Shashank Joshi @shashj Treating civilians as combatants on the basis that they haven’t fled a city by your bogus deadline is about as war crime-y as it gets.
They were threatening military tribunals - the mechanism for punishing traitors and collaborators- not treating them as enemy combatants
Is there a case here for NATO fitting a load of drones with loudspeakers and flying them over the Russian forces broadcasting a warning of the likely personal consequences of taking part in such actions?
Not really. Poor use of resources, most will not believe the drones, will be used as example of NATO lies and individual soldiers will be coerced into acting anyway
From memory, leafletting was done by both Germany and Britain in WW2. Drop leaflets over the enemy towns. I wonder if any studies were ever done into its effectiveness?
As an aside, looks like the Ukrainians lost a Frogfoot plane last night.
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Indeed, given the way tertiary education has changed in my lifetime, level of education is little more than a proxy for age.
Not just tertiary education.
We forget it now, but in the 70's it was perfectly common to leave school without O Levels or CSEs. Nada. Zilch. That would mean being born in about 1960, so in your 60's now. That remained technically possible up to Ken Baker's reforms of the mid-80's.
So partly age, but also a cohort of people who have some reason to feel that the world has moved away from them in ways they don't like.
had a successful career in teaching for 34 years. Always a Tory voter .
Private schools or state sector?
And primary, secondary, or tertiary?
I ask because I know very very few tory teachers who survived for long in the state secondary sector.
1976-1993- in inner London comps in Wandsworth [ before gentrification!) & Peckham - 1993 -2008 in a Kent grammar School. Another prejudice shattered?
My anecdotal 'evidence' matches this thread. The people in my life who are avowed tories and Boris fans did not go to University.
The problem here for me as a Labour (or when the situation suits LibDem of Green) supporter is that it is all too easy to come across as snotty. This really came to the fore with Brexit where the divide was quite stark. Thick, stupid, easily misled people tended to support Boris and Brexit. Of course there are exceptions to this like our very own Leon who I am sure is very bright.
See how easy it is to get snotty over it? It's something which is guaranteed to wind up Brexit supporters and Boris tories, who will point with some justification to the same kind of Metropolitan elitism which herded people into the Brexit fold. Concerns about ghost towns, immigration and the EU's manifest centralised corruption were ignored by the well-educated.
I wonder if Mike and Ipsos have really hit on something. That THIS is the real and biggest divide in Britain today?
Pretty sure describing folk as thick, stupid and easily misled is snotty rather than coming across as such! Props for setting off a firework so early in the morning tho'.
This is the problem though, as IanB2 has just demonstrated. For those of us who wanted to Remain in the EU and who despair at the electorate's gullibility in voting for this deceiving clown Boris Johnson, it's terribly terribly easy to retreat into this kind of thinking. Oh well, what do you expect from stupid uneducated people?
But I also try to stop myself by remembering the genuine grievances people had and in order to do this I find it helpful to picture Tony Blair's smiling face. That's usually enough to halt me in my tracks and remind me just how much the Metropolitan elitists are to blame for what happened.
Whatever Mike says about Blair's successes for Labour, they came about in large part because he wore the emperor's clothes. Under him, Britain's bitter divisions began to emerge, the fissures of which finally became apparent with the Brexit vote.
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Well, yes and no.
I think OGH has a valid point when two constituencies have similar median ages, but different median education levels.
And which way the data should be read matters.
If the Conservatives key appeal is to older people, or non-grads... fine, they will still be around in the future.
If it's to those who left school without certificates... Salt of the Earth, sure, but there will be vanishingly few people like that in a decade or two.
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Indeed, given the way tertiary education has changed in my lifetime, level of education is little more than a proxy for age.
Not just tertiary education.
We forget it now, but in the 70's it was perfectly common to leave school without O Levels or CSEs. Nada. Zilch. That would mean being born in about 1960, so in your 60's now. That remained technically possible up to Ken Baker's reforms of the mid-80's.
So partly age, but also a cohort of people who have some reason to feel that the world has moved away from them in ways they don't like.
had a successful career in teaching for 34 years. Always a Tory voter .
Private schools or state sector?
And primary, secondary, or tertiary?
I ask because I know very very few tory teachers who survived for long in the state secondary sector.
1976-1993- in inner London comps in Wandsworth [ before gentrification!) & Peckham - 1993 -2008 in a Kent grammar School. Another prejudice shattered?
No I was genuinely curious.
May I ask which comps in Wandsworth? Or is that too much detail to put on here?
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Indeed, given the way tertiary education has changed in my lifetime, level of education is little more than a proxy for age.
Not just tertiary education.
We forget it now, but in the 70's it was perfectly common to leave school without O Levels or CSEs. Nada. Zilch. That would mean being born in about 1960, so in your 60's now. That remained technically possible up to Ken Baker's reforms of the mid-80's.
So partly age, but also a cohort of people who have some reason to feel that the world has moved away from them in ways they don't like.
I feel the latter point particularly - but I'm unclear about the educational link as I was one of the very few to get a place in a top university in 1972 and had a successful career in teaching for 34 years. Always a Tory voter and by no means alone among my co-worker peers. Fairly sure that the world moving away thing is mainly just a product of age and a long memory.
There's no doubt the Tories have moved 'down market' over the decades. You only have to look at their candidates and MPs to see that. Which plays very well in our sort of electoral system, given the propensity of the educated middle classes to agglomerate within a minority of constituencies.
One can certainly see that in the constituencies that have moved away from the Conservatives, and those that have moved towards them, over thirty years.
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Indeed, given the way tertiary education has changed in my lifetime, level of education is little more than a proxy for age.
Not just tertiary education.
We forget it now, but in the 70's it was perfectly common to leave school without O Levels or CSEs. Nada. Zilch. That would mean being born in about 1960, so in your 60's now. That remained technically possible up to Ken Baker's reforms of the mid-80's.
So partly age, but also a cohort of people who have some reason to feel that the world has moved away from them in ways they don't like.
had a successful career in teaching for 34 years. Always a Tory voter .
Private schools or state sector?
And primary, secondary, or tertiary?
I ask because I know very very few tory teachers who survived for long in the state secondary sector.
1976-1993- in inner London comps in Wandsworth [ before gentrification!) & Peckham - 1993 -2008 in a Kent grammar School. Another prejudice shattered?
No I was genuinely curious.
May I ask which comps in Wandsworth? Or is that too much detail to put on here?
(I taught in Wandsworth comps)
By the way, whilst I think gentrification is certainly apparent in Clapham, Battersea and (obvs) Putney, it really hasn't reached good old Tooting yet. Which is where I taught.
My anecdotal 'evidence' matches this thread. The people in my life who are avowed tories and Boris fans did not go to University.
The problem here for me as a Labour (or when the situation suits LibDem of Green) supporter is that it is all too easy to come across as snotty. This really came to the fore with Brexit where the divide was quite stark. Thick, stupid, easily misled people tended to support Boris and Brexit. Of course there are exceptions to this like our very own Leon who I am sure is very bright.
See how easy it is to get snotty over it? It's something which is guaranteed to wind up Brexit supporters and Boris tories, who will point with some justification to the same kind of Metropolitan elitism which herded people into the Brexit fold. Concerns about ghost towns, immigration and the EU's manifest centralised corruption were ignored by the well-educated.
I wonder if Mike and Ipsos have really hit on something. That THIS is the real and biggest divide in Britain today?
The Joseph Rowntree report on the Brexit referendum was interesting.
"People with all levels of qualifications were more likely to vote leave in low-skill areas compared with high-skill areas. However, this effect was stronger for the more highly qualified. In low-skilled communities the difference in support for leave between graduates and those with GCSEs was 20 points. In high-skilled communities it was over 40 points. In low-skill areas the proportion of A-level holders voting leave was closer to that of people with low-skills. In high-skill areas their vote was much more similar to graduates."
So there was peer pressure in both low skill and high skill areas, or to phrase it differently, peoples vote was influenced by their surroundings as well as their education level.
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Indeed, given the way tertiary education has changed in my lifetime, level of education is little more than a proxy for age.
Not just tertiary education.
We forget it now, but in the 70's it was perfectly common to leave school without O Levels or CSEs. Nada. Zilch. That would mean being born in about 1960, so in your 60's now. That remained technically possible up to Ken Baker's reforms of the mid-80's.
So partly age, but also a cohort of people who have some reason to feel that the world has moved away from them in ways they don't like.
I feel the latter point particularly - but I'm unclear about the educational link as I was one of the very few to get a place in a top university in 1972 and had a successful career in teaching for 34 years. Always a Tory voter and by no means alone among my co-worker peers. Fairly sure that the world moving away thing is mainly just a product of age and a long memory.
There's no doubt the Tories have moved 'down market' over the decades. You only have to look at their candidates and MPs to see that. Which plays very well in our sort of electoral system, given the propensity of the educated middle classes to agglomerate within a minority of constituencies.
One can certainly see that in the constituencies that have moved away from the Conservatives, and those that have moved towards them, over thirty years.
I agree with all of this except, except, except ... Maggie.
Margaret Thatcher did something remarkable when she opened up council house tenants to be able to buy their own homes. For a time she spoke the language of the 'housewife's' purse holder. She knew how much a loaf of bread cost, which is something I bet you none of the current Cabinet do. Then came the whole Mondeo Man phenomenon etc. and places like Basildon and Romford turned blue. She really got the aspirations of working class people.
For all her faults, and I intensely disagree with 'some' of her philosophy, she was an astounding politician.
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Indeed, given the way tertiary education has changed in my lifetime, level of education is little more than a proxy for age.
Not just tertiary education.
We forget it now, but in the 70's it was perfectly common to leave school without O Levels or CSEs. Nada. Zilch. That would mean being born in about 1960, so in your 60's now. That remained technically possible up to Ken Baker's reforms of the mid-80's.
So partly age, but also a cohort of people who have some reason to feel that the world has moved away from them in ways they don't like.
I feel the latter point particularly - but I'm unclear about the educational link as I was one of the very few to get a place in a top university in 1972 and had a successful career in teaching for 34 years. Always a Tory voter and by no means alone among my co-worker peers. Fairly sure that the world moving away thing is mainly just a product of age and a long memory.
As @ydoethur will tell you, there were plenty of Tories in teaching until Gove.
There is little new about the Tories positioning. They have for more than a century served a coalition of those who, for whatever reason, dislike the liberal middle class.
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Indeed, given the way tertiary education has changed in my lifetime, level of education is little more than a proxy for age.
Not just tertiary education.
We forget it now, but in the 70's it was perfectly common to leave school without O Levels or CSEs. Nada. Zilch. That would mean being born in about 1960, so in your 60's now. That remained technically possible up to Ken Baker's reforms of the mid-80's.
So partly age, but also a cohort of people who have some reason to feel that the world has moved away from them in ways they don't like.
I feel the latter point particularly - but I'm unclear about the educational link as I was one of the very few to get a place in a top university in 1972 and had a successful career in teaching for 34 years. Always a Tory voter and by no means alone among my co-worker peers. Fairly sure that the world moving away thing is mainly just a product of age and a long memory.
As @ydoethur will tell you, there were plenty of Tories in teaching until Gove.
The irony is that there were probably more Tories in teaching in 2010 than ever before, because of Gove. His reforms in theory sounded great.
Unfortunately due to a very large number of avoidable mistakes, not helped by his own extraordinary arrogance and unwillingness to listen to experts, whom he just thought of as nuisances, paying heed rather to a failed think tank manager and a series of at best tenth-rate civil servants as well as a truly extraordinarily incompetent ex-investment fund manager, the reforms in practice proved utterly disastrous.
Which means that there are probably fewer Tories in education now than there have ever been.
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Indeed, given the way tertiary education has changed in my lifetime, level of education is little more than a proxy for age.
Not just tertiary education.
We forget it now, but in the 70's it was perfectly common to leave school without O Levels or CSEs. Nada. Zilch. That would mean being born in about 1960, so in your 60's now. That remained technically possible up to Ken Baker's reforms of the mid-80's.
So partly age, but also a cohort of people who have some reason to feel that the world has moved away from them in ways they don't like.
I feel the latter point particularly - but I'm unclear about the educational link as I was one of the very few to get a place in a top university in 1972 and had a successful career in teaching for 34 years. Always a Tory voter and by no means alone among my co-worker peers. Fairly sure that the world moving away thing is mainly just a product of age and a long memory.
There's no doubt the Tories have moved 'down market' over the decades. You only have to look at their candidates and MPs to see that. Which plays very well in our sort of electoral system, given the propensity of the educated middle classes to agglomerate within a minority of constituencies.
One can certainly see that in the constituencies that have moved away from the Conservatives, and those that have moved towards them, over thirty years.
I agree with all of this except, except, except ... Maggie.
Margaret Thatcher did something remarkable when she opened up council house tenants to be able to buy their own homes. For a time she spoke the language of the 'housewife's' purse holder. She knew how much a loaf of bread cost, which is something I bet you none of the current Cabinet do. Then came the whole Mondeo Man phenomenon etc. and places like Basildon and Romford turned blue. She really got the aspirations of working class people.
For all her faults, and I intensely disagree with 'some' of her philosophy, she was an astounding politician.
A lot of the grandchildren of those who bought their council houses are finding it very difficult to find anywhere to live now though.
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
My anecdotal 'evidence' matches this thread. The people in my life who are avowed tories and Boris fans did not go to University.
The problem here for me as a Labour (or when the situation suits LibDem of Green) supporter is that it is all too easy to come across as snotty. This really came to the fore with Brexit where the divide was quite stark. Thick, stupid, easily misled people tended to support Boris and Brexit. Of course there are exceptions to this like our very own Leon who I am sure is very bright.
See how easy it is to get snotty over it? It's something which is guaranteed to wind up Brexit supporters and Boris tories, who will point with some justification to the same kind of Metropolitan elitism which herded people into the Brexit fold. Concerns about ghost towns, immigration and the EU's manifest centralised corruption were ignored by the well-educated.
I wonder if Mike and Ipsos have really hit on something. That THIS is the real and biggest divide in Britain today?
Pretty sure describing folk as thick, stupid and easily misled is snotty rather than coming across as such! Props for setting off a firework so early in the morning tho'.
This is the problem though, as IanB2 has just demonstrated. For those of us who wanted to Remain in the EU and who despair at the electorate's gullibility in voting for this deceiving clown Boris Johnson, it's terribly terribly easy to retreat into this kind of thinking. Oh well, what do you expect from stupid uneducated people?
But I also try to stop myself by remembering the genuine grievances people had and in order to do this I find it helpful to picture Tony Blair's smiling face. That's usually enough to halt me in my tracks and remind me just how much the Metropolitan elitists are to blame for what happened.
Whatever Mike says about Blair's successes for Labour, they came about in large part because he wore the emperor's clothes. Under him, Britain's bitter divisions began to emerge, the fissures of which finally became apparent with the Brexit vote.
Presumably if the stupid, uneducated people had have voted Remain, or Labour in 2019, that would have been great though.
My anecdotal 'evidence' matches this thread. The people in my life who are avowed tories and Boris fans did not go to University.
The problem here for me as a Labour (or when the situation suits LibDem of Green) supporter is that it is all too easy to come across as snotty. This really came to the fore with Brexit where the divide was quite stark. Thick, stupid, easily misled people tended to support Boris and Brexit. Of course there are exceptions to this like our very own Leon who I am sure is very bright.
See how easy it is to get snotty over it? It's something which is guaranteed to wind up Brexit supporters and Boris tories, who will point with some justification to the same kind of Metropolitan elitism which herded people into the Brexit fold. Concerns about ghost towns, immigration and the EU's manifest centralised corruption were ignored by the well-educated.
I wonder if Mike and Ipsos have really hit on something. That THIS is the real and biggest divide in Britain today?
Clever. Insult both Brexit supporters and remainers in the same post and hope to set off an argument. Shame we know what you are.
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Indeed, given the way tertiary education has changed in my lifetime, level of education is little more than a proxy for age.
Not just tertiary education.
We forget it now, but in the 70's it was perfectly common to leave school without O Levels or CSEs. Nada. Zilch. That would mean being born in about 1960, so in your 60's now. That remained technically possible up to Ken Baker's reforms of the mid-80's.
So partly age, but also a cohort of people who have some reason to feel that the world has moved away from them in ways they don't like.
I feel the latter point particularly - but I'm unclear about the educational link as I was one of the very few to get a place in a top university in 1972 and had a successful career in teaching for 34 years. Always a Tory voter and by no means alone among my co-worker peers. Fairly sure that the world moving away thing is mainly just a product of age and a long memory.
There's no doubt the Tories have moved 'down market' over the decades. You only have to look at their candidates and MPs to see that. Which plays very well in our sort of electoral system, given the propensity of the educated middle classes to agglomerate within a minority of constituencies.
One can certainly see that in the constituencies that have moved away from the Conservatives, and those that have moved towards them, over thirty years.
I agree with all of this except, except, except ... Maggie.
Margaret Thatcher did something remarkable when she opened up council house tenants to be able to buy their own homes. For a time she spoke the language of the 'housewife's' purse holder. She knew how much a loaf of bread cost, which is something I bet you none of the current Cabinet do. Then came the whole Mondeo Man phenomenon etc. and places like Basildon and Romford turned blue. She really got the aspirations of working class people.
For all her faults, and I intensely disagree with 'some' of her philosophy, she was an astounding politician.
A lot of the grandchildren of those who bought their council houses are finding it very difficult to find anywhere to live now though.
Very, very, true.
I think the disenfranchisement of an entire generation from owning their own homes (probably two generations in reality) is a massive ticking timebomb.
Boris was right about the need to build. But to do so will piss off the Telegraph constituency.
My anecdotal 'evidence' matches this thread. The people in my life who are avowed tories and Boris fans did not go to University.
The problem here for me as a Labour (or when the situation suits LibDem of Green) supporter is that it is all too easy to come across as snotty. This really came to the fore with Brexit where the divide was quite stark. Thick, stupid, easily misled people tended to support Boris and Brexit. Of course there are exceptions to this like our very own Leon who I am sure is very bright.
See how easy it is to get snotty over it? It's something which is guaranteed to wind up Brexit supporters and Boris tories, who will point with some justification to the same kind of Metropolitan elitism which herded people into the Brexit fold. Concerns about ghost towns, immigration and the EU's manifest centralised corruption were ignored by the well-educated.
I wonder if Mike and Ipsos have really hit on something. That THIS is the real and biggest divide in Britain today?
Pretty sure describing folk as thick, stupid and easily misled is snotty rather than coming across as such! Props for setting off a firework so early in the morning tho'.
This is the problem though, as IanB2 has just demonstrated. For those of us who wanted to Remain in the EU and who despair at the electorate's gullibility in voting for this deceiving clown Boris Johnson, it's terribly terribly easy to retreat into this kind of thinking. Oh well, what do you expect from stupid uneducated people?
But I also try to stop myself by remembering the genuine grievances people had and in order to do this I find it helpful to picture Tony Blair's smiling face. That's usually enough to halt me in my tracks and remind me just how much the Metropolitan elitists are to blame for what happened.
Whatever Mike says about Blair's successes for Labour, they came about in large part because he wore the emperor's clothes. Under him, Britain's bitter divisions began to emerge, the fissures of which finally became apparent with the Brexit vote.
Presumably if the stupid, uneducated people had have voted Remain, or Labour in 2019, that would have been great though.
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
So what interpretation did he offer for this ?
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. "When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. "It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
My anecdotal 'evidence' matches this thread. The people in my life who are avowed tories and Boris fans did not go to University.
The problem here for me as a Labour (or when the situation suits LibDem of Green) supporter is that it is all too easy to come across as snotty. This really came to the fore with Brexit where the divide was quite stark. Thick, stupid, easily misled people tended to support Boris and Brexit. Of course there are exceptions to this like our very own Leon who I am sure is very bright.
See how easy it is to get snotty over it? It's something which is guaranteed to wind up Brexit supporters and Boris tories, who will point with some justification to the same kind of Metropolitan elitism which herded people into the Brexit fold. Concerns about ghost towns, immigration and the EU's manifest centralised corruption were ignored by the well-educated.
I wonder if Mike and Ipsos have really hit on something. That THIS is the real and biggest divide in Britain today?
Pretty sure describing folk as thick, stupid and easily misled is snotty rather than coming across as such! Props for setting off a firework so early in the morning tho'.
This is the problem though, as IanB2 has just demonstrated. For those of us who wanted to Remain in the EU and who despair at the electorate's gullibility in voting for this deceiving clown Boris Johnson, it's terribly terribly easy to retreat into this kind of thinking. Oh well, what do you expect from stupid uneducated people?
But I also try to stop myself by remembering the genuine grievances people had and in order to do this I find it helpful to picture Tony Blair's smiling face. That's usually enough to halt me in my tracks and remind me just how much the Metropolitan elitists are to blame for what happened.
Whatever Mike says about Blair's successes for Labour, they came about in large part because he wore the emperor's clothes. Under him, Britain's bitter divisions began to emerge, the fissures of which finally became apparent with the Brexit vote.
I don't think that a fair description of the phenomenon of New Labour. The North-South divide preceeded New Labour, and also Thatcherism. To a degree it has always been there, but it became more marked in the Seventies to Nineties with the decline of manufacturing employment. The divide is now more between left behind towns and Metropolitan University cities.
The JRT report covered this too, it is well worth a read:
"Groups in Britain who have been ‘left behind’ by rapid economic change and feel cut adrift from the mainstream consensus were the most likely to support Brexit. These voters face a ‘double whammy’. While their lack of qualifications put them at a significant disadvantage in the modern economy, they are also being further marginalised in society by the lack of opportunities that faced in their low-skilled communities. This will make it extremely difficult for the left behind to adapt and prosper in future."
Tony Blair had the right formula with "Education, Education and Education" though implementing that rather fell foul of other priorities in office. Governments get distracted by foreign wars, including the current one.
My anecdotal 'evidence' matches this thread. The people in my life who are avowed tories and Boris fans did not go to University.
The problem here for me as a Labour (or when the situation suits LibDem of Green) supporter is that it is all too easy to come across as snotty. This really came to the fore with Brexit where the divide was quite stark. Thick, stupid, easily misled people tended to support Boris and Brexit. Of course there are exceptions to this like our very own Leon who I am sure is very bright.
See how easy it is to get snotty over it? It's something which is guaranteed to wind up Brexit supporters and Boris tories, who will point with some justification to the same kind of Metropolitan elitism which herded people into the Brexit fold. Concerns about ghost towns, immigration and the EU's manifest centralised corruption were ignored by the well-educated.
I wonder if Mike and Ipsos have really hit on something. That THIS is the real and biggest divide in Britain today?
Clever. Insult both Brexit supporters and remainers in the same post and hope to set off an argument. Shame we know what you are.
You don't though. You don't like me because I dare to disagree with your nasty right wing views. But I also don't entirely tow the left wing line on everything. IanB2 has never managed to get over the fact that I accused Jeremy Corbyn of being an anti-semite. And, yes, I think we should lay aside our self interests and we should back Zelensky with a No Fly Zone. It's a perspective. Get over it.
The problem on here is that too many of you are entrenched. You are not prepared to be free thinkers. To think outside your own box. To use this site as a great opportunity to broaden your perspective. It's frankly sad to see the way arguments develop and people pile-on people almost the moment they post.
And, by the way, I explained clearly why I mask my IP: because I have to protect someone close to me who is in the centre of Westminster. However, I am frankly incredulous that anyone would not use a VPN on the internet. When you research just how much data mining goes on, and the odious tracking of your every move, people are staggeringly complacent about casually using the internet.
I'm not a troll but I disallow all cookies and I always use a VPN. Everyone should do the same.
Shashank Joshi @shashj Treating civilians as combatants on the basis that they haven’t fled a city by your bogus deadline is about as war crime-y as it gets.
Say what you will about Putin and his acolytes (and as the old joke goes, in Russia you cannot), but when they decide to go full Nazi they commit to it.
They are going full Stalinist. The seizure of people and making them disappear far away, executions, lists of people being picked up etc., starving people into submission etc. They did not need to learn this from the Nazis. They simply need to repeat what previous Russian leaders did in their own recent history.
Constantly referring to this regime as Nazi-like is wrong because it somehow assumes that Russia had to learn all this appalling behaviour from others when the truth is that it has behaved appallingly to its own and other people in exactly this way. It is copying its own playbook not another country's.
That's a pretty strange post, given that the "intellectual" inspiration for later Putinism have been the likes of Dugin and Ilyin, two bona fide fascists. I don't really feel the need to correct you if you want to trace a line from Putin back to Stalin, but telling people that they're wrong to point out the fascist underpinning of Putin's regime is strange when it's probably the most accurate descriptor.
There is nothing strange about pointing out that Putin is copying what Stalin did. What is strange is the need to refer to the Nazis when describing Russia's behaviour when there are direct examples of exactly the same behaviour in Russia's own history. It's as if there is a need to downplay the very obvious likenesses between Putin and earlier Russian leaders, specifically Stalin, not least because Putin himself has praised what Stalin achieved and bemoaned the loss of the Russian Empire he created.
The Nazis were not the sole embodiment of evil in 20th century Europe. Stalinism and what he got the Soviets to do were quite as evil. Putin may choose to airbrush his and Soviet crimes from history. We in the West should not.
Having just finished Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" the parallels are striking - down to the same lies.
My anecdotal 'evidence' matches this thread. The people in my life who are avowed tories and Boris fans did not go to University.
The problem here for me as a Labour (or when the situation suits LibDem of Green) supporter is that it is all too easy to come across as snotty. This really came to the fore with Brexit where the divide was quite stark. Thick, stupid, easily misled people tended to support Boris and Brexit. Of course there are exceptions to this like our very own Leon who I am sure is very bright.
See how easy it is to get snotty over it? It's something which is guaranteed to wind up Brexit supporters and Boris tories, who will point with some justification to the same kind of Metropolitan elitism which herded people into the Brexit fold. Concerns about ghost towns, immigration and the EU's manifest centralised corruption were ignored by the well-educated.
I wonder if Mike and Ipsos have really hit on something. That THIS is the real and biggest divide in Britain today?
Pretty sure describing folk as thick, stupid and easily misled is snotty rather than coming across as such! Props for setting off a firework so early in the morning tho'.
This is the problem though, as IanB2 has just demonstrated. For those of us who wanted to Remain in the EU and who despair at the electorate's gullibility in voting for this deceiving clown Boris Johnson, it's terribly terribly easy to retreat into this kind of thinking. Oh well, what do you expect from stupid uneducated people?
But I also try to stop myself by remembering the genuine grievances people had and in order to do this I find it helpful to picture Tony Blair's smiling face. That's usually enough to halt me in my tracks and remind me just how much the Metropolitan elitists are to blame for what happened.
Whatever Mike says about Blair's successes for Labour, they came about in large part because he wore the emperor's clothes. Under him, Britain's bitter divisions began to emerge, the fissures of which finally became apparent with the Brexit vote.
Presumably if the stupid, uneducated people had have voted Remain, or Labour in 2019, that would have been great though.
Not being 'educated' doesn't make one 'stupid'.
That is of course true, but I was echoing Heathener's words.
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Indeed, given the way tertiary education has changed in my lifetime, level of education is little more than a proxy for age.
Not just tertiary education.
We forget it now, but in the 70's it was perfectly common to leave school without O Levels or CSEs. Nada. Zilch. That would mean being born in about 1960, so in your 60's now. That remained technically possible up to Ken Baker's reforms of the mid-80's.
So partly age, but also a cohort of people who have some reason to feel that the world has moved away from them in ways they don't like.
I feel the latter point particularly - but I'm unclear about the educational link as I was one of the very few to get a place in a top university in 1972 and had a successful career in teaching for 34 years. Always a Tory voter and by no means alone among my co-worker peers. Fairly sure that the world moving away thing is mainly just a product of age and a long memory.
There's no doubt the Tories have moved 'down market' over the decades. You only have to look at their candidates and MPs to see that. Which plays very well in our sort of electoral system, given the propensity of the educated middle classes to agglomerate within a minority of constituencies.
One can certainly see that in the constituencies that have moved away from the Conservatives, and those that have moved towards them, over thirty years.
I agree with all of this except, except, except ... Maggie.
Margaret Thatcher did something remarkable when she opened up council house tenants to be able to buy their own homes. For a time she spoke the language of the 'housewife's' purse holder. She knew how much a loaf of bread cost, which is something I bet you none of the current Cabinet do. Then came the whole Mondeo Man phenomenon etc. and places like Basildon and Romford turned blue. She really got the aspirations of working class people.
For all her faults, and I intensely disagree with 'some' of her philosophy, she was an astounding politician.
A lot of the grandchildren of those who bought their council houses are finding it very difficult to find anywhere to live now though.
Government has had around a decade to sort that out, where it could have borrowed enough money sufficiently cheaply to run a massive house building program (and could have increased significantly the proportion of energy efficient homes into the bargain). It's been suggested here hundreds of times.
Given our current finances, and the challenges ahead on energy costs, it might now be too late to do this at scale.
Some context: Mariupol defenders won't face Russian military tribunals. They'll face "Donbass" ones = will be "judged" by pro-Russian warlords, so that Russian hands gonna be clean and it will be innocent in the following massacre. That's a mega war crime announced beforehand
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
So what interpretation did he offer for this ?
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. "When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. "It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
That both the UK and Ukraine are in the category of countries with a freedom loving people. That doesn’t mean that the UK is equivalent to Ukraine
My anecdotal 'evidence' matches this thread. The people in my life who are avowed tories and Boris fans did not go to University.
The problem here for me as a Labour (or when the situation suits LibDem of Green) supporter is that it is all too easy to come across as snotty. This really came to the fore with Brexit where the divide was quite stark. Thick, stupid, easily misled people tended to support Boris and Brexit. Of course there are exceptions to this like our very own Leon who I am sure is very bright.
See how easy it is to get snotty over it? It's something which is guaranteed to wind up Brexit supporters and Boris tories, who will point with some justification to the same kind of Metropolitan elitism which herded people into the Brexit fold. Concerns about ghost towns, immigration and the EU's manifest centralised corruption were ignored by the well-educated.
I wonder if Mike and Ipsos have really hit on something. That THIS is the real and biggest divide in Britain today?
Pretty sure describing folk as thick, stupid and easily misled is snotty rather than coming across as such! Props for setting off a firework so early in the morning tho'.
This is the problem though, as IanB2 has just demonstrated. For those of us who wanted to Remain in the EU and who despair at the electorate's gullibility in voting for this deceiving clown Boris Johnson, it's terribly terribly easy to retreat into this kind of thinking. Oh well, what do you expect from stupid uneducated people?
But I also try to stop myself by remembering the genuine grievances people had and in order to do this I find it helpful to picture Tony Blair's smiling face. That's usually enough to halt me in my tracks and remind me just how much the Metropolitan elitists are to blame for what happened.
Whatever Mike says about Blair's successes for Labour, they came about in large part because he wore the emperor's clothes. Under him, Britain's bitter divisions began to emerge, the fissures of which finally became apparent with the Brexit vote.
Presumably if the stupid, uneducated people had have voted Remain, or Labour in 2019, that would have been great though.
Not being 'educated' doesn't make one 'stupid'.
Absolutely, and in Angela Rayner we see a good example of intelligence without formal qualifications.
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Indeed, given the way tertiary education has changed in my lifetime, level of education is little more than a proxy for age.
Not just tertiary education.
We forget it now, but in the 70's it was perfectly common to leave school without O Levels or CSEs. Nada. Zilch. That would mean being born in about 1960, so in your 60's now. That remained technically possible up to Ken Baker's reforms of the mid-80's.
So partly age, but also a cohort of people who have some reason to feel that the world has moved away from them in ways they don't like.
I feel the latter point particularly - but I'm unclear about the educational link as I was one of the very few to get a place in a top university in 1972 and had a successful career in teaching for 34 years. Always a Tory voter and by no means alone among my co-worker peers. Fairly sure that the world moving away thing is mainly just a product of age and a long memory.
There's no doubt the Tories have moved 'down market' over the decades. You only have to look at their candidates and MPs to see that. Which plays very well in our sort of electoral system, given the propensity of the educated middle classes to agglomerate within a minority of constituencies.
One can certainly see that in the constituencies that have moved away from the Conservatives, and those that have moved towards them, over thirty years.
I agree with all of this except, except, except ... Maggie.
Margaret Thatcher did something remarkable when she opened up council house tenants to be able to buy their own homes. For a time she spoke the language of the 'housewife's' purse holder. She knew how much a loaf of bread cost, which is something I bet you none of the current Cabinet do. Then came the whole Mondeo Man phenomenon etc. and places like Basildon and Romford turned blue. She really got the aspirations of working class people.
For all her faults, and I intensely disagree with 'some' of her philosophy, she was an astounding politician.
Yeah the "Thatcher is evil" stuff used to wind me up - I think for many on the left it was the class war bollocks even though large chunks of the labour movement thought Scargill was a prize prannock.
Yes her economic policies were destructive and often strategically stupid (destroying heavy industry so that we're reliant on imports). At the same time the status quo ante wasn't working so change was needed. And they left social security way higher than they are now and once the destruction dust settled threw money into redevelopment. And as you say took so many people with her who thought "I'll have a piece of that" as new shiny shiny was developed and brought to market.
The other massive difference between then and now - honesty. Thatcher and her cabinets didn't lie, didn't steal, had basic standards. They did some truly shitty things but they believed it was in the national interest and did what they could to help the people being left behind - even if it was "on yer bike" (which as someone who has moved around for work I have always considered to be a good contribution to the debate). They didn't cut the front line, then cut support, then blame the poor. That was later.
Shashank Joshi @shashj Treating civilians as combatants on the basis that they haven’t fled a city by your bogus deadline is about as war crime-y as it gets.
Say what you will about Putin and his acolytes (and as the old joke goes, in Russia you cannot), but when they decide to go full Nazi they commit to it.
They are going full Stalinist. The seizure of people and making them disappear far away, executions, lists of people being picked up etc., starving people into submission etc. They did not need to learn this from the Nazis. They simply need to repeat what previous Russian leaders did in their own recent history.
Constantly referring to this regime as Nazi-like is wrong because it somehow assumes that Russia had to learn all this appalling behaviour from others when the truth is that it has behaved appallingly to its own and other people in exactly this way. It is copying its own playbook not another country's.
That's a pretty strange post, given that the "intellectual" inspiration for later Putinism have been the likes of Dugin and Ilyin, two bona fide fascists. I don't really feel the need to correct you if you want to trace a line from Putin back to Stalin, but telling people that they're wrong to point out the fascist underpinning of Putin's regime is strange when it's probably the most accurate descriptor.
There is nothing strange about pointing out that Putin is copying what Stalin did. What is strange is the need to refer to the Nazis when describing Russia's behaviour when there are direct examples of exactly the same behaviour in Russia's own history. It's as if there is a need to downplay the very obvious likenesses between Putin and earlier Russian leaders, specifically Stalin, not least because Putin himself has praised what Stalin achieved and bemoaned the loss of the Russian Empire he created.
The Nazis were not the sole embodiment of evil in 20th century Europe. Stalinism and what he got the Soviets to do were quite as evil. Putin may choose to airbrush his and Soviet crimes from history. We in the West should not.
Having just finished Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" the parallels are striking - down to the same lies.
I might have to get that; I've have never understood the hatred of 'official' Russians for Ukrainians. The comments about relationships that we are hearing surely make it clear that they are very similar peoples, if not the same, just speaking a different language!
My anecdotal 'evidence' matches this thread. The people in my life who are avowed tories and Boris fans did not go to University.
The problem here for me as a Labour (or when the situation suits LibDem of Green) supporter is that it is all too easy to come across as snotty. This really came to the fore with Brexit where the divide was quite stark. Thick, stupid, easily misled people tended to support Boris and Brexit. Of course there are exceptions to this like our very own Leon who I am sure is very bright.
See how easy it is to get snotty over it? It's something which is guaranteed to wind up Brexit supporters and Boris tories, who will point with some justification to the same kind of Metropolitan elitism which herded people into the Brexit fold. Concerns about ghost towns, immigration and the EU's manifest centralised corruption were ignored by the well-educated.
I wonder if Mike and Ipsos have really hit on something. That THIS is the real and biggest divide in Britain today?
Clever. Insult both Brexit supporters and remainers in the same post and hope to set off an argument. Shame we know what you are.
You don't though. You don't like me because I dare to disagree with your nasty right wing views. But I also don't entirely tow the left wing line on everything. IanB2 has never managed to get over the fact that I accused Jeremy Corbyn of being an anti-semite. And, yes, I think we should lay aside our self interests and we should back Zelensky with a No Fly Zone. It's a perspective. Get over it.
The problem on here is that too many of you are entrenched. You are not prepared to be free thinkers. To think outside your own box. To use this site as a great opportunity to broaden your perspective. It's frankly sad to see the way arguments develop and people pile-on people almost the moment they post.
And, by the way, I explained clearly why I mask my IP: because I have to protect someone close to me who is in the centre of Westminster. However, I am frankly incredulous that anyone would not use a VPN on the internet. When you research just how much data mining goes on, and the odious tracking of your every move, people are staggeringly complacent about casually using the internet.
I'm not a troll but I disallow all cookies and I always use a VPN. Everyone should do the same.
What are my “nasty right wing views that concern you so much”?
it is a pure coincidence that all of the themes you have pursued, from covid to Ukraine, have been aligned with Putin’s strategy at the time. I put that down to your willingness to think for yourself and to challenge orders from above, of course.
My anecdotal 'evidence' matches this thread. The people in my life who are avowed tories and Boris fans did not go to University.
The problem here for me as a Labour (or when the situation suits LibDem of Green) supporter is that it is all too easy to come across as snotty. This really came to the fore with Brexit where the divide was quite stark. Thick, stupid, easily misled people tended to support Boris and Brexit. Of course there are exceptions to this like our very own Leon who I am sure is very bright.
See how easy it is to get snotty over it? It's something which is guaranteed to wind up Brexit supporters and Boris tories, who will point with some justification to the same kind of Metropolitan elitism which herded people into the Brexit fold. Concerns about ghost towns, immigration and the EU's manifest centralised corruption were ignored by the well-educated.
I wonder if Mike and Ipsos have really hit on something. That THIS is the real and biggest divide in Britain today?
Pretty sure describing folk as thick, stupid and easily misled is snotty rather than coming across as such! Props for setting off a firework so early in the morning tho'.
This is the problem though, as IanB2 has just demonstrated. For those of us who wanted to Remain in the EU and who despair at the electorate's gullibility in voting for this deceiving clown Boris Johnson, it's terribly terribly easy to retreat into this kind of thinking. Oh well, what do you expect from stupid uneducated people?
But I also try to stop myself by remembering the genuine grievances people had and in order to do this I find it helpful to picture Tony Blair's smiling face. That's usually enough to halt me in my tracks and remind me just how much the Metropolitan elitists are to blame for what happened.
Whatever Mike says about Blair's successes for Labour, they came about in large part because he wore the emperor's clothes. Under him, Britain's bitter divisions began to emerge, the fissures of which finally became apparent with the Brexit vote.
Presumably if the stupid, uneducated people had have voted Remain, or Labour in 2019, that would have been great though.
Not being 'educated' doesn't make one 'stupid'.
Absolutely, and in Angela Rayner we see a good example of intelligence without formal qualifications.
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Indeed, given the way tertiary education has changed in my lifetime, level of education is little more than a proxy for age.
Not just tertiary education.
We forget it now, but in the 70's it was perfectly common to leave school without O Levels or CSEs. Nada. Zilch. That would mean being born in about 1960, so in your 60's now. That remained technically possible up to Ken Baker's reforms of the mid-80's.
So partly age, but also a cohort of people who have some reason to feel that the world has moved away from them in ways they don't like.
I feel the latter point particularly - but I'm unclear about the educational link as I was one of the very few to get a place in a top university in 1972 and had a successful career in teaching for 34 years. Always a Tory voter and by no means alone among my co-worker peers. Fairly sure that the world moving away thing is mainly just a product of age and a long memory.
There's no doubt the Tories have moved 'down market' over the decades. You only have to look at their candidates and MPs to see that. Which plays very well in our sort of electoral system, given the propensity of the educated middle classes to agglomerate within a minority of constituencies.
One can certainly see that in the constituencies that have moved away from the Conservatives, and those that have moved towards them, over thirty years.
I agree with all of this except, except, except ... Maggie.
Margaret Thatcher did something remarkable when she opened up council house tenants to be able to buy their own homes. For a time she spoke the language of the 'housewife's' purse holder. She knew how much a loaf of bread cost, which is something I bet you none of the current Cabinet do. Then came the whole Mondeo Man phenomenon etc. and places like Basildon and Romford turned blue. She really got the aspirations of working class people.
For all her faults, and I intensely disagree with 'some' of her philosophy, she was an astounding politician.
A lot of the grandchildren of those who bought their council houses are finding it very difficult to find anywhere to live now though.
Government has had around a decade to sort that out, where it could have borrowed enough money sufficiently cheaply to run a massive house building program (and could have increased significantly the proportion of energy efficient homes into the bargain). It's been suggested here hundreds of times.
Given our current finances, and the challenges ahead on energy costs, it might now be too late to do this at scale.
When people foam on about "the left" and "the right" I always wheel out Harold Macmillan, old Etonian patrician high-church Tory who campaigned in 1959 boasting about how many council houses his government had built.
The simple problem we have is that too many people make too much money from private property. Comments made upthread about today's generation being shut out of the market is true - market rents are impossibly high, that deposit to buy and pay a cheaper mortgage impossible to save.
The solution is more high rise living and regulated rents. They've just completed the Wembley Park development with a new town of apartments, all private sector, all £bonkers to rent. Great for the developer, less great for the economy as all that money is sucked out of circulation into the pockets of the few. Would have been better built the same but with regulated rents making them affordable. But we can't do that cos Communist.
My anecdotal 'evidence' matches this thread. The people in my life who are avowed tories and Boris fans did not go to University.
The problem here for me as a Labour (or when the situation suits LibDem of Green) supporter is that it is all too easy to come across as snotty. This really came to the fore with Brexit where the divide was quite stark. Thick, stupid, easily misled people tended to support Boris and Brexit. Of course there are exceptions to this like our very own Leon who I am sure is very bright.
See how easy it is to get snotty over it? It's something which is guaranteed to wind up Brexit supporters and Boris tories, who will point with some justification to the same kind of Metropolitan elitism which herded people into the Brexit fold. Concerns about ghost towns, immigration and the EU's manifest centralised corruption were ignored by the well-educated.
I wonder if Mike and Ipsos have really hit on something. That THIS is the real and biggest divide in Britain today?
Pretty sure describing folk as thick, stupid and easily misled is snotty rather than coming across as such! Props for setting off a firework so early in the morning tho'.
This is the problem though, as IanB2 has just demonstrated. For those of us who wanted to Remain in the EU and who despair at the electorate's gullibility in voting for this deceiving clown Boris Johnson, it's terribly terribly easy to retreat into this kind of thinking. Oh well, what do you expect from stupid uneducated people?
But I also try to stop myself by remembering the genuine grievances people had and in order to do this I find it helpful to picture Tony Blair's smiling face. That's usually enough to halt me in my tracks and remind me just how much the Metropolitan elitists are to blame for what happened.
Whatever Mike says about Blair's successes for Labour, they came about in large part because he wore the emperor's clothes. Under him, Britain's bitter divisions began to emerge, the fissures of which finally became apparent with the Brexit vote.
I don't think that a fair description of the phenomenon of New Labour. The North-South divide preceeded New Labour, and also Thatcherism. To a degree it has always been there, but it became more marked in the Seventies to Nineties with the decline of manufacturing employment. The divide is now more between left behind towns and Metropolitan University cities.
The JRT report covered this too, it is well worth a read:
"Groups in Britain who have been ‘left behind’ by rapid economic change and feel cut adrift from the mainstream consensus were the most likely to support Brexit. These voters face a ‘double whammy’. While their lack of qualifications put them at a significant disadvantage in the modern economy, they are also being further marginalised in society by the lack of opportunities that faced in their low-skilled communities. This will make it extremely difficult for the left behind to adapt and prosper in future."
Tony Blair had the right formula with "Education, Education and Education" though implementing that rather fell foul of other priorities in office. Governments get distracted by foreign wars, including the current one.
Education has to be the way forward. But it creates problems as well.
There's that kitchen sink drama trope of the young person leaving home to study and being really resented by their parents. It is a trope, but like all tropes it has a lump of truth at its core.
Beyond a certain point, to be educated is to specialise. Which means leaving home for training and going where the work is. It's one of the many reasons that University Technical Colleges (14-19 schools with strong links to a local industry) flopped- what happens if people aren't interested in the local industry?
And once those who want to and can leave do leave, the people left are the left behind.
I don't think it's a problem that can be solved- I doubt we really want to go back to a world where everyone stays in Hometown apart from the doctor and the clergyman- but the negative consequences need better managing.
Shashank Joshi @shashj Treating civilians as combatants on the basis that they haven’t fled a city by your bogus deadline is about as war crime-y as it gets.
Say what you will about Putin and his acolytes (and as the old joke goes, in Russia you cannot), but when they decide to go full Nazi they commit to it.
They are going full Stalinist. The seizure of people and making them disappear far away, executions, lists of people being picked up etc., starving people into submission etc. They did not need to learn this from the Nazis. They simply need to repeat what previous Russian leaders did in their own recent history.
Constantly referring to this regime as Nazi-like is wrong because it somehow assumes that Russia had to learn all this appalling behaviour from others when the truth is that it has behaved appallingly to its own and other people in exactly this way. It is copying its own playbook not another country's.
That's a pretty strange post, given that the "intellectual" inspiration for later Putinism have been the likes of Dugin and Ilyin, two bona fide fascists. I don't really feel the need to correct you if you want to trace a line from Putin back to Stalin, but telling people that they're wrong to point out the fascist underpinning of Putin's regime is strange when it's probably the most accurate descriptor.
There is nothing strange about pointing out that Putin is copying what Stalin did. What is strange is the need to refer to the Nazis when describing Russia's behaviour when there are direct examples of exactly the same behaviour in Russia's own history. It's as if there is a need to downplay the very obvious likenesses between Putin and earlier Russian leaders, specifically Stalin, not least because Putin himself has praised what Stalin achieved and bemoaned the loss of the Russian Empire he created.
The Nazis were not the sole embodiment of evil in 20th century Europe. Stalinism and what he got the Soviets to do were quite as evil. Putin may choose to airbrush his and Soviet crimes from history. We in the West should not.
Having just finished Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" the parallels are striking - down to the same lies.
Certainly Stalin found it useful to break the Ukranian peasant class, but the extraction of grain was also key to his industrialisation programme. Not just to feed his new urban industrial workers, but also to export. Grain exports were one of his few sources of Foreign exchange, and that was essential to restructure an agricultural economy into an industrial one. Starving Ukraine served two purposes.
The thing I think is shown most clearly by this is the astonishing delusions of those who vote Labour. Many seem to genuinely believe that they are still the party of the working class, dedicated to helping the poor and disadvantaged in society.
The reality is that the Labour party is comprised of well educated, well paid, generally public sector professionals with degrees, final salary pensions and middle class expectations. These are, of course, not bad people, many of them are good people and they are the bedrock of our public services. But, even after Blair, they still want to believe that they and not the Tories can do better for the poor. They believe that the Tories are just for the rich and the deluded. They do not see how entitled they are themselves. And how patronising they are to those who are less well educated.
We also see it in their policies. Where are the Labour supporters wanting to get rid of incompetent teachers who have betrayed generations of disadvantaged children? Where are the Labour supporters questioning the chains of debt forged in totally inadequate educational establishments staffed by their members? Where are the Labour supporters focused on taking privileges away from those on fabulously expensive final salary pensions to really help those without them? By their privileges you shall know them.
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
So what interpretation did he offer for this ?
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. "When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. "It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
That both the UK and Ukraine are in the category of countries with a freedom loving people. That doesn’t mean that the UK is equivalent to Ukraine
Yes, Boris’ quote about “Ukraine and Brexit” really isn’t that offensive. You can see what he’s trying to say. It was emotionally misjudged but not an obviously foolish or outrageous statement
But the misjudgement (or canny trolling?) got his opponents to hyper-ventilate, which then made the news
Shashank Joshi @shashj Treating civilians as combatants on the basis that they haven’t fled a city by your bogus deadline is about as war crime-y as it gets.
Say what you will about Putin and his acolytes (and as the old joke goes, in Russia you cannot), but when they decide to go full Nazi they commit to it.
They are going full Stalinist. The seizure of people and making them disappear far away, executions, lists of people being picked up etc., starving people into submission etc. They did not need to learn this from the Nazis. They simply need to repeat what previous Russian leaders did in their own recent history.
Constantly referring to this regime as Nazi-like is wrong because it somehow assumes that Russia had to learn all this appalling behaviour from others when the truth is that it has behaved appallingly to its own and other people in exactly this way. It is copying its own playbook not another country's.
That's a pretty strange post, given that the "intellectual" inspiration for later Putinism have been the likes of Dugin and Ilyin, two bona fide fascists. I don't really feel the need to correct you if you want to trace a line from Putin back to Stalin, but telling people that they're wrong to point out the fascist underpinning of Putin's regime is strange when it's probably the most accurate descriptor.
There is nothing strange about pointing out that Putin is copying what Stalin did. What is strange is the need to refer to the Nazis when describing Russia's behaviour when there are direct examples of exactly the same behaviour in Russia's own history. It's as if there is a need to downplay the very obvious likenesses between Putin and earlier Russian leaders, specifically Stalin, not least because Putin himself has praised what Stalin achieved and bemoaned the loss of the Russian Empire he created.
The Nazis were not the sole embodiment of evil in 20th century Europe. Stalinism and what he got the Soviets to do were quite as evil. Putin may choose to airbrush his and Soviet crimes from history. We in the West should not.
Having just finished Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" the parallels are striking - down to the same lies.
Certainly Stalin found it useful to break the Ukranian peasant class, but the extraction of grain was also key to his industrialisation programme. Not just to feed his new urban industrial workers, but also to export. Grain exports were one of his few sources of Foreign exchange, and that was essential to restructure an agricultural economy into an industrial one. Starving Ukraine served two purposes.
On that note, I see the Russians stole 5 ships of Ukrainian grain yesterday. Perhaps they are attempting Holodomor 2.0
There’s a column in the NYT which says Putin’s new plan is to create so many refugees, pouring into the EU/NATO, that the West pressures Zelenskyy into agreeing a peace deal that looks good for Putin
Sounds plausible. 10m Ukes have already been displaced inside and outside their country. It might work, as well
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Indeed, given the way tertiary education has changed in my lifetime, level of education is little more than a proxy for age.
Not just tertiary education.
We forget it now, but in the 70's it was perfectly common to leave school without O Levels or CSEs. Nada. Zilch. That would mean being born in about 1960, so in your 60's now. That remained technically possible up to Ken Baker's reforms of the mid-80's.
So partly age, but also a cohort of people who have some reason to feel that the world has moved away from them in ways they don't like.
I feel the latter point particularly - but I'm unclear about the educational link as I was one of the very few to get a place in a top university in 1972 and had a successful career in teaching for 34 years. Always a Tory voter and by no means alone among my co-worker peers. Fairly sure that the world moving away thing is mainly just a product of age and a long memory.
There's no doubt the Tories have moved 'down market' over the decades. You only have to look at their candidates and MPs to see that. Which plays very well in our sort of electoral system, given the propensity of the educated middle classes to agglomerate within a minority of constituencies.
Interesting turn of phrase - sums of the patronising contempt shown by the emcs to those ' beneath' them.
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
So what interpretation did he offer for this ?
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. "When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. "It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
That both the UK and Ukraine are in the category of countries with a freedom loving people. That doesn’t mean that the UK is equivalent to Ukraine
Yes, Boris’ quote about “Ukraine and Brexit” really isn’t that offensive. You can see what he’s trying to say. It was emotionally misjudged but not an obviously foolish or outrageous statement
But the misjudgement (or canny trolling?) got his opponents to hyper-ventilate, which then made the news
Nonsense. It was appalling as well as being spectacularly inaccurate.
My anecdotal 'evidence' matches this thread. The people in my life who are avowed tories and Boris fans did not go to University.
The problem here for me as a Labour (or when the situation suits LibDem of Green) supporter is that it is all too easy to come across as snotty. This really came to the fore with Brexit where the divide was quite stark. Thick, stupid, easily misled people tended to support Boris and Brexit. Of course there are exceptions to this like our very own Leon who I am sure is very bright.
See how easy it is to get snotty over it? It's something which is guaranteed to wind up Brexit supporters and Boris tories, who will point with some justification to the same kind of Metropolitan elitism which herded people into the Brexit fold. Concerns about ghost towns, immigration and the EU's manifest centralised corruption were ignored by the well-educated.
I wonder if Mike and Ipsos have really hit on something. That THIS is the real and biggest divide in Britain today?
Pretty sure describing folk as thick, stupid and easily misled is snotty rather than coming across as such! Props for setting off a firework so early in the morning tho'.
This is the problem though, as IanB2 has just demonstrated. For those of us who wanted to Remain in the EU and who despair at the electorate's gullibility in voting for this deceiving clown Boris Johnson, it's terribly terribly easy to retreat into this kind of thinking. Oh well, what do you expect from stupid uneducated people?
But I also try to stop myself by remembering the genuine grievances people had and in order to do this I find it helpful to picture Tony Blair's smiling face. That's usually enough to halt me in my tracks and remind me just how much the Metropolitan elitists are to blame for what happened.
Whatever Mike says about Blair's successes for Labour, they came about in large part because he wore the emperor's clothes. Under him, Britain's bitter divisions began to emerge, the fissures of which finally became apparent with the Brexit vote.
I don't think that a fair description of the phenomenon of New Labour. The North-South divide preceeded New Labour, and also Thatcherism. To a degree it has always been there, but it became more marked in the Seventies to Nineties with the decline of manufacturing employment. The divide is now more between left behind towns and Metropolitan University cities.
The JRT report covered this too, it is well worth a read:
"Groups in Britain who have been ‘left behind’ by rapid economic change and feel cut adrift from the mainstream consensus were the most likely to support Brexit. These voters face a ‘double whammy’. While their lack of qualifications put them at a significant disadvantage in the modern economy, they are also being further marginalised in society by the lack of opportunities that faced in their low-skilled communities. This will make it extremely difficult for the left behind to adapt and prosper in future."
Tony Blair had the right formula with "Education, Education and Education" though implementing that rather fell foul of other priorities in office. Governments get distracted by foreign wars, including the current one.
Education has to be the way forward. But it creates problems as well.
There's that kitchen sink drama trope of the young person leaving home to study and being really resented by their parents. It is a trope, but like all tropes it has a lump of truth at its core.
Beyond a certain point, to be educated is to specialise. Which means leaving home for training and going where the work is. It's one of the many reasons that University Technical Colleges (14-19 schools with strong links to a local industry) flopped- what happens if people aren't interested in the local industry?
And once those who want to and can leave do leave, the people left are the left behind.
I don't think it's a problem that can be solved- I doubt we really want to go back to a world where everyone stays in Hometown apart from the doctor and the clergyman- but the negative consequences need better managing.
When I was a teenager, a friend's girlfriend was the oldest of ?five? kids. Her younger siblings were all boys. Her parents would go out every night, leaving her to look after her brothers - who were nice, but a handful. She did very well at her A-levels, and got into uni (the first of her family to do so).
Her parents refused to support her, and she dropped out after the first year. As she bitterly said: her parents could have not gone to the pub two nights a week, and the money would have paid for her to go. But they wanted her at home to look after the kids.
Former head of the foreign office Sir Peter Ricketts @skynews says Boris Johnson should withdraw his Brexit/Ukraine remark, saying it was "seen as desperately insulting and insensitive all of Europe... we should be trying to heal wounds with the EU not doubling down on them" https://twitter.com/tamcohen/status/1505814607591522307
Shashank Joshi @shashj Treating civilians as combatants on the basis that they haven’t fled a city by your bogus deadline is about as war crime-y as it gets.
Say what you will about Putin and his acolytes (and as the old joke goes, in Russia you cannot), but when they decide to go full Nazi they commit to it.
They are going full Stalinist. The seizure of people and making them disappear far away, executions, lists of people being picked up etc., starving people into submission etc. They did not need to learn this from the Nazis. They simply need to repeat what previous Russian leaders did in their own recent history.
Constantly referring to this regime as Nazi-like is wrong because it somehow assumes that Russia had to learn all this appalling behaviour from others when the truth is that it has behaved appallingly to its own and other people in exactly this way. It is copying its own playbook not another country's.
That's a pretty strange post, given that the "intellectual" inspiration for later Putinism have been the likes of Dugin and Ilyin, two bona fide fascists. I don't really feel the need to correct you if you want to trace a line from Putin back to Stalin, but telling people that they're wrong to point out the fascist underpinning of Putin's regime is strange when it's probably the most accurate descriptor.
There is nothing strange about pointing out that Putin is copying what Stalin did. What is strange is the need to refer to the Nazis when describing Russia's behaviour when there are direct examples of exactly the same behaviour in Russia's own history. It's as if there is a need to downplay the very obvious likenesses between Putin and earlier Russian leaders, specifically Stalin, not least because Putin himself has praised what Stalin achieved and bemoaned the loss of the Russian Empire he created.
The Nazis were not the sole embodiment of evil in 20th century Europe. Stalinism and what he got the Soviets to do were quite as evil. Putin may choose to airbrush his and Soviet crimes from history. We in the West should not.
Having just finished Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" the parallels are striking - down to the same lies.
Certainly Stalin found it useful to break the Ukranian peasant class, but the extraction of grain was also key to his industrialisation programme. Not just to feed his new urban industrial workers, but also to export. Grain exports were one of his few sources of Foreign exchange, and that was essential to restructure an agricultural economy into an industrial one. Starving Ukraine served two purposes.
On that note, I see the Russians stole 5 ships of Ukrainian grain yesterday. Perhaps they are attempting Holodomor 2.0
There’s a column in the NYT which says Putin’s new plan is to create so many refugees, pouring into the EU/NATO, that the West pressures Zelenskyy into agreeing a peace deal that looks good for Putin
Sounds plausible. 10m Ukes have already been displaced inside and outside their country. It might work, as well
He might get a peace deal by that route (though I doubt it). Removal of sanctions is another matter.
He is utterly trashing his country, financially, morally and reputationally.
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Indeed, given the way tertiary education has changed in my lifetime, level of education is little more than a proxy for age.
Not just tertiary education.
We forget it now, but in the 70's it was perfectly common to leave school without O Levels or CSEs. Nada. Zilch. That would mean being born in about 1960, so in your 60's now. That remained technically possible up to Ken Baker's reforms of the mid-80's.
So partly age, but also a cohort of people who have some reason to feel that the world has moved away from them in ways they don't like.
had a successful career in teaching for 34 years. Always a Tory voter .
Private schools or state sector?
And primary, secondary, or tertiary?
I ask because I know very very few tory teachers who survived for long in the state secondary sector.
1976-1993- in inner London comps in Wandsworth [ before gentrification!) & Peckham - 1993 -2008 in a Kent grammar School. Another prejudice shattered?
No I was genuinely curious.
May I ask which comps in Wandsworth? Or is that too much detail to put on here?
(I taught in Wandsworth comps)
Spencer Park - layer renamed John Archer - just near Wandsworth prison!
*) Ha-ha-ha at Red Bull. *) Congrats to Ferrari. It'd be good to see a three-way battle at the front all season. *) Shame Williams seem to be near the back. Again. And Macca doing poorly. *) Congrats to Haas.
*) But most of all: I want to laugh at Mazepin. It looks like Haas may have a car as good as, or better than, they had in their first season. Mazepin could have been scoring points. But he isn't. Oh dear. So sad. Never mind.
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Indeed, given the way tertiary education has changed in my lifetime, level of education is little more than a proxy for age.
Not just tertiary education.
We forget it now, but in the 70's it was perfectly common to leave school without O Levels or CSEs. Nada. Zilch. That would mean being born in about 1960, so in your 60's now. That remained technically possible up to Ken Baker's reforms of the mid-80's.
So partly age, but also a cohort of people who have some reason to feel that the world has moved away from them in ways they don't like.
I feel the latter point particularly - but I'm unclear about the educational link as I was one of the very few to get a place in a top university in 1972 and had a successful career in teaching for 34 years. Always a Tory voter and by no means alone among my co-worker peers. Fairly sure that the world moving away thing is mainly just a product of age and a long memory.
There's no doubt the Tories have moved 'down market' over the decades. You only have to look at their candidates and MPs to see that. Which plays very well in our sort of electoral system, given the propensity of the educated middle classes to agglomerate within a minority of constituencies.
One can certainly see that in the constituencies that have moved away from the Conservatives, and those that have moved towards them, over thirty years.
I agree with all of this except, except, except ... Maggie.
Margaret Thatcher did something remarkable when she opened up council house tenants to be able to buy their own homes. For a time she spoke the language of the 'housewife's' purse holder. She knew how much a loaf of bread cost, which is something I bet you none of the current Cabinet do. Then came the whole Mondeo Man phenomenon etc. and places like Basildon and Romford turned blue. She really got the aspirations of working class people.
For all her faults, and I intensely disagree with 'some' of her philosophy, she was an astounding politician.
A lot of the grandchildren of those who bought their council houses are finding it very difficult to find anywhere to live now though.
Government has had around a decade to sort that out, where it could have borrowed enough money sufficiently cheaply to run a massive house building program (and could have increased significantly the proportion of energy efficient homes into the bargain). It's been suggested here hundreds of times.
Given our current finances, and the challenges ahead on energy costs, it might now be too late to do this at scale.
When people foam on about "the left" and "the right" I always wheel out Harold Macmillan, old Etonian patrician high-church Tory who campaigned in 1959 boasting about how many council houses his government had built.
The simple problem we have is that too many people make too much money from private property. Comments made upthread about today's generation being shut out of the market is true - market rents are impossibly high, that deposit to buy and pay a cheaper mortgage impossible to save.
The solution is more high rise living and regulated rents. They've just completed the Wembley Park development with a new town of apartments, all private sector, all £bonkers to rent. Great for the developer, less great for the economy as all that money is sucked out of circulation into the pockets of the few. Would have been better built the same but with regulated rents making them affordable. But we can't do that cos Communist.
Big part of the problem is that housing benefits are based on some formula rather than negotiated
The thing I think is shown most clearly by this is the astonishing delusions of those who vote Labour. Many seem to genuinely believe that they are still the party of the working class, dedicated to helping the poor and disadvantaged in society.
The reality is that the Labour party is comprised of well educated, well paid, generally public sector professionals with degrees, final salary pensions and middle class expectations. These are, of course, not bad people, many of them are good people and they are the bedrock of our public services. But, even after Blair, they still want to believe that they and not the Tories can do better for the poor. They believe that the Tories are just for the rich and the deluded. They do not see how entitled they are themselves. And how patronising they are to those who are less well educated.
We also see it in their policies. Where are the Labour supporters wanting to get rid of incompetent teachers who have betrayed generations of disadvantaged children? Where are the Labour supporters questioning the chains of debt forged in totally inadequate educational establishments staffed by their members? Where are the Labour supporters focused on taking privileges away from those on fabulously expensive final salary pensions to really help those without them? By their privileges you shall know them.
I think it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that the 10 million or so who voted Labour in 2019 are all elitist metropolitans who are living it up on final salary pensions. Surely, the reality is that older people tend to vote Tory and tend to have fewer qualifications.
The fact is that you can quite easily have a degree and be struggling by on a zero hours contract with no hope of ever owning a home; and can just as easily be a homeowning pensioner with no qualifications and a nice, steady, guaranteed income.
The interesting bit in all this is that the cost of living crisis will affect the latter just as much as the former. That hasn’t happened for a while.
Shashank Joshi @shashj Treating civilians as combatants on the basis that they haven’t fled a city by your bogus deadline is about as war crime-y as it gets.
Say what you will about Putin and his acolytes (and as the old joke goes, in Russia you cannot), but when they decide to go full Nazi they commit to it.
They are going full Stalinist. The seizure of people and making them disappear far away, executions, lists of people being picked up etc., starving people into submission etc. They did not need to learn this from the Nazis. They simply need to repeat what previous Russian leaders did in their own recent history.
Constantly referring to this regime as Nazi-like is wrong because it somehow assumes that Russia had to learn all this appalling behaviour from others when the truth is that it has behaved appallingly to its own and other people in exactly this way. It is copying its own playbook not another country's.
That's a pretty strange post, given that the "intellectual" inspiration for later Putinism have been the likes of Dugin and Ilyin, two bona fide fascists. I don't really feel the need to correct you if you want to trace a line from Putin back to Stalin, but telling people that they're wrong to point out the fascist underpinning of Putin's regime is strange when it's probably the most accurate descriptor.
There is nothing strange about pointing out that Putin is copying what Stalin did. What is strange is the need to refer to the Nazis when describing Russia's behaviour when there are direct examples of exactly the same behaviour in Russia's own history. It's as if there is a need to downplay the very obvious likenesses between Putin and earlier Russian leaders, specifically Stalin, not least because Putin himself has praised what Stalin achieved and bemoaned the loss of the Russian Empire he created.
The Nazis were not the sole embodiment of evil in 20th century Europe. Stalinism and what he got the Soviets to do were quite as evil. Putin may choose to airbrush his and Soviet crimes from history. We in the West should not.
Having just finished Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" the parallels are striking - down to the same lies.
Certainly Stalin found it useful to break the Ukranian peasant class, but the extraction of grain was also key to his industrialisation programme. Not just to feed his new urban industrial workers, but also to export. Grain exports were one of his few sources of Foreign exchange, and that was essential to restructure an agricultural economy into an industrial one. Starving Ukraine served two purposes.
On that note, I see the Russians stole 5 ships of Ukrainian grain yesterday. Perhaps they are attempting Holodomor 2.0
There’s a column in the NYT which says Putin’s new plan is to create so many refugees, pouring into the EU/NATO, that the West pressures Zelenskyy into agreeing a peace deal that looks good for Putin
Sounds plausible. 10m Ukes have already been displaced inside and outside their country. It might work, as well
He might get a peace deal by that route (though I doubt it). Removal of sanctions is another matter.
He is utterly trashing his country, financially, morally and reputationally.
We need to move fast towards cutting off the flow of western cash, buying Russian hydrocarbons
That’s the crucial choke point - that’s when Russia REALLY suffers. No more money. Default. Then Putin simply can’t afford any more wars
It will be painful and difficult for us, too. Finding and paying for new sources of energy. But there are no cheap easy ways out of this
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
So what interpretation did he offer for this ?
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. "When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. "It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
That both the UK and Ukraine are in the category of countries with a freedom loving people. That doesn’t mean that the UK is equivalent to Ukraine
Yes, Boris’ quote about “Ukraine and Brexit” really isn’t that offensive. You can see what he’s trying to say. It was emotionally misjudged but not an obviously foolish or outrageous statement
But the misjudgement (or canny trolling?) got his opponents to hyper-ventilate, which then made the news
I’m cynical enough to go with canny trolling. The words were carefully chosen. You would hope for better, but that’s the PM the UK has. For now.
Shashank Joshi @shashj Treating civilians as combatants on the basis that they haven’t fled a city by your bogus deadline is about as war crime-y as it gets.
Say what you will about Putin and his acolytes (and as the old joke goes, in Russia you cannot), but when they decide to go full Nazi they commit to it.
They are going full Stalinist. The seizure of people and making them disappear far away, executions, lists of people being picked up etc., starving people into submission etc. They did not need to learn this from the Nazis. They simply need to repeat what previous Russian leaders did in their own recent history.
Constantly referring to this regime as Nazi-like is wrong because it somehow assumes that Russia had to learn all this appalling behaviour from others when the truth is that it has behaved appallingly to its own and other people in exactly this way. It is copying its own playbook not another country's.
That's a pretty strange post, given that the "intellectual" inspiration for later Putinism have been the likes of Dugin and Ilyin, two bona fide fascists. I don't really feel the need to correct you if you want to trace a line from Putin back to Stalin, but telling people that they're wrong to point out the fascist underpinning of Putin's regime is strange when it's probably the most accurate descriptor.
There is nothing strange about pointing out that Putin is copying what Stalin did. What is strange is the need to refer to the Nazis when describing Russia's behaviour when there are direct examples of exactly the same behaviour in Russia's own history. It's as if there is a need to downplay the very obvious likenesses between Putin and earlier Russian leaders, specifically Stalin, not least because Putin himself has praised what Stalin achieved and bemoaned the loss of the Russian Empire he created.
The Nazis were not the sole embodiment of evil in 20th century Europe. Stalinism and what he got the Soviets to do were quite as evil. Putin may choose to airbrush his and Soviet crimes from history. We in the West should not.
Having just finished Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" the parallels are striking - down to the same lies.
Certainly Stalin found it useful to break the Ukranian peasant class, but the extraction of grain was also key to his industrialisation programme. Not just to feed his new urban industrial workers, but also to export. Grain exports were one of his few sources of Foreign exchange, and that was essential to restructure an agricultural economy into an industrial one. Starving Ukraine served two purposes.
On that note, I see the Russians stole 5 ships of Ukrainian grain yesterday. Perhaps they are attempting Holodomor 2.0
There’s a column in the NYT which says Putin’s new plan is to create so many refugees, pouring into the EU/NATO, that the West pressures Zelenskyy into agreeing a peace deal that looks good for Putin
Sounds plausible. 10m Ukes have already been displaced inside and outside their country. It might work, as well
The Syrian refugee crisis was 4D chess.
1) Install Merkel 2) Refugee crisis 3) Mass migration into Europe 4) Brexit (only a slight wind up ) 5) The end of the Western Alliance.
But he got cocky and now his army is in bits.
This is also why Johnson's speech was a mistake; there was an open goal in getting a closer relationship with Europe, especially exporting offshore wind energy.
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
So what interpretation did he offer for this ?
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. "When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. "It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
That both the UK and Ukraine are in the category of countries with a freedom loving people. That doesn’t mean that the UK is equivalent to Ukraine
Yes, Boris’ quote about “Ukraine and Brexit” really isn’t that offensive. You can see what he’s trying to say. It was emotionally misjudged but not an obviously foolish or outrageous statement
But the misjudgement (or canny trolling?) got his opponents to hyper-ventilate, which then made the news
Nonsense. It was appalling as well as being spectacularly inaccurate.
What he said was “the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, … choose freedom every time”
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
So what interpretation did he offer for this ?
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. "When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. "It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
That both the UK and Ukraine are in the category of countries with a freedom loving people. That doesn’t mean that the UK is equivalent to Ukraine
Yes, Boris’ quote about “Ukraine and Brexit” really isn’t that offensive. You can see what he’s trying to say. It was emotionally misjudged but not an obviously foolish or outrageous statement
But the misjudgement (or canny trolling?) got his opponents to hyper-ventilate, which then made the news
Nonsense. It was appalling as well as being spectacularly inaccurate.
What he said was “the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, … choose freedom every time”
Is that appalling? Or inaccurate?
Both. The comparison was crass. It is also inaccurate.
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
So what interpretation did he offer for this ?
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. "When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. "It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
That both the UK and Ukraine are in the category of countries with a freedom loving people. That doesn’t mean that the UK is equivalent to Ukraine
Yes, Boris’ quote about “Ukraine and Brexit” really isn’t that offensive. You can see what he’s trying to say. It was emotionally misjudged but not an obviously foolish or outrageous statement
But the misjudgement (or canny trolling?) got his opponents to hyper-ventilate, which then made the news
Nonsense. It was appalling as well as being spectacularly inaccurate.
What he said was “the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, … choose freedom every time”
Is that appalling? Or inaccurate?
It’s clearly inaccurate, as we objectively have fewer freedoms than we did before Brexit - and the government is in the process of removing more. We chose, as individuals, to be less free than we were. Whether we are in any practical sense freer as a country remains to be seen. We are certainly more openly divided.
Shashank Joshi @shashj Treating civilians as combatants on the basis that they haven’t fled a city by your bogus deadline is about as war crime-y as it gets.
Say what you will about Putin and his acolytes (and as the old joke goes, in Russia you cannot), but when they decide to go full Nazi they commit to it.
They are going full Stalinist. The seizure of people and making them disappear far away, executions, lists of people being picked up etc., starving people into submission etc. They did not need to learn this from the Nazis. They simply need to repeat what previous Russian leaders did in their own recent history.
Constantly referring to this regime as Nazi-like is wrong because it somehow assumes that Russia had to learn all this appalling behaviour from others when the truth is that it has behaved appallingly to its own and other people in exactly this way. It is copying its own playbook not another country's.
That's a pretty strange post, given that the "intellectual" inspiration for later Putinism have been the likes of Dugin and Ilyin, two bona fide fascists. I don't really feel the need to correct you if you want to trace a line from Putin back to Stalin, but telling people that they're wrong to point out the fascist underpinning of Putin's regime is strange when it's probably the most accurate descriptor.
There is nothing strange about pointing out that Putin is copying what Stalin did. What is strange is the need to refer to the Nazis when describing Russia's behaviour when there are direct examples of exactly the same behaviour in Russia's own history. It's as if there is a need to downplay the very obvious likenesses between Putin and earlier Russian leaders, specifically Stalin, not least because Putin himself has praised what Stalin achieved and bemoaned the loss of the Russian Empire he created.
The Nazis were not the sole embodiment of evil in 20th century Europe. Stalinism and what he got the Soviets to do were quite as evil. Putin may choose to airbrush his and Soviet crimes from history. We in the West should not.
Having just finished Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" the parallels are striking - down to the same lies.
Certainly Stalin found it useful to break the Ukranian peasant class, but the extraction of grain was also key to his industrialisation programme. Not just to feed his new urban industrial workers, but also to export. Grain exports were one of his few sources of Foreign exchange, and that was essential to restructure an agricultural economy into an industrial one. Starving Ukraine served two purposes.
On that note, I see the Russians stole 5 ships of Ukrainian grain yesterday. Perhaps they are attempting Holodomor 2.0
There’s a column in the NYT which says Putin’s new plan is to create so many refugees, pouring into the EU/NATO, that the West pressures Zelenskyy into agreeing a peace deal that looks good for Putin
Sounds plausible. 10m Ukes have already been displaced inside and outside their country. It might work, as well
He might get a peace deal by that route (though I doubt it). Removal of sanctions is another matter.
He is utterly trashing his country, financially, morally and reputationally.
We need to move fast towards cutting off the flow of western cash, buying Russian hydrocarbons
That’s the crucial choke point - that’s when Russia REALLY suffers. No more money. Default. Then Putin simply can’t afford any more wars
It will be painful and difficult for us, too. Finding and paying for new sources of energy. But there are no cheap easy ways out of this
Does anyone on PB know fast we could get some of our gas fields up and running (again) ? Surely the current price of energy means some previously uneconomical sources of gas are now viable?
Government should just approve them and get on with it.
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
So what interpretation did he offer for this ?
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. "When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. "It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
That both the UK and Ukraine are in the category of countries with a freedom loving people. That doesn’t mean that the UK is equivalent to Ukraine
Yes, Boris’ quote about “Ukraine and Brexit” really isn’t that offensive. You can see what he’s trying to say. It was emotionally misjudged but not an obviously foolish or outrageous statement
But the misjudgement (or canny trolling?) got his opponents to hyper-ventilate, which then made the news
Nonsense. It was appalling as well as being spectacularly inaccurate.
What he said was “the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, … choose freedom every time”
Is that appalling? Or inaccurate?
Both. The comparison was crass. It is also inaccurate.
It was crass.
Accuracy - I’m sure there’s occasions when it’s not been the case (Danegeld) but this is politics so within the normal range
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Indeed, given the way tertiary education has changed in my lifetime, level of education is little more than a proxy for age.
Not just tertiary education.
We forget it now, but in the 70's it was perfectly common to leave school without O Levels or CSEs. Nada. Zilch. That would mean being born in about 1960, so in your 60's now. That remained technically possible up to Ken Baker's reforms of the mid-80's.
So partly age, but also a cohort of people who have some reason to feel that the world has moved away from them in ways they don't like.
I feel the latter point particularly - but I'm unclear about the educational link as I was one of the very few to get a place in a top university in 1972 and had a successful career in teaching for 34 years. Always a Tory voter and by no means alone among my co-worker peers. Fairly sure that the world moving away thing is mainly just a product of age and a long memory.
There's no doubt the Tories have moved 'down market' over the decades. You only have to look at their candidates and MPs to see that. Which plays very well in our sort of electoral system, given the propensity of the educated middle classes to agglomerate within a minority of constituencies.
One can certainly see that in the constituencies that have moved away from the Conservatives, and those that have moved towards them, over thirty years.
I agree with all of this except, except, except ... Maggie.
Margaret Thatcher did something remarkable when she opened up council house tenants to be able to buy their own homes. For a time she spoke the language of the 'housewife's' purse holder. She knew how much a loaf of bread cost, which is something I bet you none of the current Cabinet do. Then came the whole Mondeo Man phenomenon etc. and places like Basildon and Romford turned blue. She really got the aspirations of working class people.
For all her faults, and I intensely disagree with 'some' of her philosophy, she was an astounding politician.
A lot of the grandchildren of those who bought their council houses are finding it very difficult to find anywhere to live now though.
Very, very, true.
I think the disenfranchisement of an entire generation from owning their own homes (probably two generations in reality) is a massive ticking timebomb.
Boris was right about the need to build. But to do so will piss off the Telegraph constituency.
Most people own a property at least with a mortgage by 39? Average age at which you were more likely to vote Tory than Labour at the 2019 general election? 39.
So home ownership or lack of it is already reflected in voting intention.
However remember even if you get on the housing ladder it dies not guarantee you will always vote Conservative. Blair won those who own with a mortgage for instant in 1997, 2001 and 2005.
Plus if you build too many new homes in greenbelt rather than brown belt sites in the Home Counties where the issue is most acute then you can lose seats to the LDs too. See the LD gain of Chesham and Amersham from the Tories
My early thought on Saudi Arabia is that Red Bull should win, if it doesn't explode, due to the faster corners. The circuit has been updated, though, but I don't know how much.
Shashank Joshi @shashj Treating civilians as combatants on the basis that they haven’t fled a city by your bogus deadline is about as war crime-y as it gets.
Say what you will about Putin and his acolytes (and as the old joke goes, in Russia you cannot), but when they decide to go full Nazi they commit to it.
They are going full Stalinist. The seizure of people and making them disappear far away, executions, lists of people being picked up etc., starving people into submission etc. They did not need to learn this from the Nazis. They simply need to repeat what previous Russian leaders did in their own recent history.
Constantly referring to this regime as Nazi-like is wrong because it somehow assumes that Russia had to learn all this appalling behaviour from others when the truth is that it has behaved appallingly to its own and other people in exactly this way. It is copying its own playbook not another country's.
That's a pretty strange post, given that the "intellectual" inspiration for later Putinism have been the likes of Dugin and Ilyin, two bona fide fascists. I don't really feel the need to correct you if you want to trace a line from Putin back to Stalin, but telling people that they're wrong to point out the fascist underpinning of Putin's regime is strange when it's probably the most accurate descriptor.
There is nothing strange about pointing out that Putin is copying what Stalin did. What is strange is the need to refer to the Nazis when describing Russia's behaviour when there are direct examples of exactly the same behaviour in Russia's own history. It's as if there is a need to downplay the very obvious likenesses between Putin and earlier Russian leaders, specifically Stalin, not least because Putin himself has praised what Stalin achieved and bemoaned the loss of the Russian Empire he created.
The Nazis were not the sole embodiment of evil in 20th century Europe. Stalinism and what he got the Soviets to do were quite as evil. Putin may choose to airbrush his and Soviet crimes from history. We in the West should not.
Having just finished Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" the parallels are striking - down to the same lies.
Certainly Stalin found it useful to break the Ukranian peasant class, but the extraction of grain was also key to his industrialisation programme. Not just to feed his new urban industrial workers, but also to export. Grain exports were one of his few sources of Foreign exchange, and that was essential to restructure an agricultural economy into an industrial one. Starving Ukraine served two purposes.
On that note, I see the Russians stole 5 ships of Ukrainian grain yesterday. Perhaps they are attempting Holodomor 2.0
There’s a column in the NYT which says Putin’s new plan is to create so many refugees, pouring into the EU/NATO, that the West pressures Zelenskyy into agreeing a peace deal that looks good for Putin
Sounds plausible. 10m Ukes have already been displaced inside and outside their country. It might work, as well
He might get a peace deal by that route (though I doubt it). Removal of sanctions is another matter.
He is utterly trashing his country, financially, morally and reputationally.
We need to move fast towards cutting off the flow of western cash, buying Russian hydrocarbons
That’s the crucial choke point - that’s when Russia REALLY suffers. No more money. Default. Then Putin simply can’t afford any more wars
It will be painful and difficult for us, too. Finding and paying for new sources of energy. But there are no cheap easy ways out of this
Does anyone on PB know fast we could get some of our gas fields up and running (again) ? Surely the current price of energy means some previously uneconomical sources of gas are now viable?
Government should just approve them and get on with it.
Of the regular posters, @Richard_Tyndall Tyndall and @rcs1000 might have the best knowledge in that area. I think they've both talked about it recently.
Shashank Joshi @shashj Treating civilians as combatants on the basis that they haven’t fled a city by your bogus deadline is about as war crime-y as it gets.
Say what you will about Putin and his acolytes (and as the old joke goes, in Russia you cannot), but when they decide to go full Nazi they commit to it.
They are going full Stalinist. The seizure of people and making them disappear far away, executions, lists of people being picked up etc., starving people into submission etc. They did not need to learn this from the Nazis. They simply need to repeat what previous Russian leaders did in their own recent history.
Constantly referring to this regime as Nazi-like is wrong because it somehow assumes that Russia had to learn all this appalling behaviour from others when the truth is that it has behaved appallingly to its own and other people in exactly this way. It is copying its own playbook not another country's.
That's a pretty strange post, given that the "intellectual" inspiration for later Putinism have been the likes of Dugin and Ilyin, two bona fide fascists. I don't really feel the need to correct you if you want to trace a line from Putin back to Stalin, but telling people that they're wrong to point out the fascist underpinning of Putin's regime is strange when it's probably the most accurate descriptor.
There is nothing strange about pointing out that Putin is copying what Stalin did. What is strange is the need to refer to the Nazis when describing Russia's behaviour when there are direct examples of exactly the same behaviour in Russia's own history. It's as if there is a need to downplay the very obvious likenesses between Putin and earlier Russian leaders, specifically Stalin, not least because Putin himself has praised what Stalin achieved and bemoaned the loss of the Russian Empire he created.
The Nazis were not the sole embodiment of evil in 20th century Europe. Stalinism and what he got the Soviets to do were quite as evil. Putin may choose to airbrush his and Soviet crimes from history. We in the West should not.
Having just finished Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" the parallels are striking - down to the same lies.
I might have to get that; I've have never understood the hatred of 'official' Russians for Ukrainians. The comments about relationships that we are hearing surely make it clear that they are very similar peoples, if not the same, just speaking a different language!
Maybe it's because much of Ukraine has been contaminated by Western, more liberal ideas. They were Austrian, Lithuanian, Polish rather than Russian-ruled, more exposed to the Enlightenment and (at the time of the Revolution) to more liberal political thought. And I think economically advanced too: Stalin's destruction of the Kulaks disproportionately affected the Ukrainians. They were also the Pale of Settlement, so lots of Jews and they lived in mixed ethnic neighbourhoods with Germans and Poles.
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Indeed, given the way tertiary education has changed in my lifetime, level of education is little more than a proxy for age.
Not just tertiary education.
We forget it now, but in the 70's it was perfectly common to leave school without O Levels or CSEs. Nada. Zilch. That would mean being born in about 1960, so in your 60's now. That remained technically possible up to Ken Baker's reforms of the mid-80's.
So partly age, but also a cohort of people who have some reason to feel that the world has moved away from them in ways they don't like.
I feel the latter point particularly - but I'm unclear about the educational link as I was one of the very few to get a place in a top university in 1972 and had a successful career in teaching for 34 years. Always a Tory voter and by no means alone among my co-worker peers. Fairly sure that the world moving away thing is mainly just a product of age and a long memory.
As @ydoethur will tell you, there were plenty of Tories in teaching until Gove.
The Tories have always had a lower percentage of the teachers vote than the national average, certainly since Thatcher never mind Gove
Johnson's idiotic speech didn't just wind up the "Remainer liberal elite" such as myself, it tarnished Britain's image and position in Europe, and actually helped to undermine a significant part of what was achieved in the last month, reputationally and diplomatically.
Shashank Joshi @shashj Treating civilians as combatants on the basis that they haven’t fled a city by your bogus deadline is about as war crime-y as it gets.
Say what you will about Putin and his acolytes (and as the old joke goes, in Russia you cannot), but when they decide to go full Nazi they commit to it.
They are going full Stalinist. The seizure of people and making them disappear far away, executions, lists of people being picked up etc., starving people into submission etc. They did not need to learn this from the Nazis. They simply need to repeat what previous Russian leaders did in their own recent history.
Constantly referring to this regime as Nazi-like is wrong because it somehow assumes that Russia had to learn all this appalling behaviour from others when the truth is that it has behaved appallingly to its own and other people in exactly this way. It is copying its own playbook not another country's.
That's a pretty strange post, given that the "intellectual" inspiration for later Putinism have been the likes of Dugin and Ilyin, two bona fide fascists. I don't really feel the need to correct you if you want to trace a line from Putin back to Stalin, but telling people that they're wrong to point out the fascist underpinning of Putin's regime is strange when it's probably the most accurate descriptor.
There is nothing strange about pointing out that Putin is copying what Stalin did. What is strange is the need to refer to the Nazis when describing Russia's behaviour when there are direct examples of exactly the same behaviour in Russia's own history. It's as if there is a need to downplay the very obvious likenesses between Putin and earlier Russian leaders, specifically Stalin, not least because Putin himself has praised what Stalin achieved and bemoaned the loss of the Russian Empire he created.
The Nazis were not the sole embodiment of evil in 20th century Europe. Stalinism and what he got the Soviets to do were quite as evil. Putin may choose to airbrush his and Soviet crimes from history. We in the West should not.
Having just finished Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" the parallels are striking - down to the same lies.
Certainly Stalin found it useful to break the Ukranian peasant class, but the extraction of grain was also key to his industrialisation programme. Not just to feed his new urban industrial workers, but also to export. Grain exports were one of his few sources of Foreign exchange, and that was essential to restructure an agricultural economy into an industrial one. Starving Ukraine served two purposes.
On that note, I see the Russians stole 5 ships of Ukrainian grain yesterday. Perhaps they are attempting Holodomor 2.0
There’s a column in the NYT which says Putin’s new plan is to create so many refugees, pouring into the EU/NATO, that the West pressures Zelenskyy into agreeing a peace deal that looks good for Putin
Sounds plausible. 10m Ukes have already been displaced inside and outside their country. It might work, as well
He might get a peace deal by that route (though I doubt it). Removal of sanctions is another matter.
He is utterly trashing his country, financially, morally and reputationally.
We need to move fast towards cutting off the flow of western cash, buying Russian hydrocarbons
That’s the crucial choke point - that’s when Russia REALLY suffers. No more money. Default. Then Putin simply can’t afford any more wars
It will be painful and difficult for us, too. Finding and paying for new sources of energy. But there are no cheap easy ways out of this
Does anyone on PB know fast we could get some of our gas fields up and running (again) ? Surely the current price of energy means some previously uneconomical sources of gas are now viable?
Government should just approve them and get on with it.
Good morning
I expect this week's energy statement from HMG will do just that together with a drive to nuclear, more windfarms, and home insulation
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
So what interpretation did he offer for this ?
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. "When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. "It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
That both the UK and Ukraine are in the category of countries with a freedom loving people. That doesn’t mean that the UK is equivalent to Ukraine
Yes, Boris’ quote about “Ukraine and Brexit” really isn’t that offensive. You can see what he’s trying to say. It was emotionally misjudged but not an obviously foolish or outrageous statement
But the misjudgement (or canny trolling?) got his opponents to hyper-ventilate, which then made the news
I’m cynical enough to go with canny trolling. The words were carefully chosen. You would hope for better, but that’s the PM the UK has. For now.
Not sure it was that canny. It will have delighted die-hard Brexit supporters. But there are not huge numbers of them and they are likely to be Tory voters anyway. It will also have annoyed the larger number of voters who dislike Johnson and made them more determined to remove him from office, voting tactically to do so where necessary. However, it will be largely ignored domestically.
Not overseas, though. There it will have reawakened all the doubts about the reliability of the British government our friends and allies have at a time when unity in the face of Putin’s threat is the overriding priority.
Basically, it was crass, unthinking and counter-productive. The hallmarks of Johnsonism, in other words.
The thing I think is shown most clearly by this is the astonishing delusions of those who vote Labour. Many seem to genuinely believe that they are still the party of the working class, dedicated to helping the poor and disadvantaged in society.
The reality is that the Labour party is comprised of well educated, well paid, generally public sector professionals with degrees, final salary pensions and middle class expectations. These are, of course, not bad people, many of them are good people and they are the bedrock of our public services. But, even after Blair, they still want to believe that they and not the Tories can do better for the poor. They believe that the Tories are just for the rich and the deluded. They do not see how entitled they are themselves. And how patronising they are to those who are less well educated.
We also see it in their policies. Where are the Labour supporters wanting to get rid of incompetent teachers who have betrayed generations of disadvantaged children? Where are the Labour supporters questioning the chains of debt forged in totally inadequate educational establishments staffed by their members? Where are the Labour supporters focused on taking privileges away from those on fabulously expensive final salary pensions to really help those without them? By their privileges you shall know them.
I think it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that the 10 million or so who voted Labour in 2019 are all elitist metropolitans who are living it up on final salary pensions. Surely, the reality is that older people tend to vote Tory and tend to have fewer qualifications.
The fact is that you can quite easily have a degree and be struggling by on a zero hours contract with no hope of ever owning a home; and can just as easily be a homeowning pensioner with no qualifications and a nice, steady, guaranteed income.
The interesting bit in all this is that the cost of living crisis will affect the latter just as much as the former. That hasn’t happened for a while.
Indeed we may find out if the cost of heating and petrol trumps sympathy for Ukrainian refugees amongst Tory voters in left behind areas.
There is little new about the Tories positioning. They have for more than a century served a coalition of those who, for whatever reason, dislike the liberal middle class.
Cameron won most of the liberal middle class in 2010 and 2015 after most of them had voted for Blair and New Labour (with some voting LD too in 2005 and 2010).
Many of them went away from the Tories in 2017 and 2019 but at the same time the Tories won many white working class Leave voters from UKIP and Labour to make up for it, hence they still won in 2019.
Many of the liberal middle class also voted LD in 2019 and are only voting Labour again now Starmer has replaced Corbyn
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
So what interpretation did he offer for this ?
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. "When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. "It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
That both the UK and Ukraine are in the category of countries with a freedom loving people. That doesn’t mean that the UK is equivalent to Ukraine
Yes, Boris’ quote about “Ukraine and Brexit” really isn’t that offensive. You can see what he’s trying to say. It was emotionally misjudged but not an obviously foolish or outrageous statement
But the misjudgement (or canny trolling?) got his opponents to hyper-ventilate, which then made the news
I’m cynical enough to go with canny trolling. The words were carefully chosen. You would hope for better, but that’s the PM the UK has. For now.
You said exactly the same thing about the refugee cock up. If you don't like what you hear you call it trolling rather than accepting it is true. It is true as was the refugee issue. I'm not a troll. I don't even have a twitter account, but I was fully aware of the refugee issue and had an immediate reaction to Boris' statement.
Doesn't look good if your reaction to everything you don't like is 'trolls'.
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
So what interpretation did he offer for this ?
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. "When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. "It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
That both the UK and Ukraine are in the category of countries with a freedom loving people. That doesn’t mean that the UK is equivalent to Ukraine
Yes, Boris’ quote about “Ukraine and Brexit” really isn’t that offensive. You can see what he’s trying to say. It was emotionally misjudged but not an obviously foolish or outrageous statement
But the misjudgement (or canny trolling?) got his opponents to hyper-ventilate, which then made the news
I’m cynical enough to go with canny trolling. The words were carefully chosen. You would hope for better, but that’s the PM the UK has. For now.
You said exactly the same thing about the refugee cock up. If you don't like what you hear you call it trolling rather than accepting it is true. It is true as was the refugee issue. I'm not a troll. I don't even have a twitter account, but I was fully aware of the refugee issue and had an immediate reaction to Boris' statement.
Doesn't look good if your reaction to everything you don't like is 'trolls'.
@StillWaters my apologies, wrong person. Please ignore my post. Sorry.
A pointless claim unless you factor in the different levels of education per age group.
Indeed, given the way tertiary education has changed in my lifetime, level of education is little more than a proxy for age.
Not just tertiary education.
We forget it now, but in the 70's it was perfectly common to leave school without O Levels or CSEs. Nada. Zilch. That would mean being born in about 1960, so in your 60's now. That remained technically possible up to Ken Baker's reforms of the mid-80's.
So partly age, but also a cohort of people who have some reason to feel that the world has moved away from them in ways they don't like.
I feel the latter point particularly - but I'm unclear about the educational link as I was one of the very few to get a place in a top university in 1972 and had a successful career in teaching for 34 years. Always a Tory voter and by no means alone among my co-worker peers. Fairly sure that the world moving away thing is mainly just a product of age and a long memory.
There's no doubt the Tories have moved 'down market' over the decades. You only have to look at their candidates and MPs to see that. Which plays very well in our sort of electoral system, given the propensity of the educated middle classes to agglomerate within a minority of constituencies.
Interesting turn of phrase - sums of the patronising contempt shown by the emcs to those ' beneath' them.
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
So what interpretation did he offer for this ?
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. "When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. "It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
That both the UK and Ukraine are in the category of countries with a freedom loving people. That doesn’t mean that the UK is equivalent to Ukraine
Yes, Boris’ quote about “Ukraine and Brexit” really isn’t that offensive. You can see what he’s trying to say. It was emotionally misjudged but not an obviously foolish or outrageous statement
But the misjudgement (or canny trolling?) got his opponents to hyper-ventilate, which then made the news
I’m cynical enough to go with canny trolling. The words were carefully chosen. You would hope for better, but that’s the PM the UK has. For now.
Not sure it was that canny. It will have delighted die-hard Brexit supporters. But there are not huge numbers of them and they are likely to be Tory voters anyway. It will also have annoyed the larger number of voters who dislike Johnson and made them more determined to remove him from office, voting tactically to do so where necessary. However, it will be largely ignored domestically.
Not overseas, though. There it will have reawakened all the doubts about the reliability of the British government our friends and allies have at a time when unity in the face of Putin’s threat is the overriding priority.
Basically, it was crass, unthinking and counter-productive. The hallmarks of Johnsonism, in other words.
Was it major news across the EU? I know it was major news amongst people who are Always and Professionally Outraged by Brexit, including Eurocrats like Guy verwhatsit and a few MEPs
But I’d be interested to see evidence it made headlines in Le Monde or Faz
The thing I think is shown most clearly by this is the astonishing delusions of those who vote Labour. Many seem to genuinely believe that they are still the party of the working class, dedicated to helping the poor and disadvantaged in society.
The reality is that the Labour party is comprised of well educated, well paid, generally public sector professionals with degrees, final salary pensions and middle class expectations. These are, of course, not bad people, many of them are good people and they are the bedrock of our public services. But, even after Blair, they still want to believe that they and not the Tories can do better for the poor. They believe that the Tories are just for the rich and the deluded. They do not see how entitled they are themselves. And how patronising they are to those who are less well educated.
We also see it in their policies. Where are the Labour supporters wanting to get rid of incompetent teachers who have betrayed generations of disadvantaged children? Where are the Labour supporters questioning the chains of debt forged in totally inadequate educational establishments staffed by their members? Where are the Labour supporters focused on taking privileges away from those on fabulously expensive final salary pensions to really help those without them? By their privileges you shall know them.
I think it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that the 10 million or so who voted Labour in 2019 are all elitist metropolitans who are living it up on final salary pensions. Surely, the reality is that older people tend to vote Tory and tend to have fewer qualifications.
The fact is that you can quite easily have a degree and be struggling by on a zero hours contract with no hope of ever owning a home; and can just as easily be a homeowning pensioner with no qualifications and a nice, steady, guaranteed income.
The interesting bit in all this is that the cost of living crisis will affect the latter just as much as the former. That hasn’t happened for a while.
Indeed we may find out if the cost of heating and petrol trumps sympathy for Ukrainian refugees amongst Tory voters in left behind areas.
That's politically controllable though. The government could cut VAT and/or excise on fuel.
If the prices are extraordinarily high it's because the tories are choosing to leave them that way.
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
So what interpretation did he offer for this ?
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. "When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. "It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
That both the UK and Ukraine are in the category of countries with a freedom loving people. That doesn’t mean that the UK is equivalent to Ukraine
Yes, Boris’ quote about “Ukraine and Brexit” really isn’t that offensive. You can see what he’s trying to say. It was emotionally misjudged but not an obviously foolish or outrageous statement
But the misjudgement (or canny trolling?) got his opponents to hyper-ventilate, which then made the news
I’m cynical enough to go with canny trolling. The words were carefully chosen. You would hope for better, but that’s the PM the UK has. For now.
Not sure it was that canny. It will have delighted die-hard Brexit supporters. But there are not huge numbers of them and they are likely to be Tory voters anyway. It will also have annoyed the larger number of voters who dislike Johnson and made them more determined to remove him from office, voting tactically to do so where necessary. However, it will be largely ignored domestically.
Not overseas, though. There it will have reawakened all the doubts about the reliability of the British government our friends and allies have at a time when unity in the face of Putin’s threat is the overriding priority.
Basically, it was crass, unthinking and counter-productive. The hallmarks of Johnsonism, in other words.
Was it major news across the EU? I know it was major news amongst people who are Always and Professionally Outraged by Brexit, including Eurocrats like Guy verwhatsit and a few MEPs
But I’d be interested to see evidence it made headlines in Le Monde or Faz
I doubt it made any headlines at all. But it will certainly have been noticed by governments. That’s the bit that matters.
Shashank Joshi @shashj Treating civilians as combatants on the basis that they haven’t fled a city by your bogus deadline is about as war crime-y as it gets.
Say what you will about Putin and his acolytes (and as the old joke goes, in Russia you cannot), but when they decide to go full Nazi they commit to it.
They are going full Stalinist. The seizure of people and making them disappear far away, executions, lists of people being picked up etc., starving people into submission etc. They did not need to learn this from the Nazis. They simply need to repeat what previous Russian leaders did in their own recent history.
Constantly referring to this regime as Nazi-like is wrong because it somehow assumes that Russia had to learn all this appalling behaviour from others when the truth is that it has behaved appallingly to its own and other people in exactly this way. It is copying its own playbook not another country's.
That's a pretty strange post, given that the "intellectual" inspiration for later Putinism have been the likes of Dugin and Ilyin, two bona fide fascists. I don't really feel the need to correct you if you want to trace a line from Putin back to Stalin, but telling people that they're wrong to point out the fascist underpinning of Putin's regime is strange when it's probably the most accurate descriptor.
There is nothing strange about pointing out that Putin is copying what Stalin did. What is strange is the need to refer to the Nazis when describing Russia's behaviour when there are direct examples of exactly the same behaviour in Russia's own history. It's as if there is a need to downplay the very obvious likenesses between Putin and earlier Russian leaders, specifically Stalin, not least because Putin himself has praised what Stalin achieved and bemoaned the loss of the Russian Empire he created.
The Nazis were not the sole embodiment of evil in 20th century Europe. Stalinism and what he got the Soviets to do were quite as evil. Putin may choose to airbrush his and Soviet crimes from history. We in the West should not.
Having just finished Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" the parallels are striking - down to the same lies.
Certainly Stalin found it useful to break the Ukranian peasant class, but the extraction of grain was also key to his industrialisation programme. Not just to feed his new urban industrial workers, but also to export. Grain exports were one of his few sources of Foreign exchange, and that was essential to restructure an agricultural economy into an industrial one. Starving Ukraine served two purposes.
On that note, I see the Russians stole 5 ships of Ukrainian grain yesterday. Perhaps they are attempting Holodomor 2.0
There’s a column in the NYT which says Putin’s new plan is to create so many refugees, pouring into the EU/NATO, that the West pressures Zelenskyy into agreeing a peace deal that looks good for Putin
Sounds plausible. 10m Ukes have already been displaced inside and outside their country. It might work, as well
He might get a peace deal by that route (though I doubt it). Removal of sanctions is another matter.
He is utterly trashing his country, financially, morally and reputationally.
The way I see it, is this. Putin's Regime cannot go down any further in our estimation. The Wayne Couzens of countries. Beyond forgiveness or redemption.
However, we can't do anything more than we are doing. The US has already said that they won't intervene. Russia still has nukes, wheat and oil; there will be many countries outside the west willing to deal with them - almost irrespective of what they do in Ukraine.
Now that they have found themselves in this position, there exists no limits on their atrocities. They can just go ahead and kill and enslave Ukraine. They will just laugh at the idea of war crimes, because they don't have any interest in courts or justice. They have crossed a rubicon, like a serial killer - what's the difference between 2 and 20 victims?
No one believed 3 weeks ago that Russia would bomb civilians. The idea that something like Mariupol could happen was beyond contemplation. If there is no hope of a client state in Ukraine, or any sort of conventional victory, and they are utterly condemned by the 'west' why wouldn't they just utterly crush and ruin the country? Plunder its resources etc. The nature of global inequality is such that there will still be many countries willing to deal with them.
I don't think this is being alarmist or being dramatic; I think it is a very likely course of events. It seems that we are being drawn, inexorably and inevitably, in to war with Russia; because the situation described above is morally intolerable. It becomes a battle for the future of civilisation.
It may be popular response to the disgraceful behaviour of P & O but I assume the consequence would see companies go into liquidation and the workforce made redundant
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
So what interpretation did he offer for this ?
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. "When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. "It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
That both the UK and Ukraine are in the category of countries with a freedom loving people. That doesn’t mean that the UK is equivalent to Ukraine
Yes, Boris’ quote about “Ukraine and Brexit” really isn’t that offensive. You can see what he’s trying to say. It was emotionally misjudged but not an obviously foolish or outrageous statement
But the misjudgement (or canny trolling?) got his opponents to hyper-ventilate, which then made the news
I agree. What his comment did was expose the nonsense of people who say they're "over Brexit". The fact they got so angry about what he said shows they're not over it.
Shashank Joshi @shashj Treating civilians as combatants on the basis that they haven’t fled a city by your bogus deadline is about as war crime-y as it gets.
Say what you will about Putin and his acolytes (and as the old joke goes, in Russia you cannot), but when they decide to go full Nazi they commit to it.
They are going full Stalinist. The seizure of people and making them disappear far away, executions, lists of people being picked up etc., starving people into submission etc. They did not need to learn this from the Nazis. They simply need to repeat what previous Russian leaders did in their own recent history.
Constantly referring to this regime as Nazi-like is wrong because it somehow assumes that Russia had to learn all this appalling behaviour from others when the truth is that it has behaved appallingly to its own and other people in exactly this way. It is copying its own playbook not another country's.
That's a pretty strange post, given that the "intellectual" inspiration for later Putinism have been the likes of Dugin and Ilyin, two bona fide fascists. I don't really feel the need to correct you if you want to trace a line from Putin back to Stalin, but telling people that they're wrong to point out the fascist underpinning of Putin's regime is strange when it's probably the most accurate descriptor.
There is nothing strange about pointing out that Putin is copying what Stalin did. What is strange is the need to refer to the Nazis when describing Russia's behaviour when there are direct examples of exactly the same behaviour in Russia's own history. It's as if there is a need to downplay the very obvious likenesses between Putin and earlier Russian leaders, specifically Stalin, not least because Putin himself has praised what Stalin achieved and bemoaned the loss of the Russian Empire he created.
The Nazis were not the sole embodiment of evil in 20th century Europe. Stalinism and what he got the Soviets to do were quite as evil. Putin may choose to airbrush his and Soviet crimes from history. We in the West should not.
Shashank Joshi @shashj Treating civilians as combatants on the basis that they haven’t fled a city by your bogus deadline is about as war crime-y as it gets.
Say what you will about Putin and his acolytes (and as the old joke goes, in Russia you cannot), but when they decide to go full Nazi they commit to it.
They are going full Stalinist. The seizure of people and making them disappear far away, executions, lists of people being picked up etc., starving people into submission etc. They did not need to learn this from the Nazis. They simply need to repeat what previous Russian leaders did in their own recent history.
Constantly referring to this regime as Nazi-like is wrong because it somehow assumes that Russia had to learn all this appalling behaviour from others when the truth is that it has behaved appallingly to its own and other people in exactly this way. It is copying its own playbook not another country's.
That's a pretty strange post, given that the "intellectual" inspiration for later Putinism have been the likes of Dugin and Ilyin, two bona fide fascists. I don't really feel the need to correct you if you want to trace a line from Putin back to Stalin, but telling people that they're wrong to point out the fascist underpinning of Putin's regime is strange when it's probably the most accurate descriptor.
There is nothing strange about pointing out that Putin is copying what Stalin did. What is strange is the need to refer to the Nazis when describing Russia's behaviour when there are direct examples of exactly the same behaviour in Russia's own history. It's as if there is a need to downplay the very obvious likenesses between Putin and earlier Russian leaders, specifically Stalin, not least because Putin himself has praised what Stalin achieved and bemoaned the loss of the Russian Empire he created.
The Nazis were not the sole embodiment of evil in 20th century Europe. Stalinism and what he got the Soviets to do were quite as evil. Putin may choose to airbrush his and Soviet crimes from history. We in the West should not.
And Putin is a Chekist. One reason for the Ukrainians to fight is what they did to the Poles during the war - murdered the intelligentsia of a whole country - Katyn could happen again if Russia takes over. Putin has probably appointed his new Vasily Blokhin.
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
So what interpretation did he offer for this ?
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. "When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. "It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
That both the UK and Ukraine are in the category of countries with a freedom loving people. That doesn’t mean that the UK is equivalent to Ukraine
Yes, Boris’ quote about “Ukraine and Brexit” really isn’t that offensive. You can see what he’s trying to say. It was emotionally misjudged but not an obviously foolish or outrageous statement
But the misjudgement (or canny trolling?) got his opponents to hyper-ventilate, which then made the news
I’m cynical enough to go with canny trolling. The words were carefully chosen. You would hope for better, but that’s the PM the UK has. For now.
Not sure it was that canny. It will have delighted die-hard Brexit supporters. But there are not huge numbers of them and they are likely to be Tory voters anyway. It will also have annoyed the larger number of voters who dislike Johnson and made them more determined to remove him from office, voting tactically to do so where necessary. However, it will be largely ignored domestically.
Not overseas, though. There it will have reawakened all the doubts about the reliability of the British government our friends and allies have at a time when unity in the face of Putin’s threat is the overriding priority.
Basically, it was crass, unthinking and counter-productive. The hallmarks of Johnsonism, in other words.
Was it major news across the EU? I know it was major news amongst people who are Always and Professionally Outraged by Brexit, including Eurocrats like Guy verwhatsit and a few MEPs
But I’d be interested to see evidence it made headlines in Le Monde or Faz
Isn't "Johnson says something crass" a bit like "Dog bites man" as a newspaper headline?
Apparently China is going to have maybe the worst harvest in a century (flooding). Meanwhile the war doesn’t just stop Ukrainian wheat exports, it triples the price of fertiliser (Russia is a massive producer). We could be looking at the first real famines for several decades.
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
So what interpretation did he offer for this ?
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. "When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. "It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
That both the UK and Ukraine are in the category of countries with a freedom loving people. That doesn’t mean that the UK is equivalent to Ukraine
Yes, Boris’ quote about “Ukraine and Brexit” really isn’t that offensive. You can see what he’s trying to say. It was emotionally misjudged but not an obviously foolish or outrageous statement
But the misjudgement (or canny trolling?) got his opponents to hyper-ventilate, which then made the news
I’m cynical enough to go with canny trolling. The words were carefully chosen. You would hope for better, but that’s the PM the UK has. For now.
Not sure it was that canny. It will have delighted die-hard Brexit supporters. But there are not huge numbers of them and they are likely to be Tory voters anyway. It will also have annoyed the larger number of voters who dislike Johnson and made them more determined to remove him from office, voting tactically to do so where necessary. However, it will be largely ignored domestically.
Not overseas, though. There it will have reawakened all the doubts about the reliability of the British government our friends and allies have at a time when unity in the face of Putin’s threat is the overriding priority.
Basically, it was crass, unthinking and counter-productive. The hallmarks of Johnsonism, in other words.
Was it major news across the EU? I know it was major news amongst people who are Always and Professionally Outraged by Brexit, including Eurocrats like Guy verwhatsit and a few MEPs
But I’d be interested to see evidence it made headlines in Le Monde or Faz
I doubt it made any headlines at all. But it will certainly have been noticed by governments. That’s the bit that matters.
lol. K. Got that
Thank god we have you, with your special hotline to global governments
Shashank Joshi @shashj Treating civilians as combatants on the basis that they haven’t fled a city by your bogus deadline is about as war crime-y as it gets.
Say what you will about Putin and his acolytes (and as the old joke goes, in Russia you cannot), but when they decide to go full Nazi they commit to it.
They are going full Stalinist. The seizure of people and making them disappear far away, executions, lists of people being picked up etc., starving people into submission etc. They did not need to learn this from the Nazis. They simply need to repeat what previous Russian leaders did in their own recent history.
Constantly referring to this regime as Nazi-like is wrong because it somehow assumes that Russia had to learn all this appalling behaviour from others when the truth is that it has behaved appallingly to its own and other people in exactly this way. It is copying its own playbook not another country's.
That's a pretty strange post, given that the "intellectual" inspiration for later Putinism have been the likes of Dugin and Ilyin, two bona fide fascists. I don't really feel the need to correct you if you want to trace a line from Putin back to Stalin, but telling people that they're wrong to point out the fascist underpinning of Putin's regime is strange when it's probably the most accurate descriptor.
There is nothing strange about pointing out that Putin is copying what Stalin did. What is strange is the need to refer to the Nazis when describing Russia's behaviour when there are direct examples of exactly the same behaviour in Russia's own history. It's as if there is a need to downplay the very obvious likenesses between Putin and earlier Russian leaders, specifically Stalin, not least because Putin himself has praised what Stalin achieved and bemoaned the loss of the Russian Empire he created.
The Nazis were not the sole embodiment of evil in 20th century Europe. Stalinism and what he got the Soviets to do were quite as evil. Putin may choose to airbrush his and Soviet crimes from history. We in the West should not.
Having just finished Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" the parallels are striking - down to the same lies.
Certainly Stalin found it useful to break the Ukranian peasant class, but the extraction of grain was also key to his industrialisation programme. Not just to feed his new urban industrial workers, but also to export. Grain exports were one of his few sources of Foreign exchange, and that was essential to restructure an agricultural economy into an industrial one. Starving Ukraine served two purposes.
On that note, I see the Russians stole 5 ships of Ukrainian grain yesterday. Perhaps they are attempting Holodomor 2.0
There’s a column in the NYT which says Putin’s new plan is to create so many refugees, pouring into the EU/NATO, that the West pressures Zelenskyy into agreeing a peace deal that looks good for Putin
Sounds plausible. 10m Ukes have already been displaced inside and outside their country. It might work, as well
He might get a peace deal by that route (though I doubt it). Removal of sanctions is another matter.
He is utterly trashing his country, financially, morally and reputationally.
The way I see it, is this. Putin's Regime cannot go down any further in our estimation. The Wayne Couzens of countries. Beyond forgiveness or redemption.
However, we can't do anything more than we are doing. The US has already said that they won't intervene. Russia still has nukes, wheat and oil; there will be many countries outside the west willing to deal with them - almost irrespective of what they do in Ukraine.
Now that they have found themselves in this position, there are no limits exist on their atrocities. They can just go ahead and kill and enslave Ukraine. They will just laugh at the idea of war crimes, because they don't have any interest in courts or justice. They have crossed a rubicon, like a serial killer - what's the difference between 2 and 20 victims?
No one believed 3 weeks ago that Russia would bomb civilians. The idea that something like Mariupol could happen was beyond contemplation. If there is no hope of a client state in Ukraine, or any sort of conventional victory, and they are utterly condemned by the 'west' why wouldn't they just utterly crush and ruin the country? Plunder its resources etc. The nature of global inequality is such that there will still be many countries willing to deal with them.
I don't think this is being alarmist or being dramatic; I think it is a very likely course of events. It seems that we are being drawn, inexorably and inevitably, in to war with Russia; because the situation described above is morally intolerable. It becomes a battle for the future of civilisation.
Slightly unfortunate that Sajid Javid finds himself going directly from Russians Deny Reality All The Time to Boris Johnson Didn't Say Ukraine's Fight For Freedom Is Like Brexit. https://twitter.com/RobDotHutton/status/1505823828206931973
In other news, if you haven’t heard the Italian commentary of the last three minutes of the game in Cardiff on Saturday, you really should. A magnificent swing in commentator emotion in the space of 10 seconds. Madonna!
What his comment did was expose the nonsense of people who say they're "over Brexit".
BoZo is the one who claimed it was "done"
The fact it is not, and never will be, is an open sore that BoZo can't heal
I do genuinely feel sorry for your trauma over brexit, but as much as you demonstrate your angst the idea it will never be over is absurd as a closer relationship will evolve to the satisfaction of most when I do hope you will be able to move on but if not that is your choice
No one believed 3 weeks ago that Russia would bomb civilians. The idea that something like Mariupol could happen was beyond contemplation.
Nobody who was familiar with the Russian concept of operations in recent decades would have believed it was beyond them. A few people on here said as much.
The only surprise was that it took this long for the gloves to come off. The Russians seems to have convinced themselves they could do an American style high energy, combined arms maneuvering war. As it turns out they can't and have retreated to their comfort zone of creating moonscapes.
Shashank Joshi @shashj Treating civilians as combatants on the basis that they haven’t fled a city by your bogus deadline is about as war crime-y as it gets.
Say what you will about Putin and his acolytes (and as the old joke goes, in Russia you cannot), but when they decide to go full Nazi they commit to it.
They are going full Stalinist. The seizure of people and making them disappear far away, executions, lists of people being picked up etc., starving people into submission etc. They did not need to learn this from the Nazis. They simply need to repeat what previous Russian leaders did in their own recent history.
Constantly referring to this regime as Nazi-like is wrong because it somehow assumes that Russia had to learn all this appalling behaviour from others when the truth is that it has behaved appallingly to its own and other people in exactly this way. It is copying its own playbook not another country's.
That's a pretty strange post, given that the "intellectual" inspiration for later Putinism have been the likes of Dugin and Ilyin, two bona fide fascists. I don't really feel the need to correct you if you want to trace a line from Putin back to Stalin, but telling people that they're wrong to point out the fascist underpinning of Putin's regime is strange when it's probably the most accurate descriptor.
There is nothing strange about pointing out that Putin is copying what Stalin did. What is strange is the need to refer to the Nazis when describing Russia's behaviour when there are direct examples of exactly the same behaviour in Russia's own history. It's as if there is a need to downplay the very obvious likenesses between Putin and earlier Russian leaders, specifically Stalin, not least because Putin himself has praised what Stalin achieved and bemoaned the loss of the Russian Empire he created.
The Nazis were not the sole embodiment of evil in 20th century Europe. Stalinism and what he got the Soviets to do were quite as evil. Putin may choose to airbrush his and Soviet crimes from history. We in the West should not.
Having just finished Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" the parallels are striking - down to the same lies.
Certainly Stalin found it useful to break the Ukranian peasant class, but the extraction of grain was also key to his industrialisation programme. Not just to feed his new urban industrial workers, but also to export. Grain exports were one of his few sources of Foreign exchange, and that was essential to restructure an agricultural economy into an industrial one. Starving Ukraine served two purposes.
On that note, I see the Russians stole 5 ships of Ukrainian grain yesterday. Perhaps they are attempting Holodomor 2.0
There’s a column in the NYT which says Putin’s new plan is to create so many refugees, pouring into the EU/NATO, that the West pressures Zelenskyy into agreeing a peace deal that looks good for Putin
Sounds plausible. 10m Ukes have already been displaced inside and outside their country. It might work, as well
He might get a peace deal by that route (though I doubt it). Removal of sanctions is another matter.
He is utterly trashing his country, financially, morally and reputationally.
The way I see it, is this. Putin's Regime cannot go down any further in our estimation. The Wayne Couzens of countries. Beyond forgiveness or redemption.
However, we can't do anything more than we are doing. The US has already said that they won't intervene. Russia still has nukes, wheat and oil; there will be many countries outside the west willing to deal with them - almost irrespective of what they do in Ukraine.
Now that they have found themselves in this position, there exists no limits on their atrocities. They can just go ahead and kill and enslave Ukraine. They will just laugh at the idea of war crimes, because they don't have any interest in courts or justice. They have crossed a rubicon, like a serial killer - what's the difference between 2 and 20 victims?
No one believed 3 weeks ago that Russia would bomb civilians. The idea that something like Mariupol could happen was beyond contemplation. If there is no hope of a client state in Ukraine, or any sort of conventional victory, and they are utterly condemned by the 'west' why wouldn't they just utterly crush and ruin the country? Plunder its resources etc. The nature of global inequality is such that there will still be many countries willing to deal with them.
I don't think this is being alarmist or being dramatic; I think it is a very likely course of events. It seems that we are being drawn, inexorably and inevitably, in to war with Russia; because the situation described above is morally intolerable. It becomes a battle for the future of civilisation.
In my bad moments, this is exactly what I think. Putin has crossed the Rubicon; he may not have wished to, but he has. He will now treat all of Ukraine like he did Chechnya, and that grotesque spectacle will drag us into outright war with Russia
Sajid Javid joins Rishi Sunak in having to argue that night is day on behalf of the prime minister over the Brexit/Ukraine row: "I don't accept that he was comparing the UK to Ukraine." Which is nonsense, of course. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1505807648448565250/photo/1
So what interpretation did he offer for this ?
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. "When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. "It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
That both the UK and Ukraine are in the category of countries with a freedom loving people. That doesn’t mean that the UK is equivalent to Ukraine
Yes, Boris’ quote about “Ukraine and Brexit” really isn’t that offensive. You can see what he’s trying to say. It was emotionally misjudged but not an obviously foolish or outrageous statement
But the misjudgement (or canny trolling?) got his opponents to hyper-ventilate, which then made the news
I’m cynical enough to go with canny trolling. The words were carefully chosen. You would hope for better, but that’s the PM the UK has. For now.
Not sure it was that canny. It will have delighted die-hard Brexit supporters. But there are not huge numbers of them and they are likely to be Tory voters anyway. It will also have annoyed the larger number of voters who dislike Johnson and made them more determined to remove him from office, voting tactically to do so where necessary. However, it will be largely ignored domestically.
Not overseas, though. There it will have reawakened all the doubts about the reliability of the British government our friends and allies have at a time when unity in the face of Putin’s threat is the overriding priority.
Basically, it was crass, unthinking and counter-productive. The hallmarks of Johnsonism, in other words.
Was it major news across the EU? I know it was major news amongst people who are Always and Professionally Outraged by Brexit, including Eurocrats like Guy verwhatsit and a few MEPs
But I’d be interested to see evidence it made headlines in Le Monde or Faz
I doubt it made any headlines at all. But it will certainly have been noticed by governments. That’s the bit that matters.
lol. K. Got that
Thank god we have you, with your special hotline to global governments
Ha, ha - what a silly little comment from someone with the brains to know I’m right.
Comments
As an aside, looks like the Ukrainians lost a Frogfoot plane last night.
But I also try to stop myself by remembering the genuine grievances people had and in order to do this I find it helpful to picture Tony Blair's smiling face. That's usually enough to halt me in my tracks and remind me just how much the Metropolitan elitists are to blame for what happened.
Whatever Mike says about Blair's successes for Labour, they came about in large part because he wore the emperor's clothes. Under him, Britain's bitter divisions began to emerge, the fissures of which finally became apparent with the Brexit vote.
If the Conservatives key appeal is to older people, or non-grads... fine, they will still be around in the future.
If it's to those who left school without certificates... Salt of the Earth, sure, but there will be vanishingly few people like that in a decade or two.
May I ask which comps in Wandsworth? Or is that too much detail to put on here?
(I taught in Wandsworth comps)
"People with all levels of qualifications were more likely to vote leave in low-skill areas compared with high-skill areas. However, this effect was stronger for the more highly qualified. In low-skilled communities the difference in support for leave between graduates and those with GCSEs was 20 points. In high-skilled communities it was over 40 points. In low-skill areas the proportion of A-level holders voting leave was closer to that of people with low-skills. In high-skill areas their vote was much more similar to graduates."
So there was peer pressure in both low skill and high skill areas, or to phrase it differently, peoples vote was influenced by their surroundings as well as their education level.
https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/brexit-vote-explained-poverty-low-skills-and-lack-opportunities
Although, to me, it seems a giant leap in logic to argue that Ukraine deserves to be punished for the actions of the US in Iraq or Vietnam.
Margaret Thatcher did something remarkable when she opened up council house tenants to be able to buy their own homes. For a time she spoke the language of the 'housewife's' purse holder. She knew how much a loaf of bread cost, which is something I bet you none of the current Cabinet do. Then came the whole Mondeo Man phenomenon etc. and places like Basildon and Romford turned blue. She really got the aspirations of working class people.
For all her faults, and I intensely disagree with 'some' of her philosophy, she was an astounding politician.
Unfortunately due to a very large number of avoidable mistakes, not helped by his own extraordinary arrogance and unwillingness to listen to experts, whom he just thought of as nuisances, paying heed rather to a failed think tank manager and a series of at best tenth-rate civil servants as well as a truly extraordinarily incompetent ex-investment fund manager, the reforms in practice proved utterly disastrous.
Which means that there are probably fewer Tories in education now than there have ever been.
I think the disenfranchisement of an entire generation from owning their own homes (probably two generations in reality) is a massive ticking timebomb.
Boris was right about the need to build. But to do so will piss off the Telegraph constituency.
"I know that it's the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples.
"When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don't believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners.
"It's because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself."...
Those voters have noticed that Labour had taken their votes for granted for decades. Not so thick then....
The JRT report covered this too, it is well worth a read:
"Groups in Britain who have been ‘left behind’ by rapid economic change and feel cut adrift from the mainstream consensus were the most likely to support Brexit. These voters face a ‘double whammy’. While their lack of qualifications put them at a significant disadvantage in the modern economy, they are also being further marginalised in society by the lack of opportunities that faced in their low-skilled communities. This will make it extremely difficult for the left behind to adapt and prosper in future."
Tony Blair had the right formula with "Education, Education and Education" though implementing that rather fell foul of other priorities in office. Governments get distracted by foreign wars, including the current one.
The problem on here is that too many of you are entrenched. You are not prepared to be free thinkers. To think outside your own box. To use this site as a great opportunity to broaden your perspective. It's frankly sad to see the way arguments develop and people pile-on people almost the moment they post.
And, by the way, I explained clearly why I mask my IP: because I have to protect someone close to me who is in the centre of Westminster. However, I am frankly incredulous that anyone would not use a VPN on the internet. When you research just how much data mining goes on, and the odious tracking of your every move, people are staggeringly complacent about casually using the internet.
I'm not a troll but I disallow all cookies and I always use a VPN. Everyone should do the same.
It's been suggested here hundreds of times.
Given our current finances, and the challenges ahead on energy costs, it might now be too late to do this at scale.
Some context: Mariupol defenders won't face Russian military tribunals. They'll face "Donbass" ones = will be "judged" by pro-Russian warlords, so that Russian hands gonna be clean and it will be innocent in the following massacre. That's a mega war crime announced beforehand
https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1505663919746125831
Yes her economic policies were destructive and often strategically stupid (destroying heavy industry so that we're reliant on imports). At the same time the status quo ante wasn't working so change was needed. And they left social security way higher than they are now and once the destruction dust settled threw money into redevelopment. And as you say took so many people with her who thought "I'll have a piece of that" as new shiny shiny was developed and brought to market.
The other massive difference between then and now - honesty. Thatcher and her cabinets didn't lie, didn't steal, had basic standards. They did some truly shitty things but they believed it was in the national interest and did what they could to help the people being left behind - even if it was "on yer bike" (which as someone who has moved around for work I have always considered to be a good contribution to the debate). They didn't cut the front line, then cut support, then blame the poor. That was later.
it is a pure coincidence that all of the themes you have pursued, from covid to Ukraine, have been aligned with Putin’s strategy at the time. I put that down to your willingness to think for yourself and to challenge orders from above, of course.
The simple problem we have is that too many people make too much money from private property. Comments made upthread about today's generation being shut out of the market is true - market rents are impossibly high, that deposit to buy and pay a cheaper mortgage impossible to save.
The solution is more high rise living and regulated rents. They've just completed the Wembley Park development with a new town of apartments, all private sector, all £bonkers to rent. Great for the developer, less great for the economy as all that money is sucked out of circulation into the pockets of the few. Would have been better built the same but with regulated rents making them affordable. But we can't do that cos Communist.
There's that kitchen sink drama trope of the young person leaving home to study and being really resented by their parents. It is a trope, but like all tropes it has a lump of truth at its core.
Beyond a certain point, to be educated is to specialise. Which means leaving home for training and going where the work is. It's one of the many reasons that University Technical Colleges (14-19 schools with strong links to a local industry) flopped- what happens if people aren't interested in the local industry?
And once those who want to and can leave do leave, the people left are the left behind.
I don't think it's a problem that can be solved- I doubt we really want to go back to a world where everyone stays in Hometown apart from the doctor and the clergyman- but the negative consequences need better managing.
The reality is that the Labour party is comprised of well educated, well paid, generally public sector professionals with degrees, final salary pensions and middle class expectations. These are, of course, not bad people, many of them are good people and they are the bedrock of our public services. But, even after Blair, they still want to believe that they and not the Tories can do better for the poor. They believe that the Tories are just for the rich and the deluded. They do not see how entitled they are themselves. And how patronising they are to those who are less well educated.
We also see it in their policies. Where are the Labour supporters wanting to get rid of incompetent teachers who have betrayed generations of disadvantaged children? Where are the Labour supporters questioning the chains of debt forged in totally inadequate educational establishments staffed by their members? Where are the Labour supporters focused on taking privileges away from those on fabulously expensive final salary pensions to really help those without them? By their privileges you shall know them.
But the misjudgement (or canny trolling?) got his opponents to hyper-ventilate, which then made the news
There’s a column in the NYT which says Putin’s new plan is to create so many refugees, pouring into the EU/NATO, that the West pressures Zelenskyy into agreeing a peace deal that looks good for Putin
Sounds plausible. 10m Ukes have already been displaced inside and outside their country. It might work, as well
Her parents refused to support her, and she dropped out after the first year. As she bitterly said: her parents could have not gone to the pub two nights a week, and the money would have paid for her to go. But they wanted her at home to look after the kids.
All WWC.
https://twitter.com/tamcohen/status/1505814607591522307
He is utterly trashing his country, financially, morally and reputationally.
*) Ha-ha-ha at Red Bull.
*) Congrats to Ferrari. It'd be good to see a three-way battle at the front all season.
*) Shame Williams seem to be near the back. Again. And Macca doing poorly.
*) Congrats to Haas.
*) But most of all: I want to laugh at Mazepin. It looks like Haas may have a car as good as, or better than, they had in their first season. Mazepin could have been scoring points. But he isn't. Oh dear. So sad. Never mind.
The fact is that you can quite easily have a degree and be struggling by on a zero hours contract with no hope of ever owning a home; and can just as easily be a homeowning pensioner with no qualifications and a nice, steady, guaranteed income.
The interesting bit in all this is that the cost of living crisis will affect the latter just as much as the former. That hasn’t happened for a while.
https://mobile.twitter.com/MattGarrahan/status/1505601820982497281
Corpses in the street, no food or water and starving people killing stray dogs to eat: gut wrenching must-read from
@guychazan in Ukraine on the hell that is Mariupol
That’s the crucial choke point - that’s when Russia REALLY suffers. No more money. Default. Then Putin simply can’t afford any more wars
It will be painful and difficult for us, too. Finding and paying for new sources of energy. But there are no cheap easy ways out of this
Be warned: the details are harrowing. It is WW2 stuff, happening in Europe in 2022
1) Install Merkel
2) Refugee crisis
3) Mass migration into Europe
4) Brexit (only a slight wind up
5) The end of the Western Alliance.
But he got cocky and now his army is in bits.
This is also why Johnson's speech was a mistake; there was an open goal in getting a closer relationship with Europe, especially exporting offshore wind energy.
Is that appalling? Or inaccurate?
Johnson regrets making the comparison, a close source told The Times. “It sounded better written down than it did when spoken,” the insider said https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/boris-johnson-sorry-comparing-ukraine-war-brexit-vote-rishi-sunak-lhhwjcccm
Brexit made us less free
Government should just approve them and get on with it.
Accuracy - I’m sure there’s occasions when it’s not been the case (Danegeld) but this is politics so within the normal range
But the vitriol spewed is out of all proportion
So home ownership or lack of it is already reflected in voting intention.
However remember even if you get on the housing ladder it dies not guarantee you will always vote Conservative. Blair won those who own with a mortgage for instant in 1997, 2001 and 2005.
Plus if you build too many new homes in greenbelt rather than brown belt sites in the Home Counties where the issue is most acute then you can lose seats to the LDs too. See the LD gain of Chesham and Amersham from the Tories
Also worth noting Aston Martin did very poorly.
My early thought on Saudi Arabia is that Red Bull should win, if it doesn't explode, due to the faster corners. The circuit has been updated, though, but I don't know how much.
Mercedes were very lucky.
Great day for Magnussen and Bottas too.
Lots to be suspicious of
We voted to leave (just)
Which is free?
I expect this week's energy statement from HMG will do just that together with a drive to nuclear, more windfarms, and home insulation
Not overseas, though. There it will have reawakened all the doubts about the reliability of the British government our friends and allies have at a time when unity in the face of Putin’s threat is the overriding priority.
Basically, it was crass, unthinking and counter-productive. The hallmarks of Johnsonism, in other words.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/21/dictatorship-russia-europe-peace-albania
Pleased to see it getting short-shrift from comments below the line, but there's plenty with the sentiment that it's all our fault.
Many of them went away from the Tories in 2017 and 2019 but at the same time the Tories won many white working class Leave voters from UKIP and Labour to make up for it, hence they still won in 2019.
Many of the liberal middle class also voted LD in 2019 and are only voting Labour again now Starmer has replaced Corbyn
Doesn't look good if your reaction to everything you don't like is 'trolls'.
But I’d be interested to see evidence it made headlines in Le Monde or Faz
If the prices are extraordinarily high it's because the tories are choosing to leave them that way.
However, we can't do anything more than we are doing. The US has already said that they won't intervene. Russia still has nukes, wheat and oil; there will be many countries outside the west willing to deal with them - almost irrespective of what they do in Ukraine.
Now that they have found themselves in this position, there exists no limits on their atrocities. They can just go ahead and kill and enslave Ukraine. They will just laugh at the idea of war crimes, because they don't have any interest in courts or justice. They have crossed a rubicon, like a serial killer - what's the difference between 2 and 20 victims?
No one believed 3 weeks ago that Russia would bomb civilians. The idea that something like Mariupol could happen was beyond contemplation. If there is no hope of a client state in Ukraine, or any sort of conventional victory, and they are utterly condemned by the 'west' why wouldn't they just utterly crush and ruin the country? Plunder its resources etc. The nature of global inequality is such that there will still be many countries willing to deal with them.
I don't think this is being alarmist or being dramatic; I think it is a very likely course of events. It seems that we are being drawn, inexorably and inevitably, in to war with Russia; because the situation described above is morally intolerable. It becomes a battle for the future of civilisation.
It may be popular response to the disgraceful behaviour of P & O but I assume the consequence would see companies go into liquidation and the workforce made redundant
Another cheering thought of a sunny Monday morn
*pops 2nd Valium*
The fact it is not, and never will be, is an open sore that BoZo can't heal
Thank god we have you, with your special hotline to global governments
Aleppo
Grozny
https://twitter.com/RobDotHutton/status/1505823828206931973
We'll deal with him in due course. There's a war on at the moment.
Btw, were you at the Festival this year, and if so how did you do?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pprfOZBp-60
The only surprise was that it took this long for the gloves to come off. The Russians seems to have convinced themselves they could do an American style high energy, combined arms maneuvering war. As it turns out they can't and have retreated to their comfort zone of creating moonscapes.
And then I try and cheer up