From what I've seen Rishi does seem to have been quiet on Ukraine. Surprising really because it would have given him the chance to burnish his leadership credentials. And given the central bank asset freezing, sanctions, Chelsea sale it is not as if he wasn't involved in some way.
He might not want it brought up if he is fearing a Wallace exocet at some point (to mix my wars up slightly).
Just laughed out loud at this @amolrajan@nadhimzahawi exchange: Q: You trusted Boris Johnson enough to be his Chancellor, yet 24 hrs later you effectively called on him to quit. What does that say about your judgement? A; 'I'll tell you what it says: I put country first." https://twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1547111472307773440
Yeah, I heard that. I like Rajan. Not shouty or aggressive, but he's quite skillful. He teed this up with a comment about how important it is to trust and respect someone you accept a job from.
What is the qualification for a vote as a Conservative party member? How long have you had to have been a member On what date must your subs have been paid ? What about people who are late payers? How big is the electorate?
What is fascinating about this leadership election is the sheer spread of candidates and outlooks and positions.
At one extreme a vision of a fictional past led by Braverman. Break poor people on the wheel. Tax cuts for decent people. Put the gayers and the trannies and the haters back in their box where decent people can look down on them.
At the other extreme a vision of a dynamic future led by Badenoch. 2020s Britain as personified by a female black migrant with braided hair and a clear vision for how to respect people who who they are without having to harang or belittle like equivalent Labour people do.
What is extraordinary is that half the field are BAME, half are women and two are both. Sorry Labour Party, but if this doesn't explode your "we are the party of modern representative politics", nothing will.
It looks as if we will have the first ethnic PM or third woman PM ( all conservatives )
I think Labour's problem is the unions. When it comes to election planning it becomes a beauty contest - who can attract the most cash from their trade union. And too many unions are very white male and wealthy. Yes I know the Tories are heavily that as well, but they get outside funding. Labour candidates need cash and that cash comes from unions who advance their own people.
Its not as if the first BAME PM and/or third female PM will make a positive difference to the Tories if it is Zahawi or Braverman or Truss. Pick a mentalist, or better still continuity Boris and the party is doomed. But what opportunity there is within the selection process to actually have choice!
I still want the party removed from power, regardless of who wins. But a Badenoch government excites me - and I literally didn't know who she was until yesterday - because she would modernise the political discourse massively.
Brexit was - in a significant part - a vote to send the foreigners home, to remove the outsiders who had brought the country down. And here is Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke, who returned to her native UK from her ancestral Nigeria age 16 to escape the situation over there, did A-Levels whilst working in McDonalds, before going on to work in IT and Finance. Now Kemi Badenoch she represents everything that is the *opposite* of the nasty insular whiter Britain that so many voted for. And don't tell this leave voter that they didn't. They bloody did.
It does raise an interesting question though as to how come the Conservative Party, without all female/minority shortlists have been able to get so many women and minorities right to the very top of the party (and not just padding out the backbenches) . . . but how come the union leaders are all '[white] male and wealthy'.
Why are the unions so unrepresentative?
PS "they didn't".
Door after door after door after door. Talking to white voters in an almost entirely white British area being told there are too many foreigners. As I said - a "nasty insular whiter Britain". You can say that I didn't have those appalling conversations all you like. I did. And there is reams of evidence and reportage from the time backing that up.
Its just that people don't want to be associated with racism and their petty bigotry and jingoist friends. I can understand that. Its not so much that people are racist - reality is far more subtle than that. Its that they dislike the other. Whether that is Europeans or non-whites or people not born in Yorkshire or people who like ballet or whatever. I - like you - am a white man who voted to leave. I - like you did not do so for any of the reasons I just listed. We are not racist or bigoted or bitter. But all the people who are voted leave. That doesn't mean that all leavers are racist, just that all racists voted leave. Why is that hard to grasp?
Because it isn't true?
I know of Remain voters who voted Remain because they were comfortable with free movement of Europeans filling labour voids but not Commonwealth/whole world.
Your anecdote assumes it was bigotry that was meant rather than volume.
My anecdote says that all the bigots voted leave but not everyone who voted leave is a bigot. Its not that difficult to grasp. Unless you are so closed-minded as to think that what you think is what all right-minded people think because you are always right.
But your anecdote is bollocks.
My anecdote is my experience knocking endless doorsteps. What the good people of Thornaby and Ingleby Barwick told me when I spoke to them. Unless you were there having those conversations you cannot possibly know whether it is bollocks or not.
Essentially you are calling me a liar. If you think I am lying why not just say so clearly and distinctly?
I don't think you're lying, except maybe to yourself. You've self-radicalised since switching sides on the issue, which is the only reason you can write such obvious untruths as "all the bigots voted leave".
Many people, including some on this site, were making pro-Remain arguments at the time that Leave would mean increased immigration from outside Europe and that free movement was good since it only applied to Europeans. That was a racist argument, and yet you have claimed "all the bigots voted Leave".
Its bollocks. Its also as someone else said, "Jews don't count" bollocks too.
If you said that some people who voted Leave did so for racist reasons, then that would be true, as too did some who voted Remain. But to say "all" Leave voters were racist, or "all" racists voted Leave is complete hogwash.
Its very very simple. Even for someone who takes as ludicrously as entrenched a position as you.
I spoke to literally hundreds of people during that campaign. Who sang the same jingoistic tune. It is lived experience. For you to call this "bollocks" is to say that I am lying. Making it up, or now "lying to myself".
I was there having those conversations. You was not. So you have no clue what happened, yet can arrogantly tell me what really happened (that these did not happen but I have imagined them having been "self-radicalised".)
Silly boy. You are so conceited you almost sound like HY.
I'm not conceited, I'm not the one claim "all" x did y.
Anyone who tries to insist "all" of anything are doing anything is generally wrong. It is no more true that all racists voted Leave, than it is true that all black Americans vote for the Democrats.
Your party leader at the time was a Remain (since you were still Labour then) was a Remain-backing racist, so it is categorically untrue that all racists backed Leave. Its never been true, and if you keep repeating that all did, then you're only lying to yourself but you aren't convincing me.
What is fascinating about this leadership election is the sheer spread of candidates and outlooks and positions.
At one extreme a vision of a fictional past led by Braverman. Break poor people on the wheel. Tax cuts for decent people. Put the gayers and the trannies and the haters back in their box where decent people can look down on them.
At the other extreme a vision of a dynamic future led by Badenoch. 2020s Britain as personified by a female black migrant with braided hair and a clear vision for how to respect people who who they are without having to harang or belittle like equivalent Labour people do.
What is extraordinary is that half the field are BAME, half are women and two are both. Sorry Labour Party, but if this doesn't explode your "we are the party of modern representative politics", nothing will.
It looks as if we will have the first ethnic PM or third woman PM ( all conservatives )
I think Labour's problem is the unions. When it comes to election planning it becomes a beauty contest - who can attract the most cash from their trade union. And too many unions are very white male and wealthy. Yes I know the Tories are heavily that as well, but they get outside funding. Labour candidates need cash and that cash comes from unions who advance their own people.
Its not as if the first BAME PM and/or third female PM will make a positive difference to the Tories if it is Zahawi or Braverman or Truss. Pick a mentalist, or better still continuity Boris and the party is doomed. But what opportunity there is within the selection process to actually have choice!
I still want the party removed from power, regardless of who wins. But a Badenoch government excites me - and I literally didn't know who she was until yesterday - because she would modernise the political discourse massively.
Brexit was - in a significant part - a vote to send the foreigners home, to remove the outsiders who had brought the country down. And here is Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke, who returned to her native UK from her ancestral Nigeria age 16 to escape the situation over there, did A-Levels whilst working in McDonalds, before going on to work in IT and Finance. Now Kemi Badenoch she represents everything that is the *opposite* of the nasty insular whiter Britain that so many voted for. And don't tell this leave voter that they didn't. They bloody did.
It does raise an interesting question though as to how come the Conservative Party, without all female/minority shortlists have been able to get so many women and minorities right to the very top of the party (and not just padding out the backbenches) . . . but how come the union leaders are all '[white] male and wealthy'.
Why are the unions so unrepresentative?
PS "they didn't".
Door after door after door after door. Talking to white voters in an almost entirely white British area being told there are too many foreigners. As I said - a "nasty insular whiter Britain". You can say that I didn't have those appalling conversations all you like. I did. And there is reams of evidence and reportage from the time backing that up.
Its just that people don't want to be associated with racism and their petty bigotry and jingoist friends. I can understand that. Its not so much that people are racist - reality is far more subtle than that. Its that they dislike the other. Whether that is Europeans or non-whites or people not born in Yorkshire or people who like ballet or whatever. I - like you - am a white man who voted to leave. I - like you did not do so for any of the reasons I just listed. We are not racist or bigoted or bitter. But all the people who are voted leave. That doesn't mean that all leavers are racist, just that all racists voted leave. Why is that hard to grasp?
It's not hard to grasp that some people are racists, but they are a minority. If only racists had voted Leave then Remain would have won a mammoth landslide.
Tbf to RP he's very clearly said not all leavers are racist.
Not even a majority of leave voters are racist. But all the racists voted leave. And they have poisoned the well so that now we have this horrible insular us vs Yerp antagonism. As they get richer than us due to the decisions we have made after leaving the EU I fear this will get worse - with the wrong new Tory leader.
Or we can have a Sunak or Badenoch and reclaim the modernising zeal we had under Cameron and before him Blair.
Just to say, because this has triggered some criticism, that as a leave voter I agree with you that more or less all racists will have voted leave. I think all leave voters need to be aware of that. My biggest issue when I voted was the metaphorical company I was keeping and it pained me to deliver them a victory.
Yes/no referendums are divisive and result in many strange bedfellows on either side of the divide. I was more concerned of the inevitable departure of the Cameron/Osborne government which I generally liked, particularly when they were in coaltion with the Lib Dems.
There was something wonderfully modernising and refreshing about that government - despite some horrendous economic hair-shirted misery. There was a feel good factor about the social changes which I hadn't felt since the initial Blair government.
The Tories have the opportunity to bring that back, to be a modern party leading a modern country. Or alternately go nasty and insular.
Doing a Cameron reheat is a dead end. It has to be different.
It would be different - its a majority Tory government for starters. And the modernising would be different as we're a decade on. But the mentality to look forward not backwards would be *great*.
And it would completely wrong-foot Labour. Think about it...
There are definitely large pockets of closet racism dotted around the country. Usually in very white areas where there is little contact with, or experience of, black or ethnic people.
Many of those with racist views know better than to express those views too openly, and I expect that adds to their feelings of threat and alienation.
It slips out from time to time though, like the woman whose house we went to look at to potentially buy who whispered to us that it was a nice area with 'no blacks or asians nearby'.
Sure, it's an anecdote but not an isolated one.
I should just add re racism and Leave, that I fully acknowledge that the majority of those who voted leave, and certainly those on here, are not racist.
I think racism is universal, there are just varying levels of self-awareness of it. We are probably just wired to make judgements about people based on physical characteristics and it is unlikely that we can actually be rewired to work a different way. We can try.
(edited) I think that if a multi racial society is to actually succeed, there needs to be a bit more realism about our human flaws. You also need to tackle racism not just by white people, but between other racial groups. There is not much sign of this type of thinking taking place on the left, it will probably have to come from the political right.
I don't think racism is universal, though I think xenophobia (in the classic meaning of the word) can be. Fear of the unknown is more universal and real than either racism or homosexuality etc which are both dated concepts that can and should be both tackled and allowed fade away.
Children that grow up in a mixed race environment, without racist parents or adult influences, won't "naturally" be racist, because the very concept would be alien to them. If all your life you've had white, brown and yellow skinned friends then the idea of racism should be as absurd as being "naturally" discriminatory against people who have yellow, brown or red hair.
But this is the problem with identity politics. It encourages people to continually 'deconstruct' multiracial societies to look for racism. There is no utopia at the end of it, just permanent conflict; which ultimately actually weakens the society when considered as a whole.
Sadly a lot of people don't have to look too far to encounter racism. My wife is Asian so I am aware that society still has a long way to go, although of course it has changed a lot since the 70s/80s where getting called a p*** was almost expected. If I was married to a white woman I am sure I would be more likely to think that racism existed in people's head and that people trying to address it were actually prolonging it. But based on what I see, through my wife's experiences, I simply don't think that is the case. I would also note that the progress we have made as a society so far has come from people actively fighting against racism. So if we want that progress to continue, then I think the fight has to continue.
On the economy: unfunded tax cuts are not sensible. But given we already have one of the lowest rates of corporation tax in the west I struggle to see why reducing it further will help close the average income gap with our neighbours. I would like to see a candidate serious about dealing with the prohibitive cost of housing, low median incomes and the poor level of productivity and investment.
The argument goes that a significant increase in CT is a pretty strange way to increase investment. I think that there is an answer to that if the increase in the rate is combined with incentives for investment and training (such as double reliefs).
The prohibitive cost of housing mainly arises from the absurdly low interest rates we have had for the last decade and may well suffer a correction over the next year (although affordability will not improve much, if at all).
Productivity is the key but it is hard, otherwise we would have sorted it long ago.
There are definitely large pockets of closet racism dotted around the country. Usually in very white areas where there is little contact with, or experience of, black or ethnic people.
Many of those with racist views know better than to express those views too openly, and I expect that adds to their feelings of threat and alienation.
It slips out from time to time though, like the woman whose house we went to look at to potentially buy who whispered to us that it was a nice area with 'no blacks or asians nearby'.
Sure, it's an anecdote but not an isolated one.
I should just add re racism and Leave, that I fully acknowledge that the majority of those who voted leave, and certainly those on here, are not racist.
I think racism is universal, there are just varying levels of self-awareness of it. We are probably just wired to make judgements about people based on physical characteristics and it is unlikely that we can actually be rewired to work a different way. We can try.
(edited) I think that if a multi racial society is to actually succeed, there needs to be a bit more realism about our human flaws. You also need to tackle racism not just by white people, but between other racial groups. There is not much sign of this type of thinking taking place on the left, it will probably have to come from the political right.
I don't think racism is universal, though I think xenophobia (in the classic meaning of the word) can be. Fear of the unknown is more universal and real than either racism or homosexuality etc which are both dated concepts that can and should be both tackled and allowed fade away.
Children that grow up in a mixed race environment, without racist parents or adult influences, won't "naturally" be racist, because the very concept would be alien to them. If all your life you've had white, brown and yellow skinned friends then the idea of racism should be as absurd as being "naturally" discriminatory against people who have yellow, brown or red hair.
I liked the parent post, because there's something in that - we all have prejudices*, whether it amounts ot racism depends on your definition for that.
Young children though, are largely free of that. They accept the world as it is. My son doesn't notice that some of his friends at playgroup are not white, it just doesn't register any more than them having a differnt hair colour. He doesn't register that it's in any way unusual that one of his uncles lives with another uncle, rather than an aunt. We learn these things through others, through the media and - of course - through family and friends, I guess.
*call them unconscious biases, maybe
We are children of our times. My dad is 83. He grew up during the Second World War. He is sometimes racist. I grew up 35 years later, but my medium size Wiltshire village had no one who wasn’t white, and frankly most of the people who lived their could trace their roots back to within 10 miles of the same village. How different is that from living in a multicultural city and growing up with all races? It’s huge. I don’t think most people are that nasty generally. In person most people are warm and friendly to almost anyone else. Something like Brexit and the mass immigration from Eastern Europe changing the characters of people’s towns (such as the town my dad grew up) cause tensions on a wider scale. It’s also easy for lies and simplistic arguments to be made. ‘You can’t see your go because of all the foreigners’ ‘Foreigners get first dibs on council housing’ And so on. Sometimes its even true. For what it’s worth I think many more leave voters were a lot more sophisticated than @RochdalePioneers believes. There were lots of reasons to vote to leave. I detested the lack of proper democracy in the EU. The pointless two locations. For years not getting accounts signed off. But I still voted remain, as broadly I thought it in the nations best interests. I still do.
You are talking about my supposed position imagined by BR and CR, not what I have actually posted. Even "racism" isn't remotely accurate for the millions who as you said had reasons to vote leave because people.
I can go all the way back to Gillian Duffy if you want. Note that Brown called her "bigoted" not "racist". She was, and Rochdale is full of people like her. And its not even a white issue - some of the worst bigotry was different BAME groups against each other.
There is always *someone* perceived to be doing better than you, being given the breaks, the assistance, "jumping the queue" etc etc. Really easy to box them off as the other if they don't look like you, talk like you, think like you.
As I keep saying, its not about racism and only racism - that's only a part of it.
On the economy: unfunded tax cuts are not sensible. But given we already have one of the lowest rates of corporation tax in the west I struggle to see why reducing it further will help close the average income gap with our neighbours. I would like to see a candidate serious about dealing with the prohibitive cost of housing, low median incomes and the poor level of productivity and investment.
The argument goes that a significant increase in CT is a pretty strange way to increase investment. I think that there is an answer to that if the increase in the rate is combined with incentives for investment and training (such as double reliefs).
The prohibitive cost of housing mainly arises from the absurdly low interest rates we have had for the last decade and may well suffer a correction over the next year (although affordability will not improve much, if at all).
Productivity is the key but it is hard, otherwise we would have sorted it long ago.
Productivity requires a willingness to invest money in either training or equipment rather than throwing it at shareholders
So higher corporation tax with incentives to invest (capital allowances) alongside the existing apprenticeship levy are needed to give us any chance of getting firms to invest in their future rather than short term profit taking.
There are definitely large pockets of closet racism dotted around the country. Usually in very white areas where there is little contact with, or experience of, black or ethnic people.
Many of those with racist views know better than to express those views too openly, and I expect that adds to their feelings of threat and alienation.
It slips out from time to time though, like the woman whose house we went to look at to potentially buy who whispered to us that it was a nice area with 'no blacks or asians nearby'.
Sure, it's an anecdote but not an isolated one.
I should just add re racism and Leave, that I fully acknowledge that the majority of those who voted leave, and certainly those on here, are not racist.
I think racism is universal, there are just varying levels of self-awareness of it. We are probably just wired to make judgements about people based on physical characteristics and it is unlikely that we can actually be rewired to work a different way. We can try.
(edited) I think that if a multi racial society is to actually succeed, there needs to be a bit more realism about our human flaws. You also need to tackle racism not just by white people, but between other racial groups. There is not much sign of this type of thinking taking place on the left, it will probably have to come from the political right.
I don't think racism is universal, though I think xenophobia (in the classic meaning of the word) can be. Fear of the unknown is more universal and real than either racism or homosexuality etc which are both dated concepts that can and should be both tackled and allowed fade away.
Children that grow up in a mixed race environment, without racist parents or adult influences, won't "naturally" be racist, because the very concept would be alien to them. If all your life you've had white, brown and yellow skinned friends then the idea of racism should be as absurd as being "naturally" discriminatory against people who have yellow, brown or red hair.
But this is the problem with identity politics. It encourages people to continually 'deconstruct' multiracial societies to look for racism. There is no utopia at the end of it, just permanent conflict; which ultimately actually weakens the society when considered as a whole.
Sadly a lot of people don't have to look too far to encounter racism. My wife is Asian so I am aware that society still has a long way to go, although of course it has changed a lot since the 70s/80s where getting called a p*** was almost expected. If I was married to a white woman I am sure I would be more likely to think that racism existed in people's head and that people trying to address it were actually prolonging it. But based on what I see, through my wife's experiences, I simply don't think that is the case. I would also note that the progress we have made as a society so far has come from people actively fighting against racism. So if we want that progress to continue, then I think the fight has to continue.
The most blatant piece of racism I ever saw was in Istanbul where the restaurant staff on mass started a conversation about how bad Arabs were after some had left the restaurant... I suspect they said the same about us after we left....
Another time someone complained about brits in German - not realising that I could follow the conversation completely...
Clear now PM Truss would make PM Boris look like a wet liberal.
With PM Truss it would be full war on Woke, the hardest of Brexits, slashed tax and spend and a scrapping of net zero. Plus a Cabinet dominated by Rees Mogg, Dorries, Francois and IDS
You are for Tugendhat I believe.
Can you tell us how you rate them after that in descending order.
Wow, I'm amused at how last week Sunak was a zero-hoper who was virtually the spawn of Satan and had absolutely zero chance, but this week he's now your number 2 choice (and realistically number 1 since Tugendhat is going to be eliminated early).
Really rapid software update there, good for you. 👍
What is fascinating about this leadership election is the sheer spread of candidates and outlooks and positions.
At one extreme a vision of a fictional past led by Braverman. Break poor people on the wheel. Tax cuts for decent people. Put the gayers and the trannies and the haters back in their box where decent people can look down on them.
At the other extreme a vision of a dynamic future led by Badenoch. 2020s Britain as personified by a female black migrant with braided hair and a clear vision for how to respect people who who they are without having to harang or belittle like equivalent Labour people do.
What is extraordinary is that half the field are BAME, half are women and two are both. Sorry Labour Party, but if this doesn't explode your "we are the party of modern representative politics", nothing will.
It looks as if we will have the first ethnic PM or third woman PM ( all conservatives )
I think Labour's problem is the unions. When it comes to election planning it becomes a beauty contest - who can attract the most cash from their trade union. And too many unions are very white male and wealthy. Yes I know the Tories are heavily that as well, but they get outside funding. Labour candidates need cash and that cash comes from unions who advance their own people.
Its not as if the first BAME PM and/or third female PM will make a positive difference to the Tories if it is Zahawi or Braverman or Truss. Pick a mentalist, or better still continuity Boris and the party is doomed. But what opportunity there is within the selection process to actually have choice!
I still want the party removed from power, regardless of who wins. But a Badenoch government excites me - and I literally didn't know who she was until yesterday - because she would modernise the political discourse massively.
Brexit was - in a significant part - a vote to send the foreigners home, to remove the outsiders who had brought the country down. And here is Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke, who returned to her native UK from her ancestral Nigeria age 16 to escape the situation over there, did A-Levels whilst working in McDonalds, before going on to work in IT and Finance. Now Kemi Badenoch she represents everything that is the *opposite* of the nasty insular whiter Britain that so many voted for. And don't tell this leave voter that they didn't. They bloody did.
It does raise an interesting question though as to how come the Conservative Party, without all female/minority shortlists have been able to get so many women and minorities right to the very top of the party (and not just padding out the backbenches) . . . but how come the union leaders are all '[white] male and wealthy'.
Why are the unions so unrepresentative?
PS "they didn't".
Door after door after door after door. Talking to white voters in an almost entirely white British area being told there are too many foreigners. As I said - a "nasty insular whiter Britain". You can say that I didn't have those appalling conversations all you like. I did. And there is reams of evidence and reportage from the time backing that up.
Its just that people don't want to be associated with racism and their petty bigotry and jingoist friends. I can understand that. Its not so much that people are racist - reality is far more subtle than that. Its that they dislike the other. Whether that is Europeans or non-whites or people not born in Yorkshire or people who like ballet or whatever. I - like you - am a white man who voted to leave. I - like you did not do so for any of the reasons I just listed. We are not racist or bigoted or bitter. But all the people who are voted leave. That doesn't mean that all leavers are racist, just that all racists voted leave. Why is that hard to grasp?
Because it isn't true?
I know of Remain voters who voted Remain because they were comfortable with free movement of Europeans filling labour voids but not Commonwealth/whole world.
Your anecdote assumes it was bigotry that was meant rather than volume.
My anecdote says that all the bigots voted leave but not everyone who voted leave is a bigot. Its not that difficult to grasp. Unless you are so closed-minded as to think that what you think is what all right-minded people think because you are always right.
But your anecdote is bollocks.
My anecdote is my experience knocking endless doorsteps. What the good people of Thornaby and Ingleby Barwick told me when I spoke to them. Unless you were there having those conversations you cannot possibly know whether it is bollocks or not.
Essentially you are calling me a liar. If you think I am lying why not just say so clearly and distinctly?
I don't think you're lying, except maybe to yourself. You've self-radicalised since switching sides on the issue, which is the only reason you can write such obvious untruths as "all the bigots voted leave".
Many people, including some on this site, were making pro-Remain arguments at the time that Leave would mean increased immigration from outside Europe and that free movement was good since it only applied to Europeans. That was a racist argument, and yet you have claimed "all the bigots voted Leave".
Its bollocks. Its also as someone else said, "Jews don't count" bollocks too.
If you said that some people who voted Leave did so for racist reasons, then that would be true, as too did some who voted Remain. But to say "all" Leave voters were racist, or "all" racists voted Leave is complete hogwash.
Its very very simple. Even for someone who takes as ludicrously as entrenched a position as you.
I spoke to literally hundreds of people during that campaign. Who sang the same jingoistic tune. It is lived experience. For you to call this "bollocks" is to say that I am lying. Making it up, or now "lying to myself".
I was there having those conversations. You was not. So you have no clue what happened, yet can arrogantly tell me what really happened (that these did not happen but I have imagined them having been "self-radicalised".)
Silly boy. You are so conceited you almost sound like HY.
The proof is in the Leave campaign video. If they hadn't thought their target market were racists they would have been out of their minds to run it throughout the campain.
On the economy: unfunded tax cuts are not sensible. But given we already have one of the lowest rates of corporation tax in the west I struggle to see why reducing it further will help close the average income gap with our neighbours. I would like to see a candidate serious about dealing with the prohibitive cost of housing, low median incomes and the poor level of productivity and investment.
The argument goes that a significant increase in CT is a pretty strange way to increase investment. I think that there is an answer to that if the increase in the rate is combined with incentives for investment and training (such as double reliefs).
The prohibitive cost of housing mainly arises from the absurdly low interest rates we have had for the last decade and may well suffer a correction over the next year (although affordability will not improve much, if at all).
Productivity is the key but it is hard, otherwise we would have sorted it long ago.
We are not seeing increases in investment despite both super low rates of CT and other creative tax breaks like the super-deduction. A further cut in CT will not change that - companies see the uncertainty in the market and hold onto the liquidity.
What the government should have done was make the reductions in CT conditional. If you pay the living wage, if you invest, if you diversify then you can claim a reduction to 19%. Not just cut it regardless.
Penny Mordaunt launches her pitch for the Tory leadership with a promise to give every family a 'childcare budget' as a survey suggests she would beat every other contender
She wants to deliver 'greater choice' for families
There are definitely large pockets of closet racism dotted around the country. Usually in very white areas where there is little contact with, or experience of, black or ethnic people.
Many of those with racist views know better than to express those views too openly, and I expect that adds to their feelings of threat and alienation.
It slips out from time to time though, like the woman whose house we went to look at to potentially buy who whispered to us that it was a nice area with 'no blacks or asians nearby'.
Sure, it's an anecdote but not an isolated one.
I should just add re racism and Leave, that I fully acknowledge that the majority of those who voted leave, and certainly those on here, are not racist.
I think racism is universal, there are just varying levels of self-awareness of it. We are probably just wired to make judgements about people based on physical characteristics and it is unlikely that we can actually be rewired to work a different way. We can try.
(edited) I think that if a multi racial society is to actually succeed, there needs to be a bit more realism about our human flaws. You also need to tackle racism not just by white people, but between other racial groups. There is not much sign of this type of thinking taking place on the left, it will probably have to come from the political right.
I don't think racism is universal, though I think xenophobia (in the classic meaning of the word) can be. Fear of the unknown is more universal and real than either racism or homosexuality etc which are both dated concepts that can and should be both tackled and allowed fade away.
Children that grow up in a mixed race environment, without racist parents or adult influences, won't "naturally" be racist, because the very concept would be alien to them. If all your life you've had white, brown and yellow skinned friends then the idea of racism should be as absurd as being "naturally" discriminatory against people who have yellow, brown or red hair.
But this is the problem with identity politics. It encourages people to continually 'deconstruct' multiracial societies to look for racism. There is no utopia at the end of it, just permanent conflict; which ultimately actually weakens the society when considered as a whole.
But provides great business and lots of jobs, for those stoking the division.
To be fair a lot of jobs in post industrial society are nonsensical. You can only make your own choice to do something productive with your life; and it is unlikely to be found in this.
Penny Mordaunt launches her pitch for the Tory leadership with a promise to give every family a 'childcare budget' as a survey suggests she would beat every other contender
She wants to deliver 'greater choice' for families
So I plan to move away from a policy of fixed entitlements to tax-free childcare, and instead create a new system of personalised budgets that will allow every child to access their entitlement to subsidised childcare at a time most suited to their family needs.
Mordaunt's wheeze. Otherwise known as massively clunky additional bureaucratically incompetent nightmare on top of all the other governmental complexities besetting parents of small children who don't happen to be quite rich.
I keep thinking of the LD's 'skills wallet' for some reason, which sank without trace with nice Jo Swinson.
On the economy: unfunded tax cuts are not sensible. But given we already have one of the lowest rates of corporation tax in the west I struggle to see why reducing it further will help close the average income gap with our neighbours. I would like to see a candidate serious about dealing with the prohibitive cost of housing, low median incomes and the poor level of productivity and investment.
The argument goes that a significant increase in CT is a pretty strange way to increase investment. I think that there is an answer to that if the increase in the rate is combined with incentives for investment and training (such as double reliefs).
The prohibitive cost of housing mainly arises from the absurdly low interest rates we have had for the last decade and may well suffer a correction over the next year (although affordability will not improve much, if at all).
Productivity is the key but it is hard, otherwise we would have sorted it long ago.
Productivity requires a willingness to invest money in either training or equipment rather than throwing it at shareholders
So higher corporation tax with incentives to invest (capital allowances) alongside the existing apprenticeship levy are needed to give us any chance of getting firms to invest in their future rather than short term profit taking.
Yes, I agree. The fact that we have something of a labour shortage and will shortly have fairly rampant wage growth as a result (driving the inflation peak or plateau well beyond what the BoE is currently forecasting btw) should also encourage employers to work on productivity. Having cheap and unlimited labour from the EU did help growth in the short term, it is foolish to claim otherwise, but it certainly didn't ecourage productivity growth.
So I plan to move away from a policy of fixed entitlements to tax-free childcare, and instead create a new system of personalised budgets that will allow every child to access their entitlement to subsidised childcare at a time most suited to their family needs.
Mordaunt's wheeze. Otherwise known as massively clunky additional bureaucratically incompetent nightmare on top of all the other governmental complexities besetting parents of small children who don't happen to be quite rich.
I keep thinking of the LD's 'skills wallet' for some reason, which sank without trace with nice Jo Swinson.
Penny Mordaunt launches her pitch for the Tory leadership with a promise to give every family a 'childcare budget' as a survey suggests she would beat every other contender
She wants to deliver 'greater choice' for families
It just makes you long for a candidate who will feed them on gruel, send their mothers to a workhouse, compel small children down the mines and up chimneys, render everything either compulsory or forbidden, abolish the welfare state and subsidise grouse shooting.
What is fascinating about this leadership election is the sheer spread of candidates and outlooks and positions.
At one extreme a vision of a fictional past led by Braverman. Break poor people on the wheel. Tax cuts for decent people. Put the gayers and the trannies and the haters back in their box where decent people can look down on them.
At the other extreme a vision of a dynamic future led by Badenoch. 2020s Britain as personified by a female black migrant with braided hair and a clear vision for how to respect people who who they are without having to harang or belittle like equivalent Labour people do.
What is extraordinary is that half the field are BAME, half are women and two are both. Sorry Labour Party, but if this doesn't explode your "we are the party of modern representative politics", nothing will.
It looks as if we will have the first ethnic PM or third woman PM ( all conservatives )
I think Labour's problem is the unions. When it comes to election planning it becomes a beauty contest - who can attract the most cash from their trade union. And too many unions are very white male and wealthy. Yes I know the Tories are heavily that as well, but they get outside funding. Labour candidates need cash and that cash comes from unions who advance their own people.
Its not as if the first BAME PM and/or third female PM will make a positive difference to the Tories if it is Zahawi or Braverman or Truss. Pick a mentalist, or better still continuity Boris and the party is doomed. But what opportunity there is within the selection process to actually have choice!
I still want the party removed from power, regardless of who wins. But a Badenoch government excites me - and I literally didn't know who she was until yesterday - because she would modernise the political discourse massively.
Brexit was - in a significant part - a vote to send the foreigners home, to remove the outsiders who had brought the country down. And here is Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke, who returned to her native UK from her ancestral Nigeria age 16 to escape the situation over there, did A-Levels whilst working in McDonalds, before going on to work in IT and Finance. Now Kemi Badenoch she represents everything that is the *opposite* of the nasty insular whiter Britain that so many voted for. And don't tell this leave voter that they didn't. They bloody did.
It does raise an interesting question though as to how come the Conservative Party, without all female/minority shortlists have been able to get so many women and minorities right to the very top of the party (and not just padding out the backbenches) . . . but how come the union leaders are all '[white] male and wealthy'.
Why are the unions so unrepresentative?
PS "they didn't".
Door after door after door after door. Talking to white voters in an almost entirely white British area being told there are too many foreigners. As I said - a "nasty insular whiter Britain". You can say that I didn't have those appalling conversations all you like. I did. And there is reams of evidence and reportage from the time backing that up.
Its just that people don't want to be associated with racism and their petty bigotry and jingoist friends. I can understand that. Its not so much that people are racist - reality is far more subtle than that. Its that they dislike the other. Whether that is Europeans or non-whites or people not born in Yorkshire or people who like ballet or whatever. I - like you - am a white man who voted to leave. I - like you did not do so for any of the reasons I just listed. We are not racist or bigoted or bitter. But all the people who are voted leave. That doesn't mean that all leavers are racist, just that all racists voted leave. Why is that hard to grasp?
Because it isn't true?
I know of Remain voters who voted Remain because they were comfortable with free movement of Europeans filling labour voids but not Commonwealth/whole world.
Your anecdote assumes it was bigotry that was meant rather than volume.
My anecdote says that all the bigots voted leave but not everyone who voted leave is a bigot. Its not that difficult to grasp. Unless you are so closed-minded as to think that what you think is what all right-minded people think because you are always right.
But your anecdote is bollocks.
Some people voted Leave because they wanted migrants from the rest of the world (like eg Asians) being treated the same as Europeans.
Many, many people voted Remain because they were comfortable with immigration coming from white Europe, and didn't want more immigration coming from the rest of the world instead.
The terrible idea that its OK if a German or an Italian comes over via the EU, but they don't want any more Pakistanis, so vote Remain, was more common than you accept.
People are complicated and there were both racists and anti-racists on both sides.
Whereas I don't disagree with anything you have said there Bart the bit about it is more complicated goes further:
Voters aren't rational. My Dad for instances fits into a category that I believe is not insignificant. He is right of Atilla the Hun and his main driver for voting leave was because there were too many blacks here. Trying to explain to him that leaving will cut down on white immigration from the EU and possibly greater immigration from countries where their skin is a darker colour was like banging your head against a brick wall.
It would be interesting to know what the level of racism is in the UK. It is clearly much much better than it used to be and I agree with @Casino_Royale (on the previous thread) re racisms (and I assume misogyny) in the Tory party is probably not an issue these days, but I would like to end on a 2nd anecdote. In the late 60s I worked in a factory during my school holidays. The guys on the shop floor were as racist as they came. But there were a group of Asians who worked there also and they were OK! It was only the Asians they didn't know who apparently lived 30 to house in dirty conditions. The ones they knew were all fine. Funny that. Similarly with Thatcher. To many men who admired her, she was one of us, while their own good lady's role was washing up and preparing meals. Irrational I know.
Many/most(?) voters are not like the people who post here.
You get attitudes like that today. A German friend of mine would have people at her place of work telling her that they voted Leave to stop European immigrants - but not her, because she was alright.
So I plan to move away from a policy of fixed entitlements to tax-free childcare, and instead create a new system of personalised budgets that will allow every child to access their entitlement to subsidised childcare at a time most suited to their family needs.
Mordaunt's wheeze. Otherwise known as massively clunky additional bureaucratically incompetent nightmare on top of all the other governmental complexities besetting parents of small children who don't happen to be quite rich.
I keep thinking of the LD's 'skills wallet' for some reason, which sank without trace with nice Jo Swinson.
Mordaunt's child care budget is not quite "small state" either.
Penny Mordaunt launches her pitch for the Tory leadership with a promise to give every family a 'childcare budget' as a survey suggests she would beat every other contender
She wants to deliver 'greater choice' for families
It just makes you long for a candidate who will feed them on gruel, send their mothers to a workhouse, compel small children down the mines and up chimneys, render everything either compulsory or forbidden, abolish the welfare state and subsidise grouse shooting.
So I plan to move away from a policy of fixed entitlements to tax-free childcare, and instead create a new system of personalised budgets that will allow every child to access their entitlement to subsidised childcare at a time most suited to their family needs.
Mordaunt's wheeze. Otherwise known as massively clunky additional bureaucratically incompetent nightmare on top of all the other governmental complexities besetting parents of small children who don't happen to be quite rich.
I keep thinking of the LD's 'skills wallet' for some reason, which sank without trace with nice Jo Swinson.
Mordaunt's child care budget is not quite "small state" either.
Come on now, none of the pensioners pining for a small state actually want their pensions to be eliminated overnight.
There are definitely large pockets of closet racism dotted around the country. Usually in very white areas where there is little contact with, or experience of, black or ethnic people.
Many of those with racist views know better than to express those views too openly, and I expect that adds to their feelings of threat and alienation.
It slips out from time to time though, like the woman whose house we went to look at to potentially buy who whispered to us that it was a nice area with 'no blacks or asians nearby'.
Sure, it's an anecdote but not an isolated one.
I should just add re racism and Leave, that I fully acknowledge that the majority of those who voted leave, and certainly those on here, are not racist.
I think racism is universal, there are just varying levels of self-awareness of it. We are probably just wired to make judgements about people based on physical characteristics and it is unlikely that we can actually be rewired to work a different way. We can try.
(edited) I think that if a multi racial society is to actually succeed, there needs to be a bit more realism about our human flaws. You also need to tackle racism not just by white people, but between other racial groups. There is not much sign of this type of thinking taking place on the left, it will probably have to come from the political right.
I don't think racism is universal, though I think xenophobia (in the classic meaning of the word) can be. Fear of the unknown is more universal and real than either racism or homosexuality etc which are both dated concepts that can and should be both tackled and allowed fade away.
Children that grow up in a mixed race environment, without racist parents or adult influences, won't "naturally" be racist, because the very concept would be alien to them. If all your life you've had white, brown and yellow skinned friends then the idea of racism should be as absurd as being "naturally" discriminatory against people who have yellow, brown or red hair.
But this is the problem with identity politics. It encourages people to continually 'deconstruct' multiracial societies to look for racism. There is no utopia at the end of it, just permanent conflict; which ultimately actually weakens the society when considered as a whole.
Sadly a lot of people don't have to look too far to encounter racism. My wife is Asian so I am aware that society still has a long way to go, although of course it has changed a lot since the 70s/80s where getting called a p*** was almost expected. If I was married to a white woman I am sure I would be more likely to think that racism existed in people's head and that people trying to address it were actually prolonging it. But based on what I see, through my wife's experiences, I simply don't think that is the case. I would also note that the progress we have made as a society so far has come from people actively fighting against racism. So if we want that progress to continue, then I think the fight has to continue.
My husband is ethnically Chinese (although actually Canadian) and being with him you notice quite a bit of what I call angry racism. Hardly anyone is unpleasant when they’re relaxed but when something annoys or frightens them it comes out. Recently an older man thought we were taking too long paying for something and I heard him say f***ing chinks under his breath. It was the same during the initial stages of COVID.
Rishi's best strategy is to try and get as many votes for himself as possible (Hah !) in order to lock out Mordaunt. I think he'd rather face Truss in the run off.
I don't think Sunak will be in the run off. If Hunt and Badenhoch supporters go to Mordaunt and Zahawi and Braverman's go to Truss it will be Mordaunt and Truss.
There are definitely large pockets of closet racism dotted around the country. Usually in very white areas where there is little contact with, or experience of, black or ethnic people.
Many of those with racist views know better than to express those views too openly, and I expect that adds to their feelings of threat and alienation.
It slips out from time to time though, like the woman whose house we went to look at to potentially buy who whispered to us that it was a nice area with 'no blacks or asians nearby'.
Sure, it's an anecdote but not an isolated one.
I should just add re racism and Leave, that I fully acknowledge that the majority of those who voted leave, and certainly those on here, are not racist.
I think racism is universal, there are just varying levels of self-awareness of it. We are probably just wired to make judgements about people based on physical characteristics and it is unlikely that we can actually be rewired to work a different way. We can try.
(edited) I think that if a multi racial society is to actually succeed, there needs to be a bit more realism about our human flaws. You also need to tackle racism not just by white people, but between other racial groups. There is not much sign of this type of thinking taking place on the left, it will probably have to come from the political right.
I don't think racism is universal, though I think xenophobia (in the classic meaning of the word) can be. Fear of the unknown is more universal and real than either racism or homosexuality etc which are both dated concepts that can and should be both tackled and allowed fade away.
Children that grow up in a mixed race environment, without racist parents or adult influences, won't "naturally" be racist, because the very concept would be alien to them. If all your life you've had white, brown and yellow skinned friends then the idea of racism should be as absurd as being "naturally" discriminatory against people who have yellow, brown or red hair.
I liked the parent post, because there's something in that - we all have prejudices*, whether it amounts ot racism depends on your definition for that.
Young children though, are largely free of that. They accept the world as it is. My son doesn't notice that some of his friends at playgroup are not white, it just doesn't register any more than them having a differnt hair colour. He doesn't register that it's in any way unusual that one of his uncles lives with another uncle, rather than an aunt. We learn these things through others, through the media and - of course - through family and friends, I guess.
*call them unconscious biases, maybe
We are children of our times. My dad is 83. He grew up during the Second World War. He is sometimes racist. I grew up 35 years later, but my medium size Wiltshire village had no one who wasn’t white, and frankly most of the people who lived their could trace their roots back to within 10 miles of the same village. How different is that from living in a multicultural city and growing up with all races? It’s huge. I don’t think most people are that nasty generally. In person most people are warm and friendly to almost anyone else. Something like Brexit and the mass immigration from Eastern Europe changing the characters of people’s towns (such as the town my dad grew up) cause tensions on a wider scale. It’s also easy for lies and simplistic arguments to be made. ‘You can’t see your go because of all the foreigners’ ‘Foreigners get first dibs on council housing’ And so on. Sometimes its even true. For what it’s worth I think many more leave voters were a lot more sophisticated than @RochdalePioneers believes. There were lots of reasons to vote to leave. I detested the lack of proper democracy in the EU. The pointless two locations. For years not getting accounts signed off. But I still voted remain, as broadly I thought it in the nations best interests. I still do.
You are talking about my supposed position imagined by BR and CR, not what I have actually posted. Even "racism" isn't remotely accurate for the millions who as you said had reasons to vote leave because people.
I can go all the way back to Gillian Duffy if you want. Note that Brown called her "bigoted" not "racist". She was, and Rochdale is full of people like her. And its not even a white issue - some of the worst bigotry was different BAME groups against each other.
There is always *someone* perceived to be doing better than you, being given the breaks, the assistance, "jumping the queue" etc etc. Really easy to box them off as the other if they don't look like you, talk like you, think like you.
As I keep saying, its not about racism and only racism - that's only a part of it.
Did you not post “Not all leavers were racist (I’d say the majority)”. Unless I misinterpret that you think something like 8 million voters at least are racist, or at least voted for racist reasons.
Rishi's best strategy is to try and get as many votes for himself as possible (Hah !) in order to lock out Mordaunt. I think he'd rather face Truss in the run off.
I don't think Sunak will be in the run off. If Hunt and Badenhoch supporters go to Mordaunt and Zahawi and Braverman's go to Truss it will be Mordaunt and Truss.
You think only 212 Tory MPs will vote in the contest?
- Her previous statements suggest she would be big on culture war, which would put me off - It's fine to be small state, I respect such arguments, but what the Conservatives have failed to express for a very long time is a coherent reformist vision of how public services should be organised to make that possible, preferring salami slice and degrade. Badenoch's initial forays don't seem to suggest she has that vision either. - I must tackle culture and upbringing, because if your vision doesn't suggest an understanding of a broad swathe of British society, clues from your upbringing do come into play. Boris's cosseted existence and his limited understanding of broader society, and basic rules of conduct were an obvious fail on this front. And spending almost your entire childhood in the US and at an International school and having a religious upbringing in Nigeria doesn't convince me. Far from thinking Badenoch has views antithetical to what a "black person should have", to paraphrase the stereotype of how the left think, I'd say her views are not at all unexpected given her upbringing. Some convincing to do, for me. - Her pre-politics CV is an odd one. One minute she's a software engineer, the next, without qualification, she's an associate director at Coutts. What happened? I'd like to think it was sheer recognised talent, that a corporate employer forwarded her within normal process, that her part time degree plus associacy was part of an open fast track scheme. Good luck, if so, excellent. But it'd be nice to see that confirmed.
Rishi's best strategy is to try and get as many votes for himself as possible (Hah !) in order to lock out Mordaunt. I think he'd rather face Truss in the run off.
I don't think Sunak will be in the run off. If Hunt and Badenhoch supporters go to Mordaunt and Zahawi and Braverman's go to Truss it will be Mordaunt and Truss.
Your assumptions seem to be exceptionally heavy there though, you've not given even a single transfer to Sunak. The reality is that as candidates are eliminated their votes fragment, the bulk may go to someone "transfer-friendly" but some will go to other candidates and some will go to the leader.
The idea Mordaunt will gain 63 transfers but Sunak will zero is a "brave" assumption.
It takes 71 votes to guarantee getting to the run-off. Unless he starts losing votes, Sunak is reasonably close to that threshold.
EDIT: It takes more than 71, I was going off the 212 figure, there's more than 212 MPs.
Rishi's best strategy is to try and get as many votes for himself as possible (Hah !) in order to lock out Mordaunt. I think he'd rather face Truss in the run off.
I don't think Sunak will be in the run off. If Hunt and Badenhoch supporters go to Mordaunt and Zahawi and Braverman's go to Truss it will be Mordaunt and Truss.
Yes. But as noted above. Sunak needs a deal with only one of those four to make it. As the front runner (presumably) that will be tempting to all of them, surely?
Penny Mordaunt launches her pitch for the Tory leadership with a promise to give every family a 'childcare budget' as a survey suggests she would beat every other contender
She wants to deliver 'greater choice' for families
Every family? Do families without children get the 'childcare budget'? I would like a 'childcare budget'.
- Her previous statements suggest she would be big on culture war, which would put me off - It's fine to be small state, I respect such arguments, but what the Conservatives have failed to express for a very long time is a coherent reformist vision of how public services should be organised to make that possible, preferring salami slice and degrade. Badenoch's initial forays don't seem to suggest she has that vision either. - I must tackle culture and upbringing, because if your vision doesn't suggest an understanding of a broad swathe of British society, clues from your upbringing do come into play. Boris's cosseted existence and his limited understanding of broader society, and basic rules of conduct were an obvious fail on this front. And spending almost your entire childhood in the US and at an International school and having a religious upbringing in Nigeria doesn't convince me. Far from thinking Badenoch has views antithetical to what a "black person should have", to paraphrase the stereotype of how the left think, I'd say her views are not at all unexpected given her upbringing. Some convincing to do, for me. - Her pre-politics CV is an odd one. One minute she's a software engineer, the next, without qualification, she's an associate director at Coutts. What happened? I'd like to think it was sheer recognised talent, that a corporate employer forwarded her within normal process, that her part time degree plus associacy was part of an open fast track scheme. Good luck, if so, excellent. But it'd be nice to see that confirmed.
I suspect that last issue comes down to a combination of corporate need (find us the best non-white, non-male internal candidate we can fast track) and her background...
Penny Mordaunt launches her pitch for the Tory leadership with a promise to give every family a 'childcare budget' as a survey suggests she would beat every other contender
She wants to deliver 'greater choice' for families
It just makes you long for a candidate who will feed them on gruel, send their mothers to a workhouse, compel small children down the mines and up chimneys, render everything either compulsory or forbidden, abolish the welfare state and subsidise grouse shooting.
But Priti didn't stand.
And has refused to appear before the Committee.....
Child care is an interesting topic to bring up. As has been said, details will be crucial. I'm not expecting any. But it is at least an effort to address an important issue.
Child care is an interesting topic to bring up. As has been said, details will be crucial. I'm not expecting any. But it is at least an effort to address an important issue.
What is fascinating about this leadership election is the sheer spread of candidates and outlooks and positions.
At one extreme a vision of a fictional past led by Braverman. Break poor people on the wheel. Tax cuts for decent people. Put the gayers and the trannies and the haters back in their box where decent people can look down on them.
At the other extreme a vision of a dynamic future led by Badenoch. 2020s Britain as personified by a female black migrant with braided hair and a clear vision for how to respect people who who they are without having to harang or belittle like equivalent Labour people do.
What is extraordinary is that half the field are BAME, half are women and two are both. Sorry Labour Party, but if this doesn't explode your "we are the party of modern representative politics", nothing will.
It looks as if we will have the first ethnic PM or third woman PM ( all conservatives )
I think Labour's problem is the unions. When it comes to election planning it becomes a beauty contest - who can attract the most cash from their trade union. And too many unions are very white male and wealthy. Yes I know the Tories are heavily that as well, but they get outside funding. Labour candidates need cash and that cash comes from unions who advance their own people.
Its not as if the first BAME PM and/or third female PM will make a positive difference to the Tories if it is Zahawi or Braverman or Truss. Pick a mentalist, or better still continuity Boris and the party is doomed. But what opportunity there is within the selection process to actually have choice!
I still want the party removed from power, regardless of who wins. But a Badenoch government excites me - and I literally didn't know who she was until yesterday - because she would modernise the political discourse massively.
Brexit was - in a significant part - a vote to send the foreigners home, to remove the outsiders who had brought the country down. And here is Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke, who returned to her native UK from her ancestral Nigeria age 16 to escape the situation over there, did A-Levels whilst working in McDonalds, before going on to work in IT and Finance. Now Kemi Badenoch she represents everything that is the *opposite* of the nasty insular whiter Britain that so many voted for. And don't tell this leave voter that they didn't. They bloody did.
It does raise an interesting question though as to how come the Conservative Party, without all female/minority shortlists have been able to get so many women and minorities right to the very top of the party (and not just padding out the backbenches) . . . but how come the union leaders are all '[white] male and wealthy'.
Why are the unions so unrepresentative?
PS "they didn't".
Door after door after door after door. Talking to white voters in an almost entirely white British area being told there are too many foreigners. As I said - a "nasty insular whiter Britain". You can say that I didn't have those appalling conversations all you like. I did. And there is reams of evidence and reportage from the time backing that up.
Its just that people don't want to be associated with racism and their petty bigotry and jingoist friends. I can understand that. Its not so much that people are racist - reality is far more subtle than that. Its that they dislike the other. Whether that is Europeans or non-whites or people not born in Yorkshire or people who like ballet or whatever. I - like you - am a white man who voted to leave. I - like you did not do so for any of the reasons I just listed. We are not racist or bigoted or bitter. But all the people who are voted leave. That doesn't mean that all leavers are racist, just that all racists voted leave. Why is that hard to grasp?
Because it isn't true?
I know of Remain voters who voted Remain because they were comfortable with free movement of Europeans filling labour voids but not Commonwealth/whole world.
Your anecdote assumes it was bigotry that was meant rather than volume.
My anecdote says that all the bigots voted leave but not everyone who voted leave is a bigot. Its not that difficult to grasp. Unless you are so closed-minded as to think that what you think is what all right-minded people think because you are always right.
But your anecdote is bollocks.
Some people voted Leave because they wanted migrants from the rest of the world (like eg Asians) being treated the same as Europeans.
Many, many people voted Remain because they were comfortable with immigration coming from white Europe, and didn't want more immigration coming from the rest of the world instead.
The terrible idea that its OK if a German or an Italian comes over via the EU, but they don't want any more Pakistanis, so vote Remain, was more common than you accept.
People are complicated and there were both racists and anti-racists on both sides.
Whereas I don't disagree with anything you have said there Bart the bit about it is more complicated goes further:
Voters aren't rational. My Dad for instances fits into a category that I believe is not insignificant. He is right of Atilla the Hun and his main driver for voting leave was because there were too many blacks here. Trying to explain to him that leaving will cut down on white immigration from the EU and possibly greater immigration from countries where their skin is a darker colour was like banging your head against a brick wall.
It would be interesting to know what the level of racism is in the UK. It is clearly much much better than it used to be and I agree with @Casino_Royale (on the previous thread) re racisms (and I assume misogyny) in the Tory party is probably not an issue these days, but I would like to end on a 2nd anecdote. In the late 60s I worked in a factory during my school holidays. The guys on the shop floor were as racist as they came. But there were a group of Asians who worked there also and they were OK! It was only the Asians they didn't know who apparently lived 30 to house in dirty conditions. The ones they knew were all fine. Funny that. Similarly with Thatcher. To many men who admired her, she was one of us, while their own good lady's role was washing up and preparing meals. Irrational I know.
Many/most(?) voters are not like the people who post here.
You get attitudes like that today. A German friend of mine would have people at her place of work telling her that they voted Leave to stop European immigrants - but not her, because she was alright.
I think that's just human nature - you always favour your friends and acquaintances over others. When it comes to colour you then see that logic expressed in different ways.
And remember that it wasn't that long ago that the Irish were discriminated against.
A deal with Badenoch by Sunak could lock out Truss, and probably hands the leadership to Mordaunt... ! I'd have though Tugendhat would be the one Sunak would really want - but seems they are disagreeing on defence.
On the economy: unfunded tax cuts are not sensible. But given we already have one of the lowest rates of corporation tax in the west I struggle to see why reducing it further will help close the average income gap with our neighbours. I would like to see a candidate serious about dealing with the prohibitive cost of housing, low median incomes and the poor level of productivity and investment.
The argument goes that a significant increase in CT is a pretty strange way to increase investment. I think that there is an answer to that if the increase in the rate is combined with incentives for investment and training (such as double reliefs).
The prohibitive cost of housing mainly arises from the absurdly low interest rates we have had for the last decade and may well suffer a correction over the next year (although affordability will not improve much, if at all).
Productivity is the key but it is hard, otherwise we would have sorted it long ago.
We had a National Productivity Year in the mid-60s. I still have the commemorative postage stamps lurking in a dark corner. An early example of nudge theory.
Penny Mordaunt launches her pitch for the Tory leadership with a promise to give every family a 'childcare budget' as a survey suggests she would beat every other contender
She wants to deliver 'greater choice' for families
It just makes you long for a candidate who will feed them on gruel, send their mothers to a workhouse, compel small children down the mines and up chimneys, render everything either compulsory or forbidden, abolish the welfare state and subsidise grouse shooting.
Subisidised grouse shooting? Been done already in 1995 - exemption from business rates.
Rishi's best strategy is to try and get as many votes for himself as possible (Hah !) in order to lock out Mordaunt. I think he'd rather face Truss in the run off.
I don't think Sunak will be in the run off. If Hunt and Badenhoch supporters go to Mordaunt and Zahawi and Braverman's go to Truss it will be Mordaunt and Truss.
You think only 212 Tory MPs will vote in the contest?
Penny nearly said it - she said she’d cut VAT on petrol in half.
So close…
Shows again that she doesn't understand the issue in any depth... Mind you it's like Rabb and Calais they know that x is important but they can't quite work out or remember why x is important...
Penny Mordaunt unveils plans for a Civil Defence Force so Armed Forces aren't too stretched. Presumably for things like floods, security at Olympics when privatised firm can't deliver, helping fire brigades with wildfires etc
There are definitely large pockets of closet racism dotted around the country. Usually in very white areas where there is little contact with, or experience of, black or ethnic people.
Many of those with racist views know better than to express those views too openly, and I expect that adds to their feelings of threat and alienation.
It slips out from time to time though, like the woman whose house we went to look at to potentially buy who whispered to us that it was a nice area with 'no blacks or asians nearby'.
Sure, it's an anecdote but not an isolated one.
I should just add re racism and Leave, that I fully acknowledge that the majority of those who voted leave, and certainly those on here, are not racist.
I think racism is universal, there are just varying levels of self-awareness of it. We are probably just wired to make judgements about people based on physical characteristics and it is unlikely that we can actually be rewired to work a different way. We can try.
(edited) I think that if a multi racial society is to actually succeed, there needs to be a bit more realism about our human flaws. You also need to tackle racism not just by white people, but between other racial groups. There is not much sign of this type of thinking taking place on the left, it will probably have to come from the political right.
I don't think racism is universal, though I think xenophobia (in the classic meaning of the word) can be. Fear of the unknown is more universal and real than either racism or homosexuality etc which are both dated concepts that can and should be both tackled and allowed fade away.
Children that grow up in a mixed race environment, without racist parents or adult influences, won't "naturally" be racist, because the very concept would be alien to them. If all your life you've had white, brown and yellow skinned friends then the idea of racism should be as absurd as being "naturally" discriminatory against people who have yellow, brown or red hair.
I liked the parent post, because there's something in that - we all have prejudices*, whether it amounts ot racism depends on your definition for that.
Young children though, are largely free of that. They accept the world as it is. My son doesn't notice that some of his friends at playgroup are not white, it just doesn't register any more than them having a differnt hair colour. He doesn't register that it's in any way unusual that one of his uncles lives with another uncle, rather than an aunt. We learn these things through others, through the media and - of course - through family and friends, I guess.
*call them unconscious biases, maybe
We are children of our times. My dad is 83. He grew up during the Second World War. He is sometimes racist. I grew up 35 years later, but my medium size Wiltshire village had no one who wasn’t white, and frankly most of the people who lived their could trace their roots back to within 10 miles of the same village. How different is that from living in a multicultural city and growing up with all races? It’s huge. I don’t think most people are that nasty generally. In person most people are warm and friendly to almost anyone else. Something like Brexit and the mass immigration from Eastern Europe changing the characters of people’s towns (such as the town my dad grew up) cause tensions on a wider scale. It’s also easy for lies and simplistic arguments to be made. ‘You can’t see your go because of all the foreigners’ ‘Foreigners get first dibs on council housing’ And so on. Sometimes its even true. For what it’s worth I think many more leave voters were a lot more sophisticated than @RochdalePioneers believes. There were lots of reasons to vote to leave. I detested the lack of proper democracy in the EU. The pointless two locations. For years not getting accounts signed off. But I still voted remain, as broadly I thought it in the nations best interests. I still do.
You are talking about my supposed position imagined by BR and CR, not what I have actually posted. Even "racism" isn't remotely accurate for the millions who as you said had reasons to vote leave because people.
I can go all the way back to Gillian Duffy if you want. Note that Brown called her "bigoted" not "racist". She was, and Rochdale is full of people like her. And its not even a white issue - some of the worst bigotry was different BAME groups against each other.
There is always *someone* perceived to be doing better than you, being given the breaks, the assistance, "jumping the queue" etc etc. Really easy to box them off as the other if they don't look like you, talk like you, think like you.
As I keep saying, its not about racism and only racism - that's only a part of it.
Did you not post “Not all leavers were racist (I’d say the majority)”. Unless I misinterpret that you think something like 8 million voters at least are racist, or at least voted for racist reasons.
And by "racist" I am speaking about open racism and bigotry and jingoism and prejudice. A bucket term to describe "the other". Places like Boston in Lincolnshire openly voted heavily for leave to get the eastern Europeans out. As they told anyone who asked them. That's white europeans like them they wanted shut of.
So "racism" in the EU sense isn't about race, its about identity. Fear of the other.
Penny Mordaunt says she will give money to MPs directly to spend on worthy projects on their patch.
MPs will like that
All MPs or only Con MPs?
If only we had some existing way for people to vote on local spending of government budgets. Groups of people elected to decide that, maybe. They could have meetings. We could call them councils
Penny Mordaunt launches her pitch for the Tory leadership with a promise to give every family a 'childcare budget' as a survey suggests she would beat every other contender
She wants to deliver 'greater choice' for families
Between feeding or heating the family? She'll need to be lucky it doesn't boil down (so to speak) to that pretty soon.
Rishi's best strategy is to try and get as many votes for himself as possible (Hah !) in order to lock out Mordaunt. I think he'd rather face Truss in the run off.
I don't think Sunak will be in the run off. If Hunt and Badenhoch supporters go to Mordaunt and Zahawi and Braverman's go to Truss it will be Mordaunt and Truss.
You think only 212 Tory MPs will vote in the contest?
No. But this is the best sample available.
Surely the number needed to guarantee the run off is 1/3 +1, which I make 120? Rishi is very, very likely to make that in my view but he's got a bit to go.
Is "All the racists voted Leave" a chapter in Jews Don't Count?
What does that mean? A looks like a complete non sequiteur
Sequitur
It means that lots of antisemites voted Remain
Thanks. Changed it. Is that a joke or has that been said anywhere?
A number of people have said on this and the last thread that "all the racists voted leave"
Did all antisemites vote leave?
Or are antisemites not racists?
Corbyn probably voted leave!
Probably
But I don't think he's all of the antisemites
Fairly typical of many of those on the left. And the vast, vast majority of the antisemites on the right will have voted leave. Probably a few antisemites in the middle who could have gone either way.
- Her previous statements suggest she would be big on culture war, which would put me off - It's fine to be small state, I respect such arguments, but what the Conservatives have failed to express for a very long time is a coherent reformist vision of how public services should be organised to make that possible, preferring salami slice and degrade. Badenoch's initial forays don't seem to suggest she has that vision either. - I must tackle culture and upbringing, because if your vision doesn't suggest an understanding of a broad swathe of British society, clues from your upbringing do come into play. Boris's cosseted existence and his limited understanding of broader society, and basic rules of conduct were an obvious fail on this front. And spending almost your entire childhood in the US and at an International school and having a religious upbringing in Nigeria doesn't convince me. Far from thinking Badenoch has views antithetical to what a "black person should have", to paraphrase the stereotype of how the left think, I'd say her views are not at all unexpected given her upbringing. Some convincing to do, for me. - Her pre-politics CV is an odd one. One minute she's a software engineer, the next, without qualification, she's an associate director at Coutts. What happened? I'd like to think it was sheer recognised talent, that a corporate employer forwarded her within normal process, that her part time degree plus associacy was part of an open fast track scheme. Good luck, if so, excellent. But it'd be nice to see that confirmed.
I suspect that last issue comes down to a combination of corporate need (find us the best non-white, non-male internal candidate we can fast track) and her background...
She was a software engineer wasn't she? Which makes it likely she is good with numbers and complex bits of code. So like so many other engineers who end up working in finance she simply switches the data she is looking at for financial.
Rishi Sunak will turn a deaf ear to SNP ploys that “pit communities against each other” as he signalled he would abandon the “muscular unionism” strategy if he becomes prime minister.
The former chancellor, who is the early frontrunner to replace Boris Johnson, failed to mention the Union once during his campaign launch yesterday, raising eyebrows among Scottish Conservatives.
€ Times
I am pretty relaxed about that. I think that PM Rishi is going to be a lot more attractive to Scots than PM Boris ever was and even more so than he is now. Indeed pretty much all of the candidates would be a big improvement in that regard.
Considering that BJ was in the minus 70s favourability then a monkey in a blue rosette would do better.
Penny Mordaunt says her "monetary policy will be about controlling inflation" - that will be news to Andrew Bailey, who probably thought that was his job
Is "All the racists voted Leave" a chapter in Jews Don't Count?
What does that mean? A looks like a complete non sequiteur
Sequitur
It means that lots of antisemites voted Remain
Thanks. Changed it. Is that a joke or has that been said anywhere?
A number of people have said on this and the last thread that "all the racists voted leave"
Did all antisemites vote leave?
Or are antisemites not racists?
Of course antisemites are racist. The Corbynite left were mostly supporters of "Lexit" - these were the most idiotic of useful idiots on the Leave side.
Engaging, fresh, full of policy and with a strong sense of her own character. This @PennyMordaunt launch is the most impressive Tory leadership launch speech so far.
Penny Mordaunt says she will give money to MPs directly to spend on worthy projects on their patch.
MPs will like that
All MPs or only Con MPs?
If only we had some existing way for people to vote on local spending of government budgets. Groups of people elected to decide that, maybe. They could have meetings. We could call them councils
And we could even given individual councillors small budgets to do things in their wards.
But then there is this nation which does things differently, and which has that happen in a number of its "unitary councils". It's called Scotland.
(no idea if it's illegal down south, actually)
Edit: though in my knowledge it is on the level of a flower bed here and a football pitch there.
Penny Mordaunt says her "monetary policy will be about controlling inflation" - that will be news to Andrew Bailey, who probably thought that was his job
Have you any idea what a Pandora's box you are opening? Where on earth do you start? Even the literate Rajan says "twenny" for 20. The glottal stop has spread as far as the grey squirrel....I could go on.
What Tories (in fact all of us ) should find most disturbing in that in the Red Wall seats Suella Braverman's policies were found to be the most popular.
God help us all.
Among TORY VOTERS in the Red Wall as I understand it
Penny Mordaunt says her "monetary policy will be about controlling inflation" - that will be news to Andrew Bailey, who probably thought that was his job
If only he did...
Sacking Bailey would be my first move as PM. He failed in his job at the FCA and has been ridiculously rewarded for that failure. Not sure who would replace him, but he needs to go as he should never ever have got the job in the first place.
Penny Mordaunt unveils plans for a Civil Defence Force so Armed Forces aren't too stretched. Presumably for things like floods, security at Olympics when privatised firm can't deliver, helping fire brigades with wildfires etc
Did she mention public order and Aid to the Civil Power?
Comments
It means that lots of antisemites voted Remain
Anyone who tries to insist "all" of anything are doing anything is generally wrong. It is no more true that all racists voted Leave, than it is true that all black Americans vote for the Democrats.
Your party leader at the time was a Remain (since you were still Labour then) was a Remain-backing racist, so it is categorically untrue that all racists backed Leave. Its never been true, and if you keep repeating that all did, then you're only lying to yourself but you aren't convincing me.
Up until the point he got transfixed by a spear, of course.
And it would completely wrong-foot Labour. Think about it...
If his final opponent is Mordaunt, he isn't.
If I was married to a white woman I am sure I would be more likely to think that racism existed in people's head and that people trying to address it were actually prolonging it. But based on what I see, through my wife's experiences, I simply don't think that is the case.
I would also note that the progress we have made as a society so far has come from people actively fighting against racism. So if we want that progress to continue, then I think the fight has to continue.
The prohibitive cost of housing mainly arises from the absurdly low interest rates we have had for the last decade and may well suffer a correction over the next year (although affordability will not improve much, if at all).
Productivity is the key but it is hard, otherwise we would have sorted it long ago.
https://twitter.com/jessphillips/status/1547147858536792065
https://twitter.com/lizziedearden/status/1547147478037929984
Hoping we don't find out.
I can go all the way back to Gillian Duffy if you want. Note that Brown called her "bigoted" not "racist". She was, and Rochdale is full of people like her. And its not even a white issue - some of the worst bigotry was different BAME groups against each other.
There is always *someone* perceived to be doing better than you, being given the breaks, the assistance, "jumping the queue" etc etc. Really easy to box them off as the other if they don't look like you, talk like you, think like you.
As I keep saying, its not about racism and only racism - that's only a part of it.
So higher corporation tax with incentives to invest (capital allowances) alongside the existing apprenticeship levy are needed to give us any chance of getting firms to invest in their future rather than short term profit taking.
Another time someone complained about brits in German - not realising that I could follow the conversation completely...
Really rapid software update there, good for you. 👍
What the government should have done was make the reductions in CT conditional. If you pay the living wage, if you invest, if you diversify then you can claim a reduction to 19%. Not just cut it regardless.
Penny Mordaunt launches her pitch for the Tory leadership with a promise to give every family a 'childcare budget' as a survey suggests she would beat every other contender
She wants to deliver 'greater choice' for families
Mordaunt's wheeze. Otherwise known as massively clunky additional bureaucratically incompetent nightmare on top of all the other governmental complexities besetting parents of small children who don't happen to be quite rich.
I keep thinking of the LD's 'skills wallet' for some reason, which sank without trace with nice Jo Swinson.
Did all antisemites vote leave?
Or are antisemites not racists?
She is rapidly dropping in my estimation.
Small state for thee, not me.
Unless I misinterpret that you think something like 8 million voters at least are racist, or at least voted for racist reasons.
Sounded like Nicola Murray!
- Her previous statements suggest she would be big on culture war, which would put me off
- It's fine to be small state, I respect such arguments, but what the Conservatives have failed to express for a very long time is a coherent reformist vision of how public services should be organised to make that possible, preferring salami slice and degrade. Badenoch's initial forays don't seem to suggest she has that vision either.
- I must tackle culture and upbringing, because if your vision doesn't suggest an understanding of a broad swathe of British society, clues from your upbringing do come into play. Boris's cosseted existence and his limited understanding of broader society, and basic rules of conduct were an obvious fail on this front. And spending almost your entire childhood in the US and at an International school and having a religious upbringing in Nigeria doesn't convince me. Far from thinking Badenoch has views antithetical to what a "black person should have", to paraphrase the stereotype of how the left think, I'd say her views are not at all unexpected given her upbringing. Some convincing to do, for me.
- Her pre-politics CV is an odd one. One minute she's a software engineer, the next, without qualification, she's an associate director at Coutts. What happened? I'd like to think it was sheer recognised talent, that a corporate employer forwarded her within normal process, that her part time degree plus associacy was part of an open fast track scheme. Good luck, if so, excellent. But it'd be nice to see that confirmed.
The idea Mordaunt will gain 63 transfers but Sunak will zero is a "brave" assumption.
It takes 71 votes to guarantee getting to the run-off. Unless he starts losing votes, Sunak is reasonably close to that threshold.
EDIT: It takes more than 71, I was going off the 212 figure, there's more than 212 MPs.
And has refused to appear before the Committee.....
As has been said, details will be crucial. I'm not expecting any. But it is at least an effort to address an important issue.
So close…
CoL, anyone? Hello?
And remember that it wasn't that long ago that the Irish were discriminated against.
I'd have though Tugendhat would be the one Sunak would really want - but seems they are disagreeing on defence.
If they could be exported we could put a dent in the trade deficit.
MPs will like that
Only two ways to do that - cut spending or spur serious levels of economic growth in very tough economic circumstances
But I don't think he's all of the antisemites
So "racism" in the EU sense isn't about race, its about identity. Fear of the other.
If only we had some existing way for people to vote on local spending of government budgets. Groups of people elected to decide that, maybe. They could have meetings. We could call them councils
“I stood on the same platform as a Boris Johnson - we have a mandate and the British expect us to deliver that”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/07/13/boris-johnson-news-pmqs-tory-leader-next-pm-penny-mordaunt/
“I’m your best shot at winning the next election - I’m the candidate Labour fear most”
Engaging, fresh, full of policy and with a strong sense of her own character. This @PennyMordaunt launch is the most impressive Tory leadership launch speech so far.
https://twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1547155243485495299
But then there is this nation which does things differently, and which has that happen in a number of its "unitary councils". It's called Scotland.
(no idea if it's illegal down south, actually)
Edit: though in my knowledge it is on the level of a flower bed here and a football pitch there.
Not sure who would replace him, but he needs to go as he should never ever have got the job in the first place.