A Penny Mordaunt led Conservative party would be a gift for Labour. There are many women who will vote Tory for the first time in their lives, some holding their noses, in order to save women's rights from gender identity ideology but they will not vote for Mordaunt.
Don't worry Carlotta, according to @Anabobazina you only care about these things if you are, quote, 'an ageing, right wing Trumpist on PB.com' so Penny will be fine.
PS for those who don't think this will be an issue for Penny:
This is why you lay the favourite, as soon as they get out in front their past statements will be scrutinized for anything that might betray a disqualifying shred of humanity.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
There isn't one. The issue kitty is empty. Should women have votes: an issue. Can women have dicks? who gives a fuck, except in edge but real cases where they use them to rape women without dicks? Not an issue. See the difference?
Yep. But who is talking endlessly about women with willies? It isn't the woke, its the anti-woke. It is quite literally a fringe issue that only exists as this Moral Panic amongst some.
Finally, something weirder than the Tories electing a new leader.
Relatively well-known copypasta. Got me the first time when I saw it in a FB group (a few months ago), but I then saw a near-identical post in a completely different group.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
I don't think you're this dumb.
I'm not. But only one of us is howling at the moon...
Calling me a moon howler and a mentalist (as someone else did last night) is a really weak argument.
Engage with the substance please.
I have posted quite a lot of substance on this subject recently. To which your level of engagement was "I don't think you're this dumb". I could say the same to you.
You talked about the Beatles and votes for women. That was dumb.
Same goes for the sheep like idiots who go liking your shitposts.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
What we are dealing with these days is at best a refusal to engage in rational argument and at worst a demand that anything you feel should be respected and protected and that you don't even want to hear about things outside of your echo chamber.
This is very different to rock and roll or the suffrage movement.
The concepts of no platforming, 'safe spaces', online bubbles have made debate impossible meaning that views are not only going unchallenged but met with an absolute refusal to engage with anything with which you disagree.
Those are very unwelcome additions to our society alongside the denial of evidence and facts.
The people who don't want to hear about things outside of their echo chamber are the "anti-Woke" here who want to ban a poster in Waterloo station about stopping sexist hate, who complain endlessly about corporations sticking a rainbow up for a month, who demand their statue of a slave trader must be respected and protected.
You are doing exactly what you accuse others of doing.
You are viewing everything through a set of filters rather than looking at the broader picture.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
What we are dealing with these days is at best a refusal to engage in rational argument and at worst a demand that anything you feel should be respected and protected and that you don't even want to hear about things outside of your echo chamber.
This is very different to rock and roll or the suffrage movement.
The concepts of no platforming, 'safe spaces', online bubbles have made debate impossible meaning that views are not only going unchallenged but met with an absolute refusal to engage with anything with which you disagree.
Those are very unwelcome additions to our society alongside the denial of evidence and facts.
"a refusal to engage in rational argument" - like saying that all lefties are stupid?
"you don't even want to hear about things outside of your echo chamber" - like getting worked up by companies advertising their opposition to domestic violence?
"denial of evidence and facts" - like refusing to acknowledge the economic harm caused by Brexit?
There is plenty of this kind of behaviour on the Right.
I deliberately didn't include any mention of specific issues because it is not just a left/right thing. It is a damaging refusal to engage. There is so little room for discovery and conversation. And too much assertion.
The debate about woke reminds me of the continental European powers in 1815 who, after thirty-odd years fighting viciously among themselves, suddenly noticed that Team GB had been busy colonising the southern hemisphere.
I'm not entirely convinced by Penny, on the one hand she's clearly switched on and a relatively good communicator. However, I don't know what she stands for, definitely feels like a blank sheet of paper onto which the great and powerful in the party are projecting their own image of what they want the next leader to be.
The reason I'm in favour of Kemi is because we have got one chance to beat Starmer in 2024 and it's going to need someone who actually stands for something and gives people something to vote in favour of to actually win. Penny doesn't do that, she's going to present the voters with that blank sheet of paper and try to win on a battle personalities, but at the same time as being in recession, being the Tory party which is now a big net drag after Boris and against Starmer who has got enough name recognition at this point to make a go of it and come out on top.
Penny, to me, seems like the "manager decline" choice for that Tories, admitting that we've got no policies or nothing positive to deliver to the nation. Kemi comes in with ideas that can turn into serious policies and give voters something vote in favour of.
It's definitely a riskier strategy but ultimately the Tory party needs to stand for something other than pretending to be second coming of Mrs Thatcher as Liz and Penny are attempting to project.
I don't know what Kemi's personality is like at all or if she has any real charisma but for me the fact that she's got ideas is winning. None of the other candidates seem to know what they want to do with the job other than occupy No. 10 for just under two years before being booted out by a Labour/SNP/LD coalition. It will be Boris but a bit more competent, or at least fewer scandals. The MPs must get Kemi onto the members ballot so she can get out there on the national stage and pitch her policy based vision against the bland managed declinism coming from whoever the other candidate is.
I think if she gets that chance it will be Dave vs Davis again, the favourite will find themselves pitching a nothing platform against a positive vision of the nation backed by ideas that make sense to ordinary people and she'll take the win.
The Tories can win the next election. Or be crushed. We're moving forward as a society - thanks to Covid - yet most of the contenders and the selectorate seem obsessed by the past.
So its a choice. Pick someone godawful and negative like Truss or Braverman (stop laughing at the back). Pick someone shiny and bereft of ideas who ultimately will pivot to knee-jerk like Mordaunt and (probably) Sunak will. Or go for change.
Tugendhat overtly set his stall out over there. Its just that he is sleep-inducingly dull. When compared to Badenoch who represents a radically different vision for the party and all of the possibilities for the country that opens up.
Personally I'd go with Sunak. He will be competent and run a sensational PR machine to sell the positives. And as I expect he will do what he can to balance the economic mess with the need to invest I expect there would be positives to spin.
But the exciting prospect is Kemi. I think Labour wouldn't have the first clue how to combat her.
I've seen two focus groups reported on the leadership race and, in both, the participants said something along the lines of "why are they talking about this culture war stuff, what are they going to do about the cost of living?" That is how Labour responds to Kemi unless she comes up with some actual policies on the issues that the electorate care about.
I don't think Kemi is engaged on culture war - she needs to say it to get on board, but will she really bother with it?
My point about them not knowing what to do with her is that her ascendency represents all of Labour's fail points in a single person. How can this black female migrant be talking about a vision for the future which embodies change when she is a hated Tory racist?
“I’d like to congratulate the Prime Minister on a singular achievement. That she’s PM would be remarkable to anyone even 20 years ago. It is a singular moment I warmly welcome. Now, can she please explain how we’re all going to avoid freezing, starving, going broke or all three this winter?”
@DavidHerdson · 1m It is a striking measure of the churn and change in the Conservative Party that although there were 10 candidates in the 2019 leadership election, and there are 8 in the current one, only three years later, just one person contested both - and he went out in the first round.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
What we are dealing with these days is at best a refusal to engage in rational argument and at worst a demand that anything you feel should be respected and protected and that you don't even want to hear about things outside of your echo chamber.
This is very different to rock and roll or the suffrage movement.
The concepts of no platforming, 'safe spaces', online bubbles have made debate impossible meaning that views are not only going unchallenged but met with an absolute refusal to engage with anything with which you disagree.
Those are very unwelcome additions to our society alongside the denial of evidence and facts.
We can set aside the nutters at either end of the spectrum who refuse to engage in rational argument. As we can the nutters on any issue you care to choose - they always exist.
On a couple of the points you mention - safe spaces is an interesting one. 25 years ago at Sheffield University there was a massive row on this subject, specifically over the Union's "Women's Safety Bus". A group of students objected to the union spending money on transporting drunk female students home. "Where's my free ride home" etc. That there had been a spate of attacks on female students didn't seem to bother them - the bus was aptly named.
As for online bubbles making debate impossible, that is a function of online. The nutters at either end of the spectrum we set aside? They're all online, they're mad as hell and the SHOUT AND SHOUT like they are the majority view. Short of abolishing social media, best we can do is ignore them and get on with our lives.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
What we are dealing with these days is at best a refusal to engage in rational argument and at worst a demand that anything you feel should be respected and protected and that you don't even want to hear about things outside of your echo chamber.
This is very different to rock and roll or the suffrage movement.
The concepts of no platforming, 'safe spaces', online bubbles have made debate impossible meaning that views are not only going unchallenged but met with an absolute refusal to engage with anything with which you disagree.
Those are very unwelcome additions to our society alongside the denial of evidence and facts.
"a refusal to engage in rational argument" - like saying that all lefties are stupid?
"you don't even want to hear about things outside of your echo chamber" - like getting worked up by companies advertising their opposition to domestic violence?
"denial of evidence and facts" - like refusing to acknowledge the economic harm caused by Brexit?
There is plenty of this kind of behaviour on the Right.
I deliberately didn't include any mention of specific issues because it is not just a left/right thing. It is a damaging refusal to engage. There is so little room for discovery and conversation. And too much assertion.
Well there is plenty of conversation on this topic on here!
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I'm not entirely convinced by Penny, on the one hand she's clearly switched on and a relatively good communicator. However, I don't know what she stands for, definitely feels like a blank sheet of paper onto which the great and powerful in the party are projecting their own image of what they want the next leader to be.
The reason I'm in favour of Kemi is because we have got one chance to beat Starmer in 2024 and it's going to need someone who actually stands for something and gives people something to vote in favour of to actually win. Penny doesn't do that, she's going to present the voters with that blank sheet of paper and try to win on a battle personalities, but at the same time as being in recession, being the Tory party which is now a big net drag after Boris and against Starmer who has got enough name recognition at this point to make a go of it and come out on top.
Penny, to me, seems like the "manager decline" choice for that Tories, admitting that we've got no policies or nothing positive to deliver to the nation. Kemi comes in with ideas that can turn into serious policies and give voters something vote in favour of.
It's definitely a riskier strategy but ultimately the Tory party needs to stand for something other than pretending to be second coming of Mrs Thatcher as Liz and Penny are attempting to project.
I don't know what Kemi's personality is like at all or if she has any real charisma but for me the fact that she's got ideas is winning. None of the other candidates seem to know what they want to do with the job other than occupy No. 10 for just under two years before being booted out by a Labour/SNP/LD coalition. It will be Boris but a bit more competent, or at least fewer scandals. The MPs must get Kemi onto the members ballot so she can get out there on the national stage and pitch her policy based vision against the bland managed declinism coming from whoever the other candidate is.
I think if she gets that chance it will be Dave vs Davis again, the favourite will find themselves pitching a nothing platform against a positive vision of the nation backed by ideas that make sense to ordinary people and she'll take the win.
The Tories can win the next election. Or be crushed. We're moving forward as a society - thanks to Covid - yet most of the contenders and the selectorate seem obsessed by the past.
So its a choice. Pick someone godawful and negative like Truss or Braverman (stop laughing at the back). Pick someone shiny and bereft of ideas who ultimately will pivot to knee-jerk like Mordaunt and (probably) Sunak will. Or go for change.
Tugendhat overtly set his stall out over there. Its just that he is sleep-inducingly dull. When compared to Badenoch who represents a radically different vision for the party and all of the possibilities for the country that opens up.
Personally I'd go with Sunak. He will be competent and run a sensational PR machine to sell the positives. And as I expect he will do what he can to balance the economic mess with the need to invest I expect there would be positives to spin.
But the exciting prospect is Kemi. I think Labour wouldn't have the first clue how to combat her.
I've seen two focus groups reported on the leadership race and, in both, the participants said something along the lines of "why are they talking about this culture war stuff, what are they going to do about the cost of living?" That is how Labour responds to Kemi unless she comes up with some actual policies on the issues that the electorate care about.
I don't think Kemi is engaged on culture war - she needs to say it to get on board, but will she really bother with it?
My point about them not knowing what to do with her is that her ascendency represents all of Labour's fail points in a single person. How can this black female migrant be talking about a vision for the future which embodies change when she is a hated Tory racist?
“I’d like to congratulate the Prime Minister on a singular achievement. That she’s PM would be remarkable to anyone even 20 years ago. It is a singular moment I warmly welcome. Now, can she please explain how we’re all going to avoid freezing, starving, going broke or all three this winter?”
It’s not especially hard.
Not 20 years ago - even 10 years ago it would have been hard to believe.
But ignoring that she may have ideas but do their resonate with voters who aren't Tory party members and what can she deliver in 2 years that gives her votes in 2024.
All I can see is a junior developer who has picked up a spec and run with it before sanity checking whether the suggested solution matches the actual real world problem.
Trussticles has left it too late - why was she so slow out of the blocks?
Cos she was en route to Indonesia when it kicked off? It's difficult to remember it was a week and less than 3 hours ago that Boris said he was going.
Suggests that she, unlike say Rishi, didn’t have a slick, oven ready leadership campaign ready to kick off at a moment’s notice. Sort of to Truss’s credit I suppose.
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
If this verifies, and it is getting closer, this will dominate the news for days. Incredible stuff
These are lethal temperatures and many will die
I think this is an outlier prediction that’s been cherry picked for headlines. All the prediction services I can find are going for 36 or 37 °C . Which is quite bad enough...
Indeed. GFS 18z throwing out fantasy charts. It’s going to be disgustingly hot. But not that hot. As Leon knows.
No I don’t. These predictions are now in the more-reliable time frame. Less than 7 days
Is it likely? No. It is possible? Unfortunately yes
Is it likely? No. It is possible? No.
So @Benpointer knows more than the most sophisticated weather models like GFS, ECM etc (which all form the basis of met office forecasts)
Dear oh dear, if they form the basis of Met Office forecasts why are the Met Office forcecasting a UK maximum of 38°C?
Indeed. Because single model runs / permutations are NOT forecasts. They are raw output from a computer of which there will be dozens more before Tuesday!
As Leon knows.
Hundreds more every six hours, but it's not normal to have forecasts of 40+C within the ensemble envelope at these lead times.
Who was claiming it was normal? Nobody. The weather is going to be unbearably, horribly hot. Nobody sane will deny that.
What triggered this threadette was the typically hysterical Leon cherrypicking the worst chart possible and presenting it as a 'forecast' when it is no such thing.
Sure, and they then overreacted by saying that such a temperature was impossible. I'm just trying to get a bit of balance, which unfortunately due involve stating the obvious.
@Cookie thanks to your reply yesterday re my woke question. Apologies for not acknowledging at the time. Interesting you were the only reply and you aren't typical of someone who is likely to bang on about this topic. I also noted you posted about your experience of your daughter's before so your experience is particularly interesting. My children are now several years out of school so I might be out of touch but we had no experience of this. Would love to hear from other parents. What does the school say when challenged?
To be clear, this is based on my shock from visiting schools we're considering for our daughter's senior school - she's still only 10. But it's universal: private and state, selective and non-selective. Which is odd, because the primary schools my daughters have been to are not perceptibly more woke than the state primary school I attended 30 years ago. I think it would be quite hard to challenge the school on this. It's easy to criticise the excesses of woke anonymously on an internet forum; much more risky in real life to a school which your children have to attend. You hear stories of quite hostile pushback to that sort of thing, and the last thing a parent wants to do is make life more difficult for their children.
Society can be divided into two types of people
Those who do not believe Woke is a problem = those who have not yet encountered it in work or life
Those who realise Woke is a problem = those who have now encountered it. Parents of kids age 10-15 are a classic case, because they can suddenly see it running rampant in schools
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work or life then like you say? Your statement doesn't make sense therefore does it? Maybe we have encountered it and in most cases find it irritating but irrelevant. As I said yesterday we just think pillocks and move on.
Note I asked you a question about this yesterday and you didn't reply. Only @cookie did and I find his reply disturbing. You keep banging on about it but don't say how it affects your life.
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work
I genuinely don't know what to make of this comment. Every single moderately large company has a social media team who pump out a near continuous stream of vacuous virtue-signalling nonsense on equality, diversity, inclusion etc for every minority group under the sun. It's particularly prevalent in June, when they all change their corporate logos to include rainbows for Pride month. LinkedIn becomes even more unreadable than usual because of the weight of posts on the subject. I absolutely do not understand how anyone could be in the workforce and not have noticed this, somewhere.
If that is the sum total of the WOKE DANGER then who cares? It is a largely pointless exercise in virtue signalling. So a company decides to participate in Pride - where is the threat?
Lets be entirely honest about this - these companies virtue signal a lot of things. Its not that they are asleep for most of the year and only do Pride. So "EUGH THEY'VE CHANGED THEIR LOGO STOP IT" is only attacking the LGBT cause because we don't here anything in protest when they support women or BAME or the environment etc.
Repression of us sexual deviants is still popular apparently. Which is precisely why we need Pride and companies showing their support for it. You guys create the WOKE THREAT you complain of.
No, that's just the tip of the iceberg. My point was specifically that I can't understand how anyone hasn't noticed it, because of the lengths companies go to to make it as visible as possible - the reason being that they don't actually care about any of it, they just really don't want to be on the end of a Twitter dogpile because they aren't participating.
To go back a few comments I have kids aged 10 and 14. In two separate schools. And I can't say I have noticed that Woke is "running rampant" in their schools.
For me - as a Bisexual man who only had the confidence to come out aged 40 - I don't look at companies changing their logos for a rainbow one as anything at all. Pride (happily) has become a mainstream part of our society. As has the push for female equality in pay and conditions, teaching kids about respecting each other and all of the other horrors that make some people shriek in fear.
I do understand. Societal change always provokes a minority who don't like it. Woke is just the latest threat, as the permissive society or women having the vote or the abolition of slavery was. You dislike the modernisation of the way people treat people with more humanity so it gets labelled - woke.
And just as Alf Garnett sat in London there ranting about all the things he didn't agree with changing, so Leon sits somewhere abroad doing the same. Different times, different issues to be unhappy about, same psychology.
Its fine. The woke-worriers will either get on board or they won't. Societal change is happening whether they do or don't.
We're back to the Woke Definition Paradox: wokeism is defined by its detractors as unhealthy obsession with social issues (eg playing identity politics) - it's axiomatic that it is therefore Bad, even if you completely support all the societal changes that . If you define it - as many do - as just being the underlying pace of societal change, then of course you won't see what the fuss is about.
I have no problem at all with people saying "we're spending too much time and money focused on this shit". Because we are. I've sat in company diversity training courses which tick the required boxes but do nothing about diversity. So yes, down with that sort of thing!
But in reality the anti-woke objectors don't want to stop diversity training, they want to stop the march of diversity. They wouldn't be happy if big corporates stopped twatting about changing their logo to rainbow colours to support pride for their own box tick purposes, they just want to stop Pride.
I get it - change can be scary. But you can only shape it, you can't stop it.
Diversity and Inclusion as it is currently being enforced is not about creating a more open and welcoming environment for all.
It is about counting characteristics and seeking to label everyone according to a checklist and to treat them accordingly.
It has nothing to do with celebrating the diversity of each individual and what they can bring. And it is all about creating uniformity and enforced group think
The Pride movement is fracturing because of this. I have sat in Pride meetings where the only thing in the D&I sphere the leadership is worried about is counting the number of black and brown faces in the room.
It is deeply frustrating to see a movement that still matters get torn apart from within by thinking which has stopped celebrating diversity and just wants uniformity.
Those are very broad claims. I know many people working in Diversity and Inclusion who are 100% focused on creating a more open and welcoming environment for all. Yes, there are others who are too concerned with labelling and checklists. Any enterprise will contain those with better and worse approaches.
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
A good range of local by-elections today. Con defences in Breckland and Warwickshire, Lab defences in Coventry, Hyndburn, North Tyneside, Wandsworth, and Wirral, and a LD defence in South Somerset. To complete the picture there should have been a contest in Rutland but the Lib Dem was returned unopposed ( and it was a gain from Con).
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
There isn't one. The issue kitty is empty. Should women have votes: an issue. Can women have dicks? who gives a fuck, except in edge but real cases where they use them to rape women without dicks? Not an issue. See the difference?
Yep. But who is talking endlessly about women with willies? It isn't the woke, its the anti-woke. It is quite literally a fringe issue that only exists as this Moral Panic amongst some.
Not the case.
Do you want to tell the actual birth women who have actually been raped on single sex wards that they are fringe issues and symptoms of moral panic? And do you want to claim that the rapes occurred because of people who claim that there are women with penises, or people who deny this (or say OK there might be, but we need special rules about what wards they get put on)?
I'm not entirely convinced by Penny, on the one hand she's clearly switched on and a relatively good communicator. However, I don't know what she stands for, definitely feels like a blank sheet of paper onto which the great and powerful in the party are projecting their own image of what they want the next leader to be.
The reason I'm in favour of Kemi is because we have got one chance to beat Starmer in 2024 and it's going to need someone who actually stands for something and gives people something to vote in favour of to actually win. Penny doesn't do that, she's going to present the voters with that blank sheet of paper and try to win on a battle personalities, but at the same time as being in recession, being the Tory party which is now a big net drag after Boris and against Starmer who has got enough name recognition at this point to make a go of it and come out on top.
Penny, to me, seems like the "manager decline" choice for that Tories, admitting that we've got no policies or nothing positive to deliver to the nation. Kemi comes in with ideas that can turn into serious policies and give voters something vote in favour of.
It's definitely a riskier strategy but ultimately the Tory party needs to stand for something other than pretending to be second coming of Mrs Thatcher as Liz and Penny are attempting to project.
I don't know what Kemi's personality is like at all or if she has any real charisma but for me the fact that she's got ideas is winning. None of the other candidates seem to know what they want to do with the job other than occupy No. 10 for just under two years before being booted out by a Labour/SNP/LD coalition. It will be Boris but a bit more competent, or at least fewer scandals. The MPs must get Kemi onto the members ballot so she can get out there on the national stage and pitch her policy based vision against the bland managed declinism coming from whoever the other candidate is.
I think if she gets that chance it will be Dave vs Davis again, the favourite will find themselves pitching a nothing platform against a positive vision of the nation backed by ideas that make sense to ordinary people and she'll take the win.
The Tories can win the next election. Or be crushed. We're moving forward as a society - thanks to Covid - yet most of the contenders and the selectorate seem obsessed by the past.
So its a choice. Pick someone godawful and negative like Truss or Braverman (stop laughing at the back). Pick someone shiny and bereft of ideas who ultimately will pivot to knee-jerk like Mordaunt and (probably) Sunak will. Or go for change.
Tugendhat overtly set his stall out over there. Its just that he is sleep-inducingly dull. When compared to Badenoch who represents a radically different vision for the party and all of the possibilities for the country that opens up.
Personally I'd go with Sunak. He will be competent and run a sensational PR machine to sell the positives. And as I expect he will do what he can to balance the economic mess with the need to invest I expect there would be positives to spin.
But the exciting prospect is Kemi. I think Labour wouldn't have the first clue how to combat her.
I've seen two focus groups reported on the leadership race and, in both, the participants said something along the lines of "why are they talking about this culture war stuff, what are they going to do about the cost of living?" That is how Labour responds to Kemi unless she comes up with some actual policies on the issues that the electorate care about.
I don't think Kemi is engaged on culture war - she needs to say it to get on board, but will she really bother with it?
My point about them not knowing what to do with her is that her ascendency represents all of Labour's fail points in a single person. How can this black female migrant be talking about a vision for the future which embodies change when she is a hated Tory racist?
“I’d like to congratulate the Prime Minister on a singular achievement. That she’s PM would be remarkable to anyone even 20 years ago. It is a singular moment I warmly welcome. Now, can she please explain how we’re all going to avoid freezing, starving, going broke or all three this winter?”
It’s not especially hard.
Not 20 years ago - even 10 years ago it would have been hard to believe.
But ignoring that she may have ideas but do their resonate with voters who aren't Tory party members and what can she deliver in 2 years that gives her votes in 2024.
All I can see is a junior developer who has picked up a spec and run with it before sanity checking whether the suggested solution matches the actual real world problem.
Was that a reference to her Software Engineering background or a professional reference?
I approve either way, having seen some… interesting electronics specs in my time.
Trussticles has left it too late - why was she so slow out of the blocks?
Cos she was en route to Indonesia when it kicked off? It's difficult to remember it was a week and less than 3 hours ago that Boris said he was going.
Suggests that she, unlike say Rishi, didn’t have a slick, oven ready leadership campaign ready to kick off at a moment’s notice. Sort of to Truss’s credit I suppose.
It was obvious that there was going to be a leadership election some time in the next 12 months. So there was plenty of time to at least start planning things.
I would make the lack of planning a campaign a large negative not a credit..
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
@Cookie thanks to your reply yesterday re my woke question. Apologies for not acknowledging at the time. Interesting you were the only reply and you aren't typical of someone who is likely to bang on about this topic. I also noted you posted about your experience of your daughter's before so your experience is particularly interesting. My children are now several years out of school so I might be out of touch but we had no experience of this. Would love to hear from other parents. What does the school say when challenged?
To be clear, this is based on my shock from visiting schools we're considering for our daughter's senior school - she's still only 10. But it's universal: private and state, selective and non-selective. Which is odd, because the primary schools my daughters have been to are not perceptibly more woke than the state primary school I attended 30 years ago. I think it would be quite hard to challenge the school on this. It's easy to criticise the excesses of woke anonymously on an internet forum; much more risky in real life to a school which your children have to attend. You hear stories of quite hostile pushback to that sort of thing, and the last thing a parent wants to do is make life more difficult for their children.
Society can be divided into two types of people
Those who do not believe Woke is a problem = those who have not yet encountered it in work or life
Those who realise Woke is a problem = those who have now encountered it. Parents of kids age 10-15 are a classic case, because they can suddenly see it running rampant in schools
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work or life then like you say? Your statement doesn't make sense therefore does it? Maybe we have encountered it and in most cases find it irritating but irrelevant. As I said yesterday we just think pillocks and move on.
Note I asked you a question about this yesterday and you didn't reply. Only @cookie did and I find his reply disturbing. You keep banging on about it but don't say how it affects your life.
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work
I genuinely don't know what to make of this comment. Every single moderately large company has a social media team who pump out a near continuous stream of vacuous virtue-signalling nonsense on equality, diversity, inclusion etc for every minority group under the sun. It's particularly prevalent in June, when they all change their corporate logos to include rainbows for Pride month. LinkedIn becomes even more unreadable than usual because of the weight of posts on the subject. I absolutely do not understand how anyone could be in the workforce and not have noticed this, somewhere.
If that is the sum total of the WOKE DANGER then who cares? It is a largely pointless exercise in virtue signalling. So a company decides to participate in Pride - where is the threat?
Lets be entirely honest about this - these companies virtue signal a lot of things. Its not that they are asleep for most of the year and only do Pride. So "EUGH THEY'VE CHANGED THEIR LOGO STOP IT" is only attacking the LGBT cause because we don't here anything in protest when they support women or BAME or the environment etc.
Repression of us sexual deviants is still popular apparently. Which is precisely why we need Pride and companies showing their support for it. You guys create the WOKE THREAT you complain of.
No, that's just the tip of the iceberg. My point was specifically that I can't understand how anyone hasn't noticed it, because of the lengths companies go to to make it as visible as possible - the reason being that they don't actually care about any of it, they just really don't want to be on the end of a Twitter dogpile because they aren't participating.
To go back a few comments I have kids aged 10 and 14. In two separate schools. And I can't say I have noticed that Woke is "running rampant" in their schools.
For me - as a Bisexual man who only had the confidence to come out aged 40 - I don't look at companies changing their logos for a rainbow one as anything at all. Pride (happily) has become a mainstream part of our society. As has the push for female equality in pay and conditions, teaching kids about respecting each other and all of the other horrors that make some people shriek in fear.
I do understand. Societal change always provokes a minority who don't like it. Woke is just the latest threat, as the permissive society or women having the vote or the abolition of slavery was. You dislike the modernisation of the way people treat people with more humanity so it gets labelled - woke.
And just as Alf Garnett sat in London there ranting about all the things he didn't agree with changing, so Leon sits somewhere abroad doing the same. Different times, different issues to be unhappy about, same psychology.
Its fine. The woke-worriers will either get on board or they won't. Societal change is happening whether they do or don't.
We're back to the Woke Definition Paradox: wokeism is defined by its detractors as unhealthy obsession with social issues (eg playing identity politics) - it's axiomatic that it is therefore Bad, even if you completely support all the societal changes that . If you define it - as many do - as just being the underlying pace of societal change, then of course you won't see what the fuss is about.
I have no problem at all with people saying "we're spending too much time and money focused on this shit". Because we are. I've sat in company diversity training courses which tick the required boxes but do nothing about diversity. So yes, down with that sort of thing!
But in reality the anti-woke objectors don't want to stop diversity training, they want to stop the march of diversity. They wouldn't be happy if big corporates stopped twatting about changing their logo to rainbow colours to support pride for their own box tick purposes, they just want to stop Pride.
I get it - change can be scary. But you can only shape it, you can't stop it.
Diversity and Inclusion as it is currently being enforced is not about creating a more open and welcoming environment for all.
It is about counting characteristics and seeking to label everyone according to a checklist and to treat them accordingly.
It has nothing to do with celebrating the diversity of each individual and what they can bring. And it is all about creating uniformity and enforced group think
The Pride movement is fracturing because of this. I have sat in Pride meetings where the only thing in the D&I sphere the leadership is worried about is counting the number of black and brown faces in the room.
It is deeply frustrating to see a movement that still matters get torn apart from within by thinking which has stopped celebrating diversity and just wants uniformity.
Exactly. Pronoun badges were handed out at my clients Pride event last week and they had massive rainbow/trans flags on all the tables.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
What we are dealing with these days is at best a refusal to engage in rational argument and at worst a demand that anything you feel should be respected and protected and that you don't even want to hear about things outside of your echo chamber.
This is very different to rock and roll or the suffrage movement.
The concepts of no platforming, 'safe spaces', online bubbles have made debate impossible meaning that views are not only going unchallenged but met with an absolute refusal to engage with anything with which you disagree.
Those are very unwelcome additions to our society alongside the denial of evidence and facts.
We can set aside the nutters at either end of the spectrum who refuse to engage in rational argument. As we can the nutters on any issue you care to choose - they always exist.
On a couple of the points you mention - safe spaces is an interesting one. 25 years ago at Sheffield University there was a massive row on this subject, specifically over the Union's "Women's Safety Bus". A group of students objected to the union spending money on transporting drunk female students home. "Where's my free ride home" etc. That there had been a spate of attacks on female students didn't seem to bother them - the bus was aptly named.
As for online bubbles making debate impossible, that is a function of online. The nutters at either end of the spectrum we set aside? They're all online, they're mad as hell and the SHOUT AND SHOUT like they are the majority view. Short of abolishing social media, best we can do is ignore them and get on with our lives.
That's not what "safe spaces" mean, in woke terms. It's emotional rather than physical safety - it means a place where people can be assured of not hearing anything that might upset them.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
It seems to me that the real challenge is being missed. Most PBers are in fact fairly old fashioned liberals in the sense of believing in freedom as widely as possible, with the major proviso being that, so to speak, your freedom to punch ends where my nose begins. I have no freedom to do harm or interfere with the freedom of others.
Some old fashioned liberals (I am one) fear that what is occurring is a power play. Artificial extensions are rapidly being built to the concept of what constitutes 'harm'. This explains the bogus 'snowflake' phenomenon, whereby certain expressions of free speech come under threat, not because it will hurt my nose but because I can't cope with the trauma of having to be in the same room/country/planet as that thought.
This is also the danger of 'protected characteristics'. This is mostly about who gets to order whom around.
And yet the laws taking away rights of free speech and protest are coming from the most fervent anti-woke right.
Trussticles has left it too late - why was she so slow out of the blocks?
Cos she was en route to Indonesia when it kicked off? It's difficult to remember it was a week and less than 3 hours ago that Boris said he was going.
Suggests that she, unlike say Rishi, didn’t have a slick, oven ready leadership campaign ready to kick off at a moment’s notice. Sort of to Truss’s credit I suppose.
Yeah. Of all the six she's the one I get the impression actually may lack some self belief. She's poor because deep down I reckon she knows she isn't up to it.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
They are slowing considerably. A 30-40% week-on-week increase has dropped through the 20%s to 5% as of the latest two days of data.
It's looking very much as though we've peaked as of the last week in infections and can expect hospitalisations to fall going forwards (put it this way - I'll be very disappointed if we don't see lower admissions compared to the previous weekday by the end of the week).
This isn't to say it's all okay. Not by a long shot - more and more areas have declared ambulance emergencies. But we're going to have to find a way of living with that. It's one reason I'm very interested to hear what the candidates have to say about the health system versus endemic covid (so far, I'm hearing crickets).
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
It seems to me that the real challenge is being missed. Most PBers are in fact fairly old fashioned liberals in the sense of believing in freedom as widely as possible, with the major proviso being that, so to speak, your freedom to punch ends where my nose begins. I have no freedom to do harm or interfere with the freedom of others.
Some old fashioned liberals (I am one) fear that what is occurring is a power play. Artificial extensions are rapidly being built to the concept of what constitutes 'harm'. This explains the bogus 'snowflake' phenomenon, whereby certain expressions of free speech come under threat, not because it will hurt my nose but because I can't cope with the trauma of having to be in the same room/country/planet as that thought.
This is also the danger of 'protected characteristics'. This is mostly about who gets to order whom around.
In the last few days, the only example of free speech being threatened was a demand that a company not run an advert talking about stopping sexist hate.
I'm not entirely convinced by Penny, on the one hand she's clearly switched on and a relatively good communicator. However, I don't know what she stands for, definitely feels like a blank sheet of paper onto which the great and powerful in the party are projecting their own image of what they want the next leader to be.
The reason I'm in favour of Kemi is because we have got one chance to beat Starmer in 2024 and it's going to need someone who actually stands for something and gives people something to vote in favour of to actually win. Penny doesn't do that, she's going to present the voters with that blank sheet of paper and try to win on a battle personalities, but at the same time as being in recession, being the Tory party which is now a big net drag after Boris and against Starmer who has got enough name recognition at this point to make a go of it and come out on top.
Penny, to me, seems like the "manager decline" choice for that Tories, admitting that we've got no policies or nothing positive to deliver to the nation. Kemi comes in with ideas that can turn into serious policies and give voters something vote in favour of.
It's definitely a riskier strategy but ultimately the Tory party needs to stand for something other than pretending to be second coming of Mrs Thatcher as Liz and Penny are attempting to project.
I don't know what Kemi's personality is like at all or if she has any real charisma but for me the fact that she's got ideas is winning. None of the other candidates seem to know what they want to do with the job other than occupy No. 10 for just under two years before being booted out by a Labour/SNP/LD coalition. It will be Boris but a bit more competent, or at least fewer scandals. The MPs must get Kemi onto the members ballot so she can get out there on the national stage and pitch her policy based vision against the bland managed declinism coming from whoever the other candidate is.
I think if she gets that chance it will be Dave vs Davis again, the favourite will find themselves pitching a nothing platform against a positive vision of the nation backed by ideas that make sense to ordinary people and she'll take the win.
The Tories can win the next election. Or be crushed. We're moving forward as a society - thanks to Covid - yet most of the contenders and the selectorate seem obsessed by the past.
So its a choice. Pick someone godawful and negative like Truss or Braverman (stop laughing at the back). Pick someone shiny and bereft of ideas who ultimately will pivot to knee-jerk like Mordaunt and (probably) Sunak will. Or go for change.
Tugendhat overtly set his stall out over there. Its just that he is sleep-inducingly dull. When compared to Badenoch who represents a radically different vision for the party and all of the possibilities for the country that opens up.
Personally I'd go with Sunak. He will be competent and run a sensational PR machine to sell the positives. And as I expect he will do what he can to balance the economic mess with the need to invest I expect there would be positives to spin.
But the exciting prospect is Kemi. I think Labour wouldn't have the first clue how to combat her.
I've seen two focus groups reported on the leadership race and, in both, the participants said something along the lines of "why are they talking about this culture war stuff, what are they going to do about the cost of living?" That is how Labour responds to Kemi unless she comes up with some actual policies on the issues that the electorate care about.
I don't think Kemi is engaged on culture war - she needs to say it to get on board, but will she really bother with it?
My point about them not knowing what to do with her is that her ascendency represents all of Labour's fail points in a single person. How can this black female migrant be talking about a vision for the future which embodies change when she is a hated Tory racist?
“I’d like to congratulate the Prime Minister on a singular achievement. That she’s PM would be remarkable to anyone even 20 years ago. It is a singular moment I warmly welcome. Now, can she please explain how we’re all going to avoid freezing, starving, going broke or all three this winter?”
It’s not especially hard.
Not 20 years ago - even 10 years ago it would have been hard to believe.
But ignoring that she may have ideas but do their resonate with voters who aren't Tory party members and what can she deliver in 2 years that gives her votes in 2024.
All I can see is a junior developer who has picked up a spec and run with it before sanity checking whether the suggested solution matches the actual real world problem.
Was that a reference to her Software Engineering background or a professional reference?
I approve either way, having seen some… interesting electronics specs in my time.
Reference to her Software Engineering background - shall we just say her career trajectory is similar to some other people I have worked with (where their career is similar due to a) their ability to tick urgent company diversity requirements, b) a general desire to remove (anywhere else) a not particularly great worker)
Now that might be a dis-service and she was rapidly promoted based on talent but....
Why does she need all these exemptions? What criminality is she hiding? We deserve to know.
Personalised exemptions for the Queen in her private capacity have been written into more than 160 laws since 1967, granting her sweeping immunity from swathes of British law – ranging from animal welfare to workers’ rights. Dozens extend further immunity to her private property portfolio, granting her unique protections as the owner of large landed estates.
More than 30 different laws stipulate that police are barred from entering the private Balmoral and Sandringham estates without the Queen’s permission to investigate suspected crimes, including wildlife offences and environmental pollution – a legal immunity accorded to no other private landowner in the country.
Police are also required to obtain her personal agreement before they can investigate suspected offences at her privately owned salmon and trout fishing business on the River Dee at Balmoral, where anglers are charged up to £630 a day to fish.
Wading into the woke debate (probably somewhat unwisely).
As a nation we have become much more socially liberal in the past 20 years, the pace of change has been breathtaking as it has been in many societies in Western Europe. I support the progress that has been made.
We have gotten to where we are through measured rational debate and respect for individuals.
The concern I have now is that there is a somewhat troubling tendency to shut down debate. You do not drive progress (or certainly not for very long) by stifling debate. You engage and you bring people with you. At the moment I fear there is a tendency that in order to protect, sustain and advance social progress and liberalism in this country we have to deplatform, shame, ‘cancel’, ruin or embarrass people who hold differing points of view. This is helping contribute to the backlash that sustains the culture war.
Just my two cents. I’m now going to run to my bunker and hide.
I wonder whether it's the influence of social media.
Change has always started with groups pushing at the boundaries, and over time, some of those boundaries become mainstream thinking, while others remain on the fringe, or are rejected. The friction would be partly contained, and the stronger ideas would trickle into the mainstream gradually.
With social media speeding up the way opinions are shared and amplifying the voices of those who are shouting loudest, these arguments are entering the mainstream a little too quickly, and often at the stage where they're still contentious.
Positive change may happen more quickly, which is a good thing (I don't think anyone can look back and say that the change in attitudes to homosexuality over the last few decades has been anything but positive, and would have been better if it had happened more quickly), but there's also going to be a hell of a lot more anger as issues are worked out in a much more public space.
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
A good range of local by-elections today. Con defences in Breckland and Warwickshire, Lab defences in Coventry, Hyndburn, North Tyneside, Wandsworth, and Wirral, and a LD defence in South Somerset. To complete the picture there should have been a contest in Rutland but the Lib Dem was returned unopposed ( and it was a gain from Con).
The Conservatives couldn't find a candidate for a seat they hold on a Council they control?
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
A good range of local by-elections today. Con defences in Breckland and Warwickshire, Lab defences in Coventry, Hyndburn, North Tyneside, Wandsworth, and Wirral, and a LD defence in South Somerset. To complete the picture there should have been a contest in Rutland but the Lib Dem was returned unopposed ( and it was a gain from Con).
Binley is the sort of seat the Conservatives could have won if Boris hadn't fucked things up so badly but it'll be a comfortable Labour hold and will stay that way for a while.
It’s funny how we were happy to stick rainbows on everything and clap for carers. Didn’t hear any complaints about that from the anti woke brigade
I thought clapping for carers was fucking stupid. I refused.
I thought so too.
I am happy to wear a Ukrainian flag badge though because a Ukrainian friend of mine tells me that he and people in his country really appreciate it. They are and isolated and embattled nation terrified that the free world will lose interest and wearing a Ukrainian flag shows that one person at least does not do so or has not done so yet anyway.
The Ukranians really do notice this, whether it’s flags at sporting and cultural events, or pin badges on politicians in Parliament. It lets them know that we haven’t forgotten about them.
@Cookie thanks to your reply yesterday re my woke question. Apologies for not acknowledging at the time. Interesting you were the only reply and you aren't typical of someone who is likely to bang on about this topic. I also noted you posted about your experience of your daughter's before so your experience is particularly interesting. My children are now several years out of school so I might be out of touch but we had no experience of this. Would love to hear from other parents. What does the school say when challenged?
To be clear, this is based on my shock from visiting schools we're considering for our daughter's senior school - she's still only 10. But it's universal: private and state, selective and non-selective. Which is odd, because the primary schools my daughters have been to are not perceptibly more woke than the state primary school I attended 30 years ago. I think it would be quite hard to challenge the school on this. It's easy to criticise the excesses of woke anonymously on an internet forum; much more risky in real life to a school which your children have to attend. You hear stories of quite hostile pushback to that sort of thing, and the last thing a parent wants to do is make life more difficult for their children.
Society can be divided into two types of people
Those who do not believe Woke is a problem = those who have not yet encountered it in work or life
Those who realise Woke is a problem = those who have now encountered it. Parents of kids age 10-15 are a classic case, because they can suddenly see it running rampant in schools
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work or life then like you say? Your statement doesn't make sense therefore does it? Maybe we have encountered it and in most cases find it irritating but irrelevant. As I said yesterday we just think pillocks and move on.
Note I asked you a question about this yesterday and you didn't reply. Only @cookie did and I find his reply disturbing. You keep banging on about it but don't say how it affects your life.
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work
I genuinely don't know what to make of this comment. Every single moderately large company has a social media team who pump out a near continuous stream of vacuous virtue-signalling nonsense on equality, diversity, inclusion etc for every minority group under the sun. It's particularly prevalent in June, when they all change their corporate logos to include rainbows for Pride month. LinkedIn becomes even more unreadable than usual because of the weight of posts on the subject. I absolutely do not understand how anyone could be in the workforce and not have noticed this, somewhere.
If that is the sum total of the WOKE DANGER then who cares? It is a largely pointless exercise in virtue signalling. So a company decides to participate in Pride - where is the threat?
Lets be entirely honest about this - these companies virtue signal a lot of things. Its not that they are asleep for most of the year and only do Pride. So "EUGH THEY'VE CHANGED THEIR LOGO STOP IT" is only attacking the LGBT cause because we don't here anything in protest when they support women or BAME or the environment etc.
Repression of us sexual deviants is still popular apparently. Which is precisely why we need Pride and companies showing their support for it. You guys create the WOKE THREAT you complain of.
No, that's just the tip of the iceberg. My point was specifically that I can't understand how anyone hasn't noticed it, because of the lengths companies go to to make it as visible as possible - the reason being that they don't actually care about any of it, they just really don't want to be on the end of a Twitter dogpile because they aren't participating.
To go back a few comments I have kids aged 10 and 14. In two separate schools. And I can't say I have noticed that Woke is "running rampant" in their schools.
For me - as a Bisexual man who only had the confidence to come out aged 40 - I don't look at companies changing their logos for a rainbow one as anything at all. Pride (happily) has become a mainstream part of our society. As has the push for female equality in pay and conditions, teaching kids about respecting each other and all of the other horrors that make some people shriek in fear.
I do understand. Societal change always provokes a minority who don't like it. Woke is just the latest threat, as the permissive society or women having the vote or the abolition of slavery was. You dislike the modernisation of the way people treat people with more humanity so it gets labelled - woke.
And just as Alf Garnett sat in London there ranting about all the things he didn't agree with changing, so Leon sits somewhere abroad doing the same. Different times, different issues to be unhappy about, same psychology.
Its fine. The woke-worriers will either get on board or they won't. Societal change is happening whether they do or don't.
We're back to the Woke Definition Paradox: wokeism is defined by its detractors as unhealthy obsession with social issues (eg playing identity politics) - it's axiomatic that it is therefore Bad, even if you completely support all the societal changes that . If you define it - as many do - as just being the underlying pace of societal change, then of course you won't see what the fuss is about.
I have no problem at all with people saying "we're spending too much time and money focused on this shit". Because we are. I've sat in company diversity training courses which tick the required boxes but do nothing about diversity. So yes, down with that sort of thing!
But in reality the anti-woke objectors don't want to stop diversity training, they want to stop the march of diversity. They wouldn't be happy if big corporates stopped twatting about changing their logo to rainbow colours to support pride for their own box tick purposes, they just want to stop Pride.
I get it - change can be scary. But you can only shape it, you can't stop it.
Diversity and Inclusion as it is currently being enforced is not about creating a more open and welcoming environment for all.
It is about counting characteristics and seeking to label everyone according to a checklist and to treat them accordingly.
It has nothing to do with celebrating the diversity of each individual and what they can bring. And it is all about creating uniformity and enforced group think
The Pride movement is fracturing because of this. I have sat in Pride meetings where the only thing in the D&I sphere the leadership is worried about is counting the number of black and brown faces in the room.
It is deeply frustrating to see a movement that still matters get torn apart from within by thinking which has stopped celebrating diversity and just wants uniformity.
Sure - that goes on. Its organisations knowing how shit their behaviours and attitudes have been trying to catch up with the modernising society. So they tick boxes. Its hardly like your Pride example is new - as a bisexual I was not made to feel remotely welcome by LGBsoc at uni. What, you like women as well? Bloody tourist. So I put it back into a lockbox and supressed it for 20 years.
But what is your objection? That companies are making a bit of a mess of changing their attitudes? Or that they are changing their attitudes at all? We need to be promoting diversity because in far too many places its mysteriously always middle-class white men who make progress. Is that because white men are the best candidates for these jobs? Or because a narrow selectorate hire people who look and talk like themselves?
My own industry has had massive problems with this. "What happened to hiring dolly birds" I was asked in my first sales job when I was on a trade show stand. A pronounced lack of female senior managers, or anyone at all in sales, yet category management is full of women many of whom tried and failed to get hired to do sales.
I've always managed to apply the "I don't care" rule to my hiring. Yes I have absolutely hired white men when they have been the best candidate. But I hired a lot of women where their brilliance was clear but they would get ignored. Cue digs that I saw myself as Hugh Heffner (surrounding myself with brilliant women).
So maybe what people are so wound up about is the reverse of what they think it is. Easy for middle class white men to describe an environment of predominantly middle class white men as an "open and welcoming environment". Less so if you are effectively excluded from that because of class, gender, race etc etc etc
I'm not entirely convinced by Penny, on the one hand she's clearly switched on and a relatively good communicator. However, I don't know what she stands for, definitely feels like a blank sheet of paper onto which the great and powerful in the party are projecting their own image of what they want the next leader to be.
The reason I'm in favour of Kemi is because we have got one chance to beat Starmer in 2024 and it's going to need someone who actually stands for something and gives people something to vote in favour of to actually win. Penny doesn't do that, she's going to present the voters with that blank sheet of paper and try to win on a battle personalities, but at the same time as being in recession, being the Tory party which is now a big net drag after Boris and against Starmer who has got enough name recognition at this point to make a go of it and come out on top.
Penny, to me, seems like the "manager decline" choice for that Tories, admitting that we've got no policies or nothing positive to deliver to the nation. Kemi comes in with ideas that can turn into serious policies and give voters something vote in favour of.
It's definitely a riskier strategy but ultimately the Tory party needs to stand for something other than pretending to be second coming of Mrs Thatcher as Liz and Penny are attempting to project.
I don't know what Kemi's personality is like at all or if she has any real charisma but for me the fact that she's got ideas is winning. None of the other candidates seem to know what they want to do with the job other than occupy No. 10 for just under two years before being booted out by a Labour/SNP/LD coalition. It will be Boris but a bit more competent, or at least fewer scandals. The MPs must get Kemi onto the members ballot so she can get out there on the national stage and pitch her policy based vision against the bland managed declinism coming from whoever the other candidate is.
I think if she gets that chance it will be Dave vs Davis again, the favourite will find themselves pitching a nothing platform against a positive vision of the nation backed by ideas that make sense to ordinary people and she'll take the win.
The Tories can win the next election. Or be crushed. We're moving forward as a society - thanks to Covid - yet most of the contenders and the selectorate seem obsessed by the past.
So its a choice. Pick someone godawful and negative like Truss or Braverman (stop laughing at the back). Pick someone shiny and bereft of ideas who ultimately will pivot to knee-jerk like Mordaunt and (probably) Sunak will. Or go for change.
Tugendhat overtly set his stall out over there. Its just that he is sleep-inducingly dull. When compared to Badenoch who represents a radically different vision for the party and all of the possibilities for the country that opens up.
Personally I'd go with Sunak. He will be competent and run a sensational PR machine to sell the positives. And as I expect he will do what he can to balance the economic mess with the need to invest I expect there would be positives to spin.
But the exciting prospect is Kemi. I think Labour wouldn't have the first clue how to combat her.
I've seen two focus groups reported on the leadership race and, in both, the participants said something along the lines of "why are they talking about this culture war stuff, what are they going to do about the cost of living?" That is how Labour responds to Kemi unless she comes up with some actual policies on the issues that the electorate care about.
I don't think Kemi is engaged on culture war - she needs to say it to get on board, but will she really bother with it?
My point about them not knowing what to do with her is that her ascendency represents all of Labour's fail points in a single person. How can this black female migrant be talking about a vision for the future which embodies change when she is a hated Tory racist?
“I’d like to congratulate the Prime Minister on a singular achievement. That she’s PM would be remarkable to anyone even 20 years ago. It is a singular moment I warmly welcome. Now, can she please explain how we’re all going to avoid freezing, starving, going broke or all three this winter?”
It’s not especially hard.
Not 20 years ago - even 10 years ago it would have been hard to believe.
But ignoring that she may have ideas but do their resonate with voters who aren't Tory party members and what can she deliver in 2 years that gives her votes in 2024.
All I can see is a junior developer who has picked up a spec and run with it before sanity checking whether the suggested solution matches the actual real world problem.
Was that a reference to her Software Engineering background or a professional reference?
I approve either way, having seen some… interesting electronics specs in my time.
Reference to her Software Engineering background - shall we just say her career trajectory is similar to some other people I have worked with (where their career is similar due to a) their ability to tick urgent company diversity requirements, b) a general desire to remove (anywhere else) a not particularly great worker)
Now that might be a dis-service and she was rapidly promoted based on talent but....
There’s also the classic issue in many companies that techies need to move to management to progress their career, so ambitious ones go for the management team jugular early. Then the tech team gets to try to pick up their codebase.
One of the organisations I belong to supplies us with a super-abundance of woke tweets and emails every day, and there are a super-abundance of committees & administrators busy examining equality & diversity & inclusion.
We have a 100 per cent white committee of the most highly privileged in the institution reading Eddo-Lodge.
However, nothing has actually changed, e.g., if you are a woman doing a pretty menial job at the bottom, you are still pretty much ignored despite all the tweets to the contrary.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
I don't think you're this dumb.
I'm not. But only one of us is howling at the moon...
Calling me a moon howler and a mentalist (as someone else did last night) is a really weak argument.
Engage with the substance please.
I have posted quite a lot of substance on this subject recently. To which your level of engagement was "I don't think you're this dumb". I could say the same to you.
You talked about the Beatles and votes for women. That was dumb.
Same goes for the sheep like idiots who go liking your shitposts.
Shitposts is a matter of perspective.
I am describing societal change and the fear this creates in people like your good self. That you don't like this isn't really a surprise is it?
I'm not entirely convinced by Penny, on the one hand she's clearly switched on and a relatively good communicator. However, I don't know what she stands for, definitely feels like a blank sheet of paper onto which the great and powerful in the party are projecting their own image of what they want the next leader to be.
The reason I'm in favour of Kemi is because we have got one chance to beat Starmer in 2024 and it's going to need someone who actually stands for something and gives people something to vote in favour of to actually win. Penny doesn't do that, she's going to present the voters with that blank sheet of paper and try to win on a battle personalities, but at the same time as being in recession, being the Tory party which is now a big net drag after Boris and against Starmer who has got enough name recognition at this point to make a go of it and come out on top.
Penny, to me, seems like the "manager decline" choice for that Tories, admitting that we've got no policies or nothing positive to deliver to the nation. Kemi comes in with ideas that can turn into serious policies and give voters something vote in favour of.
It's definitely a riskier strategy but ultimately the Tory party needs to stand for something other than pretending to be second coming of Mrs Thatcher as Liz and Penny are attempting to project.
I don't know what Kemi's personality is like at all or if she has any real charisma but for me the fact that she's got ideas is winning. None of the other candidates seem to know what they want to do with the job other than occupy No. 10 for just under two years before being booted out by a Labour/SNP/LD coalition. It will be Boris but a bit more competent, or at least fewer scandals. The MPs must get Kemi onto the members ballot so she can get out there on the national stage and pitch her policy based vision against the bland managed declinism coming from whoever the other candidate is.
I think if she gets that chance it will be Dave vs Davis again, the favourite will find themselves pitching a nothing platform against a positive vision of the nation backed by ideas that make sense to ordinary people and she'll take the win.
The Tories can win the next election. Or be crushed. We're moving forward as a society - thanks to Covid - yet most of the contenders and the selectorate seem obsessed by the past.
So its a choice. Pick someone godawful and negative like Truss or Braverman (stop laughing at the back). Pick someone shiny and bereft of ideas who ultimately will pivot to knee-jerk like Mordaunt and (probably) Sunak will. Or go for change.
Tugendhat overtly set his stall out over there. Its just that he is sleep-inducingly dull. When compared to Badenoch who represents a radically different vision for the party and all of the possibilities for the country that opens up.
Personally I'd go with Sunak. He will be competent and run a sensational PR machine to sell the positives. And as I expect he will do what he can to balance the economic mess with the need to invest I expect there would be positives to spin.
But the exciting prospect is Kemi. I think Labour wouldn't have the first clue how to combat her.
I've seen two focus groups reported on the leadership race and, in both, the participants said something along the lines of "why are they talking about this culture war stuff, what are they going to do about the cost of living?" That is how Labour responds to Kemi unless she comes up with some actual policies on the issues that the electorate care about.
I don't think Kemi is engaged on culture war - she needs to say it to get on board, but will she really bother with it?
My point about them not knowing what to do with her is that her ascendency represents all of Labour's fail points in a single person. How can this black female migrant be talking about a vision for the future which embodies change when she is a hated Tory racist?
“I’d like to congratulate the Prime Minister on a singular achievement. That she’s PM would be remarkable to anyone even 20 years ago. It is a singular moment I warmly welcome. Now, can she please explain how we’re all going to avoid freezing, starving, going broke or all three this winter?”
It’s not especially hard.
Not 20 years ago - even 10 years ago it would have been hard to believe.
But ignoring that she may have ideas but do their resonate with voters who aren't Tory party members and what can she deliver in 2 years that gives her votes in 2024.
All I can see is a junior developer who has picked up a spec and run with it before sanity checking whether the suggested solution matches the actual real world problem.
Was that a reference to her Software Engineering background or a professional reference?
I approve either way, having seen some… interesting electronics specs in my time.
Reference to her Software Engineering background - shall we just say her career trajectory is similar to some other people I have worked with (where their career is similar due to a) their ability to tick urgent company diversity requirements, b) a general desire to remove (anywhere else) a not particularly great worker)
Now that might be a dis-service and she was rapidly promoted based on talent but....
She appears to be rather more of an achiever than Sunak or Mordaunt tbf.
Can any golf fans explain Rory Mcilroy's odds at every single major being so short even though he's not won one since 2014 ?
Fools and their money......
The amount of time BBC radio spends talking about Rory is completely out of proportion to his record. Ever major it's "can Rory win it?" The answer 30 odd times in a row has been "no". Better golfers get far less said about them.
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
I'm not entirely convinced by Penny, on the one hand she's clearly switched on and a relatively good communicator. However, I don't know what she stands for, definitely feels like a blank sheet of paper onto which the great and powerful in the party are projecting their own image of what they want the next leader to be.
The reason I'm in favour of Kemi is because we have got one chance to beat Starmer in 2024 and it's going to need someone who actually stands for something and gives people something to vote in favour of to actually win. Penny doesn't do that, she's going to present the voters with that blank sheet of paper and try to win on a battle personalities, but at the same time as being in recession, being the Tory party which is now a big net drag after Boris and against Starmer who has got enough name recognition at this point to make a go of it and come out on top.
Penny, to me, seems like the "manager decline" choice for that Tories, admitting that we've got no policies or nothing positive to deliver to the nation. Kemi comes in with ideas that can turn into serious policies and give voters something vote in favour of.
It's definitely a riskier strategy but ultimately the Tory party needs to stand for something other than pretending to be second coming of Mrs Thatcher as Liz and Penny are attempting to project.
I don't know what Kemi's personality is like at all or if she has any real charisma but for me the fact that she's got ideas is winning. None of the other candidates seem to know what they want to do with the job other than occupy No. 10 for just under two years before being booted out by a Labour/SNP/LD coalition. It will be Boris but a bit more competent, or at least fewer scandals. The MPs must get Kemi onto the members ballot so she can get out there on the national stage and pitch her policy based vision against the bland managed declinism coming from whoever the other candidate is.
I think if she gets that chance it will be Dave vs Davis again, the favourite will find themselves pitching a nothing platform against a positive vision of the nation backed by ideas that make sense to ordinary people and she'll take the win.
The Tories can win the next election. Or be crushed. We're moving forward as a society - thanks to Covid - yet most of the contenders and the selectorate seem obsessed by the past.
So its a choice. Pick someone godawful and negative like Truss or Braverman (stop laughing at the back). Pick someone shiny and bereft of ideas who ultimately will pivot to knee-jerk like Mordaunt and (probably) Sunak will. Or go for change.
Tugendhat overtly set his stall out over there. Its just that he is sleep-inducingly dull. When compared to Badenoch who represents a radically different vision for the party and all of the possibilities for the country that opens up.
Personally I'd go with Sunak. He will be competent and run a sensational PR machine to sell the positives. And as I expect he will do what he can to balance the economic mess with the need to invest I expect there would be positives to spin.
But the exciting prospect is Kemi. I think Labour wouldn't have the first clue how to combat her.
I've seen two focus groups reported on the leadership race and, in both, the participants said something along the lines of "why are they talking about this culture war stuff, what are they going to do about the cost of living?" That is how Labour responds to Kemi unless she comes up with some actual policies on the issues that the electorate care about.
I don't think Kemi is engaged on culture war - she needs to say it to get on board, but will she really bother with it?
My point about them not knowing what to do with her is that her ascendency represents all of Labour's fail points in a single person. How can this black female migrant be talking about a vision for the future which embodies change when she is a hated Tory racist?
“I’d like to congratulate the Prime Minister on a singular achievement. That she’s PM would be remarkable to anyone even 20 years ago. It is a singular moment I warmly welcome. Now, can she please explain how we’re all going to avoid freezing, starving, going broke or all three this winter?”
It’s not especially hard.
Not 20 years ago - even 10 years ago it would have been hard to believe.
But ignoring that she may have ideas but do their resonate with voters who aren't Tory party members and what can she deliver in 2 years that gives her votes in 2024.
All I can see is a junior developer who has picked up a spec and run with it before sanity checking whether the suggested solution matches the actual real world problem.
Was that a reference to her Software Engineering background or a professional reference?
I approve either way, having seen some… interesting electronics specs in my time.
Reference to her Software Engineering background - shall we just say her career trajectory is similar to some other people I have worked with (where their career is similar due to a) their ability to tick urgent company diversity requirements, b) a general desire to remove (anywhere else) a not particularly great worker)
Now that might be a dis-service and she was rapidly promoted based on talent but....
She appears to be rather more of an achiever than Sunak or Mordaunt tbf.
That’s not amazingly hard. Most of the scientists in my office are higher achievers than any of them. Compared to my boss they’re intellectually embarrassing minnows. Compared to my old boss they’re not even on the same plane of existence.
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
Right idea - wrong person being asked to drop out....
And it's too late now for this round anyway Suella will be out at 3pm.
It shows Truss’ weakness that Frost is begging others to drop out and support her.
All the momentum is with Kemi.
Can anyone who knows more about Tory politics than me rank the remaining six Left to Right? (Or should that be soft-right to hard-right?)
As far as I can see (L-R) it is Tugendhat, Mordaunt, Sunak, Truss, Badenoch, Braverman. Mordaunt is the one I find hardest to position in the spectrum, which perhaps explains her success.
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 6m Lacks calibre; makes grave errors; over-reaches; lacks depth. Maybe if she got her head down & achieved something she might be an option in a decade's time, but for now I don't get why anyone rates her. Good hair isn't enough for a PM.
I'm not entirely convinced by Penny, on the one hand she's clearly switched on and a relatively good communicator. However, I don't know what she stands for, definitely feels like a blank sheet of paper onto which the great and powerful in the party are projecting their own image of what they want the next leader to be.
The reason I'm in favour of Kemi is because we have got one chance to beat Starmer in 2024 and it's going to need someone who actually stands for something and gives people something to vote in favour of to actually win. Penny doesn't do that, she's going to present the voters with that blank sheet of paper and try to win on a battle personalities, but at the same time as being in recession, being the Tory party which is now a big net drag after Boris and against Starmer who has got enough name recognition at this point to make a go of it and come out on top.
Penny, to me, seems like the "manager decline" choice for that Tories, admitting that we've got no policies or nothing positive to deliver to the nation. Kemi comes in with ideas that can turn into serious policies and give voters something vote in favour of.
It's definitely a riskier strategy but ultimately the Tory party needs to stand for something other than pretending to be second coming of Mrs Thatcher as Liz and Penny are attempting to project.
I don't know what Kemi's personality is like at all or if she has any real charisma but for me the fact that she's got ideas is winning. None of the other candidates seem to know what they want to do with the job other than occupy No. 10 for just under two years before being booted out by a Labour/SNP/LD coalition. It will be Boris but a bit more competent, or at least fewer scandals. The MPs must get Kemi onto the members ballot so she can get out there on the national stage and pitch her policy based vision against the bland managed declinism coming from whoever the other candidate is.
I think if she gets that chance it will be Dave vs Davis again, the favourite will find themselves pitching a nothing platform against a positive vision of the nation backed by ideas that make sense to ordinary people and she'll take the win.
The Tories can win the next election. Or be crushed. We're moving forward as a society - thanks to Covid - yet most of the contenders and the selectorate seem obsessed by the past.
So its a choice. Pick someone godawful and negative like Truss or Braverman (stop laughing at the back). Pick someone shiny and bereft of ideas who ultimately will pivot to knee-jerk like Mordaunt and (probably) Sunak will. Or go for change.
Tugendhat overtly set his stall out over there. Its just that he is sleep-inducingly dull. When compared to Badenoch who represents a radically different vision for the party and all of the possibilities for the country that opens up.
Personally I'd go with Sunak. He will be competent and run a sensational PR machine to sell the positives. And as I expect he will do what he can to balance the economic mess with the need to invest I expect there would be positives to spin.
But the exciting prospect is Kemi. I think Labour wouldn't have the first clue how to combat her.
I've seen two focus groups reported on the leadership race and, in both, the participants said something along the lines of "why are they talking about this culture war stuff, what are they going to do about the cost of living?" That is how Labour responds to Kemi unless she comes up with some actual policies on the issues that the electorate care about.
I don't think Kemi is engaged on culture war - she needs to say it to get on board, but will she really bother with it?
My point about them not knowing what to do with her is that her ascendency represents all of Labour's fail points in a single person. How can this black female migrant be talking about a vision for the future which embodies change when she is a hated Tory racist?
“I’d like to congratulate the Prime Minister on a singular achievement. That she’s PM would be remarkable to anyone even 20 years ago. It is a singular moment I warmly welcome. Now, can she please explain how we’re all going to avoid freezing, starving, going broke or all three this winter?”
It’s not especially hard.
It is. Far too many of my long-standing former comrades think they are literally the only thing holding back the forces of evil. Yet another female Tory PM would be challenging enough, but a BAME one? Isn't she supposed to be on their side? After all they have to Fight the Tories for her rights to do things like become Tory Prime Minister.
There is a horrible hectoring tone about many of the left on this subject. Badenoch as PM would put the shits up them so hard they will barely be able to mention cost of living problems because they're so busy fighting their own culture war.
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
Frosty seems to be yearning for the ghost of Boris Past. He needs to let go. His and Boris's disastrous reign is over. With luck we will never see its like again.
I'm not entirely convinced by Penny, on the one hand she's clearly switched on and a relatively good communicator. However, I don't know what she stands for, definitely feels like a blank sheet of paper onto which the great and powerful in the party are projecting their own image of what they want the next leader to be.
The reason I'm in favour of Kemi is because we have got one chance to beat Starmer in 2024 and it's going to need someone who actually stands for something and gives people something to vote in favour of to actually win. Penny doesn't do that, she's going to present the voters with that blank sheet of paper and try to win on a battle personalities, but at the same time as being in recession, being the Tory party which is now a big net drag after Boris and against Starmer who has got enough name recognition at this point to make a go of it and come out on top.
Penny, to me, seems like the "manager decline" choice for that Tories, admitting that we've got no policies or nothing positive to deliver to the nation. Kemi comes in with ideas that can turn into serious policies and give voters something vote in favour of.
It's definitely a riskier strategy but ultimately the Tory party needs to stand for something other than pretending to be second coming of Mrs Thatcher as Liz and Penny are attempting to project.
I don't know what Kemi's personality is like at all or if she has any real charisma but for me the fact that she's got ideas is winning. None of the other candidates seem to know what they want to do with the job other than occupy No. 10 for just under two years before being booted out by a Labour/SNP/LD coalition. It will be Boris but a bit more competent, or at least fewer scandals. The MPs must get Kemi onto the members ballot so she can get out there on the national stage and pitch her policy based vision against the bland managed declinism coming from whoever the other candidate is.
I think if she gets that chance it will be Dave vs Davis again, the favourite will find themselves pitching a nothing platform against a positive vision of the nation backed by ideas that make sense to ordinary people and she'll take the win.
The Tories can win the next election. Or be crushed. We're moving forward as a society - thanks to Covid - yet most of the contenders and the selectorate seem obsessed by the past.
So its a choice. Pick someone godawful and negative like Truss or Braverman (stop laughing at the back). Pick someone shiny and bereft of ideas who ultimately will pivot to knee-jerk like Mordaunt and (probably) Sunak will. Or go for change.
Tugendhat overtly set his stall out over there. Its just that he is sleep-inducingly dull. When compared to Badenoch who represents a radically different vision for the party and all of the possibilities for the country that opens up.
Personally I'd go with Sunak. He will be competent and run a sensational PR machine to sell the positives. And as I expect he will do what he can to balance the economic mess with the need to invest I expect there would be positives to spin.
But the exciting prospect is Kemi. I think Labour wouldn't have the first clue how to combat her.
I've seen two focus groups reported on the leadership race and, in both, the participants said something along the lines of "why are they talking about this culture war stuff, what are they going to do about the cost of living?" That is how Labour responds to Kemi unless she comes up with some actual policies on the issues that the electorate care about.
I don't think Kemi is engaged on culture war - she needs to say it to get on board, but will she really bother with it?
My point about them not knowing what to do with her is that her ascendency represents all of Labour's fail points in a single person. How can this black female migrant be talking about a vision for the future which embodies change when she is a hated Tory racist?
You confuse some left-wingers on Twitter with the Labour Party. Starmer and the Labour Party don't go on about all Tories being racist. They have led with the failings of Johnson and his government, they will continue to lead on the cost of living, on NHS waiting lists, etc. Labour's big successes recently were hitting the Tories on Partygate (leading, in part, to toppling the PM) and a windfall tax (leading to a massive Govt U-turn). None of that strategy changes if the Tories pick Badenoch or a straight white man.
Wading into the woke debate (probably somewhat unwisely).
As a nation we have become much more socially liberal in the past 20 years, the pace of change has been breathtaking as it has been in many societies in Western Europe. I support the progress that has been made.
We have gotten to where we are through measured rational debate and respect for individuals.
The concern I have now is that there is a somewhat troubling tendency to shut down debate. You do not drive progress (or certainly not for very long) by stifling debate. You engage and you bring people with you. At the moment I fear there is a tendency that in order to protect, sustain and advance social progress and liberalism in this country we have to deplatform, shame, ‘cancel’, ruin or embarrass people who hold differing points of view. This is helping contribute to the backlash that sustains the culture war.
Just my two cents. I’m now going to run to my bunker and hide.
I wonder whether it's the influence of social media.
Change has always started with groups pushing at the boundaries, and over time, some of those boundaries become mainstream thinking, while others remain on the fringe, or are rejected. The friction would be partly contained, and the stronger ideas would trickle into the mainstream gradually.
With social media speeding up the way opinions are shared and amplifying the voices of those who are shouting loudest, these arguments are entering the mainstream a little too quickly, and often at the stage where they're still contentious.
Positive change may happen more quickly, which is a good thing (I don't think anyone can look back and say that the change in attitudes to homosexuality over the last few decades has been anything but positive, and would have been better if it had happened more quickly), but there's also going to be a hell of a lot more anger as issues are worked out in a much more public space.
There's also potential for mistakes to be made if ideas aren't tested.
St Andrews really is just too easy for the modern pros now. 3 woods off the tee to drive a par 4 by even those who aren't in the worlds best.
Not easy if the wind blows! Which it normally would on at least one of four days, although unlikely this time around.
That's it, its only defence is hoping that the weather is very poor.
Look at the list of winners it produces - it is one of the best tests of golf around still, 6 of the last 9 winners the best in the world at the time, then Daly the longest hitter, Oosthuizen a great iron player and regular major contender, and Johnson an accurate driver and great wedge player. No other course has a better record of getting quality winners.
Zach Johnson Louis Oosthuizen Tiger Tiger Daly Faldo Seve Nicklaus Nicklaus
Lol you are talking about golf from mostly golfers from 20+ years ago. Modern pros are murdering this course. Doesn't mean the best golfer in the world won't win, but it is a joke when a 50+ year old senior tour player is casually driving par 4s in 1.
Unless the weather get bad its going to be -15 plus that wins this.
What does it matter if they finish -15 under? Realistically I would be expecting it to be closer to -20 this week, but if the wind blowed all week it might have been -5.
Dustin Johnson was -20 under at Augusta a couple of years ago. Tour events are regularly won at -15 to -25.
Well its a major so supposed to be the ultimate test not a regular tour event.
Yes Johnson murdered it once, but they then make it more difficult (as they did when Tiger did) and the drop off to the others is huge....because the test is so severe. Most Masters only the top 15 or so finish under par at all, separating the best from the rest.
Here we are just seeing well past their prime golfers casually driving multiple par 4s in 1. With no wind, there is no challenge from distance required, width of fairways, need to control / shape the ball or tough greens.
I really don't mind driveable par 4s. They create good risk/reward choices that do separate the great from the good. The tests this week are course management, avoiding the bunkers, playing off sloping lies, chipping, imaginative irons.
Lots of major courses are now par 71 or par 70, which makes them look as if they are tougher to score on as makes par for the tournament 4 or 8 shots less, often by making a 510 yd hole a par 4. In terms of numbers of shots to win even if this week ends up at 20 under that is 268. 10 USPGAs alone have been won in fewer shots. The US Open is the tough, brutal major but they should not all be like that.
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
Right idea - wrong person being asked to drop out....
And it's too late now for this round anyway Suella will be out at 3pm.
It shows Truss’ weakness that Frost is begging others to drop out and support her.
All the momentum is with Kemi.
Can anyone who knows more about Tory politics than me rank the remaining six Left to Right? (Or should that be soft-right to hard-right?)
As far as I can see (L-R) it is Tugendhat, Mordaunt, Sunak, Truss, Badenoch, Braverman. Mordaunt is the one I find hardest to position in the spectrum, which perhaps explains her success.
Mordaunt will win this and then there will be terrible buyer's remorse.
@Cookie thanks to your reply yesterday re my woke question. Apologies for not acknowledging at the time. Interesting you were the only reply and you aren't typical of someone who is likely to bang on about this topic. I also noted you posted about your experience of your daughter's before so your experience is particularly interesting. My children are now several years out of school so I might be out of touch but we had no experience of this. Would love to hear from other parents. What does the school say when challenged?
To be clear, this is based on my shock from visiting schools we're considering for our daughter's senior school - she's still only 10. But it's universal: private and state, selective and non-selective. Which is odd, because the primary schools my daughters have been to are not perceptibly more woke than the state primary school I attended 30 years ago. I think it would be quite hard to challenge the school on this. It's easy to criticise the excesses of woke anonymously on an internet forum; much more risky in real life to a school which your children have to attend. You hear stories of quite hostile pushback to that sort of thing, and the last thing a parent wants to do is make life more difficult for their children.
Society can be divided into two types of people
Those who do not believe Woke is a problem = those who have not yet encountered it in work or life
Those who realise Woke is a problem = those who have now encountered it. Parents of kids age 10-15 are a classic case, because they can suddenly see it running rampant in schools
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work or life then like you say? Your statement doesn't make sense therefore does it? Maybe we have encountered it and in most cases find it irritating but irrelevant. As I said yesterday we just think pillocks and move on.
Note I asked you a question about this yesterday and you didn't reply. Only @cookie did and I find his reply disturbing. You keep banging on about it but don't say how it affects your life.
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work
I genuinely don't know what to make of this comment. Every single moderately large company has a social media team who pump out a near continuous stream of vacuous virtue-signalling nonsense on equality, diversity, inclusion etc for every minority group under the sun. It's particularly prevalent in June, when they all change their corporate logos to include rainbows for Pride month. LinkedIn becomes even more unreadable than usual because of the weight of posts on the subject. I absolutely do not understand how anyone could be in the workforce and not have noticed this, somewhere.
If that is the sum total of the WOKE DANGER then who cares? It is a largely pointless exercise in virtue signalling. So a company decides to participate in Pride - where is the threat?
Lets be entirely honest about this - these companies virtue signal a lot of things. Its not that they are asleep for most of the year and only do Pride. So "EUGH THEY'VE CHANGED THEIR LOGO STOP IT" is only attacking the LGBT cause because we don't here anything in protest when they support women or BAME or the environment etc.
Repression of us sexual deviants is still popular apparently. Which is precisely why we need Pride and companies showing their support for it. You guys create the WOKE THREAT you complain of.
No, that's just the tip of the iceberg. My point was specifically that I can't understand how anyone hasn't noticed it, because of the lengths companies go to to make it as visible as possible - the reason being that they don't actually care about any of it, they just really don't want to be on the end of a Twitter dogpile because they aren't participating.
To go back a few comments I have kids aged 10 and 14. In two separate schools. And I can't say I have noticed that Woke is "running rampant" in their schools.
For me - as a Bisexual man who only had the confidence to come out aged 40 - I don't look at companies changing their logos for a rainbow one as anything at all. Pride (happily) has become a mainstream part of our society. As has the push for female equality in pay and conditions, teaching kids about respecting each other and all of the other horrors that make some people shriek in fear.
I do understand. Societal change always provokes a minority who don't like it. Woke is just the latest threat, as the permissive society or women having the vote or the abolition of slavery was. You dislike the modernisation of the way people treat people with more humanity so it gets labelled - woke.
And just as Alf Garnett sat in London there ranting about all the things he didn't agree with changing, so Leon sits somewhere abroad doing the same. Different times, different issues to be unhappy about, same psychology.
Its fine. The woke-worriers will either get on board or they won't. Societal change is happening whether they do or don't.
We're back to the Woke Definition Paradox: wokeism is defined by its detractors as unhealthy obsession with social issues (eg playing identity politics) - it's axiomatic that it is therefore Bad, even if you completely support all the societal changes that . If you define it - as many do - as just being the underlying pace of societal change, then of course you won't see what the fuss is about.
I have no problem at all with people saying "we're spending too much time and money focused on this shit". Because we are. I've sat in company diversity training courses which tick the required boxes but do nothing about diversity. So yes, down with that sort of thing!
But in reality the anti-woke objectors don't want to stop diversity training, they want to stop the march of diversity. They wouldn't be happy if big corporates stopped twatting about changing their logo to rainbow colours to support pride for their own box tick purposes, they just want to stop Pride.
I get it - change can be scary. But you can only shape it, you can't stop it.
Diversity and Inclusion as it is currently being enforced is not about creating a more open and welcoming environment for all.
It is about counting characteristics and seeking to label everyone according to a checklist and to treat them accordingly.
It has nothing to do with celebrating the diversity of each individual and what they can bring. And it is all about creating uniformity and enforced group think
The Pride movement is fracturing because of this. I have sat in Pride meetings where the only thing in the D&I sphere the leadership is worried about is counting the number of black and brown faces in the room.
It is deeply frustrating to see a movement that still matters get torn apart from within by thinking which has stopped celebrating diversity and just wants uniformity.
Sure - that goes on. Its organisations knowing how shit their behaviours and attitudes have been trying to catch up with the modernising society. So they tick boxes. Its hardly like your Pride example is new - as a bisexual I was not made to feel remotely welcome by LGBsoc at uni. What, you like women as well? Bloody tourist. So I put it back into a lockbox and supressed it for 20 years.
But what is your objection? That companies are making a bit of a mess of changing their attitudes? Or that they are changing their attitudes at all? We need to be promoting diversity because in far too many places its mysteriously always middle-class white men who make progress. Is that because white men are the best candidates for these jobs? Or because a narrow selectorate hire people who look and talk like themselves?
My own industry has had massive problems with this. "What happened to hiring dolly birds" I was asked in my first sales job when I was on a trade show stand. A pronounced lack of female senior managers, or anyone at all in sales, yet category management is full of women many of whom tried and failed to get hired to do sales.
I've always managed to apply the "I don't care" rule to my hiring. Yes I have absolutely hired white men when they have been the best candidate. But I hired a lot of women where their brilliance was clear but they would get ignored. Cue digs that I saw myself as Hugh Heffner (surrounding myself with brilliant women).
So maybe what people are so wound up about is the reverse of what they think it is. Easy for middle class white men to describe an environment of predominantly middle class white men as an "open and welcoming environment". Less so if you are effectively excluded from that because of class, gender, race etc etc etc
My issue is with the nature of the diversity which they are seeking to impose.
It has nothing to do about removing barriers and improving the culture and everything to do with stripping people of their individuality and treating them as part of an artificially constructed group.
Learning to value each individual for the qualities they possess and the potential they have is true inclusion. Only viewing them through the lens of intersectionality does not respect the individual just what others think they represent.
Can any golf fans explain Rory Mcilroy's odds at every single major being so short even though he's not won one since 2014 ?
Fools and their money......
The amount of time BBC radio spends talking about Rory is completely out of proportion to his record. Ever major it's "can Rory win it?" The answer 30 odd times in a row has been "no". Better golfers get far less said about them.
I still think too much is being read into the Yougov poll of members yesterday. Rishi has time to recover with the membership if he gets through and he is by far the best known of the remaining candidates.
There is, however, a feeling that the Tories need a fresh start and it may be that being associated with Boris is fatal to Rishi. He has to explain what he would do differently as PM, not least in tax and economic policy and he has to do it quickly.
Rishi is in a hard place. None of the other candidates will give him back the Treasury for the above reason. If he doesn't win he faces a serious demotion at best and the risk of being simply out.
There is no way that the ERG will accept Sunak's leadership if he does win. It will be permanent civil war inside the PCP - unless he does what Johnson did and throws out the critics. That would probably be best for the Tories - and certainly for the country - in the long term, but it would almost certainly also mean a surge in support for Reform/UKIP and so a guaranteed election defeat.
Yes, the briefing against him has been pretty strong, they would play nice.
As for the members, it becomes self fulfilling- they will be hearing he has bo chance with members and even those who like him will begin to doubt.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
What we are dealing with these days is at best a refusal to engage in rational argument and at worst a demand that anything you feel should be respected and protected and that you don't even want to hear about things outside of your echo chamber.
This is very different to rock and roll or the suffrage movement.
The concepts of no platforming, 'safe spaces', online bubbles have made debate impossible meaning that views are not only going unchallenged but met with an absolute refusal to engage with anything with which you disagree.
Those are very unwelcome additions to our society alongside the denial of evidence and facts.
We can set aside the nutters at either end of the spectrum who refuse to engage in rational argument. As we can the nutters on any issue you care to choose - they always exist.
On a couple of the points you mention - safe spaces is an interesting one. 25 years ago at Sheffield University there was a massive row on this subject, specifically over the Union's "Women's Safety Bus". A group of students objected to the union spending money on transporting drunk female students home. "Where's my free ride home" etc. That there had been a spate of attacks on female students didn't seem to bother them - the bus was aptly named.
As for online bubbles making debate impossible, that is a function of online. The nutters at either end of the spectrum we set aside? They're all online, they're mad as hell and the SHOUT AND SHOUT like they are the majority view. Short of abolishing social media, best we can do is ignore them and get on with our lives.
That's not what "safe spaces" mean, in woke terms. It's emotional rather than physical safety - it means a place where people can be assured of not hearing anything that might upset them.
I think you have just deftly demonstrated the difference between "woke" and reality. Women's refuges are not a hypothetical thing that exists only to protect their right to be feminists. Its to stop their violent menfolk beating and raping the shit out of them. Again.
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
Right idea - wrong person being asked to drop out....
And it's too late now for this round anyway Suella will be out at 3pm.
It shows Truss’ weakness that Frost is begging others to drop out and support her.
All the momentum is with Kemi.
Can anyone who knows more about Tory politics than me rank the remaining six Left to Right? (Or should that be soft-right to hard-right?)
As far as I can see (L-R) it is Tugendhat, Mordaunt, Sunak, Truss, Badenoch, Braverman. Mordaunt is the one I find hardest to position in the spectrum, which perhaps explains her success.
Mordaunt will win this and then there will be terrible buyer's remorse.
But… she probably has enough to get over the line and form a govt after the next election. Before then being replaced. Who will be the next politician to remain in office over two election cycles I wonder? Will we see their like again?
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
Right idea - wrong person being asked to drop out....
And it's too late now for this round anyway Suella will be out at 3pm.
It shows Truss’ weakness that Frost is begging others to drop out and support her.
All the momentum is with Kemi.
Can anyone who knows more about Tory politics than me rank the remaining six Left to Right? (Or should that be soft-right to hard-right?)
As far as I can see (L-R) it is Tugendhat, Mordaunt, Sunak, Truss, Badenoch, Braverman. Mordaunt is the one I find hardest to position in the spectrum, which perhaps explains her success.
Mordaunt will win this and then there will be terrible buyer's remorse.
Yeah that is my assumption. Sunak is their best candidate (as is clear from the polling vs Labour) but is suffering from being a known quality. Tories are projecting ideal qualities onto blank slates like Mordaunt and Badenoch, but it is highly likely that they turn out to be far weaker than Sunak. I mean, Mordaunt may turn out to be brilliant but on a balance of probabilities I would say she won't.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
I don't think you're this dumb.
I'm not. But only one of us is howling at the moon...
Calling me a moon howler and a mentalist (as someone else did last night) is a really weak argument.
Engage with the substance please.
I have posted quite a lot of substance on this subject recently. To which your level of engagement was "I don't think you're this dumb". I could say the same to you.
You talked about the Beatles and votes for women. That was dumb.
Same goes for the sheep like idiots who go liking your shitposts.
Shitposts is a matter of perspective.
I am describing societal change and the fear this creates in people like your good self. That you don't like this isn't really a surprise is it?
I have no fears about everyone in our society being included and given a fair shot.
Again, all you have are insinuations, innuendos, and tropes.
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
I don't think you're this dumb.
I'm not. But only one of us is howling at the moon...
Calling me a moon howler and a mentalist (as someone else did last night) is a really weak argument.
Engage with the substance please.
I have posted quite a lot of substance on this subject recently. To which your level of engagement was "I don't think you're this dumb". I could say the same to you.
You talked about the Beatles and votes for women. That was dumb.
Same goes for the sheep like idiots who go liking your shitposts.
Shitposts is a matter of perspective.
I am describing societal change and the fear this creates in people like your good self. That you don't like this isn't really a surprise is it?
No you aren't, mate. Diminishing returns. Societal change is you can go to prison for b*ggering another bloke - then you can't - then you can marry him. Changes in the law. There has never been a law against a person with a dick asking people to call him her, and nobody actually gives or has ever given a fuck. It's as interesting and important as someone telling you they are vegan. Hence the militants pushing it to the edge cases, at the expense of every single birth/biological woman ever born, in order to provoke a reaction.
@Cookie thanks to your reply yesterday re my woke question. Apologies for not acknowledging at the time. Interesting you were the only reply and you aren't typical of someone who is likely to bang on about this topic. I also noted you posted about your experience of your daughter's before so your experience is particularly interesting. My children are now several years out of school so I might be out of touch but we had no experience of this. Would love to hear from other parents. What does the school say when challenged?
To be clear, this is based on my shock from visiting schools we're considering for our daughter's senior school - she's still only 10. But it's universal: private and state, selective and non-selective. Which is odd, because the primary schools my daughters have been to are not perceptibly more woke than the state primary school I attended 30 years ago. I think it would be quite hard to challenge the school on this. It's easy to criticise the excesses of woke anonymously on an internet forum; much more risky in real life to a school which your children have to attend. You hear stories of quite hostile pushback to that sort of thing, and the last thing a parent wants to do is make life more difficult for their children.
Society can be divided into two types of people
Those who do not believe Woke is a problem = those who have not yet encountered it in work or life
Those who realise Woke is a problem = those who have now encountered it. Parents of kids age 10-15 are a classic case, because they can suddenly see it running rampant in schools
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work or life then like you say? Your statement doesn't make sense therefore does it? Maybe we have encountered it and in most cases find it irritating but irrelevant. As I said yesterday we just think pillocks and move on.
Note I asked you a question about this yesterday and you didn't reply. Only @cookie did and I find his reply disturbing. You keep banging on about it but don't say how it affects your life.
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work
I genuinely don't know what to make of this comment. Every single moderately large company has a social media team who pump out a near continuous stream of vacuous virtue-signalling nonsense on equality, diversity, inclusion etc for every minority group under the sun. It's particularly prevalent in June, when they all change their corporate logos to include rainbows for Pride month. LinkedIn becomes even more unreadable than usual because of the weight of posts on the subject. I absolutely do not understand how anyone could be in the workforce and not have noticed this, somewhere.
If that is the sum total of the WOKE DANGER then who cares? It is a largely pointless exercise in virtue signalling. So a company decides to participate in Pride - where is the threat?
Lets be entirely honest about this - these companies virtue signal a lot of things. Its not that they are asleep for most of the year and only do Pride. So "EUGH THEY'VE CHANGED THEIR LOGO STOP IT" is only attacking the LGBT cause because we don't here anything in protest when they support women or BAME or the environment etc.
Repression of us sexual deviants is still popular apparently. Which is precisely why we need Pride and companies showing their support for it. You guys create the WOKE THREAT you complain of.
No, that's just the tip of the iceberg. My point was specifically that I can't understand how anyone hasn't noticed it, because of the lengths companies go to to make it as visible as possible - the reason being that they don't actually care about any of it, they just really don't want to be on the end of a Twitter dogpile because they aren't participating.
To go back a few comments I have kids aged 10 and 14. In two separate schools. And I can't say I have noticed that Woke is "running rampant" in their schools.
For me - as a Bisexual man who only had the confidence to come out aged 40 - I don't look at companies changing their logos for a rainbow one as anything at all. Pride (happily) has become a mainstream part of our society. As has the push for female equality in pay and conditions, teaching kids about respecting each other and all of the other horrors that make some people shriek in fear.
I do understand. Societal change always provokes a minority who don't like it. Woke is just the latest threat, as the permissive society or women having the vote or the abolition of slavery was. You dislike the modernisation of the way people treat people with more humanity so it gets labelled - woke.
And just as Alf Garnett sat in London there ranting about all the things he didn't agree with changing, so Leon sits somewhere abroad doing the same. Different times, different issues to be unhappy about, same psychology.
Its fine. The woke-worriers will either get on board or they won't. Societal change is happening whether they do or don't.
We're back to the Woke Definition Paradox: wokeism is defined by its detractors as unhealthy obsession with social issues (eg playing identity politics) - it's axiomatic that it is therefore Bad, even if you completely support all the societal changes that . If you define it - as many do - as just being the underlying pace of societal change, then of course you won't see what the fuss is about.
I have no problem at all with people saying "we're spending too much time and money focused on this shit". Because we are. I've sat in company diversity training courses which tick the required boxes but do nothing about diversity. So yes, down with that sort of thing!
But in reality the anti-woke objectors don't want to stop diversity training, they want to stop the march of diversity. They wouldn't be happy if big corporates stopped twatting about changing their logo to rainbow colours to support pride for their own box tick purposes, they just want to stop Pride.
I get it - change can be scary. But you can only shape it, you can't stop it.
Diversity and Inclusion as it is currently being enforced is not about creating a more open and welcoming environment for all.
It is about counting characteristics and seeking to label everyone according to a checklist and to treat them accordingly.
It has nothing to do with celebrating the diversity of each individual and what they can bring. And it is all about creating uniformity and enforced group think
The Pride movement is fracturing because of this. I have sat in Pride meetings where the only thing in the D&I sphere the leadership is worried about is counting the number of black and brown faces in the room.
It is deeply frustrating to see a movement that still matters get torn apart from within by thinking which has stopped celebrating diversity and just wants uniformity.
Sure - that goes on. Its organisations knowing how shit their behaviours and attitudes have been trying to catch up with the modernising society. So they tick boxes. Its hardly like your Pride example is new - as a bisexual I was not made to feel remotely welcome by LGBsoc at uni. What, you like women as well? Bloody tourist. So I put it back into a lockbox and supressed it for 20 years.
But what is your objection? That companies are making a bit of a mess of changing their attitudes? Or that they are changing their attitudes at all? We need to be promoting diversity because in far too many places its mysteriously always middle-class white men who make progress. Is that because white men are the best candidates for these jobs? Or because a narrow selectorate hire people who look and talk like themselves?
My own industry has had massive problems with this. "What happened to hiring dolly birds" I was asked in my first sales job when I was on a trade show stand. A pronounced lack of female senior managers, or anyone at all in sales, yet category management is full of women many of whom tried and failed to get hired to do sales.
I've always managed to apply the "I don't care" rule to my hiring. Yes I have absolutely hired white men when they have been the best candidate. But I hired a lot of women where their brilliance was clear but they would get ignored. Cue digs that I saw myself as Hugh Heffner (surrounding myself with brilliant women).
So maybe what people are so wound up about is the reverse of what they think it is. Easy for middle class white men to describe an environment of predominantly middle class white men as an "open and welcoming environment". Less so if you are effectively excluded from that because of class, gender, race etc etc etc
My issue is with the nature of the diversity which they are seeking to impose.
It has nothing to do about removing barriers and improving the culture and everything to do with stripping people of their individuality and treating them as part of an artificially constructed group.
Learning to value each individual for the qualities they possess and the potential they have is true inclusion. Only viewing them through the lens of intersectionality does not respect the individual just what others think they represent.
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
I'm not entirely convinced by Penny, on the one hand she's clearly switched on and a relatively good communicator. However, I don't know what she stands for, definitely feels like a blank sheet of paper onto which the great and powerful in the party are projecting their own image of what they want the next leader to be.
The reason I'm in favour of Kemi is because we have got one chance to beat Starmer in 2024 and it's going to need someone who actually stands for something and gives people something to vote in favour of to actually win. Penny doesn't do that, she's going to present the voters with that blank sheet of paper and try to win on a battle personalities, but at the same time as being in recession, being the Tory party which is now a big net drag after Boris and against Starmer who has got enough name recognition at this point to make a go of it and come out on top.
Penny, to me, seems like the "manager decline" choice for that Tories, admitting that we've got no policies or nothing positive to deliver to the nation. Kemi comes in with ideas that can turn into serious policies and give voters something vote in favour of.
It's definitely a riskier strategy but ultimately the Tory party needs to stand for something other than pretending to be second coming of Mrs Thatcher as Liz and Penny are attempting to project.
I don't know what Kemi's personality is like at all or if she has any real charisma but for me the fact that she's got ideas is winning. None of the other candidates seem to know what they want to do with the job other than occupy No. 10 for just under two years before being booted out by a Labour/SNP/LD coalition. It will be Boris but a bit more competent, or at least fewer scandals. The MPs must get Kemi onto the members ballot so she can get out there on the national stage and pitch her policy based vision against the bland managed declinism coming from whoever the other candidate is.
I think if she gets that chance it will be Dave vs Davis again, the favourite will find themselves pitching a nothing platform against a positive vision of the nation backed by ideas that make sense to ordinary people and she'll take the win.
The Tories can win the next election. Or be crushed. We're moving forward as a society - thanks to Covid - yet most of the contenders and the selectorate seem obsessed by the past.
So its a choice. Pick someone godawful and negative like Truss or Braverman (stop laughing at the back). Pick someone shiny and bereft of ideas who ultimately will pivot to knee-jerk like Mordaunt and (probably) Sunak will. Or go for change.
Tugendhat overtly set his stall out over there. Its just that he is sleep-inducingly dull. When compared to Badenoch who represents a radically different vision for the party and all of the possibilities for the country that opens up.
Personally I'd go with Sunak. He will be competent and run a sensational PR machine to sell the positives. And as I expect he will do what he can to balance the economic mess with the need to invest I expect there would be positives to spin.
But the exciting prospect is Kemi. I think Labour wouldn't have the first clue how to combat her.
I've seen two focus groups reported on the leadership race and, in both, the participants said something along the lines of "why are they talking about this culture war stuff, what are they going to do about the cost of living?" That is how Labour responds to Kemi unless she comes up with some actual policies on the issues that the electorate care about.
I don't think Kemi is engaged on culture war - she needs to say it to get on board, but will she really bother with it?
My point about them not knowing what to do with her is that her ascendency represents all of Labour's fail points in a single person. How can this black female migrant be talking about a vision for the future which embodies change when she is a hated Tory racist?
“I’d like to congratulate the Prime Minister on a singular achievement. That she’s PM would be remarkable to anyone even 20 years ago. It is a singular moment I warmly welcome. Now, can she please explain how we’re all going to avoid freezing, starving, going broke or all three this winter?”
It’s not especially hard.
It is. Far too many of my long-standing former comrades think they are literally the only thing holding back the forces of evil. Yet another female Tory PM would be challenging enough, but a BAME one? Isn't she supposed to be on their side? After all they have to Fight the Tories for her rights to do things like become Tory Prime Minister.
There is a horrible hectoring tone about many of the left on this subject. Badenoch as PM would put the shits up them so hard they will barely be able to mention cost of living problems because they're so busy fighting their own culture war.
To coin a phrase, it would "rub the left's nose in diversity".
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
Not endemic. Still pandemic. Very much so.
Its a constant presence now, that's endemic, isn't it?
The time that Covid19 was exponentially spreading to naive communities as a pandemic has long since been and gone. Now its simply waxing and waning ever-present in society just as other endemic viruses do.
The 'woke' movement is not a continuation of a tendency towards greater liberalism in the cultural and social sphere. It presents itself this way, and people support it for these reasons, but it is actually a profound rupture with this tradition and its roots in the enlightenment. It seeks to do away with facts, logic and argument, in favour of emotion and belief. It is a manifestation of the post truth worldview that began to appear around the time of the first scottish independence referendum, then again with Brexit and the election of Trump. As I have suggested before, in a lot of ways it is just a left wing reaction to the politics of Brexit, but has evolved to have a tribal, pseudo religious quality; claiming to resolve all injustice in society. It seems to me that the endgame of woke is the undoing of the enlightenment.
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
Right idea - wrong person being asked to drop out....
And it's too late now for this round anyway Suella will be out at 3pm.
It shows Truss’ weakness that Frost is begging others to drop out and support her.
All the momentum is with Kemi.
Can anyone who knows more about Tory politics than me rank the remaining six Left to Right? (Or should that be soft-right to hard-right?)
I’d probably say (from left to right):
1. Tom 2. Rishi 3. Penny 4. Liz 5. Kemi 6. Suella
But Rishi/Penny probably interchangeable.
Remarkable to see Sunak second from the left. Shows how the Tory Party has moved in the past seven years.
Remarkable to see the Chancellor who increased Gordon Brown's favourite tax and lifted taxing and spending to record highs being listed second from the left?
The only remarkable thing about it is that there's another Tory listed to the left of the poundshop Gordon Brown.
I'm not entirely convinced by Penny, on the one hand she's clearly switched on and a relatively good communicator. However, I don't know what she stands for, definitely feels like a blank sheet of paper onto which the great and powerful in the party are projecting their own image of what they want the next leader to be.
The reason I'm in favour of Kemi is because we have got one chance to beat Starmer in 2024 and it's going to need someone who actually stands for something and gives people something to vote in favour of to actually win. Penny doesn't do that, she's going to present the voters with that blank sheet of paper and try to win on a battle personalities, but at the same time as being in recession, being the Tory party which is now a big net drag after Boris and against Starmer who has got enough name recognition at this point to make a go of it and come out on top.
Penny, to me, seems like the "manager decline" choice for that Tories, admitting that we've got no policies or nothing positive to deliver to the nation. Kemi comes in with ideas that can turn into serious policies and give voters something vote in favour of.
It's definitely a riskier strategy but ultimately the Tory party needs to stand for something other than pretending to be second coming of Mrs Thatcher as Liz and Penny are attempting to project.
I don't know what Kemi's personality is like at all or if she has any real charisma but for me the fact that she's got ideas is winning. None of the other candidates seem to know what they want to do with the job other than occupy No. 10 for just under two years before being booted out by a Labour/SNP/LD coalition. It will be Boris but a bit more competent, or at least fewer scandals. The MPs must get Kemi onto the members ballot so she can get out there on the national stage and pitch her policy based vision against the bland managed declinism coming from whoever the other candidate is.
I think if she gets that chance it will be Dave vs Davis again, the favourite will find themselves pitching a nothing platform against a positive vision of the nation backed by ideas that make sense to ordinary people and she'll take the win.
The Tories can win the next election. Or be crushed. We're moving forward as a society - thanks to Covid - yet most of the contenders and the selectorate seem obsessed by the past.
So its a choice. Pick someone godawful and negative like Truss or Braverman (stop laughing at the back). Pick someone shiny and bereft of ideas who ultimately will pivot to knee-jerk like Mordaunt and (probably) Sunak will. Or go for change.
Tugendhat overtly set his stall out over there. Its just that he is sleep-inducingly dull. When compared to Badenoch who represents a radically different vision for the party and all of the possibilities for the country that opens up.
Personally I'd go with Sunak. He will be competent and run a sensational PR machine to sell the positives. And as I expect he will do what he can to balance the economic mess with the need to invest I expect there would be positives to spin.
But the exciting prospect is Kemi. I think Labour wouldn't have the first clue how to combat her.
I've seen two focus groups reported on the leadership race and, in both, the participants said something along the lines of "why are they talking about this culture war stuff, what are they going to do about the cost of living?" That is how Labour responds to Kemi unless she comes up with some actual policies on the issues that the electorate care about.
I don't think Kemi is engaged on culture war - she needs to say it to get on board, but will she really bother with it?
My point about them not knowing what to do with her is that her ascendency represents all of Labour's fail points in a single person. How can this black female migrant be talking about a vision for the future which embodies change when she is a hated Tory racist?
You confuse some left-wingers on Twitter with the Labour Party. Starmer and the Labour Party don't go on about all Tories being racist. They have led with the failings of Johnson and his government, they will continue to lead on the cost of living, on NHS waiting lists, etc. Labour's big successes recently were hitting the Tories on Partygate (leading, in part, to toppling the PM) and a windfall tax (leading to a massive Govt U-turn). None of that strategy changes if the Tories pick Badenoch or a straight white man.
I could name half a dozen senior Labour people on Teesside who I paraphrased. Not sure all of them are even on Twitter.
Of course Labour will go on cost of living - its the economic bomb that will cause riots this winter unless the government do something. My point was simply that as well as this it is much easier to make a loony Tory PM look like a dinosaur than it would be if they elect a symbol of modernity like Badenoch.
@Cookie thanks to your reply yesterday re my woke question. Apologies for not acknowledging at the time. Interesting you were the only reply and you aren't typical of someone who is likely to bang on about this topic. I also noted you posted about your experience of your daughter's before so your experience is particularly interesting. My children are now several years out of school so I might be out of touch but we had no experience of this. Would love to hear from other parents. What does the school say when challenged?
To be clear, this is based on my shock from visiting schools we're considering for our daughter's senior school - she's still only 10. But it's universal: private and state, selective and non-selective. Which is odd, because the primary schools my daughters have been to are not perceptibly more woke than the state primary school I attended 30 years ago. I think it would be quite hard to challenge the school on this. It's easy to criticise the excesses of woke anonymously on an internet forum; much more risky in real life to a school which your children have to attend. You hear stories of quite hostile pushback to that sort of thing, and the last thing a parent wants to do is make life more difficult for their children.
Society can be divided into two types of people
Those who do not believe Woke is a problem = those who have not yet encountered it in work or life
Those who realise Woke is a problem = those who have now encountered it. Parents of kids age 10-15 are a classic case, because they can suddenly see it running rampant in schools
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work or life then like you say? Your statement doesn't make sense therefore does it? Maybe we have encountered it and in most cases find it irritating but irrelevant. As I said yesterday we just think pillocks and move on.
Note I asked you a question about this yesterday and you didn't reply. Only @cookie did and I find his reply disturbing. You keep banging on about it but don't say how it affects your life.
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work
I genuinely don't know what to make of this comment. Every single moderately large company has a social media team who pump out a near continuous stream of vacuous virtue-signalling nonsense on equality, diversity, inclusion etc for every minority group under the sun. It's particularly prevalent in June, when they all change their corporate logos to include rainbows for Pride month. LinkedIn becomes even more unreadable than usual because of the weight of posts on the subject. I absolutely do not understand how anyone could be in the workforce and not have noticed this, somewhere.
If that is the sum total of the WOKE DANGER then who cares? It is a largely pointless exercise in virtue signalling. So a company decides to participate in Pride - where is the threat?
Lets be entirely honest about this - these companies virtue signal a lot of things. Its not that they are asleep for most of the year and only do Pride. So "EUGH THEY'VE CHANGED THEIR LOGO STOP IT" is only attacking the LGBT cause because we don't here anything in protest when they support women or BAME or the environment etc.
Repression of us sexual deviants is still popular apparently. Which is precisely why we need Pride and companies showing their support for it. You guys create the WOKE THREAT you complain of.
No, that's just the tip of the iceberg. My point was specifically that I can't understand how anyone hasn't noticed it, because of the lengths companies go to to make it as visible as possible - the reason being that they don't actually care about any of it, they just really don't want to be on the end of a Twitter dogpile because they aren't participating.
To go back a few comments I have kids aged 10 and 14. In two separate schools. And I can't say I have noticed that Woke is "running rampant" in their schools.
For me - as a Bisexual man who only had the confidence to come out aged 40 - I don't look at companies changing their logos for a rainbow one as anything at all. Pride (happily) has become a mainstream part of our society. As has the push for female equality in pay and conditions, teaching kids about respecting each other and all of the other horrors that make some people shriek in fear.
I do understand. Societal change always provokes a minority who don't like it. Woke is just the latest threat, as the permissive society or women having the vote or the abolition of slavery was. You dislike the modernisation of the way people treat people with more humanity so it gets labelled - woke.
And just as Alf Garnett sat in London there ranting about all the things he didn't agree with changing, so Leon sits somewhere abroad doing the same. Different times, different issues to be unhappy about, same psychology.
Its fine. The woke-worriers will either get on board or they won't. Societal change is happening whether they do or don't.
We're back to the Woke Definition Paradox: wokeism is defined by its detractors as unhealthy obsession with social issues (eg playing identity politics) - it's axiomatic that it is therefore Bad, even if you completely support all the societal changes that . If you define it - as many do - as just being the underlying pace of societal change, then of course you won't see what the fuss is about.
I have no problem at all with people saying "we're spending too much time and money focused on this shit". Because we are. I've sat in company diversity training courses which tick the required boxes but do nothing about diversity. So yes, down with that sort of thing!
But in reality the anti-woke objectors don't want to stop diversity training, they want to stop the march of diversity. They wouldn't be happy if big corporates stopped twatting about changing their logo to rainbow colours to support pride for their own box tick purposes, they just want to stop Pride.
I get it - change can be scary. But you can only shape it, you can't stop it.
Diversity and Inclusion as it is currently being enforced is not about creating a more open and welcoming environment for all.
It is about counting characteristics and seeking to label everyone according to a checklist and to treat them accordingly.
It has nothing to do with celebrating the diversity of each individual and what they can bring. And it is all about creating uniformity and enforced group think
The Pride movement is fracturing because of this. I have sat in Pride meetings where the only thing in the D&I sphere the leadership is worried about is counting the number of black and brown faces in the room.
It is deeply frustrating to see a movement that still matters get torn apart from within by thinking which has stopped celebrating diversity and just wants uniformity.
Exactly. Pronoun badges were handed out at my clients Pride event last week and they had massive rainbow/trans flags on all the tables.
I didn't go.
I always refuse to give pronouns. But I always try to respect the wishes of individuals who make specific requests.
And as for Pride flags....
There is absolutely nothing in the rainbow flag that excluded anyone. With the various new 'progressive' versions are so forced that they have to be updated regularly because a new group wants their space on it.
The traditional 6 colour rainbow flag is a symbol that represents all who wish to be part of it and in no way excludes anyone.
But you aren't allowed to say that in a Pride context anymore as you are labelled as a -phobe .
The odious Braverman was interviewed about her plan for the UK to leave the ECHR .
Apparently even JRM doesn’t think this is a good idea so that tells you how far right she is . Hopefully today sees the end of the truly vile Bravermans leadership ambitions.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
Not endemic. Still pandemic. Very much so.
Its a constant presence now, that's endemic, isn't it?
The time that Covid19 was exponentially spreading to naive communities as a pandemic has long since been and gone. Now its simply waxing and waning ever-present in society just as other endemic viruses do.
No. Worldwide outbreaks of new variants, all still spreading. It's not history as a pandemic.
And most importantly the hospitals are still under pressure, as are public services, all part ofd the same pandemic that started. We're nowhere near a steady state.
The odious Braverman was interviewed about her plan for the UK to leave the ECHR .
Apparently even JRM doesn’t think this is a good idea so that tells you how far right she is . Hopefully today sees the end of the truly vile Bravermans leadership ambitions.
That policy was promoted by Theresa May during the Cameron government.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
A good range of local by-elections today. Con defences in Breckland and Warwickshire, Lab defences in Coventry, Hyndburn, North Tyneside, Wandsworth, and Wirral, and a LD defence in South Somerset. To complete the picture there should have been a contest in Rutland but the Lib Dem was returned unopposed ( and it was a gain from Con).
The odious Braverman was interviewed about her plan for the UK to leave the ECHR .
Apparently even JRM doesn’t think this is a good idea so that tells you how far right she is . Hopefully today sees the end of the truly vile Bravermans leadership ambitions.
Probably. And then one of the others will make her Home Secretary when they win.
Be interesting to see how Lab's polling does over the summer as the Tories spend all their comms bandwidth arguing amongst themselves about who said what on trans rights and who would cut what amount off business tax, whilst the focus groups are packed with voting folk screaming for action on the energy cost crisis looming (see last night's newsnight).
Can any golf fans explain Rory Mcilroy's odds at every single major being so short even though he's not won one since 2014 ?
Fools and their money......
The amount of time BBC radio spends talking about Rory is completely out of proportion to his record. Ever major it's "can Rory win it?" The answer 30 odd times in a row has been "no". Better golfers get far less said about them.
Who are these better golfers?
People like Scheffller, Thomas, Koepka; I think Rory's ranking flatters him, his performance in majors has been quite poor given his talent.
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
I don't think you're this dumb.
I'm not. But only one of us is howling at the moon...
Calling me a moon howler and a mentalist (as someone else did last night) is a really weak argument.
Engage with the substance please.
I have posted quite a lot of substance on this subject recently. To which your level of engagement was "I don't think you're this dumb". I could say the same to you.
You talked about the Beatles and votes for women. That was dumb.
Same goes for the sheep like idiots who go liking your shitposts.
Shitposts is a matter of perspective.
I am describing societal change and the fear this creates in people like your good self. That you don't like this isn't really a surprise is it?
No you aren't, mate. Diminishing returns. Societal change is you can go to prison for b*ggering another bloke - then you can't - then you can marry him. Changes in the law. There has never been a law against a person with a dick asking people to call him her, and nobody actually gives or has ever given a fuck. It's as interesting and important as someone telling you they are vegan. Hence the militants pushing it to the edge cases, at the expense of every single birth/biological woman ever born, in order to provoke a reaction.
So we need to marginalise and ostracise these militants. Freedom and Liberty can't be imposed over the rights of others. The row over the extremist end of the trans rights movement can't be used to simply scrap trans rights, nor to scrap women's safe places and their own rights.
The problem is finding a balance. My dismissal of the "anti-woke" debate is that it isn't really interested in feminism, it just wants to use it to bash the trannies with.
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
Right idea - wrong person being asked to drop out....
And it's too late now for this round anyway Suella will be out at 3pm.
It shows Truss’ weakness that Frost is begging others to drop out and support her.
All the momentum is with Kemi.
Can anyone who knows more about Tory politics than me rank the remaining six Left to Right? (Or should that be soft-right to hard-right?)
As far as I can see (L-R) it is Tugendhat, Mordaunt, Sunak, Truss, Badenoch, Braverman. Mordaunt is the one I find hardest to position in the spectrum, which perhaps explains her success.
Mordaunt will win this and then there will be terrible buyer's remorse.
Yeah that is my assumption. Sunak is their best candidate (as is clear from the polling vs Labour) but is suffering from being a known quality. Tories are projecting ideal qualities onto blank slates like Mordaunt and Badenoch, but it is highly likely that they turn out to be far weaker than Sunak. I mean, Mordaunt may turn out to be brilliant but on a balance of probabilities I would say she won't.
It all depends on whom she brings in around her. Leadership is not about having all the answers; it is about providing the framework for others to do so. I have a good feeling about Penny Mordaunt on this.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
Not endemic. Still pandemic. Very much so.
Its a constant presence now, that's endemic, isn't it?
The time that Covid19 was exponentially spreading to naive communities as a pandemic has long since been and gone. Now its simply waxing and waning ever-present in society just as other endemic viruses do.
No. Worldwide outbreaks of new variants, all still spreading. It's not history as a pandemic.
And most importantly the hospitals are still under pressure, as are public services, all part ofd the same pandemic that started. We're nowhere near a steady state.
New variants will spread for the rest of time too. That's entirely normal with endemic viruses, they evolve into new variants, that's why we get a new flu vaccine every year instead of just reusing last year's one again.
This is our steady state.
We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem. ~ Douglas Adams
The 'woke' movement is not a continuation of a tendency towards greater liberalism in the cultural and social sphere. It presents itself this way, and people support it for these reasons, but it is actually a profound rupture with this tradition and its roots in the enlightenment. It seeks to do away with facts, logic and argument, in favour of emotion and belief. It is a manifestation of the post truth worldview that began to appear around the time of the first scottish independence referendum, then again with Brexit and the election of Trump. As I have suggested before, in a lot of ways it is just a left wing reaction to the politics of Brexit, but has evolved to have a tribal, pseudo religious quality; claiming to resolve all injustice in society. It seems to me that the endgame of woke is the undoing of the enlightenment.
Not being flippant, but I thought it was undone by the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars?
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
What we are dealing with these days is at best a refusal to engage in rational argument and at worst a demand that anything you feel should be respected and protected and that you don't even want to hear about things outside of your echo chamber.
This is very different to rock and roll or the suffrage movement.
The concepts of no platforming, 'safe spaces', online bubbles have made debate impossible meaning that views are not only going unchallenged but met with an absolute refusal to engage with anything with which you disagree.
Those are very unwelcome additions to our society alongside the denial of evidence and facts.
We can set aside the nutters at either end of the spectrum who refuse to engage in rational argument. As we can the nutters on any issue you care to choose - they always exist.
On a couple of the points you mention - safe spaces is an interesting one. 25 years ago at Sheffield University there was a massive row on this subject, specifically over the Union's "Women's Safety Bus". A group of students objected to the union spending money on transporting drunk female students home. "Where's my free ride home" etc. That there had been a spate of attacks on female students didn't seem to bother them - the bus was aptly named.
As for online bubbles making debate impossible, that is a function of online. The nutters at either end of the spectrum we set aside? They're all online, they're mad as hell and the SHOUT AND SHOUT like they are the majority view. Short of abolishing social media, best we can do is ignore them and get on with our lives.
That's not what "safe spaces" mean, in woke terms. It's emotional rather than physical safety - it means a place where people can be assured of not hearing anything that might upset them.
I think you have just deftly demonstrated the difference between "woke" and reality. Women's refuges are not a hypothetical thing that exists only to protect their right to be feminists. Its to stop their violent menfolk beating and raping the shit out of them. Again.
Actually what? When the left talks about "safe spaces", they do not mean - or at least do not primarily mean - women's refuges. You must know this.
Comments
https://youtube.com/shorts/Kd_AAStPWbY?feature=share
Same goes for the sheep like idiots who go liking your shitposts.
You are viewing everything through a set of filters rather than looking at the broader picture.
It’s not especially hard.
It's difficult to remember it was a week and less than 3 hours ago that Boris said he was going.
·
1m
It is a striking measure of the churn and change in the Conservative Party that although there were 10 candidates in the 2019 leadership election, and there are 8 in the current one, only three years later, just one person contested both - and he went out in the first round.
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Lets hope we’ve seen the peak now.
(see https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=nation&areaName=England for the gory details.)
On a couple of the points you mention - safe spaces is an interesting one. 25 years ago at Sheffield University there was a massive row on this subject, specifically over the Union's "Women's Safety Bus". A group of students objected to the union spending money on transporting drunk female students home. "Where's my free ride home" etc. That there had been a spate of attacks on female students didn't seem to bother them - the bus was aptly named.
As for online bubbles making debate impossible, that is a function of online. The nutters at either end of the spectrum we set aside? They're all online, they're mad as hell and the SHOUT AND SHOUT like they are the majority view. Short of abolishing social media, best we can do is ignore them and get on with our lives.
But ignoring that she may have ideas but do their resonate with voters who aren't Tory party members and what can she deliver in 2 years that gives her votes in 2024.
All I can see is a junior developer who has picked up a spec and run with it before sanity checking whether the suggested solution matches the actual real world problem.
NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
https://twitter.com/benrileysmith/status/1547533183947784192
And it's too late now for this round anyway Suella will be out at 3pm.
Do you want to tell the actual birth women who have actually been raped on single sex wards that they are fringe issues and symptoms of moral panic? And do you want to claim that the rapes occurred because of people who claim that there are women with penises, or people who deny this (or say OK there might be, but we need special rules about what wards they get put on)?
I approve either way, having seen some… interesting electronics specs in my time.
I would make the lack of planning a campaign a large negative not a credit..
I didn't go.
When the modern driver is good for almost 400 yards, they either need to build bigger courses or make the drivers go only 300 yards.
Of all the six she's the one I get the impression actually may lack some self belief.
She's poor because deep down I reckon she knows she isn't up to it.
It's looking very much as though we've peaked as of the last week in infections and can expect hospitalisations to fall going forwards (put it this way - I'll be very disappointed if we don't see lower admissions compared to the previous weekday by the end of the week).
This isn't to say it's all okay. Not by a long shot - more and more areas have declared ambulance emergencies. But we're going to have to find a way of living with that. It's one reason I'm very interested to hear what the candidates have to say about the health system versus endemic covid (so far, I'm hearing crickets).
All the momentum is with Kemi.
Now that might be a dis-service and she was rapidly promoted based on talent but....
Personalised exemptions for the Queen in her private capacity have been written into more than 160 laws since 1967, granting her sweeping immunity from swathes of British law – ranging from animal welfare to workers’ rights. Dozens extend further immunity to her private property portfolio, granting her unique protections as the owner of large landed estates.
More than 30 different laws stipulate that police are barred from entering the private Balmoral and Sandringham estates without the Queen’s permission to investigate suspected crimes, including wildlife offences and environmental pollution – a legal immunity accorded to no other private landowner in the country.
Police are also required to obtain her personal agreement before they can investigate suspected offences at her privately owned salmon and trout fishing business on the River Dee at Balmoral, where anglers are charged up to £630 a day to fish.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jul/14/queen-immunity-british-laws-private-property?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Change has always started with groups pushing at the boundaries, and over time, some of those boundaries become mainstream thinking, while others remain on the fringe, or are rejected. The friction would be partly contained, and the stronger ideas would trickle into the mainstream gradually.
With social media speeding up the way opinions are shared and amplifying the voices of those who are shouting loudest, these arguments are entering the mainstream a little too quickly, and often at the stage where they're still contentious.
Positive change may happen more quickly, which is a good thing (I don't think anyone can look back and say that the change in attitudes to homosexuality over the last few decades has been anything but positive, and would have been better if it had happened more quickly), but there's also going to be a hell of a lot more anger as issues are worked out in a much more public space.
But what is your objection? That companies are making a bit of a mess of changing their attitudes? Or that they are changing their attitudes at all? We need to be promoting diversity because in far too many places its mysteriously always middle-class white men who make progress. Is that because white men are the best candidates for these jobs? Or because a narrow selectorate hire people who look and talk like themselves?
My own industry has had massive problems with this. "What happened to hiring dolly birds" I was asked in my first sales job when I was on a trade show stand. A pronounced lack of female senior managers, or anyone at all in sales, yet category management is full of women many of whom tried and failed to get hired to do sales.
I've always managed to apply the "I don't care" rule to my hiring. Yes I have absolutely hired white men when they have been the best candidate. But I hired a lot of women where their brilliance was clear but they would get ignored. Cue digs that I saw myself as Hugh Heffner (surrounding myself with brilliant women).
So maybe what people are so wound up about is the reverse of what they think it is. Easy for middle class white men to describe an environment of predominantly middle class white men as an "open and welcoming environment". Less so if you are effectively excluded from that because of class, gender, race etc etc etc
The Racing Post's top golf man, Steve Palmer, has tipped Rory.
https://www.racingpost.com/sport/the-open/steve-palmers-open-championship-predictions-best-bets-free-golf-betting-tips/567586
My problem with woke is that nothing has changed.
One of the organisations I belong to supplies us with a super-abundance of woke tweets and emails every day, and there are a super-abundance of committees & administrators busy examining equality & diversity & inclusion.
We have a 100 per cent white committee of the most highly privileged in the institution reading Eddo-Lodge.
However, nothing has actually changed, e.g., if you are a woman doing a pretty menial job at the bottom, you are still pretty much ignored despite all the tweets to the contrary.
Wokery has become the Glass Bead Game.
I am describing societal change and the fear this creates in people like your good self. That you don't like this isn't really a surprise is it?
That's how they make their money.
1. Tom
2. Rishi
3. Penny
4. Liz
5. Kemi
6. Suella
But Rishi/Penny probably interchangeable.
Mordaunt is the one I find hardest to position in the spectrum, which perhaps explains her success.
Andrew Lilico
@andrew_lilico
·
6m
Lacks calibre; makes grave errors; over-reaches; lacks depth. Maybe if she got her head down & achieved something she might be an option in a decade's time, but for now I don't get why anyone rates her. Good hair isn't enough for a PM.
https://twitter.com/andrew_lilico/status/1547538092923523072
There is a horrible hectoring tone about many of the left on this subject. Badenoch as PM would put the shits up them so hard they will barely be able to mention cost of living problems because they're so busy fighting their own culture war.
Lots of major courses are now par 71 or par 70, which makes them look as if they are tougher to score on as makes par for the tournament 4 or 8 shots less, often by making a 510 yd hole a par 4. In terms of numbers of shots to win even if this week ends up at 20 under that is 268. 10 USPGAs alone have been won in fewer shots. The US Open is the tough, brutal major but they should not all be like that.
It has nothing to do about removing barriers and improving the culture and everything to do with stripping people of their individuality and treating them as part of an artificially constructed group.
Learning to value each individual for the qualities they possess and the potential they have is true inclusion. Only viewing them through the lens of intersectionality does not respect the individual just what others think they represent.
As for the members, it becomes self fulfilling- they will be hearing he has bo chance with members and even those who like him will begin to doubt.
Hes toast.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
Again, all you have are insinuations, innuendos, and tropes.
Shows how the Tory Party has moved in the past seven years.
The time that Covid19 was exponentially spreading to naive communities as a pandemic has long since been and gone. Now its simply waxing and waning ever-present in society just as other endemic viruses do.
The only remarkable thing about it is that there's another Tory listed to the left of the poundshop Gordon Brown.
Of course Labour will go on cost of living - its the economic bomb that will cause riots this winter unless the government do something. My point was simply that as well as this it is much easier to make a loony Tory PM look like a dinosaur than it would be if they elect a symbol of modernity like Badenoch.
And as for Pride flags....
There is absolutely nothing in the rainbow flag that excluded anyone. With the various new 'progressive' versions are so forced that they have to be updated regularly because a new group wants their space on it.
The traditional 6 colour rainbow flag is a symbol that represents all who wish to be part of it and in no way excludes anyone.
But you aren't allowed to say that in a Pride context anymore as you are labelled as a -phobe .
Apparently even JRM doesn’t think this is a good idea so that tells you how far right she is . Hopefully today sees the end of the truly vile Bravermans leadership ambitions.
And most importantly the hospitals are still under pressure, as are public services, all part ofd the same pandemic that started. We're nowhere near a steady state.
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Camperdown, North Tyneside - Labour defence: C, G, L, LD, UKIP
Overton, Hyndburn - Labour defence: C, L, I, RUK
Liscard, Wirral - Labour defence: C, G, L, LD
Arden, Warwickshire - Conservative defence: C, L, LD
Binley and Willenhall, Coventry - Labour defence: C, L, Alliance for democracy and freedom, Coventry Citizens, TUSC
Thetford Boudica, Breckland - Conservative defence:C, L
Tooting Broadway, Wandsworth - Labour defence: C, G, L, LD
Brympton, South Somerset - Lib Dem defence:C, G, L, LD, I
Be interesting to see how Lab's polling does over the summer as the Tories spend all their comms bandwidth arguing amongst themselves about who said what on trans rights and who would cut what amount off business tax, whilst the focus groups are packed with voting folk screaming for action on the energy cost crisis looming (see last night's newsnight).
The problem is finding a balance. My dismissal of the "anti-woke" debate is that it isn't really interested in feminism, it just wants to use it to bash the trannies with.
This is our steady state.
We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem. ~ Douglas Adams