administration's like some insect in metamorphosis which expends all its energy on its raison d'etre (either Brexit or becoming a butterfly), then dies next day because it's knackered.
Excellent analogy, and quite true
Even if Boris survives, what is he FOR? What will he do with his miraculous 2nd (3rd, 8th) life?
There is no obvious answer. If he does survive he needs to get on to this, sharply
The only saving grace for the Tories is that the other main parties are equally vacuous, apart from the Scot Nats, who are in the weird position of urgently standing for something they never quite want to achieve, but at least it is a position
Those who are criticising Starmer for bad decisions as DPP are really missing the point. He has been in a job, outside of politics, where he had to make very significant decisions. He went beyond the performance of being a barrister, taking the leap to be a decision maker. And not in the form a Judge, but as a prosecutor, under continuous public scrutiny. I just find that really impressive.
What did all these other people in Parliament do? Opinion writing columnist, novelist, councillor, a few years in an investment bank, think tankers... I don't think anyone is in the same league as Starmer. Just compare him to Braverman and Raab - both failed at magic circle careers, with their careers dissolving in to mid rate jobs where they failed to make any real impact; and now they seem to be being used to provide a front to provide credibility for what they and everyone else knows is bad law.
Even people like Emily Thornberry, Bob Neill, and Geoffrey Cox don't come close to Starmer, he is in a league of his own because of his background. That isn't a criticism of the other people in Parliament, experience shows that all different kinds of people can be good decision makers, and I am not exactly a fan of the Labour Party. But I do think that Starmer is exceptional in this one regard.
This is not how modern politics works
It is far, far more dangerous for a party leader to have held a job under continuous public scrutiny. Because there is plenty to criticise.
As director of public prosecutions, Starmer refused to prosecute the police officers accused of killing Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson.
He did not cover himself in glory.
Did he?
The Jean Charles de Menezes stuff was before his time, as this article states it was in 2006, and he only became DPP in 2008.
"No, I think BJ stays and BJ goes are about the same from a Labour POV. Johnson is the Tory's best campaigner as you say and has a proven ability to reach parts of the electorate his rivals can't. But, he has been severely compromised by current events. By contrast, replacing him now with someone credible like Sunak would give the Tories a bounce now but their ability to recover further might be more limited. To put it another way, I think the distribution of outcomes for the Tories under Johnson has a lower mean but fatter tails. The probability of staying in office after the next election might be more or less similar, but the chances of a huge defeat under Johnson are bigger and the average outcome is worse."
++++
That's a fair analysis. But my point is less about logic than emotion. Labour, and the Remainery centre and left, have been brutally duffed up by Boris more than once. He is the man that won the Brexit referendum AND then won the Brexit election, forcing it through (it is remarkable to remember how close we came to the moral catastrophe of a 2nd vote)
Boris, therefore, is like the guy who beat you senseless, in a bewildering and extremely painful way, several times.
Now he lies sprawled in the dust, leaking blood. Your brain says: He's finished. But your muscle memory, your subconscious, says Go over there and stamp on his head. Then shoot him. Then dump him in a river. Like Rasputin. Make sure he's bloody dead this time
One hint of a twitch of Boris reviving, and all the jangling nerves return.....
Not sure how you can say that Boris is the best campaigner the Tories have. He might be, but we know nothing about nearly all of them, except May and I grant you he is better than her, but then so is everyone. How do you know how others will perform? It is not as if he didn't have the campaign set up for him on a plate namely 'Get Brexit Done' and against Corbyn for goodness sake.
Without Brexit and Corbyn I'm not sure he would get away with hiding in a fridge and refusing to be interviewed by Neil. There might be others much better than him at campaigning.
We know Boris is REALLY good because he won two London mayorals, against the grain, the Brexit referendum, against expectations, and then a large majority, against all the predictions
He is just very good at it. Now, the magic may have totally deserted him (or it may not), but that is an excellent track record. Better than anyone else in modern British politics with the possible exception of Blair, but he has basically left politics
Around Boris there is nullity, as you say. The bare and boundless sands.
If you were a havering Tory MP about to sack Boris, this CV of his would give you pause, especially when compared to his rivals, who are at best entirely unproven
Congrats on being one of his few (in the literal sense) apologists on this platform. It is normally the mad or the childish that point out that the Emperor has no clothes. Clearly not always true.
Surely Boris's limitation is that he's only a salesman. With Cummings or some other hard bastard in the back room pulling the le(a)vers which actually make things happen and steam-rollering obstacles, he's very happy to deliver a pool clip reassuring the nation that lying to the Queen (or whatever) is absolutely fine, and anyway.. look at me in my union jack pants.
But when the backroom intellect is delivered by Nadine Dorries wanting to cancel Match of the Day - or even at its best a Cummingsless Gove struggling to define levelling up - the sales pitch just looks vacuous.
As much as any wrongdoing, he's just run out of steam. The administration's like some insect in metamorphosis which expends all its energy on its raison d'etre (either Brexit or becoming a butterfly), then dies next day because it's knackered.
I'm sure there are things which are more futile than trying to ascribe personal political views to members of the Royal Family, but I can't immediately think of any.
If we ruled out futile political speculations on PB we’d have about 3 comments a day
My bet:
Queen: Leave The Late D of E: Leave Charles: Remain Andrew: Remoaner, wanted a 2nd vote Anne: Leave Edward: Remain Wills: Remain Kate: Leave Harry: Leave Megan: Not sure how Brexit benefits her, so probably Remain
Queen: definitely L D of E: probably L, but he'd want Greece and the UK tied together, so not a definite Charles: R Andrew: he'd want as much young 'totty' in the UK as possible, so R Anne: L Edward: genuinely no idea Wills: R Kate: R (because she knows that she has to support her husband, even when he's mistaken) Harry: Where's the party? Meghan: My friend Oprah said that Brexit was a terrible thing
Harry surely Leave: back then he was a lairy lad in the army. They are all Leave
Er, apart from 100% of the sample ex-HMF on PB that is (me, Dura and Carnyx IIRC - any more for any more?)
And HCav in particular generally are 50:50 Remain:Leave as of the sample I come into contact with. Much like the rest of the population.
"No, I think BJ stays and BJ goes are about the same from a Labour POV. Johnson is the Tory's best campaigner as you say and has a proven ability to reach parts of the electorate his rivals can't. But, he has been severely compromised by current events. By contrast, replacing him now with someone credible like Sunak would give the Tories a bounce now but their ability to recover further might be more limited. To put it another way, I think the distribution of outcomes for the Tories under Johnson has a lower mean but fatter tails. The probability of staying in office after the next election might be more or less similar, but the chances of a huge defeat under Johnson are bigger and the average outcome is worse."
++++
That's a fair analysis. But my point is less about logic than emotion. Labour, and the Remainery centre and left, have been brutally duffed up by Boris more than once. He is the man that won the Brexit referendum AND then won the Brexit election, forcing it through (it is remarkable to remember how close we came to the moral catastrophe of a 2nd vote)
Boris, therefore, is like the guy who beat you senseless, in a bewildering and extremely painful way, several times.
Now he lies sprawled in the dust, leaking blood. Your brain says: He's finished. But your muscle memory, your subconscious, says Go over there and stamp on his head. Then shoot him. Then dump him in a river. Like Rasputin. Make sure he's bloody dead this time
One hint of a twitch of Boris reviving, and all the jangling nerves return.....
Not sure how you can say that Boris is the best campaigner the Tories have. He might be, but we know nothing about nearly all of them, except May and I grant you he is better than her, but then so is everyone. How do you know how others will perform? It is not as if he didn't have the campaign set up for him on a plate namely 'Get Brexit Done' and against Corbyn for goodness sake.
Without Brexit and Corbyn I'm not sure he would get away with hiding in a fridge and refusing to be interviewed by Neil. There might be others much better than him at campaigning.
We know Boris is REALLY good because he won two London mayorals, against the grain, the Brexit referendum, against expectations, and then a large majority, against all the predictions
He is just very good at it. Now, the magic may have totally deserted him (or it may not), but that is an excellent track record. Better than anyone else in modern British politics with the possible exception of Blair, but he has basically left politics
Around Boris there is nullity, as you say. The bare and boundless sands.
If you were a havering Tory MP about to sack Boris, this CV of his would give you pause, especially when compared to his rivals, who are at best entirely unproven
Congrats on being one of his few (in the literal sense) apologists on this platform. It is normally the mad or the childish that point out that the Emperor has no clothes. Clearly not always true.
Surely Boris's limitation is that he's only a salesman. With Cummings or some other hard bastard in the back room pulling the le(a)vers which actually make things happen and steam-rollering obstacles, he's very happy to deliver a pool clip reassuring the nation that lying to the Queen (or whatever) is absolutely fine, and anyway.. look at me in my union jack pants.
But when the backroom intellect is delivered by Nadine Dorries wanting to cancel Match of the Day - or even at its best a Cummingsless Gove struggling to define levelling up - the sales pitch just looks vacuous.
As much as any wrongdoing, he's just run out of steam. The administration's like some insect in metamorphosis which expends all its energy on its raison d'etre (either Brexit or becoming a butterfly), then dies next day because it's knackered.
He managed to insult all lawyers and you just managed to insult all people in sales! So sorry to be a pedant, but professional sales people don't lie as they get found out and lose customers. He is not a sales man, he is a con man. Thinks he can blag it and enough people will fall for it. He believes as long as he can fool some of the people some of the time he can keep feeding his big fat ego.
The unending supply of cnuts you've never heard of that the Tory party has in parliament never ceases to amaze me. At least in this time of crises he's concerning himself with the big issues.
Comments
https://theconversation.com/there-may-be-a-huge-flaw-in-uk-fracking-hopes-the-geology-80591
The idea of instant virtually cost fee worldwide electronic transactions, well yes that's obviously the future compared to something like Western Union, banking the unbanked, being able to get finance etc. If that is say Solana, well that's a different matter.
NFTs are the same. The idea you can have an instantly provable digital token, that's perfectly sensible idea for say tickets to a gig, the bands can cut out a load of middle men and people can trade without worrying about fraud. But the current stuff of buying some profile picture as a digital flex with some vacuous nonsense about getting access to an elite online club, is bollocks in 99.99999999% of cases.
She's been extremely irate about the partying and alcohol stories but the "cake on a birthday in the office" was up there with saying "and they had coffee in the office" as far as non-stories go.
That is, it would be possible to use a crypto currency to provide a history of the actual currency in a transaction. Including attaching "tax paid" to it's history.
Or literally block money that has been used for certain purposes....
"'David Cameron has forgotten his history': Furious veterans turn on the PM for 'horrific decision to put words in the mouths of Second World War soldiers' in his bid to keep Britain in the EU"
https://tinyurl.com/237j4yay
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/25/22349242/nft-metadata-explained-art-crypto-urls-links-ipfs
The NFT project I have ownership of is quite different. It is a token to use a bespoke AI generator to create paintings (which I also get physical copies of at a large discount).
That's insane.
Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions when the (bad) decision was made not to pursue further charges against Mr Worboys following his first conviction.
I don't disagree that alternative energy sources would be much better, but I expect we will be using gas for a long time to come.
God: Leave (He is an Englishman, after all)
Jesus: Remain, probably a 2nd voter, he does like dramatic revivals
Holy Ghost: Abstained, mysteriously
Mohammad: Leave, also slaughter the Remainers
Buddha: Remain, but Leave in the next life
Satan: Remain
The Sumerian Wind-Demon Pazuzu: Remain
Noah: Leave, ASAP!
Abraham: Stay. Stay the blade. Verily
Zeus: Remain. So I can RAPE europa in the form of a bull
Pre-vaccines they used their isolation well to keep the pandemic to a minimum, which would have been laudable had that been reversed post-vaccines but instead it seems their pre-vaccine success is just broken clock syndrome.
Mind you I'm still looking for use of blockchain that wouldn't be better and more easily served by a trusted 3rd party and a database.
Without Brexit and Corbyn I'm not sure he would get away with hiding in a fridge and refusing to be interviewed by Neil. There might be others much better than him at campaigning.
He is just very good at it. Now, the magic may have totally deserted him (or it may not), but that is an excellent track record. Better than anyone else in modern British politics with the possible exception of Blair, but he has basically left politics
Around Boris there is nullity, as you say. The bare and boundless sands.
If you were a havering Tory MP about to sack Boris, this CV of his would give you pause, especially when compared to his rivals, who are at best entirely unproven
She's quite thrilled about being Queen of the four nations.
Remember she purred when Dave (pbuh) told her he had won the Indyref and Scotland was staying.
But yes, a dilemma. Though one has to begin somewhere.
Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, coal was being mined by drag line excavators in open cast mines, loading dump trucks the size of a house.
I remember a documentary, long time ago.. they took a UK ex-coal miner - I *think* Yorkshire - round the world to see how coal production worked in other countries. His reaction to an opencast coal mine was watching a mind expanding - apparently his shift had never produced as much coal as one of those trucks. And they were rolling by in a convoy.....
Well, if it is said that Satan has all the best tunes, (and almost certainly likes prog metal), and if he has the good sense to be a remainer too, it has to be said that he can't be all bad.
As for God, if He IS an Englishman I doubt he would be a Leave supporter. After all, He is supposed to be omnipotent and a super intelligence, so I doubt would want to be on the same side as Nigel Farage, the BNP and Boris Johnson. Unless He just has a sick sense of humour. I doubt also that He would want to be seen as a useful idiot to Mad Vlad.
Good post though Leon, you haven't lost your touch!
https://twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1486359652560519173?s=20
Even if you worked on the premise that it take a bit of time to pass from one member of a household to another, again with Omicron we know this will happen pretty swiftly.
Money transfer outfits a lot less.
NuBanks even less. But their coverage, worldwide is lower.
What did all these other people in Parliament do? Opinion writing columnist, novelist, councillor, a few years in an investment bank, think tankers... I don't think anyone is in the same league as Starmer. Just compare him to Braverman and Raab - both failed at magic circle careers, with their careers dissolving in to mid rate jobs where they failed to make any real impact; and now they seem to be being used to provide a front to provide credibility for what they and everyone else knows is bad law.
Even people like Emily Thornberry, Bob Neill, and Geoffrey Cox don't come close to Starmer, he is in a league of his own because of his background. That isn't a criticism of the other people in Parliament, experience shows that all different kinds of people can be good decision makers, and I am not exactly a fan of the Labour Party. But I do think that Starmer is exceptional in this one regard.
The US and EU are trying to set up alternative supplies of gas to Europe if Russia cuts off the pipeline supplies. The only possibility for getting a lot more gas in a hurry is bringing in LNG by ship. I gather there's quite a lot of capacity for supplying LNG, but is there the capacity in Europe for handling the ships as they arrive, and are the ports sufficiently connected to the intra-European gas distribution networks?
“OMICRON, BA2 sub-variant, Denmark: admissions soar 1.4x HIGHER than any other wave. Babies are absolutely surging right now: more admitted than 80 years olds.”
https://twitter.com/enemyinastate/status/1486360020539301894?s=21
https://twitter.com/AmichaiStein1/status/1486319598429523971?s=20
Vacillating between options AND talking nonsense at the same time
"The future" for an independent Scotland is much more attractive than the short term wrangling that will happen after a yes vote, imo.
Short term: Negotiation with a bitter Westminster, EU debate, currency, hard border, mortgages, pensions, Faslane
Long term: 100% renewable, reverse fertility trends, immigration, re-wilding, Glasgow rebuilt
I am not really a mega crypto evangelist, but the world is going to worldwide digital currency with transactions via your smart phone in split second or you can take out a micro-loan at very small percentage etc.
How that is done, well that tech is still being developed. All this stuff is mostly going to be Pets.com, but somewhere among everything somebody will build the Amazon of this.
And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever.
Definite remain vibes there.
We did have some opencast here, although the one next to the River Aire was probably not a good idea!
Prior to the 1980s though, I understood that a lot of closures were due to geological conditions. Perhaps they just made it uneconomic in comparison with the next pit rather than shipping from Australia.
Also, in the developing world people aren't banked or don't have easy access to a bank, nor do they trust them.
I’m a Forsaker. I choose to Abide. So much more poetic. Also ABIDE doesn’t have unfortunate associations, REMAIN always sounded uncomfortably close to “Remains”
It is far, far more dangerous for a party leader to have held a job under continuous public scrutiny. Because there is plenty to criticise.
As director of public prosecutions, Starmer refused to prosecute the police officers accused of killing Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson.
He did not cover himself in glory.
And HCav in particular generally are 50:50 Remain:Leave as of the sample I come into contact with. Much like the rest of the population.
[super_good_guys.txt]
And here's a list of paedophiles and genocidal psychos who I'm pretty sure would have voted the opposite way to me. Because boooo, paedophiles and genocide, boooo.
[good_for_nothings.txt]
Younger military types are much Leavier. Especially the boozy laddish types like Harry (as was, RIP)
https://twitter.com/bmay/status/1486349166565601281?s=20
What’s going on? I thought the BBC didn’t report on polling?
However both of those 2 posts have come up with redeeming factors Trump has that Boris doesn't, namely loyalty to his family and a loyal following, even if that family maybe evil also and the followers deluded.
That. Was. The. Joke
Whoooooooooooooooooooosh
The Jean Charles de Menezes stuff was before his time, as this article states it was in 2006, and he only became DPP in 2008.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6208836.stm
The absolute best stockbroker I knew, an absolute legend in ability and the size and quality of clients could have been CEO of the business worldwide, brilliantly clever and able (and a qualified lawyer, natch) but he had no desire to get involved of the management and control because he loved what he did and did it brilliantly and made a very healthy fortune.
So to suggest that say Starmer has more ability and a better career than say Cox is pushing it - the heads of the CPS, banks etc aren’t always the best lawyers or bankers but people who find their place in the management or regulatory side.
I would imagine that Cox isn’t paid the sort of money he is because he’s just ok and I doubt Starmer (although I could be wrong obviously) was the sort of barrister who would have been first on the list for many big clients.
I doubt General Sir Nick Carter was the “best soldier” but he followed the staff route which inevitably puts you into a position where you are going to be “head” of something.
And I also think that from personal experience and anecdotes re the CPS, being head of it isn’t that great a deal - a giant amongst pygmies maybe.
If I’m wrong then I withdraw about Starmer’s genius but I wouldn’t go as far as a hagiography as you wrote.
Something a lot of the African mobile phone networks have been providing at very low cost (but rather profitably) for the last 11 or so years.
https://www.povertyactionlab.org/blog/10-22-20/rise-mobile-money-sub-saharan-africa-has-digital-technology-lived-its-promises has a quick overview and every problem it highlights are the ones that crypto definitely won't be able to fix.
As I said before I've still never seen a blockchain solution that isn't better served by a trusted 3rd party system and you've just proven my point.
On your second point, I'm not sure that really true any more. Mobile phone money transfers (where basically the phone company acts as the bank and guarantor of the integrity of the transfer) are now very widely and cheaply available, and someone receiving a crypto payment directly needs a mobile phone anyway.
Edit: I see that @eek has already made the same point, better than I did.
The tech isn't even there with VR, its miles off being really good (and you still need a mega PC).
Blockchain tech wasn't designed as a speculative asset, it was designed as a decentralised and personal alternative to the old ways of having bank act as gatekeeper and intermediary and demand a cut (some might say extort a cut) at every stage.
In many respects crypto is to banking as blogging was to journalism, a completely new technology that takes power out of the hands of the old gatekeepers and allows anyone to self publish, or in this case, be their own bank.
But when the backroom intellect is delivered by Nadine Dorries wanting to cancel Match of the Day - or even at its best a Cummingsless Gove struggling to define levelling up - the sales pitch just looks vacuous.
As much as any wrongdoing, he's just run out of steam. The administration's like some insect in metamorphosis which expends all its energy on its raison d'etre (either Brexit or becoming a butterfly), then dies next day because it's knackered.
Secondly, one of the things I like about Starmer is that he has done a proper job, rather than the joker/polemicist currently in No10. And not just A job, it is a serious job.
https://twitter.com/ChrisHopkins92/status/1486359936103763972?t=DXGMQRHT6AxQFcaClrNxmQ&s=19
https://www.bbc.com/editorialguidelines/guidance/surveys
https://www.bbc.com/editorialguidelines/guidance/surveys#reportingopinionpolls
Even if Boris survives, what is he FOR? What will he do with his miraculous 2nd (3rd, 8th) life?
There is no obvious answer. If he does survive he needs to get on to this, sharply
The only saving grace for the Tories is that the other main parties are equally vacuous, apart from the Scot Nats, who are in the weird position of urgently standing for something they never quite want to achieve, but at least it is a position
He stated that there was insufficient evidence to secure a conviction against any individual.