Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
It is quite a leap from 'things are a tad sub-optimal, no?' to 'if only poloticiand weren't on holiday everything would be fine'. It's not an argument I've heard majy making. Don't get me wrong: I'm an enthusiastic democrat and I think politicians perform a useful function in respresenting their electorate's views and in making the machine work. But there's a view of the state that it is powered by sheer effort from MPs, and if only they worked harder things would be better - as if it were all powered by some gigantic hamster wheel on which they must all constantly pedal. Quite clearly, this isn't the case.
Someone cleaned out nearly all the Victoria plums off the tree I was given for my 70th b'day 9 years ago. The other day I counted forty, now there are just four. Mightily pissed off. Good morning fellow misanthropes.
Bustards.
That was an autocorrect but who knows? Squirrels?
I considered squirrels, which there are hereabouts, but there's no evidence at all of debris - half-eaten fruit, stones etc around the tree.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
He spent a goodly amount of time telling people they shouldn't get rid of him immediately because there was a country to run.
As far as I know no one has asked at the leader hustings how they will cope with a Trump fascist America that is pulling out of NATO and supporting Putin.
Some civil servants might want to have a very close read of the fine print of the Trident contract.
If the United States were to withdraw their cooperation completely, the UK nuclear capability would probably have a life expectancy measured in months rather than years.
We could create our own nuclear weapons pretty quickly if needed, as could Israel and Japan
What are your qualifications and knowledge on fusion weapons and delivery systems to make such a rash statement. Do you know you could launch from existing submarines for instance? If not could you build 3 submarines (the minimum needed to maintain a full time deterent) 'quickly'. How you have the arrogance to come out with statements when you have no knowledge whatsoever is beyond me
If the alternative is risking nuclear destruction by Putin with no deterrent response of course, the government would direct huge resources to it
What resources? What management skills does the current string of Tory governments have?
We are the 5th largest economy in the world, national security is the first job of any government. Billions and billions of pounds would be diverted to it if the US withdrew from NATO
It'd take about 5-10 years - or 20 if the Tories and MoD were involved.
Depends how many funds and scientists are involved
You don't get it. You don't need scientists. You need engineers. Project managers. Trainers.
As I said we have over 5 million engineers
I'vew already pointed ouyt you are counting toilet cleaners, delivery men, secretaries and accountants as "engineers". And you are ignoring that.
The depressing thing is that HYUFD is quite possibly representative of the way a large number of our elected representative are able to reason about complicated issues they don't really understand.
It's not the ignorance, but rather the absurd overconfidence in their own judgment that is most worrying.
The thing is having explained why what he proposed is physically not possible, over and over again, he still persists. We all make assumptions that others can point out are wrong and we learn from that. He never does.
He pulls stuff from the internet and never looks at the context or whether it is just crap. The classic was the national IQ tables. When shown they were nonsense for 3rd world countries he refused to accept they were wrong, even though they put the national average IQ for certain countries at the IQ of a typical 5 - 7 year old and argued that was why these countries were so poor and went down the racist rabbit hole of black people are just thick.
That is not arguing they are wrong for nation, that is you arguing ideologically they are wrong.
I also never said black people were thick, you by implication just did. Of course the Far East nations not the white nations have the highest iq
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
There's no such constitutional role as "caretaker" Prime Minister. You're the Prime Minister or you're not. "Polls" do not force a PM not to act. That's a concious decision. Not acting because you think your colleagues don't want you to is a decision. He has decisions to make and the decision he's made is to do nothing. Because he was always unsuited to the job.
If vegans are going to go down the will no one think of the insects route there will be quite a change in their modus vivendi, I would imagine.
Take @Dura_Ace for example. He will have to start driving everywhere at 14 mph to ensure any bugs that happen upon his windscreen are gently ushered off and onto a safe space on the central reservation rather than squished into a messy pulp and then heartlessly disposed of with a swipe of the windscreen wipers.
Not so many insects to kill these days. All part of the environmental apocalypse.
Oh Microsoft! (I'm rarely using Microsoft stuff in the past few years - just had to download Teams for a meeting).
Procedure: 1. Download and start Teams 2. Need to sign in. I've got an old Skype account, so I'll use that, but can't remember password, from years ago, so reset 3. Get reset link in email, reset password 4. Try to login - get told this is first time you signed in on this device, we need to send you an email code (fine, but a bit dumb - I just reset the password using the same email, if I'm a bad actor then I've already compromised the email account so this is pointless). 5. Enter the reset code. 6. Before going any further, they want to verify I have access to the email address entered, so they send me a code (the previous two codes I entered that were sent to the email address were not enough, clearly) 7. Click on link in email, which takes me to a web browser sign in page. Sign in, all fine. This hasn't changed the prompt in Teams to verify my email 8. Restart Teams, am now finally able to log in. I have received six emails from MS during this process (not all requied any action)
Sweet mother of Jesus, does no one at MS learn about if statements?
Its not if statements that are the issue but the lack of a status flag saying - this email address was validated 2 minutes ago so don't both revalidating it.
And all those routines are completely separate to each other - if you were using Zoom you would still have had the same number of emails...
There was some (rather odd) glee yesterday that No was leading Yes by 51% to 49%.
Perhaps not so gleeful now that the subsidiary finding is published:
- “If Liz Truss becomes PM?”
Yes 52% No 48%
Why? Truss has made clear she will never allow indyref2 on her watch anyway.
If Starmer gets in ironically he was the leader Scots thought least likely to lead to independence even if he allowed indyref2 due to reliance on the SNP in a hung parliament
Truss has made many things clear in the past and then changed.
Who knows?She might decide a closer relationship with the EU is what's required if only to watch Leon go ballistic
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
He spent a goodly amount of time telling people they shouldn't get rid of him immediately because there was a country to run.
Indeed he did make that argument and they disregarded and went against his advice.
That was the right thing to do in my opinion, I was calling for Boris to go too, but you can't say "Boris you're not fit to run the country" then when he resigns say "hey, why aren't you running the country?"
He's resigned already, you got what you wanted already! He's a caretaker PM now and its for the next PM to be making decisions, not him.
If vegans are going to go down the will no one think of the insects route there will be quite a change in their modus vivendi, I would imagine.
Take @Dura_Ace for example. He will have to start driving everywhere at 14 mph to ensure any bugs that happen upon his windscreen are gently ushered off and onto a safe space on the central reservation rather than squished into a messy pulp and then heartlessly disposed of with a swipe of the windscreen wipers.
Jainist Digambara monks carry a peacock feather whisk (the pichi) to brush insects from their path when they walk. It's one of the three material possessions they have; the others being a water jug (kamadalu) and Jainist holy texts (shastra).
Oh Microsoft! (I'm rarely using Microsoft stuff in the past few years - just had to download Teams for a meeting).
Procedure: 1. Download and start Teams 2. Need to sign in. I've got an old Skype account, so I'll use that, but can't remember password, from years ago, so reset 3. Get reset link in email, reset password 4. Try to login - get told this is first time you signed in on this device, we need to send you an email code (fine, but a bit dumb - I just reset the password using the same email, if I'm a bad actor then I've already compromised the email account so this is pointless). 5. Enter the reset code. 6. Before going any further, they want to verify I have access to the email address entered, so they send me a code (the previous two codes I entered that were sent to the email address were not enough, clearly) 7. Click on link in email, which takes me to a web browser sign in page. Sign in, all fine. This hasn't changed the prompt in Teams to verify my email 8. Restart Teams, am now finally able to log in. I have received six emails from MS during this process (not all required any action)
Sweet mother of Jesus, does no one at MS learn about if statements?
The chances are that they all work in different depts and use the same standard procedure for verification, but none of the depts talk to the others, so each verification is a standalone event and not something that is shared
As far as I know no one has asked at the leader hustings how they will cope with a Trump fascist America that is pulling out of NATO and supporting Putin.
Some civil servants might want to have a very close read of the fine print of the Trident contract.
If the United States were to withdraw their cooperation completely, the UK nuclear capability would probably have a life expectancy measured in months rather than years.
We could create our own nuclear weapons pretty quickly if needed, as could Israel and Japan
What are your qualifications and knowledge on fusion weapons and delivery systems to make such a rash statement. Do you know you could launch from existing submarines for instance? If not could you build 3 submarines (the minimum needed to maintain a full time deterent) 'quickly'. How you have the arrogance to come out with statements when you have no knowledge whatsoever is beyond me
If the alternative is risking nuclear destruction by Putin with no deterrent response of course, the government would direct huge resources to it
It doesn't matter what resources you apply you can't develop this stuff quickly. It takes a long time to design and build a submarine and you need 3 as a minimum. Stuff will go wrong. Just look at the development time currently. It is in years and decades and there is always a critical path that can't be shortened by additional resources.
FYI the pension group I represent on a voluntary basis are the scientists from the privatised part of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Many of them worked on this stuff in the 60s and 70s. These people don't exist anymore here, but more importantly the facilities have been sold off and are now science parks. So before you start you have a huge capital build, which takes time (many years).
If the US withdrew from NATO the entire defence and most of the engineering and manufacturing industry in the UK would be directed to the task
For crying out loud do you not understand critical path analysis?
It takes 9 months to produce a baby. If you put 9 women on it you don't get a baby in 1 month.
If it takes 10 men a month to build a house do you think 600 men can build a house by lunchtime?
You ever seen those videos of the Amish putting up a barn?
Yes very good. I have and it is very impressive. However that is a very good example isn't it because they are superb at working to the critical path. Twice as many Amish would put up two barns in the same time, but they couldn't get one barn put up in half the time.
A simple fact that HYUFD can't understand.
Well guess you will just have to be vaporised and destroyed in a Putin nuclear missile attack then given you are clearly not willing to support the necessary national defence measures in the event of a US withdrawal from NATO
I never said I wasn't. I was just pointing out your saying hat we can build this stuff quickly because we have 5 million (dishwasher) engineers is utter nonsense.
Read Jim Miller's Post earlier, it could certainly be done in a year
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
There's no such constitutional role as "caretaker" Prime Minister. You're the Prime Minister or you're not. "Polls" do not force a PM not to act. That's a concious decision. Not acting because you think your colleagues don't want you to is a decision. He has decisions to make and the decision he's made is to do nothing. Because he was always unsuited to the job.
There absolutely is a constitutional role as a caretaker Prime Minister and that is Boris right now.
Our constitution is unwritten, the fact that Boris has been said to be a caretaker PM makes him a caretaker PM. The principle of a caretaker government is not new and has been around for many years, Brown post-2010 election was a caretaker PM too until Cameron became PM.
He has no decisions to make, unless they can't wait for the new PM, because he's caretaker.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done", the country voted for someone (it could have been anyone) to get Brexit done. Same with beating Corbyn. Any Cons leader would have beaten Corbyn because Corbyn.
And yet even now you cheer him on after he disappointed you once you had your lockdown revelation.
People who actually know him could have told you all this (and many did, publicly) but no you were a cheerleader for him then and you are, just like a useful idiot, cheerleading for him now.
Even...deep breath...even the mighty @HYUFD has stopped praising him because he can see what has been happening and the type of person Boris is. But you continue to fly the flag for him for some unfathomable, bizarre reason.
There was some (rather odd) glee yesterday that No was leading Yes by 51% to 49%.
Perhaps not so gleeful now that the subsidiary finding is published:
- “If Liz Truss becomes PM?”
Yes 52% No 48%
Overwhelming. Unionists may as well give up given they might trail by a (checks post) massive 2% when a contingent event happens. I'm sure Sturgeon would love to ride into a referendum with that kind of commanding lead. All over for the (checks latest vocab) "yoons".
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done", the country voted for someone (it could have been anyone) to get Brexit done. Same with beating Corbyn. Any Cons leader would have beaten Corbyn because Corbyn.
And yet even now you cheer him on after he disappointed you once you had your lockdown revelation.
People who actually know him could have told you all this (and many did, publicly) but no you were a cheerleader for him then and you are, just like a useful idiot, cheerleading for him now.
Even...deep breath...even the mighty @HYUFD has stopped praising him because he can see what has been happening and the type of person Boris is. But you continue to fly the flag for him for some unfathomable, bizarre reason.
Have a word with yourself.
I don't cheer him on, I'm cheering Truss on.
I don't want Boris making decisions, he's gone, we got rid of him. I want Truss making the decisions.
If vegans are going to go down the will no one think of the insects route there will be quite a change in their modus vivendi, I would imagine.
Take @Dura_Ace for example. He will have to start driving everywhere at 14 mph to ensure any bugs that happen upon his windscreen are gently ushered off and onto a safe space on the central reservation rather than squished into a messy pulp and then heartlessly disposed of with a swipe of the windscreen wipers.
Jainist Digambara monks carry a peacock feather whisk (the pichi) to brush insects from their path when they walk. It's one of the three material possessions they have; the others being a water jug (kamadalu) and Jainist holy texts (shastra).
It's a lifestye that is not without appeal.
What do they do about protecting all the bacteria?
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
Listening this morning It has become civil war between Truss and Sunak supporters and frankly for this conservative it is embarrassing and totally counter productive and yet the 1922 committee decided this utterly absurd timeline was a good idea
We are watching the destruction of the conservative party, and unless they have a collective ceasefire and unite behind the new leader than Starmer is going to be the next pm in 2024
It's a tough one to watch, even as an sort of Conservative in exile. Loyalty has always been the secret weapon of the Conservative party. You back the leader until that's unsustainable, then you ruthlessly send them to live on a farm.
That plan has rather gone askew in recent years. One manifestation of that has been the half-assed decapitation of BoJo; there's much too much of a risk that he's going to hang around undead, like Nearly Headless Nick in Harry Potter. At the moment, Truss is having to indulge that; partly because she needs the votes, partly because she didn't turn on him during the great collapse.
The other manifestation is that the degree of anger expressed over the campaign isn't going to be easy to heal. The Sunakites do seem to think that Truss is a dangerous nutter, in which case it's not going to be credible for them to serve under her. And they may well be accurate in their diagnosis of the situation.
The only government regeneration that has really worked in my lifetime was Thatcher-to-Major. (Yes, May-to-Johnson was followed by a big win, but look around you, look at the mess unleashed.) There were several factors. Major was a really good politician, at least in the early days. There was an obvious policy change to mark a clean break (Poll Tax). And the campaign was short and good-natured enough that it was obvious that all three candidates were going to get good jobs afterwards.
Talking of decline, Italy is in a bit of a state. Even Florence is looking, in many places, quite ragged and down at heel, and Tuscany is one of the richer regions, and Florence usually a jewel in that crown
Prices fine
There is lots of graffiti and litter. Beautiful buildings decay. The illegal migrants are obvious. O tempora O mores. I know lots of this is standard for Italy but.. this feels worse than usual In short, I can see why the Italians are about to elect a hard right, post fascist government I’m off to Rome today and will report whether the capital is in a similar mood
That's what 25 years of basically no economic growth does for you. We are going the same way after 25 years of Blairite economics.
It’s probably more to do with endemic corruption, widespread organised crime and industrial scale levels of tax avoidance (which are all intertwined, of course). Italy’s basic problem is that most Italians don’t really care that much about Italy. Their loyalties are far more local.
Another problem is that La vita is still dolce for enough Italians, such that nothing gets sorted. As Berlusconj infamously said “are the restaurants empty? Are Italian women not beautiful?” Italy is still a notably pleasant and agreeable place to live if you can insulate yourself from the many issues. However it seems as if that insulation is becoming more difficult: people don’t vote for ex-fascists if they are happy
Florence, Italy feels poorer than plenty of places in Spain
I haven’t been to Italy for a while, but Spain has certainly got much wealthier over the years I’ve been going there and since I lived there. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s it was still a genuinely poor country in large part. Things didn’t work and no-ine expected them to. That’s changed. People can see and feel the improvements, so despite all the continuing challenges and problems there’s generally a sense of common investment. The one place that I think has seen some noticeable recent decline is Barcelona. Public spaces there are definitely grimier and petty crime is a huge problem. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Catalan regional government’s entire focus is on issues that have nothing to do with day-to-day living - and that it depends on votes cast outside of Barcelona.
Urban life - in big cities - is in decline across much of Europe. For reasons. An unhappy echo of the Roman Empire where urbanism declined before the Empire itself toppled
It’s worse in the USA
But maybe we will bounce back…
It’s much worse in much of the US, for sure.
Measuring urban decline is a matter of timescale. Most cities in the UK are probably a lot more vibrant, safer, better organised and cleaner than they were 30 years ago (and a lot less affordable), but may have gone downhill over the last five to 10 years or so.
Talking of decline, Italy is in a bit of a state. Even Florence is looking, in many places, quite ragged and down at heel, and Tuscany is one of the richer regions, and Florence usually a jewel in that crown
Prices are lower than you’d expect in a tourist mecca. The posh cafes are desperate for business. The cheap pizzerias are doing fine
There is lots of graffiti and litter. Beautiful buildings decay. The illegal migrants are obvious. O tempora O mores. I know lots of this is standard for Italy but.. this feels worse than usual
In short, I can see why the Italians are about to elect a hard right, post fascist government
I’m off to Rome today and will report whether the capital is in a similar mood
It certainly looks like Italians will elect a rightwing coalition government of Brothers of Italy, Lega Nord and Forza Italia next month whether Brothers of Italy comes first or not
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
He is out of a job in a couple of weeks. Spending his last few weeks in office actually doing the job and then having a holiday would have been sensible. Instead his parting memory for us all is him twatting about in a greek supermarket whilst shit in the sea makes so much of England's coastline a no-go zone.
Being out of a job in a couple of weeks makes "gardening leave" more reasonable, not less.
What "doing the job" should he be doing that wouldn't conflict with the principle of being only a caretaker PM that has no authority to make long-term decisions?
He is the Prime Minister. There is no gardening leave. Even during an election campaign the PM and government ministers remain in charge of the government and have to actually do things whether they are likely to leave office shortly or not.
What could he be doing? Getting the Whitehall machine working on a range of scenarios and options so that when Truss is appointed PM there are already thought through and costed options available for her to pick through.
Supposedly - and frankly laughably - the only reason we have a vaccine is because of Boris Johnson "getting all the big calls right". So the idea that he shouldn't be allowed to do anything now just makes the "big calls" argument look like the crock of shit it is.
There was some (rather odd) glee yesterday that No was leading Yes by 51% to 49%.
Perhaps not so gleeful now that the subsidiary finding is published:
- “If Liz Truss becomes PM?”
Yes 52% No 48%
The obvious thing about that poll is that the percentages for Yes went up in all three cases. When voters were reminded that Johnson was the PM, and for the hypothetical that either Sunak or Truss were PM. The Tories remain the strongest argument for Scottish independence - but we knew that anyway.
As far as I can tell the poll didn't ask the more interesting hypothetical question: what the referendum voting intention would be if the UK government was a Labour government led by Keir Starmer.
SNP rhetoric leads me to believe that they expect it would be a lot less favourable for Independence, which is what I expect. If there wasn't a difference then that would be an interesting polling result.
If vegans are going to go down the will no one think of the insects route there will be quite a change in their modus vivendi, I would imagine.
Take @Dura_Ace for example. He will have to start driving everywhere at 14 mph to ensure any bugs that happen upon his windscreen are gently ushered off and onto a safe space on the central reservation rather than squished into a messy pulp and then heartlessly disposed of with a swipe of the windscreen wipers.
Jainist Digambara monks carry a peacock feather whisk (the pichi) to brush insects from their path when they walk. It's one of the three material possessions they have; the others being a water jug (kamadalu) and Jainist holy texts (shastra).
It's a lifestye that is not without appeal.
What do they do about protecting all the bacteria?
Our daughter aged about six was found tiptoeing around the kitchen so as not to tread on the invisible bacteria she had just learned about.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done", the country voted for someone (it could have been anyone) to get Brexit done. Same with beating Corbyn. Any Cons leader would have beaten Corbyn because Corbyn.
And yet even now you cheer him on after he disappointed you once you had your lockdown revelation.
People who actually know him could have told you all this (and many did, publicly) but no you were a cheerleader for him then and you are, just like a useful idiot, cheerleading for him now.
Even...deep breath...even the mighty @HYUFD has stopped praising him because he can see what has been happening and the type of person Boris is. But you continue to fly the flag for him for some unfathomable, bizarre reason.
Have a word with yourself.
49% of Conservative voters still want Boris as PM, just 20% want Sunak and only 18% Truss
There was some (rather odd) glee yesterday that No was leading Yes by 51% to 49%.
Perhaps not so gleeful now that the subsidiary finding is published:
- “If Liz Truss becomes PM?”
Yes 52% No 48%
Why? Truss has made clear she will never allow indyref2 on her watch anyway.
If Starmer gets in ironically he was the leader Scots thought least likely to lead to independence even if he allowed indyref2 due to reliance on the SNP in a hung parliament
Perhaps - and its just possible - the thought processes of voters aren't limited only to the latest replacement Tory MP for their final few months in office.
You cling to Starmer's occasional statements on this like a life jacket. As if you care what he thinks or trust what he says.
There was some (rather odd) glee yesterday that No was leading Yes by 51% to 49%.
Perhaps not so gleeful now that the subsidiary finding is published:
- “If Liz Truss becomes PM?”
Yes 52% No 48%
Why? Truss has made clear she will never allow indyref2 on her watch anyway.
If Starmer gets in ironically he was the leader Scots thought least likely to lead to independence even if he allowed indyref2 due to reliance on the SNP in a hung parliament
Perhaps - and its just possible - the thought processes of voters aren't limited only to the latest replacement Tory MP for their final few months in office.
You cling to Starmer's occasional statements on this like a life jacket. As if you care what he thinks or trust what he says.
Well as there will never be an indyref2 allowed by a Conservative PM it doesn't matter how popular they are in Scotland.
Starmer might allow indyref2 though if he needs SNP support in a hung parliament so his support in Scotland is more relevant
Someone cleaned out nearly all the Victoria plums off the tree I was given for my 70th b'day 9 years ago. The other day I counted forty, now there are just four. Mightily pissed off. Good morning fellow misanthropes.
Bustards.
That was an autocorrect but who knows? Squirrels?
If I were Liz Truss's new Home Secretary, I might be mildly concerned by social media suggestions that theft and especially shoplifting are justified in the cost of living crisis. If I were Vladimir Putin's Secretary of State for Troll Farms, I'd not be displeased. If I were forced to choose between nicking and starving, well, there but for the grace of God...
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
There's no such constitutional role as "caretaker" Prime Minister. You're the Prime Minister or you're not. "Polls" do not force a PM not to act. That's a concious decision. Not acting because you think your colleagues don't want you to is a decision. He has decisions to make and the decision he's made is to do nothing. Because he was always unsuited to the job.
There absolutely is a constitutional role as a caretaker Prime Minister and that is Boris right now.
Our constitution is unwritten, the fact that Boris has been said to be a caretaker PM makes him a caretaker PM. The principle of a caretaker government is not new and has been around for many years, Brown post-2010 election was a caretaker PM too until Cameron became PM.
He has no decisions to make, unless they can't wait for the new PM, because he's caretaker.
That's rather the point, though. Most people would agree that it would be odd if Johnson did something that wasn't urgent - announced a sweeping local government reorganisation, say. But most people do feel that the energy price surge is really worrying, and Johnson sailing off on two holidays while his potential successors slag each other off doesn't look good.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
He is out of a job in a couple of weeks. Spending his last few weeks in office actually doing the job and then having a holiday would have been sensible. Instead his parting memory for us all is him twatting about in a greek supermarket whilst shit in the sea makes so much of England's coastline a no-go zone.
Being out of a job in a couple of weeks makes "gardening leave" more reasonable, not less.
What "doing the job" should he be doing that wouldn't conflict with the principle of being only a caretaker PM that has no authority to make long-term decisions?
He is the Prime Minister. There is no gardening leave. Even during an election campaign the PM and government ministers remain in charge of the government and have to actually do things whether they are likely to leave office shortly or not.
What could he be doing? Getting the Whitehall machine working on a range of scenarios and options so that when Truss is appointed PM there are already thought through and costed options available for her to pick through.
Supposedly - and frankly laughably - the only reason we have a vaccine is because of Boris Johnson "getting all the big calls right". So the idea that he shouldn't be allowed to do anything now just makes the "big calls" argument look like the crock of shit it is.
Bad example there Rochdale, during an election campaign the PM and Government Ministers are in a caretaker role then too, just as Boris is now, and are not supposed to make long-term decisions then either.
Absolutely the Whitehall machine should be and I'm sure is working on a range of scenarios to be presented to Truss on day one of her being PM. It will then be her responsibility to make any "big calls" or otherwise that she wants to make, just as it was Boris's responsibility during the pandemic leading to the vaccines. The reasons we got the vaccines first, to the chagrin of our neighbours, absolutely was because of the big calls made earlier in the pandemic but Boris has neither the right nor the responsibility to make such calls now. He only has the right to make caretaker calls, not big long-term calls.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done"
Still a member of the EU, are we?
Not being a member of the EU is not getting Brexit done. Anyone can leave the EU. It is how you leave the EU that counts.
Oh Microsoft! (I'm rarely using Microsoft stuff in the past few years - just had to download Teams for a meeting).
Procedure: 1. Download and start Teams 2. Need to sign in. I've got an old Skype account, so I'll use that, but can't remember password, from years ago, so reset 3. Get reset link in email, reset password 4. Try to login - get told this is first time you signed in on this device, we need to send you an email code (fine, but a bit dumb - I just reset the password using the same email, if I'm a bad actor then I've already compromised the email account so this is pointless). 5. Enter the reset code. 6. Before going any further, they want to verify I have access to the email address entered, so they send me a code (the previous two codes I entered that were sent to the email address were not enough, clearly) 7. Click on link in email, which takes me to a web browser sign in page. Sign in, all fine. This hasn't changed the prompt in Teams to verify my email 8. Restart Teams, am now finally able to log in. I have received six emails from MS during this process (not all requied any action)
Sweet mother of Jesus, does no one at MS learn about if statements?
Its not if statements that are the issue but the lack of a status flag saying - this email address was validated 2 minutes ago so don't both revalidating it.
And all those routines are completely separate to each other - if you were using Zoom you would still have had the same number of emails...
Well, you need both, don't you. Flag and then IF that only calls for validation if lacking the flag.
Haven't encountered this with Zoom (although I set that account up ~2.5 years ago, may have changed) or, to this level, anywhere else. Normally it's one verification and off you go.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
He is out of a job in a couple of weeks. Spending his last few weeks in office actually doing the job and then having a holiday would have been sensible. Instead his parting memory for us all is him twatting about in a greek supermarket whilst shit in the sea makes so much of England's coastline a no-go zone.
Being out of a job in a couple of weeks makes "gardening leave" more reasonable, not less.
What "doing the job" should he be doing that wouldn't conflict with the principle of being only a caretaker PM that has no authority to make long-term decisions?
He is the Prime Minister. There is no gardening leave. Even during an election campaign the PM and government ministers remain in charge of the government and have to actually do things whether they are likely to leave office shortly or not.
What could he be doing? Getting the Whitehall machine working on a range of scenarios and options so that when Truss is appointed PM there are already thought through and costed options available for her to pick through. .
If he were doing that, would we even know about it?
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
Listening this morning It has become civil war between Truss and Sunak supporters and frankly for this conservative it is embarrassing and totally counter productive and yet the 1922 committee decided this utterly absurd timeline was a good idea
We are watching the destruction of the conservative party, and unless they have a collective ceasefire and unite behind the new leader than Starmer is going to be the next pm in 2024
It's a tough one to watch, even as an sort of Conservative in exile. Loyalty has always been the secret weapon of the Conservative party. You back the leader until that's unsustainable, then you ruthlessly send them to live on a farm.
That plan has rather gone askew in recent years. One manifestation of that has been the half-assed decapitation of BoJo; there's much too much of a risk that he's going to hang around undead, like Nearly Headless Nick in Harry Potter. At the moment, Truss is having to indulge that; partly because she needs the votes, partly because she didn't turn on him during the great collapse.
The other manifestation is that the degree of anger expressed over the campaign isn't going to be easy to heal. The Sunakites do seem to think that Truss is a dangerous nutter, in which case it's not going to be credible for them to serve under her. And they may well be accurate in their diagnosis of the situation.
The only government regeneration that has really worked in my lifetime was Thatcher-to-Major. (Yes, May-to-Johnson was followed by a big win, but look around you, look at the mess unleashed.) There were several factors. Major was a really good politician, at least in the early days. There was an obvious policy change to mark a clean break (Poll Tax). And the campaign was short and good-natured enough that it was obvious that all three candidates were going to get good jobs afterwards.
The campaign was short and good-natured because the only people voting were MPs so any differences in opinion were kept to within the confines of the Parliamentary Tory party.
You simply can't have a good-natured debate when the general public and the media are involved because all differences will be emphasised.
However, that doesn't explain why this election is quite so vicious - it's almost like one of the candidates knows the other is utterly mad and hasn't grasped that there is really no money given the forthcoming issues.
How could Sunak accept a job in Truss’s cabinet if he thinks her economic plans are going to be a disaster ?
How could Liz Truss have stayed in the Cabinet if she thought the Chancellor's economic policies were disastrous? That is why governments embrace collective responsibility. Argue in Cabinet; agree outside.
There was some (rather odd) glee yesterday that No was leading Yes by 51% to 49%.
Perhaps not so gleeful now that the subsidiary finding is published:
- “If Liz Truss becomes PM?”
Yes 52% No 48%
Overwhelming. Unionists may as well give up given they might trail by a (checks post) massive 2% when a contingent event happens. I'm sure Sturgeon would love to ride into a referendum with that kind of commanding lead. All over for the (checks latest vocab) "yoons".
And yet Sturgeon wants to ride into a referendum and the cowards and hypocrites of the Union are running a mile from one. Strange..
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done"
Still a member of the EU, are we?
Not being a member of the EU is not getting Brexit done. Anyone can leave the EU. It is how you leave the EU that counts.
"Anyone can leave the EU" and yet nobody did during the 2017-19 Parliament.
Leaving the EU is what counted, that was done. Brexit is done.
What we do in the future is up to us now, that's the whole point of taking back control. We elect the MPs to Parliament to decide our laws, not the EU Commission etc making decisions or laws.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done"
Still a member of the EU, are we?
Not being a member of the EU is not getting Brexit done.
Um, yeah, it literally is. "Get Brexit Done" was a slogan because the lying Remainer parliament of 2017-19 had spent its entire existence blocking it.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
There's no such constitutional role as "caretaker" Prime Minister. You're the Prime Minister or you're not. "Polls" do not force a PM not to act. That's a concious decision. Not acting because you think your colleagues don't want you to is a decision. He has decisions to make and the decision he's made is to do nothing. Because he was always unsuited to the job.
There absolutely is a constitutional role as a caretaker Prime Minister and that is Boris right now.
Our constitution is unwritten, the fact that Boris has been said to be a caretaker PM makes him a caretaker PM. The principle of a caretaker government is not new and has been around for many years, Brown post-2010 election was a caretaker PM too until Cameron became PM.
He has no decisions to make, unless they can't wait for the new PM, because he's caretaker.
Again, you have no grasp of the UK's constitution. None whatsoever. Our consitution might be uncodified, but it's written in loads of places, from the Bill of Rights through to the European Communities (Withdrawal) Act and many weird and wonderful paces inbetween. Traditionally a PM (normally) held that title by virtue of being First Lord of the Treasury - the head of the commission exercising the ancient office of Lord High Treasurer established (in writing) in 1714.
However, on 20 March 1905 Edward VII issued a Royal Warrant recognising the office of Prime Minister. Teddy Seven (or probaby a secretary) wrote that down and, when he wrote it down, he didn't mention a "caretaker" role. There is no "caretaker" role in the constitution. "Unwritten" or "uncodified doesn't mean you can make one up.
If vegans are going to go down the will no one think of the insects route there will be quite a change in their modus vivendi, I would imagine.
Take @Dura_Ace for example. He will have to start driving everywhere at 14 mph to ensure any bugs that happen upon his windscreen are gently ushered off and onto a safe space on the central reservation rather than squished into a messy pulp and then heartlessly disposed of with a swipe of the windscreen wipers.
Jainist Digambara monks carry a peacock feather whisk (the pichi) to brush insects from their path when they walk. It's one of the three material possessions they have; the others being a water jug (kamadalu) and Jainist holy texts (shastra).
It's a lifestye that is not without appeal.
What do they do about protecting all the bacteria?
Bacteria? They all get jobs in politics, the gravy train for life. That is all the protection they need...
There was some (rather odd) glee yesterday that No was leading Yes by 51% to 49%.
Perhaps not so gleeful now that the subsidiary finding is published:
- “If Liz Truss becomes PM?”
Yes 52% No 48%
Overwhelming. Unionists may as well give up given they might trail by a (checks post) massive 2% when a contingent event happens. I'm sure Sturgeon would love to ride into a referendum with that kind of commanding lead. All over for the (checks latest vocab) "yoons".
And yet Sturgeon wants to ride into a referendum and the cowards and hypocrites of the Union are running a mile from one. Strange..
Unionists won a referendum less than a generation ago nationalists refuse to respect the result of
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
There's no such constitutional role as "caretaker" Prime Minister. You're the Prime Minister or you're not. "Polls" do not force a PM not to act. That's a concious decision. Not acting because you think your colleagues don't want you to is a decision. He has decisions to make and the decision he's made is to do nothing. Because he was always unsuited to the job.
There absolutely is a constitutional role as a caretaker Prime Minister and that is Boris right now.
Our constitution is unwritten, the fact that Boris has been said to be a caretaker PM makes him a caretaker PM. The principle of a caretaker government is not new and has been around for many years, Brown post-2010 election was a caretaker PM too until Cameron became PM.
He has no decisions to make, unless they can't wait for the new PM, because he's caretaker.
That's rather the point, though. Most people would agree that it would be odd if Johnson did something that wasn't urgent - announced a sweeping local government reorganisation, say. But most people do feel that the energy price surge is really worrying, and Johnson sailing off on two holidays while his potential successors slag each other off doesn't look good.
But his potential successors are literally debating how to tackling the energy price surge. The voters in the leadership campaign are taking that into consideration when they vote.
Boris as caretaker has no right to pre-empt what the new PM decides on that. If people wanted Boris to make this call, they should have kept him as PM, but he's resigned so that's over.
There was some (rather odd) glee yesterday that No was leading Yes by 51% to 49%.
Perhaps not so gleeful now that the subsidiary finding is published:
- “If Liz Truss becomes PM?”
Yes 52% No 48%
Why? Truss has made clear she will never allow indyref2 on her watch anyway.
If Starmer gets in ironically he was the leader Scots thought least likely to lead to independence even if he allowed indyref2 due to reliance on the SNP in a hung parliament
Perhaps - and its just possible - the thought processes of voters aren't limited only to the latest replacement Tory MP for their final few months in office.
You cling to Starmer's occasional statements on this like a life jacket. As if you care what he thinks or trust what he says.
Well as there will never be an indyref2 allowed by a Conservative PM it doesn't matter how popular they are in Scotland.
Just as well.
Net favourability
Nicola Sturgeon +9 Anas Sarwar -4 Keir Starmer -14 Douglas Ross -37 Rishi Sunak -40 Liz Truss -45 The Oaf -60
Scottish National Party +5 Scottish Green Party +/-0 Scottish Labour -3 Scottish Liberal Democrats -13 Scottish Conservative & Unionist Party -38
Someone cleaned out nearly all the Victoria plums off the tree I was given for my 70th b'day 9 years ago. The other day I counted forty, now there are just four. Mightily pissed off. Good morning fellow misanthropes.
My plums are looking good after a judicious watering nightly for a week. These are Syston Whites.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
There's no such constitutional role as "caretaker" Prime Minister. You're the Prime Minister or you're not. "Polls" do not force a PM not to act. That's a concious decision. Not acting because you think your colleagues don't want you to is a decision. He has decisions to make and the decision he's made is to do nothing. Because he was always unsuited to the job.
There absolutely is a constitutional role as a caretaker Prime Minister and that is Boris right now.
Our constitution is unwritten, the fact that Boris has been said to be a caretaker PM makes him a caretaker PM. The principle of a caretaker government is not new and has been around for many years, Brown post-2010 election was a caretaker PM too until Cameron became PM.
He has no decisions to make, unless they can't wait for the new PM, because he's caretaker.
Again, you have no grasp of the UK's constitution. None whatsoever. Our consitution might be uncodified, but it's written in loads of places, from the Bill of Rights through to the European Communities (Withdrawal) Act and many weird and wonderful paces inbetween. Traditionally a PM (normally) held that title by virtue of being First Lord of the Treasury - the head of the commission exercising the ancient office of Lord High Treasurer established (in writing) in 1714.
However, on 20 March 1905 Edward VII issued a Royal Warrant recognising the office of Prime Minister. Teddy Seven (or probaby a secretary) wrote that down and, when he wrote it down, he didn't mention a "caretaker" role. There is no "caretaker" role in the constitution. "Unwritten" or "uncodified doesn't mean you can make one up.
If it's "written in loads of places" (it is, though some of it is literally unwritten) then you can't take one of those places and claim it defines the entirety of the role of PM.
There was some (rather odd) glee yesterday that No was leading Yes by 51% to 49%.
Perhaps not so gleeful now that the subsidiary finding is published:
- “If Liz Truss becomes PM?”
Yes 52% No 48%
Why? Truss has made clear she will never allow indyref2 on her watch anyway.
If Starmer gets in ironically he was the leader Scots thought least likely to lead to independence even if he allowed indyref2 due to reliance on the SNP in a hung parliament
Perhaps - and its just possible - the thought processes of voters aren't limited only to the latest replacement Tory MP for their final few months in office.
You cling to Starmer's occasional statements on this like a life jacket. As if you care what he thinks or trust what he says.
Well as there will never be an indyref2 allowed by a Conservative PM it doesn't matter how popular they are in Scotland.
Starmer might allow indyref2 though if he needs SNP support in a hung parliament so his support in Scotland is more relevant
Sure. And thats the answer to your question "why" are Scottish voters more in favour of independence with Truss as PM. Because they know they will be tret with the sneering disdain you endlessly display on this subject and they are sick of it.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done", the country voted for someone (it could have been anyone) to get Brexit done. Same with beating Corbyn. Any Cons leader would have beaten Corbyn because Corbyn.
And yet even now you cheer him on after he disappointed you once you had your lockdown revelation.
People who actually know him could have told you all this (and many did, publicly) but no you were a cheerleader for him then and you are, just like a useful idiot, cheerleading for him now.
Even...deep breath...even the mighty @HYUFD has stopped praising him because he can see what has been happening and the type of person Boris is. But you continue to fly the flag for him for some unfathomable, bizarre reason.
Have a word with yourself.
49% of Conservative voters still want Boris as PM, just 20% want Sunak and only 18% Truss
There aren't as many Conservative voters as there used to be. In the last 7 by-elections the Conservative vote dropped from 186,000 at the General Election to 80,000 in the by-elections - Quite a lot of the 100,000 missing voters left because of Boris Johnson.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
There's no such constitutional role as "caretaker" Prime Minister. You're the Prime Minister or you're not. "Polls" do not force a PM not to act. That's a concious decision. Not acting because you think your colleagues don't want you to is a decision. He has decisions to make and the decision he's made is to do nothing. Because he was always unsuited to the job.
There absolutely is a constitutional role as a caretaker Prime Minister and that is Boris right now.
Our constitution is unwritten, the fact that Boris has been said to be a caretaker PM makes him a caretaker PM. The principle of a caretaker government is not new and has been around for many years, Brown post-2010 election was a caretaker PM too until Cameron became PM.
He has no decisions to make, unless they can't wait for the new PM, because he's caretaker.
Again, you have no grasp of the UK's constitution. None whatsoever. Our consitution might be uncodified, but it's written in loads of places, from the Bill of Rights through to the European Communities (Withdrawal) Act and many weird and wonderful paces inbetween. Traditionally a PM (normally) held that title by virtue of being First Lord of the Treasury - the head of the commission exercising the ancient office of Lord High Treasurer established (in writing) in 1714.
However, on 20 March 1905 Edward VII issued a Royal Warrant recognising the office of Prime Minister. Teddy Seven (or probaby a secretary) wrote that down and, when he wrote it down, he didn't mention a "caretaker" role. There is no "caretaker" role in the constitution. "Unwritten" or "uncodified doesn't mean you can make one up.
I have a better grasp of the UK's constitution than you do it seems. The Cabinet Manual is part of our "unwritten constitution" that is written and absolutely does place restrictions on caretaker governments.
If you dispute that, take it up with them, because its been true for years now.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done"
Still a member of the EU, are we?
Not being a member of the EU is not getting Brexit done. Anyone can leave the EU. It is how you leave the EU that counts.
"Anyone can leave the EU" and yet nobody did during the 2017-19 Parliament.
Leaving the EU is what counted, that was done. Brexit is done.
What we do in the future is up to us now, that's the whole point of taking back control. We elect the MPs to Parliament to decide our laws, not the EU Commission etc making decisions or laws.
Most laws are passed by Ministers acting through Secondary Legislation passed by Parliament. That was true of nearly all laws that originated in the EU (the European Communities Act being the Primary Legislation) and is equally true now.
It's a tough one to watch, even as an sort of Conservative in exile. Loyalty has always been the secret weapon of the Conservative party. You back the leader until that's unsustainable, then you ruthlessly send them to live on a farm.
Team Truss sent this out not an hour ago
Liz is the right person to take our Party and country forward because she is the best placed to bring what we need above all else – unity.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done", the country voted for someone (it could have been anyone) to get Brexit done. Same with beating Corbyn. Any Cons leader would have beaten Corbyn because Corbyn.
And yet even now you cheer him on after he disappointed you once you had your lockdown revelation.
People who actually know him could have told you all this (and many did, publicly) but no you were a cheerleader for him then and you are, just like a useful idiot, cheerleading for him now.
Even...deep breath...even the mighty @HYUFD has stopped praising him because he can see what has been happening and the type of person Boris is. But you continue to fly the flag for him for some unfathomable, bizarre reason.
Have a word with yourself.
He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else.
Allowing the Downing Street parties wasn't good for Boris.
Protecting Paterson wasn't good for Boris.
If Boris had acted in his own self-interest he wouldn't have been forced out.
Instead he stupidly and weakly pandered to others to his own detriment.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done"
Still a member of the EU, are we?
Not being a member of the EU is not getting Brexit done. Anyone can leave the EU. It is how you leave the EU that counts.
"Anyone can leave the EU" and yet nobody did during the 2017-19 Parliament.
Leaving the EU is what counted, that was done. Brexit is done.
What we do in the future is up to us now, that's the whole point of taking back control. We elect the MPs to Parliament to decide our laws, not the EU Commission etc making decisions or laws.
Most laws are passed by Ministers acting through Secondary Legislation passed by Parliament. That was true of nearly all laws that originated in the EU (the European Communities Act being the Primary Legislation) and is equally true now.
Spectaculaly failing to understand what being in the EU meant, I assume deliberately so.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
He is out of a job in a couple of weeks. Spending his last few weeks in office actually doing the job and then having a holiday would have been sensible. Instead his parting memory for us all is him twatting about in a greek supermarket whilst shit in the sea makes so much of England's coastline a no-go zone.
Being out of a job in a couple of weeks makes "gardening leave" more reasonable, not less.
What "doing the job" should he be doing that wouldn't conflict with the principle of being only a caretaker PM that has no authority to make long-term decisions?
He is the Prime Minister. There is no gardening leave. Even during an election campaign the PM and government ministers remain in charge of the government and have to actually do things whether they are likely to leave office shortly or not.
What could he be doing? Getting the Whitehall machine working on a range of scenarios and options so that when Truss is appointed PM there are already thought through and costed options available for her to pick through.
Supposedly - and frankly laughably - the only reason we have a vaccine is because of Boris Johnson "getting all the big calls right". So the idea that he shouldn't be allowed to do anything now just makes the "big calls" argument look like the crock of shit it is.
Bad example there Rochdale, during an election campaign the PM and Government Ministers are in a caretaker role then too, just as Boris is now, and are not supposed to make long-term decisions then either.
Absolutely the Whitehall machine should be and I'm sure is working on a range of scenarios to be presented to Truss on day one of her being PM. It will then be her responsibility to make any "big calls" or otherwise that she wants to make, just as it was Boris's responsibility during the pandemic leading to the vaccines. The reasons we got the vaccines first, to the chagrin of our neighbours, absolutely was because of the big calls made earlier in the pandemic but Boris has neither the right nor the responsibility to make such calls now. He only has the right to make caretaker calls, not big long-term calls.
Its a great example. Alastair Darling in his book writes about still being Chancellor and still managing the economy both during an election campaign he was sure they would lose and *afterwards* in the interregnum before a new government was appointed.
There is no caretaker Chancellor or PM or Minister of the Privvy - you are in office until you are not. And as for your hope that Whitehall is working on stuff, I understand from this morning's news that Truss will borrow money to pay for your tax cut without any OBR or Treasury analysis of how stupid that is because it would take too long. So they aren't doing anything of the sort. The government has literally ceased to function.
There was some (rather odd) glee yesterday that No was leading Yes by 51% to 49%.
Perhaps not so gleeful now that the subsidiary finding is published:
- “If Liz Truss becomes PM?”
Yes 52% No 48%
Overwhelming. Unionists may as well give up given they might trail by a (checks post) massive 2% when a contingent event happens. I'm sure Sturgeon would love to ride into a referendum with that kind of commanding lead. All over for the (checks latest vocab) "yoons".
There used to be an element of the SNP that were all for waiting for the settled will of the Scottish people before going for another referendum (60%, or thereabouts, maybe stable leads of 55%). Angus Robertson, I believe, was one. The idea was that good governance would make the argument. I admit I quite like the philosophy, but as a Unionist I would! I think Sturgeon is instinctively in this camp also.
The rest would be happy for 50%+1 vote, and that's, barring any change to the rules, their right to continue on that basis. As we've all seen, however, embarking on a difficult and divisive political project with only whisker of a majority is a recipe for all kinds of difficulty. Going for a referendum where at best 52% are supportive of the outcome could be a real strategic blunder for the SNP and potentially cause problems for an iScotland.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
There's no such constitutional role as "caretaker" Prime Minister. You're the Prime Minister or you're not. "Polls" do not force a PM not to act. That's a concious decision. Not acting because you think your colleagues don't want you to is a decision. He has decisions to make and the decision he's made is to do nothing. Because he was always unsuited to the job.
There absolutely is a constitutional role as a caretaker Prime Minister and that is Boris right now.
Our constitution is unwritten, the fact that Boris has been said to be a caretaker PM makes him a caretaker PM. The principle of a caretaker government is not new and has been around for many years, Brown post-2010 election was a caretaker PM too until Cameron became PM.
He has no decisions to make, unless they can't wait for the new PM, because he's caretaker.
Again, you have no grasp of the UK's constitution. None whatsoever. Our consitution might be uncodified, but it's written in loads of places, from the Bill of Rights through to the European Communities (Withdrawal) Act and many weird and wonderful paces inbetween. Traditionally a PM (normally) held that title by virtue of being First Lord of the Treasury - the head of the commission exercising the ancient office of Lord High Treasurer established (in writing) in 1714.
However, on 20 March 1905 Edward VII issued a Royal Warrant recognising the office of Prime Minister. Teddy Seven (or probaby a secretary) wrote that down and, when he wrote it down, he didn't mention a "caretaker" role. There is no "caretaker" role in the constitution. "Unwritten" or "uncodified doesn't mean you can make one up.
If it's "written in loads of places" (it is, though some of it is literally unwritten) then you can't take one of those places and claim it defines the entirety of the role of PM.
No. None of it is "literally unwritten". All of it is written down somewhere waiting for someone to compile it into a codified whole. Even constitutional conventions have to be written down somewhere (eg. Bagehot) otherwise my my constitutional law exam would have been an oral.
It's a tough one to watch, even as an sort of Conservative in exile. Loyalty has always been the secret weapon of the Conservative party. You back the leader until that's unsustainable, then you ruthlessly send them to live on a farm.
Team Truss sent this out not an hour ago
Liz is the right person to take our Party and country forward because she is the best placed to bring what we need above all else – unity.
It's terrifying...
How is it terrifying? They are incompetent proto-fascists. They will be sending political dissenters to internment camps on rail-replacement bus services.
Belgium did fine without a government for the best part of two years. There are other cases too. Let Boris have his holidays and long live the interregnum –– to cries of "oh no, Putin/Covid/cost-of-living etc, something must be done".
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done", the country voted for someone (it could have been anyone) to get Brexit done. Same with beating Corbyn. Any Cons leader would have beaten Corbyn because Corbyn.
And yet even now you cheer him on after he disappointed you once you had your lockdown revelation.
People who actually know him could have told you all this (and many did, publicly) but no you were a cheerleader for him then and you are, just like a useful idiot, cheerleading for him now.
Even...deep breath...even the mighty @HYUFD has stopped praising him because he can see what has been happening and the type of person Boris is. But you continue to fly the flag for him for some unfathomable, bizarre reason.
Have a word with yourself.
49% of Conservative voters still want Boris as PM, just 20% want Sunak and only 18% Truss
Belgium did fine without a government for the best part of two years. There are other cases too. Let Boris have his holidays and long live the interregnum –– to cries of "oh no, Putin/Covid/cost-of-living etc, something must be done".
Some people are only happy when they are complaining. These same people who are complaining that Boris isn't making decisions would be complaining if he was, on the grounds that he has no right to do so because he's already resigned.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
He is out of a job in a couple of weeks. Spending his last few weeks in office actually doing the job and then having a holiday would have been sensible. Instead his parting memory for us all is him twatting about in a greek supermarket whilst shit in the sea makes so much of England's coastline a no-go zone.
Being out of a job in a couple of weeks makes "gardening leave" more reasonable, not less.
What "doing the job" should he be doing that wouldn't conflict with the principle of being only a caretaker PM that has no authority to make long-term decisions?
He is the Prime Minister. There is no gardening leave. Even during an election campaign the PM and government ministers remain in charge of the government and have to actually do things whether they are likely to leave office shortly or not.
What could he be doing? Getting the Whitehall machine working on a range of scenarios and options so that when Truss is appointed PM there are already thought through and costed options available for her to pick through.
Supposedly - and frankly laughably - the only reason we have a vaccine is because of Boris Johnson "getting all the big calls right". So the idea that he shouldn't be allowed to do anything now just makes the "big calls" argument look like the crock of shit it is.
Bad example there Rochdale, during an election campaign the PM and Government Ministers are in a caretaker role then too, just as Boris is now, and are not supposed to make long-term decisions then either.
Absolutely the Whitehall machine should be and I'm sure is working on a range of scenarios to be presented to Truss on day one of her being PM. It will then be her responsibility to make any "big calls" or otherwise that she wants to make, just as it was Boris's responsibility during the pandemic leading to the vaccines. The reasons we got the vaccines first, to the chagrin of our neighbours, absolutely was because of the big calls made earlier in the pandemic but Boris has neither the right nor the responsibility to make such calls now. He only has the right to make caretaker calls, not big long-term calls.
Its a great example. Alastair Darling in his book writes about still being Chancellor and still managing the economy both during an election campaign he was sure they would lose and *afterwards* in the interregnum before a new government was appointed.
There is no caretaker Chancellor or PM or Minister of the Privvy - you are in office until you are not. And as for your hope that Whitehall is working on stuff, I understand from this morning's news that Truss will borrow money to pay for your tax cut without any OBR or Treasury analysis of how stupid that is because it would take too long. So they aren't doing anything of the sort. The government has literally ceased to function.
No shit Sherlock the Government has ceased to function, it's ceased to as it's a caretaker Government awaiting the new Government to make the decisions.
Boris warned everyone that if he was forced out then that would lead to a vacuum until the new leader was elected. He was right, wasn't he?
Absolutely the Chancellor can take day to day decisions but decisions about this winter's fuel etc isn't a day to day decision it is a long term one that is the responsibility of the next Prime Minister.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done"
Still a member of the EU, are we?
Not being a member of the EU is not getting Brexit done.
Um, yeah, it literally is. "Get Brexit Done" was a slogan because the lying Remainer parliament of 2017-19 had spent its entire existence blocking it.
For someone who is a leaver and therefore presumably a big fan of democratic accountability you seem to have precisely zero understanding of how exactly this "lying Remainer parliament" came into being. Do you think it was wafted here from paradise (or Luton Airport, for that matter)?
As far as I know no one has asked at the leader hustings how they will cope with a Trump fascist America that is pulling out of NATO and supporting Putin.
Some civil servants might want to have a very close read of the fine print of the Trident contract.
If the United States were to withdraw their cooperation completely, the UK nuclear capability would probably have a life expectancy measured in months rather than years.
We could create our own nuclear weapons pretty quickly if needed, as could Israel and Japan
What are your qualifications and knowledge on fusion weapons and delivery systems to make such a rash statement. Do you know you could launch from existing submarines for instance? If not could you build 3 submarines (the minimum needed to maintain a full time deterent) 'quickly'. How you have the arrogance to come out with statements when you have no knowledge whatsoever is beyond me
If the alternative is risking nuclear destruction by Putin with no deterrent response of course, the government would direct huge resources to it
It doesn't matter what resources you apply you can't develop this stuff quickly. It takes a long time to design and build a submarine and you need 3 as a minimum. Stuff will go wrong. Just look at the development time currently. It is in years and decades and there is always a critical path that can't be shortened by additional resources.
FYI the pension group I represent on a voluntary basis are the scientists from the privatised part of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Many of them worked on this stuff in the 60s and 70s. These people don't exist anymore here, but more importantly the facilities have been sold off and are now science parks. So before you start you have a huge capital build, which takes time (many years).
If the US withdrew from NATO the entire defence and most of the engineering and manufacturing industry in the UK would be directed to the task
For crying out loud do you not understand critical path analysis?
It takes 9 months to produce a baby. If you put 9 women on it you don't get a baby in 1 month.
If it takes 10 men a month to build a house do you think 600 men can build a house by lunchtime?
You ever seen those videos of the Amish putting up a barn?
Yes very good. I have and it is very impressive. However that is a very good example isn't it because they are superb at working to the critical path. Twice as many Amish would put up two barns in the same time, but they couldn't get one barn put up in half the time.
A simple fact that HYUFD can't understand.
Well guess you will just have to be vaporised and destroyed in a Putin nuclear missile attack then given you are clearly not willing to support the necessary national defence measures in the event of a US withdrawal from NATO
I never said I wasn't. I was just pointing out your saying hat we can build this stuff quickly because we have 5 million (dishwasher) engineers is utter nonsense.
Read Jim Miller's Post earlier, it could certainly be done in a year
I did and you didn't read the posts in reply to it, because we can't and you ignore all the evidence everyone is giving you here as to why it isn't possible to do in under decades. We can build an H bomb very quickly, because we already do and have done for decades, and to be honest that isn't that complicated. Good god even I know how they work. However the rest isn't easy and requires decades of capital infrastructure to work. For instance in Jim's example they just dropped the two A bombs from a plane (and they only had 2). Don't do that anymore as it won't get to its destination. They get shot down. And when dropped from a plane it can be big. Again not anymore if launching from a sub. These subs take up to 2 decades to design from scratch and build.
OK here are somethings you can't shorten. Lots of things that need testing, need testing over time. So for instance when software testing or pressure testing if that takes 3 months you can't shorten it by doubling the staff. By its nature it must take that long. Eg you can't pressure test a tank for 10 hours by pressure testing 2 for 5 hours. This is the critical path stuff. You can't train an engineer quicker. It takes as long as it takes and engineers can't just transfer over from one subject to another if it is complicated. So a dishwasher engineer can fix a cooker with maybe a couple of weeks training, but a fluids engineer can't become a fusion engineer with out years of training and then possibly not at all.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
Listening this morning It has become civil war between Truss and Sunak supporters and frankly for this conservative it is embarrassing and totally counter productive and yet the 1922 committee decided this utterly absurd timeline was a good idea
We are watching the destruction of the conservative party, and unless they have a collective ceasefire and unite behind the new leader than Starmer is going to be the next pm in 2024
It's a tough one to watch, even as an sort of Conservative in exile. Loyalty has always been the secret weapon of the Conservative party. You back the leader until that's unsustainable, then you ruthlessly send them to live on a farm.
That plan has rather gone askew in recent years. One manifestation of that has been the half-assed decapitation of BoJo; there's much too much of a risk that he's going to hang around undead, like Nearly Headless Nick in Harry Potter. At the moment, Truss is having to indulge that; partly because she needs the votes, partly because she didn't turn on him during the great collapse.
The other manifestation is that the degree of anger expressed over the campaign isn't going to be easy to heal. The Sunakites do seem to think that Truss is a dangerous nutter, in which case it's not going to be credible for them to serve under her. And they may well be accurate in their diagnosis of the situation.
The only government regeneration that has really worked in my lifetime was Thatcher-to-Major. (Yes, May-to-Johnson was followed by a big win, but look around you, look at the mess unleashed.) There were several factors. Major was a really good politician, at least in the early days. There was an obvious policy change to mark a clean break (Poll Tax). And the campaign was short and good-natured enough that it was obvious that all three candidates were going to get good jobs afterwards.
The campaign was short and good-natured because the only people voting were MPs so any differences in opinion were kept to within the confines of the Parliamentary Tory party.
You simply can't have a good-natured debate when the general public and the media are involved because all differences will be emphasised.
However, that doesn't explain why this election is quite so vicious - it's almost like one of the candidates knows the other is utterly mad and hasn't grasped that there is really no money given the forthcoming issues.
Curious comparison with 2019. Plenty of Conservatives knew full well that Johnson would be a bad Prime Minister, and their fears were largely borne out. I don't recall the same degree of venom then, though that might just be that the background level of political venom was so much worse.
Perhaps the Hunts and Stewarts of the time just accepted that they were doomed and there was nothing to be done. Does that make Sunak a better, stronger, braver man? Perhaps Johnson was confident and lazy enough not to campaign as aggressively as Truss. Perhaps the difference is that everyone knew that Johnson would win with the public and that Truss won't. Perhaps I'm guessing.
Belgium did fine without a government for the best part of two years. There are other cases too. Let Boris have his holidays and long live the interregnum –– to cries of "oh no, Putin/Covid/cost-of-living etc, something must be done".
Wasn't that the same list of crises that Conservative MPs were bandying about as reasons for why Boris was indispensable?
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done", the country voted for someone (it could have been anyone) to get Brexit done. Same with beating Corbyn. Any Cons leader would have beaten Corbyn because Corbyn.
And yet even now you cheer him on after he disappointed you once you had your lockdown revelation.
People who actually know him could have told you all this (and many did, publicly) but no you were a cheerleader for him then and you are, just like a useful idiot, cheerleading for him now.
Even...deep breath...even the mighty @HYUFD has stopped praising him because he can see what has been happening and the type of person Boris is. But you continue to fly the flag for him for some unfathomable, bizarre reason.
Have a word with yourself.
He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else.
Allowing the Downing Street parties wasn't good for Boris.
Protecting Paterson wasn't good for Boris.
If Boris had acted in his own self-interest he wouldn't have been forced out.
Instead he stupidly and weakly pandered to others to his own detriment.
Ironic isn't it.
Those weren't acts of altruism, though. They were things he thought he could get away with as World King and they were the easiest thing to do in the moment.
Then, when they unravelled, he stabbed people in the back to protect himself. With Partygate, he moved in a heartbeat from helping the cover-up to saying he'd known nothing, been horrified by all that had happened, and that deputy heads would roll (which they did). With Paterson, he whipped MPs to support and publicly defend his whitewash scheme, then made a u-turn that made fools and charlatans of every one of them within 24 hours.
You're talking about it as if he paid a price for his loyalty. He didn't - he paid a price for always doing the easiest thing for him to do in any situation. It's fair to say he was awful at judging his own self interest in a strategic way, but it's not at all that he at any point consciously acted against it.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done"
Still a member of the EU, are we?
Not being a member of the EU is not getting Brexit done. Anyone can leave the EU. It is how you leave the EU that counts.
"Anyone can leave the EU" and yet nobody did during the 2017-19 Parliament.
Leaving the EU is what counted, that was done. Brexit is done.
What we do in the future is up to us now, that's the whole point of taking back control. We elect the MPs to Parliament to decide our laws, not the EU Commission etc making decisions or laws.
Most laws are passed by Ministers acting through Secondary Legislation passed by Parliament. That was true of nearly all laws that originated in the EU (the European Communities Act being the Primary Legislation) and is equally true now.
Spectaculaly failing to understand what being in the EU meant, I assume deliberately so.
So legally what have I got wrong? What exactly did being in the EU "mean"?
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
Parliament may legitimately be in recess. Government isn't, or rather shouldn't be in recess.
In a nutshell Johnson, despite demanding he remain in office until September in order to pass Brown and May's terms in office, rode off into the sunset taking his bat and ball with him months ago. He is a disgrace to the office of Prime Minister to the last.
You'll be telling us next he delegated the role of caretaker to Starmer which is why we are in the mess we are in.
Belgium did fine without a government for the best part of two years. There are other cases too. Let Boris have his holidays and long live the interregnum –– to cries of "oh no, Putin/Covid/cost-of-living etc, something must be done".
The Leterme II federal government still operated in that period until the Di Rupo I government was formed.
Yves Leterme didn't just fuck off on multiple holidays and shut the joint down.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done", the country voted for someone (it could have been anyone) to get Brexit done. Same with beating Corbyn. Any Cons leader would have beaten Corbyn because Corbyn.
And yet even now you cheer him on after he disappointed you once you had your lockdown revelation.
People who actually know him could have told you all this (and many did, publicly) but no you were a cheerleader for him then and you are, just like a useful idiot, cheerleading for him now.
Even...deep breath...even the mighty @HYUFD has stopped praising him because he can see what has been happening and the type of person Boris is. But you continue to fly the flag for him for some unfathomable, bizarre reason.
Have a word with yourself.
49% of Conservative voters still want Boris as PM, just 20% want Sunak and only 18% Truss
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done"
Still a member of the EU, are we?
As I said, he didn't get it done. The country voted for someone (it could have been a donkey with a straw hat on) to get it done.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done"
Still a member of the EU, are we?
Not being a member of the EU is not getting Brexit done.
Um, yeah, it literally is. "Get Brexit Done" was a slogan because the lying Remainer parliament of 2017-19 had spent its entire existence blocking it.
For someone who is a leaver and therefore presumably a big fan of democratic accountability you seem to have precisely zero understanding of how exactly this "lying Remainer parliament" came into being. Do you think it was wafted here from paradise (or Luton Airport, for that matter)?
It came into being because a majority of its members, predominantly those led by Mr Corbyn and Sir Keir, lied to the public at the 2017 general election.
As far as I know no one has asked at the leader hustings how they will cope with a Trump fascist America that is pulling out of NATO and supporting Putin.
Some civil servants might want to have a very close read of the fine print of the Trident contract.
If the United States were to withdraw their cooperation completely, the UK nuclear capability would probably have a life expectancy measured in months rather than years.
We could create our own nuclear weapons pretty quickly if needed, as could Israel and Japan
What are your qualifications and knowledge on fusion weapons and delivery systems to make such a rash statement. Do you know you could launch from existing submarines for instance? If not could you build 3 submarines (the minimum needed to maintain a full time deterent) 'quickly'. How you have the arrogance to come out with statements when you have no knowledge whatsoever is beyond me
If the alternative is risking nuclear destruction by Putin with no deterrent response of course, the government would direct huge resources to it
It doesn't matter what resources you apply you can't develop this stuff quickly. It takes a long time to design and build a submarine and you need 3 as a minimum. Stuff will go wrong. Just look at the development time currently. It is in years and decades and there is always a critical path that can't be shortened by additional resources.
FYI the pension group I represent on a voluntary basis are the scientists from the privatised part of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Many of them worked on this stuff in the 60s and 70s. These people don't exist anymore here, but more importantly the facilities have been sold off and are now science parks. So before you start you have a huge capital build, which takes time (many years).
If the US withdrew from NATO the entire defence and most of the engineering and manufacturing industry in the UK would be directed to the task
For crying out loud do you not understand critical path analysis?
It takes 9 months to produce a baby. If you put 9 women on it you don't get a baby in 1 month.
If it takes 10 men a month to build a house do you think 600 men can build a house by lunchtime?
You ever seen those videos of the Amish putting up a barn?
Yes very good. I have and it is very impressive. However that is a very good example isn't it because they are superb at working to the critical path. Twice as many Amish would put up two barns in the same time, but they couldn't get one barn put up in half the time.
A simple fact that HYUFD can't understand.
Well guess you will just have to be vaporised and destroyed in a Putin nuclear missile attack then given you are clearly not willing to support the necessary national defence measures in the event of a US withdrawal from NATO
I never said I wasn't. I was just pointing out your saying hat we can build this stuff quickly because we have 5 million (dishwasher) engineers is utter nonsense.
Read Jim Miller's Post earlier, it could certainly be done in a year
I did and you didn't read the posts in reply to it, because we can't and you ignore all the evidence everyone is giving you here as to why it isn't possible to do in under decades. We can build an H bomb very quickly, because we already do and have done for decades, and to be honest that isn't that complicated. Good god even I know how they work. However the rest isn't easy and requires decades of capital infrastructure to work. For instance in Jim's example they just dropped the two A bombs from a plane (and they only had 2). Don't do that anymore as it won't get to its destination. They get shot down. And when dropped from a plane it can be big. Again not anymore if launching from a sub. These subs take up to 2 decades to design from scratch and build.
OK here are somethings you can't shorten. Lots of things that need testing, need testing over time. So for instance when software testing or pressure testing if that takes 3 months you can't shorten it by doubling the staff. By its nature it must take that long. Eg you can't pressure test a tank for 10 hours by pressure testing 2 for 5 hours. This is the critical path stuff. You can't train an engineer quicker. It takes as long as it takes and engineers can't just transfer over from one subject to another if it is complicated. So a dishwasher engineer can fix a cooker with maybe a couple of weeks training, but a fluids engineer can't become a fusion engineer with out years of training and then possibly not at all.
How you don't understand this I don't know.
We can. Just as usual wet liberals like you have to find excuses why we can't. Otherwise Putin will of course destroy you and your family with a nuclear missile if we don't
There was some (rather odd) glee yesterday that No was leading Yes by 51% to 49%.
Perhaps not so gleeful now that the subsidiary finding is published:
- “If Liz Truss becomes PM?”
Yes 52% No 48%
Overwhelming. Unionists may as well give up given they might trail by a (checks post) massive 2% when a contingent event happens. I'm sure Sturgeon would love to ride into a referendum with that kind of commanding lead. All over for the (checks latest vocab) "yoons".
There used to be an element of the SNP that were all for waiting for the settled will of the Scottish people before going for another referendum (60%, or thereabouts, maybe stable leads of 55%). Angus Robertson, I believe, was one. The idea was that good governance would make the argument. I admit I quite like the philosophy, but as a Unionist I would! I think Sturgeon is instinctively in this camp also.
The rest would be happy for 50%+1 vote, and that's, barring any change to the rules, their right to continue on that basis. As we've all seen, however, embarking on a difficult and divisive political project with only whisker of a majority is a recipe for all kinds of difficulty. Going for a referendum where at best 52% are supportive of the outcome could be a real strategic blunder for the SNP and potentially cause problems for an iScotland.
Depends whether you think Bettertogether II can sustain or even increase their current poll standing by pointing out the fantasic record of the Union over the last 8 years and finding credible & popular people to speak on behalf of it. They lost support in the lead up to 2014 despite sort of managing the latter last time out but now they'll have a rump of Galloway, Neil Oliver and the These Islands weirdos. I would enjoy seeing Gordon Brown explaining why the last 12 years of Tory misrule still make staying with Big U worth it mind.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done"
Still a member of the EU, are we?
As I said, he didn't get it done. The country voted for someone (it could have been a donkey with a straw hat on) to get it done.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done"
Still a member of the EU, are we?
Not being a member of the EU is not getting Brexit done.
Um, yeah, it literally is. "Get Brexit Done" was a slogan because the lying Remainer parliament of 2017-19 had spent its entire existence blocking it.
For someone who is a leaver and therefore presumably a big fan of democratic accountability you seem to have precisely zero understanding of how exactly this "lying Remainer parliament" came into being. Do you think it was wafted here from paradise (or Luton Airport, for that matter)?
It came into being as it was voted for in the 2017 election where people voted and elected MPs whereby about 90% of MPs elected were elected on a mandate of honouring the EU referendum and leaving the EU.
Of course Starker, Grieve etc were lying when they said they'd do that in 2017, so the rest is history. The public realised they'd been lied to and enacted their revenge in the 2019 election.
If vegans are going to go down the will no one think of the insects route there will be quite a change in their modus vivendi, I would imagine.
Take @Dura_Ace for example. He will have to start driving everywhere at 14 mph to ensure any bugs that happen upon his windscreen are gently ushered off and onto a safe space on the central reservation rather than squished into a messy pulp and then heartlessly disposed of with a swipe of the windscreen wipers.
Jainist Digambara monks carry a peacock feather whisk (the pichi) to brush insects from their path when they walk. It's one of the three material possessions they have; the others being a water jug (kamadalu) and Jainist holy texts (shastra).
It's a lifestye that is not without appeal.
If they allow a fourth possession, namely prestige German sports cars, I suspect that would tick all your boxes.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done"
Still a member of the EU, are we?
Not being a member of the EU is not getting Brexit done.
Um, yeah, it literally is. "Get Brexit Done" was a slogan because the lying Remainer parliament of 2017-19 had spent its entire existence blocking it.
For someone who is a leaver and therefore presumably a big fan of democratic accountability you seem to have precisely zero understanding of how exactly this "lying Remainer parliament" came into being. Do you think it was wafted here from paradise (or Luton Airport, for that matter)?
And also doesn't seem to have noticed that it was the ERG that kept May's Brexit deal from passing.
There was some (rather odd) glee yesterday that No was leading Yes by 51% to 49%.
Perhaps not so gleeful now that the subsidiary finding is published:
- “If Liz Truss becomes PM?”
Yes 52% No 48%
Why? Truss has made clear she will never allow indyref2 on her watch anyway.
If Starmer gets in ironically he was the leader Scots thought least likely to lead to independence even if he allowed indyref2 due to reliance on the SNP in a hung parliament
Perhaps - and its just possible - the thought processes of voters aren't limited only to the latest replacement Tory MP for their final few months in office.
You cling to Starmer's occasional statements on this like a life jacket. As if you care what he thinks or trust what he says.
Well as there will never be an indyref2 allowed by a Conservative PM it doesn't matter how popular they are in Scotland.
Starmer might allow indyref2 though if he needs SNP support in a hung parliament so his support in Scotland is more relevant
Sure. And thats the answer to your question "why" are Scottish voters more in favour of independence with Truss as PM. Because they know they will be tret with the sneering disdain you endlessly display on this subject and they are sick of it.
It doesn't legally or constitutionally matter if 99% of Scots want independence if we have a Tory Government that can still refuse indyref2. As I said it only matters for a Labour PM how popular they are in Scotland as they would be the only ones granting indyref2 if reliant on SNP support
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done", the country voted for someone (it could have been anyone) to get Brexit done. Same with beating Corbyn. Any Cons leader would have beaten Corbyn because Corbyn.
And yet even now you cheer him on after he disappointed you once you had your lockdown revelation.
People who actually know him could have told you all this (and many did, publicly) but no you were a cheerleader for him then and you are, just like a useful idiot, cheerleading for him now.
Even...deep breath...even the mighty @HYUFD has stopped praising him because he can see what has been happening and the type of person Boris is. But you continue to fly the flag for him for some unfathomable, bizarre reason.
Have a word with yourself.
49% of Conservative voters still want Boris as PM, just 20% want Sunak and only 18% Truss
There aren't as many Conservative voters as there used to be. In the last 7 by-elections the Conservative vote dropped from 186,000 at the General Election to 80,000 in the by-elections - Quite a lot of the 100,000 missing voters left because of Boris Johnson.
How do we define a Conservative voter now? Is it someone who used to vote Conservative and may do so again? How many Conservative members in the constituencies where there were by-elections didn't actually vote Conservative?
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done", the country voted for someone (it could have been anyone) to get Brexit done. Same with beating Corbyn. Any Cons leader would have beaten Corbyn because Corbyn.
And yet even now you cheer him on after he disappointed you once you had your lockdown revelation.
People who actually know him could have told you all this (and many did, publicly) but no you were a cheerleader for him then and you are, just like a useful idiot, cheerleading for him now.
Even...deep breath...even the mighty @HYUFD has stopped praising him because he can see what has been happening and the type of person Boris is. But you continue to fly the flag for him for some unfathomable, bizarre reason.
Have a word with yourself.
He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else.
Allowing the Downing Street parties wasn't good for Boris.
Protecting Paterson wasn't good for Boris.
If Boris had acted in his own self-interest he wouldn't have been forced out.
Instead he stupidly and weakly pandered to others to his own detriment.
Ironic isn't it.
Doesn't alter his main thrust if it does question his appreciation of what will help him and when.
Knowing, it turns out, several if not many people who know him, all are absolutely unequivocal in identifying him as a solipsistic chancer. Should he ever deign to read PB he would laugh his t*ts off at all these people defending him and would absolutely put them into the useful idiot bucket which has seen him advance his own position these past few years.
As far as I know no one has asked at the leader hustings how they will cope with a Trump fascist America that is pulling out of NATO and supporting Putin.
Some civil servants might want to have a very close read of the fine print of the Trident contract.
If the United States were to withdraw their cooperation completely, the UK nuclear capability would probably have a life expectancy measured in months rather than years.
We could create our own nuclear weapons pretty quickly if needed, as could Israel and Japan
What are your qualifications and knowledge on fusion weapons and delivery systems to make such a rash statement. Do you know you could launch from existing submarines for instance? If not could you build 3 submarines (the minimum needed to maintain a full time deterent) 'quickly'. How you have the arrogance to come out with statements when you have no knowledge whatsoever is beyond me
If the alternative is risking nuclear destruction by Putin with no deterrent response of course, the government would direct huge resources to it
What resources? What management skills does the current string of Tory governments have?
We are the 5th largest economy in the world, national security is the first job of any government. Billions and billions of pounds would be diverted to it if the US withdrew from NATO
It'd take about 5-10 years - or 20 if the Tories and MoD were involved.
Depends how many funds and scientists are involved
You don't get it. You don't need scientists. You need engineers. Project managers. Trainers.
As I said we have over 5 million engineers
I'vew already pointed ouyt you are counting toilet cleaners, delivery men, secretaries and accountants as "engineers". And you are ignoring that.
The depressing thing is that HYUFD is quite possibly representative of the way a large number of our elected representative are able to reason about complicated issues they don't really understand.
It's not the ignorance, but rather the absurd overconfidence in their own judgment that is most worrying.
The thing is having explained why what he proposed is physically not possible, over and over again, he still persists. We all make assumptions that others can point out are wrong and we learn from that. He never does.
He pulls stuff from the internet and never looks at the context or whether it is just crap. The classic was the national IQ tables. When shown they were nonsense for 3rd world countries he refused to accept they were wrong, even though they put the national average IQ for certain countries at the IQ of a typical 5 - 7 year old and argued that was why these countries were so poor and went down the racist rabbit hole of black people are just thick.
That is not arguing they are wrong for nation, that is you arguing ideologically they are wrong.
I also never said black people were thick, you by implication just did. Of course the Far East nations not the white nations have the highest iq
I wasn't arguing ideologically I was pointing out the stuff was plain wrong. Just cos it is on the internet does not make it correct and stating that numerous countries have an average IQ of a severely disabled person is patently nonsense. But you go on believing anything you read on the web.
I didn't claim they were thick (bizarre!) you did. It is still racist to insist black people are thick even if you think Asians are bright. Even Hitler made a pact with Japan or are you going claim that proved he wasn't racist.
You specifically insisted an IQ table that showed black nations with average IQs of a typical 5 - 7 year old were accurate and that was why those countries were so poor (ie their population was stupid). When others pointed out that it may have something to do with the education system you stated that the education children got in Mali was equivalent to say Israel and that they weren't disadvantaged.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
There's no such constitutional role as "caretaker" Prime Minister. You're the Prime Minister or you're not. "Polls" do not force a PM not to act. That's a concious decision. Not acting because you think your colleagues don't want you to is a decision. He has decisions to make and the decision he's made is to do nothing. Because he was always unsuited to the job.
There absolutely is a constitutional role as a caretaker Prime Minister and that is Boris right now.
Our constitution is unwritten, the fact that Boris has been said to be a caretaker PM makes him a caretaker PM. The principle of a caretaker government is not new and has been around for many years, Brown post-2010 election was a caretaker PM too until Cameron became PM.
He has no decisions to make, unless they can't wait for the new PM, because he's caretaker.
My word. You've just owned yourself spectacularly. You don't have a clue do you? You have no idea about the law or the constitution. You just Google shit and post it without reading it. You quoted an Institute of Government page ( https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/caretaker-government ) that says -
The phrase ‘caretaker government’ describes a government that holds office subject to certain temporary restrictions on what it may do, either during the pre-election period known as ‘purdah’ or because it may have lost the confidence of the House of Commons. In other countries, such as New Zealand, this status is more formally termed ‘caretaker’, but the UK has not adopted the phrase.
The UK has not developed comprehensive rules over the formation and operation of caretaker governments. The workings of caretaker governments operate through convention, which has been published in the 2011 Cabinet Manual.
In the UK, government acts in a caretaker capacity in three scenarios:
1.During a general election campaign 2.If a vote of no confidence is passed by the House of Commons 3. If an election produces an unclear result
(Emphasis mine)
So even in the IoG page you yourself cite Johnson is not a "caretaker" Prime Minister because none of the three eventualities they set out, and is set out in the 2011 Cabinet Manual, exists. 'Caretaker' is the wrong term for as the IoG site you yourself cite says, this is not a caretaker Prime Minister.
I beg you, please read the stuff you cite from before posting it. It would save you a lot of hassle.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done"
Still a member of the EU, are we?
Not being a member of the EU is not getting Brexit done.
Um, yeah, it literally is. "Get Brexit Done" was a slogan because the lying Remainer parliament of 2017-19 had spent its entire existence blocking it.
For someone who is a leaver and therefore presumably a big fan of democratic accountability you seem to have precisely zero understanding of how exactly this "lying Remainer parliament" came into being. Do you think it was wafted here from paradise (or Luton Airport, for that matter)?
It came into being because a majority of its members, predominantly those led by Mr Corbyn and Sir Keir, lied to the public at the 2017 general election.
And I'm not "a leaver", as we've already left...
It was a democratically-elected parliament, just like all the others. I'm guessing that people voted knowing exactly what they wanted and who would best be placed to try to achieve it for them.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done"
Still a member of the EU, are we?
As I said, he didn't get it done. The country voted for someone (it could have been a donkey with a straw hat on) to get it done.
Still a member of the EU, are we?
We left the EU because the country wanted to leave the EU. It mattered not who was at the head of the government which promised to leave the EU. It happened to be Boris and hence it was under his premiership that we left.
It was the country that wanted to leave and instructed whomever was to hand to carry out its instructions. That person happened to be Boris.
Are you saying without Boris we would still be in the EU?
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done"
Still a member of the EU, are we?
Not being a member of the EU is not getting Brexit done.
Um, yeah, it literally is. "Get Brexit Done" was a slogan because the lying Remainer parliament of 2017-19 had spent its entire existence blocking it.
For someone who is a leaver and therefore presumably a big fan of democratic accountability you seem to have precisely zero understanding of how exactly this "lying Remainer parliament" came into being. Do you think it was wafted here from paradise (or Luton Airport, for that matter)?
And also doesn't seem to have noticed that it was the ERG that kept May's Brexit deal from passing.
It wasn't the ERG who voted against every variety of Leave...
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
There's no such constitutional role as "caretaker" Prime Minister. You're the Prime Minister or you're not. "Polls" do not force a PM not to act. That's a concious decision. Not acting because you think your colleagues don't want you to is a decision. He has decisions to make and the decision he's made is to do nothing. Because he was always unsuited to the job.
There absolutely is a constitutional role as a caretaker Prime Minister and that is Boris right now.
Our constitution is unwritten, the fact that Boris has been said to be a caretaker PM makes him a caretaker PM. The principle of a caretaker government is not new and has been around for many years, Brown post-2010 election was a caretaker PM too until Cameron became PM.
He has no decisions to make, unless they can't wait for the new PM, because he's caretaker.
My word. You've just owned yourself spectacularly. You don't have a clue do you? You have no idea about the law or the constitution. You just Google shit and post it without reading it. You quoted an Institute of Government page ( https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/caretaker-government ) that says -
The phrase ‘caretaker government’ describes a government that holds office subject to certain temporary restrictions on what it may do, either during the pre-election period known as ‘purdah’ or because it may have lost the confidence of the House of Commons. In other countries, such as New Zealand, this status is more formally termed ‘caretaker’, but the UK has not adopted the phrase.
The UK has not developed comprehensive rules over the formation and operation of caretaker governments. The workings of caretaker governments operate through convention, which has been published in the 2011 Cabinet Manual.
In the UK, government acts in a caretaker capacity in three scenarios:
1.During a general election campaign 2.If a vote of no confidence is passed by the House of Commons 3. If an election produces an unclear result
(Emphasis mine)
So even in the IoG page you yourself cite Johnson is not a "caretaker" Prime Minister because none of the three eventualities they set out, and is set out in the 2011 Cabinet Manual, exists. 'Caretaker' is the wrong term for as the IoG site you yourself cite says, this is not a caretaker Prime Minister.
I beg you, please read the stuff you cite from before posting it. It would save you a lot of hassle.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done"
Still a member of the EU, are we?
As I said, he didn't get it done. The country voted for someone (it could have been a donkey with a straw hat on) to get it done.
Still a member of the EU, are we?
Nope. We left. Brexit was done.
Where this becomes an argument is the definition of Brexit. I have previously categorised these as "Brexit" - the act of leaving the EU, and "BREXIT!", the [insert drawing of moon on a stick here] prize that people assumed would descend upon them having left the EU.
Brexit is done, BREXIT will never be done. Which is why the winners of the referendum are largely so ANGRY and needing to keep defending BREXIT all the time.
Despite Brexit having been done, significant numbers of voters, their MPs and certain newspapers proclaim almost daily the latest threat to achieving Brexit, by which they really mean BREXIT!
So its done legally and logically, but not done emotionally.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done"
Still a member of the EU, are we?
As I said, he didn't get it done. The country voted for someone (it could have been a donkey with a straw hat on) to get it done.
Still a member of the EU, are we?
We left the EU because the country wanted to leave the EU. It mattered not who was at the head of the government which promised to leave the EU. It happened to be Boris and hence it was under his premiership that we left.
It was the country that wanted to leave and instructed whomever was to hand to carry out its instructions. That person happened to be Boris.
Are you saying without Boris we would still be in the EU?
I'm saying that Boris was elected in 2019 specifically on a pledge to end the blockage of the previous parliament and get Brexit done, and he did that because (as you admit) we are no longer a member of the EU.
Conservative hustings this week are tomorrow and Thursday.
They seem to take these more seriously than running the country!
So they should, right now.
Parliament is in recess, and this is about choosing the next Prime Minister.
The country is in crisis. The PM has gone awol. The Conservative Party is guilty of criminal negligence.
What part of Parliament being in recess are you finding confusing?
The PM hasn't gone AWOL, he's gone absent as he's on leave not without it. August is the time MPs including the PM have their annual holidays.
Whether its a good idea for Parliament to shut down for an entire month for a summer holiday is an entirely separate question, but there is nothing strange happening there.
What part of the difference between "executive" and "legislature" do you find hard to grasp exactly? The Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, handles day-to-day executive functions on behalf of the Crown. That is entirely separate from the work of the legislature. The executive does not take a recess. He still has that role whether or not Parliament is sitting. This is a crisis, somewhere around the scale of a natural disaster, that he has decided not to handle.
No he hasn't decided not to handle, he's been informed by his colleagues (and the country generally in polls) that they don't want him to handle it.
Boris is a caretaker Prime Minister right now, that was determined when he resigned. He has a role to address any urgent issues that can't wait for the new Prime Minister but addressing things about this winter etc is the new Prime Minister's responsibility, not Boris's.
If Boris had spent every day this summer announcing new policies the same people complaining he's "gone AWOL" would be complaining that he's resigned and has no right to be doing so.
Mate.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done"
Still a member of the EU, are we?
As I said, he didn't get it done. The country voted for someone (it could have been a donkey with a straw hat on) to get it done.
Still a member of the EU, are we?
Nope. We left. Brexit was done.
Right. So Topping's denials that Boris got Brexit done (in the sense of the 2019 election slogan) are wrong.
As far as I know no one has asked at the leader hustings how they will cope with a Trump fascist America that is pulling out of NATO and supporting Putin.
Some civil servants might want to have a very close read of the fine print of the Trident contract.
If the United States were to withdraw their cooperation completely, the UK nuclear capability would probably have a life expectancy measured in months rather than years.
We could create our own nuclear weapons pretty quickly if needed, as could Israel and Japan
What are your qualifications and knowledge on fusion weapons and delivery systems to make such a rash statement. Do you know you could launch from existing submarines for instance? If not could you build 3 submarines (the minimum needed to maintain a full time deterent) 'quickly'. How you have the arrogance to come out with statements when you have no knowledge whatsoever is beyond me
If the alternative is risking nuclear destruction by Putin with no deterrent response of course, the government would direct huge resources to it
It doesn't matter what resources you apply you can't develop this stuff quickly. It takes a long time to design and build a submarine and you need 3 as a minimum. Stuff will go wrong. Just look at the development time currently. It is in years and decades and there is always a critical path that can't be shortened by additional resources.
FYI the pension group I represent on a voluntary basis are the scientists from the privatised part of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Many of them worked on this stuff in the 60s and 70s. These people don't exist anymore here, but more importantly the facilities have been sold off and are now science parks. So before you start you have a huge capital build, which takes time (many years).
If the US withdrew from NATO the entire defence and most of the engineering and manufacturing industry in the UK would be directed to the task
For crying out loud do you not understand critical path analysis?
It takes 9 months to produce a baby. If you put 9 women on it you don't get a baby in 1 month.
If it takes 10 men a month to build a house do you think 600 men can build a house by lunchtime?
You ever seen those videos of the Amish putting up a barn?
Yes very good. I have and it is very impressive. However that is a very good example isn't it because they are superb at working to the critical path. Twice as many Amish would put up two barns in the same time, but they couldn't get one barn put up in half the time.
A simple fact that HYUFD can't understand.
Well guess you will just have to be vaporised and destroyed in a Putin nuclear missile attack then given you are clearly not willing to support the necessary national defence measures in the event of a US withdrawal from NATO
I never said I wasn't. I was just pointing out your saying hat we can build this stuff quickly because we have 5 million (dishwasher) engineers is utter nonsense.
Read Jim Miller's Post earlier, it could certainly be done in a year
I did and you didn't read the posts in reply to it, because we can't and you ignore all the evidence everyone is giving you here as to why it isn't possible to do in under decades. We can build an H bomb very quickly, because we already do and have done for decades, and to be honest that isn't that complicated. Good god even I know how they work. However the rest isn't easy and requires decades of capital infrastructure to work. For instance in Jim's example they just dropped the two A bombs from a plane (and they only had 2). Don't do that anymore as it won't get to its destination. They get shot down. And when dropped from a plane it can be big. Again not anymore if launching from a sub. These subs take up to 2 decades to design from scratch and build.
OK here are somethings you can't shorten. Lots of things that need testing, need testing over time. So for instance when software testing or pressure testing if that takes 3 months you can't shorten it by doubling the staff. By its nature it must take that long. Eg you can't pressure test a tank for 10 hours by pressure testing 2 for 5 hours. This is the critical path stuff. You can't train an engineer quicker. It takes as long as it takes and engineers can't just transfer over from one subject to another if it is complicated. So a dishwasher engineer can fix a cooker with maybe a couple of weeks training, but a fluids engineer can't become a fusion engineer with out years of training and then possibly not at all.
How you don't understand this I don't know.
We can. Just as usual wet liberals like you have to find excuses why we can't. Otherwise Putin will of course destroy you and your family with a nuclear missile if we don't
Oh god this is mind boggling.
Try the Amish house example again. A large number of Amish build a barn very quickly. Yes?
If we double the number of Amish can they build the barn quicker?
No they can't. They have optimised the build speed. More people just get in the way.
However if they double the number of people they can build 2 barns in the time it takes to build 1 barn.
The lesson from this. You can optimise the speed of building something, but once you get to the critical path you can't build it any quicker.
The interesting (distressing? Wholly predictable?) element of this is that the very same people who got behind TMay and Boris over Brexit are now lining up to support Truss. IDS et al are trotting out the line that Communism Brexit is a great idea just that it hasn't been executed properly. I fear they are about to learn that the concept is fundamentally flawed.
Comments
Don't get me wrong: I'm an enthusiastic democrat and I think politicians perform a useful function in respresenting their electorate's views and in making the machine work. But there's a view of the state that it is powered by sheer effort from MPs, and if only they worked harder things would be better - as if it were all powered by some gigantic hamster wheel on which they must all constantly pedal. Quite clearly, this isn't the case.
I also never said black people were thick, you by implication just did. Of course the Far East nations not the white nations have the highest iq
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon#:~:text=The windshield phenomenon (or windscreen,populations caused by human activity.
Its not if statements that are the issue but the lack of a status flag saying - this email address was validated 2 minutes ago so don't both revalidating it.
And all those routines are completely separate to each other - if you were using Zoom you would still have had the same number of emails...
Who knows?She might decide a closer relationship with the EU is what's required if only to watch Leon go ballistic
That was the right thing to do in my opinion, I was calling for Boris to go too, but you can't say "Boris you're not fit to run the country" then when he resigns say "hey, why aren't you running the country?"
He's resigned already, you got what you wanted already! He's a caretaker PM now and its for the next PM to be making decisions, not him.
Bit ironic given Vespasian and Titus were good emperors. Domitian rather less so... but his demise did usher in the Golden Age.
It's a lifestye that is not without appeal.
We Read Jim Miller's Post earlier, it could certainly be done in a year
Our constitution is unwritten, the fact that Boris has been said to be a caretaker PM makes him a caretaker PM. The principle of a caretaker government is not new and has been around for many years, Brown post-2010 election was a caretaker PM too until Cameron became PM.
He has no decisions to make, unless they can't wait for the new PM, because he's caretaker.
Boris is self-serving, a liar, a hypocrite, and only interested in himself and always has been. He does precisely what is good for Boris and no one else. He is and always was manifestly unfit to be Prime Minister.
He did not "get Brexit done", the country voted for someone (it could have been anyone) to get Brexit done. Same with beating Corbyn. Any Cons leader would have beaten Corbyn because Corbyn.
And yet even now you cheer him on after he disappointed you once you had your lockdown revelation.
People who actually know him could have told you all this (and many did, publicly) but no you were a cheerleader for him then and you are, just like a useful idiot, cheerleading for him now.
Even...deep breath...even the mighty @HYUFD has stopped praising him because he can see what has been happening and the type of person Boris is. But you continue to fly the flag for him for some unfathomable, bizarre reason.
Have a word with yourself.
He would have to abide by Cabinet collectively responsibility.
He either returns to backbench waiting for the right 'I told you all so' moment or he just jacks it in and heads to CA.
I don't want Boris making decisions, he's gone, we got rid of him. I want Truss making the decisions.
That plan has rather gone askew in recent years. One manifestation of that has been the half-assed decapitation of BoJo; there's much too much of a risk that he's going to hang around undead, like Nearly Headless Nick in Harry Potter. At the moment, Truss is having to indulge that; partly because she needs the votes, partly because she didn't turn on him during the great collapse.
The other manifestation is that the degree of anger expressed over the campaign isn't going to be easy to heal. The Sunakites do seem to think that Truss is a dangerous nutter, in which case it's not going to be credible for them to serve under her. And they may well be accurate in their diagnosis of the situation.
The only government regeneration that has really worked in my lifetime was Thatcher-to-Major. (Yes, May-to-Johnson was followed by a big win, but look around you, look at the mess unleashed.) There were several factors. Major was a really good politician, at least in the early days. There was an obvious policy change to mark a clean break (Poll Tax). And the campaign was short and good-natured enough that it was obvious that all three candidates were going to get good jobs afterwards.
Measuring urban decline is a matter of timescale. Most cities in the UK are probably a lot more vibrant, safer, better organised and cleaner than they were 30 years ago (and a lot less affordable), but may have gone downhill over the last five to 10 years or so.
What could he be doing? Getting the Whitehall machine working on a range of scenarios and options so that when Truss is appointed PM there are already thought through and costed options available for her to pick through.
Supposedly - and frankly laughably - the only reason we have a vaccine is because of Boris Johnson "getting all the big calls right". So the idea that he shouldn't be allowed to do anything now just makes the "big calls" argument look like the crock of shit it is.
As far as I can tell the poll didn't ask the more interesting hypothetical question: what the referendum voting intention would be if the UK government was a Labour government led by Keir Starmer.
SNP rhetoric leads me to believe that they expect it would be a lot less favourable for Independence, which is what I expect. If there wasn't a difference then that would be an interesting polling result.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/08/21/forget-liz-truss-rishi-sunak-tory-supporters-would-much-rather/?utm_content=telegraph&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1661109782
You cling to Starmer's occasional statements on this like a life jacket. As if you care what he thinks or trust what he says.
Starmer might allow indyref2 though if he needs SNP support in a hung parliament so his support in Scotland is more relevant
Absolutely the Whitehall machine should be and I'm sure is working on a range of scenarios to be presented to Truss on day one of her being PM. It will then be her responsibility to make any "big calls" or otherwise that she wants to make, just as it was Boris's responsibility during the pandemic leading to the vaccines. The reasons we got the vaccines first, to the chagrin of our neighbours, absolutely was because of the big calls made earlier in the pandemic but Boris has neither the right nor the responsibility to make such calls now. He only has the right to make caretaker calls, not big long-term calls.
Haven't encountered this with Zoom (although I set that account up ~2.5 years ago, may have changed) or, to this level, anywhere else. Normally it's one verification and off you go.
You simply can't have a good-natured debate when the general public and the media are involved because all differences will be emphasised.
However, that doesn't explain why this election is quite so vicious - it's almost like one of the candidates knows the other is utterly mad and hasn't grasped that there is really no money given the forthcoming issues.
Leaving the EU is what counted, that was done. Brexit is done.
What we do in the future is up to us now, that's the whole point of taking back control. We elect the MPs to Parliament to decide our laws, not the EU Commission etc making decisions or laws.
However, on 20 March 1905 Edward VII issued a Royal Warrant recognising the office of Prime Minister. Teddy Seven (or probaby a secretary) wrote that down and, when he wrote it down, he didn't mention a "caretaker" role. There is no "caretaker" role in the constitution. "Unwritten" or "uncodified doesn't mean you can make one up.
Boris as caretaker has no right to pre-empt what the new PM decides on that. If people wanted Boris to make this call, they should have kept him as PM, but he's resigned so that's over.
Net favourability
Nicola Sturgeon +9
Anas Sarwar -4
Keir Starmer -14
Douglas Ross -37
Rishi Sunak -40
Liz Truss -45
The Oaf -60
Scottish National Party +5
Scottish Green Party +/-0
Scottish Labour -3
Scottish Liberal Democrats -13
Scottish Conservative & Unionist Party -38
(Ipsos Scotland; 12-15 August; sample size: 1,000)
If you dispute that, take it up with them, because its been true for years now.
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/caretaker-government
Liz is the right person to take our Party and country forward because she is the best placed to bring what we need above all else – unity.
It's terrifying...
Allowing the Downing Street parties wasn't good for Boris.
Protecting Paterson wasn't good for Boris.
If Boris had acted in his own self-interest he wouldn't have been forced out.
Instead he stupidly and weakly pandered to others to his own detriment.
Ironic isn't it.
There is no caretaker Chancellor or PM or Minister of the Privvy - you are in office until you are not. And as for your hope that Whitehall is working on stuff, I understand from this morning's news that Truss will borrow money to pay for your tax cut without any OBR or Treasury analysis of how stupid that is because it would take too long. So they aren't doing anything of the sort. The government has literally ceased to function.
The rest would be happy for 50%+1 vote, and that's, barring any change to the rules, their right to continue on that basis. As we've all seen, however, embarking on a difficult and divisive political project with only whisker of a majority is a recipe for all kinds of difficulty. Going for a referendum where at best 52% are supportive of the outcome could be a real strategic blunder for the SNP and potentially cause problems for an iScotland.
5251%Boris warned everyone that if he was forced out then that would lead to a vacuum until the new leader was elected. He was right, wasn't he?
Absolutely the Chancellor can take day to day decisions but decisions about this winter's fuel etc isn't a day to day decision it is a long term one that is the responsibility of the next Prime Minister.
OK here are somethings you can't shorten. Lots of things that need testing, need testing over time. So for instance when software testing or pressure testing if that takes 3 months you can't shorten it by doubling the staff. By its nature it must take that long. Eg you can't pressure test a tank for 10 hours by pressure testing 2 for 5 hours. This is the critical path stuff. You can't train an engineer quicker. It takes as long as it takes and engineers can't just transfer over from one subject to another if it is complicated. So a dishwasher engineer can fix a cooker with maybe a couple of weeks training, but a fluids engineer can't become a fusion engineer with out years of training and then possibly not at all.
How you don't understand this I don't know.
Perhaps the Hunts and Stewarts of the time just accepted that they were doomed and there was nothing to be done. Does that make Sunak a better, stronger, braver man? Perhaps Johnson was confident and lazy enough not to campaign as aggressively as Truss. Perhaps the difference is that everyone knew that Johnson would win with the public and that Truss won't. Perhaps I'm guessing.
Then, when they unravelled, he stabbed people in the back to protect himself. With Partygate, he moved in a heartbeat from helping the cover-up to saying he'd known nothing, been horrified by all that had happened, and that deputy heads would roll (which they did). With Paterson, he whipped MPs to support and publicly defend his whitewash scheme, then made a u-turn that made fools and charlatans of every one of them within 24 hours.
You're talking about it as if he paid a price for his loyalty. He didn't - he paid a price for always doing the easiest thing for him to do in any situation. It's fair to say he was awful at judging his own self interest in a strategic way, but it's not at all that he at any point consciously acted against it.
In a nutshell Johnson, despite demanding he remain in office until September in order to pass Brown and May's terms in office, rode off into the sunset taking his bat and ball with him months ago. He is a disgrace to the office of Prime Minister to the last.
You'll be telling us next he delegated the role of caretaker to Starmer which is why we are in the mess we are in.
Yves Leterme didn't just fuck off on multiple holidays and shut the joint down.
And I'm not "a leaver", as we've already left...
Of course Starker, Grieve etc were lying when they said they'd do that in 2017, so the rest is history. The public realised they'd been lied to and enacted their revenge in the 2019 election.
Knowing, it turns out, several if not many people who know him, all are absolutely unequivocal in identifying him as a solipsistic chancer. Should he ever deign to read PB he would laugh his t*ts off at all these people defending him and would absolutely put them into the useful idiot bucket which has seen him advance his own position these past few years.
I didn't claim they were thick (bizarre!) you did. It is still racist to insist black people are thick even if you think Asians are bright. Even Hitler made a pact with Japan or are you going claim that proved he wasn't racist.
You specifically insisted an IQ table that showed black nations with average IQs of a typical 5 - 7 year old were accurate and that was why those countries were so poor (ie their population was stupid). When others pointed out that it may have something to do with the education system you stated that the education children got in Mali was equivalent to say Israel and that they weren't disadvantaged.
Bonkers beyond belief.
The phrase ‘caretaker government’ describes a government that holds office subject to certain temporary restrictions on what it may do, either during the pre-election period known as ‘purdah’ or because it may have lost the confidence of the House of Commons. In other countries, such as New Zealand, this status is more formally termed ‘caretaker’, but the UK has not adopted the phrase.
The UK has not developed comprehensive rules over the formation and operation of caretaker governments. The workings of caretaker governments operate through convention, which has been published in the 2011 Cabinet Manual.
In the UK, government acts in a caretaker capacity in three scenarios:
1.During a general election campaign
2.If a vote of no confidence is passed by the House of Commons
3. If an election produces an unclear result
(Emphasis mine)
So even in the IoG page you yourself cite Johnson is not a "caretaker" Prime Minister because none of the three eventualities they set out, and is set out in the 2011 Cabinet Manual, exists. 'Caretaker' is the wrong term for as the IoG site you yourself cite says, this is not a caretaker Prime Minister.
I beg you, please read the stuff you cite from before posting it. It would save you a lot of hassle.
Clueless. Utterly clueless.
It was the country that wanted to leave and instructed whomever was to hand to carry out its instructions. That person happened to be Boris.
Are you saying without Boris we would still be in the EU?
Where this becomes an argument is the definition of Brexit. I have previously categorised these as "Brexit" - the act of leaving the EU, and "BREXIT!", the [insert drawing of moon on a stick here] prize that people assumed would descend upon them having left the EU.
Brexit is done, BREXIT will never be done. Which is why the winners of the referendum are largely so ANGRY and needing to keep defending BREXIT all the time.
Despite Brexit having been done, significant numbers of voters, their MPs and certain newspapers proclaim almost daily the latest threat to achieving Brexit, by which they really mean BREXIT!
So its done legally and logically, but not done emotionally.
Try the Amish house example again. A large number of Amish build a barn very quickly. Yes?
If we double the number of Amish can they build the barn quicker?
No they can't. They have optimised the build speed. More people just get in the way.
However if they double the number of people they can build 2 barns in the time it takes to build 1 barn.
The lesson from this. You can optimise the speed of building something, but once you get to the critical path you can't build it any quicker.
CommunismBrexit is a great idea just that it hasn't been executed properly. I fear they are about to learn that the concept is fundamentally flawed.