Forza now is centre right, certainly compared to Lega and Fratelli
So you have the opposition centre-right grouping (FdL prospered because they were the main opposition party - most of the other parties were in the government coalition) joining forces with two centre-right groupings which were in the Government.
It would be like an opposition Conservative party deciding to form an electoral alliance with a governing Conservative Party.
Are FdL going to be able to convincingly attack a Government in which its allies were both members and supporters? Is Meloni going to be able to keep the party together IF they get into Government or is there going to be yet another schism and a new opposition centre-right grouping formed?
Forza and Lega have now both withdrawn from the Draghi government, if we had PR like Italy we could well have 2 or even 3 main rightwing parties like they do. You could have a Hunt/Sunak led centre right party, a Truss led harder right party and a Farage led populist nationalist right party
The left would also fragment. Corbyn style left, new labour style social democrats and just a conventional left wing party.
I agree. You would have a Corbyn hard left party, a Brownite/Starmerite Labour Party and a Blairite New Labour party too led by someone like David Miliband or Wes Streeting.
So you would have at least 6 main UK parties rather than the current 2 + the LDs, the Greens + Scottish and Welsh nationalists and NI parties all with more seats as well
3 Cons and 3 Labs = 6.
You've lost the LibDems by my calculations.
Bit careless.
I added the LDs too but they are not a main UK party on the level of Labour and the Conservatives.
Only 2 parties have over 50 seats or 10% of seats in Parliament in the UK with FPTP. In Germany which has PR 5 parties have over 50 seats, in Italy which has PR 4 parties have over 50 seats, in Spain which has PR 4 parties have over 10% of seats. In Israel and Ireland which have PR 3 parties have over 10% of seats. In New Zealand which has PR there are 2 main parties and another 2 parties just short of 10% of the seats.
In the UK only the SNP of the minor parties gets anywhere close to 10% or more of seats, Parliament under FPTP is dominated by Labour and the Tories
Yes fair enough. But if the Cons and Lab splintered into aggregate 6, I reckon the LDs (if they stayed intact) might well become a 'main party' in this new more thinly spread political landscape.
Perhaps one day we'll get to find out what would actually happen. I'd vote for PR, I think.
@Richard_Tyndall 's idea of abolishing parties is more attractive than PR.
You need parties to unite legislators of similar ideology and so voters know what they are voting for and to form an effective government
You do not need parties in their current for to do that. Parties should win over support amongst MPs through strength of argument not threats and bribes. Make every vote in Parliament a free vote. Allow MPs to represent their constituents not their party.
You can't have an effective government if every vote on legislation is a free vote. Voters also elect MPs on the basis of a party manifesto
Maybe not as effective in your eyes but far better in mine.
A family member is on this flight from Dublin to Boston and I've just noticed that it's done a weird change of direction as it gets close to Boston. Would it be because of bad weather?
A family member is on this flight from Dublin to Boston and I've just noticed that it's done a weird change of direction as it gets close to Boston. Would it be because of bad weather?
Russia starting to make a tactical withdrawal from the west of the Dnipro river starting with their command staff. That won't make those left on the ground a tad nervous, no sirree.
Hold on a sec. Aren’t you to this day a vocal apologist for the clusterf*cl of a govt that was the Coalition?
Which cut our strategic natural gas storage off at the knees.
That cow towed to the Russian regime and willingly accepted its money (even after the latter invaded Crimea and used radiological weapons on British soil), rather than underlining to allies the collective danger of them relying on Russian hydrocarbons?
Which failed to move forward domestic nuclear, so in awe were they with achieving a superficially balanced budget and a pathetic schoolboy crush on the Chinese Communist Party, leading to a dishonest sleight of hand to shift the construction liability off balance sheet and recklessly hand the Chinese a foothold in the most key and sensitive of industries?
That spurned tidal? Set solar back years? Which imposed “windfall” taxes on the North Sea which achieved nothing apart from disincentivising investment?
Rather than snide smugly about a Brexit wedge issue such as this tweet, I personally am ready to give Truss a chance. She can’t do worse than those chimps “The Quad”, who to a man have shown their true colours since leaving office with the company they’ve kept. Chinese autocrats, Russian oligarchs, crooked commodity barons and Mark Zuckerburg. Not sure which is scoring worst on that front!
If she turns out to be shit then we’ll all vote against her (or not vote). But she deserves as much of a chance as any other incoming Prime Minister from any party, until her record in office says otherwise.
Off topic, but have you seen the latest analyses of the Calvine photo?
Increasingly looks like it is not a “rock in a loch”. Mick West is struggling to debunk it. More eye witness testimony has emerged
So we are left with two hypotheses
1. It is a massively elaborate hoax over decades
2. It shows a genuine and anomalous object in the sky over Scotland. Which could be: what?
It’s a little maddening because we do not have all the data. There’s five photos missing. We don’t have anything more than brief written eye witness testimony from anonymous sources so it’s very difficult to assess their credibility. And there’s no military report or telemetrics, from the plane/planes or ground radar, if indeed there even were any such reports written of such an incident. The only public witness is second hand in the form of Nick Pope, and he may not be a credible witness because he’s been making a career since leaving the MOD out of being “Britain’s Fox Molder”.
So it’s an order of magnitude less compelling than the US Navy cases, where anyone that looks objectively at all the available data in the round (including the behaviour of those with top clearance that have seen evidence we have not) can only conclude something very strange indeed is going on.
And yet… the very long period of secrecy for Calvine (extended in 2020 for another 52 years!) is intriguing. As are the declassified documents that showed that certain cabinet members received a briefing. And there’s an apparent letter to the US Air Force online (I have not verified the source), advising them of the incident, with what it must be said are curiously worded comments, apparently confirming the photo’s legitimacy:
What’s most curious of all, is that the negatives were apparently returned to the Daily Record of Glasgow and they still did not publish them! Tabloids knowingly publish all manner of nonsense, from toast that looks like the messiah to Elvis alive in Marbella. It is said that the editor at the time (now deceased) was on the D-Notice Committee. A thicker plot than it might seem perhaps.
So as you say, we are either left with an elaborate hoax, with the two “witnesses” embarrassed that the MoD ever got involved and wanting to stay in obscurity. Or, they really did see something amazing. As with the public US Navy cases, it’s difficult to see how this could be allied tech, there are joint chiefs and clear processes to ensure the secrecy of such programmes is preserved. This story leaked out easily and was given legs by the MOD staff involved in investigating it because they apparently were not being told to this day of any black ops project.
You know where I lean. But this is not the smoking gun that convinces any waverers. If anything it feels like the sort of case that gets given a wave of publicity only to be subsequently debunked, to take attention from the extraordinary evidence, statements and political / academic processes going on in the US.
Do you read Fortean Times at all? Piece in the latest issue very scathing about the uap nonsense from the states. Essentially saying all the ‘actors’ have long running interest in the area.
You may be right, but you also know which way I lean too!
Sorry never heard of it. My interest in this topic only arose in 2020 when a highly rationalist friend who helped design the FLIR pod software said he has “no better explanation (of the Pentagon UAP videos) than aliens”.
After that I soaked up all the public testimonies I could find from of those present. Fravor, Graves, Dietrich etc… And I’ve watched hour upon hour of Lue Elizondo and Christopher Mellon, who are more responsible for this wave of political interest than anyone else. And I have to say, I take them all at face value.
What’s clear is that the weight of the US security establishment does so too. We’ve seen admissions of such by not only more Jr congresspeople but acting Gang of 8 members and multiple past intelligence chiefs. And of course, we’ve got people like Avi Loeb from Harvard, Garry Nolan from Stanford and Bill Nelson at NASA now acting as the faces of science / academia in pursuing the topic.
To be honest I rule out the secret tech explanation. There are far too many contradictions for that to be true. I think either a small group of people have successfully hijacked the narrative of almost the entire US security establishment in a conspiracy that would be too implausible for a movie but might just be true in real life. Or it’s as simple as it looks, in the vastness of space and time someone else out there found our little corner and is bit by bit revealing themselves in a form of slow exposure therapy.
Fortean Times is the go to for all things Fortean (a bit tautological), but basically ghosts, ufos, cryptozoology, esp etc. Anything weird. Elizondo has a long interest in ufos etc. Essentially I have been interested in this stuff since I was 10, and I just don’t see anything new here, and that is the Fortean Times opinion too.
Studying the evidence of the last 60 years or more, the sociology of flying saucers into ufos into UAPs etc and the types of alien etc are fascinating. Many reports are obvious lies, hoaxes or simple misidentifications. There are some examples with no conclusive proof, but that’s not to say it’s inexplicable.
If you are interested in the wider world of wierd, I’d suggest trying Fortean times.
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I've been reading the Fortean Times for 30 years and indeed, as an esoteric flint knapper, I have actually written for them multiple times. I know the editor, subs, writers, etc
If they are dismissing this latest UAP flap then they are simply wrong. This is several orders of magnitude bigger than anything we have seen for 50 years, and, possibly, ever
Comments
https://www.flightradar24.com/EIN1GX/2d10d58b
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/14/putin-war-europe-ukraine-west
“Get Putin. Take him down. Lock him up. That’s a strategic aim all could and should energetically pursue.”
Simples.
I expect Truss will be doing another u-turn soon unless she wants to look like she’s on the side of the energy companies .
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I've been reading the Fortean Times for 30 years and indeed, as an esoteric flint knapper, I have actually written for them multiple times. I know the editor, subs, writers, etc
If they are dismissing this latest UAP flap then they are simply wrong. This is several orders of magnitude bigger than anything we have seen for 50 years, and, possibly, ever
I don’t see that. In what way is this different?