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Why the war on wokeism won’t work for the Tories – politicalbetting.com
Why the war on wokeism won’t work for the Tories – politicalbetting.com
The latest @IpsosUK Issues index out today. Unsurprisingly, concern about inflation / prices rises dominant (and rising). We know this but it can't hurt to be reminded of the scale of public concern out there. https://t.co/OV3Ew9aM0c pic.twitter.com/hllBGQKdYs
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1.05 Liz Truss 95%
22 Rishi Sunak 5%
Next Conservative leader
1.04 Liz Truss 96%
19.5 Rishi Sunak 5%
F1: searching for betting potential.
This link contains the starting grid, which is more mixed up due to penalties than it's been for a long time.
https://www.formula1.com/en/results.html/2022/races/1118/belgium/starting-grid.html
Betting PostF1: unusually, I went for a short odds bet. Sainz to beat Leclerc at 1.44. He starts 15 places ahead of his team mate.
https://enormo-haddock.blogspot.com/2022/08/belgium-pre-race-2022.html
Also, if you backed Perez at 26 (I mentioned pre-weekend), I'd advocate laying him for the win at 4.7, though it's up to you, of course.
In it, both the Pennsylvania Senate and Gubernatorial races are covered.
So... Doug Mastriano is the Republican candidate for Governor, and he scores a +56 among Republicans for favourability.
Shapiro is the Democratic candidate, and he gets +68 among Democrats.
For the Senate, Fetterman manages +69 with Democrats.
And - with Republicans - Dr Oz manages (and I'm not making this up) just +15.
Mercedes again so far off the pace that you wonder if Hamilton wouldn't be quicker hopping around the track. 1.8 seconds slower than Vercrash'em? Sheesh.
Which is why the wokeism grew out of places like elite universities.
Not saying the Tories view the job of Prime Minister as the party’s personal plaything, but …
From @ShippersUnbound’s Sunday Times long read https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/liz-trusss-biggest-battle-will-be-with-her-own-party-suffering-sellers-remorse-over-boris-johnson-jt6jlmwhk https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1563769140321599490/photo/1
CNN Travel:
Sewage-covered beaches risk turning England into the 'dirty man of Europe'
Near the southwest tip of England, where the region of Cornwall meets the Atlantic, is Longrock Beach.
It's part of the mythical coastline around Penzance -- a liminal space where the sky meets the ocean, dotted with prehistoric monuments. Off the shore from Longrock, an island topped by a fairytale castle rises up from the water: St. Michael's Mount.
Longrock is idyllic -- safe and family friendly, with shallow water, and "favored with Penzance locals," according to the tourist board.
Last week it was rather less so. Longrock was one of 100 beaches around England which had raw sewage disgorged into the sea during the peak summer period.
… As Whitty co-wrote in his summer report: "Nobody wants a child to ingest human faeces."
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/amp/uk-beaches-sewage-england/
(But the standards today are, very rightly, higher. So holidaymakers may be de-turd, quite undertstandably.)
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1661008/london-news-newham-bin-strike-latest/
Only Edinburgh is getting the crap - and it's largely because of the Festival, as it always is: just that it normally gets cleared off 24 hours a day. It's been targeted to make a point.
The other strikes elsewhere are much briefer. ATM we'll lose one collection of some kinds of bin, and that's simply cos we live where we do.
It's not realistic for him to return. It's not that realistic for the Conservatives to VONC Truss this side of a General Election.
However, the polling that's out there implies that the party would happily have him back in a heartbeat, and Team Truss has happily stoked the "Borwis Was Wobbed" meme, because they need the votes.
It's not a stable situation. Thatcher Over The Water was a bad enough problem for the Conservatives, and she was obviously past it and had accepted (at some level) her defeat.
Once Liz 'gottle of geer' Truss wins, she'll revert to a somewhat boring political functionary who will leave the sillier elements of wokery to the loons who will battle to be the wokest. It will add to the gaiety of life if nothing else.
On the broader issue, I think that the tories will be more effective in their "war on woke" as the opposition party. If the 'wokeism' is seen as coming from a left wing government, then it can become something its opponents rally around in opposition. The fact is, that for all their claims to the contrary, they have been in government for 12 years and have themselves been responsible for a lot of the 'woke' agenda.
As a slightly better educated septugenarian white man my pleasure centres are occasionally tickled by the antics of competitive wokies. Long may they exist. But expecting a backlash against the backlash is the height of optimism. There's always someone who will insist on their purity of wokery being aired.
Extinction Rebellion can be relied upon to do that. Fossil fuels must never be used again. Nuclear power is Satan's breath. I look up at my solar panels now celebrating their eleventh birthday, and smile gently. This beats nailing my head to a coffee table.
I find it amazing that we are expecting any changes from what is still a Conservative government, of which both candidates have been members for several years.
And good morning one and all from a sunny North Essex!
It is happening here in Wales
https://www.westerntelegraph.co.uk/news/20774176.yet-another-top-pembrokeshire-beach-issued-raw-sewage-warning/
The political problem in the UK, watching from afar, is more one of inaction against the creeping spread of the wokery around the public sector, especially the escalating cost of the thousands of trainers and officers pushing the agenda. When the Home Office is hiring diversity managers, you can bet that the mandarins are doing their best to keep this from Ms Patel. It’s another symptom of the growing lack of control that ministers actually have over the departments they lead.
Either Truss announces a massive package to cut the energy bills of most of the country or her government is over before it even begins.
She'll lame duck until Jan 2025 when they will be wiped out.
NI or general VAT.
It's the energy Liz! Sort it out!!
The media and this forum are picking bits of announcement out and attacking them, when if you read today's newspapers Truss is looking at not only helping with the domestic energy bills but more widely at helping businesses through this tsunami of seriously bad economic news
I have supported Truss in not going into detail for exactly what is happening now, and urge everyone to wait a couple weeks to learn of the package in the whole
The suggestion to reduce vat from 20% to 15% is one of the measures that will help business and reduce the inflation rate but is costly at 38 billion. It is also interesting that it is supported by Gordon Brown
There is no doubt no peacetime new PM has faced the prospect of being condemned within weeks of taking office, but by the end of September we may have a good idea if she has survived or it is over
There is a paywalled article in the i, so I won't embed that comments "Johnson is a lucky bugger" (not literally I am sure) in that none of the CoL crisis is being attributed to him personally, despite the Conservative Party taking a large percentage of the blame.
The Rest is Politics podcast has become compulsory listening
But I have a genuine question. When did it become the governments' job to protect everyone from any inflationary spikes? This is a new one on me. As a boomer, I never expected to receive shed loads of cash as my right. I won't complain and this doesn't make me hanker back for the fifties.
And therein lies the problem. Woke has no definition. It basically means "stuff I don't like or which makes me feel uncomfortable". And because of that a harmless public sector HR project that, for example, talks about inclusivity in the workplace becomes just as "woke" and dangerous as allowing blokes to claim they are women so they can get into women only places.
(b) there is a difference between the permanent effect of inflation, and a short term increase in energy bills, the latter being what is causing the grief at present (and of course also an increase in CPI and RPI inflation). The general assumption seems to be that prices will go down, so an element of deflation.
https://twitter.com/HugoSAS/status/1563524046204985345?t=sGzhH3hyaxS7ZtlCAL6-4A&s=19
Scooters everywhere for the Bank Holiday Rally:
Millions of people cant pay their bills.
Other millions who just about can pay decide to join a payment strike in solidarity.
Courts already have a multi year backlog so are of no use enforcing payments (even with no backlog wouldn't help with the can't pays.
The energy suppliers legally have to continue supplying energy to people who are not paying them for the energy.
The energy suppliers cannot afford to pay the companies they buy from so go bankrupt.
The remaining energy suppliers are then told to take on the debts of the bankrupt suppliers and go bust themselves.
The country has no energy suppliers and we join the Taliban in trying to create a pre industrial revolution society.
At some point in the chain the government simply has to step in. It may as well get ahead of the problems!
In short, woke is opposed to equality. It embraces racism and sexism, but those are 'ok' because they're aimed at whites and men and the vaguely defined 'system' (contrary to laws which make it illegal to pay people differently based on demographics) is somehow tilted in their favour*.
It also has the deranged view that children too young to drink, have sex, have a job, or vote are mature enough to decide they want to change their sex. Even though this can lead to permanent sterilisation.
There's also the innumerate nonsense propagated by zealots and believed by credulous fools of the gender pay gap, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of how numbers work (or, indeed, the law).
Last but not least, it denies biological reality (the male advantage in terms of strength) to pretend that men who have become women can compete on a level playing field with those who actually have female genetics.
*It is statistically beneficial to be white rather than black in the justice system when it comes to sentencing. It's also useful to be female rather than male, attractive rather than ugly, and rich rather than poor. The sex difference is the biggest, I believe.
It was and I remeber it well. I voted for 'arold' but the Tories succeeded in painting him as responsible for the inflation. His gnomes of Zurich quote was used against him. But no one expected him to empty the treasury to save them from the effects.
The tories have a large majority in Parliament and can pass whatever laws they want. Instead they try and find new targets to blame, the latest one they are pushing is the ECHR. But many of the proponents of the anti woke crusade, IE Lawrence Fox, actually make appeals to the ECHR in their battles against 'woke tyranny'. For instance, if you look at fair cop, who are about fighting 'wokedom' in the police forces, they rely on human rights and, explictly, on the ECHR.
https://www.faircop.org.uk/the-law/
So the tory position on this subject is unfortunately one of incompetence and contradictions that will (in my view) only get resolved by a period in opposition.
I thought it was the very premise of the documentary series 'Yes, Minster' and 'Yes, Prime Minister'
Which I have always found -- in the instances when the series came close to spheres of activity I know well --- very accurate.
I said that elements of the transgender stuff is straying into child abuse. There have also been plenty of record stories of what appears to be systemic child abuse either ignored or covered up by authorities for political and cultural reasons.
Most child abuse, it goes without saying, occurs in the home or by people known to the child.
Woke is just about recognising structural prejudices in society.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/26/childrens-national-hospital-trans-hysterectomies/
There is already grumbling that the team who got her this far is not up to actually running the government, so she will have to bring in other people
He would come on here every month or so pointing out that people 'Didn't give a Monkeys' about the EU as an issue and it was pointless the Government being concerned about it. Then of course 2016 came along.
Now although I am far less invested in this 'woke' issue (I am still waiting for someone to define it properly for me) I can see commentators making exactly the same mistake again using exactly the same reasoning. You act as if all these questions are either/or - you either have to be concerned about the CoL crisis or about Wokeism. It is an inability to comprehend that people can, contrary to what you might think, walk and chew gum at the same time.
I have no idea where the woke issue is going because unlike the EU issue, beyond the most extreme examples which seem to be fairly few and far between, I don't understand the boundaries and the detailed concerns.
But I do observe OGH making exactly the same argument that he made a decade ago over another subject he was sceptical about which leads me to believe he might be making exactly the same mistake when interpreting the views of the wider public and their ability to judge many issues at the same time.
My point is that it is disingenuous to scapegoat 'liberals' when the illiberal are at it too.
Mr. Password, single father accurately describes Denethor, Theoden, and Elrond. And anyone who used that as the definition of those characters would be a cretin because, while accurate in itself, it utterly misses the point.
"What's your main character trait?"
"I am black. And a woman."
It's absolutely tokenistic, ticking a diversity box and defining a role by a couple of demographics.
Black dwarves may or may not work within the world of Tolkien (if the showrunners had more knowledge of the lore and less intensity for their own political views they would've just set it in Harad and had a majority of the cast as non-white humans, but there we are) but a skin colour and trouser contents do not make a character. Yet that is the metric by which some judge such things, and the great positive extolled in the PR.
You might as well describe the Witch King of Angmar as an elderly man.
Anyway, time for me to go for a wander. Have fun kids.
1.04 Liz Truss 96%
22 Rishi Sunak 5%
Next Conservative leader
1.04 Liz Truss 96%
23 Rishi Sunak 4%
Every move to make society nicer (for want of a better word) has been loudly opposed beforehand. Sometimes because of genuine issues that need ironing out, but mostly because humans dislike change. And also, we don't like to have to note bits of nastiness that we have tolerated.
The other thing that happens is that the passing of generational batons is difficult. The still vigorous don't like the idea of letting the younger take over. They're not ready, they'll do it wrong and... it hints at our incoming mortality.
Much more comforting to poke fun at their foolishness.
Edit: sorry, Holocaust denier and antisemite.
https://twitter.com/mrdanwalker/status/1563471267101278208
"Fantastic response to Dogging For Treasure last night [...]"
Provided it doesn't become a boring plot point in the actual show I don't see that it is a problem. I couldn't give a toss what people say in the PR, given it was a criticism of LotR is not surprising they mentioned it.
Right now, we have real problems. The huge cost in energy bills is going to leave people cold and shivering. These will not be only the people who absolutely cannot afford it. My MiL has switched off her boiler and puts it on once a week for her bath. She listens to the endless stories on the news and is terrified, even although she can easily afford her heating bills.
The total failure of the Bank to do its job and control inflation is another problem. How do we maintain the cohesion and unity needed to bring down inflation again? What difficult choices do we make in relation to interest rates, wage increases and taxes? What do we do about a structure that has been found to be so unfit for purpose?
The public finances are in a terrible mess. We never fully recovered from the GFC, we spent billions and billions protecting the economy from the ravages of Covid and we have printed as much new money as we dare now that inflation has taken off. The idea that the state can somehow and magically protect us from this external price shock is fundamentally delusional. All available resources need to be focused on those most in need but none of the parties, fishing for votes, are willing to accept this reality.
We have a major war on the continent of Europe again, and, with a lot of western help, an unstable, deeply paranoid, nuclear power run by a psychopathic and possibly very ill dictator is losing. This continues to threaten our very existence.
There are other issues but these alone make self indulgent crap about Wokeism an absurd displacement activity. A government that wastes time on that in light of the overwhelming intray deserves to fail.