Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Starmer v Sunak, a privately educated former barrister and head of the CPS with an Oxford degree v a privately and Oxford and Stanford educated ex Goldman Sachs banker.
The most elitist general election ever? Definitely the end of populism then
Starmer wasn't privately educated. Passed 11+ and went to local Grammar School which at some point stopped being a real state school.
You'd think @HYUFD would be a supporter of an 11+ grammar school boy!
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Yeah, you mean in the way he adopted a policy of "believe all victims" and so we had Carl Beech wreck people's lives? Yup, 'very smart cookie'
Is that the latest right wing nutter meme since the previous one backfired spectacularly on Big Clown? Yes he is a very smart cookie. You are too partisan to see it, or you are really not a very smart cookie, or perhaps both.
Ahem, if you are going to lob insults, it might be better to get your facts right. Who is disagreeing with the statement that Starmer instituted a policy of believe all victims at the CPS? What people are disagreeing with BJ on is that Starmer didn't prosecute Jimmy Saville.
I have no need to defend Starmer on detail. I am not a Labour supporter, and therefore will be able to disagree with him on lots of things. He is very smart though. The fact that you are still an apologist for the worst PM probably in history suggests that you are going to be more and more disappointed that Starmer outmanoeuvres him at every juncture. One of the important things in politics and life in general is not to underestimate your opponents. Smarter Tories are beginning to realise they need someone better than the fat blusterer to outsmart Starmer.
Yes, I see you didn't acknowledge you got your point wrong, did you? Never mind.
Oh dear, I didn't get a point wrong (although it has been known occasionally - well maybe about 1985ish perhaps?). I said Starmer is a smart cookie, which you took exception to because you are so absorbed with thinking that anyone that you disagree with is not effective. He is smart cookie, for you to pretend otherwise is just silly. Starmer is very very smart. That comes as a shock to swivel-eyed far right UKIPy/Johnson apologist Tories. Sorry to have to break it to you.
Starmer was responsible for a policy that wrecked people's lives in a very public way. As far as I am aware, he has never apologised or recognised what he did. That does not sound like a decent person.
As for the "He is smart cookie, for you to pretend otherwise is just silly." that is not a fact, it is your view just as it is my view that he has significant flaws. Just because you say something doesn't make it a fact (although I know that is a common attribute of the pub bore who likes to tell everyone how it is and how right they are).
If you're talking about the CPS stuff, he really wasn't. It's on record that Allison Saunders was the fuck up at CPS.
He really was. Read the Ashcroft biography, Starmer was very much responsible for the CPS adopting the policy.
It seems like the defenders of Starmer at the CPS are trying to have it both ways. If you bring up Saville, the defence is "he didn't have any responsibility even though he headed the CPS", with the Carl Beech episode, it's "well, he wasn't head of the CPS so he didn't have any responsibility for it even though he very much made the decision it should go ahead". It's either one or the other.
I guess this is where Johnson has the advantage, he's never done a proper job in his life.
(And in those non-jobs he has had he's only been sacked for lying a few times.)
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Starmer v Sunak, a privately educated former barrister and head of the CPS with an Oxford degree v a privately and Oxford and Stanford educated ex Goldman Sachs banker.
The most elitist general election ever? Definitely the end of populism then
Starmer wasn't privately educated. Passed 11+ and went to local Grammar School which at some point stopped being a real state school.
It doesn't matter whether he did or not. This is post-facts politics now.
Where oh where is @isam when we need him. I believe he has recreated in his sitting room an interactive experience of Starmer's school years including the various statutes and ordinances covering the conversion of the school to fee paying. Plus relevant bank accounts from the time including thos of Starmer's parents. .
Thank you Nigel for that. I recently suggested that he was the worst PM in my lifetime (i.e. since Atlee) and got jumped on from a great height. Admittedly it was Hyufd but even so I was astonished to find that even in so broad a forum as PB there was anyone prepared to argue that he didn't rank lower than all predecessors since WW2.
But you go further. 'In history', you say? Hmmm. Boris....Lord North.....Lord North...Boris.
It's close, I'll grant.
Absurd, Boris got Brexit done, won a landslide election win, delivered one of the most successful vaccination programmes in the world and unemployment still half the level Brown's Labour left in 2010.
After Blair and Thatcher in terms of delivery Boris is the most successful PM of the last 50 years
Didn't get Brexit done. Still a festering sore in NI, Dover, etc. etc.
And to be at all intellectually honest you need also to consider the alternative hypothesis - that, after winning the election, Mr Johnson was in other ways a drag and a disrupting factor in an otherwise rational programme of national government/.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Yeah, you mean in the way he adopted a policy of "believe all victims" and so we had Carl Beech wreck people's lives? Yup, 'very smart cookie'
Is that the latest right wing nutter meme since the previous one backfired spectacularly on Big Clown? Yes he is a very smart cookie. You are too partisan to see it, or you are really not a very smart cookie, or perhaps both.
Ahem, if you are going to lob insults, it might be better to get your facts right. Who is disagreeing with the statement that Starmer instituted a policy of believe all victims at the CPS? What people are disagreeing with BJ on is that Starmer didn't prosecute Jimmy Saville.
I have no need to defend Starmer on detail. I am not a Labour supporter, and therefore will be able to disagree with him on lots of things. He is very smart though. The fact that you are still an apologist for the worst PM probably in history suggests that you are going to be more and more disappointed that Starmer outmanoeuvres him at every juncture. One of the important things in politics and life in general is not to underestimate your opponents. Smarter Tories are beginning to realise they need someone better than the fat blusterer to outsmart Starmer.
Yes, I see you didn't acknowledge you got your point wrong, did you? Never mind.
Oh dear, I didn't get a point wrong (although it has been known occasionally - well maybe about 1985ish perhaps?). I said Starmer is a smart cookie, which you took exception to because you are so absorbed with thinking that anyone that you disagree with is not effective. He is smart cookie, for you to pretend otherwise is just silly. Starmer is very very smart. That comes as a shock to swivel-eyed far right UKIPy/Johnson apologist Tories. Sorry to have to break it to you.
Starmer was responsible for a policy that wrecked people's lives in a very public way. As far as I am aware, he has never apologised or recognised what he did. That does not sound like a decent person.
As for the "He is smart cookie, for you to pretend otherwise is just silly." that is not a fact, it is your view just as it is my view that he has significant flaws. Just because you say something doesn't make it a fact (although I know that is a common attribute of the pub bore who likes to tell everyone how it is and how right they are).
If you're talking about the CPS stuff, he really wasn't. It's on record that Allison Saunders was the fuck up at CPS.
He really was. Read the Ashcroft biography, Starmer was very much responsible for the CPS adopting the policy.
It seems like the defenders of Starmer at the CPS are trying to have it both ways. If you bring up Saville, the defence is "he didn't have any responsibility even though he headed the CPS", with the Carl Beech episode, it's "well, he wasn't head of the CPS so he didn't have any responsibility for it even though he very much made the decision it should go ahead". It's either one or the other.
No that's a load of crap. Allison Saunders is on record as admitting she fucked up by pushing a policy which removed "alleged" from crimes. It was her policy and she fucked it up.
The culture she created was at fault, Starmer didn't create the culture at the CPS, Saunders did. Like the Big Dog you're spinning really hard to try and use Starmer's time as DPP against him, but his record was pretty decent. Attempting to ascribe his successor's policy to him is like saying Theresa May is to blame for Boris having loads of parties.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Yeah, you mean in the way he adopted a policy of "believe all victims" and so we had Carl Beech wreck people's lives? Yup, 'very smart cookie'
That was Allison Saunders fwiw.
Ahem, Saunders formally instituted it but it was Starmer who very much laid the groundwork for it when he was CPS after the Rochdale case. It merely came into effect on Saunder's watch
No, it was Allison Saunders, she was very much behind casting people into victim and perpetrator roles even before charging. She removed the "alleged" from the language around alleged victims/accuers and called people accused of crimes "perpetrators" rather than the accused/alleged perpetrators. There was a huge culture change that she oversaw which led to innocent people being locked up due to the CPS withholding information from defence teams that may have damaged the prosecution's case. She was a disaster and happily got sacked. Starmer wasn't to blame for her failures.
A quick look turns up this. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/mar/06/new-measures-child-sex-abuse ..."We need to settle this," Starmer said. "Ten years or so ago, it was thought that police and prosecutors were over-enthusiastic or over-eager in pursuing [such] cases. Now it is thought they are over-cautious. I don't think we can go on like this."
Starmer called for an approach that was fair to innocent suspects but equally fair to victims. The test for bringing a case – whether there is a realistic prospect of bringing a conviction – must not change but the justice system must look more carefully at the way it assessed credibility, he said.
"At the moment, there is a great deal of focus on whether the victim is telling the truth. We need to look equally carefully at the account the suspect is giving, look at the context, look at the pattern of behaviour, make the necessary links and think about how a case can be be built."
Starmer said authorities had to "clear the decks", agree what the approach should be and draft the way cases were investigated and prosecuted to ensure they were fair to both sides...
Which does not seem to support @MrEd 's contention. Not quite sure how that demonstrates responsibility for Hogan Howe's failures.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Yeah, you mean in the way he adopted a policy of "believe all victims" and so we had Carl Beech wreck people's lives? Yup, 'very smart cookie'
Is that the latest right wing nutter meme since the previous one backfired spectacularly on Big Clown? Yes he is a very smart cookie. You are too partisan to see it, or you are really not a very smart cookie, or perhaps both.
Ahem, if you are going to lob insults, it might be better to get your facts right. Who is disagreeing with the statement that Starmer instituted a policy of believe all victims at the CPS? What people are disagreeing with BJ on is that Starmer didn't prosecute Jimmy Saville.
I have no need to defend Starmer on detail. I am not a Labour supporter, and therefore will be able to disagree with him on lots of things. He is very smart though. The fact that you are still an apologist for the worst PM probably in history suggests that you are going to be more and more disappointed that Starmer outmanoeuvres him at every juncture. One of the important things in politics and life in general is not to underestimate your opponents. Smarter Tories are beginning to realise they need someone better than the fat blusterer to outsmart Starmer.
Yes, I see you didn't acknowledge you got your point wrong, did you? Never mind.
Oh dear, I didn't get a point wrong (although it has been known occasionally - well maybe about 1985ish perhaps?). I said Starmer is a smart cookie, which you took exception to because you are so absorbed with thinking that anyone that you disagree with is not effective. He is smart cookie, for you to pretend otherwise is just silly. Starmer is very very smart. That comes as a shock to swivel-eyed far right UKIPy/Johnson apologist Tories. Sorry to have to break it to you.
Starmer was responsible for a policy that wrecked people's lives in a very public way. As far as I am aware, he has never apologised or recognised what he did. That does not sound like a decent person.
As for the "He is smart cookie, for you to pretend otherwise is just silly." that is not a fact, it is your view just as it is my view that he has significant flaws. Just because you say something doesn't make it a fact (although I know that is a common attribute of the pub bore who likes to tell everyone how it is and how right they are).
If you're talking about the CPS stuff, he really wasn't. It's on record that Allison Saunders was the fuck up at CPS.
He really was. Read the Ashcroft biography, Starmer was very much responsible for the CPS adopting the policy.
It seems like the defenders of Starmer at the CPS are trying to have it both ways. If you bring up Saville, the defence is "he didn't have any responsibility even though he headed the CPS", with the Carl Beech episode, it's "well, he wasn't head of the CPS so he didn't have any responsibility for it even though he very much made the decision it should go ahead". It's either one or the other.
Point of information, but wasn't Starmer knighted by Cameron for his work at the DPP?
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 1h The BoE Governor has asked people not to seek wage rises in response to inflation. Such "2nd round effects" can make inflation more persistent & the cost of cutting it higher. Does the govt intend to bolster the Governor's stance by limiting public sector pay rises this year?
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Starmer v Sunak, a privately educated former barrister and head of the CPS with an Oxford degree v a privately and Oxford and Stanford educated ex Goldman Sachs banker.
The most elitist general election ever? Definitely the end of populism then
Point of order: Starmer didn't go to Oxford for undergrad, he went to Leeds and did a BCL at Oxford.
He still has an Oxford degree, a postgraduate degree in law, even if he went to Leeds for undergrad.
No different to Bill Clinton who went to Georgetown for undergrad but Yale law school for postgrad or Obama who went to Occidental College and Columbia and Harvard law school or indeed Gerald Ford who went to Michigan University and Yale law school.
People who go to Oxford for a postgraduate degree are generally older, wiser and far more serious than the jeunesse dorée for whom the institution was originally intended. They must surely emerge with a jaundiced view of undergrads and all they stand for.
Having met a few - no, they aren't.
Many seem to be even more Oxford than Oxford - they often seem to believe that doing a post graduate degree at Oxbridge has re-baptised them into the Top Rank of Society.
You are your last degree
This is why part time degrees at Oxford are incredibly popular with upper middle management - they persuade their employers to fork out zillions a year to do a part time Masters at RiceCrispies College. So that they soar into the rank of the elect.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Starmer v Sunak, a privately educated former barrister and head of the CPS with an Oxford degree v a privately and Oxford and Stanford educated ex Goldman Sachs banker.
The most elitist general election ever? Definitely the end of populism then
Starmer wasn't privately educated. Passed 11+ and went to local Grammar School which at some point stopped being a real state school.
It doesn't matter whether he did or not. This is post-facts politics now.
Where oh where is @isam when we need him. I believe he has recreated in his sitting room an interactive experience of Starmer's school years including the various statutes and ordinances covering the conversion of the school to fee paying. Plus relevant bank accounts from the time including thos of Starmer's parents. .
AIUI, and I could be wrong, when Reigate Grammar converted from being a proper state school to become 'private' there was a lead time, whereby those boys who were there already could stay not fee-paying. Or something like that.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Starmer v Sunak, a privately educated former barrister and head of the CPS with an Oxford degree v a privately and Oxford and Stanford educated ex Goldman Sachs banker.
The most elitist general election ever? Definitely the end of populism then
Starmer wasn't privately educated. Passed 11+ and went to local Grammar School which at some point stopped being a real state school.
You'd think @HYUFD would be a supporter of an 11+ grammar school boy!
What's the point of grammar schools if brainy oiks don't get recognition from the posh?
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Yeah, you mean in the way he adopted a policy of "believe all victims" and so we had Carl Beech wreck people's lives? Yup, 'very smart cookie'
That was Allison Saunders fwiw.
Ahem, Saunders formally instituted it but it was Starmer who very much laid the groundwork for it when he was CPS after the Rochdale case. It merely came into effect on Saunder's watch
No, it was Allison Saunders, she was very much behind casting people into victim and perpetrator roles even before charging. She removed the "alleged" from the language around alleged victims/accuers and called people accused of crimes "perpetrators" rather than the accused/alleged perpetrators. There was a huge culture change that she oversaw which led to innocent people being locked up due to the CPS withholding information from defence teams that may have damaged the prosecution's case. She was a disaster and happily got sacked. Starmer wasn't to blame for her failures.
A quick look turns up this. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/mar/06/new-measures-child-sex-abuse ..."We need to settle this," Starmer said. "Ten years or so ago, it was thought that police and prosecutors were over-enthusiastic or over-eager in pursuing [such] cases. Now it is thought they are over-cautious. I don't think we can go on like this."
Starmer called for an approach that was fair to innocent suspects but equally fair to victims. The test for bringing a case – whether there is a realistic prospect of bringing a conviction – must not change but the justice system must look more carefully at the way it assessed credibility, he said.
"At the moment, there is a great deal of focus on whether the victim is telling the truth. We need to look equally carefully at the account the suspect is giving, look at the context, look at the pattern of behaviour, make the necessary links and think about how a case can be be built."
Starmer said authorities had to "clear the decks", agree what the approach should be and draft the way cases were investigated and prosecuted to ensure they were fair to both sides...
Which does not seem to support @MrEd 's contention. Not quite sure how that demonstrates responsibility for Hogan Howe's failures.
But that's not what the issue is, it was Allison Saunders that moved completely to "believe the victim" and simply did away with rational investigation as "hurtful" etc...
The worst one of her policies was simply hiding damaging evidence from defence teams by being late with disclosure or simply "forgetting".
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 1h The BoE Governor has asked people not to seek wage rises in response to inflation. Such "2nd round effects" can make inflation more persistent & the cost of cutting it higher. Does the govt intend to bolster the Governor's stance by limiting public sector pay rises this year?
Reasons why Boris doesn't want to go now No 1 to 60million
Boris wants another 4-6 months to get past Brown and May - and he needs to avoid a VONC otherwise he isn't going to get there.
I still think Boris wins a VONC 55% to 45% or so for now
He'll probably beat Spencer Perceval. Unlikely he'll beat Gordon Brown.
Ah, Boris, you old duffer, it could all have been so different. You were played a hugely difficult hand - take over a party with no majority and with two wings in open rebellion, in different directions, deal with the most contentious constitutional issue of the post-war era, and then thrown off course by the biggest emergency of my lifetime. The first you managed with astonishing success, the second to no less dissatisfaction than anyone else would have achieved*, and the third better than many, with some brave calls along the way.
And then you threw it away on - what? Holding some not-very-good-parties? Evacuating someone's pets from Afghanistan? Owen Paterson? A distasteful jibe at PMQs?
I'm not trying to excuse Boris. I didn't want him in the first place and I certainly don't want him now. But he dealt with the really difficult issues quite well - certainly better than many. The first few months of his premiership when he took a fractious party without a majority which had recently polled below 10% in a national election to a landslide-ish majority was just astonishing.
He's played an astonishingly difficult hand with a surprising degree of success, and then made some really, really, really stupid and unnecessary unforced errors. Like the spy who finds the Macguffin, defeats three different sets of baddies, makes it home through no-mans land, then gets hilariously drunk on the train back from Dover, picks a fight with a bouncer and leaves the Macguffin on the tube.
*I can sense Remainer piss boiling from here when I write this. Sorry. It's hard to frame in a neutral way. But I stand by it - other solutions may or may not have been better; but any other solution would have pissed off at least as many people.
Those are my feelings, entirely. He does have unique gifts, but also unique flaws. He has been felled by the flaws before he could fulfil the gifts. It is a damn shame, but I see no way out now
I noticed this in Muniria Mizra's resignation letter:
"I have served you for fourteen years and it has been a privilege to do so. You have achieved many important things both as Prime Minister and, before that, as Mayor of London. You are a man of extraordinary abilities with a unique talent for connecting with people.
"You are a better man than many of your detractors will ever understand which is why it is desperately sad that you let yourself down by making a scurrilous accusation against the Leader of the Opposition."
On Alastair Meeks' count, hostile is up to 43... but friendly is up to 100. Still seems momentum is with Boris Johnson.
I suspect there is a lag in AM's data that may mean the friendlies are currently higher than they actually are. Were I a Tory MP I would be avoiding people at the weekend as you know what the conversations are going to be like.
I imagine we will see a slow but steady trickle of letters through until Monday when I would expect some sort of announcement.
Mps already know what their constituents think. It is now surely all about timing and positioning.
Another day breaks. Another day of Tory parliamentary majority wasted. And another day closer to the next election. There’s no refund on time, not that you would know it from the inaction of these gutless Tory MPs.
Two years is a long time in politics but I think the Conservatives may have already cooked their goose for 2024. Yesterday felt an awful lot like Black Wednesday. If you look at the polls from 1992 through 1994 when Blair took over, the damage to the Cons had already been done.
But at the moment I do have a begrudging respect for Rishi Sunak and I fear him. He's very capable and competent. I also liked his calm after the storm demeanour yesterday. Undoubtedly PM material but I think it's now or never.
Liz Truss would be my golden ticket.
No it didn't.
The Labour leads are still nothing like 1994 and absolutely nothing like the over 20% leads they had once Blair took over.
The Tories have also just won the Southern West by election with an increased voteshare on 2019. If the Tories were heading for a landslide defeat they would not have got 86% of the vote last night, no Labour and LD candidate or not
The site is, in my view, overpricing Partygate as an issue, and underpricing cost of living the same way.
If Johnson survives Partygate the call will be the storm is over, whereas in fact the storm for Johnson and all the tories will be just beginning.
Absolutely agree with this. Partygate will be meh for many. Meanwhile, I think the national expectation (whether justified or not) was for the good times to roll/roaring twenties post-pandemic.
Who did people expect was going to pay the costs of lockdowns they were demanding?
Fantastic comment and absolutely.
Public in favour of lockdowns. Public not in favour of tax rises.
*passes out in shock and surprise*
Public in favour of tax rises for the wealthy.
Where did that £8.7bn wasted on PPE go? It's sitting in somebody's bank accounts.
The public are always in favour of tax rises for the wealthy.
And wealthy always means those who have more than they do.
I think it was the Economist who did a study on this years back. The definition of "Wealthy" as in "those guys who should pay more tax" was surprisingly constant
RichBastards >= X * (family earnings of person surveyed).
I forget the value of X....
1.0001
I have a vague recollection that it was something around 5 - that people on 20K thought that people on 100K were the EvulRich and that people on 100K thought the EvulRich were on 500K
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Yeah, you mean in the way he adopted a policy of "believe all victims" and so we had Carl Beech wreck people's lives? Yup, 'very smart cookie'
That was Allison Saunders fwiw.
Ahem, Saunders formally instituted it but it was Starmer who very much laid the groundwork for it when he was CPS after the Rochdale case. It merely came into effect on Saunder's watch
No, it was Allison Saunders, she was very much behind casting people into victim and perpetrator roles even before charging. She removed the "alleged" from the language around alleged victims/accuers and called people accused of crimes "perpetrators" rather than the accused/alleged perpetrators. There was a huge culture change that she oversaw which led to innocent people being locked up due to the CPS withholding information from defence teams that may have damaged the prosecution's case. She was a disaster and happily got sacked. Starmer wasn't to blame for her failures.
A quick look turns up this. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/mar/06/new-measures-child-sex-abuse ..."We need to settle this," Starmer said. "Ten years or so ago, it was thought that police and prosecutors were over-enthusiastic or over-eager in pursuing [such] cases. Now it is thought they are over-cautious. I don't think we can go on like this."
Starmer called for an approach that was fair to innocent suspects but equally fair to victims. The test for bringing a case – whether there is a realistic prospect of bringing a conviction – must not change but the justice system must look more carefully at the way it assessed credibility, he said.
"At the moment, there is a great deal of focus on whether the victim is telling the truth. We need to look equally carefully at the account the suspect is giving, look at the context, look at the pattern of behaviour, make the necessary links and think about how a case can be be built."
Starmer said authorities had to "clear the decks", agree what the approach should be and draft the way cases were investigated and prosecuted to ensure they were fair to both sides...
Which does not seem to support @MrEd 's contention. Not quite sure how that demonstrates responsibility for Hogan Howe's failures.
But that's not what the issue is, it was Allison Saunders that moved completely to "believe the victim" and simply did away with rational investigation as "hurtful" etc...
I realise that. Just pointing out what Starmer's on the record statement was. ...At the moment, there is a great deal of focus on whether the victim is telling the truth. We need to look equally carefully at the account the suspect is giving.. Sounds fairly even handed to me.
On Alastair Meeks' count, hostile is up to 43... but friendly is up to 100. Still seems momentum is with Boris Johnson.
I suspect there is a lag in AM's data that may mean the friendlies are currently higher than they actually are. Were I a Tory MP I would be avoiding people at the weekend as you know what the conversations are going to be like.
I imagine we will see a slow but steady trickle of letters through until Monday when I would expect some sort of announcement.
Mps already know what their constituents think. It is now surely all about timing and positioning.
Another day breaks. Another day of Tory parliamentary majority wasted. And another day closer to the next election. There’s no refund on time, not that you would know it from the inaction of these gutless Tory MPs.
Two years is a long time in politics but I think the Conservatives may have already cooked their goose for 2024. Yesterday felt an awful lot like Black Wednesday. If you look at the polls from 1992 through 1994 when Blair took over, the damage to the Cons had already been done.
But at the moment I do have a begrudging respect for Rishi Sunak and I fear him. He's very capable and competent. I also liked his calm after the storm demeanour yesterday. Undoubtedly PM material but I think it's now or never.
Liz Truss would be my golden ticket.
No it didn't.
The Labour leads are still nothing like 1994 and absolutely nothing like the over 20% leads they had once Blair took over.
The Tories have also just won the Southern West by election with an increased voteshare on 2019. If the Tories were heading for a landslide defeat they would not have got 86% of the vote last night, no Labour and LD candidate or not
The site is, in my view, overpricing Partygate as an issue, and underpricing cost of living the same way.
If Johnson survives Partygate the call will be the storm is over, whereas in fact the storm for Johnson and all the tories will be just beginning.
Absolutely agree with this. Partygate will be meh for many. Meanwhile, I think the national expectation (whether justified or not) was for the good times to roll/roaring twenties post-pandemic.
Who did people expect was going to pay the costs of lockdowns they were demanding?
Fantastic comment and absolutely.
Public in favour of lockdowns. Public not in favour of tax rises.
*passes out in shock and surprise*
Public in favour of tax rises for the wealthy.
Where did that £8.7bn wasted on PPE go? It's sitting in somebody's bank accounts.
The public are always in favour of tax rises for the wealthy.
And wealthy always means those who have more than they do.
Without exception.
Sorry to be the exception but I'd fully expect any sensible tax increase to hit me more than those with below average incomes and/or savings.
Honestly, I am not super wealthy but like many (not all) on here I am comfortably off. I end up spending stuff on things I don't really need or worse still pushing it into savings I'll never possibly use in my lifetime.
Sure, I can give it away, and almost certainly will in the end, but I could afford to pay more taxes too.
Thank you Nigel for that. I recently suggested that he was the worst PM in my lifetime (i.e. since Atlee) and got jumped on from a great height. Admittedly it was Hyufd but even so I was astonished to find that even in so broad a forum as PB there was anyone prepared to argue that he didn't rank lower than all predecessors since WW2.
But you go further. 'In history', you say? Hmmm. Boris....Lord North.....Lord North...Boris.
It's close, I'll grant.
Absurd, Boris got Brexit done, won a landslide election win, delivered one of the most successful vaccination programmes in the world and unemployment still half the level Brown's Labour left in 2010.
After Blair and Thatcher in terms of delivery Boris is the most successful PM of the last 50 years
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 1h The BoE Governor has asked people not to seek wage rises in response to inflation. Such "2nd round effects" can make inflation more persistent & the cost of cutting it higher. Does the govt intend to bolster the Governor's stance by limiting public sector pay rises this year?
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Yeah, you mean in the way he adopted a policy of "believe all victims" and so we had Carl Beech wreck people's lives? Yup, 'very smart cookie'
That was Allison Saunders fwiw.
Ahem, Saunders formally instituted it but it was Starmer who very much laid the groundwork for it when he was CPS after the Rochdale case. It merely came into effect on Saunder's watch
No, it was Allison Saunders, she was very much behind casting people into victim and perpetrator roles even before charging. She removed the "alleged" from the language around alleged victims/accuers and called people accused of crimes "perpetrators" rather than the accused/alleged perpetrators. There was a huge culture change that she oversaw which led to innocent people being locked up due to the CPS withholding information from defence teams that may have damaged the prosecution's case. She was a disaster and happily got sacked. Starmer wasn't to blame for her failures.
A quick look turns up this. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/mar/06/new-measures-child-sex-abuse ..."We need to settle this," Starmer said. "Ten years or so ago, it was thought that police and prosecutors were over-enthusiastic or over-eager in pursuing [such] cases. Now it is thought they are over-cautious. I don't think we can go on like this."
Starmer called for an approach that was fair to innocent suspects but equally fair to victims. The test for bringing a case – whether there is a realistic prospect of bringing a conviction – must not change but the justice system must look more carefully at the way it assessed credibility, he said.
"At the moment, there is a great deal of focus on whether the victim is telling the truth. We need to look equally carefully at the account the suspect is giving, look at the context, look at the pattern of behaviour, make the necessary links and think about how a case can be be built."
Starmer said authorities had to "clear the decks", agree what the approach should be and draft the way cases were investigated and prosecuted to ensure they were fair to both sides...
Which does not seem to support @MrEd 's contention. Not quite sure how that demonstrates responsibility for Hogan Howe's failures.
But that's not what the issue is, it was Allison Saunders that moved completely to "believe the victim" and simply did away with rational investigation as "hurtful" etc...
I realise that. Just pointing out what Starmer's on the record statement was. ...At the moment, there is a great deal of focus on whether the victim is telling the truth. We need to look equally carefully at the account the suspect is giving.. sounds fairly even handed to me.
Yeah agreed. The poisonous changes to CPS culture came after his tenure. It's just another Big Dog style lie from MrEd.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Yeah, you mean in the way he adopted a policy of "believe all victims" and so we had Carl Beech wreck people's lives? Yup, 'very smart cookie'
Is that the latest right wing nutter meme since the previous one backfired spectacularly on Big Clown? Yes he is a very smart cookie. You are too partisan to see it, or you are really not a very smart cookie, or perhaps both.
Ahem, if you are going to lob insults, it might be better to get your facts right. Who is disagreeing with the statement that Starmer instituted a policy of believe all victims at the CPS? What people are disagreeing with BJ on is that Starmer didn't prosecute Jimmy Saville.
I have no need to defend Starmer on detail. I am not a Labour supporter, and therefore will be able to disagree with him on lots of things. He is very smart though. The fact that you are still an apologist for the worst PM probably in history suggests that you are going to be more and more disappointed that Starmer outmanoeuvres him at every juncture. One of the important things in politics and life in general is not to underestimate your opponents. Smarter Tories are beginning to realise they need someone better than the fat blusterer to outsmart Starmer.
Yes, I see you didn't acknowledge you got your point wrong, did you? Never mind.
Oh dear, I didn't get a point wrong (although it has been known occasionally - well maybe about 1985ish perhaps?). I said Starmer is a smart cookie, which you took exception to because you are so absorbed with thinking that anyone that you disagree with is not effective. He is smart cookie, for you to pretend otherwise is just silly. Starmer is very very smart. That comes as a shock to swivel-eyed far right UKIPy/Johnson apologist Tories. Sorry to have to break it to you.
Starmer was responsible for a policy that wrecked people's lives in a very public way. As far as I am aware, he has never apologised or recognised what he did. That does not sound like a decent person.
As for the "He is smart cookie, for you to pretend otherwise is just silly." that is not a fact, it is your view just as it is my view that he has significant flaws. Just because you say something doesn't make it a fact (although I know that is a common attribute of the pub bore who likes to tell everyone how it is and how right they are).
If you're talking about the CPS stuff, he really wasn't. It's on record that Allison Saunders was the fuck up at CPS.
He really was. Read the Ashcroft biography, Starmer was very much responsible for the CPS adopting the policy.
It seems like the defenders of Starmer at the CPS are trying to have it both ways. If you bring up Saville, the defence is "he didn't have any responsibility even though he headed the CPS", with the Carl Beech episode, it's "well, he wasn't head of the CPS so he didn't have any responsibility for it even though he very much made the decision it should go ahead". It's either one or the other.
The one thing I don't get is the anger people feel about BJs Starmer/Saville comment. Starmer was head of the CPS when the decision to not prosecute was made and he apologised in 2013 for their failings in the matter. Yet apparently bringing that up at PMQs in regard to responsibility for the actions of a Department of which you are in charge is the worst thing a PM has done in living memory. It baffles me.
The performance of the CPS with the John Worboys case under SKS's leadership was also woeful.
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 1h The BoE Governor has asked people not to seek wage rises in response to inflation. Such "2nd round effects" can make inflation more persistent & the cost of cutting it higher. Does the govt intend to bolster the Governor's stance by limiting public sector pay rises this year?
I heard the Governor this morning and he seemed completely anachronistic. When the country's main economic problems are stagnating real wages and stagnating productivity and one of its biggest strengths is almost full employment, the idea that wage restraint is the answer is hard to fathom. A Tory government pursuing that line would be shooting itself in the foot. There are still plenty of public sector workers who voted conservative at the last election.
What does the worst year for living standards in at least three decades look like in chart form? Here's that striking (& deeply depressing) @bankofengland forecast. Worse than post financial crisis Worse than Black Wednesday 1992. The biggest fall in disposable incomes on record https://t.co/4VZNCHZ2iP
Reasons why Boris doesn't want to go now No 1 to 60million
Boris wants another 4-6 months to get past Brown and May - and he needs to avoid a VONC otherwise he isn't going to get there.
I still think Boris wins a VONC 55% to 45% or so for now
He'll probably beat Spencer Perceval. Unlikely he'll beat Gordon Brown.
Ah, Boris, you old duffer, it could all have been so different. You were played a hugely difficult hand - take over a party with no majority and with two wings in open rebellion, in different directions, deal with the most contentious constitutional issue of the post-war era, and then thrown off course by the biggest emergency of my lifetime. The first you managed with astonishing success, the second to no less dissatisfaction than anyone else would have achieved*, and the third better than many, with some brave calls along the way.
And then you threw it away on - what? Holding some not-very-good-parties? Evacuating someone's pets from Afghanistan? Owen Paterson? A distasteful jibe at PMQs?
I'm not trying to excuse Boris. I didn't want him in the first place and I certainly don't want him now. But he dealt with the really difficult issues quite well - certainly better than many. The first few months of his premiership when he took a fractious party without a majority which had recently polled below 10% in a national election to a landslide-ish majority was just astonishing.
He's played an astonishingly difficult hand with a surprising degree of success, and then made some really, really, really stupid and unnecessary unforced errors. Like the spy who finds the Macguffin, defeats three different sets of baddies, makes it home through no-mans land, then gets hilariously drunk on the train back from Dover, picks a fight with a bouncer and leaves the Macguffin on the tube.
*I can sense Remainer piss boiling from here when I write this. Sorry. It's hard to frame in a neutral way. But I stand by it - other solutions may or may not have been better; but any other solution would have pissed off at least as many people.
If the locals find you writing stuff like that, they will be erecting stocks and pillory in that grassy triangle in Sale Moor...
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Yeah, you mean in the way he adopted a policy of "believe all victims" and so we had Carl Beech wreck people's lives? Yup, 'very smart cookie'
That was Allison Saunders fwiw.
Ahem, Saunders formally instituted it but it was Starmer who very much laid the groundwork for it when he was CPS after the Rochdale case. It merely came into effect on Saunder's watch
No, it was Allison Saunders, she was very much behind casting people into victim and perpetrator roles even before charging. She removed the "alleged" from the language around alleged victims/accuers and called people accused of crimes "perpetrators" rather than the accused/alleged perpetrators. There was a huge culture change that she oversaw which led to innocent people being locked up due to the CPS withholding information from defence teams that may have damaged the prosecution's case. She was a disaster and happily got sacked. Starmer wasn't to blame for her failures.
A quick look turns up this. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/mar/06/new-measures-child-sex-abuse ..."We need to settle this," Starmer said. "Ten years or so ago, it was thought that police and prosecutors were over-enthusiastic or over-eager in pursuing [such] cases. Now it is thought they are over-cautious. I don't think we can go on like this."
Starmer called for an approach that was fair to innocent suspects but equally fair to victims. The test for bringing a case – whether there is a realistic prospect of bringing a conviction – must not change but the justice system must look more carefully at the way it assessed credibility, he said.
"At the moment, there is a great deal of focus on whether the victim is telling the truth. We need to look equally carefully at the account the suspect is giving, look at the context, look at the pattern of behaviour, make the necessary links and think about how a case can be be built."
Starmer said authorities had to "clear the decks", agree what the approach should be and draft the way cases were investigated and prosecuted to ensure they were fair to both sides...
Which does not seem to support @MrEd 's contention. Not quite sure how that demonstrates responsibility for Hogan Howe's failures.
But that's not what the issue is, it was Allison Saunders that moved completely to "believe the victim" and simply did away with rational investigation as "hurtful" etc...
The worst one of her policies was simply hiding damaging evidence from defence teams by being late with disclosure or simply "forgetting".
Yes, I'm sure it was Alison Saunders who did the damage. That quote above though is pure Starmer fence-sitting!
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 1h The BoE Governor has asked people not to seek wage rises in response to inflation. Such "2nd round effects" can make inflation more persistent & the cost of cutting it higher. Does the govt intend to bolster the Governor's stance by limiting public sector pay rises this year?
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Starmer v Sunak, a privately educated former barrister and head of the CPS with an Oxford degree v a privately and Oxford and Stanford educated ex Goldman Sachs banker.
The most elitist general election ever? Definitely the end of populism then
Starmer wasn't privately educated. Passed 11+ and went to local Grammar School which at some point stopped being a real state school.
It doesn't matter whether he did or not. This is post-facts politics now.
Where oh where is @isam when we need him. I believe he has recreated in his sitting room an interactive experience of Starmer's school years including the various statutes and ordinances covering the conversion of the school to fee paying. Plus relevant bank accounts from the time including thos of Starmer's parents. .
AIUI, and I could be wrong, when Reigate Grammar converted from being a proper state school to become 'private' there was a lead time, whereby those boys who were there already could stay not fee-paying. Or something like that.
Absolutely makes sense although strictly, that means that Starmer did attend a fee-paying school albeit as you say it is unlikely (but I have no idea) that he paid fees.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Yeah, you mean in the way he adopted a policy of "believe all victims" and so we had Carl Beech wreck people's lives? Yup, 'very smart cookie'
Is that the latest right wing nutter meme since the previous one backfired spectacularly on Big Clown? Yes he is a very smart cookie. You are too partisan to see it, or you are really not a very smart cookie, or perhaps both.
Ahem, if you are going to lob insults, it might be better to get your facts right. Who is disagreeing with the statement that Starmer instituted a policy of believe all victims at the CPS? What people are disagreeing with BJ on is that Starmer didn't prosecute Jimmy Saville.
I have no need to defend Starmer on detail. I am not a Labour supporter, and therefore will be able to disagree with him on lots of things. He is very smart though. The fact that you are still an apologist for the worst PM probably in history suggests that you are going to be more and more disappointed that Starmer outmanoeuvres him at every juncture. One of the important things in politics and life in general is not to underestimate your opponents. Smarter Tories are beginning to realise they need someone better than the fat blusterer to outsmart Starmer.
Yes, I see you didn't acknowledge you got your point wrong, did you? Never mind.
Oh dear, I didn't get a point wrong (although it has been known occasionally - well maybe about 1985ish perhaps?). I said Starmer is a smart cookie, which you took exception to because you are so absorbed with thinking that anyone that you disagree with is not effective. He is smart cookie, for you to pretend otherwise is just silly. Starmer is very very smart. That comes as a shock to swivel-eyed far right UKIPy/Johnson apologist Tories. Sorry to have to break it to you.
Starmer was responsible for a policy that wrecked people's lives in a very public way. As far as I am aware, he has never apologised or recognised what he did. That does not sound like a decent person.
As for the "He is smart cookie, for you to pretend otherwise is just silly." that is not a fact, it is your view just as it is my view that he has significant flaws. Just because you say something doesn't make it a fact (although I know that is a common attribute of the pub bore who likes to tell everyone how it is and how right they are).
If you're talking about the CPS stuff, he really wasn't. It's on record that Allison Saunders was the fuck up at CPS.
He really was. Read the Ashcroft biography, Starmer was very much responsible for the CPS adopting the policy.
It seems like the defenders of Starmer at the CPS are trying to have it both ways. If you bring up Saville, the defence is "he didn't have any responsibility even though he headed the CPS", with the Carl Beech episode, it's "well, he wasn't head of the CPS so he didn't have any responsibility for it even though he very much made the decision it should go ahead". It's either one or the other.
Point of information, but wasn't Starmer knighted by Cameron for his work at the DPP?
So was his successor, so that isn't saying much.
No, but where does it all end?
Do we pillory Cameron for rewarding the DPP who failed to prosecute Savile?
It's all a load of tosh, as most people recognise.
Thank you Nigel for that. I recently suggested that he was the worst PM in my lifetime (i.e. since Atlee) and got jumped on from a great height. Admittedly it was Hyufd but even so I was astonished to find that even in so broad a forum as PB there was anyone prepared to argue that he didn't rank lower than all predecessors since WW2.
But you go further. 'In history', you say? Hmmm. Boris....Lord North.....Lord North...Boris.
It's close, I'll grant.
Absurd, Boris got Brexit done, won a landslide election win, delivered one of the most successful vaccination programmes in the world and unemployment still half the level Brown's Labour left in 2010.
After Blair and Thatcher in terms of delivery Boris is the most successful PM of the last 50 years
Didn't get Brexit done. Still a festering sore in NI, Dover, etc. etc.
And to be at all intellectually honest you need also to consider the alternative hypothesis - that, after winning the election, Mr Johnson was in other ways a drag and a disrupting factor in an otherwise rational programme of national government/.
Of all the lies, the idea that he has "got Brexit done" is the biggest whopper of them all. Somehow allowed to drift unchallenged across the airwaves because Labour are too frightened to talk about Brexit.
He is on TV just this week telling the cameras that the deal he personally negotiated is not working.
As for the Brexit benefits paper earlier this week: it makes Gove's half-decent levelling up paper look like a work of infinite depth and scholarship by comparison.
On Alastair Meeks' count, hostile is up to 43... but friendly is up to 100. Still seems momentum is with Boris Johnson.
I suspect there is a lag in AM's data that may mean the friendlies are currently higher than they actually are. Were I a Tory MP I would be avoiding people at the weekend as you know what the conversations are going to be like.
I imagine we will see a slow but steady trickle of letters through until Monday when I would expect some sort of announcement.
Mps already know what their constituents think. It is now surely all about timing and positioning.
Another day breaks. Another day of Tory parliamentary majority wasted. And another day closer to the next election. There’s no refund on time, not that you would know it from the inaction of these gutless Tory MPs.
Two years is a long time in politics but I think the Conservatives may have already cooked their goose for 2024. Yesterday felt an awful lot like Black Wednesday. If you look at the polls from 1992 through 1994 when Blair took over, the damage to the Cons had already been done.
But at the moment I do have a begrudging respect for Rishi Sunak and I fear him. He's very capable and competent. I also liked his calm after the storm demeanour yesterday. Undoubtedly PM material but I think it's now or never.
Liz Truss would be my golden ticket.
No it didn't.
The Labour leads are still nothing like 1994 and absolutely nothing like the over 20% leads they had once Blair took over.
The Tories have also just won the Southern West by election with an increased voteshare on 2019. If the Tories were heading for a landslide defeat they would not have got 86% of the vote last night, no Labour and LD candidate or not
The site is, in my view, overpricing Partygate as an issue, and underpricing cost of living the same way.
If Johnson survives Partygate the call will be the storm is over, whereas in fact the storm for Johnson and all the tories will be just beginning.
Absolutely agree with this. Partygate will be meh for many. Meanwhile, I think the national expectation (whether justified or not) was for the good times to roll/roaring twenties post-pandemic.
Who did people expect was going to pay the costs of lockdowns they were demanding?
Fantastic comment and absolutely.
Public in favour of lockdowns. Public not in favour of tax rises.
*passes out in shock and surprise*
Public in favour of tax rises for the wealthy.
Where did that £8.7bn wasted on PPE go? It's sitting in somebody's bank accounts.
The public are always in favour of tax rises for the wealthy.
And wealthy always means those who have more than they do.
Without exception.
Sorry to be the exception but I'd fully expect any sensible tax increase to hit me more than those with below average incomes and/or savings.
Honestly, I am not super wealthy but like many (not all) on here I am comfortably off. I end up spending stuff on things I don't really need or worse still pushing it into savings I'll never possibly use in my lifetime.
Sure, I can give it away, and almost certainly will in the end, but I could afford to pay more taxes too.
Yes my without exception was wrong. There's you and @kinabalu and others I'm sure. But we're not talking about those who have the luxury of being wealthy enough to advocate extra taxes and that should have been made clear.
With the exception of champagne socialists some of those who are very wealthy. .
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Yeah, you mean in the way he adopted a policy of "believe all victims" and so we had Carl Beech wreck people's lives? Yup, 'very smart cookie'
That was Allison Saunders fwiw.
Ahem, Saunders formally instituted it but it was Starmer who very much laid the groundwork for it when he was CPS after the Rochdale case. It merely came into effect on Saunder's watch
No, it was Allison Saunders, she was very much behind casting people into victim and perpetrator roles even before charging. She removed the "alleged" from the language around alleged victims/accuers and called people accused of crimes "perpetrators" rather than the accused/alleged perpetrators. There was a huge culture change that she oversaw which led to innocent people being locked up due to the CPS withholding information from defence teams that may have damaged the prosecution's case. She was a disaster and happily got sacked. Starmer wasn't to blame for her failures.
A quick look turns up this. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/mar/06/new-measures-child-sex-abuse ..."We need to settle this," Starmer said. "Ten years or so ago, it was thought that police and prosecutors were over-enthusiastic or over-eager in pursuing [such] cases. Now it is thought they are over-cautious. I don't think we can go on like this."
Starmer called for an approach that was fair to innocent suspects but equally fair to victims. The test for bringing a case – whether there is a realistic prospect of bringing a conviction – must not change but the justice system must look more carefully at the way it assessed credibility, he said.
"At the moment, there is a great deal of focus on whether the victim is telling the truth. We need to look equally carefully at the account the suspect is giving, look at the context, look at the pattern of behaviour, make the necessary links and think about how a case can be be built."
Starmer said authorities had to "clear the decks", agree what the approach should be and draft the way cases were investigated and prosecuted to ensure they were fair to both sides...
Which does not seem to support @MrEd 's contention. Not quite sure how that demonstrates responsibility for Hogan Howe's failures.
But that's not what the issue is, it was Allison Saunders that moved completely to "believe the victim" and simply did away with rational investigation as "hurtful" etc...
The worst one of her policies was simply hiding damaging evidence from defence teams by being late with disclosure or simply "forgetting".
Yes, I'm sure it was Alison Saunders who did the damage. That quote above though is pure Starmer fence-sitting!
He simply followed the prevailing consensus at the time. No more and no less. If he had spoken out against the nonsense prosecutions he would have terminated his career.
Why should he do that?
This is the system of public service we have built, in this country, systematically. The whistleblowers on the various scandals have had their careers ended. Those who kept their doubts to themselves survive and prosper.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Starmer v Sunak, a privately educated former barrister and head of the CPS with an Oxford degree v a privately and Oxford and Stanford educated ex Goldman Sachs banker.
The most elitist general election ever? Definitely the end of populism then
Starmer wasn't privately educated. Passed 11+ and went to local Grammar School which at some point stopped being a real state school.
You'd think @HYUFD would be a supporter of an 11+ grammar school boy!
What's the point of grammar schools if brainy oiks don't get recognition from the posh?
It was Labour's government of 1964-1970 under Education Secretary Crosland which began the process of turning grammar schools into comprehensives. That forced grammar schools which did not want to become comprehensives to become private schools instead, especially if they were in a Labour local authority area as they were less likely than Tory local authorities to allow existing grammars to continue
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
No he's not of that ilk. Some are on the Left - eg our Owls - but he's not like that. He's not a Starmer fan but he's rooting for Labour and it's plainly sincere. I'd be able to tell if it wasn't. I most always can.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Starmer v Sunak, a privately educated former barrister and head of the CPS with an Oxford degree v a privately and Oxford and Stanford educated ex Goldman Sachs banker.
The most elitist general election ever? Definitely the end of populism then
Starmer wasn't privately educated. Passed 11+ and went to local Grammar School which at some point stopped being a real state school.
Its a slightly tricky one. In effect he ended up attending a fee paying school, but (a) didn't pay and (b) it wasn't such when he started. So you can argue that he benefited from a private education.
But yes, he definitely didn't have parents paying 18 grand a year for 7 years to educate him.
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 1h The BoE Governor has asked people not to seek wage rises in response to inflation. Such "2nd round effects" can make inflation more persistent & the cost of cutting it higher. Does the govt intend to bolster the Governor's stance by limiting public sector pay rises this year?
Anecdotally it is falling on deaf ears. In demand professionals in the private sector are already getting substantial rises.
And public sector freezes while private sector pay soars means lower quality public sector candidates which means more inefficiency, worse services and probably, long term, a more expensive public sector.
I work with some clients who routinely pay at the lower end of the range and they are invariably the ones with the biggest overhead costs and inefficient processes.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Yeah, you mean in the way he adopted a policy of "believe all victims" and so we had Carl Beech wreck people's lives? Yup, 'very smart cookie'
Is that the latest right wing nutter meme since the previous one backfired spectacularly on Big Clown? Yes he is a very smart cookie. You are too partisan to see it, or you are really not a very smart cookie, or perhaps both.
Ahem, if you are going to lob insults, it might be better to get your facts right. Who is disagreeing with the statement that Starmer instituted a policy of believe all victims at the CPS? What people are disagreeing with BJ on is that Starmer didn't prosecute Jimmy Saville.
I have no need to defend Starmer on detail. I am not a Labour supporter, and therefore will be able to disagree with him on lots of things. He is very smart though. The fact that you are still an apologist for the worst PM probably in history suggests that you are going to be more and more disappointed that Starmer outmanoeuvres him at every juncture. One of the important things in politics and life in general is not to underestimate your opponents. Smarter Tories are beginning to realise they need someone better than the fat blusterer to outsmart Starmer.
Yes, I see you didn't acknowledge you got your point wrong, did you? Never mind.
Oh dear, I didn't get a point wrong (although it has been known occasionally - well maybe about 1985ish perhaps?). I said Starmer is a smart cookie, which you took exception to because you are so absorbed with thinking that anyone that you disagree with is not effective. He is smart cookie, for you to pretend otherwise is just silly. Starmer is very very smart. That comes as a shock to swivel-eyed far right UKIPy/Johnson apologist Tories. Sorry to have to break it to you.
Starmer was responsible for a policy that wrecked people's lives in a very public way. As far as I am aware, he has never apologised or recognised what he did. That does not sound like a decent person.
As for the "He is smart cookie, for you to pretend otherwise is just silly." that is not a fact, it is your view just as it is my view that he has significant flaws. Just because you say something doesn't make it a fact (although I know that is a common attribute of the pub bore who likes to tell everyone how it is and how right they are).
If you're talking about the CPS stuff, he really wasn't. It's on record that Allison Saunders was the fuck up at CPS.
He really was. Read the Ashcroft biography, Starmer was very much responsible for the CPS adopting the policy.
It seems like the defenders of Starmer at the CPS are trying to have it both ways. If you bring up Saville, the defence is "he didn't have any responsibility even though he headed the CPS", with the Carl Beech episode, it's "well, he wasn't head of the CPS so he didn't have any responsibility for it even though he very much made the decision it should go ahead". It's either one or the other.
Point of information, but wasn't Starmer knighted by Cameron for his work at the DPP?
So was his successor, so that isn't saying much.
No, but where does it all end?
Do we pillory Cameron for rewarding the DPP who failed to prosecute Savile?
It's all a load of tosh, as most people recognise.
Behave Mr Punter. It is important to score points that nobody gives a monkeys about.... for some reason or other.
People make mistakes all the time. The only person who never made a mistake never did anything at all.
Thank you Nigel for that. I recently suggested that he was the worst PM in my lifetime (i.e. since Atlee) and got jumped on from a great height. Admittedly it was Hyufd but even so I was astonished to find that even in so broad a forum as PB there was anyone prepared to argue that he didn't rank lower than all predecessors since WW2.
But you go further. 'In history', you say? Hmmm. Boris....Lord North.....Lord North...Boris.
It's close, I'll grant.
Absurd, Boris got Brexit done, won a landslide election win, delivered one of the most successful vaccination programmes in the world and unemployment still half the level Brown's Labour left in 2010.
After Blair and Thatcher in terms of delivery Boris is the most successful PM of the last 50 years
Didn't get Brexit done. Still a festering sore in NI, Dover, etc. etc.
And to be at all intellectually honest you need also to consider the alternative hypothesis - that, after winning the election, Mr Johnson was in other ways a drag and a disrupting factor in an otherwise rational programme of national government/.
Of all the lies, the idea that he has "got Brexit done" is the biggest whopper of them all. Somehow allowed to drift unchallenged across the airwaves because Labour are too frightened to talk about Brexit.
He is on TV just this week telling the cameras that the deal he personally negotiated is not working.
As for the Brexit benefits paper earlier this week: it makes Gove's half-decent levelling up paper look like a work of infinite depth and scholarship by comparison.
The UK is no longer a member of the European Union - therefore Brexit is done.
If that doesn't make Brexit done, at what point do ongoing negotiations about trading relationships with the EU hhave to conclude for you to admit Brexit is done? Those negotiations will never permanently end! Just because we open trade negotiations with India doesn't mean Indian independence isn't done!
Worse than the drop after the GFC or Black Wednesday is quite a grim situation.
Yes, indeed. Also, that graph is obviously an average; there will be a large number of low-paid people for whom the effect is proportionately larger, and who probably will already have had a tough time during the pandemic. The only relatively bright spot is that at the moment unemployment doesn't seem to be likely to be a big problem, but it is going to be pretty grim for many.
Not all of this is the government's fault, of course, and their room for manoeuvre is limited, but Sunak's mitigation measures are only going to address a small part of the pain.
It will be interesting to see if voters wake up to the fact that Brexit has made this substantially worse.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Starmer v Sunak, a privately educated former barrister and head of the CPS with an Oxford degree v a privately and Oxford and Stanford educated ex Goldman Sachs banker.
The most elitist general election ever? Definitely the end of populism then
Starmer wasn't privately educated. Passed 11+ and went to local Grammar School which at some point stopped being a real state school.
It doesn't matter whether he did or not. This is post-facts politics now.
Where oh where is @isam when we need him. I believe he has recreated in his sitting room an interactive experience of Starmer's school years including the various statutes and ordinances covering the conversion of the school to fee paying. Plus relevant bank accounts from the time including thos of Starmer's parents. .
AIUI, and I could be wrong, when Reigate Grammar converted from being a proper state school to become 'private' there was a lead time, whereby those boys who were there already could stay not fee-paying. Or something like that.
Absolutely makes sense although strictly, that means that Starmer did attend a fee-paying school albeit as you say it is unlikely (but I have no idea) that he paid fees.
I passed the 11+ and went to a Grammar School, where I stayed through to the VIth form. Of those with me, had the school 'converted' to fee paying I'm quite sure that some of the parents could not have paid fees, some parents would not have on principle (mine quite possibly among them) and some would have paid, albeit reluctantly. Some, of course, of the parents would have paid for the 'cachet' for their sons. However, I cannot imagine that a way would not have been found for everyone to stay on, especially as some at least of those who parents could/would not pay were very high flyers. It was 20 years before Starmer was at school, of course.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Yeah, you mean in the way he adopted a policy of "believe all victims" and so we had Carl Beech wreck people's lives? Yup, 'very smart cookie'
That was Allison Saunders fwiw.
Ahem, Saunders formally instituted it but it was Starmer who very much laid the groundwork for it when he was CPS after the Rochdale case. It merely came into effect on Saunder's watch
No, it was Allison Saunders, she was very much behind casting people into victim and perpetrator roles even before charging. She removed the "alleged" from the language around alleged victims/accuers and called people accused of crimes "perpetrators" rather than the accused/alleged perpetrators. There was a huge culture change that she oversaw which led to innocent people being locked up due to the CPS withholding information from defence teams that may have damaged the prosecution's case. She was a disaster and happily got sacked. Starmer wasn't to blame for her failures.
A quick look turns up this. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/mar/06/new-measures-child-sex-abuse ..."We need to settle this," Starmer said. "Ten years or so ago, it was thought that police and prosecutors were over-enthusiastic or over-eager in pursuing [such] cases. Now it is thought they are over-cautious. I don't think we can go on like this."
Starmer called for an approach that was fair to innocent suspects but equally fair to victims. The test for bringing a case – whether there is a realistic prospect of bringing a conviction – must not change but the justice system must look more carefully at the way it assessed credibility, he said.
"At the moment, there is a great deal of focus on whether the victim is telling the truth. We need to look equally carefully at the account the suspect is giving, look at the context, look at the pattern of behaviour, make the necessary links and think about how a case can be be built."
Starmer said authorities had to "clear the decks", agree what the approach should be and draft the way cases were investigated and prosecuted to ensure they were fair to both sides...
Which does not seem to support @MrEd 's contention. Not quite sure how that demonstrates responsibility for Hogan Howe's failures.
But that's not what the issue is, it was Allison Saunders that moved completely to "believe the victim" and simply did away with rational investigation as "hurtful" etc...
I realise that. Just pointing out what Starmer's on the record statement was. ...At the moment, there is a great deal of focus on whether the victim is telling the truth. We need to look equally carefully at the account the suspect is giving.. sounds fairly even handed to me.
Yeah agreed. The poisonous changes to CPS culture came after his tenure. It's just another Big Dog style lie from MrEd.
As I said, Ashcroft's biography makes it very clear about Starmer's responsibility here. As far as I am aware, Starmer hasn't come out and said it is untruthful / unfair. So less of the Big Dog lie.
Thank you Nigel for that. I recently suggested that he was the worst PM in my lifetime (i.e. since Atlee) and got jumped on from a great height. Admittedly it was Hyufd but even so I was astonished to find that even in so broad a forum as PB there was anyone prepared to argue that he didn't rank lower than all predecessors since WW2.
But you go further. 'In history', you say? Hmmm. Boris....Lord North.....Lord North...Boris.
It's close, I'll grant.
Absurd, Boris got Brexit done, won a landslide election win, delivered one of the most successful vaccination programmes in the world and unemployment still half the level Brown's Labour left in 2010.
After Blair and Thatcher in terms of delivery Boris is the most successful PM of the last 50 years
Didn't get Brexit done. Still a festering sore in NI, Dover, etc. etc.
And to be at all intellectually honest you need also to consider the alternative hypothesis - that, after winning the election, Mr Johnson was in other ways a drag and a disrupting factor in an otherwise rational programme of national government/.
Of all the lies, the idea that he has "got Brexit done" is the biggest whopper of them all. Somehow allowed to drift unchallenged across the airwaves because Labour are too frightened to talk about Brexit.
He is on TV just this week telling the cameras that the deal he personally negotiated is not working.
As for the Brexit benefits paper earlier this week: it makes Gove's half-decent levelling up paper look like a work of infinite depth and scholarship by comparison.
The UK is no longer a member of the European Union - therefore Brexit is done.
If that doesn't make Brexit done, at what point do ongoing negotiations about trading relationships with the EU hhave to conclude for you to admit Brexit is done? Those negotiations will never permanently end! Just because we open trade negotiations with India doesn't mean Indian independence isn't done!
That's just the problem - he's selling an illusion. Trading relations with mainland Europe have rarely stopped for millennia. Large-scale trading relations with India and other places further afield are relatively recent, by comparison.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Starmer v Sunak, a privately educated former barrister and head of the CPS with an Oxford degree v a privately and Oxford and Stanford educated ex Goldman Sachs banker.
The most elitist general election ever? Definitely the end of populism then
The last election was between an Eton and Oxford educated former editor of the Spectator against a professional politician - albeit one who went to North London Poly.
Reasons why Boris doesn't want to go now No 1 to 60million
Boris wants another 4-6 months to get past Brown and May - and he needs to avoid a VONC otherwise he isn't going to get there.
I still think Boris wins a VONC 55% to 45% or so for now
He'll probably beat Spencer Perceval. Unlikely he'll beat Gordon Brown.
Ah, Boris, you old duffer, it could all have been so different. You were played a hugely difficult hand - take over a party with no majority and with two wings in open rebellion, in different directions, deal with the most contentious constitutional issue of the post-war era, and then thrown off course by the biggest emergency of my lifetime. The first you managed with astonishing success, the second to no less dissatisfaction than anyone else would have achieved*, and the third better than many, with some brave calls along the way.
And then you threw it away on - what? Holding some not-very-good-parties? Evacuating someone's pets from Afghanistan? Owen Paterson? A distasteful jibe at PMQs?
I'm not trying to excuse Boris. I didn't want him in the first place and I certainly don't want him now. But he dealt with the really difficult issues quite well - certainly better than many. The first few months of his premiership when he took a fractious party without a majority which had recently polled below 10% in a national election to a landslide-ish majority was just astonishing.
He's played an astonishingly difficult hand with a surprising degree of success, and then made some really, really, really stupid and unnecessary unforced errors. Like the spy who finds the Macguffin, defeats three different sets of baddies, makes it home through no-mans land, then gets hilariously drunk on the train back from Dover, picks a fight with a bouncer and leaves the Macguffin on the tube.
*I can sense Remainer piss boiling from here when I write this. Sorry. It's hard to frame in a neutral way. But I stand by it - other solutions may or may not have been better; but any other solution would have pissed off at least as many people.
As a former remainer (meaningless term now, really) I agree completely. The options were piss off the Brexiters, piss off the Remainers or piss off everybody both extremes (something Norway-esque). Probably the last option was best for the country, but would have still greatly annoyed those on both extremes and been seen as a betrayal, for different reasons, by many. It would have required a great leader to bring people together behind it.
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 1h The BoE Governor has asked people not to seek wage rises in response to inflation. Such "2nd round effects" can make inflation more persistent & the cost of cutting it higher. Does the govt intend to bolster the Governor's stance by limiting public sector pay rises this year?
I heard the Governor this morning and he seemed completely anachronistic. When the country's main economic problems are stagnating real wages and stagnating productivity and one of its biggest strengths is almost full employment, the idea that wage restraint is the answer is hard to fathom. A Tory government pursuing that line would be shooting itself in the foot. There are still plenty of public sector workers who voted conservative at the last election.
It's not anachronistic wanting some restraint in wage demands. There's going to be a large inflationary shock this year, and probably next as well, from factors completely beyond the UK's control. If that feeds into significant wage inflation, the cycle could go on for years.
Up until this winter everyone thought fuel price shocks anachronistic, too.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Johnson is no grotesque interloper: his behaviour and attitudes are emblematic of the British establishment. If our ruling institutions have a shared culture, it’s entitlement and shamelessness, a conviction that wrongdoing should meet consequences only if you are poor and powerless.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Yeah, you mean in the way he adopted a policy of "believe all victims" and so we had Carl Beech wreck people's lives? Yup, 'very smart cookie'
Is that the latest right wing nutter meme since the previous one backfired spectacularly on Big Clown? Yes he is a very smart cookie. You are too partisan to see it, or you are really not a very smart cookie, or perhaps both.
Ahem, if you are going to lob insults, it might be better to get your facts right. Who is disagreeing with the statement that Starmer instituted a policy of believe all victims at the CPS? What people are disagreeing with BJ on is that Starmer didn't prosecute Jimmy Saville.
I have no need to defend Starmer on detail. I am not a Labour supporter, and therefore will be able to disagree with him on lots of things. He is very smart though. The fact that you are still an apologist for the worst PM probably in history suggests that you are going to be more and more disappointed that Starmer outmanoeuvres him at every juncture. One of the important things in politics and life in general is not to underestimate your opponents. Smarter Tories are beginning to realise they need someone better than the fat blusterer to outsmart Starmer.
Yes, I see you didn't acknowledge you got your point wrong, did you? Never mind.
Oh dear, I didn't get a point wrong (although it has been known occasionally - well maybe about 1985ish perhaps?). I said Starmer is a smart cookie, which you took exception to because you are so absorbed with thinking that anyone that you disagree with is not effective. He is smart cookie, for you to pretend otherwise is just silly. Starmer is very very smart. That comes as a shock to swivel-eyed far right UKIPy/Johnson apologist Tories. Sorry to have to break it to you.
Starmer was responsible for a policy that wrecked people's lives in a very public way. As far as I am aware, he has never apologised or recognised what he did. That does not sound like a decent person.
As for the "He is smart cookie, for you to pretend otherwise is just silly." that is not a fact, it is your view just as it is my view that he has significant flaws. Just because you say something doesn't make it a fact (although I know that is a common attribute of the pub bore who likes to tell everyone how it is and how right they are).
If you're talking about the CPS stuff, he really wasn't. It's on record that Allison Saunders was the fuck up at CPS.
He really was. Read the Ashcroft biography, Starmer was very much responsible for the CPS adopting the policy.
It seems like the defenders of Starmer at the CPS are trying to have it both ways. If you bring up Saville, the defence is "he didn't have any responsibility even though he headed the CPS", with the Carl Beech episode, it's "well, he wasn't head of the CPS so he didn't have any responsibility for it even though he very much made the decision it should go ahead". It's either one or the other.
No that's a load of crap. Allison Saunders is on record as admitting she fucked up by pushing a policy which removed "alleged" from crimes. It was her policy and she fucked it up.
The culture she created was at fault, Starmer didn't create the culture at the CPS, Saunders did. Like the Big Dog you're spinning really hard to try and use Starmer's time as DPP against him, but his record was pretty decent. Attempting to ascribe his successor's policy to him is like saying Theresa May is to blame for Boris having loads of parties.
As I said, take a look at Ashcroft's biography on his time at CPS and read through it. As I also said, Starmer has not publicly disputed that and / or claimed that Ashcroft misrepresented what he did as far as I am aware. The picture painted is not one of Starmer being the innocent you portray (whereas Ashcroft does essentially say Starmer didn't have any role in the Saville case).
Thank you Nigel for that. I recently suggested that he was the worst PM in my lifetime (i.e. since Atlee) and got jumped on from a great height. Admittedly it was Hyufd but even so I was astonished to find that even in so broad a forum as PB there was anyone prepared to argue that he didn't rank lower than all predecessors since WW2.
But you go further. 'In history', you say? Hmmm. Boris....Lord North.....Lord North...Boris.
It's close, I'll grant.
Absurd, Boris got Brexit done, won a landslide election win, delivered one of the most successful vaccination programmes in the world and unemployment still half the level Brown's Labour left in 2010.
After Blair and Thatcher in terms of delivery Boris is the most successful PM of the last 50 years
Didn't get Brexit done. Still a festering sore in NI, Dover, etc. etc.
And to be at all intellectually honest you need also to consider the alternative hypothesis - that, after winning the election, Mr Johnson was in other ways a drag and a disrupting factor in an otherwise rational programme of national government/.
Of all the lies, the idea that he has "got Brexit done" is the biggest whopper of them all. Somehow allowed to drift unchallenged across the airwaves because Labour are too frightened to talk about Brexit.
He is on TV just this week telling the cameras that the deal he personally negotiated is not working.
As for the Brexit benefits paper earlier this week: it makes Gove's half-decent levelling up paper look like a work of infinite depth and scholarship by comparison.
The UK is no longer a member of the European Union - therefore Brexit is done.
If that doesn't make Brexit done, at what point do ongoing negotiations about trading relationships with the EU hhave to conclude for you to admit Brexit is done? Those negotiations will never permanently end! Just because we open trade negotiations with India doesn't mean Indian independence isn't done!
That's just the problem - he's selling an illusion. Trading relations with mainland Europe have rarely stopped for millennia. Large-scale trading relations with India and other places further afield are relatively recent, by comparison.
I think you're misunderstanding why voters who voted Tory in 2019 to "get Brexit done" did so. It was obvious that negotiations would go on for years - the vindictiveness of the EU in the preceding three years, encouraged by a small group of well-connected sore losers, had made that clear - but the government and parliament had to get the status of EU member removed so that the referendum result had been honoured.
Worse than the drop after the GFC or Black Wednesday is quite a grim situation.
Yes, indeed. Also, that graph is obviously an average; there will be a large number of low-paid people for whom the effect is proportionately larger, and who probably will already have had a tough time during the pandemic. The only relatively bright spot is that at the moment unemployment doesn't seem to be likely to be a big problem, but it is going to be pretty grim for many.
Not all of this is the government's fault, of course, and their room for manoeuvre is limited, but Sunak's mitigation measures are only going to address a small part of the pain.
It will be interesting to see if voters wake up to the fact that Brexit has made this substantially worse.
The other chart of relevance is this one from the FT which gives some idea of the regional bounce back, and where it is lacking:
The West Midlands being the cockpit of any election, but by far the worst affected doesn't bode well, especially for a government that talks about "The North" and ignores the Midlands.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Starmer v Sunak, a privately educated former barrister and head of the CPS with an Oxford degree v a privately and Oxford and Stanford educated ex Goldman Sachs banker.
The most elitist general election ever? Definitely the end of populism then
Starmer wasn't privately educated. Passed 11+ and went to local Grammar School which at some point stopped being a real state school.
It doesn't matter whether he did or not. This is post-facts politics now.
Where oh where is @isam when we need him. I believe he has recreated in his sitting room an interactive experience of Starmer's school years including the various statutes and ordinances covering the conversion of the school to fee paying. Plus relevant bank accounts from the time including thos of Starmer's parents. .
AIUI, and I could be wrong, when Reigate Grammar converted from being a proper state school to become 'private' there was a lead time, whereby those boys who were there already could stay not fee-paying. Or something like that.
Absolutely makes sense although strictly, that means that Starmer did attend a fee-paying school albeit as you say it is unlikely (but I have no idea) that he paid fees.
I passed the 11+ and went to a Grammar School, where I stayed through to the VIth form. Of those with me, had the school 'converted' to fee paying I'm quite sure that some of the parents could not have paid fees, some parents would not have on principle (mine quite possibly among them) and some would have paid, albeit reluctantly. Some, of course, of the parents would have paid for the 'cachet' for their sons. However, I cannot imagine that a way would not have been found for everyone to stay on, especially as some at least of those who parents could/would not pay were very high flyers. It was 20 years before Starmer was at school, of course.
Of course but he did go to a fee paying school. He may not have paid fees but he went to a fee paying school.
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 1h The BoE Governor has asked people not to seek wage rises in response to inflation. Such "2nd round effects" can make inflation more persistent & the cost of cutting it higher. Does the govt intend to bolster the Governor's stance by limiting public sector pay rises this year?
I heard the Governor this morning and he seemed completely anachronistic. When the country's main economic problems are stagnating real wages and stagnating productivity and one of its biggest strengths is almost full employment, the idea that wage restraint is the answer is hard to fathom. A Tory government pursuing that line would be shooting itself in the foot. There are still plenty of public sector workers who voted conservative at the last election.
It's not anachronistic wanting some restraint in wage demands. There's going to be a large inflationary shock this year, and probably next as well, from factors completely beyond the UK's control. If that feeds into significant wage inflation, the cycle could go on for years.
Up until this winter everyone thought fuel price shocks anachronistic, too.
The question is one of who should suffer the impact of those prices increases.
The shareholders or the workers. Now you may want it to be the workers but in reality that will have a secondary impact on discretionary spending which may have impacts you haven't modelled.
Worse than the drop after the GFC or Black Wednesday is quite a grim situation.
Yes, indeed. Also, that graph is obviously an average; there will be a large number of low-paid people for whom the effect is proportionately larger, and who probably will already have had a tough time during the pandemic. The only relatively bright spot is that at the moment unemployment doesn't seem to be likely to be a big problem, but it is going to be pretty grim for many.
Not all of this is the government's fault, of course, and their room for manoeuvre is limited, but Sunak's mitigation measures are only going to address a small part of the pain.
It will be interesting to see if voters wake up to the fact that Brexit has made this substantially worse.
The other chart of relevance is this one from the FT which gives some idea of the regional bounce back, and where it is lacking:
The West Midlands being the cockpit of any election, but by far the worst affected doesn't bode well, especially for a government that talks about "The North" and ignores the Midlands.
The East Midlands and Wales and the North doing better than the South East already in post pandemic recovery under this government very significant
On Alastair Meeks' count, hostile is up to 43... but friendly is up to 100. Still seems momentum is with Boris Johnson.
I suspect there is a lag in AM's data that may mean the friendlies are currently higher than they actually are. Were I a Tory MP I would be avoiding people at the weekend as you know what the conversations are going to be like.
I imagine we will see a slow but steady trickle of letters through until Monday when I would expect some sort of announcement.
Mps already know what their constituents think. It is now surely all about timing and positioning.
Another day breaks. Another day of Tory parliamentary majority wasted. And another day closer to the next election. There’s no refund on time, not that you would know it from the inaction of these gutless Tory MPs.
Two years is a long time in politics but I think the Conservatives may have already cooked their goose for 2024. Yesterday felt an awful lot like Black Wednesday. If you look at the polls from 1992 through 1994 when Blair took over, the damage to the Cons had already been done.
But at the moment I do have a begrudging respect for Rishi Sunak and I fear him. He's very capable and competent. I also liked his calm after the storm demeanour yesterday. Undoubtedly PM material but I think it's now or never.
Liz Truss would be my golden ticket.
No it didn't.
The Labour leads are still nothing like 1994 and absolutely nothing like the over 20% leads they had once Blair took over.
The Tories have also just won the Southern West by election with an increased voteshare on 2019. If the Tories were heading for a landslide defeat they would not have got 86% of the vote last night, no Labour and LD candidate or not
The site is, in my view, overpricing Partygate as an issue, and underpricing cost of living the same way.
If Johnson survives Partygate the call will be the storm is over, whereas in fact the storm for Johnson and all the tories will be just beginning.
Absolutely agree with this. Partygate will be meh for many. Meanwhile, I think the national expectation (whether justified or not) was for the good times to roll/roaring twenties post-pandemic.
Who did people expect was going to pay the costs of lockdowns they were demanding?
Fantastic comment and absolutely.
Public in favour of lockdowns. Public not in favour of tax rises.
*passes out in shock and surprise*
Public in favour of tax rises for the wealthy.
Where did that £8.7bn wasted on PPE go? It's sitting in somebody's bank accounts.
The public are always in favour of tax rises for the wealthy.
And wealthy always means those who have more than they do.
Without exception.
Sorry to be the exception but I'd fully expect any sensible tax increase to hit me more than those with below average incomes and/or savings.
Honestly, I am not super wealthy but like many (not all) on here I am comfortably off. I end up spending stuff on things I don't really need or worse still pushing it into savings I'll never possibly use in my lifetime.
Sure, I can give it away, and almost certainly will in the end, but I could afford to pay more taxes too.
Yes my without exception was wrong. There's you and @kinabalu and others I'm sure. But we're not talking about those who have the luxury of being wealthy enough to advocate extra taxes and that should have been made clear.
With the exception of champagne socialists some of those who are very wealthy. .
I'm with Benpointer, a bit.
I tend to oppose taxing the rich much more because: 1. My belief is that it doesn't work. The rich are not like you and me. That's why they're rich. They're motivated by increasing their wealth, rather than family, an easy life, inertia, whatever motivates most people. And they have the means to do so. If you try to tax them more, they will either go somewhere else, pay specialists to find ways of avoiding the increased liabilities, or do less of the money-making activities that are being so heavily taxed - because they are wealthy enough not to need to. So if you're objective is maximising tax revenue, raising taxes on the rich is a surprisingly poor way to do it. And 2. The rich already pay a frighteningly large proportion of the tax the exchequer receives. A narrow base to tax revenues is undesirable because it's a) fraught with risk and b) engenders a disconnect in the minds of most people between raising of funds for public spending and the outcomes of that public spending, which leads to poor understanding of values. It's like the story Nick tells about the Swiss talking about 'our bridge' and that public spending is 'ours' whereas we say 'they are building a bridge'. Public spending is a public good, but should also be a public cost; not a cost which falls upon some 'other'. (A good example: Andy Burnham can add, I think, £10 to council tax in Greater Manchester, and with it pay for the specific outcome of free public transport for 16-18 year olds. Is this a cost I think there is a benefit in? As it happens, yes, even though I have no children that age. I can see the public good in allowing that cohort wider access to education and other opportunities.)
I'm not against tax rises per se, but I'm always wary when they are narrowly targeted.
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 1h The BoE Governor has asked people not to seek wage rises in response to inflation. Such "2nd round effects" can make inflation more persistent & the cost of cutting it higher. Does the govt intend to bolster the Governor's stance by limiting public sector pay rises this year?
Worth noting how over-optomistic previous BoE forecasts on inflation have consistently been:
They are all scared of drawing that line with a positive gradient. It is much more comforting for their job prospects to have the gradient go negative at a point in the not-too-near, not-too-far, future.
When they get to the predicted inflexion point they can either claim it as a great success or kick it further down the road by moving the inflexion point again.
Not only bought and sold for English gold, we'll have to put up with the parcel of rogues sitting on their ample arses up here. Poor old Ruth, she's only just escaped from us revolting Jocks.
Never happen of course, an idea as hallucinogenic as the Boris bridge/tunnel etc.
SKS had personal involvement in the Chris Huhne case but knew absolutely nothing about the Jimmy Saville case. One was for forging a speeding ticket reply and one was for the rape of underage learning difficulty girls by one of the most famous men of the previous 50 years.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Starmer v Sunak, a privately educated former barrister and head of the CPS with an Oxford degree v a privately and Oxford and Stanford educated ex Goldman Sachs banker.
The most elitist general election ever? Definitely the end of populism then
Starmer wasn't privately educated. Passed 11+ and went to local Grammar School which at some point stopped being a real state school.
It doesn't matter whether he did or not. This is post-facts politics now.
Where oh where is @isam when we need him. I believe he has recreated in his sitting room an interactive experience of Starmer's school years including the various statutes and ordinances covering the conversion of the school to fee paying. Plus relevant bank accounts from the time including thos of Starmer's parents. .
AIUI, and I could be wrong, when Reigate Grammar converted from being a proper state school to become 'private' there was a lead time, whereby those boys who were there already could stay not fee-paying. Or something like that.
Absolutely makes sense although strictly, that means that Starmer did attend a fee-paying school albeit as you say it is unlikely (but I have no idea) that he paid fees.
I passed the 11+ and went to a Grammar School, where I stayed through to the VIth form. Of those with me, had the school 'converted' to fee paying I'm quite sure that some of the parents could not have paid fees, some parents would not have on principle (mine quite possibly among them) and some would have paid, albeit reluctantly. Some, of course, of the parents would have paid for the 'cachet' for their sons. However, I cannot imagine that a way would not have been found for everyone to stay on, especially as some at least of those who parents could/would not pay were very high flyers. It was 20 years before Starmer was at school, of course.
Of course but he did go to a fee paying school. He may not have paid fees but he went to a fee paying school.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
No he's not of that ilk. Some are on the Left - eg our Owls - but he's not like that. He's not a Starmer fan but he's rooting for Labour and it's plainly sincere. I'd be able to tell if it wasn't. I most always can.
"I'd be able to tell if it wasn't. I most always can."
I have some fascinating real-estate deals that you can be on the ground floor for, if you want. I'll quote you happy.....
Thank you Nigel for that. I recently suggested that he was the worst PM in my lifetime (i.e. since Atlee) and got jumped on from a great height. Admittedly it was Hyufd but even so I was astonished to find that even in so broad a forum as PB there was anyone prepared to argue that he didn't rank lower than all predecessors since WW2.
But you go further. 'In history', you say? Hmmm. Boris....Lord North.....Lord North...Boris.
It's close, I'll grant.
Absurd, Boris got Brexit done, won a landslide election win, delivered one of the most successful vaccination programmes in the world and unemployment still half the level Brown's Labour left in 2010.
After Blair and Thatcher in terms of delivery Boris is the most successful PM of the last 50 years
That assumes Brexit was delivered properly and was a good thing, overeggs the size of the election win, ignores the feebleness of Corbyn and the Labour Party at the time, ignores the many failings in the handling of the pandemic and the very high rates of covid cases and deaths by any reasonable international comparison, and the very deifferent economic scenarios that Brown and Johnson had to deal with.
You also overlook his mendacity and incompetence.
I won't be around to check but I'm pretty sure history will mark him down as one of the worst ever UK PMs. I'd definitely rate him lower than any other post-war PM, and comparisons with the legendary Lord North are not far-fetched.
Worse than the drop after the GFC or Black Wednesday is quite a grim situation.
Yes, indeed. Also, that graph is obviously an average; there will be a large number of low-paid people for whom the effect is proportionately larger, and who probably will already have had a tough time during the pandemic. The only relatively bright spot is that at the moment unemployment doesn't seem to be likely to be a big problem, but it is going to be pretty grim for many.
Not all of this is the government's fault, of course, and their room for manoeuvre is limited, but Sunak's mitigation measures are only going to address a small part of the pain.
It will be interesting to see if voters wake up to the fact that Brexit has made this substantially worse.
The other chart of relevance is this one from the FT which gives some idea of the regional bounce back, and where it is lacking:
The West Midlands being the cockpit of any election, but by far the worst affected doesn't bode well, especially for a government that talks about "The North" and ignores the Midlands.
The East Midlands and Wales and the North doing better than the South East already in post pandemic recovery under this government very significant
Worse than the drop after the GFC or Black Wednesday is quite a grim situation.
Yes, indeed. Also, that graph is obviously an average; there will be a large number of low-paid people for whom the effect is proportionately larger, and who probably will already have had a tough time during the pandemic. The only relatively bright spot is that at the moment unemployment doesn't seem to be likely to be a big problem, but it is going to be pretty grim for many.
Not all of this is the government's fault, of course, and their room for manoeuvre is limited, but Sunak's mitigation measures are only going to address a small part of the pain.
It will be interesting to see if voters wake up to the fact that Brexit has made this substantially worse.
I'm anti-Brexit but I'd struggle to estimate the contribution of Brexit to the forecast decline in living standards, compared to the pandemic.
Is it 9:1 pandemic:Brexit? I can't see how the pandemic doesn't give the government a pass on any negative consequences of Brexit. It's just so obvious as a source of difficulty.
Worse than the drop after the GFC or Black Wednesday is quite a grim situation.
Yes, indeed. Also, that graph is obviously an average; there will be a large number of low-paid people for whom the effect is proportionately larger, and who probably will already have had a tough time during the pandemic. The only relatively bright spot is that at the moment unemployment doesn't seem to be likely to be a big problem, but it is going to be pretty grim for many.
Not all of this is the government's fault, of course, and their room for manoeuvre is limited, but Sunak's mitigation measures are only going to address a small part of the pain.
It will be interesting to see if voters wake up to the fact that Brexit has made this substantially worse.
The other chart of relevance is this one from the FT which gives some idea of the regional bounce back, and where it is lacking:
The West Midlands being the cockpit of any election, but by far the worst affected doesn't bode well, especially for a government that talks about "The North" and ignores the Midlands.
The East Midlands and Wales and the North doing better than the South East already in post pandemic recovery under this government very significant
But N. Ireland which 'hasn't really' left is doing better than anywhere else.
Reasons why Boris doesn't want to go now No 1 to 60million
Boris wants another 4-6 months to get past Brown and May - and he needs to avoid a VONC otherwise he isn't going to get there.
I still think Boris wins a VONC 55% to 45% or so for now
He'll probably beat Spencer Perceval. Unlikely he'll beat Gordon Brown.
Ah, Boris, you old duffer, it could all have been so different. You were played a hugely difficult hand - take over a party with no majority and with two wings in open rebellion, in different directions, deal with the most contentious constitutional issue of the post-war era....
Bit rich to say he was dealt a hugely difficult hand by Brexit when he was the leading campaigner for it. And was at the very least partly responsible for the open rebellion in the party.
On the VONC vote, surely the result last night persuades MPs not to stick the knife in now? Low turnout but 86% of the vote and, regardless of how you look at it, nearly 13,000 people voted for the Conservatives despite all the problems. Agreed, a lot will be postal vote but the point still holds.
Difficult to know for sure that they are voting for the Conservatives because they support the Boris-led regime or because they are heartened that there are finally enough rumblings of discontent about Boris that an end is in sight.
I think anyone seeking to draw too many conclusions from an uncontested by-election in a safe Tory seat is on a fools errand.
Yes utterly pointless. Someone did some comparisons this morning here to Batley and Spen and it wasn't favourable. Also on the news this lunchtime it refered to LDs and Lab supporters voting for the Conservative in support because of the reason for the by election. It is completely impossible to deduce anything. @MrEd desperate for something
Worse than the drop after the GFC or Black Wednesday is quite a grim situation.
Yes, indeed. Also, that graph is obviously an average; there will be a large number of low-paid people for whom the effect is proportionately larger, and who probably will already have had a tough time during the pandemic. The only relatively bright spot is that at the moment unemployment doesn't seem to be likely to be a big problem, but it is going to be pretty grim for many.
Not all of this is the government's fault, of course, and their room for manoeuvre is limited, but Sunak's mitigation measures are only going to address a small part of the pain.
It will be interesting to see if voters wake up to the fact that Brexit has made this substantially worse.
The other chart of relevance is this one from the FT which gives some idea of the regional bounce back, and where it is lacking:
The West Midlands being the cockpit of any election, but by far the worst affected doesn't bode well, especially for a government that talks about "The North" and ignores the Midlands.
The East Midlands and Wales and the North doing better than the South East already in post pandemic recovery under this government very significant
You don't seem to have noticed that NI is doing best of all, under the Protocol.
Not only bought and sold for English gold, we'll have to put up with the parcel of rogues sitting on their ample arses up here. Poor old Ruth, she's only just escaped from us revolting Jocks.
Never happen of course, an idea as hallucinogenic as the Boris bridge/tunnel etc.
Well the previous idea was to use York - it's the same bi-annual plan to move democracy round without actually doing anything.
Worse than the drop after the GFC or Black Wednesday is quite a grim situation.
Yes, indeed. Also, that graph is obviously an average; there will be a large number of low-paid people for whom the effect is proportionately larger, and who probably will already have had a tough time during the pandemic. The only relatively bright spot is that at the moment unemployment doesn't seem to be likely to be a big problem, but it is going to be pretty grim for many.
Not all of this is the government's fault, of course, and their room for manoeuvre is limited, but Sunak's mitigation measures are only going to address a small part of the pain.
It will be interesting to see if voters wake up to the fact that Brexit has made this substantially worse.
The other chart of relevance is this one from the FT which gives some idea of the regional bounce back, and where it is lacking:
The West Midlands being the cockpit of any election, but by far the worst affected doesn't bode well, especially for a government that talks about "The North" and ignores the Midlands.
The East Midlands and Wales and the North doing better than the South East already in post pandemic recovery under this government very significant
On the other hand, those areas might have been much more damaged during the pandemic. More data needed.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
No he's not of that ilk. Some are on the Left - eg our Owls - but he's not like that. He's not a Starmer fan but he's rooting for Labour and it's plainly sincere. I'd be able to tell if it wasn't. I most always can.
"I'd be able to tell if it wasn't. I most always can."
I have some fascinating real-estate deals that you can be on the ground floor for, if you want. I'll quote you happy.....
I see through skin into what lies beneath. The heart, the mind, the soul. Blessing and a curse.
On the VONC vote, surely the result last night persuades MPs not to stick the knife in now? Low turnout but 86% of the vote and, regardless of how you look at it, nearly 13,000 people voted for the Conservatives despite all the problems. Agreed, a lot will be postal vote but the point still holds.
Difficult to know for sure that they are voting for the Conservatives because they support the Boris-led regime or because they are heartened that there are finally enough rumblings of discontent about Boris that an end is in sight.
I think anyone seeking to draw too many conclusions from an uncontested by-election in a safe Tory seat is on a fools errand.
Yes utterly pointless. Someone did some comparisons this morning here to Batley and Spen and it wasn't favourable. Also on the news this lunchtime it refered to LDs and Lab supporters voting for the Conservative in support because of the reason for the by election. It is completely impossible to deduce anything. @MrEd desperate for something
Only useful info is UKIP doing so badly..
Christ, I didn't say it was good for BJ, only that it might make Tory MPs waver in sending in their letters.
I am sure it has been pointed out already, but the story in Southend is the low turnout. A third of what it was in the last election. Number of Con voters less than half. No left wing parties on the ballot as far as I can see. There isn't much in this to shore up Johnson. There wasn't even a credible challenger on the right, no Reform UK or Brexit party. So the way to 'kick' the tories was clearly by not voting at all. These by elections are never particularly representative, but the tories are going to struggle in Southend if they can only manage to drum up 12k votes, and the normal turnout is 45k.
Do we know who made the decision to arrest Paul Gambaccini?
Timeline in this article. Note the comment at the end... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31720761 ...He said he would "enthusiastically" support a 28-day bail limit, adding: "There is no possible excuse for further delay in leaving somebody out to dry. "The only reason for the delay is to try to get somebody else to accuse you. "It's not a proper use of the criminal justice system, it's the misuse of a power they happen to have for other reasons." But DPP Alison Saunders - the most senior prosecutor in England and Wales - said the 28-day limit was "too short" because decisions on whether to press charges take substantially longer in a minority of cases, often involving fraud, corruption or historical sex offences. She insisted that the CPS does not release the names of suspects before charge and stressed that a decision not to press charges is not a determination of innocence or guilt, but a judgment on whether there is sufficient evidence to secure a conviction. Ms Saunders made clear she did not believe the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) owed Gambaccini an apology....
On Alastair Meeks' count, hostile is up to 43... but friendly is up to 100. Still seems momentum is with Boris Johnson.
I suspect there is a lag in AM's data that may mean the friendlies are currently higher than they actually are. Were I a Tory MP I would be avoiding people at the weekend as you know what the conversations are going to be like.
I imagine we will see a slow but steady trickle of letters through until Monday when I would expect some sort of announcement.
Mps already know what their constituents think. It is now surely all about timing and positioning.
Another day breaks. Another day of Tory parliamentary majority wasted. And another day closer to the next election. There’s no refund on time, not that you would know it from the inaction of these gutless Tory MPs.
Two years is a long time in politics but I think the Conservatives may have already cooked their goose for 2024. Yesterday felt an awful lot like Black Wednesday. If you look at the polls from 1992 through 1994 when Blair took over, the damage to the Cons had already been done.
But at the moment I do have a begrudging respect for Rishi Sunak and I fear him. He's very capable and competent. I also liked his calm after the storm demeanour yesterday. Undoubtedly PM material but I think it's now or never.
Liz Truss would be my golden ticket.
No it didn't.
The Labour leads are still nothing like 1994 and absolutely nothing like the over 20% leads they had once Blair took over.
The Tories have also just won the Southern West by election with an increased voteshare on 2019. If the Tories were heading for a landslide defeat they would not have got 86% of the vote last night, no Labour and LD candidate or not
The site is, in my view, overpricing Partygate as an issue, and underpricing cost of living the same way.
If Johnson survives Partygate the call will be the storm is over, whereas in fact the storm for Johnson and all the tories will be just beginning.
Absolutely agree with this. Partygate will be meh for many. Meanwhile, I think the national expectation (whether justified or not) was for the good times to roll/roaring twenties post-pandemic.
Who did people expect was going to pay the costs of lockdowns they were demanding?
Fantastic comment and absolutely.
Public in favour of lockdowns. Public not in favour of tax rises.
*passes out in shock and surprise*
Public in favour of tax rises for the wealthy.
Where did that £8.7bn wasted on PPE go? It's sitting in somebody's bank accounts.
The public are always in favour of tax rises for the wealthy.
And wealthy always means those who have more than they do.
Without exception.
Sorry to be the exception but I'd fully expect any sensible tax increase to hit me more than those with below average incomes and/or savings.
Honestly, I am not super wealthy but like many (not all) on here I am comfortably off. I end up spending stuff on things I don't really need or worse still pushing it into savings I'll never possibly use in my lifetime.
Sure, I can give it away, and almost certainly will in the end, but I could afford to pay more taxes too.
Yes my without exception was wrong. There's you and @kinabalu and others I'm sure. But we're not talking about those who have the luxury of being wealthy enough to advocate extra taxes and that should have been made clear.
With the exception of champagne socialists some of those who are very wealthy. .
I'm with Benpointer, a bit.
I tend to oppose taxing the rich much more because: 1. My belief is that it doesn't work. The rich are not like you and me. That's why they're rich. They're motivated by increasing their wealth, rather than family, an easy life, inertia, whatever motivates most people. And they have the means to do so. If you try to tax them more, they will either go somewhere else, pay specialists to find ways of avoiding the increased liabilities, or do less of the money-making activities that are being so heavily taxed - because they are wealthy enough not to need to. So if you're objective is maximising tax revenue, raising taxes on the rich is a surprisingly poor way to do it. And 2. The rich already pay a frighteningly large proportion of the tax the exchequer receives. A narrow base to tax revenues is undesirable because it's a) fraught with risk and b) engenders a disconnect in the minds of most people between raising of funds for public spending and the outcomes of that public spending, which leads to poor understanding of values. It's like the story Nick tells about the Swiss talking about 'our bridge' and that public spending is 'ours' whereas we say 'they are building a bridge'. Public spending is a public good, but should also be a public cost; not a cost which falls upon some 'other'. (A good example: Andy Burnham can add, I think, £10 to council tax in Greater Manchester, and with it pay for the specific outcome of free public transport for 16-18 year olds. Is this a cost I think there is a benefit in? As it happens, yes, even though I have no children that age. I can see the public good in allowing that cohort wider access to education and other opportunities.)
I'm not against tax rises per se, but I'm always wary when they are narrowly targeted.
Do the rich (however you are defining that) really pay most of the total tax take in the UK?
Also, your point 1 seems to be inconsistent with point 2. If the rich have the motivation and means to avoid paying tax, it seems very unlikely that they are also providing the exchequer with most of their tax revenue.
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 1h The BoE Governor has asked people not to seek wage rises in response to inflation. Such "2nd round effects" can make inflation more persistent & the cost of cutting it higher. Does the govt intend to bolster the Governor's stance by limiting public sector pay rises this year?
The problem with the ONS 2020 data is that the Scottish numbers (for example) are obviously out. Unless finding 109% of an age group fills you with confidence.
It may well be that the vaccination effort has created the best data set on population we have. Which is a bit of a crazy thought, in some ways.
Not only bought and sold for English gold, we'll have to put up with the parcel of rogues sitting on their ample arses up here. Poor old Ruth, she's only just escaped from us revolting Jocks.
Never happen of course, an idea as hallucinogenic as the Boris bridge/tunnel etc.
Well the previous idea was to use York - it's the same bi-annual plan to move democracy round without actually doing anything.
I think there are more obvious routes to spreading democracy around when it comes to the HoL. Again, they'll never happen.
Quite a muscly Owen Jones piece here imo. His main point is we shouldn't be suckered by the Tory Party into thinking if Boris Johnson goes all is fine.
Owen must be weeping at how Starmer's star has risen
It is an all-too-common trait among too many who regarded Corbyn as the messiah. Basically they are willing Starmer to fail, gunning for him at every opportunity and as a consequence just consigning themselves to derision.
In the meantime, I am increasingly impressed with how not only Starmer but also the key players on the Labour front bench are stepping up to the mark. The opposition front bench under Starmer was initially a disappointment but since he rejigged it they seem to have got their collective act together.
I am right of centre but I have always rated Starmer. If he becomes PM, he will become the first PM in a very long time to have done a "proper job" outside of politics, and one that he has risen right to the very top in. He is a very smart cookie.
Yeah, you mean in the way he adopted a policy of "believe all victims" and so we had Carl Beech wreck people's lives? Yup, 'very smart cookie'
Is that the latest right wing nutter meme since the previous one backfired spectacularly on Big Clown? Yes he is a very smart cookie. You are too partisan to see it, or you are really not a very smart cookie, or perhaps both.
Ahem, if you are going to lob insults, it might be better to get your facts right. Who is disagreeing with the statement that Starmer instituted a policy of believe all victims at the CPS? What people are disagreeing with BJ on is that Starmer didn't prosecute Jimmy Saville.
I have no need to defend Starmer on detail. I am not a Labour supporter, and therefore will be able to disagree with him on lots of things. He is very smart though. The fact that you are still an apologist for the worst PM probably in history suggests that you are going to be more and more disappointed that Starmer outmanoeuvres him at every juncture. One of the important things in politics and life in general is not to underestimate your opponents. Smarter Tories are beginning to realise they need someone better than the fat blusterer to outsmart Starmer.
Yes, I see you didn't acknowledge you got your point wrong, did you? Never mind.
Oh dear, I didn't get a point wrong (although it has been known occasionally - well maybe about 1985ish perhaps?). I said Starmer is a smart cookie, which you took exception to because you are so absorbed with thinking that anyone that you disagree with is not effective. He is smart cookie, for you to pretend otherwise is just silly. Starmer is very very smart. That comes as a shock to swivel-eyed far right UKIPy/Johnson apologist Tories. Sorry to have to break it to you.
Starmer was responsible for a policy that wrecked people's lives in a very public way. As far as I am aware, he has never apologised or recognised what he did. That does not sound like a decent person.
As for the "He is smart cookie, for you to pretend otherwise is just silly." that is not a fact, it is your view just as it is my view that he has significant flaws. Just because you say something doesn't make it a fact (although I know that is a common attribute of the pub bore who likes to tell everyone how it is and how right they are).
If you're talking about the CPS stuff, he really wasn't. It's on record that Allison Saunders was the fuck up at CPS.
He really was. Read the Ashcroft biography, Starmer was very much responsible for the CPS adopting the policy.
It seems like the defenders of Starmer at the CPS are trying to have it both ways. If you bring up Saville, the defence is "he didn't have any responsibility even though he headed the CPS", with the Carl Beech episode, it's "well, he wasn't head of the CPS so he didn't have any responsibility for it even though he very much made the decision it should go ahead". It's either one or the other.
No that's a load of crap. Allison Saunders is on record as admitting she fucked up by pushing a policy which removed "alleged" from crimes. It was her policy and she fucked it up.
The culture she created was at fault, Starmer didn't create the culture at the CPS, Saunders did. Like the Big Dog you're spinning really hard to try and use Starmer's time as DPP against him, but his record was pretty decent. Attempting to ascribe his successor's policy to him is like saying Theresa May is to blame for Boris having loads of parties.
As I said, take a look at Ashcroft's biography on his time at CPS and read through it. As I also said, Starmer has not publicly disputed that and / or claimed that Ashcroft misrepresented what he did as far as I am aware. The picture painted is not one of Starmer being the innocent you portray (whereas Ashcroft does essentially say Starmer didn't have any role in the Saville case).
Some people might view a tax-exile, Tory peer, with a history of writing political biographies with un-evidenced claims, to be not the most reliable source on a Labour party leader.
Worse than the drop after the GFC or Black Wednesday is quite a grim situation.
Yes, indeed. Also, that graph is obviously an average; there will be a large number of low-paid people for whom the effect is proportionately larger, and who probably will already have had a tough time during the pandemic. The only relatively bright spot is that at the moment unemployment doesn't seem to be likely to be a big problem, but it is going to be pretty grim for many.
Not all of this is the government's fault, of course, and their room for manoeuvre is limited, but Sunak's mitigation measures are only going to address a small part of the pain.
It will be interesting to see if voters wake up to the fact that Brexit has made this substantially worse.
I'm anti-Brexit but I'd struggle to estimate the contribution of Brexit to the forecast decline in living standards, compared to the pandemic.
Is it 9:1 pandemic:Brexit? I can't see how the pandemic doesn't give the government a pass on any negative consequences of Brexit. It's just so obvious as a source of difficulty.
Best estimate is that the Brexit effect so far is a 15% reduction in our international trade and around 4% hit to GDP (OBR, similar to other reputable estimates). That's enormous - very few policy changes have such a big effect, for better or worse. Obviously the pandemic has drowned that out over the past two years, but the pandemic effect will wane over the next couple of years, whereas the Brexit effect will accumulate.
Reasons why Boris doesn't want to go now No 1 to 60million
Boris wants another 4-6 months to get past Brown and May - and he needs to avoid a VONC otherwise he isn't going to get there.
I still think Boris wins a VONC 55% to 45% or so for now
He'll probably beat Spencer Perceval. Unlikely he'll beat Gordon Brown.
Ah, Boris, you old duffer, it could all have been so different. You were played a hugely difficult hand - take over a party with no majority and with two wings in open rebellion, in different directions, deal with the most contentious constitutional issue of the post-war era....
Bit rich to say he was dealt a hugely difficult hand by Brexit when he was the leading campaigner for it. And was at the very least partly responsible for the open rebellion in the party.
Yes, true. I thought of weaving something into that effect but pithy reflection was already becoming an essay. 'Started from a hugely difficult position' should have been it. But had he not campaigned for it, and had Remain won the day, where would we have been? We'd have been in the dog days of David Cameron's second term, DC's majority would have been whittled away to less than zero, we'd still be at an agonising impasse in our relations with Europe... the starting point wouldn't have been the same but would have been no less difficult.
So blowing up Stormont has zero impact on anything due to external factors.
Exactly what I suspected would happen and the DUP attempt to win votes back from the TUV is starting to fail.
Even my mother (who votes DUP) thinks they are heading for oblivion now that Paisley is dead. She thinks that Norn Iron will be tossed away by "the English" and will have to become federal with the South, or as she put it "have our government again like when I was younger even though they are all useless"
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 1h The BoE Governor has asked people not to seek wage rises in response to inflation. Such "2nd round effects" can make inflation more persistent & the cost of cutting it higher. Does the govt intend to bolster the Governor's stance by limiting public sector pay rises this year?
I heard the Governor this morning and he seemed completely anachronistic. When the country's main economic problems are stagnating real wages and stagnating productivity and one of its biggest strengths is almost full employment, the idea that wage restraint is the answer is hard to fathom. A Tory government pursuing that line would be shooting itself in the foot. There are still plenty of public sector workers who voted conservative at the last election.
It's not anachronistic wanting some restraint in wage demands. There's going to be a large inflationary shock this year, and probably next as well, from factors completely beyond the UK's control. If that feeds into significant wage inflation, the cycle could go on for years.
Up until this winter everyone thought fuel price shocks anachronistic, too.
The question is one of who should suffer the impact of those prices increases.
The shareholders or the workers. Now you may want it to be the workers but in reality that will have a secondary impact on discretionary spending which may have impacts you haven't modelled.
The reality is it's going to be everyone. What the BoE is hoping to avoid is a continuing wage price spiral like we saw in the 70s.
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 1h The BoE Governor has asked people not to seek wage rises in response to inflation. Such "2nd round effects" can make inflation more persistent & the cost of cutting it higher. Does the govt intend to bolster the Governor's stance by limiting public sector pay rises this year?
I heard the Governor this morning and he seemed completely anachronistic. When the country's main economic problems are stagnating real wages and stagnating productivity and one of its biggest strengths is almost full employment, the idea that wage restraint is the answer is hard to fathom. A Tory government pursuing that line would be shooting itself in the foot. There are still plenty of public sector workers who voted conservative at the last election.
It's not anachronistic wanting some restraint in wage demands. There's going to be a large inflationary shock this year, and probably next as well, from factors completely beyond the UK's control. If that feeds into significant wage inflation, the cycle could go on for years.
Up until this winter everyone thought fuel price shocks anachronistic, too.
It really did sound like someone commenting from another era. The reason we have inflation is because commodity prices have soared and supply chains have been squeezed. It's a supply shock, not a demand shock. It is not driven by people having more money in their pockets and being prepared to spend more, and that's not going to be the case if we get long-overdue rises in wages - not even in real wages, just rises to keep up with the inflationary shock.
The UK is not uncompetitively expensive compared with its peers in the labour market either. It's relatively cheap. That's one reason why we have such low labour productivity (that and our service dominated economy as manufacturing is easier to automate than services). I would go as far as to say we need wage price inflation that's enough to put the squeeze on inefficient businesses and force through long-overdue automation. The best time to do this is during a period of very low unemployment.
From a purely political perspective it's also just not somewhere the Tories or any other party are going to go. They have hitched themselves to the pay growth wagon. It is supposed to be one of the benefits of Brexit.
Comments
(And in those non-jobs he has had he's only been sacked for lying a few times.)
.
And to be at all intellectually honest you need also to consider the alternative hypothesis - that, after winning the election, Mr Johnson was in other ways a drag and a disrupting factor in an otherwise rational programme of national government/.
The culture she created was at fault, Starmer didn't create the culture at the CPS, Saunders did. Like the Big Dog you're spinning really hard to try and use Starmer's time as DPP against him, but his record was pretty decent. Attempting to ascribe his successor's policy to him is like saying Theresa May is to blame for Boris having loads of parties.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/mar/06/new-measures-child-sex-abuse
..."We need to settle this," Starmer said. "Ten years or so ago, it was thought that police and prosecutors were over-enthusiastic or over-eager in pursuing [such] cases. Now it is thought they are over-cautious. I don't think we can go on like this."
Starmer called for an approach that was fair to innocent suspects but equally fair to victims. The test for bringing a case – whether there is a realistic prospect of bringing a conviction – must not change but the justice system must look more carefully at the way it assessed credibility, he said.
"At the moment, there is a great deal of focus on whether the victim is telling the truth. We need to look equally carefully at the account the suspect is giving, look at the context, look at the pattern of behaviour, make the necessary links and think about how a case can be be built."
Starmer said authorities had to "clear the decks", agree what the approach should be and draft the way cases were investigated and prosecuted to ensure they were fair to both sides...
Which does not seem to support @MrEd 's contention.
Not quite sure how that demonstrates responsibility for Hogan Howe's failures.
Many seem to be even more Oxford than Oxford - they often seem to believe that doing a post graduate degree at Oxbridge has re-baptised them into the Top Rank of Society.
You are your last degree
This is why part time degrees at Oxford are incredibly popular with upper middle management - they persuade their employers to fork out zillions a year to do a part time Masters at RiceCrispies College. So that they soar into the rank of the elect.
Or something like that.
The worst one of her policies was simply hiding damaging evidence from defence teams by being late with disclosure or simply "forgetting".
I noticed this in Muniria Mizra's resignation letter:
"I have served you for fourteen years and it has been a privilege to do so. You have achieved many important things both as Prime Minister and, before that, as Mayor of London. You are a man of extraordinary abilities with a unique talent for connecting with people.
"You are a better man than many of your detractors will ever understand which is why it is desperately sad that you let yourself down by making a scurrilous accusation against the Leader of the Opposition."
Poignant. And rather sad
Just pointing out what Starmer's on the record statement was.
...At the moment, there is a great deal of focus on whether the victim is telling the truth. We need to look equally carefully at the account the suspect is giving.. Sounds fairly even handed to me.
Saunders took over a few months after that.
Honestly, I am not super wealthy but like many (not all) on here I am comfortably off. I end up spending stuff on things I don't really need or worse still pushing it into savings I'll never possibly use in my lifetime.
Sure, I can give it away, and almost certainly will in the end, but I could afford to pay more taxes too.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-trojan-horse-inquiry-gove-launched-told-bogus
Yet apparently bringing that up at PMQs in regard to responsibility for the actions of a Department of which you are in charge is the worst thing a PM has done in living memory. It baffles me.
The performance of the CPS with the John Worboys case under SKS's leadership was also woeful.
https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/keir-starmer-breaks-silence-amid-growing-pressure-over-john-worboys-release
Here's that striking (& deeply depressing) @bankofengland forecast.
Worse than post financial crisis
Worse than Black Wednesday 1992.
The biggest fall in disposable incomes on record https://t.co/4VZNCHZ2iP
From: https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1489358343630110727?t=FGQlx7AcTW2BoHTItT8blA&s=19
Worse than the drop after the GFC or Black Wednesday is quite a grim situation. If the BoE are being over optimistic again, where will we be?
That quote above though is pure Starmer fence-sitting!
Do we pillory Cameron for rewarding the DPP who failed to prosecute Savile?
It's all a load of tosh, as most people recognise.
He is on TV just this week telling the cameras that the deal he personally negotiated is not working.
As for the Brexit benefits paper earlier this week: it makes Gove's half-decent levelling up paper look like a work of infinite depth and scholarship by comparison.
With the exception of
champagne socialistssome of those who are very wealthy..
Why should he do that?
This is the system of public service we have built, in this country, systematically. The whistleblowers on the various scandals have had their careers ended. Those who kept their doubts to themselves survive and prosper.
But yes, he definitely didn't have parents paying 18 grand a year for 7 years to educate him.
I work with some clients who routinely pay at the lower end of the range and they are invariably the ones with the biggest overhead costs and inefficient processes.
Outstanding suggestion. Is he a fifth columnist?
People make mistakes all the time. The only person who never made a mistake never did anything at all.
If that doesn't make Brexit done, at what point do ongoing negotiations about trading relationships with the EU hhave to conclude for you to admit Brexit is done? Those negotiations will never permanently end! Just because we open trade negotiations with India doesn't mean Indian independence isn't done!
Not all of this is the government's fault, of course, and their room for manoeuvre is limited, but Sunak's mitigation measures are only going to address a small part of the pain.
It will be interesting to see if voters wake up to the fact that Brexit has made this substantially worse.
Gove simply helping them save on train fares
People are always in favour of more taxes on the wealthy where wealthy means more wealthy than them.
However, I cannot imagine that a way would not have been found for everyone to stay on, especially as some at least of those who parents could/would not pay were very high flyers.
It was 20 years before Starmer was at school, of course.
You would have thought this rather sinister figure might learn after embarrassing himself during Potus 2020.
But no.
Time for a short break from PB, I think.
https://twitter.com/lisaocarroll/status/1489562074552406019
And the same is true for Cliff Richard.
There's going to be a large inflationary shock this year, and probably next as well, from factors completely beyond the UK's control. If that feeds into significant wage inflation, the cycle could go on for years.
Up until this winter everyone thought fuel price shocks anachronistic, too.
That they have done.
The West Midlands being the cockpit of any election, but by far the worst affected doesn't bode well, especially for a government that talks about "The North" and ignores the Midlands.
The shareholders or the workers. Now you may want it to be the workers but in reality that will have a secondary impact on discretionary spending which may have impacts you haven't modelled.
I tend to oppose taxing the rich much more because:
1. My belief is that it doesn't work. The rich are not like you and me. That's why they're rich. They're motivated by increasing their wealth, rather than family, an easy life, inertia, whatever motivates most people. And they have the means to do so. If you try to tax them more, they will either go somewhere else, pay specialists to find ways of avoiding the increased liabilities, or do less of the money-making activities that are being so heavily taxed - because they are wealthy enough not to need to. So if you're objective is maximising tax revenue, raising taxes on the rich is a surprisingly poor way to do it.
And 2. The rich already pay a frighteningly large proportion of the tax the exchequer receives. A narrow base to tax revenues is undesirable because it's a) fraught with risk and b) engenders a disconnect in the minds of most people between raising of funds for public spending and the outcomes of that public spending, which leads to poor understanding of values. It's like the story Nick tells about the Swiss talking about 'our bridge' and that public spending is 'ours' whereas we say 'they are building a bridge'. Public spending is a public good, but should also be a public cost; not a cost which falls upon some 'other'. (A good example: Andy Burnham can add, I think, £10 to council tax in Greater Manchester, and with it pay for the specific outcome of free public transport for 16-18 year olds. Is this a cost I think there is a benefit in? As it happens, yes, even though I have no children that age. I can see the public good in allowing that cohort wider access to education and other opportunities.)
I'm not against tax rises per se, but I'm always wary when they are narrowly targeted.
When they get to the predicted inflexion point they can either claim it as a great success or kick it further down the road by moving the inflexion point again.
It is almost Johnsonian ....
https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1489557423534874627
Never happen of course, an idea as hallucinogenic as the Boris bridge/tunnel etc.
One was for forging a speeding ticket reply and one was for the rape of underage learning difficulty girls by one of the most famous men of the previous 50 years.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-16869488
I have some fascinating real-estate deals that you can be on the ground floor for, if you want. I'll quote you happy.....
You also overlook his mendacity and incompetence.
I won't be around to check but I'm pretty sure history will mark him down as one of the worst ever UK PMs. I'd definitely rate him lower than any other post-war PM, and comparisons with the legendary Lord North are not far-fetched.
Is it 9:1 pandemic:Brexit? I can't see how the pandemic doesn't give the government a pass on any negative consequences of Brexit. It's just so obvious as a source of difficulty.
Only useful info is UKIP doing so badly..
Exactly what I suspected would happen and the DUP attempt to win votes back from the TUV is starting to fail.
Note the comment at the end...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31720761
...He said he would "enthusiastically" support a 28-day bail limit, adding: "There is no possible excuse for further delay in leaving somebody out to dry.
"The only reason for the delay is to try to get somebody else to accuse you.
"It's not a proper use of the criminal justice system, it's the misuse of a power they happen to have for other reasons."
But DPP Alison Saunders - the most senior prosecutor in England and Wales - said the 28-day limit was "too short" because decisions on whether to press charges take substantially longer in a minority of cases, often involving fraud, corruption or historical sex offences.
She insisted that the CPS does not release the names of suspects before charge and stressed that a decision not to press charges is not a determination of innocence or guilt, but a judgment on whether there is sufficient evidence to secure a conviction.
Ms Saunders made clear she did not believe the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) owed Gambaccini an apology....
Also, your point 1 seems to be inconsistent with point 2. If the rich have the motivation and means to avoid paying tax, it seems very unlikely that they are also providing the exchequer with most of their tax revenue.
It may well be that the vaccination effort has created the best data set on population we have. Which is a bit of a crazy thought, in some ways.
Plus there are two obvious errors in your statement.
Lady D doesn't live in Scotland any more.
And the HoL isn't moving to Edinburgh even if mr G gets his way.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/mediamonkeyblog/2015/oct/09/isabel-oakeshott-david-cameron-piggatecall-me-dave
Why would the DPP be denying it, if his arrest had nothing to do with the CPS?
But had he not campaigned for it, and had Remain won the day, where would we have been? We'd have been in the dog days of David Cameron's second term, DC's majority would have been whittled away to less than zero, we'd still be at an agonising impasse in our relations with Europe... the starting point wouldn't have been the same but would have been no less difficult.
What the BoE is hoping to avoid is a continuing wage price spiral like we saw in the 70s.
The UK is not uncompetitively expensive compared with its peers in the labour market either. It's relatively cheap. That's one reason why we have such low labour productivity (that and our service dominated economy as manufacturing is easier to automate than services). I would go as far as to say we need wage price inflation that's enough to put the squeeze on inefficient businesses and force through long-overdue automation. The best time to do this is during a period of very low unemployment.
From a purely political perspective it's also just not somewhere the Tories or any other party are going to go. They have hitched themselves to the pay growth wagon. It is supposed to be one of the benefits of Brexit.