"According to Russian media reports, not denied by the UK side, Truss’s chilly encounter with her vastly more experienced Russian opposite number, Sergey Lavrov, included an exchange that went roughly like this.
Truss: ‘Russia must move its troops away from the Ukrainian border, or else…’ Lavrov: ‘Why should we? It’s up to Russia where it deploys its troops inside Russia’ (which, of course, it is). He then asked, for good measure: ‘Do you recognise Russia’s sovereignty over the Rostov and Voronezh regions?’ At which point Truss mounted her high horse and responded with all the authority of the UK’s chief diplomat: ‘The UK will never recognise Russia’s sovereignty over these regions.’
This is where the UK’s ambassador to Moscow, Deborah Bronnert, is said to have leant across to Truss and discreetly informed her that these regions were actually in Russia. Her assumption had apparently been that they were the two so-called breakaway regions on the Ukrainian side of the border."
Lavrov asked a silly trick question and Truss made a mistake. Zero consequence except among the useful idiots in the UK who use it to undermine Truss. Which is why Lavrov did it.
A strong post, StillWaters, a damn fine try at spinning it. Unfortunately you would ask us to believe absolutely everybody would have blundered into that trap - but that isn’t true, is it?
No, she made a mistake. But whatever - people misspeak all the time.
She did not misspeak. The Foreign Secretary might reasonably be expected to have read her brief and maybe glanced at a map on the flight over for crisis talks.
Of course. And then in a discussion the names of 2 oblasts are thrown out. Perhaps she misheard, perhaps she thought they were a different name.
Consider her options:
1. Say they recognise sovereignty - real downside if it’s a quirky babe for Donblas 2. Bristle and push back - establishes the principle; downside risk is she looks a little silly 3. Ignore/redefine the question “we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about X”
I personally would have gone with option 3. But I’m not going to condemn her for going with option 2 and getting called out.
She looks a little silly and gets mocked on Twitter. So f***ng what? Lavrov is an arse and got a cheap shot in. Real world consequence zero.
Sometimes people just need to ignore the trolls.
If she had been asked about Downing St parties she would have given a more diplomatic answer.
Diplomacy is her job. The moment required the upmost care. This is they very essence of her responsibility. Instead of using language with the precision of a surgeon’s knife she bluffed it. Not good.
Sure. She made a misstep on negotiations. Cost: zero
Now we have a choice:
1. Do we mock, undermine and weaken the Foreign Secretary at a time of serious international tension as the Russian hope we will do? 2. Do we not do what the Russians want us to do?
1. Oh fuck right off. She is a narcissistic vacuous self-promoting cretin. 2. The Russians don't really care what we think - Britain has reduced itself to a bit player having left the big stage. Compare and contrast how Russia is dealing with France / EU with how it is dealing with the UK.
Russia knows the UK opposes it and is a prime mover in resisting its advances. Russia believes Macron is vain and wants to be seen as a peace bring so will be more likely to make concessions.
Of course Russia bigs France up.
Some of your guys just don’t have a fucking clue. You let your hatred for this government blind you to another’s plays.
Who are "my guys". Specifically.
A typo - “you guys”. People on this board who allow their dislike of this government blind them to the facts on the ground
"According to Russian media reports, not denied by the UK side, Truss’s chilly encounter with her vastly more experienced Russian opposite number, Sergey Lavrov, included an exchange that went roughly like this.
Truss: ‘Russia must move its troops away from the Ukrainian border, or else…’ Lavrov: ‘Why should we? It’s up to Russia where it deploys its troops inside Russia’ (which, of course, it is). He then asked, for good measure: ‘Do you recognise Russia’s sovereignty over the Rostov and Voronezh regions?’ At which point Truss mounted her high horse and responded with all the authority of the UK’s chief diplomat: ‘The UK will never recognise Russia’s sovereignty over these regions.’
This is where the UK’s ambassador to Moscow, Deborah Bronnert, is said to have leant across to Truss and discreetly informed her that these regions were actually in Russia. Her assumption had apparently been that they were the two so-called breakaway regions on the Ukrainian side of the border."
Lavrov asked a silly trick question and Truss made a mistake. Zero consequence except among the useful idiots in the UK who use it to undermine Truss. Which is why Lavrov did it.
A strong post, StillWaters, a damn fine try at spinning it. Unfortunately you would ask us to believe absolutely everybody would have blundered into that trap - but that isn’t true, is it?
No, she made a mistake. But whatever - people misspeak all the time.
She did not misspeak. The Foreign Secretary might reasonably be expected to have read her brief and maybe glanced at a map on the flight over for crisis talks.
Of course. And then in a discussion the names of 2 oblasts are thrown out. Perhaps she misheard, perhaps she thought they were a different name.
Consider her options:
1. Say they recognise sovereignty - real downside if it’s a quirky babe for Donblas 2. Bristle and push back - establishes the principle; downside risk is she looks a little silly 3. Ignore/redefine the question “we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about X”
I personally would have gone with option 3. But I’m not going to condemn her for going with option 2 and getting called out.
She looks a little silly and gets mocked on Twitter. So f***ng what? Lavrov is an arse and got a cheap shot in. Real world consequence zero.
Sometimes people just need to ignore the trolls.
If she had been asked about Downing St parties she would have given a more diplomatic answer.
Diplomacy is her job. The moment required the upmost care. This is they very essence of her responsibility. Instead of using language with the precision of a surgeon’s knife she bluffed it. Not good.
Sure. She made a misstep on negotiations. Cost: zero
Now we have a choice:
1. Do we mock, undermine and weaken the Foreign Secretary at a time of serious international tension as the Russian hope we will do? 2. Do we not do what the Russians want us to do?
1. Oh fuck right off. She is a narcissistic vacuous self-promoting cretin.
Kinder politics.
The alternative apparently is that we all tearily clutch our hankies as Maggie Truss waves our brave boys off to war from Southampton Dock.
Johnson has just ordered all of the British troops out of Ukraine.
Speak bollocks and carry a limp dick.
The trainers. Not the others that they haven’t admired are there.
The reality is a couple of hundred British trainers in Ukraine are a tactical weakness for the West. They won’t make a difference but I am sure that Putin would love to capture them.
@Dura_Ace simultaneously mocks our inability to send any significant military forces to “defend” Ukraine (and of course we won’t do that, for the same reason France, Germany and America won’t) and then also mocks our highly prudent withdrawal of what small forces we do have there, so - as you say - they don’t become captives of the Red Army
Basically there is a whole class of people on this site, and elsewhere in British political life, who are determined to say that EVERYTHING BRITAIN IS DOES IS WRONG AND STUPID even when they openly contradict themselves. And much of this is Brexit related. And it is fucking boring, as @DavidL notes
Some on here seem to be almost salivating at the thought of Putin invading Ukraine.
"According to Russian media reports, not denied by the UK side, Truss’s chilly encounter with her vastly more experienced Russian opposite number, Sergey Lavrov, included an exchange that went roughly like this.
Truss: ‘Russia must move its troops away from the Ukrainian border, or else…’ Lavrov: ‘Why should we? It’s up to Russia where it deploys its troops inside Russia’ (which, of course, it is). He then asked, for good measure: ‘Do you recognise Russia’s sovereignty over the Rostov and Voronezh regions?’ At which point Truss mounted her high horse and responded with all the authority of the UK’s chief diplomat: ‘The UK will never recognise Russia’s sovereignty over these regions.’
This is where the UK’s ambassador to Moscow, Deborah Bronnert, is said to have leant across to Truss and discreetly informed her that these regions were actually in Russia. Her assumption had apparently been that they were the two so-called breakaway regions on the Ukrainian side of the border."
Lavrov asked a silly trick question and Truss made a mistake. Zero consequence except among the useful idiots in the UK who use it to undermine Truss. Which is why Lavrov did it.
A strong post, StillWaters, a damn fine try at spinning it. Unfortunately you would ask us to believe absolutely everybody would have blundered into that trap - but that isn’t true, is it?
No, she made a mistake. But whatever - people misspeak all the time.
She did not misspeak. The Foreign Secretary might reasonably be expected to have read her brief and maybe glanced at a map on the flight over for crisis talks.
Of course. And then in a discussion the names of 2 oblasts are thrown out. Perhaps she misheard, perhaps she thought they were a different name.
Consider her options:
1. Say they recognise sovereignty - real downside if it’s a quirky babe for Donblas 2. Bristle and push back - establishes the principle; downside risk is she looks a little silly 3. Ignore/redefine the question “we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about X”
I personally would have gone with option 3. But I’m not going to condemn her for going with option 2 and getting called out.
She looks a little silly and gets mocked on Twitter. So f***ng what? Lavrov is an arse and got a cheap shot in. Real world consequence zero.
Sometimes people just need to ignore the trolls.
If she had been asked about Downing St parties she would have given a more diplomatic answer.
Diplomacy is her job. The moment required the upmost care. This is they very essence of her responsibility. Instead of using language with the precision of a surgeon’s knife she bluffed it. Not good.
Sure. She made a misstep on negotiations. Cost: zero
Now we have a choice:
1. Do we mock, undermine and weaken the Foreign Secretary at a time of serious international tension as the Russian hope we will do? 2. Do we not do what the Russians want us to do?
1. Oh fuck right off. She is a narcissistic vacuous self-promoting cretin. 2. The Russians don't really care what we think - Britain has reduced itself to a bit player having left the big stage. Compare and contrast how Russia is dealing with France / EU with how it is dealing with the UK.
As far as I can see, Russia’s dealings with France have consisted of entertaining Macron to a bizarre meeting across the longest table in Europe, asking him to get tested, indulging his popinjay pretensions as a leader of peace and the man who brokered a new age of global harmony…. And then invading Ukraine anyway (if the diplomatic rumours are right)
He’s gonna look a total twerp if they DO invade, now. Dare I say it: even more than Ms Truss
Be fair - the dining room table in Bruce Wayne Manor in Batman (1988) was longer.
Diplomacy often ends in failure. Diplomacy rarely ends in open mockery. She flew to Moscow to cosplay Thatcher warn Russia about its threat to Ukraine and its border claims. Without having the First Clue where any of those places were. Unsurprisingly Lavrov just laughed her off as being irrelevant. Its like the big kids are doing something and the little kid wants in. Doesn't understand the rules, or what is happening, but heard the big kids say a word which they are now confidently repeating out of context.
Cue mocking laughter. Aimed at Britain.
You do wonder how much further this lot can trash the UK, looked on as a banana republic nowadays.
The Sunday Rawnsley: Eager to wound, but unwilling to strike, Sir John and Mrs May reflect the state of the party they once led. It is simultaneously infuriated and paralysed by a scandal that is also a crisis. This leaves the Tory party and with it the government, marooned in no man’s land.
Waiting to see if the polls are verified by a heavy defeat at the May local elections “puts our councillors in the executioner’s tumbril”, as another MP puts it. The prime minister is solely focused on trying to save his own skin. He always governed from one week to the next. Now he governs from one day to the next.
One Conservative MP reports: “The phrase you hear a lot of in the tearoom is ‘we can’t go on like this’.” So I asked him whether he had submitted a letter calling for a confidence vote. He confessed that he hadn’t, before arguing that it was too early to move. He was choosing to go on like this… there is the substantial group who want Mr Johnson gone, but are hesitant about acting. “One of the worst outcomes is that we get a confidence vote and he narrowly survives it,” says one senior Tory. “If he wins by just one vote, he will stay. Anyone else would walk, but he will stay.”
The Conservative party will pay a penalty for its prevarication – indeed, it already is paying. The longer this goes on, the more this looks like a lawless government that thinks rules are for everyone else and the deeper the reputational damage sustained by the Tories. “A month ago, this was hurting only Boris,” says one former cabinet minister. “Now, it is hurting the whole government. The more they put up ministers to make a defence of him, the more it damages all of us.”
So I asked this senior Tory whether he had put in a confidence letter and discovered he was another who hadn’t done so yet. The government will remain trapped in this nightmare no man’s land, and the country with it, until Tory MPs cease equivocating and a critical mass of them decide to bring things to a head.
What a bunch of spineless wasters most Tory MPs are.
And meanwhile, the Government achieves nothing - save to bleed the young ruthlessly in order to stuff the mouths of the elderly with gold.
Research by the Intergenerational Foundation thinktank, to be published on Monday, claims that younger workers are being unfairly targeted by the government in a “tax by stealth” caused by freezes on income tax brackets and the student loan repayment threshold, as well as April’s national insurance rise.
Low-earning young people will be hit hardest by the changes, claims the report, having a significant impact on their take home pay, disposable income and potential to save for housing and pensions.
Researchers calculate a graduate earning £27,000 a year will see their deductions rise by about 20% over the next four years – from 18% of their pay to 22%. They predict their disposable income will drop by almost 30%.
...
Labelling under-30s the “packhorse generation”, the thinktank claims they are being targeted by the government, which it says is using high inflation to pull more low-income, and especially younger, workers into taxation sooner.
The mouths of the elderly are not being stuffed with gold. The state pension is less than £10,000 a year.
So where is the money going then because its those working a full week and don't have children who are paying for it.
You seem to forget those "rich" pensioners paid for 50 years to get their £9K a year maximum. Where did all their money go. You Tories ensure we get teh worst pension in the developed world, always grasping for more and blaming th epoor for it , most unedyfying.
Surely "true" Conservatism would be more like the pre-war, pre-Labour situation were you work until you drop dead thus placing no burden on the state pockets of the wealthy?
The Sunday Rawnsley: Eager to wound, but unwilling to strike, Sir John and Mrs May reflect the state of the party they once led. It is simultaneously infuriated and paralysed by a scandal that is also a crisis. This leaves the Tory party and with it the government, marooned in no man’s land.
Waiting to see if the polls are verified by a heavy defeat at the May local elections “puts our councillors in the executioner’s tumbril”, as another MP puts it. The prime minister is solely focused on trying to save his own skin. He always governed from one week to the next. Now he governs from one day to the next.
One Conservative MP reports: “The phrase you hear a lot of in the tearoom is ‘we can’t go on like this’.” So I asked him whether he had submitted a letter calling for a confidence vote. He confessed that he hadn’t, before arguing that it was too early to move. He was choosing to go on like this… there is the substantial group who want Mr Johnson gone, but are hesitant about acting. “One of the worst outcomes is that we get a confidence vote and he narrowly survives it,” says one senior Tory. “If he wins by just one vote, he will stay. Anyone else would walk, but he will stay.”
The Conservative party will pay a penalty for its prevarication – indeed, it already is paying. The longer this goes on, the more this looks like a lawless government that thinks rules are for everyone else and the deeper the reputational damage sustained by the Tories. “A month ago, this was hurting only Boris,” says one former cabinet minister. “Now, it is hurting the whole government. The more they put up ministers to make a defence of him, the more it damages all of us.”
So I asked this senior Tory whether he had put in a confidence letter and discovered he was another who hadn’t done so yet. The government will remain trapped in this nightmare no man’s land, and the country with it, until Tory MPs cease equivocating and a critical mass of them decide to bring things to a head.
What a bunch of spineless wasters most Tory MPs are.
And meanwhile, the Government achieves nothing - save to bleed the young ruthlessly in order to stuff the mouths of the elderly with gold.
Research by the Intergenerational Foundation thinktank, to be published on Monday, claims that younger workers are being unfairly targeted by the government in a “tax by stealth” caused by freezes on income tax brackets and the student loan repayment threshold, as well as April’s national insurance rise.
Low-earning young people will be hit hardest by the changes, claims the report, having a significant impact on their take home pay, disposable income and potential to save for housing and pensions.
Researchers calculate a graduate earning £27,000 a year will see their deductions rise by about 20% over the next four years – from 18% of their pay to 22%. They predict their disposable income will drop by almost 30%.
...
Labelling under-30s the “packhorse generation”, the thinktank claims they are being targeted by the government, which it says is using high inflation to pull more low-income, and especially younger, workers into taxation sooner.
The mouths of the elderly are not being stuffed with gold. The state pension is less than £10,000 a year.
So where is the money going then because its those working a full week and don't have children who are paying for it.
You seem to forget those "rich" pensioners paid for 50 years to get their £9K a year maximum. Where did all their money go. You Tories ensure we get teh worst pension in the developed world, always grasping for more and blaming th epoor for it , most unedyfying.
It’s amazing how many of the so called hard done by younger generation seem to think older people just had everything handed to them on a plate without having to work for it or sacrifice anything, I’ve worked for 40 years, over that time I’ve paid towards millions of peoples pensions and when the time comes in ten years or so time I will get my pension. That’s perfectly fair.
The trivialisation of British politics continues this morning. We are now apparently focused on a mistatement by Truss rather than the risk of the largest war in Europe since WW2.
On the domestic front we are obsessed about people working in close proximity to each other having a drink afterwards instead of addressing a serious cost of living squeeze, inflation that incompetence at the BoE Monetary Policy Committee has allowed to get out of hand, a record waiting list for the NHS, a police service that is plainly not fit for purpose and serious economic threats of further disruption from either a war in Ukraine or an invasion of Taiwan.
It is hard not to notice that these mad obsessions tend to be driven by those who have never forgiven Johnson for Brexit. Its irrational and, frankly, boring. This site is still highly educational with informed commentators on many issues but the effort/reward ratios are not what they were.
I am - surprisingly you may think - in full agreement with you. At a time when we need serious political ideas and leadership we instead have a circus.
Have to apply a bit of context though. I am roasting Truss, true. By itself, her "misstatement" wouldn't matter too much. But look at the wider context. We don't pose much of a military threat to anyone after savagely cutting our armed forces back - yet we still talk like we do which is openly sneered at by the Russians. We have done something which all our friends and allies not only think is bonkers but they can prove it, yet we insist we are right and they are all wrong. We then try to pull those same allies with us and wonder why they are less responsive than before. We have a PM who flew to the UN General Assembly to berate Kermit the Frog for his mistreatment of Miss Piggy and then made such a pigs ear of the climate summit that the minister responsible was in tears.
So in context, her misstatement is the latest step on a journey down irrelevance lane. The only thing we do have some influence over is Russian money in the UK which this government is strangely reluctant to go after. Can't think why...
Thats the Ukraine stuff. The domestic stuff is far more pressing. But we can't do much about those for two very simple reasons: 1. The PM, half the Cabinet and a significant number of government MPs have a laissez faire approach to the rule of law. Trust in government to do the basics legally has crumbled and that makes it very difficult to try and tackle the major policy crises we have 2. The PM, half the Cabinet and a significant number of government MPs have a laissez faire approach to facts. The PM keeps stating statistics which the government statisticians keep telling him are flat out lies. This isn't the usual political spin, this is an open disregard for the truth. How can we tackle things like the cost of living crisis when the government thinks black is white and quotes figures that simply aren't correct?
So yes, I agree with you. There are so many urgent critical things we need to deal with. Until we remove Boris Johnson from office and restore the rule of law, honesty, propriety and ethics to government we are stuck. We cannot tackle all the issues you rightly highlight until we have a government who are honest, recognise the issues even exist and are seen as able to do the basics like obey their own laws.
"According to Russian media reports, not denied by the UK side, Truss’s chilly encounter with her vastly more experienced Russian opposite number, Sergey Lavrov, included an exchange that went roughly like this.
Truss: ‘Russia must move its troops away from the Ukrainian border, or else…’ Lavrov: ‘Why should we? It’s up to Russia where it deploys its troops inside Russia’ (which, of course, it is). He then asked, for good measure: ‘Do you recognise Russia’s sovereignty over the Rostov and Voronezh regions?’ At which point Truss mounted her high horse and responded with all the authority of the UK’s chief diplomat: ‘The UK will never recognise Russia’s sovereignty over these regions.’
This is where the UK’s ambassador to Moscow, Deborah Bronnert, is said to have leant across to Truss and discreetly informed her that these regions were actually in Russia. Her assumption had apparently been that they were the two so-called breakaway regions on the Ukrainian side of the border."
Lavrov asked a silly trick question and Truss made a mistake. Zero consequence except among the useful idiots in the UK who use it to undermine Truss. Which is why Lavrov did it.
A strong post, StillWaters, a damn fine try at spinning it. Unfortunately you would ask us to believe absolutely everybody would have blundered into that trap - but that isn’t true, is it?
No, she made a mistake. But whatever - people misspeak all the time.
She did not misspeak. The Foreign Secretary might reasonably be expected to have read her brief and maybe glanced at a map on the flight over for crisis talks.
Of course. And then in a discussion the names of 2 oblasts are thrown out. Perhaps she misheard, perhaps she thought they were a different name.
Consider her options:
1. Say they recognise sovereignty - real downside if it’s a quirky babe for Donblas 2. Bristle and push back - establishes the principle; downside risk is she looks a little silly 3. Ignore/redefine the question “we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about X”
I personally would have gone with option 3. But I’m not going to condemn her for going with option 2 and getting called out.
She looks a little silly and gets mocked on Twitter. So f***ng what? Lavrov is an arse and got a cheap shot in. Real world consequence zero.
Sometimes people just need to ignore the trolls.
If she had been asked about Downing St parties she would have given a more diplomatic answer.
Diplomacy is her job. The moment required the upmost care. This is they very essence of her responsibility. Instead of using language with the precision of a surgeon’s knife she bluffed it. Not good.
Sure. She made a misstep on negotiations. Cost: zero
Now we have a choice:
1. Do we mock, undermine and weaken the Foreign Secretary at a time of serious international tension as the Russian hope we will do? 2. Do we not do what the Russians want us to do?
1. Oh fuck right off. She is a narcissistic vacuous self-promoting cretin. 2. The Russians don't really care what we think - Britain has reduced itself to a bit player having left the big stage. Compare and contrast how Russia is dealing with France / EU with how it is dealing with the UK.
As far as I can see, Russia’s dealings with France have consisted of entertaining Macron to a bizarre meeting across the longest table in Europe, asking him to get tested, indulging his popinjay pretensions as a leader of peace and the man who brokered a new age of global harmony…. And then invading Ukraine anyway (if the diplomatic rumours are right)
He’s gonna look a total twerp if they DO invade, now. Dare I say it: even more than Ms Truss
Be fair - the dining room table in Bruce Wayne Manor in Batman (1988) was longer.
Diplomacy often ends in failure. Diplomacy rarely ends in open mockery. She flew to Moscow to cosplay Thatcher warn Russia about its threat to Ukraine and its border claims. Without having the First Clue where any of those places were. Unsurprisingly Lavrov just laughed her off as being irrelevant. Its like the big kids are doing something and the little kid wants in. Doesn't understand the rules, or what is happening, but heard the big kids say a word which they are now confidently repeating out of context.
Cue mocking laughter. Aimed at Britain.
No, it’s just your tiresome desire to belittle Britain and celebrate any perceived humiliation. It really is pathological
Is the UK a superpower? No. Is it as important as, say, China? Of course not
Is Britain a pathetically oversized version of Ireland, with a bit less rain? No, not that either
It is a senior mid-ranking power, armed with nukes, a member of the G7, NATO, the UNSC, probably the most important ally of the USA alongside Japan, and the UK also wields much soft power, ESPECIALLY over Russia, with their deep links to London (because this cuts both ways). How many of Russia’s top ten thousand send their kids to British private schools, or British universities? A LOT. And a lot more than France or Germany, to name two other examples of significant European powers
Has the UK lost influence over the EU’s foreign policy since Brexit? Yes. But what is that foreign policy? Search me. it varies depending on whether you are taking to Brussels, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Budapest, Athens, Zagreb or some fringe group of amputee pensioners in Wroclaw
How am I belittling Britain? I am nobody - an anonymous username on a forum talking to other (mostly) anonymous people.
What belittles Britain is reducing our armed forces so that we can barely defend our own airspace and territorial interests, never mind being able to project power as we once did. What belittles Britain is removing ourselves from the regional block and talking like we've grown in stature rather than been reduced in stature. What belittles Britain is doing something that none of our friends and allies understands and then haughtily insisting that we are right and everyone else is wrong What belittles Britain is making ourselves a laughing stock by having a clown PM who makes a speech to the UN General Assembly about Kermit the Frog What belittles Britain is huffing and puffing about the Ukraine then pulling what few troops we have out just before the invasion What belittles Britain is sending a vacuous "diplomat" to Russia to lecture Russia about borders without being able to understand where Russia is on a map.
You make the valid point about our economic power. We are not a big military power as we once were. We are not the kingmaker in one of the global power blocks as we once were. But we still have a big economy and a lot of Russians own a lot of our politicians it. We should have been threatening to freeze those assets, not impotently making military threats we can't back up. But no, Truss wants to be Thatcher. And me calling out our self-evident global embarrassment is either siding with Russia or belittling Britain apparently.
"According to Russian media reports, not denied by the UK side, Truss’s chilly encounter with her vastly more experienced Russian opposite number, Sergey Lavrov, included an exchange that went roughly like this.
Truss: ‘Russia must move its troops away from the Ukrainian border, or else…’ Lavrov: ‘Why should we? It’s up to Russia where it deploys its troops inside Russia’ (which, of course, it is). He then asked, for good measure: ‘Do you recognise Russia’s sovereignty over the Rostov and Voronezh regions?’ At which point Truss mounted her high horse and responded with all the authority of the UK’s chief diplomat: ‘The UK will never recognise Russia’s sovereignty over these regions.’
This is where the UK’s ambassador to Moscow, Deborah Bronnert, is said to have leant across to Truss and discreetly informed her that these regions were actually in Russia. Her assumption had apparently been that they were the two so-called breakaway regions on the Ukrainian side of the border."
Lavrov asked a silly trick question and Truss made a mistake. Zero consequence except among the useful idiots in the UK who use it to undermine Truss. Which is why Lavrov did it.
A strong post, StillWaters, a damn fine try at spinning it. Unfortunately you would ask us to believe absolutely everybody would have blundered into that trap - but that isn’t true, is it?
No, she made a mistake. But whatever - people misspeak all the time.
She did not misspeak. The Foreign Secretary might reasonably be expected to have read her brief and maybe glanced at a map on the flight over for crisis talks.
Of course. And then in a discussion the names of 2 oblasts are thrown out. Perhaps she misheard, perhaps she thought they were a different name.
Consider her options:
1. Say they recognise sovereignty - real downside if it’s a quirky babe for Donblas 2. Bristle and push back - establishes the principle; downside risk is she looks a little silly 3. Ignore/redefine the question “we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about X”
I personally would have gone with option 3. But I’m not going to condemn her for going with option 2 and getting called out.
She looks a little silly and gets mocked on Twitter. So f***ng what? Lavrov is an arse and got a cheap shot in. Real world consequence zero.
Sometimes people just need to ignore the trolls.
If she had been asked about Downing St parties she would have given a more diplomatic answer.
Diplomacy is her job. The moment required the upmost care. This is they very essence of her responsibility. Instead of using language with the precision of a surgeon’s knife she bluffed it. Not good.
Sure. She made a misstep on negotiations. Cost: zero
Now we have a choice:
1. Do we mock, undermine and weaken the Foreign Secretary at a time of serious international tension as the Russian hope we will do? 2. Do we not do what the Russians want us to do?
1. Oh fuck right off. She is a narcissistic vacuous self-promoting cretin. 2. The Russians don't really care what we think - Britain has reduced itself to a bit player having left the big stage. Compare and contrast how Russia is dealing with France / EU with how it is dealing with the UK.
Russia knows the UK opposes it and is a prime mover in resisting its advances. Russia believes Macron is vain and wants to be seen as a peace bring so will be more likely to make concessions.
Of course Russia bigs France up.
Some of your guys just don’t have a fucking clue. You let your hatred for this government blind you to another’s plays.
If Macron’s vanity brings about a peaceful settlement, I’m all for it.
The Sunday Rawnsley: Eager to wound, but unwilling to strike, Sir John and Mrs May reflect the state of the party they once led. It is simultaneously infuriated and paralysed by a scandal that is also a crisis. This leaves the Tory party and with it the government, marooned in no man’s land.
Waiting to see if the polls are verified by a heavy defeat at the May local elections “puts our councillors in the executioner’s tumbril”, as another MP puts it. The prime minister is solely focused on trying to save his own skin. He always governed from one week to the next. Now he governs from one day to the next.
One Conservative MP reports: “The phrase you hear a lot of in the tearoom is ‘we can’t go on like this’.” So I asked him whether he had submitted a letter calling for a confidence vote. He confessed that he hadn’t, before arguing that it was too early to move. He was choosing to go on like this… there is the substantial group who want Mr Johnson gone, but are hesitant about acting. “One of the worst outcomes is that we get a confidence vote and he narrowly survives it,” says one senior Tory. “If he wins by just one vote, he will stay. Anyone else would walk, but he will stay.”
The Conservative party will pay a penalty for its prevarication – indeed, it already is paying. The longer this goes on, the more this looks like a lawless government that thinks rules are for everyone else and the deeper the reputational damage sustained by the Tories. “A month ago, this was hurting only Boris,” says one former cabinet minister. “Now, it is hurting the whole government. The more they put up ministers to make a defence of him, the more it damages all of us.”
So I asked this senior Tory whether he had put in a confidence letter and discovered he was another who hadn’t done so yet. The government will remain trapped in this nightmare no man’s land, and the country with it, until Tory MPs cease equivocating and a critical mass of them decide to bring things to a head.
What a bunch of spineless wasters most Tory MPs are.
And meanwhile, the Government achieves nothing - save to bleed the young ruthlessly in order to stuff the mouths of the elderly with gold.
Research by the Intergenerational Foundation thinktank, to be published on Monday, claims that younger workers are being unfairly targeted by the government in a “tax by stealth” caused by freezes on income tax brackets and the student loan repayment threshold, as well as April’s national insurance rise.
Low-earning young people will be hit hardest by the changes, claims the report, having a significant impact on their take home pay, disposable income and potential to save for housing and pensions.
Researchers calculate a graduate earning £27,000 a year will see their deductions rise by about 20% over the next four years – from 18% of their pay to 22%. They predict their disposable income will drop by almost 30%.
...
Labelling under-30s the “packhorse generation”, the thinktank claims they are being targeted by the government, which it says is using high inflation to pull more low-income, and especially younger, workers into taxation sooner.
The mouths of the elderly are not being stuffed with gold. The state pension is less than £10,000 a year.
Well, of course, those reliant entirely on the state pension get a good hard kicking along with the rest of the poor, but the poor will be largely sticking with Labour and the Government doesn't care about their fate.
Most older voters are owner-occupiers, and have seen the value of their property appreciate by 10% in the last twelve months alone - mountains of capital that can be readily accessed through downsizing and equity release. A great many will also be benefiting from occupational pension schemes that were vastly more generous in the past than they are today: defined benefit pensions, especially in the private sector, are almost a thing of the past; money purchase schemes are rubbish by comparison. Meanwhile, for the expectant heirs, inheritance tax is IIRC lower than it has ever been.
The dramatic generational gap we've seen opening up in voting patterns hasn't happened by chance. The Tory core vote, besides a modest number of genuinely rich people, consists of comfortably off people born before about 1980: middle class pensioners and their heirs. In crude terms, the current structure of the economy serves to syphon off the earnings of younger workers to keep the state running, whilst asset holdings that are mainly concentrated in the hands of people over about 45 or 50 are treated with kid gloves and left to continuously inflate, courtesy of rock bottom interest rates and quantitative easing.
The higher house prices inflate, the richer the old become and the harder it gets for the young to afford to live. So much for all the trite, laughable nonsense about the dignity of work. So much for Mrs Thatcher's property owning democracy as well. It's also small wonder that the young have increasingly given up bothering to reproduce. Ours is a very sick society.
Now we have the greedy "me me " carpetbaggers in wanting to mug pensioners, greedy no marks who would rather mug a pensioner than go out and earn their own money. Lovely people on here for sure, full of the milk of human kindness, oh to be a Tory.
"According to Russian media reports, not denied by the UK side, Truss’s chilly encounter with her vastly more experienced Russian opposite number, Sergey Lavrov, included an exchange that went roughly like this.
Truss: ‘Russia must move its troops away from the Ukrainian border, or else…’ Lavrov: ‘Why should we? It’s up to Russia where it deploys its troops inside Russia’ (which, of course, it is). He then asked, for good measure: ‘Do you recognise Russia’s sovereignty over the Rostov and Voronezh regions?’ At which point Truss mounted her high horse and responded with all the authority of the UK’s chief diplomat: ‘The UK will never recognise Russia’s sovereignty over these regions.’
This is where the UK’s ambassador to Moscow, Deborah Bronnert, is said to have leant across to Truss and discreetly informed her that these regions were actually in Russia. Her assumption had apparently been that they were the two so-called breakaway regions on the Ukrainian side of the border."
Lavrov asked a silly trick question and Truss made a mistake. Zero consequence except among the useful idiots in the UK who use it to undermine Truss. Which is why Lavrov did it.
Well, in that case I actually feel slightly more kindly to Lavrov for doing us all such a massive favour.
Only slightly, mind. He’s still the useful idiot of a mass murdering twat who would look much better having a nasty and amusing accident with a ten foot pole that goes up his arse.
It’s funny the number of people who rush to help the Russians by undermining a piece in the West’s chessboard.
"According to Russian media reports, not denied by the UK side, Truss’s chilly encounter with her vastly more experienced Russian opposite number, Sergey Lavrov, included an exchange that went roughly like this.
Truss: ‘Russia must move its troops away from the Ukrainian border, or else…’ Lavrov: ‘Why should we? It’s up to Russia where it deploys its troops inside Russia’ (which, of course, it is). He then asked, for good measure: ‘Do you recognise Russia’s sovereignty over the Rostov and Voronezh regions?’ At which point Truss mounted her high horse and responded with all the authority of the UK’s chief diplomat: ‘The UK will never recognise Russia’s sovereignty over these regions.’
This is where the UK’s ambassador to Moscow, Deborah Bronnert, is said to have leant across to Truss and discreetly informed her that these regions were actually in Russia. Her assumption had apparently been that they were the two so-called breakaway regions on the Ukrainian side of the border."
Lavrov asked a silly trick question and Truss made a mistake. Zero consequence except among the useful idiots in the UK who use it to undermine Truss. Which is why Lavrov did it.
A strong post, StillWaters, a damn fine try at spinning it. Unfortunately you would ask us to believe absolutely everybody would have blundered into that trap - but that isn’t true, is it?
No, she made a mistake. But whatever - people misspeak all the time.
She did not misspeak. The Foreign Secretary might reasonably be expected to have read her brief and maybe glanced at a map on the flight over for crisis talks.
Of course. And then in a discussion the names of 2 oblasts are thrown out. Perhaps she misheard, perhaps she thought they were a different name.
Consider her options:
1. Say they recognise sovereignty - real downside if it’s a quirky babe for Donblas 2. Bristle and push back - establishes the principle; downside risk is she looks a little silly 3. Ignore/redefine the question “we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about X”
I personally would have gone with option 3. But I’m not going to condemn her for going with option 2 and getting called out.
She looks a little silly and gets mocked on Twitter. So f***ng what? Lavrov is an arse and got a cheap shot in. Real world consequence zero.
Sometimes people just need to ignore the trolls.
If she had been asked about Downing St parties she would have given a more diplomatic answer.
Diplomacy is her job. The moment required the upmost care. This is they very essence of her responsibility. Instead of using language with the precision of a surgeon’s knife she bluffed it. Not good.
Sure. She made a misstep on negotiations. Cost: zero
Now we have a choice:
1. Do we mock, undermine and weaken the Foreign Secretary at a time of serious international tension as the Russian hope we will do? 2. Do we not do what the Russians want us to do?
1. Oh fuck right off. She is a narcissistic vacuous self-promoting cretin.
Kinder politics.
The alternative apparently is that we all tearily clutch our hankies as Maggie Truss waves our brave boys off to war from Southampton Dock.
Johnson has just ordered all of the British troops out of Ukraine.
Speak bollocks and carry a limp dick.
The trainers. Not the others that they haven’t admired are there.
The reality is a couple of hundred British trainers in Ukraine are a tactical weakness for the West. They won’t make a difference but I am sure that Putin would love to capture them.
@Dura_Ace simultaneously mocks our inability to send any significant military forces to “defend” Ukraine (and of course we won’t do that, for the same reason France, Germany and America won’t) and then also mocks our highly prudent withdrawal of what small forces we do have there, so - as you say - they don’t become captives of the Red Army
Basically there is a whole class of people on this site, and elsewhere in British political life, who are determined to say that EVERYTHING BRITAIN IS DOES IS WRONG AND STUPID even when they openly contradict themselves. And much of this is Brexit related. And it is fucking boring, as @DavidL notes
Bored? Take a load of poppers and sit on one of your flint toys.
"According to Russian media reports, not denied by the UK side, Truss’s chilly encounter with her vastly more experienced Russian opposite number, Sergey Lavrov, included an exchange that went roughly like this.
Truss: ‘Russia must move its troops away from the Ukrainian border, or else…’ Lavrov: ‘Why should we? It’s up to Russia where it deploys its troops inside Russia’ (which, of course, it is). He then asked, for good measure: ‘Do you recognise Russia’s sovereignty over the Rostov and Voronezh regions?’ At which point Truss mounted her high horse and responded with all the authority of the UK’s chief diplomat: ‘The UK will never recognise Russia’s sovereignty over these regions.’
This is where the UK’s ambassador to Moscow, Deborah Bronnert, is said to have leant across to Truss and discreetly informed her that these regions were actually in Russia. Her assumption had apparently been that they were the two so-called breakaway regions on the Ukrainian side of the border."
Lavrov asked a silly trick question and Truss made a mistake. Zero consequence except among the useful idiots in the UK who use it to undermine Truss. Which is why Lavrov did it.
A strong post, StillWaters, a damn fine try at spinning it. Unfortunately you would ask us to believe absolutely everybody would have blundered into that trap - but that isn’t true, is it?
No, she made a mistake. But whatever - people misspeak all the time.
She did not misspeak. The Foreign Secretary might reasonably be expected to have read her brief and maybe glanced at a map on the flight over for crisis talks.
Of course. And then in a discussion the names of 2 oblasts are thrown out. Perhaps she misheard, perhaps she thought they were a different name.
Consider her options:
1. Say they recognise sovereignty - real downside if it’s a quirky babe for Donblas 2. Bristle and push back - establishes the principle; downside risk is she looks a little silly 3. Ignore/redefine the question “we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about X”
I personally would have gone with option 3. But I’m not going to condemn her for going with option 2 and getting called out.
She looks a little silly and gets mocked on Twitter. So f***ng what? Lavrov is an arse and got a cheap shot in. Real world consequence zero.
Sometimes people just need to ignore the trolls.
If she had been asked about Downing St parties she would have given a more diplomatic answer.
Diplomacy is her job. The moment required the upmost care. This is they very essence of her responsibility. Instead of using language with the precision of a surgeon’s knife she bluffed it. Not good.
Sure. She made a misstep on negotiations. Cost: zero
Now we have a choice:
1. Do we mock, undermine and weaken the Foreign Secretary at a time of serious international tension as the Russian hope we will do? 2. Do we not do what the Russians want us to do?
1. Oh fuck right off. She is a narcissistic vacuous self-promoting cretin. 2. The Russians don't really care what we think - Britain has reduced itself to a bit player having left the big stage. Compare and contrast how Russia is dealing with France / EU with how it is dealing with the UK.
Russia knows the UK opposes it and is a prime mover in resisting its advances. Russia believes Macron is vain and wants to be seen as a peace bring so will be more likely to make concessions.
Of course Russia bigs France up.
Some of your guys just don’t have a fucking clue. You let your hatred for this government blind you to another’s plays.
The Sunday Rawnsley: Eager to wound, but unwilling to strike, Sir John and Mrs May reflect the state of the party they once led. It is simultaneously infuriated and paralysed by a scandal that is also a crisis. This leaves the Tory party and with it the government, marooned in no man’s land.
Waiting to see if the polls are verified by a heavy defeat at the May local elections “puts our councillors in the executioner’s tumbril”, as another MP puts it. The prime minister is solely focused on trying to save his own skin. He always governed from one week to the next. Now he governs from one day to the next.
One Conservative MP reports: “The phrase you hear a lot of in the tearoom is ‘we can’t go on like this’.” So I asked him whether he had submitted a letter calling for a confidence vote. He confessed that he hadn’t, before arguing that it was too early to move. He was choosing to go on like this… there is the substantial group who want Mr Johnson gone, but are hesitant about acting. “One of the worst outcomes is that we get a confidence vote and he narrowly survives it,” says one senior Tory. “If he wins by just one vote, he will stay. Anyone else would walk, but he will stay.”
The Conservative party will pay a penalty for its prevarication – indeed, it already is paying. The longer this goes on, the more this looks like a lawless government that thinks rules are for everyone else and the deeper the reputational damage sustained by the Tories. “A month ago, this was hurting only Boris,” says one former cabinet minister. “Now, it is hurting the whole government. The more they put up ministers to make a defence of him, the more it damages all of us.”
So I asked this senior Tory whether he had put in a confidence letter and discovered he was another who hadn’t done so yet. The government will remain trapped in this nightmare no man’s land, and the country with it, until Tory MPs cease equivocating and a critical mass of them decide to bring things to a head.
What a bunch of spineless wasters most Tory MPs are.
And meanwhile, the Government achieves nothing - save to bleed the young ruthlessly in order to stuff the mouths of the elderly with gold.
Research by the Intergenerational Foundation thinktank, to be published on Monday, claims that younger workers are being unfairly targeted by the government in a “tax by stealth” caused by freezes on income tax brackets and the student loan repayment threshold, as well as April’s national insurance rise.
Low-earning young people will be hit hardest by the changes, claims the report, having a significant impact on their take home pay, disposable income and potential to save for housing and pensions.
Researchers calculate a graduate earning £27,000 a year will see their deductions rise by about 20% over the next four years – from 18% of their pay to 22%. They predict their disposable income will drop by almost 30%.
...
Labelling under-30s the “packhorse generation”, the thinktank claims they are being targeted by the government, which it says is using high inflation to pull more low-income, and especially younger, workers into taxation sooner.
The mouths of the elderly are not being stuffed with gold. The state pension is less than £10,000 a year.
Yet they are the richest generation of pensioners ever. And the youngsters of today the first generation to be poorer than their parents since the world wars. The comparison is fair, the discrepancy between the generations is not.
The youngsters of today will inherit more than any generation before them once they reach middle age
Lizaveta's real crime wasn't that she had a poor grasp of Russian geography but that she considered neither the question nor her response to it. She just fired off an answer of reflexive bullshit because she lacked the wit to think it through. That's what makes her intellectually and temperamentally unsuited to be Foreign Secretary never mind PM.
That’s a much fairer criticism than anyone else has made on this board today
"According to Russian media reports, not denied by the UK side, Truss’s chilly encounter with her vastly more experienced Russian opposite number, Sergey Lavrov, included an exchange that went roughly like this.
Truss: ‘Russia must move its troops away from the Ukrainian border, or else…’ Lavrov: ‘Why should we? It’s up to Russia where it deploys its troops inside Russia’ (which, of course, it is). He then asked, for good measure: ‘Do you recognise Russia’s sovereignty over the Rostov and Voronezh regions?’ At which point Truss mounted her high horse and responded with all the authority of the UK’s chief diplomat: ‘The UK will never recognise Russia’s sovereignty over these regions.’
This is where the UK’s ambassador to Moscow, Deborah Bronnert, is said to have leant across to Truss and discreetly informed her that these regions were actually in Russia. Her assumption had apparently been that they were the two so-called breakaway regions on the Ukrainian side of the border."
Lavrov asked a silly trick question and Truss made a mistake. Zero consequence except among the useful idiots in the UK who use it to undermine Truss. Which is why Lavrov did it.
A strong post, StillWaters, a damn fine try at spinning it. Unfortunately you would ask us to believe absolutely everybody would have blundered into that trap - but that isn’t true, is it?
No, she made a mistake. But whatever - people misspeak all the time.
She did not misspeak. The Foreign Secretary might reasonably be expected to have read her brief and maybe glanced at a map on the flight over for crisis talks.
Of course. And then in a discussion the names of 2 oblasts are thrown out. Perhaps she misheard, perhaps she thought they were a different name.
Consider her options:
1. Say they recognise sovereignty - real downside if it’s a quirky babe for Donblas 2. Bristle and push back - establishes the principle; downside risk is she looks a little silly 3. Ignore/redefine the question “we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about X”
I personally would have gone with option 3. But I’m not going to condemn her for going with option 2 and getting called out.
She looks a little silly and gets mocked on Twitter. So f***ng what? Lavrov is an arse and got a cheap shot in. Real world consequence zero.
Sometimes people just need to ignore the trolls.
If she had been asked about Downing St parties she would have given a more diplomatic answer.
Diplomacy is her job. The moment required the upmost care. This is they very essence of her responsibility. Instead of using language with the precision of a surgeon’s knife she bluffed it. Not good.
Sure. She made a misstep on negotiations. Cost: zero
Now we have a choice:
1. Do we mock, undermine and weaken the Foreign Secretary at a time of serious international tension as the Russian hope we will do? 2. Do we not do what the Russians want us to do?
1. Oh fuck right off. She is a narcissistic vacuous self-promoting cretin. 2. The Russians don't really care what we think - Britain has reduced itself to a bit player having left the big stage. Compare and contrast how Russia is dealing with France / EU with how it is dealing with the UK.
As far as I can see, Russia’s dealings with France have consisted of entertaining Macron to a bizarre meeting across the longest table in Europe, asking him to get tested, indulging his popinjay pretensions as a leader of peace and the man who brokered a new age of global harmony…. And then invading Ukraine anyway (if the diplomatic rumours are right)
He’s gonna look a total twerp if they DO invade, now. Dare I say it: even more than Ms Truss
Be fair - the dining room table in Bruce Wayne Manor in Batman (1988) was longer.
Diplomacy often ends in failure. Diplomacy rarely ends in open mockery. She flew to Moscow to cosplay Thatcher warn Russia about its threat to Ukraine and its border claims. Without having the First Clue where any of those places were. Unsurprisingly Lavrov just laughed her off as being irrelevant. Its like the big kids are doing something and the little kid wants in. Doesn't understand the rules, or what is happening, but heard the big kids say a word which they are now confidently repeating out of context.
Cue mocking laughter. Aimed at Britain.
No, it’s just your tiresome desire to belittle Britain and celebrate any perceived humiliation. It really is pathological
Is the UK a superpower? No. Is it as important as, say, China? Of course not
Is Britain a pathetically oversized version of Ireland, with a bit less rain? No, not that either
It is a senior mid-ranking power, armed with nukes, a member of the G7, NATO, the UNSC, probably the most important ally of the USA alongside Japan, and the UK also wields much soft power, ESPECIALLY over Russia, with their deep links to London (because this cuts both ways). How many of Russia’s top ten thousand send their kids to British private schools, or British universities? A LOT. And a lot more than France or Germany, to name two other examples of significant European powers
Has the UK lost influence over the EU’s foreign policy since Brexit? Yes. But what is that foreign policy? Search me. it varies depending on whether you are taking to Brussels, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Budapest, Athens, Zagreb or some fringe group of amputee pensioners in Wroclaw
How am I belittling Britain? I am nobody - an anonymous username on a forum talking to other (mostly) anonymous people.
What belittles Britain is reducing our armed forces so that we can barely defend our own airspace and territorial interests, never mind being able to project power as we once did. What belittles Britain is removing ourselves from the regional block and talking like we've grown in stature rather than been reduced in stature. What belittles Britain is doing something that none of our friends and allies understands and then haughtily insisting that we are right and everyone else is wrong What belittles Britain is making ourselves a laughing stock by having a clown PM who makes a speech to the UN General Assembly about Kermit the Frog What belittles Britain is huffing and puffing about the Ukraine then pulling what few troops we have out just before the invasion What belittles Britain is sending a vacuous "diplomat" to Russia to lecture Russia about borders without being able to understand where Russia is on a map.
You make the valid point about our economic power. We are not a big military power as we once were. We are not the kingmaker in one of the global power blocks as we once were. But we still have a big economy and a lot of Russians own a lot of our politicians it. We should have been threatening to freeze those assets, not impotently making military threats we can't back up. But no, Truss wants to be Thatcher. And me calling out our self-evident global embarrassment is either siding with Russia or belittling Britain apparently.
Well, you have spent the entirety of your time on this site, since the Brexit vote, promising us the terrors of the earth.
Can Britain on its own, prevent Russia from invading the Ukraine? Of course not. Even at the height of the British Empire, we could not have done so.
Can Britain, as a member of NATO, and a significant trading partner of Russia, cause harm to Russia if it does so? Can we provide military aid to those NATO members who fear Russian expansion? The answer to both questions is Yes.
Try the test of opposites. If we were on Russia's side, would that enhance their ability to annex chunks of the Ukraine and get away with it? Certainly it would. Germany wouldn't sitck its neck out, and the US might well conclude that NATO was a dead letter.
Johnson is a tosser, but by and large the government has done the right thing in relation to the Ukraine.
NATO is not going to conduct a general war against Russia over the Ukraine. You know that, I know that, Putin knows that. So this is not a military conflict in that we / NATO can stop Putin militarily.
Putin is backed by Russian oligarchs who have a lot of cash in this country. If we seized all their assets that would hurt Putin. Would need international diplomatic co-operation, not military intervention. But we're back-pedalling the former and waving our limp dick about instead.
"According to Russian media reports, not denied by the UK side, Truss’s chilly encounter with her vastly more experienced Russian opposite number, Sergey Lavrov, included an exchange that went roughly like this.
Truss: ‘Russia must move its troops away from the Ukrainian border, or else…’ Lavrov: ‘Why should we? It’s up to Russia where it deploys its troops inside Russia’ (which, of course, it is). He then asked, for good measure: ‘Do you recognise Russia’s sovereignty over the Rostov and Voronezh regions?’ At which point Truss mounted her high horse and responded with all the authority of the UK’s chief diplomat: ‘The UK will never recognise Russia’s sovereignty over these regions.’
This is where the UK’s ambassador to Moscow, Deborah Bronnert, is said to have leant across to Truss and discreetly informed her that these regions were actually in Russia. Her assumption had apparently been that they were the two so-called breakaway regions on the Ukrainian side of the border."
Lavrov asked a silly trick question and Truss made a mistake. Zero consequence except among the useful idiots in the UK who use it to undermine Truss. Which is why Lavrov did it.
A strong post, StillWaters, a damn fine try at spinning it. Unfortunately you would ask us to believe absolutely everybody would have blundered into that trap - but that isn’t true, is it?
No, she made a mistake. But whatever - people misspeak all the time.
She did not misspeak. The Foreign Secretary might reasonably be expected to have read her brief and maybe glanced at a map on the flight over for crisis talks.
Of course. And then in a discussion the names of 2 oblasts are thrown out. Perhaps she misheard, perhaps she thought they were a different name.
Consider her options:
1. Say they recognise sovereignty - real downside if it’s a quirky babe for Donblas 2. Bristle and push back - establishes the principle; downside risk is she looks a little silly 3. Ignore/redefine the question “we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about X”
I personally would have gone with option 3. But I’m not going to condemn her for going with option 2 and getting called out.
She looks a little silly and gets mocked on Twitter. So f***ng what? Lavrov is an arse and got a cheap shot in. Real world consequence zero.
Sometimes people just need to ignore the trolls.
If she had been asked about Downing St parties she would have given a more diplomatic answer.
Diplomacy is her job. The moment required the upmost care. This is they very essence of her responsibility. Instead of using language with the precision of a surgeon’s knife she bluffed it. Not good.
Sure. She made a misstep on negotiations. Cost: zero
Now we have a choice:
1. Do we mock, undermine and weaken the Foreign Secretary at a time of serious international tension as the Russian hope we will do? 2. Do we not do what the Russians want us to do?
1. Oh fuck right off. She is a narcissistic vacuous self-promoting cretin. 2. The Russians don't really care what we think - Britain has reduced itself to a bit player having left the big stage. Compare and contrast how Russia is dealing with France / EU with how it is dealing with the UK.
Russia knows the UK opposes it and is a prime mover in resisting its advances. Russia believes Macron is vain and wants to be seen as a peace bring so will be more likely to make concessions.
Of course Russia bigs France up.
Some of your guys just don’t have a fucking clue. You let your hatred for this government blind you to another’s plays.
Who are "my guys". Specifically.
A typo - “you guys”. People on this board who allow their dislike of this government blind them to the facts on the ground
Appreciate the clarification - was going to laugh mercilessly if you were going to stick me in the Labour camp.
On your "facts on the ground". Would love to know which facts you think I am ignoring.
The Sunday Rawnsley: Eager to wound, but unwilling to strike, Sir John and Mrs May reflect the state of the party they once led. It is simultaneously infuriated and paralysed by a scandal that is also a crisis. This leaves the Tory party and with it the government, marooned in no man’s land.
Waiting to see if the polls are verified by a heavy defeat at the May local elections “puts our councillors in the executioner’s tumbril”, as another MP puts it. The prime minister is solely focused on trying to save his own skin. He always governed from one week to the next. Now he governs from one day to the next.
One Conservative MP reports: “The phrase you hear a lot of in the tearoom is ‘we can’t go on like this’.” So I asked him whether he had submitted a letter calling for a confidence vote. He confessed that he hadn’t, before arguing that it was too early to move. He was choosing to go on like this… there is the substantial group who want Mr Johnson gone, but are hesitant about acting. “One of the worst outcomes is that we get a confidence vote and he narrowly survives it,” says one senior Tory. “If he wins by just one vote, he will stay. Anyone else would walk, but he will stay.”
The Conservative party will pay a penalty for its prevarication – indeed, it already is paying. The longer this goes on, the more this looks like a lawless government that thinks rules are for everyone else and the deeper the reputational damage sustained by the Tories. “A month ago, this was hurting only Boris,” says one former cabinet minister. “Now, it is hurting the whole government. The more they put up ministers to make a defence of him, the more it damages all of us.”
So I asked this senior Tory whether he had put in a confidence letter and discovered he was another who hadn’t done so yet. The government will remain trapped in this nightmare no man’s land, and the country with it, until Tory MPs cease equivocating and a critical mass of them decide to bring things to a head.
What a bunch of spineless wasters most Tory MPs are.
And meanwhile, the Government achieves nothing - save to bleed the young ruthlessly in order to stuff the mouths of the elderly with gold.
Research by the Intergenerational Foundation thinktank, to be published on Monday, claims that younger workers are being unfairly targeted by the government in a “tax by stealth” caused by freezes on income tax brackets and the student loan repayment threshold, as well as April’s national insurance rise.
Low-earning young people will be hit hardest by the changes, claims the report, having a significant impact on their take home pay, disposable income and potential to save for housing and pensions.
Researchers calculate a graduate earning £27,000 a year will see their deductions rise by about 20% over the next four years – from 18% of their pay to 22%. They predict their disposable income will drop by almost 30%.
...
Labelling under-30s the “packhorse generation”, the thinktank claims they are being targeted by the government, which it says is using high inflation to pull more low-income, and especially younger, workers into taxation sooner.
The mouths of the elderly are not being stuffed with gold. The state pension is less than £10,000 a year.
Yet they are the richest generation of pensioners ever. And the youngsters of today the first generation to be poorer than their parents since the world wars. The comparison is fair, the discrepancy between the generations is not.
The youngsters of today will inherit more than any generation before them once they reach middle age
I would venture to suggest that is not at all certain depending on the care their parents may need
A friends parents have both been in care for 4 years at a cost to their estate in excess of £450,000
Best-selling author Adam Kay has been desperately trying to remove from the internet any trace of the vile songs Your Baby and Northern Birds, which he recorded as part of a comedy duo called Amateur Transplants.
I saw Amateur Transplants the day after the 2010 general election and they were fantastic. The interesting thing is, those two songs aren’t the most offensive.
I think it’s sad that comedy is being destroyed by wokeness. Neither Adam Kay or Suman Biswas would approve of the stuff they sing about. But like Jimmy Carr, they’re act plays on our prejudices and has a cynical view of the world.
No.
Adam Kay's book, which I quite liked, nevertheless has some rather schoolboy 'humour' misogynism about it.
But on the broader point, it is absolutely NOT the case that all topics are fair game. Any decent human being doesn't make jokes about the deaths of people: whether Romas or children, for example.
I'm weary of the attack on 'wokeness' being used as a front for plain nasty, vile, human behaviour.
The Nasty Party is back.
(But I expect when Sandpit gets up in Dubai he will still like your post, so that's alright then)
Attacks on wokeness frequently go too far as part of culture war stuff, but you are getting on your moral high horse and attempting to police what other people find amusing. You're essentially declaring people should not be allowed to laugh at black comedy or offense comedy because it's not right as far as you're concerned.
That's up to you. Lots of stuff in that vein is not very amusing, but I'd much rather people feel able to approach the line of tastelessness sometimes than never approach certain topics comedically.
Take a mild example- There's an old joke about the troubles being a stupid name because what did people think 3000 died of, stress? Under your definition its joking about people dying (not as target, but it's still a joke about death so your definition says not ok)
I don't think moral grandstanding is necessary because most comedy is safer and more mainstream as people prefer that.
But I disagree with you - everything absolutely is fair game. I don't believe that makes me a bad person or the person telling it.
As for being a front for nasty behaviour it's like the famous quote about art or photography - hard to define the line, but we can generally tell it when we see it.
When it comes to moralising on other's behaviour i could never rule out something might need condemning. But I'd play it very very cautiously. The same reason I am always wary around civil liberty issues - X might be ok, buy be careful.
The joy of art - painting, music, comedy etc etc - is that it is subjective. What I enjoy may be different to what you enjoy. I can think of a whole load of jokes told by various comedians that I don't find funny or find offensive, but that doesn't make them invalid. Jimmy Carr is under attack for one joke - I don't much care for that joke but I really dislike Jimmy Carr anyway. Does that mean we should cancel Jimmy Carr? No!
You talk about it being hard to define the line - this is the critical point. The quick response by a comedian receiving groans or flinches from a joke - "too soon?" is absolutely it. What is funny now, or appropriate, or even acceptable in the wider sense will not be the same as what is funny / appropriate / acceptable at another time. We can only take things in the time they were done - you can't retroactively impose today's morality on yesterday because it will be different.
Jeremy Clarkson (yes yes) has a good column in today’s Sunday Times which makes an excellent case for Jimmy Carr being genuinely and personally funny, in the darkest way. He describes how the Top Gear team wanted Carr to go to Whitby to film something boring, so they had to tempt Carr with a helicopter ride, which he then accepted, as long as Carr could bring along Adrian (AA) Gill: a mutual friend who was at that point close to death from cancer. Carr wanted to cheer him up
Clarkson goes on:
“Later, on the sea wall, we started to talk about television, and Adrian said he’d just started watching Vikings on Amazon Prime. “Vikings?” asked Jimmy. “Bit ambitious. It’s a ten-parter, isn’t it?” That’s probably the meanest thing you could say to someone with cancer, and yet Adrian didn’t just laugh. He guffawed so hard, some fish came out of his nose.”
That’s a fantastic off the cuff joke, and very very dark. I hope if I am close to the end I have a friend who can somehow make me laugh about it. I don’t want people all maudlin and weepy all the time
When my Grandad reached his 90s he became quite determined about giving away the many books he had accumulated during his life, and was quite insistent that nobody should give him a book as a present again, because he'd probably die before he was able to read it. I think he'd have loved that joke.
I remember when i was once an innocent man in prison - long story - I got lots of visits from kindly friends, most of whom were very sympathetic and sad for me and kind and all that. And I was and I am very grateful
But the visits that really cheered me up were from the one witty heedless friend who would come in half-drunk and make terrible but very black jokes about me never getting out and being sodomised-to-death, and then he would wander out the prison and I’d go back to my cell, feeling much better than I did after every other visit
Peculiar but true
Because it meant that every day you *weren’t* sodomised to death was a little bit better than it might have been.
Lizaveta's real crime wasn't that she had a poor grasp of Russian geography but that she considered neither the question nor her response to it. She just fired off an answer of reflexive bullshit because she lacked the wit to think it through. That's what makes her intellectually and temperamentally unsuited to be Foreign Secretary never mind PM.
That’s a much fairer criticism than anyone else has made on this board today
Yes, indeed it is. It shows her limitations without the need to resort to petty name calling and cheap insults.
The Sunday Rawnsley: Eager to wound, but unwilling to strike, Sir John and Mrs May reflect the state of the party they once led. It is simultaneously infuriated and paralysed by a scandal that is also a crisis. This leaves the Tory party and with it the government, marooned in no man’s land.
Waiting to see if the polls are verified by a heavy defeat at the May local elections “puts our councillors in the executioner’s tumbril”, as another MP puts it. The prime minister is solely focused on trying to save his own skin. He always governed from one week to the next. Now he governs from one day to the next.
One Conservative MP reports: “The phrase you hear a lot of in the tearoom is ‘we can’t go on like this’.” So I asked him whether he had submitted a letter calling for a confidence vote. He confessed that he hadn’t, before arguing that it was too early to move. He was choosing to go on like this… there is the substantial group who want Mr Johnson gone, but are hesitant about acting. “One of the worst outcomes is that we get a confidence vote and he narrowly survives it,” says one senior Tory. “If he wins by just one vote, he will stay. Anyone else would walk, but he will stay.”
The Conservative party will pay a penalty for its prevarication – indeed, it already is paying. The longer this goes on, the more this looks like a lawless government that thinks rules are for everyone else and the deeper the reputational damage sustained by the Tories. “A month ago, this was hurting only Boris,” says one former cabinet minister. “Now, it is hurting the whole government. The more they put up ministers to make a defence of him, the more it damages all of us.”
So I asked this senior Tory whether he had put in a confidence letter and discovered he was another who hadn’t done so yet. The government will remain trapped in this nightmare no man’s land, and the country with it, until Tory MPs cease equivocating and a critical mass of them decide to bring things to a head.
What a bunch of spineless wasters most Tory MPs are.
And meanwhile, the Government achieves nothing - save to bleed the young ruthlessly in order to stuff the mouths of the elderly with gold.
Research by the Intergenerational Foundation thinktank, to be published on Monday, claims that younger workers are being unfairly targeted by the government in a “tax by stealth” caused by freezes on income tax brackets and the student loan repayment threshold, as well as April’s national insurance rise.
Low-earning young people will be hit hardest by the changes, claims the report, having a significant impact on their take home pay, disposable income and potential to save for housing and pensions.
Researchers calculate a graduate earning £27,000 a year will see their deductions rise by about 20% over the next four years – from 18% of their pay to 22%. They predict their disposable income will drop by almost 30%.
...
Labelling under-30s the “packhorse generation”, the thinktank claims they are being targeted by the government, which it says is using high inflation to pull more low-income, and especially younger, workers into taxation sooner.
The mouths of the elderly are not being stuffed with gold. The state pension is less than £10,000 a year.
Yet they are the richest generation of pensioners ever. And the youngsters of today the first generation to be poorer than their parents since the world wars. The comparison is fair, the discrepancy between the generations is not.
In the normal course of events, you'd expect every sector to be better off, simply through economic growth and technology. It's not pensioners but the young who are the anomaly here. The state pension is low. That some property-owning pensioners have benefited from house price inflation does not amount to HMG stuffing their mouths with gold, and in any case, the gains are often unrealised. And many pensioners are poor, just as many young adults are doing very nicely, thank you.
Exactly, sweeping statements about some Tory pensioners being rich is just bollox. Poster wants to get off his butt and get out and make his own money rather than covetting pensioner's pittances.
It was neither in his own interests, nor his constituents interests. I think he miscalculated, and said so at the time.
It is unquestionably in the interests of his constituents for BoZo to be removed.
Even if you ignore his unsuitability for the role, you can't ignore the fact that he has appointed the worst cabinet in living memory.
When he goes, they go, and that would be good for everybody
And in any event, even if the clown hangs on for a bit, the Tories would be mad to send him into another election and remind everyone, in a year or two’s time, of the pandemic and all of our privations and his largesse. Taking a longer view, Aaron will be on the right side of history. And if his seat isn’t holdable, what does his long term career prospects matter anyway?
He might do a David Amess and run off to a safer seat.
Why? With a majority of 16%, he should survive even a substantial adverse swing. Unless the BC is particularly unhelpful.
"According to Russian media reports, not denied by the UK side, Truss’s chilly encounter with her vastly more experienced Russian opposite number, Sergey Lavrov, included an exchange that went roughly like this.
Truss: ‘Russia must move its troops away from the Ukrainian border, or else…’ Lavrov: ‘Why should we? It’s up to Russia where it deploys its troops inside Russia’ (which, of course, it is). He then asked, for good measure: ‘Do you recognise Russia’s sovereignty over the Rostov and Voronezh regions?’ At which point Truss mounted her high horse and responded with all the authority of the UK’s chief diplomat: ‘The UK will never recognise Russia’s sovereignty over these regions.’
This is where the UK’s ambassador to Moscow, Deborah Bronnert, is said to have leant across to Truss and discreetly informed her that these regions were actually in Russia. Her assumption had apparently been that they were the two so-called breakaway regions on the Ukrainian side of the border."
Lavrov asked a silly trick question and Truss made a mistake. Zero consequence except among the useful idiots in the UK who use it to undermine Truss. Which is why Lavrov did it.
A strong post, StillWaters, a damn fine try at spinning it. Unfortunately you would ask us to believe absolutely everybody would have blundered into that trap - but that isn’t true, is it?
No, she made a mistake. But whatever - people misspeak all the time.
She did not misspeak. The Foreign Secretary might reasonably be expected to have read her brief and maybe glanced at a map on the flight over for crisis talks.
Of course. And then in a discussion the names of 2 oblasts are thrown out. Perhaps she misheard, perhaps she thought they were a different name.
Consider her options:
1. Say they recognise sovereignty - real downside if it’s a quirky babe for Donblas 2. Bristle and push back - establishes the principle; downside risk is she looks a little silly 3. Ignore/redefine the question “we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about X”
I personally would have gone with option 3. But I’m not going to condemn her for going with option 2 and getting called out.
She looks a little silly and gets mocked on Twitter. So f***ng what? Lavrov is an arse and got a cheap shot in. Real world consequence zero.
Sometimes people just need to ignore the trolls.
If she had been asked about Downing St parties she would have given a more diplomatic answer.
Diplomacy is her job. The moment required the upmost care. This is they very essence of her responsibility. Instead of using language with the precision of a surgeon’s knife she bluffed it. Not good.
Sure. She made a misstep on negotiations. Cost: zero
Now we have a choice:
1. Do we mock, undermine and weaken the Foreign Secretary at a time of serious international tension as the Russian hope we will do? 2. Do we not do what the Russians want us to do?
1. Oh fuck right off. She is a narcissistic vacuous self-promoting cretin. 2. The Russians don't really care what we think - Britain has reduced itself to a bit player having left the big stage. Compare and contrast how Russia is dealing with France / EU with how it is dealing with the UK.
Russia knows the UK opposes it and is a prime mover in resisting its advances. Russia believes Macron is vain and wants to be seen as a peace bring so will be more likely to make concessions.
Of course Russia bigs France up.
Some of your guys just don’t have a fucking clue. You let your hatred for this government blind you to another’s plays.
Oh Dear, nurse more medication needed!
I’m guessing you’ve never negotiated against Russians. I have.
The trivialisation of British politics continues this morning. We are now apparently focused on a mistatement by Truss rather than the risk of the largest war in Europe since WW2.
On the domestic front we are obsessed about people working in close proximity to each other having a drink afterwards instead of addressing a serious cost of living squeeze, inflation that incompetence at the BoE Monetary Policy Committee has allowed to get out of hand, a record waiting list for the NHS, a police service that is plainly not fit for purpose and serious economic threats of further disruption from either a war in Ukraine or an invasion of Taiwan.
It is hard not to notice that these mad obsessions tend to be driven by those who have never forgiven Johnson for Brexit. Its irrational and, frankly, boring. This site is still highly educational with informed commentators on many issues but the effort/reward ratios are not what they were.
The more important the ishoos are the less I want them handled by lazy incompetent liars.
I have absolutely no problem with people making a serious critique of the governments policy and suggesting a better course, indeed I welcome it, particularly if the person doing it is informed and able to bring relevant material to the table. There is plenty to criticise but our media and PB seem obsessed with flim flam and gotchas. Perhaps it is a demonstration of our irrelevance on the world stage these days but its tedious.
Can you add anything positive on current UK leaders and positions David. We are run by crooked , lacklustre , immoral cowards. Any positives you can think of at all, I cannot despite wracking my brain.
Brexit has happened and apart from the SNP no other party is going to suggest we rejoin
I didn't mention Brexit
You do not need to, you are consumed with the horror of it, alongside many others, who simply cannot accept it and live a life of daily distress evidenced by your non stop 24/7 postings
The Sunday Rawnsley: Eager to wound, but unwilling to strike, Sir John and Mrs May reflect the state of the party they once led. It is simultaneously infuriated and paralysed by a scandal that is also a crisis. This leaves the Tory party and with it the government, marooned in no man’s land.
Waiting to see if the polls are verified by a heavy defeat at the May local elections “puts our councillors in the executioner’s tumbril”, as another MP puts it. The prime minister is solely focused on trying to save his own skin. He always governed from one week to the next. Now he governs from one day to the next.
One Conservative MP reports: “The phrase you hear a lot of in the tearoom is ‘we can’t go on like this’.” So I asked him whether he had submitted a letter calling for a confidence vote. He confessed that he hadn’t, before arguing that it was too early to move. He was choosing to go on like this… there is the substantial group who want Mr Johnson gone, but are hesitant about acting. “One of the worst outcomes is that we get a confidence vote and he narrowly survives it,” says one senior Tory. “If he wins by just one vote, he will stay. Anyone else would walk, but he will stay.”
The Conservative party will pay a penalty for its prevarication – indeed, it already is paying. The longer this goes on, the more this looks like a lawless government that thinks rules are for everyone else and the deeper the reputational damage sustained by the Tories. “A month ago, this was hurting only Boris,” says one former cabinet minister. “Now, it is hurting the whole government. The more they put up ministers to make a defence of him, the more it damages all of us.”
So I asked this senior Tory whether he had put in a confidence letter and discovered he was another who hadn’t done so yet. The government will remain trapped in this nightmare no man’s land, and the country with it, until Tory MPs cease equivocating and a critical mass of them decide to bring things to a head.
What a bunch of spineless wasters most Tory MPs are.
And meanwhile, the Government achieves nothing - save to bleed the young ruthlessly in order to stuff the mouths of the elderly with gold.
Research by the Intergenerational Foundation thinktank, to be published on Monday, claims that younger workers are being unfairly targeted by the government in a “tax by stealth” caused by freezes on income tax brackets and the student loan repayment threshold, as well as April’s national insurance rise.
Low-earning young people will be hit hardest by the changes, claims the report, having a significant impact on their take home pay, disposable income and potential to save for housing and pensions.
Researchers calculate a graduate earning £27,000 a year will see their deductions rise by about 20% over the next four years – from 18% of their pay to 22%. They predict their disposable income will drop by almost 30%.
...
Labelling under-30s the “packhorse generation”, the thinktank claims they are being targeted by the government, which it says is using high inflation to pull more low-income, and especially younger, workers into taxation sooner.
The mouths of the elderly are not being stuffed with gold. The state pension is less than £10,000 a year.
So where is the money going then because its those working a full week and don't have children who are paying for it.
You seem to forget those "rich" pensioners paid for 50 years to get their £9K a year maximum. Where did all their money go. You Tories ensure we get teh worst pension in the developed world, always grasping for more and blaming th epoor for it , most unedyfying.
Surely "true" Conservatism would be more like the pre-war, pre-Labour situation were you work until you drop dead thus placing no burden on the state pockets of the wealthy?
The whiners on here would be moaning that they could not work after they were dead.
You do wonder how much further this lot can trash the UK, looked on as a banana republic nowadays.
We are treated with pity if we're lucky by our friends abroad. They can't understand what has happened to us.
Before someone says "eugh you're all bitter about Brexit" again, remember that I am a recanting Brexiteer. It isn't leaving the EU that is our downfall its what we have done afterwards. Our government won't even look at what it has done and instead says that the sky is green.
We have imposed vast costs on business by demanding and then imposing huge trade barriers with our biggest market. We have partitioned our country so that you need an export license to send stuff to it. And then we either deny we have done these things or try and insist someone else made us do it.
Our friends think we've gone nuts. Saying "yeah we did this, its what we want" might have them scratch their heads but at least its sane. Its not what you are all doing but it's our new plan and we like it. What they see isn't even sane. Its made worse when we have a PM who goes to the UN to berate Kermit the Frog, a Foreign Secretary who doesn't know where Russia is and a PM who wherever he goes gets questioned about how many laws he has broken.
Pointing this all out isn't belittling Britain as I was accused of, it wanting to stop this government doing so. We're a global laughing stock.
The Sunday Rawnsley: Eager to wound, but unwilling to strike, Sir John and Mrs May reflect the state of the party they once led. It is simultaneously infuriated and paralysed by a scandal that is also a crisis. This leaves the Tory party and with it the government, marooned in no man’s land.
Waiting to see if the polls are verified by a heavy defeat at the May local elections “puts our councillors in the executioner’s tumbril”, as another MP puts it. The prime minister is solely focused on trying to save his own skin. He always governed from one week to the next. Now he governs from one day to the next.
One Conservative MP reports: “The phrase you hear a lot of in the tearoom is ‘we can’t go on like this’.” So I asked him whether he had submitted a letter calling for a confidence vote. He confessed that he hadn’t, before arguing that it was too early to move. He was choosing to go on like this… there is the substantial group who want Mr Johnson gone, but are hesitant about acting. “One of the worst outcomes is that we get a confidence vote and he narrowly survives it,” says one senior Tory. “If he wins by just one vote, he will stay. Anyone else would walk, but he will stay.”
The Conservative party will pay a penalty for its prevarication – indeed, it already is paying. The longer this goes on, the more this looks like a lawless government that thinks rules are for everyone else and the deeper the reputational damage sustained by the Tories. “A month ago, this was hurting only Boris,” says one former cabinet minister. “Now, it is hurting the whole government. The more they put up ministers to make a defence of him, the more it damages all of us.”
So I asked this senior Tory whether he had put in a confidence letter and discovered he was another who hadn’t done so yet. The government will remain trapped in this nightmare no man’s land, and the country with it, until Tory MPs cease equivocating and a critical mass of them decide to bring things to a head.
What a bunch of spineless wasters most Tory MPs are.
And meanwhile, the Government achieves nothing - save to bleed the young ruthlessly in order to stuff the mouths of the elderly with gold.
Research by the Intergenerational Foundation thinktank, to be published on Monday, claims that younger workers are being unfairly targeted by the government in a “tax by stealth” caused by freezes on income tax brackets and the student loan repayment threshold, as well as April’s national insurance rise.
Low-earning young people will be hit hardest by the changes, claims the report, having a significant impact on their take home pay, disposable income and potential to save for housing and pensions.
Researchers calculate a graduate earning £27,000 a year will see their deductions rise by about 20% over the next four years – from 18% of their pay to 22%. They predict their disposable income will drop by almost 30%.
...
Labelling under-30s the “packhorse generation”, the thinktank claims they are being targeted by the government, which it says is using high inflation to pull more low-income, and especially younger, workers into taxation sooner.
The mouths of the elderly are not being stuffed with gold. The state pension is less than £10,000 a year.
Yet they are the richest generation of pensioners ever. And the youngsters of today the first generation to be poorer than their parents since the world wars. The comparison is fair, the discrepancy between the generations is not.
The youngsters of today will inherit more than any generation before them once they reach middle age
I would venture to suggest that is not at all certain depending on the care their parents may need
A friends parents have both been in care for 4 years at a cost to their estate in excess of £450,000
Only if they need residential care, which only a quarter of pensioners will ever need
The Sunday Rawnsley: Eager to wound, but unwilling to strike, Sir John and Mrs May reflect the state of the party they once led. It is simultaneously infuriated and paralysed by a scandal that is also a crisis. This leaves the Tory party and with it the government, marooned in no man’s land.
Waiting to see if the polls are verified by a heavy defeat at the May local elections “puts our councillors in the executioner’s tumbril”, as another MP puts it. The prime minister is solely focused on trying to save his own skin. He always governed from one week to the next. Now he governs from one day to the next.
One Conservative MP reports: “The phrase you hear a lot of in the tearoom is ‘we can’t go on like this’.” So I asked him whether he had submitted a letter calling for a confidence vote. He confessed that he hadn’t, before arguing that it was too early to move. He was choosing to go on like this… there is the substantial group who want Mr Johnson gone, but are hesitant about acting. “One of the worst outcomes is that we get a confidence vote and he narrowly survives it,” says one senior Tory. “If he wins by just one vote, he will stay. Anyone else would walk, but he will stay.”
The Conservative party will pay a penalty for its prevarication – indeed, it already is paying. The longer this goes on, the more this looks like a lawless government that thinks rules are for everyone else and the deeper the reputational damage sustained by the Tories. “A month ago, this was hurting only Boris,” says one former cabinet minister. “Now, it is hurting the whole government. The more they put up ministers to make a defence of him, the more it damages all of us.”
So I asked this senior Tory whether he had put in a confidence letter and discovered he was another who hadn’t done so yet. The government will remain trapped in this nightmare no man’s land, and the country with it, until Tory MPs cease equivocating and a critical mass of them decide to bring things to a head.
What a bunch of spineless wasters most Tory MPs are.
And meanwhile, the Government achieves nothing - save to bleed the young ruthlessly in order to stuff the mouths of the elderly with gold.
Research by the Intergenerational Foundation thinktank, to be published on Monday, claims that younger workers are being unfairly targeted by the government in a “tax by stealth” caused by freezes on income tax brackets and the student loan repayment threshold, as well as April’s national insurance rise.
Low-earning young people will be hit hardest by the changes, claims the report, having a significant impact on their take home pay, disposable income and potential to save for housing and pensions.
Researchers calculate a graduate earning £27,000 a year will see their deductions rise by about 20% over the next four years – from 18% of their pay to 22%. They predict their disposable income will drop by almost 30%.
...
Labelling under-30s the “packhorse generation”, the thinktank claims they are being targeted by the government, which it says is using high inflation to pull more low-income, and especially younger, workers into taxation sooner.
The mouths of the elderly are not being stuffed with gold. The state pension is less than £10,000 a year.
Yet they are the richest generation of pensioners ever. And the youngsters of today the first generation to be poorer than their parents since the world wars. The comparison is fair, the discrepancy between the generations is not.
In the normal course of events, you'd expect every sector to be better off, simply through economic growth and technology. It's not pensioners but the young who are the anomaly here. The state pension is low. That some property-owning pensioners have benefited from house price inflation does not amount to HMG stuffing their mouths with gold, and in any case, the gains are often unrealised. And many pensioners are poor, just as many young adults are doing very nicely, thank you.
Exactly, sweeping statements about some Tory pensioners being rich is just bollox. Poster wants to get off his butt and get out and make his own money rather than covetting pensioner's pittances.
It is true to say if you are 30 and work in the City with home owning parents who live in the home counties you will inherit from, you will be far better off than a pensioner reliant on the state pension who rents or lives in a council house for instance
Well, all those white working class people with equally low savings can then promptly self-identify as black (or whatever the approved phrase will be by then) and get the same benefits as Ms Dodds is proposing. After all, it is important to be inclusive and not phobic about poor white people, right?
Well, all those white working class people with equally low savings can then promptly self-identify as black (or whatever the approved phrase will be by then) and get the same benefits as Ms Dodds is proposing. After all, it is important to be inclusive and not phobic about poor white people, right?
I can't understand what she is thinking. Yes there are some major systemic injustices that hit black people. But poverty isn't a black issue - its a poor issue. "Black people have no savings and Labour will fix that" send what kind of message to all the non-black poor people with no savings?
BAME people are more likely to have minimal savings because they are more likely to have poverty pay jobs. So go after poverty to fix racial systemic issues, not after race.
Hands up how many PB-ears would have correctly guessed that Voronezh and Rostov are in Russia not Ukraine (or some other Russiany-but-not-actually-Russian place?
I’m pretty damn good at geography, but I would have not confidently known. My only knowledge is that Rostov is surely also known as “Rostov-on-Don” so that means it is probably in the Donbas, which is disputed territory of Ukraine?
The Fiendish Russians phrased the question to embarrass her. Now, arguably, the Foreign Sec should not be so “easily” tripped up, but I can see why she got it wrong
Those here, however, are not the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, entering fraught diplomatic negotiations with the Russians over events on the border of Russia and Ukraine.
We have not been receiving multiple briefs on the situation and various classifications, with maps of the areas and regions of interest highlighted.
She failed to do her job, failed to prepare, failed to know fundamentals of the areas of concern on which she was repeatedly briefed, and failed the people of the UK and the West.
Now, we may compare her to the unbriefed general public thrown in at zero notice on sensitive diplomatic negotiations, but I would suggest that this is not the appropriate threshold of competence to use in this scenario.
Those Dalek’s must withdraw immediately. Spiridon is a peace loving democratic jungle with its right to self determination.
But surely this is unpatriotic to be belittling Liz Truss like this, just like the Evil Lavrov wants? These lampoon pics could be coming from SMERSH, brits sharing them are Putin’s useful idiots?
Hands up how many PB-ears would have correctly guessed that Voronezh and Rostov are in Russia not Ukraine (or some other Russiany-but-not-actually-Russian place?
I’m pretty damn good at geography, but I would have not confidently known. My only knowledge is that Rostov is surely also known as “Rostov-on-Don” so that means it is probably in the Donbas, which is disputed territory of Ukraine?
The Fiendish Russians phrased the question to embarrass her. Now, arguably, the Foreign Sec should not be so “easily” tripped up, but I can see why she got it wrong
Those here, however, are not the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, entering fraught diplomatic negotiations with the Russians over events on the border of Russia and Ukraine.
We have not been receiving multiple briefs on the situation and various classifications, with maps of the areas and regions of interest highlighted.
She failed to do her job, failed to prepare, failed to know fundamentals of the areas of concern on which she was repeatedly briefed, and failed the people of the UK and the West.
Now, we may compare her to the unbriefed general public thrown in at zero notice on sensitive diplomatic negotiations, but I would suggest that this is not the appropriate threshold of competence to use in this scenario.
I disagree. It’s not about homework but character and temperament. Leon is asking us to believe Lady Thatcher and Tony Blair, or a whole host of other names would have sprung forth into that simple trap.
"According to Russian media reports, not denied by the UK side, Truss’s chilly encounter with her vastly more experienced Russian opposite number, Sergey Lavrov, included an exchange that went roughly like this.
Truss: ‘Russia must move its troops away from the Ukrainian border, or else…’ Lavrov: ‘Why should we? It’s up to Russia where it deploys its troops inside Russia’ (which, of course, it is). He then asked, for good measure: ‘Do you recognise Russia’s sovereignty over the Rostov and Voronezh regions?’ At which point Truss mounted her high horse and responded with all the authority of the UK’s chief diplomat: ‘The UK will never recognise Russia’s sovereignty over these regions.’
This is where the UK’s ambassador to Moscow, Deborah Bronnert, is said to have leant across to Truss and discreetly informed her that these regions were actually in Russia. Her assumption had apparently been that they were the two so-called breakaway regions on the Ukrainian side of the border."
Comments
Have to apply a bit of context though.
I am roasting Truss, true. By itself, her "misstatement" wouldn't matter too much. But look at the wider context. We don't pose much of a military threat to anyone after savagely cutting our armed forces back - yet we still talk like we do which is openly sneered at by the Russians. We have done something which all our friends and allies not only think is bonkers but they can prove it, yet we insist we are right and they are all wrong. We then try to pull those same allies with us and wonder why they are less responsive than before. We have a PM who flew to the UN General Assembly to berate Kermit the Frog for his mistreatment of Miss Piggy and then made such a pigs ear of the climate summit that the minister responsible was in tears.
So in context, her misstatement is the latest step on a journey down irrelevance lane. The only thing we do have some influence over is Russian money in the UK which this government is strangely reluctant to go after. Can't think why...
Thats the Ukraine stuff. The domestic stuff is far more pressing. But we can't do much about those for two very simple reasons:
1. The PM, half the Cabinet and a significant number of government MPs have a laissez faire approach to the rule of law. Trust in government to do the basics legally has crumbled and that makes it very difficult to try and tackle the major policy crises we have
2. The PM, half the Cabinet and a significant number of government MPs have a laissez faire approach to facts. The PM keeps stating statistics which the government statisticians keep telling him are flat out lies. This isn't the usual political spin, this is an open disregard for the truth. How can we tackle things like the cost of living crisis when the government thinks black is white and quotes figures that simply aren't correct?
So yes, I agree with you. There are so many urgent critical things we need to deal with. Until we remove Boris Johnson from office and restore the rule of law, honesty, propriety and ethics to government we are stuck. We cannot tackle all the issues you rightly highlight until we have a government who are honest, recognise the issues even exist and are seen as able to do the basics like obey their own laws.
Putin is backed by Russian oligarchs who have a lot of cash in this country. If we seized all their assets that would hurt Putin. Would need international diplomatic co-operation, not military intervention. But we're back-pedalling the former and waving our limp dick about instead.
This thread has now been Trussed up
On your "facts on the ground". Would love to know which facts you think I am ignoring.
A friends parents have both been in care for 4 years at a cost to their estate in excess of £450,000
Before someone says "eugh you're all bitter about Brexit" again, remember that I am a recanting Brexiteer. It isn't leaving the EU that is our downfall its what we have done afterwards. Our government won't even look at what it has done and instead says that the sky is green.
We have imposed vast costs on business by demanding and then imposing huge trade barriers with our biggest market. We have partitioned our country so that you need an export license to send stuff to it. And then we either deny we have done these things or try and insist someone else made us do it.
Our friends think we've gone nuts. Saying "yeah we did this, its what we want" might have them scratch their heads but at least its sane. Its not what you are all doing but it's our new plan and we like it. What they see isn't even sane. Its made worse when we have a PM who goes to the UN to berate Kermit the Frog, a Foreign Secretary who doesn't know where Russia is and a PM who wherever he goes gets questioned about how many laws he has broken.
Pointing this all out isn't belittling Britain as I was accused of, it wanting to stop this government doing so. We're a global laughing stock.
https://twitter.com/pipmadeley/status/1492807964926820352?s=21
BAME people are more likely to have minimal savings because they are more likely to have poverty pay jobs. So go after poverty to fix racial systemic issues, not after race.
We have not been receiving multiple briefs on the situation and various classifications, with maps of the areas and regions of interest highlighted.
She failed to do her job, failed to prepare, failed to know fundamentals of the areas of concern on which she was repeatedly briefed, and failed the people of the UK and the West.
Now, we may compare her to the unbriefed general public thrown in at zero notice on sensitive diplomatic negotiations, but I would suggest that this is not the appropriate threshold of competence to use in this scenario.
But surely this is unpatriotic to be belittling Liz Truss like this, just like the Evil Lavrov wants? These lampoon pics could be coming from SMERSH, brits sharing them are Putin’s useful idiots?