Talking about traveling to very cold places, my brother-in-law is currently flying south to Chile, from where he'll be dropped off on Antarctica to trek across it over the next few months. https://polarweber.com/
Whilst I do like seeing new places, for this, I think better him than me.
This is a peak travel moment. Even for a jaded Gazetteer like me
You hike for three hours over Vatnajokull - one of the biggest glaciers in the world. You descend intense Mordor slopes of black volcanic scree. You are plunged into the emerald and crystal chasm of the ice cave. Where you gaze at clearly frozen time.
Then you hike back to the Glacier Lagoon where you have hot chocolate laced with Brennivin and superb lobster soup as you gaze with utterly contented exhaustion at the toppling icebergs
Bliss
Just a shame that a guided tour with your hand held the whole way isn't real travel, eh?
Not sure they allow peculiar and solitary men with dogs down here. But you could give it a go
You’re just being led down there and baby fed, so you can write it up to encourage the rest of us to make the trip properly. So I suggest that you do your job and find out.
"Properly" = no guide.
Darwinism.
I’d expect that most of us know that much of the challenge, and joy, of travel is finding yourself in an unfamiliar environment and working out how to cope with all the challenges that throws at you, and enjoy where you are. Looking for someone at the airport holding up a piece of paper with your name on it, and then following them about for a week, is a pale imitation.
You’re an idiot. You simply can’t go to half these places without professional guides
1. It’s Icelandic law 2. You could easily die
All you are doing is proving that you actually have not travelled much, if you disbelieve this
It's Icelandic law? When I went to Iceland only a few years ago it wasn't law to have a guide.
I agree you can die, but that depends upon weather conditions. Again when I was there it was very mild and driving wasn't an issue at all and you could rent a car.
I’m talking about the ice caves. Of course you can wander the streets of Reykjavik or drive the ring road as much as you like
Not what you said. You said 'You simply can’t go to half these places without professional guides'. Practically everything you have posted you can go to without a guide. I know because I have been to them. Even the only one you said needs a guide is a recommendation because it is dangerous not to, not because it is the law (it might be, but I doubt it). The same is true for all sorts of stuff all over the world. I wouldn't go on an unpisted glacier without a guide for instance, but it isn't illegal to do so in most countries. I couldn't go around the race track last week without a test beforehand, but it wasn't the law.
We made a mistake when going to Iceland. I normally do not book organised stuff and prefer to discover them ourselves, however Iceland was a different trip for us so did go along with organised stuff and regret doing so. We would have got more in by not doing so because of wasted time between trips. You seem to be cramming a lot in (of course). I assume you have back to back stuff organised which is hard to coordinate for the bog standard tourist as the trips are so long and not coordinated.
FYI I recommend the Cod War patrol boat. Not as impressive as all the other stuff you will be seeing but a good bit of history to fill a spare hour.
We are in danger of boring other pb-ers but I am pretty sure it’s the law to have a guide if you visit the ice caves
“How to visit Iceland’s ice caves
You can’t visit Iceland’s ice caves alone, and have to go with a tour guide. Don’t even think about trying to visit an ice cave without a guide. There are a lot of hazards involved – including potential collapse of the cave, flooding, and instable ice. People have died trying to see them alone. Be sure to book a tour.”
And if not the actual law it’s a law of natural selection
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
This is a peak travel moment. Even for a jaded Gazetteer like me
You hike for three hours over Vatnajokull - one of the biggest glaciers in the world. You descend intense Mordor slopes of black volcanic scree. You are plunged into the emerald and crystal chasm of the ice cave. Where you gaze at clearly frozen time.
Then you hike back to the Glacier Lagoon where you have hot chocolate laced with Brennivin and superb lobster soup as you gaze with utterly contented exhaustion at the toppling icebergs
Bliss
Just a shame that a guided tour with your hand held the whole way isn't real travel, eh?
Not sure they allow peculiar and solitary men with dogs down here. But you could give it a go
You’re just being led down there and baby fed, so you can write it up to encourage the rest of us to make the trip properly. So I suggest that you do your job and find out.
"Properly" = no guide.
Darwinism.
I’d expect that most of us know that much of the challenge, and joy, of travel is finding yourself in an unfamiliar environment and working out how to cope with all the challenges that throws at you, and enjoy where you are. Looking for someone at the airport holding up a piece of paper with your name on it, and then following them about for a week, is a pale imitation.
You’re an idiot. You simply can’t go to half these places without professional guides
1. It’s Icelandic law 2. You could easily die
All you are doing is proving that you actually have not travelled much, if you disbelieve this
It's Icelandic law? When I went to Iceland only a few years ago it wasn't law to have a guide.
I agree you can die, but that depends upon weather conditions. Again when I was there it was very mild and driving wasn't an issue at all and you could rent a car.
Bear in mind "leon" is usually on a freebie, all the promotional fluff, photos, hotel recommendations etc that follow are the payback. I'd be inclined to take it all with a large pinch of salt
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
Population density in London is far higher already than in the North and the South East is also far more densely populated than say the North East or Yorkshire.
It was an absolute shit show of a budget, worse than the ERM, because this was clearly self inflicted as a lone move by the Truss government, whereas ERM was a mistake supported by the whole political elite.
After Brexit, we saw tremendous wage growth in lower income professions, which generated a lot of goodwill towards Johnson before he screwed it up with partygate. Then Truss undid that wage increase with the currency devaluation, in order to give a tax cut for the rich.
“Then Truss undid that wage increase with the currency devaluation”
What currency devaluation?
It somewhat misses the point on another level, too. The inflation (and BOE failure) that followed the wage growth led to the interest rate rises that are now being mooned at....
Inflation was caused by an external commodity price shock, not wage growth.
The inflation problem would be worse for working people if they weren't getting pay rises. Which is why we have some people here still bemoaning they can't get the staff they want for minimum wage anymore.
Generally the same people who go on about a living wage and how people in full time work shouldnt need to rely on welfare/food banks.
Actually it strikes me that they are exactly the opposite sorts of people holding such opinions.
There are many on the left who are going on about letting more immigrants in because of staffing issues. We have seen low paid workers actually raising their pay above minimum wage now the bottomless bag of cheap labour has been shut down.
Now is it just me or thinks workers having payrises because managers can't just shrug and say well tough you aren't getting a payrise because there are plenty of people available to do your job cheaper is about the only way these people are ever going to see pay rises. (Yes right wing people say the same but they arent usually the people going on about a living wage).
Sorry but the only way to raise wages and not make minimum wage a maxium wage for the low paid is to make demand exceed supply
But many of those on here advocating a living wage instead of benefits are not of the left. And some of us pay substantially more than the minimum wage already.
This is not about minimum and maximum wages but about living wages. It is entirely possible to increase the minimum wage so it is a living wage and therefore remove the need for benefits. If that then becomes the maximum wage then so what? It is not for Governments to decide the maximum that can be paid. It is for them to ensure they are not subsiding the profits of employers who pay too little for people to live on.
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Try living in the red wall for a while? Excuse me, I do live in the Red Wall, you don't.
There is new housing estates all over the place. You know, all those homes you keep complaining about because you want to excuse the NIMBY scum? All those new homes have voters.
The Red Wall fell because of construction, because the likes of Barratt etc got people on the property ladder, NOT because poor people suddenly became fed up of Labour not doing anything for them.
Didn't see it either, Andy, but am interested that you should ask here on this forum.
It's what I do if I want an impartial and balanced view. No good going to the mainstream media, and although not everyone here is as objective as you and I (ahem) you tend to know who calls it straight and who doesn't, so your chances of getting a fair view are good.
Targeting Albanians (as some shamefully did when fighting for Brexit) as the cause of Britain’s crime and border problems makes for easy rhetoric but ignores hard fact. Repeating the same things and expecting different results is insane (ask Einstein!)
The Russian becomes ill or actually suffers a death if he desires to be political. This may seem strange, yet a Russian person has a constitution which creates a disposition towards disease, towards death, with intensive political involvement. The Russian Folk Soul has absolutely no affinity with that quality in the English and American Folk Soul which creates a political capacity.)
And is Russia really going to invade Norway rather than just prat about cutting undersea cables?
The relevance of Steiner is the cult's crazy belief about transitioning to the next "epoch". As for the national or racial folk soul stuff, Steiner saw everything in racial terms. The cult believes that a root race rises in the dying phase of one epoch and then becomes the main racial basis for the next epoch after a cataclysm. They are as mad as March hares.
It's the cataclysm I am most worried about. Never trust reincarnation nutters who believe in an inevitable perhaps imminent cataclysm.
Hostilities between Russia and Norway wouldn't start with an invasion. They might start with incidents at energy sector facilities either on land or at sea.
There has been little coverage of the Norway drones story since the number arrested went to seven.
In their report on the raising of the Norwegian military alert level, the Washington Post mention the drones. They don't say outright that Støre cited them as a reason, so presumably he didn't. But it appears the seven remain in custody.
One guy is accused of flying drones over Svalbard. Where exactly on Svalbard, I don't know. There is a Russian settlement there.
Wiki-Google-Twitter experts on Svalbard may soon appear...
WASHINGTON — Senior Russian military leaders recently had conversations to discuss when and how Moscow might use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, contributing to heightened concern in Washington and allied capitals, according to multiple senior American officials.
Yeah right, we're meant to believe a nation that can barely agree to mobilise some peasants and is unable to stop the Turks from breaking their grain embargo is willing to commit nuclear suicide?
Pull the other one.
Not sure “pull the other one” is the optimum retort at this juncture
What happened to the invasion from Belarus?
Yokes suggested it is still on just two days ago.
There’s still exercises going on in Belarus, and the suggestion is that an invasion of Ukraine could take place. Personally I can’t see it, the Russian conscripts are lacking training, morale and equipment - but the threat of it, is keeping thousands of Ukranian soldiers occupied on the other side of the border.
Plus it’s muddy weather either side of frozen ground weather?
I'd like a Lab/LD coalition after the next election, which will hopefully bring in proportional representation. Maybe not what you were expecting my preferences to be.
Talking about traveling to very cold places, my brother-in-law is currently flying south to Chile, from where he'll be dropped off on Antarctica to trek across it over the next few months. https://polarweber.com/
Whilst I do like seeing new places, for this, I think better him than me.
Of all the world wide travels my wife and I have done over the last 20 years including 5 round the world trips. Antarctica was and will always be the highlight for us and landing on the peninsula at several locations and viewing the awesome beauty made us realise how privileged we have been
Talking about traveling to very cold places, my brother-in-law is currently flying south to Chile, from where he'll be dropped off on Antarctica to trek across it over the next few months. https://polarweber.com/
Whilst I do like seeing new places, for this, I think better him than me.
Interesting, bloke I know who has done the same walk trained for it in the same way by towing tyres behind him to represent the sledge
TV ad for the Citroën Visa GTi in 1988, propelled like a Super Etendard* over the sea. Note that the car was actually catapulted from the 'Clemenceau' aircraft carrier and had to be filled with concrete to film a proper launch, without the car disintegrating immediately. https://twitter.com/AviationMarlene/status/1587774876349333505
*The aircraft shown in the video is the Etendard 4P, apparently.
Never done one off the bow but we did push an Army Major's Land Rover off the stern just for a laugh. In those days every RN carrier had an Army officer aboard to take charge of all land maps as we apparently couldn't be trusted with them. This twat came aboard with a bristling ginger soup strainer, a swagger stick and his own Land Rover that he insisted be craned aboard. When we put back into Pompey at the end of the cruise the Land Rover was at the bottom of the Atlantic and the swagger stick was missing presumed stolen. Only the moonchh endured.
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Try living in the red wall for a while? Excuse me, I do live in the Red Wall, you don't.
There is new housing estates all over the place. You know, all those homes you keep complaining about because you want to excuse the NIMBY scum? All those new homes have voters.
The Red Wall fell because of construction, because the likes of Barratt etc got people on the property ladder, NOT because poor people suddenly became fed up of Labour not doing anything for them.
You're in Birchwood aren't you? Cheshire daaaaarling.
Talking about traveling to very cold places, my brother-in-law is currently flying south to Chile, from where he'll be dropped off on Antarctica to trek across it over the next few months. https://polarweber.com/
Whilst I do like seeing new places, for this, I think better him than me.
Of all the world wide travels my wife and I have done over the last 20 years including 5 round the world trips. Antarctica was and will always be the highlight for us and landing on the peninsula at several locations and viewing the awesome beauty made us realise how privileged we have been
In a lifetime of travel, Antarctica might be my overall highlight as well. It is certainly like nowhere else on earth. And the closest to heaven - and hell - all in one place
Targeting Albanians (as some shamefully did when fighting for Brexit) as the cause of Britain’s crime and border problems makes for easy rhetoric but ignores hard fact. Repeating the same things and expecting different results is insane (ask Einstein!)
The Russian becomes ill or actually suffers a death if he desires to be political. This may seem strange, yet a Russian person has a constitution which creates a disposition towards disease, towards death, with intensive political involvement. The Russian Folk Soul has absolutely no affinity with that quality in the English and American Folk Soul which creates a political capacity.)
And is Russia really going to invade Norway rather than just prat about cutting undersea cables?
The relevance of Steiner is the cult's crazy belief about transitioning to the next "epoch". As for the national or racial folk soul stuff, Steiner saw everything in racial terms. The cult believes that a root race rises in the dying phase of one epoch and then becomes the main racial basis for the next epoch after a cataclysm. They are as mad as March hares.
It's the cataclysm I am most worried about. Never trust reincarnation nutters who believe in an inevitable perhaps imminent cataclysm.
Hostilities between Russia and Norway wouldn't start with an invasion. They might start with incidents at energy sector facilities either on land or at sea.
There has been little coverage of the Norway drones story since the number arrested went to seven.
In their report on the raising of the Norwegian military alert level, the Washington Post mention the drones. They don't say outright that Støre cited them as a reason, so presumably he didn't. But it appears the seven remain in custody.
One guy is accused of flying drones over Svalbard. Where exactly on Svalbard, I don't know. There is a Russian settlement there.
Wiki-Google experts on Svalbard may soon appear...
There is little in Svalbard other than the disused Russian coal mines and Longyearbyen the capital
We have visited it and it was notable that wherever we went we had to have an armed guard against polar bears and indeed we were very fortunate to observe one from a safe distance in its natural environment
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Try living in the red wall for a while? Excuse me, I do live in the Red Wall, you don't.
There is new housing estates all over the place. You know, all those homes you keep complaining about because you want to excuse the NIMBY scum? All those new homes have voters.
The Red Wall fell because of construction, because the likes of Barratt etc got people on the property ladder, NOT because poor people suddenly became fed up of Labour not doing anything for them.
That's utter rubbish.
Brexit and Johnson offered those people let down by decades of Labour local government corruption an opportunity for change. Sadly Brexit was a false premise and the Conservatives now look as dodgy as the late T. Dan Smith.
WASHINGTON — Senior Russian military leaders recently had conversations to discuss when and how Moscow might use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, contributing to heightened concern in Washington and allied capitals, according to multiple senior American officials.
Yeah right, we're meant to believe a nation that can barely agree to mobilise some peasants and is unable to stop the Turks from breaking their grain embargo is willing to commit nuclear suicide?
Pull the other one.
Not sure “pull the other one” is the optimum retort at this juncture
What happened to the invasion from Belarus?
Yokes suggested it is still on just two days ago.
There’s still exercises going on in Belarus, and the suggestion is that an invasion of Ukraine could take place. Personally I can’t see it, the Russian conscripts are lacking training, morale and equipment - but the threat of it, is keeping thousands of Ukranian soldiers occupied on the other side of the border.
Does "conscript" cover guys who did their year of military service years ago and were among the reservists who were mobilised recently?
Edit: no, wait, it can't, because they're trained. To whom do you refer then?
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Try living in the red wall for a while? Excuse me, I do live in the Red Wall, you don't.
There is new housing estates all over the place. You know, all those homes you keep complaining about because you want to excuse the NIMBY scum? All those new homes have voters.
The Red Wall fell because of construction, because the likes of Barratt etc got people on the property ladder, NOT because poor people suddenly became fed up of Labour not doing anything for them.
You're in Birchwood aren't you? Cheshire daaaaarling.
I've moved around a bit, I'd rather not say where I live if you don't mind, but Birchwood is not a bad example. Warrington North is a safe Labour seat, or used to be, like much of the North West its seen massive construction recently and its trended away from Labour as the share of owner occupier voters in the constituency has risen.
Just like the neighbouring constituency of Leigh. What you'd think of as Leigh is still just as grotty terraced homes as it always was, but its surrounded by new estates of semi-detached homes with gardens and driveways for 2 parking spaces each.
Drive around the new estates of Leigh, versus the old streets of Leigh, and its hardly a surprise voting levels have changed. The voting is changing not because people are suddenly fed up of Labour, but because Leigh itself, much of the North itself, is changing. The houses people are living in - and increasingly owning - are not the same homes that existed thirty years ago.
And constituencies that were predominantly owner occupied in the past, that are now unaffordable and NIMBYs are blocking construction, are seeing trends away from the Tories.
WASHINGTON — Senior Russian military leaders recently had conversations to discuss when and how Moscow might use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, contributing to heightened concern in Washington and allied capitals, according to multiple senior American officials.
Yeah right, we're meant to believe a nation that can barely agree to mobilise some peasants and is unable to stop the Turks from breaking their grain embargo is willing to commit nuclear suicide?
Pull the other one.
Not sure “pull the other one” is the optimum retort at this juncture
What happened to the invasion from Belarus?
Yokes suggested it is still on just two days ago.
There’s still exercises going on in Belarus, and the suggestion is that an invasion of Ukraine could take place. Personally I can’t see it, the Russian conscripts are lacking training, morale and equipment - but the threat of it, is keeping thousands of Ukranian soldiers occupied on the other side of the border.
Plus it’s muddy weather either side of frozen ground weather?
Rasputitsa to the Russians - but it's not normally as much as a problem in the autumn as it is in the spring.
WASHINGTON — Senior Russian military leaders recently had conversations to discuss when and how Moscow might use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, contributing to heightened concern in Washington and allied capitals, according to multiple senior American officials.
Yeah right, we're meant to believe a nation that can barely agree to mobilise some peasants and is unable to stop the Turks from breaking their grain embargo is willing to commit nuclear suicide?
Pull the other one.
Not sure “pull the other one” is the optimum retort at this juncture
What happened to the invasion from Belarus?
The Belarus army didn't fancy the idea.
The other news which Leon (and the NYT) seems to have missed, as he trecks the barren wastes, was about the conversations the US and Russia held about nukes over the last week. Which led to something of a reduction in tensions.
There are Belarussians fighting in Ukraine - for Ukraine. There is the Kalinouski unit made up of former security officials from Belarus and the Pahonya battalion.
Targeting Albanians (as some shamefully did when fighting for Brexit) as the cause of Britain’s crime and border problems makes for easy rhetoric but ignores hard fact. Repeating the same things and expecting different results is insane (ask Einstein!)
Enlighten us - what hard fact is being ignored?
Sorry, everything below the link is a quote.
His next says
" 70% of the 140,000 Albanians who have moved to the UK were living in Italy and Greece.1200 of them are Business people. Albanians in the UK work hard and pay tax. UK should fight the crime gangs of all nationalities and stop discriminating v Albanians to excuse policy failures."
And now *another* headache for Suella Braverman, as the bar standards board looks into a “dishonest statement to promote her career” as she tried to break into politics. Full story - and something else the regulator might want to have a look at - in the brand new Eye, out today. https://twitter.com/PrivateEyeNews/status/1587772749153542148
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Try living in the red wall for a while? Excuse me, I do live in the Red Wall, you don't.
There is new housing estates all over the place. You know, all those homes you keep complaining about because you want to excuse the NIMBY scum? All those new homes have voters.
The Red Wall fell because of construction, because the likes of Barratt etc got people on the property ladder, NOT because poor people suddenly became fed up of Labour not doing anything for them.
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Try living in the red wall for a while? Excuse me, I do live in the Red Wall, you don't.
There is new housing estates all over the place. You know, all those homes you keep complaining about because you want to excuse the NIMBY scum? All those new homes have voters.
The Red Wall fell because of construction, because the likes of Barratt etc got people on the property ladder, NOT because poor people suddenly became fed up of Labour not doing anything for them.
That's utter rubbish.
Brexit and Johnson offered those people let down by decades of Labour local government corruption an opportunity for change. Sadly Brexit was a false premise and the Conservatives now look as dodgy as the late T. Dan Smith.
"Suella Braverman speaks for ordinary people – and that’s why Leftist elites detest her The Home Secretary is right about the migrant crisis, but that makes her a target for those who want to maintain the lie Allison Pearson" (£)
So if you are not even an honest think tank, just a lobby group fronting up as one, you’d love charitable status, but should you have it? So you see how grey an answer this is?
I was surprised that the ERG was taxpayer funded. Braverman was asked on Ch4 News to say how much it received and who its members were and she refused to do so.
TV ad for the Citroën Visa GTi in 1988, propelled like a Super Etendard* over the sea. Note that the car was actually catapulted from the 'Clemenceau' aircraft carrier and had to be filled with concrete to film a proper launch, without the car disintegrating immediately. https://twitter.com/AviationMarlene/status/1587774876349333505
*The aircraft shown in the video is the Etendard 4P, apparently.
Never done one off the bow but we did push an Army Major's Land Rover off the stern just for a laugh. In those days every RN carrier had an Army officer aboard to take charge of all land maps as we apparently couldn't be trusted with them. This twat came aboard with a bristling ginger soup strainer, a swagger stick and his own Land Rover that he insisted be craned aboard. When we put back into Pompey at the end of the cruise the Land Rover was at the bottom of the Atlantic and the swagger stick was missing presumed stolen. Only the moonchh endured.
What did he think he would be doing with a Landie at sea? Drive up and down the flight deck? I'd have thought it only got in the way and was a fire hazard with the petrol.
So if you are not even an honest think tank, just a lobby group fronting up as one, you’d love charitable status, but should you have it? So you see how grey an answer this is?
I was surprised that the ERG was taxpayer funded. Braverman was asked on Ch4 News to say how much it received and who its members were and she refused to do so.
tbf she was right not to give the member names - personal information legislation.
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Try living in the red wall for a while? Excuse me, I do live in the Red Wall, you don't.
There is new housing estates all over the place. You know, all those homes you keep complaining about because you want to excuse the NIMBY scum? All those new homes have voters.
The Red Wall fell because of construction, because the likes of Barratt etc got people on the property ladder, NOT because poor people suddenly became fed up of Labour not doing anything for them.
You're in Birchwood aren't you? Cheshire daaaaarling.
I've moved around a bit, I'd rather not say where I live if you don't mind, but Birchwood is not a bad example. Warrington North is a safe Labour seat, or used to be, like much of the North West its seen massive construction recently and its trended away from Labour as the share of owner occupier voters in the constituency has risen.
Just like the neighbouring constituency of Leigh. What you'd think of as Leigh is still just as grotty terraced homes as it always was, but its surrounded by new estates of semi-detached homes with gardens and driveways for 2 parking spaces each.
Drive around the new estates of Leigh, versus the old streets of Leigh, and its hardly a surprise voting levels have changed. The voting is changing not because people are suddenly fed up of Labour, but because Leigh itself, much of the North itself, is changing. The houses people are living in - and increasingly owning - are not the same homes that existed thirty years ago.
And constituencies that were predominantly owner occupied in the past, that are now unaffordable and NIMBYs are blocking construction, are seeing trends away from the Tories.
Its housing, stupid.
The South East still has the highest owner occupation rate in the country at 70%, it is London with the lowest at 50% where the problem really is for the Tories.
Control immigration too and you reduce demand so do not need so much supply
I'd like a Lab/LD coalition after the next election, which will hopefully bring in proportional representation. Maybe not what you were expecting my preferences to be.
Fair enough.
I always thought you were a Tory, so that does surprise me I must admit. I was wrong.
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Try living in the red wall for a while? Excuse me, I do live in the Red Wall, you don't.
There is new housing estates all over the place. You know, all those homes you keep complaining about because you want to excuse the NIMBY scum? All those new homes have voters.
The Red Wall fell because of construction, because the likes of Barratt etc got people on the property ladder, NOT because poor people suddenly became fed up of Labour not doing anything for them.
You're in Birchwood aren't you? Cheshire daaaaarling.
I've moved around a bit, I'd rather not say where I live if you don't mind, but Birchwood is not a bad example. Warrington North is a safe Labour seat, or used to be, like much of the North West its seen massive construction recently and its trended away from Labour as the share of owner occupier voters in the constituency has risen.
Just like the neighbouring constituency of Leigh. What you'd think of as Leigh is still just as grotty terraced homes as it always was, but its surrounded by new estates of semi-detached homes with gardens and driveways for 2 parking spaces each.
Drive around the new estates of Leigh, versus the old streets of Leigh, and its hardly a surprise voting levels have changed. The voting is changing not because people are suddenly fed up of Labour, but because Leigh itself, much of the North itself, is changing. The houses people are living in - and increasingly owning - are not the same homes that existed thirty years ago.
And constituencies that were predominantly owner occupied in the past, that are now unaffordable and NIMBYs are blocking construction, are seeing trends away from the Tories.
Its housing, stupid.
Again again, I hope your Tory friends go and argue your points on the doorstep. They will be annihilated.
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Try living in the red wall for a while? Excuse me, I do live in the Red Wall, you don't.
There is new housing estates all over the place. You know, all those homes you keep complaining about because you want to excuse the NIMBY scum? All those new homes have voters.
The Red Wall fell because of construction, because the likes of Barratt etc got people on the property ladder, NOT because poor people suddenly became fed up of Labour not doing anything for them.
Loving the metaphors in final para
Not to mention the realization that those Red Wallers will soon becvome the 'NIMBY scum' BR decries.
SKS made a perfect little weapon against himself by smearing Corbyn and courteously handed it to Sunak, who is now using it, because why wouldn't he?
It is nonetheless quite remarkable that Sunak associating Starmer with Corbyn "I do think Jeremy Corbyn would make a great Prime Minister" (Starmer) is a big win every week for Sunak. Corbyn remains a massive drag on Labour.
References to Corbyn aren't references to Jeremy Corbyn as such. They are short hand for the muscle memory of Labour to tax and spend - something which does still resonate with those over 50.
You will keep hearing "Corbyn" for years to come. Basically, until Labour changes its broken business model.
As opposed to the Hunt/Sunak business model of tax and not spend?
I don't see attacks on Corbyn as a metaphor for Labour's current business programme. If it were Sunak wouldn't have referenced Hezbollah. They are attacks on Starmer's association with a reprehensible and evil former leader of the Labour Party.
I really don't see any downsides to the Tories keep mentioning Corbyn. He was a large part of why they got an 80-seat majority. Fear of his form of open borders, anti-NATO, tax and borrow until the pips squeak socialism still scares people. Labour still hasn't put enough clear blue water between them and him.
And it's not as if the Tories have a huge amount else to sell!
Rishi banging on about Corbyn might help with those Tory/LibDem-leaners who still think Corbyn runs Labour but that is about a dozen people in the whole country, and 11 of those work for CCHQ.
This is the same mistake Labour made with Gordon Brown after Blair, and the Tories made with Theresa May after Cameron, which is to try and force the new leader to carry on the campaigning style of the one they replaced. Sunak needs to be the calm, efficient and incisive new broom, not a tribute act to blustering Boris.
Rishi needs to follow Boris in only one way, which is to persuade the voters to give his *new* government a chance, by differentiating himself from his predecessors. Even Liz Truss got that memo.
Two points if I may:- 1. There is not much to Cons can do, they are really beyond their sell by date, 13 years and generally the public seeks a change at that time. so irrespective of the Truss debacle, Partygate, evrything else, time is simply up. 2. What has happened to the Johnson resignation honours list?
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Try living in the red wall for a while? Excuse me, I do live in the Red Wall, you don't.
There is new housing estates all over the place. You know, all those homes you keep complaining about because you want to excuse the NIMBY scum? All those new homes have voters.
The Red Wall fell because of construction, because the likes of Barratt etc got people on the property ladder, NOT because poor people suddenly became fed up of Labour not doing anything for them.
Loving the metaphors in final para
Not to mention the realization that those Red Wallers will soon becvome the 'NIMBY scum' BR decries.
"Scum" is seriously psychotic, much more disturbing than the usual banhammer words. Barty over caffeinating again.
TV ad for the Citroën Visa GTi in 1988, propelled like a Super Etendard* over the sea. Note that the car was actually catapulted from the 'Clemenceau' aircraft carrier and had to be filled with concrete to film a proper launch, without the car disintegrating immediately. https://twitter.com/AviationMarlene/status/1587774876349333505
*The aircraft shown in the video is the Etendard 4P, apparently.
Never done one off the bow but we did push an Army Major's Land Rover off the stern just for a laugh. In those days every RN carrier had an Army officer aboard to take charge of all land maps as we apparently couldn't be trusted with them. This twat came aboard with a bristling ginger soup strainer, a swagger stick and his own Land Rover that he insisted be craned aboard. When we put back into Pompey at the end of the cruise the Land Rover was at the bottom of the Atlantic and the swagger stick was missing presumed stolen. Only the moonchh endured.
What did he think he would be doing with a Landie at sea? Drive up and down the flight deck? I'd have thought it only got in the way and was a fire hazard with the petrol.
There was usually a car or two aboard for use while in port. Usually LRs or Rover 800s in my time - always diesel. The Galloping Major wanted his own LR, reserved for his use as befitted his status. On my first cruise we had a Mini Van in which all nine pilots of the squadron toured Crete with the Rugby playing AWI clinging to the roof as I tried to coax it over 55mph.
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Let’s explain a.
Austerity didn’t really start in 2010 the impacts started to be noticed in 2014 through 2017.
The result of that impact was felt by whatever party was in power (mainly labour) in the 2017-2020 elections where a lot of councils switched to Tory or Tory led leaderships.
Those councils are also failing to delivery which means that any austerity will result in the current council leadership copping the blame and Labour winning some seats if not the council leadership
When I was a young, newly qualified chartered accountant, just starting to get accustomed to the pressurized world of big business & high finance, I was taken to a slap-up lunch there by a senior Deloittes partner, a boisterous chap, very trad, loud posh voice, portly, pinstripes & braces etc, he seemed ancient to me at the time but was probably about 52, and we had what he said was his "usual", essentially a pile of red meat and a jug of claret. I remember thinking, god, this can't be healthy, having this on a regular basis, and sure enough he had a coronary about 2 months later. Happy ending though, otherwise I wouldn't post it, because he recovered and took early retirement.
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Let’s explain a.
Austerity didn’t really start in 2010 the impacts started to be noticed in 2014 through 2017.
The result of that impact was felt by whatever party was in power (mainly labour) in the 2017-2020 elections where a lot of councils switched to Tory or Tory led leaderships.
Those councils are also failing to delivery which means that any austerity will result in the current council leadership copping the blame and Labour winning some seats if not the council leadership
I'd have thought that most urban and red wall councils were still Labour led. Mine certainly is, and they still get the blame locally for not being able to do anything because their budgets have been cut by central govt.
SKS made a perfect little weapon against himself by smearing Corbyn and courteously handed it to Sunak, who is now using it, because why wouldn't he?
It is nonetheless quite remarkable that Sunak associating Starmer with Corbyn "I do think Jeremy Corbyn would make a great Prime Minister" (Starmer) is a big win every week for Sunak. Corbyn remains a massive drag on Labour.
References to Corbyn aren't references to Jeremy Corbyn as such. They are short hand for the muscle memory of Labour to tax and spend - something which does still resonate with those over 50.
You will keep hearing "Corbyn" for years to come. Basically, until Labour changes its broken business model.
As opposed to the Hunt/Sunak business model of tax and not spend?
I don't see attacks on Corbyn as a metaphor for Labour's current business programme. If it were Sunak wouldn't have referenced Hezbollah. They are attacks on Starmer's association with a reprehensible and evil former leader of the Labour Party.
I really don't see any downsides to the Tories keep mentioning Corbyn. He was a large part of why they got an 80-seat majority. Fear of his form of open borders, anti-NATO, tax and borrow until the pips squeak socialism still scares people. Labour still hasn't put enough clear blue water between them and him.
And it's not as if the Tories have a huge amount else to sell!
Rishi banging on about Corbyn might help with those Tory/LibDem-leaners who still think Corbyn runs Labour but that is about a dozen people in the whole country, and 11 of those work for CCHQ.
This is the same mistake Labour made with Gordon Brown after Blair, and the Tories made with Theresa May after Cameron, which is to try and force the new leader to carry on the campaigning style of the one they replaced. Sunak needs to be the calm, efficient and incisive new broom, not a tribute act to blustering Boris.
Rishi needs to follow Boris in only one way, which is to persuade the voters to give his *new* government a chance, by differentiating himself from his predecessors. Even Liz Truss got that memo.
The (relatively few) Tory/LibDem-leaners who still think Corbyn runs Labour will have changed their mind by the next GE. When Corbyn stands against a Labour candidate and is expelled, the penny will finally drop. Given that Starmer is looking forward to finally dealing with Corbyn for once and all, I suspect that he will be delighted if the Tories bang on about Corbyn in the meantime.
When I was a young, newly qualified chartered accountant, just starting to get accustomed to the pressurized world of big business & high finance, I was taken to a slap-up lunch there by a senior Deloittes partner, a boisterous chap, very trad, loud posh voice, portly, pinstripes & braces etc, he seemed ancient to me at the time but was probably about 52, and we had what he said was his "usual", essentially a pile of red meat and a jug of claret. I remember thinking, god, this can't be healthy, having this on a regular basis, and sure enough he had a coronary about 2 months later. Happy ending though, otherwise I wouldn't post it, because he recovered and took early retirement.
My one time brother in law - very successful City trader - took me there in the late 1980s. My Lord, the drinking
I vaguely remember weird olde liqueurs and spirits you don’t get anywhere else. Totally unhealthy and outdated but places like Simpsons are what makes London - esp the City - wonderful and unique. The endless storied history
According to Twitter the City Corp is on the case and won’t allow a change of use. More luxury flats?! Pfff
When I was a young, newly qualified chartered accountant, just starting to get accustomed to the pressurized world of big business & high finance, I was taken to a slap-up lunch there by a senior Deloittes partner, a boisterous chap, very trad, loud posh voice, portly, pinstripes & braces etc, he seemed ancient to me at the time but was probably about 52, and we had what he said was his "usual", essentially a pile of red meat and a jug of claret. I remember thinking, god, this can't be healthy, having this on a regular basis, and sure enough he had a coronary about 2 months later. Happy ending though, otherwise I wouldn't post it, because he recovered and took early retirement.
My one time brother in law - very successful City trader - took me there in the late 1980s. My Lord, the drinking
I vaguely remember weird olde liqueurs and spirits you don’t get anywhere else. Totally unhealthy and outdated but places like Simpsons are what makes London - esp the City - wonderful and unique. The endless storied history
According to Twitter the City Corp is on the case and won’t allow a change of use. More luxury flats?! Pfff
This is a peak travel moment. Even for a jaded Gazetteer like me
You hike for three hours over Vatnajokull - one of the biggest glaciers in the world. You descend intense Mordor slopes of black volcanic scree. You are plunged into the emerald and crystal chasm of the ice cave. Where you gaze at clearly frozen time.
Then you hike back to the Glacier Lagoon where you have hot chocolate laced with Brennivin and superb lobster soup as you gaze with utterly contented exhaustion at the toppling icebergs
Bliss
Just a shame that a guided tour with your hand held the whole way isn't real travel, eh?
Not sure they allow peculiar and solitary men with dogs down here. But you could give it a go
You’re just being led down there and baby fed, so you can write it up to encourage the rest of us to make the trip properly. So I suggest that you do your job and find out.
"Properly" = no guide.
Darwinism.
I’d expect that most of us know that much of the challenge, and joy, of travel is finding yourself in an unfamiliar environment and working out how to cope with all the challenges that throws at you, and enjoy where you are. Looking for someone at the airport holding up a piece of paper with your name on it, and then following them about for a week, is a pale imitation.
You’re an idiot. You simply can’t go to half these places without professional guides
1. It’s Icelandic law 2. You could easily die
All you are doing is proving that you actually have not travelled much, if you disbelieve this
It's Icelandic law? When I went to Iceland only a few years ago it wasn't law to have a guide.
I agree you can die, but that depends upon weather conditions. Again when I was there it was very mild and driving wasn't an issue at all and you could rent a car.
Bear in mind "leon" is usually on a freebie, all the promotional fluff, photos, hotel recommendations etc that follow are the payback. I'd be inclined to take it all with a large pinch of salt
Bit harsh, he is out their working his socks off I thought
Nord Stream 1 operator says it found craters at damaged pipeline site
… initial data gathering at location of the pipeline damage on line 1 in the Swedish exclusive economic zone and found "technogenic craters".
"According to preliminary results of the damage site inspection, technogenic craters with a depth of 3 to 5 meters were found on the seabed at a distance of about 248 metres from each other," it said.
Sweden and Denmark have both concluded that four leaks on Nord Stream 1 and 2 were caused by explosions, but have not said who might be responsible.
"The section of the pipe between the craters is destroyed, the radius of pipe fragments dispersion is at least 250 metres. Experts continue to analyse the survey data," Nord Stream AG added.
When I was a young, newly qualified chartered accountant, just starting to get accustomed to the pressurized world of big business & high finance, I was taken to a slap-up lunch there by a senior Deloittes partner, a boisterous chap, very trad, loud posh voice, portly, pinstripes & braces etc, he seemed ancient to me at the time but was probably about 52, and we had what he said was his "usual", essentially a pile of red meat and a jug of claret. I remember thinking, god, this can't be healthy, having this on a regular basis, and sure enough he had a coronary about 2 months later. Happy ending though, otherwise I wouldn't post it, because he recovered and took early retirement.
My one time brother in law - very successful City trader - took me there in the late 1980s. My Lord, the drinking
I vaguely remember weird olde liqueurs and spirits you don’t get anywhere else. Totally unhealthy and outdated but places like Simpsons are what makes London - esp the City - wonderful and unique. The endless storied history
According to Twitter the City Corp is on the case and won’t allow a change of use. More luxury flats?! Pfff
SKS made a perfect little weapon against himself by smearing Corbyn and courteously handed it to Sunak, who is now using it, because why wouldn't he?
It is nonetheless quite remarkable that Sunak associating Starmer with Corbyn "I do think Jeremy Corbyn would make a great Prime Minister" (Starmer) is a big win every week for Sunak. Corbyn remains a massive drag on Labour.
References to Corbyn aren't references to Jeremy Corbyn as such. They are short hand for the muscle memory of Labour to tax and spend - something which does still resonate with those over 50.
You will keep hearing "Corbyn" for years to come. Basically, until Labour changes its broken business model.
As opposed to the Hunt/Sunak business model of tax and not spend?
I don't see attacks on Corbyn as a metaphor for Labour's current business programme. If it were Sunak wouldn't have referenced Hezbollah. They are attacks on Starmer's association with a reprehensible and evil former leader of the Labour Party.
I really don't see any downsides to the Tories keep mentioning Corbyn. He was a large part of why they got an 80-seat majority. Fear of his form of open borders, anti-NATO, tax and borrow until the pips squeak socialism still scares people. Labour still hasn't put enough clear blue water between them and him.
And it's not as if the Tories have a huge amount else to sell!
A lot has happened since Corbyn led the Labour Party. (Nearly as much has happened since he last took the Labour whip!) Brexit was the big issue in the latter part of his leadership. Now it's only political obsessives who ever mention it.
Since then - COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, the Cost of Living Crisis, the Energy Crisis, the Death of the Queen, the Truss/Kwarteng Crisis, the Invasion of the Asylum Seekers (!). It seems like a different world.
You might as well send the Navy off to sink Noah's Ark.
When I was a young, newly qualified chartered accountant, just starting to get accustomed to the pressurized world of big business & high finance, I was taken to a slap-up lunch there by a senior Deloittes partner, a boisterous chap, very trad, loud posh voice, portly, pinstripes & braces etc, he seemed ancient to me at the time but was probably about 52, and we had what he said was his "usual", essentially a pile of red meat and a jug of claret. I remember thinking, god, this can't be healthy, having this on a regular basis, and sure enough he had a coronary about 2 months later. Happy ending though, otherwise I wouldn't post it, because he recovered and took early retirement.
That's a nice story. The first time I was taken there was by some Spanish clients who had been told this was the best restaurant in London. I remember nothing about the food but what I remember is walking with them from my apartment on Old Compron Street which at the time had people living in several doorways in cardboard boxes and them saying to me they had no idea London had become like this.'It is worse than Madrid'. This was about 1990.
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Try living in the red wall for a while? Excuse me, I do live in the Red Wall, you don't.
There is new housing estates all over the place. You know, all those homes you keep complaining about because you want to excuse the NIMBY scum? All those new homes have voters.
The Red Wall fell because of construction, because the likes of Barratt etc got people on the property ladder, NOT because poor people suddenly became fed up of Labour not doing anything for them.
You're in Birchwood aren't you? Cheshire daaaaarling.
I've moved around a bit, I'd rather not say where I live if you don't mind, but Birchwood is not a bad example. Warrington North is a safe Labour seat, or used to be, like much of the North West its seen massive construction recently and its trended away from Labour as the share of owner occupier voters in the constituency has risen.
Just like the neighbouring constituency of Leigh. What you'd think of as Leigh is still just as grotty terraced homes as it always was, but its surrounded by new estates of semi-detached homes with gardens and driveways for 2 parking spaces each.
Drive around the new estates of Leigh, versus the old streets of Leigh, and its hardly a surprise voting levels have changed. The voting is changing not because people are suddenly fed up of Labour, but because Leigh itself, much of the North itself, is changing. The houses people are living in - and increasingly owning - are not the same homes that existed thirty years ago.
And constituencies that were predominantly owner occupied in the past, that are now unaffordable and NIMBYs are blocking construction, are seeing trends away from the Tories.
Its housing, stupid.
Again again, I hope your Tory friends go and argue your points on the doorstep. They will be annihilated.
Actually try reading that Economist article I linked to and the doorstep matches what I said. Your typical Red Wall voter now is someone who drives a car and has a mortgage on their house - but people with mortgages are the biggest swing voters of all.
There is an egalitarianism to Barratt Britain. Accountants, teachers, sales reps, plasterers and driving instructors live on the same street, and the smaller choice of pubs and restaurants means they socialise together, too. As long as mortgages remain affordable and petrol is cheap, it is not a place that worries much about politics. That is a boon for the government, and a problem for Labour. “When you knock on the door of a big new house,” asks a shadow minister, “how do you tell the people living there that the country is going wrong?”
The big danger for the Tories in the Red Wall isn't that people are not getting the promised opportunities, like you claim.
The big danger for the Tories in the Red Wall is that mortgages for their Barratt Home* and petrol for their Kia Sportage* are both becoming much, much more expensive.
If the Tories lose those who look at their mortgage and petrol going up and shudder, they lose the Red Wall.
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Let’s explain a.
Austerity didn’t really start in 2010 the impacts started to be noticed in 2014 through 2017.
The result of that impact was felt by whatever party was in power (mainly labour) in the 2017-2020 elections where a lot of councils switched to Tory or Tory led leaderships.
Those councils are also failing to delivery which means that any austerity will result in the current council leadership copping the blame and Labour winning some seats if not the council leadership
I'd have thought that most urban and red wall councils were still Labour led. Mine certainly is, and they still get the blame locally for not being able to do anything because their budgets have been cut by central govt.
Yep that’s true of some places but elsewhere the Tories have got into power and are now discovering that because they have failed to delivery re-election looks unlikely
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Try living in the red wall for a while? Excuse me, I do live in the Red Wall, you don't.
There is new housing estates all over the place. You know, all those homes you keep complaining about because you want to excuse the NIMBY scum? All those new homes have voters.
The Red Wall fell because of construction, because the likes of Barratt etc got people on the property ladder, NOT because poor people suddenly became fed up of Labour not doing anything for them.
You're in Birchwood aren't you? Cheshire daaaaarling.
I've moved around a bit, I'd rather not say where I live if you don't mind, but Birchwood is not a bad example. Warrington North is a safe Labour seat, or used to be, like much of the North West its seen massive construction recently and its trended away from Labour as the share of owner occupier voters in the constituency has risen.
Just like the neighbouring constituency of Leigh. What you'd think of as Leigh is still just as grotty terraced homes as it always was, but its surrounded by new estates of semi-detached homes with gardens and driveways for 2 parking spaces each.
Drive around the new estates of Leigh, versus the old streets of Leigh, and its hardly a surprise voting levels have changed. The voting is changing not because people are suddenly fed up of Labour, but because Leigh itself, much of the North itself, is changing. The houses people are living in - and increasingly owning - are not the same homes that existed thirty years ago.
And constituencies that were predominantly owner occupied in the past, that are now unaffordable and NIMBYs are blocking construction, are seeing trends away from the Tories.
Its housing, stupid.
Again again, I hope your Tory friends go and argue your points on the doorstep. They will be annihilated.
I don't think Bart is presenting an argument why people in Warrington North or Leigh SHOULD vote Tory - he is saying that where there has been a long term shift to owner occupation, especially of new builds - such as Warrington North, Leigh, Blyth, Rother Valley, and dozens of others - there has been a long term shift to the Tories. This seems inarguable to me. I also agree with the implication that the Tories would be well served to try to maximise the number of owner occupiers.
“Blaming the Chinese government for the pandemic has remained the one unchanging element of the hypotheses, with a specific focus on the Wuhan Institute, which is nearly 10 miles and across a river from the seafood market in a teeming metropolis of about 8.6 million — about the size of New York City — with extensive regional transport links.”
FACT CHECK: the Wuhan CDC - part of the Wuhan lab network and a place which we know stored bats for investigating coronaviruses - is in fact about 300 metres from the Seafood Market
If he can’t even get that right, ignore
“There are several related entities with likely shared personnel in the vicinity of the seafood market, ranging from walking distance (Wuhan CDC) to a few miles (Wuhan Institute of Virology).
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Try living in the red wall for a while? Excuse me, I do live in the Red Wall, you don't.
There is new housing estates all over the place. You know, all those homes you keep complaining about because you want to excuse the NIMBY scum? All those new homes have voters.
The Red Wall fell because of construction, because the likes of Barratt etc got people on the property ladder, NOT because poor people suddenly became fed up of Labour not doing anything for them.
You're in Birchwood aren't you? Cheshire daaaaarling.
I've moved around a bit, I'd rather not say where I live if you don't mind, but Birchwood is not a bad example. Warrington North is a safe Labour seat, or used to be, like much of the North West its seen massive construction recently and its trended away from Labour as the share of owner occupier voters in the constituency has risen.
Just like the neighbouring constituency of Leigh. What you'd think of as Leigh is still just as grotty terraced homes as it always was, but its surrounded by new estates of semi-detached homes with gardens and driveways for 2 parking spaces each.
Drive around the new estates of Leigh, versus the old streets of Leigh, and its hardly a surprise voting levels have changed. The voting is changing not because people are suddenly fed up of Labour, but because Leigh itself, much of the North itself, is changing. The houses people are living in - and increasingly owning - are not the same homes that existed thirty years ago.
And constituencies that were predominantly owner occupied in the past, that are now unaffordable and NIMBYs are blocking construction, are seeing trends away from the Tories.
Its housing, stupid.
Those sorts of households will by and large be the ones that are mortgaged up to the hilt. Mortgage rates have already gone through the roof for some, and will do so for many others when cheap fixed rate deals come up for renewal in the next couple of years. Your party has in 2022 made a pretty good attempt of ensuring that it is going to be blamed for that when the time comes. So what you say should apply in the past tense. Voting patterns did change, but they're going to change again and this time not in the way you would want.
When I was a young, newly qualified chartered accountant, just starting to get accustomed to the pressurized world of big business & high finance, I was taken to a slap-up lunch there by a senior Deloittes partner, a boisterous chap, very trad, loud posh voice, portly, pinstripes & braces etc, he seemed ancient to me at the time but was probably about 52, and we had what he said was his "usual", essentially a pile of red meat and a jug of claret. I remember thinking, god, this can't be healthy, having this on a regular basis, and sure enough he had a coronary about 2 months later. Happy ending though, otherwise I wouldn't post it, because he recovered and took early retirement.
My one time brother in law - very successful City trader - took me there in the late 1980s. My Lord, the drinking.
I vaguely remember weird olde liqueurs and spirits you don’t get anywhere else. Totally unhealthy and outdated but places like Simpsons are what makes London - esp the City - wonderful and unique. The endless storied history.
According to Twitter the City Corp is on the case and won’t allow a change of use. More luxury flats?! Pfff.
Ah sorry my mistake, I was actually talking about Simpsons in the Strand - but similar sort of thing. They bring a trolley up to the table and it's heaving with meat. "Good job I'm not a vegetarian" I think I said to this vip partner who was hosting me - a wry little joke there that when you think about it shows what a precocious young man I was - and he snorted and said, "Well there's other places for them". The old days - for the better, for the worse.
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Try living in the red wall for a while? Excuse me, I do live in the Red Wall, you don't.
There is new housing estates all over the place. You know, all those homes you keep complaining about because you want to excuse the NIMBY scum? All those new homes have voters.
The Red Wall fell because of construction, because the likes of Barratt etc got people on the property ladder, NOT because poor people suddenly became fed up of Labour not doing anything for them.
You're in Birchwood aren't you? Cheshire daaaaarling.
I've moved around a bit, I'd rather not say where I live if you don't mind, but Birchwood is not a bad example. Warrington North is a safe Labour seat, or used to be, like much of the North West its seen massive construction recently and its trended away from Labour as the share of owner occupier voters in the constituency has risen.
Just like the neighbouring constituency of Leigh. What you'd think of as Leigh is still just as grotty terraced homes as it always was, but its surrounded by new estates of semi-detached homes with gardens and driveways for 2 parking spaces each.
Drive around the new estates of Leigh, versus the old streets of Leigh, and its hardly a surprise voting levels have changed. The voting is changing not because people are suddenly fed up of Labour, but because Leigh itself, much of the North itself, is changing. The houses people are living in - and increasingly owning - are not the same homes that existed thirty years ago.
And constituencies that were predominantly owner occupied in the past, that are now unaffordable and NIMBYs are blocking construction, are seeing trends away from the Tories.
Its housing, stupid.
Those sorts of households will by and large be the ones that are mortgaged up to the hilt. Mortgage rates have already gone through the roof for some, and will do so for many others when cheap fixed rate deals come up for renewal in the next couple of years. Your party has in 2022 made a pretty good attempt of ensuring that it is going to be blamed for that when the time comes. So what you say should apply in the past tense. Voting patterns did change, but they're going to change again and this time not in the way you would want.
That's still a change from "people who vote Labour because they are Labour People" to "people who are swing voters who are voting Labour this time".
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Try living in the red wall for a while? Excuse me, I do live in the Red Wall, you don't.
There is new housing estates all over the place. You know, all those homes you keep complaining about because you want to excuse the NIMBY scum? All those new homes have voters.
The Red Wall fell because of construction, because the likes of Barratt etc got people on the property ladder, NOT because poor people suddenly became fed up of Labour not doing anything for them.
You're in Birchwood aren't you? Cheshire daaaaarling.
I've moved around a bit, I'd rather not say where I live if you don't mind, but Birchwood is not a bad example. Warrington North is a safe Labour seat, or used to be, like much of the North West its seen massive construction recently and its trended away from Labour as the share of owner occupier voters in the constituency has risen.
Just like the neighbouring constituency of Leigh. What you'd think of as Leigh is still just as grotty terraced homes as it always was, but its surrounded by new estates of semi-detached homes with gardens and driveways for 2 parking spaces each.
Drive around the new estates of Leigh, versus the old streets of Leigh, and its hardly a surprise voting levels have changed. The voting is changing not because people are suddenly fed up of Labour, but because Leigh itself, much of the North itself, is changing. The houses people are living in - and increasingly owning - are not the same homes that existed thirty years ago.
And constituencies that were predominantly owner occupied in the past, that are now unaffordable and NIMBYs are blocking construction, are seeing trends away from the Tories.
Its housing, stupid.
Again again, I hope your Tory friends go and argue your points on the doorstep. They will be annihilated.
I don't think Bart is presenting an argument why people in Warrington North or Leigh SHOULD vote Tory - he is saying that where there has been a long term shift to owner occupation, especially of new builds - such as Warrington North, Leigh, Blyth, Rother Valley, and dozens of others - there has been a long term shift to the Tories. This seems inarguable to me. I also agree with the implication that the Tories would be well served to try to maximise the number of owner occupiers.
Bingo. You've nailed it completely.
Essentially Britain votes by housing. Renters as a class tend to vote Labour. Owned outright tend to vote Tory. Owned with a mortgage, are the swing voters, who in recent years have voted Tory but in Blair's time voted Labour.
In much of the country renting has become more common, but in parts of the North owner occupiers have become more common due to vast amounts of new builds. That has meant more Tory voters, but since those voters have mortgages they're not safe Tory.
The idea that the North swung Tory because voters were pissed off and angry misses the transformation in housing that has happened. Drive around the North outside the cities, and yes if you're here you're driving to get around, and there has been major new housing developments and those developments lead to new owner occupiers which changes how people think about voting.
'Levelling up' is dangerous ground for Sunak, given that video of him trumpeting unlevelling up the already high...
That’s not actually what he was saying in the video. But Labour had artfully cut the video to mislead.
He was saying that all deprived areas need support - including deprived rural areas in Kent - not just deprived urban areas
The problem was not him rightly pointing to pockets of deprived rural areas. The probem was that he claimed he had taken money from genuinely shonky areas in the north to give to pockets of deprived rural areas.
Nobody is denying that rural places can't hide poverty. But you can't divert money from places already promised the cash. Or in practice what it's meant is that money has gone to posh Tory areas to sort the small bit that isn't quite as posh as the rest whilst the scum area gets little or nothing.
Stockton on Tees seeing levelling up money spent in Yarm as a prime example. Yes, there are bits of Yarm not as nice as the rest. But relatively these areas are fine - certainly a lot better than chunks of town centre or Newtown wards.
Why do the Tories still have a minister for levelling up? Bottom line up front, Boris Johnson’s glib election promise “we will level up” is undeliverable bollocks.
Once you fathom out the impossible to fathom out “what exactly does it mean? Level up the north to the level of the south? But bits of the south are just as run down as bits of the north and vice versa? And switch to how to do it anyway to delivery something at least, even though you don’t really understand what it means, you realise it’s not about funnelling existing money from this to that, you will just end up hated and stuck in the 20s in the polling, it has to be new money, given to deserving places, fairly, and so that Tiverton in Blue Wall can’t get upset they are just as deserving and being cheated.
After all that, are you now levelling up? Of course not, because it is just pretend the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities their regions can ever be levelled, it always was empty unachievable Johnsonian electioneering bollocks.
Why? Because: (a) Red Wall voters have noticed they are still relatively / actually poor (b) Brexit promised them resources and riches (c) Tories promised them definitely resources and riches (d) They won't take no for an answer
Either this government produces a rabbit out of the hat or the Tory 2019 first timers depart.
(A) is wrong.
Red Wall Tory voters are typically home owners, not impoverished people awaiting resources and riches.
Thanks to the relatively huge success in building new homes up here, compared to the rest of the country, the Red Wall has seen much more people getting on the property ladder rather than the reverse happening as in much of the country.
That's the real reason the non-metropolitan North has been swinging Tory while the South is swinging against the Tories. Because voters here have their own deeds to their very own Barratt Home and similar, rather than rental bills.
(a) is not wrong. A is the reason why we have seen a clearout of Labour councils and Labour MPs in Labour since the Danelaw areas. Try living in the red wall for a while and you will see what they are so upset about./
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
Try living in the red wall for a while? Excuse me, I do live in the Red Wall, you don't.
There is new housing estates all over the place. You know, all those homes you keep complaining about because you want to excuse the NIMBY scum? All those new homes have voters.
The Red Wall fell because of construction, because the likes of Barratt etc got people on the property ladder, NOT because poor people suddenly became fed up of Labour not doing anything for them.
You're in Birchwood aren't you? Cheshire daaaaarling.
I've moved around a bit, I'd rather not say where I live if you don't mind, but Birchwood is not a bad example. Warrington North is a safe Labour seat, or used to be, like much of the North West its seen massive construction recently and its trended away from Labour as the share of owner occupier voters in the constituency has risen.
Just like the neighbouring constituency of Leigh. What you'd think of as Leigh is still just as grotty terraced homes as it always was, but its surrounded by new estates of semi-detached homes with gardens and driveways for 2 parking spaces each.
Drive around the new estates of Leigh, versus the old streets of Leigh, and its hardly a surprise voting levels have changed. The voting is changing not because people are suddenly fed up of Labour, but because Leigh itself, much of the North itself, is changing. The houses people are living in - and increasingly owning - are not the same homes that existed thirty years ago.
And constituencies that were predominantly owner occupied in the past, that are now unaffordable and NIMBYs are blocking construction, are seeing trends away from the Tories.
Its housing, stupid.
Those sorts of households will by and large be the ones that are mortgaged up to the hilt. Mortgage rates have already gone through the roof for some, and will do so for many others when cheap fixed rate deals come up for renewal in the next couple of years. Your party has in 2022 made a pretty good attempt of ensuring that it is going to be blamed for that when the time comes. So what you say should apply in the past tense. Voting patterns did change, but they're going to change again and this time not in the way you would want.
I 100% agree with you and said much the same myself in another post.
Its mortgage rates, more than a failure of levelling up, that should make Red Wall Tory MPs sharpen up their CVs.
If you are interested in learning about climate issues, let me recommend Steven E. Koonin's "Unsettled". (He was "Undersecretary for Science, U. S. Department of Energy under the Obama Administration".)
His academic credentials would fill a truck.
(Obama had two permanent energy secretaries, Steven Chu and Ernest Moniz (and one temporary fill-in). Both favor more nuclear power, though I don't know whether they ever convinced their boss on that isssue.)
“Blaming the Chinese government for the pandemic has remained the one unchanging element of the hypotheses, with a specific focus on the Wuhan Institute, which is nearly 10 miles and across a river from the seafood market in a teeming metropolis of about 8.6 million — about the size of New York City — with extensive regional transport links.”
FACT CHECK: the Wuhan CDC - part of the Wuhan lab network and a place which we know stored bats for investigating coronaviruses - is in fact about 300 metres from the Seafood Market
If he can’t even get that right, ignore
“There are several related entities with likely shared personnel in the vicinity of the seafood market, ranging from walking distance (Wuhan CDC) to a few miles (Wuhan Institute of Virology).
Anyone saying "no" should explain what they mean (or they could mean almost anything).
Burning effigies of anyone is not that great; in the case of Guy Fawkes it looks a bit like celebrating his torture and execution, but that's sort of OK because he was RC. It's like awful things like the London Dungeon, Ooooh the kids will love it because it's so *gruesome*. Torturing people to death isn't funny.
I don't like it. I don't like burning effigies even of dead people like Guy Fawkes though. I'm sure it's mostly just harmless fun but it feels a bit nasty somehow especially if you think about how people used to be burned at the stake. My home town has the initials of various people who were burned alive at spots around town engraved on the pavement.
When I was a young, newly qualified chartered accountant, just starting to get accustomed to the pressurized world of big business & high finance, I was taken to a slap-up lunch there by a senior Deloittes partner, a boisterous chap, very trad, loud posh voice, portly, pinstripes & braces etc, he seemed ancient to me at the time but was probably about 52, and we had what he said was his "usual", essentially a pile of red meat and a jug of claret. I remember thinking, god, this can't be healthy, having this on a regular basis, and sure enough he had a coronary about 2 months later. Happy ending though, otherwise I wouldn't post it, because he recovered and took early retirement.
That's a nice story. The first time I was taken there was by some Spanish clients who had been told this was the best restaurant in London. I remember nothing about the food but what I remember is walking with them from my apartment on Old Compron Street which at the time had people living in several doorways in cardboard boxes and them saying to me they had no idea London had become like this.'It is worse than Madrid'. This was about 1990.
I suspect you are also talking about Simpson’s in the STRAND. You would not walk to Cornhill from Soho
When I was a young, newly qualified chartered accountant, just starting to get accustomed to the pressurized world of big business & high finance, I was taken to a slap-up lunch there by a senior Deloittes partner, a boisterous chap, very trad, loud posh voice, portly, pinstripes & braces etc, he seemed ancient to me at the time but was probably about 52, and we had what he said was his "usual", essentially a pile of red meat and a jug of claret. I remember thinking, god, this can't be healthy, having this on a regular basis, and sure enough he had a coronary about 2 months later. Happy ending though, otherwise I wouldn't post it, because he recovered and took early retirement.
My one time brother in law - very successful City trader - took me there in the late 1980s. My Lord, the drinking
I vaguely remember weird olde liqueurs and spirits you don’t get anywhere else. Totally unhealthy and outdated but places like Simpsons are what makes London - esp the City - wonderful and unique. The endless storied history
According to Twitter the City Corp is on the case and won’t allow a change of use. More luxury flats?! Pfff
Yes great food, slice of old London, etc, but the seating is uncomfortable as fuck.
▪️ Ending the use of hotels to house migrants ▪️ Setting a target that 80% of claims are resolved within six months of being lodged. ▪️ Using cruise ships to house migrants while their claims are processed.
Rather than actually ending the use of hotels, Sunak used PMQs today to say how much this had increased "more hotels with 4,500 new beds."
Sunak would face an enormous challenge to meet the 80% target, with the most recent figures suggesting only 4%
Whitehall officials had previously warned that holding migrants on cruise ships would breach the 1951 refugee convention preventing “arbitrary detainment”. Sunak had first suggested the idea in 2020, when it was dismissed on cost grounds.
At his first PMQs, Sunak attacked Starmer for breaking his pledges in his leadership contest. But Sunak has already ditched GP charges, getting rid of EU law in 100 days, cutting income tax from 20p to 16p by end of the next parliament and likely the migration pledges too.
Comments
Edi Rama accuses her of using "easy rhetoric" to hide from UK govt policy failings
He warns that Britain must treat Albania with "respect" if it wants a deal:
https://bit.ly/3T3QmuK
https://polarweber.com/
Whilst I do like seeing new places, for this, I think better him than me.
“How to visit Iceland’s ice caves
You can’t visit Iceland’s ice caves alone, and have to go with a tour guide. Don’t even think about trying to visit an ice cave without a guide. There are a lot of hazards involved – including potential collapse of the cave, flooding, and instable ice. People have died trying to see them alone. Be sure to book a tour.”
And if not the actual law it’s a law of natural selection
https://bridgesandballoons.com/iceland-ice-caves/
Incidentally, it wouldn't be a good idea for the Tories to listen to you. Telling people that their lived experience is wrong never works.
"I lead my party, he follows his" rings a bell
This is not about minimum and maximum wages but about living wages. It is entirely possible to increase the minimum wage so it is a living wage and therefore remove the need for benefits. If that then becomes the maximum wage then so what? It is not for Governments to decide the maximum that can be paid. It is for them to ensure they are not subsiding the profits of employers who pay too little for people to live on.
Corporation tax - £16bn
New upper end council tax bands - £2bn
Abolish non-dom status - £3bn
Freeze income tax bands - £10bn
Land Value Tax - ???????
Coudn't we get quite creative with LVT. Different tax rates depending on what you do with the land?
There is new housing estates all over the place. You know, all those homes you keep complaining about because you want to excuse the NIMBY scum? All those new homes have voters.
The Red Wall fell because of construction, because the likes of Barratt etc got people on the property ladder, NOT because poor people suddenly became fed up of Labour not doing anything for them.
Rama tweet
https://twitter.com/ediramaal/status/1587800223430180864?s=20&t=hL81YWlyJvapqCNkFDbVSQ
Targeting Albanians (as some shamefully did when fighting for Brexit) as the cause of Britain’s crime and border problems makes for easy rhetoric but ignores hard fact. Repeating the same things and expecting different results is insane (ask Einstein!)
It's the cataclysm I am most worried about. Never trust reincarnation nutters who believe in an inevitable perhaps imminent cataclysm.
Hostilities between Russia and Norway wouldn't start with an invasion. They might start with incidents at energy sector facilities either on land or at sea.
There has been little coverage of the Norway drones story since the number arrested went to seven.
In their report on the raising of the Norwegian military alert level, the Washington Post mention the drones. They don't say outright that Støre cited them as a reason, so presumably he didn't. But it appears the seven remain in custody.
One guy is accused of flying drones over Svalbard. Where exactly on Svalbard, I don't know. There is a Russian settlement there.
Wiki-Google-Twitter experts on Svalbard may soon appear...
How you make one that people will go "Oooh, look, Liz Truss - he he he...." is another matter. Most will just cross themselves and look away.
If they even have a clue who it is supposed to be.
We have visited it and it was notable that wherever we went we had to have an armed guard against polar bears and indeed we were very fortunate to observe one from a safe distance in its natural environment
Brexit and Johnson offered those people let down by decades of Labour local government corruption an opportunity for change. Sadly Brexit was a false premise and the Conservatives now look as dodgy as the late T. Dan Smith.
Edit: no, wait, it can't, because they're trained. To whom do you refer then?
Just like the neighbouring constituency of Leigh. What you'd think of as Leigh is still just as grotty terraced homes as it always was, but its surrounded by new estates of semi-detached homes with gardens and driveways for 2 parking spaces each.
Drive around the new estates of Leigh, versus the old streets of Leigh, and its hardly a surprise voting levels have changed. The voting is changing not because people are suddenly fed up of Labour, but because Leigh itself, much of the North itself, is changing. The houses people are living in - and increasingly owning - are not the same homes that existed thirty years ago.
And constituencies that were predominantly owner occupied in the past, that are now unaffordable and NIMBYs are blocking construction, are seeing trends away from the Tories.
Its housing, stupid.
His next says
" 70% of the 140,000 Albanians who have moved to the UK were living in Italy and Greece.1200 of them are Business people. Albanians in the UK work hard and pay tax. UK should fight the crime gangs of all nationalities and stop discriminating v Albanians to excuse policy failures."
So that's OK, then.
Housing, more than Brexit, explains the Red Wall.
https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/03/31/the-truth-behind-the-tories-northern-strongholds
The reason behind it is that the airport in Kaliningrad is starting flights from the Middle East & North Africa.
Poland fears a new wave of illegal migrants
https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1587818606485594112
Control immigration too and you reduce demand so do not need so much supply
https://www.mpamag.com/uk/mortgage-types/residential/northsouth-divide-in-owner-occupation/382974
I always thought you were a Tory, so that does surprise me I must admit. I was wrong.
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/save-our-simpsons-tavern
Save our Stewed Cheese!
This is the same mistake Labour made with Gordon Brown after Blair, and the Tories made with Theresa May after Cameron, which is to try and force the new leader to carry on the campaigning style of the one they replaced. Sunak needs to be the calm, efficient and incisive new broom, not a tribute act to blustering Boris.
Rishi needs to follow Boris in only one way, which is to persuade the voters to give his *new* government a chance, by differentiating himself from his predecessors. Even Liz Truss got that memo.
1. There is not much to Cons can do, they are really beyond their sell by date, 13 years and generally the public seeks a change at that time. so irrespective of the Truss debacle, Partygate, evrything else, time is simply up.
2. What has happened to the Johnson resignation honours list?
Austerity didn’t really start in 2010 the impacts started to be noticed in 2014 through 2017.
The result of that impact was felt by whatever party was in power (mainly labour) in the 2017-2020 elections where a lot of councils switched to Tory or Tory led leaderships.
Those councils are also failing to delivery which means that any austerity will result in the current council leadership copping the blame and Labour winning some seats if not the council leadership
This really is the most front-footed I have seen them, since 1996-ish. ~AA
https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1587826138121998344
https://twitter.com/JohnHealey_MP/status/1587814849857331208
Starmer needs to drop the identity politics if he wants to reconnect with voters.
Paul Embery"
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/02/a-labour-victory-isnt-in-the-bag-yet/
I vaguely remember weird olde liqueurs and spirits you don’t get anywhere else. Totally unhealthy and outdated but places like Simpsons are what makes London - esp the City - wonderful and unique. The endless storied history
According to Twitter the City Corp is on the case and won’t allow a change of use. More luxury flats?! Pfff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYD1z46WO0o
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/soamess-mystery-weight-loss-has-commons-chewing-the-fat-z8kddbkhz
… initial data gathering at location of the pipeline damage on line 1 in the Swedish exclusive economic zone and found "technogenic craters".
"According to preliminary results of the damage site inspection, technogenic craters with a depth of 3 to 5 meters were found on the seabed at a distance of about 248 metres from each other," it said.
Sweden and Denmark have both concluded that four leaks on Nord Stream 1 and 2 were caused by explosions, but have not said who might be responsible.
"The section of the pipe between the craters is destroyed, the radius of pipe fragments dispersion is at least 250 metres. Experts continue to analyse the survey data," Nord Stream AG added.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nord-stream-1-operator-says-it-has-completed-initial-data-gathering-damaged-2022-11-02/
Since then - COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, the Cost of Living Crisis, the Energy Crisis, the Death of the Queen, the Truss/Kwarteng Crisis, the Invasion of the Asylum Seekers (!). It seems like a different world.
You might as well send the Navy off to sink Noah's Ark.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-11-01/column-propublica-vanity-fair-covid-lab-leak-expose-train-wreck
Propublica has put out dozens of tweets, about its excellent other stories, since this translation misadventure.
I'm not aware of their offering any followup, explanation, additional data, response to near-universal criticism from the translating community and others.
https://twitter.com/JamesFallows/status/1587820525769957377
https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/03/31/the-truth-behind-the-tories-northern-strongholds
There is an egalitarianism to Barratt Britain. Accountants, teachers, sales reps, plasterers and driving instructors live on the same street, and the smaller choice of pubs and restaurants means they socialise together, too. As long as mortgages remain affordable and petrol is cheap, it is not a place that worries much about politics. That is a boon for the government, and a problem for Labour. “When you knock on the door of a big new house,” asks a shadow minister, “how do you tell the people living there that the country is going wrong?”
The big danger for the Tories in the Red Wall isn't that people are not getting the promised opportunities, like you claim.
The big danger for the Tories in the Red Wall is that mortgages for their Barratt Home* and petrol for their Kia Sportage* are both becoming much, much more expensive.
If the Tories lose those who look at their mortgage and petrol going up and shudder, they lose the Red Wall.
* Other brands are available.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/nov/02/effigy-liz-truss-lettuce-burned-edenbridge-bonfire-night
Much more interesting than the AI 'art', IMO.
This isn't footage... it's a render of a Neural Radiance Field and THIS shot is a big deal because the camera animation is from a DIFFERENT shot.
If you still don't get why I'm so excited... look at how the reflections on the ground move.
https://twitter.com/SirWrender/status/1587530670858850308
Prototype stage only, but the potential for real time CGI is immense.
I also agree with the implication that the Tories would be well served to try to maximise the number of owner occupiers.
[*] terms and conditions apply.
Preposterous article. Just one paragraph
“Blaming the Chinese government for the pandemic has remained the one unchanging element of the hypotheses, with a specific focus on the Wuhan Institute, which is nearly 10 miles and across a river from the seafood market in a teeming metropolis of about 8.6 million — about the size of New York City — with extensive regional transport links.”
FACT CHECK: the Wuhan CDC - part of the Wuhan lab network and a place which we know stored bats for investigating coronaviruses - is in fact about 300 metres from the Seafood Market
If he can’t even get that right, ignore
“There are several related entities with likely shared personnel in the vicinity of the seafood market, ranging from walking distance (Wuhan CDC) to a few miles (Wuhan Institute of Virology).
Here’s a map. @mattwridley and @AshleyRindsberg will know more.
github.com/Project-Eviden…”
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/senate/
Decision Desk:
"Our model currently predicts that Republicans have a 50.8% chance of controlling the Senate. Our mean seat projection is 51 (R) and 49 (D)."
https://forecast.decisiondeskhq.com/senate
Essentially Britain votes by housing. Renters as a class tend to vote Labour. Owned outright tend to vote Tory. Owned with a mortgage, are the swing voters, who in recent years have voted Tory but in Blair's time voted Labour.
In much of the country renting has become more common, but in parts of the North owner occupiers have become more common due to vast amounts of new builds. That has meant more Tory voters, but since those voters have mortgages they're not safe Tory.
The idea that the North swung Tory because voters were pissed off and angry misses the transformation in housing that has happened. Drive around the North outside the cities, and yes if you're here you're driving to get around, and there has been major new housing developments and those developments lead to new owner occupiers which changes how people think about voting.
Its mortgage rates, more than a failure of levelling up, that should make Red Wall Tory MPs sharpen up their CVs.
His academic credentials would fill a truck.
(Obama had two permanent energy secretaries, Steven Chu and Ernest Moniz (and one temporary fill-in). Both favor more nuclear power, though I don't know whether they ever convinced their boss on that isssue.)
The prime minister will examine "whether now is the right time to bring them forward," his spokeswoman said.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63488785
Oh dear.
Surprised that they would even consider somewhere so repressed that it has this level of asylum seekers
It's something I would expect the 6.30 Weds R4 comedy show to make a joke of and the studio audience to laugh like drains.
One that's worth examining a bit is his summer pledges on migration...
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/nov/02/rishi-sunak-to-ditch-key-tory-leadership-campaign-pledges?CMP=share_btn_tw
Points from the leadership campaign include:
▪️ Ending the use of hotels to house migrants
▪️ Setting a target that 80% of claims are resolved within six months of being lodged.
▪️ Using cruise ships to house migrants while their claims are processed.
Rather than actually ending the use of hotels, Sunak used PMQs today to say how much this had increased "more hotels with 4,500 new beds."
Sunak would face an enormous challenge to meet the 80% target, with the most recent figures suggesting only 4%
Whitehall officials had previously warned that holding migrants on cruise ships would breach the 1951 refugee convention preventing “arbitrary detainment”. Sunak had first suggested the idea in 2020, when it was dismissed on cost grounds.
At his first PMQs, Sunak attacked Starmer for breaking his pledges in his leadership contest. But Sunak has already ditched GP charges, getting rid of EU law in 100 days, cutting income tax from 20p to 16p by end of the next parliament and likely the migration pledges too.
TL:DR
You can save yourself a lot of time by accepting Rishi Sunak isn’t very good
https://twitter.com/jonlis1/status/1587750330510499840