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.
But it's not unacceptable in the sense that you think it should be banned?
“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).
Yes, it's the same old narrative against the lab leak theory. They're just mouthing the same words like "preposterous" and "train wreck" but only the simpletons are listening now. It's pretty obvious that it leaked from a lab, it's not even controversial for that to happen, lab leaks happen from time to time. The denial of the lab leak has almost become an article of faith for these people who are so invested in it now that they can see no way back. The lab leak theory is racist, it's sinophobic, it's anti-science, it's only believed by conspiracy theorists, the intelligence services who say it probably happened are clueless and politicised. It's almost as if they are worried that if they're wrong about this then they may end being proved wrong about all of the other stuff they have tried to cancel discussion about. You'll notice those denying the lab leak are almost a concentric circle on the Venn diagram with transgender rights and those who seem to think the whole of Albania could migrate here and no one would notice and suggesting otherwise is "racist", Albanophobic, a conspiracy etc...
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.
Adman with an appt on Old Compton? Exactly how the world is meant to be. I like it when this happens.
Two words of advice for fellow PBers regarding Twitter:
(1) Never discuss Tesla. I foolishly made a couple of comments because a friend of mine is a bear on the stock, and now I have hundred of notifications that are replies of replies of replies.
(2) Don't follow Tulsi Gabbard. She was batshit crazy when she ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020, and she's doubly batshit crazy now.
Another approach is: 1) Never be on Twitter. If you are on it, stop now.
2) Look up the handful of people you really want to note (cartoonist Matt, there may be one or two others, in my case) as and when you feel like it, but not by being a 'follower'
3) Note that PBers links to Twitter can be useful, especially when the news agenda is frenetic; other kind people (thank you) act as your filter
4) Find a hobby or indulge in good works.
Twitter consists mostly of deranged narcissists shouting at each other. Elon Musk is a talented example. Most are not even talented.
"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" (£)
'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.
Here in Warwickshire every town and village is sprouting new-build houses left, right and centre. It's hard to square this with the meme that the Tories aren't creating enough homes. Unless their critics really mean they aren't building enough affordable nineteenth-century townhouses in Islington. Hard to disagree with that.
Help is at hand, though. In the vanguard of local Nimbys Against Newbuild we find Labour MP Matt Western:
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.
One of my holiday jobs (aged around16-17) was to be a film runner for a firm in Greek Street. As I would be taking those old, big metal film cannisters from one place to another it was not unusual for a girl standing around to ask if I "wanted a girl, mister".
That said I think they were joking.
When I was due to leave after the summer they were inundated by film school graduates and PhDs wanting the job which was essentially to take those cannisters around Soho and go out for cokes and ciggies for the staff.
When I did leave they asked me if I wanted to stay and work my way up but I said no thanks I need some more formal education. Parallel lives has occasionally made me wonder what would have happened if I'd stayed.
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.
But kids (and many adults) find it very amusing. My teachers always got a rapturous response from the classroom, when telling us about gruesome medieval and early modern executions (the demise of Hugh de Spenser the Younger, I recall, caused particular merriment).
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.
True. I think it makes you drink more. To dull the discomfort
Whatever the truths of this “eviction” places like Simpson’s (City) should have their usage protected so they have to stay as pubs/hostelries
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
Yes sorry, Leon, I seem to have completely derailed this one. Just jumped in without checking the small print on your link.
“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).
Yes, it's the same old narrative against the lab leak theory. They're just mouthing the same words like "preposterous" and "train wreck" but only the simpletons are listening now. It's pretty obvious that it leaked from a lab, it's not even controversial for that to happen, lab leaks happen from time to time. The denial of the lab leak has almost become an article of faith for these people who are so invested in it now that they can see no way back. The lab leak theory is racist, it's sinophobic, it's anti-science, it's only believed by conspiracy theorists, the intelligence services who say it probably happened are clueless and politicised. It's almost as if they are worried that if they're wrong about this then they may end being proved wrong about all of the other stuff they have tried to cancel discussion about. You'll notice those denying the lab leak are almost a concentric circle on the Venn diagram with transgender rights and those who seem to think the whole of Albania could migrate here and no one would notice and suggesting otherwise is "racist", Albanophobic, a conspiracy etc...
The fact is we'll likely never know for sure - we'll only ever be certain if it was a lab leak and the exact point of leak or genetic linkage to something studied there can be shown. Which is why the conspiracy theorists (not pointing at you) love the lab leak theory because, essentially, it cannot be disproven.
The evidence has, as with Andy Cooke (although he seems to have moved from more in favour of lab leak than I was) nudged me from the "don't know" to "zoonosis more likely" viewpoint.
'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.
There have been suggestions of this voting-by-housing-tenure hypothesis before. It is interesting and believable, but I don't know of studies that examine it carefully. Do you?
'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.
Here in Warwickshire every town and village is sprouting new-build houses left, right and centre. It's hard to square this with the meme that the Tories aren't creating enough homes. Unless their critics really mean they aren't building enough affordable nineteenth-century townhouses in Islington. Hard to disagree with that.
Help is at hand, though. In the vanguard of local Nimbys Against Newbuild we find Labour MP Matt Western:
We don't have a housing crisis we have an affordability crisis. Plenty of housing and just about every planning request is granted (in the teeth often of Neighbourhood/Local Plans).
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.
It is fun, so long as its fake.
That's why we just had Halloween. Its fun. Gruesome is fun, not awful.
Though certainly for too long in the past people used to be taught to be afraid of "witches" and not those who burned them alive.
▪️ 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.
'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.
But you didn’t address any of the points put to you - you did a Leaky Sue, you clearly invented a string of alternative questions and then said wrong wrong wrong like panto season.
Let’s get some clarity from you.
1. You make out you believe Levelling Up clearly means levelling up the left behind North, to the investment levels of not left behind South - yes or no? 2. To be more than empty slogan, pitched at Brexit voting Labour constituencies, the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities and their regions has to be achievable, you truly believe this is achievable - yes or no? 3. You come across as bought into Boris’s rhetoric and idea, but there is a reason why far smarter politicians than Boris Johnson declined to open Pandora’s Box with promises like these. Regardless what you think levelling up is, what do voters across the country think of it? Do all voters Up North, and despite whatever Them and Us divisions government rhetoric and policy is creating, really want investment for themselves ahead of deprived area’s in the South, like Tendering, Jaywick, Thanet, or do voters up north recognise places down south, in the South East of England, just as poor as themselves, so these voters want lots of new money and investment everywhere for everyone, so levelling up to Northern voters (not you obviously, your mind is in a different place alongside Boris) is we are all in it together to improve on deprivation and lack of investment wherever it is?
'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.
Here in Warwickshire every town and village is sprouting new-build houses left, right and centre. It's hard to square this with the meme that the Tories aren't creating enough homes. Unless their critics really mean they aren't building enough affordable nineteenth-century townhouses in Islington. Hard to disagree with that.
Help is at hand, though. In the vanguard of local Nimbys Against Newbuild we find Labour MP Matt Western:
We don't have a housing crisis we have an affordability crisis. Plenty of housing and just about every planning request is granted (in the teeth often of Neighbourhood/Local Plans).
But people can't afford them.
We have an affordability crisis because there isn't plenty of housing and there aren't enough requests or grants made and houses built. And because people own homes they don't live in, further constraining housing supply.
Its simple supply and demand. Add more supply, the price comes down, and the Red Wall in 2019 was not just where the most construction had happened it also had as a result the lowest price-earnings ratio of anywhere in England. Which is why it swung Tory, not because it was deprived of opportunity, but because people there now had an opportunity to get on the ladder and had taken it.
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.
It is fun, so long as its fake.
That's why we just had Halloween. Its fun. Gruesome is fun, not awful.
Though certainly for too long in the past people used to be taught to be afraid of "witches" and not those who burned them alive.
Admittedly, I think if we revived publicly torturing people to death, it would attract considerable popular support, so long as the victims were detested.
“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).
Yes, it's the same old narrative against the lab leak theory. They're just mouthing the same words like "preposterous" and "train wreck" but only the simpletons are listening now. It's pretty obvious that it leaked from a lab, it's not even controversial for that to happen, lab leaks happen from time to time. The denial of the lab leak has almost become an article of faith for these people who are so invested in it now that they can see no way back. The lab leak theory is racist, it's sinophobic, it's anti-science, it's only believed by conspiracy theorists, the intelligence services who say it probably happened are clueless and politicised. It's almost as if they are worried that if they're wrong about this then they may end being proved wrong about all of the other stuff they have tried to cancel discussion about. You'll notice those denying the lab leak are almost a concentric circle on the Venn diagram with transgender rights and those who seem to think the whole of Albania could migrate here and no one would notice and suggesting otherwise is "racist", Albanophobic, a conspiracy etc...
What is striking is how feeble the arguments for zoonosis, and against lab leak, have become. Wearied and palsied. Like a boxer who knows it’s probably over but can’t quite give up. The punches go out but they have no sting
“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).
Yes, it's the same old narrative against the lab leak theory. They're just mouthing the same words like "preposterous" and "train wreck" but only the simpletons are listening now. It's pretty obvious that it leaked from a lab, it's not even controversial for that to happen, lab leaks happen from time to time. The denial of the lab leak has almost become an article of faith for these people who are so invested in it now that they can see no way back. The lab leak theory is racist, it's sinophobic, it's anti-science, it's only believed by conspiracy theorists, the intelligence services who say it probably happened are clueless and politicised. It's almost as if they are worried that if they're wrong about this then they may end being proved wrong about all of the other stuff they have tried to cancel discussion about. You'll notice those denying the lab leak are almost a concentric circle on the Venn diagram with transgender rights and those who seem to think the whole of Albania could migrate here and no one would notice and suggesting otherwise is "racist", Albanophobic, a conspiracy etc...
The debate should surely be - if it leaked from the lab (seems likely) was it (a) Natural coronavirus that just happens to have made the jump to human or (b) human modified coronavirus, for example following gain of function research.
We see infectious diseases leak from labs quite often - Pirbright has entered the chat - and to some extent it is forgiveable. If however it turns out to be gain of function products that have gained all too much function then that is a very different story. While I don't quite support Leon's desire for a Nuremberg style tribunal and executions, serious questions need answers and sadly we won't get them from the Chinese. I work with many Chinese scientists and all too often their first instinct is to cover things up, even at a trivial - 'who broke that flask' level. Add in the regressive Chinese totalitarian state and its orders of magnitude worse.
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.
Odd time for comedy, 6.30 on a Wednesday.
Your kidding, right? It is the slot for "new" and out there and sometimes in there radio comedy.
Are you from round these parts?
It's what the BBC calls "light comedy". An almost forgotten, archaic definition of "light" as "depressingly unfunny".
Monday is ancient panel games which are funny even if you're not sure why. (I love them, but it's true. I mean... Just A Minute. It works, but why?)
Friday is topical, which means there's always a lot of dross, unfortunately.
Midweek can be brilliant. Anything with Milton Jones or John Finnemore is worth a listen. But some of it is too wry for its own good, or plucky failed experiments.
There's a limit to how much reliable funny the world can generate.
'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.
There have been suggestions of this voting-by-housing-tenure hypothesis before. It is interesting and believable, but I don't know of studies that examine it carefully. Do you?
I've seen many studies on it before, none to hand, but this excellent chart is in the article I linked to above and sums it up well.
The vast construction in the Red Wall, one of the only places in the country where there has been a semi-reasonable amount of construction, has led to home ownership rates here moving from Labour levels to Tory levels. The seats then swung accordingly.
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
“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).
Yes, it's the same old narrative against the lab leak theory. They're just mouthing the same words like "preposterous" and "train wreck" but only the simpletons are listening now. It's pretty obvious that it leaked from a lab, it's not even controversial for that to happen, lab leaks happen from time to time. The denial of the lab leak has almost become an article of faith for these people who are so invested in it now that they can see no way back. The lab leak theory is racist, it's sinophobic, it's anti-science, it's only believed by conspiracy theorists, the intelligence services who say it probably happened are clueless and politicised. It's almost as if they are worried that if they're wrong about this then they may end being proved wrong about all of the other stuff they have tried to cancel discussion about. You'll notice those denying the lab leak are almost a concentric circle on the Venn diagram with transgender rights and those who seem to think the whole of Albania could migrate here and no one would notice and suggesting otherwise is "racist", Albanophobic, a conspiracy etc...
What is striking is how feeble the arguments for zoonosis, and against lab leak, have become. Wearied and palsied. Like a boxer who knows it’s probably over but can’t quite give up. The punches go out but they have no sting
But then again, you wouldn't understand a scientific argument if it was permanently engraved on the screen of your device.
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.
But kids (and many adults) find it very amusing. My teachers always got a rapturous response from the classroom, when telling us about gruesome medieval and early modern executions (the demise of Hugh de Spenser the Younger, I recall, caused particular merriment).
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.
It is fun, so long as its fake.
That's why we just had Halloween. Its fun. Gruesome is fun, not awful.
Though certainly for too long in the past people used to be taught to be afraid of "witches" and not those who burned them alive.
Admittedly, I think if we revived publicly torturing people to death, it would attract considerable popular support, so long as the victims were detested.
“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).
Yes, it's the same old narrative against the lab leak theory. They're just mouthing the same words like "preposterous" and "train wreck" but only the simpletons are listening now. It's pretty obvious that it leaked from a lab, it's not even controversial for that to happen, lab leaks happen from time to time. The denial of the lab leak has almost become an article of faith for these people who are so invested in it now that they can see no way back. The lab leak theory is racist, it's sinophobic, it's anti-science, it's only believed by conspiracy theorists, the intelligence services who say it probably happened are clueless and politicised. It's almost as if they are worried that if they're wrong about this then they may end being proved wrong about all of the other stuff they have tried to cancel discussion about. You'll notice those denying the lab leak are almost a concentric circle on the Venn diagram with transgender rights and those who seem to think the whole of Albania could migrate here and no one would notice and suggesting otherwise is "racist", Albanophobic, a conspiracy etc...
The debate should surely be - if it leaked from the lab (seems likely) was it (a) Natural coronavirus that just happens to have made the jump to human or (b) human modified coronavirus, for example following gain of function research.
We see infectious diseases leak from labs quite often - Pirbright has entered the chat - and to some extent it is forgiveable. If however it turns out to be gain of function products that have gained all too much function then that is a very different story. While I don't quite support Leon's desire for a Nuremberg style tribunal and executions, serious questions need answers and sadly we won't get them from the Chinese. I work with many Chinese scientists and all too often their first instinct is to cover things up, even at a trivial - 'who broke that flask' level. Add in the regressive Chinese totalitarian state and its orders of magnitude worse.
I can see why “asking for trials” might seem extreme - but then, twenty MILLION people have died. And economies have been crippled worldwide. So much evil has flown from this one tragic calamity
Can we really just shrug and say “oh well yes it probably came from the lab, whatever, it’s all history now”?!
If you lost a brother or a wife or a mother to covid, if you lost a business or a job or you now have crippling long Covid, you would want and expect more than that
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.
It is fun, so long as its fake.
That's why we just had Halloween. Its fun. Gruesome is fun, not awful.
Though certainly for too long in the past people used to be taught to be afraid of "witches" and not those who burned them alive.
Admittedly, I think if we revived publicly torturing people to death, it would attract considerable popular support, so long as the victims were detested.
'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.
Here in Warwickshire every town and village is sprouting new-build houses left, right and centre. It's hard to square this with the meme that the Tories aren't creating enough homes. Unless their critics really mean they aren't building enough affordable nineteenth-century townhouses in Islington. Hard to disagree with that.
Help is at hand, though. In the vanguard of local Nimbys Against Newbuild we find Labour MP Matt Western:
We don't have a housing crisis we have an affordability crisis. Plenty of housing and just about every planning request is granted (in the teeth often of Neighbourhood/Local Plans).
But people can't afford them.
Just an observation, BDEV is down 50% YTD. Seems worth a punt in a 5-10 year view. I have bought some mainly to wind up Barty, because this makes me the good guy in his world picture and undermines his bizarre delusion that I am NIMBY scum.
It looks like the Republicans' decision to focus on crime is going to pay off, since that is the issue with the most salience atm according to various polls.
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
I frequently walk that route, and further.
I get the probably unfair impression that Roger has never been much of a hiker
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.
It is fun, so long as its fake.
That's why we just had Halloween. Its fun. Gruesome is fun, not awful.
Though certainly for too long in the past people used to be taught to be afraid of "witches" and not those who burned them alive.
Admittedly, I think if we revived publicly torturing people to death, it would attract considerable popular support, so long as the victims were detested.
O/T but 538 now have the Republicans with a 53% chance of taking the Senate, and an 85% chance of taking the House.
That's still basically a coin flip, though, and suggests that the betting markets being priced as they are (a 67% chance) that the value is to lay the Republicans taking control.
“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).
Yes, it's the same old narrative against the lab leak theory. They're just mouthing the same words like "preposterous" and "train wreck" but only the simpletons are listening now. It's pretty obvious that it leaked from a lab, it's not even controversial for that to happen, lab leaks happen from time to time. The denial of the lab leak has almost become an article of faith for these people who are so invested in it now that they can see no way back. The lab leak theory is racist, it's sinophobic, it's anti-science, it's only believed by conspiracy theorists, the intelligence services who say it probably happened are clueless and politicised. It's almost as if they are worried that if they're wrong about this then they may end being proved wrong about all of the other stuff they have tried to cancel discussion about. You'll notice those denying the lab leak are almost a concentric circle on the Venn diagram with transgender rights and those who seem to think the whole of Albania could migrate here and no one would notice and suggesting otherwise is "racist", Albanophobic, a conspiracy etc...
What is striking is how feeble the arguments for zoonosis, and against lab leak, have become. Wearied and palsied. Like a boxer who knows it’s probably over but can’t quite give up. The punches go out but they have no sting.
It's the default though. The evidence for something else needs to be strong to overturn the default. Not there yet imho.
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.
It is fun, so long as its fake.
That's why we just had Halloween. Its fun. Gruesome is fun, not awful.
Though certainly for too long in the past people used to be taught to be afraid of "witches" and not those who burned them alive.
Admittedly, I think if we revived publicly torturing people to death, it would attract considerable popular support, so long as the victims were detested.
Racism, sadism and cruelty always lurk beneath the surface in human nature, I'm afraid.
It would come out again very quickly again here too, if things broke down and it was allowed to do so.
It looks like the Republicans' decision to focus on crime is going to pay off, since that is the issue with the most salience atm according to various polls.
O/T but 538 now have the Republicans with a 53% chance of taking the Senate, and an 85% chance of taking the House.
That's still basically a coin flip, though, and suggests that the betting markets being priced as they are (a 67% chance) that the value is to lay the Republicans taking control.
Maybe this thing about polls understating the populist right is getting priced in.
“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).
Yes, it's the same old narrative against the lab leak theory. They're just mouthing the same words like "preposterous" and "train wreck" but only the simpletons are listening now. It's pretty obvious that it leaked from a lab, it's not even controversial for that to happen, lab leaks happen from time to time. The denial of the lab leak has almost become an article of faith for these people who are so invested in it now that they can see no way back. The lab leak theory is racist, it's sinophobic, it's anti-science, it's only believed by conspiracy theorists, the intelligence services who say it probably happened are clueless and politicised. It's almost as if they are worried that if they're wrong about this then they may end being proved wrong about all of the other stuff they have tried to cancel discussion about. You'll notice those denying the lab leak are almost a concentric circle on the Venn diagram with transgender rights and those who seem to think the whole of Albania could migrate here and no one would notice and suggesting otherwise is "racist", Albanophobic, a conspiracy etc...
What is striking is how feeble the arguments for zoonosis, and against lab leak, have become. Wearied and palsied. Like a boxer who knows it’s probably over but can’t quite give up. The punches go out but they have no sting
You also appear to have no clue as to the organisational difference between the Wuhan Institute of Virolology (WIV) and the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control (CDC). The Wuhan CDC is not, as you say, part of the "same lab netowrk" as the WIV. They're organisationally separate. The Wuhan CDC is a branch office of the Beijing CDC
The WIV, on the other hand, is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Now, in a centralised country like China, clearly there will be linkages, but it is disingenuous at best to say they are part of the same "network".
The initial draft of your theory, penned by the WSJ IIRC, was that two people at the WIV got ill in late November 2019. That has now shifted to pointing at the geographic proximity to of the CDC to the market. Which is it?
It might have been a lab leak but it might not. You protest far too much in your dismissal of zoonosis.
“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).
Yes, it's the same old narrative against the lab leak theory. They're just mouthing the same words like "preposterous" and "train wreck" but only the simpletons are listening now. It's pretty obvious that it leaked from a lab, it's not even controversial for that to happen, lab leaks happen from time to time. The denial of the lab leak has almost become an article of faith for these people who are so invested in it now that they can see no way back. The lab leak theory is racist, it's sinophobic, it's anti-science, it's only believed by conspiracy theorists, the intelligence services who say it probably happened are clueless and politicised. It's almost as if they are worried that if they're wrong about this then they may end being proved wrong about all of the other stuff they have tried to cancel discussion about. You'll notice those denying the lab leak are almost a concentric circle on the Venn diagram with transgender rights and those who seem to think the whole of Albania could migrate here and no one would notice and suggesting otherwise is "racist", Albanophobic, a conspiracy etc...
What is striking is how feeble the arguments for zoonosis, and against lab leak, have become. Wearied and palsied. Like a boxer who knows it’s probably over but can’t quite give up. The punches go out but they have no sting.
It's the default though. The evidence for something else needs to be strong to overturn the default. Not there yet imho.
It has zero claim to defaulthood. Here's how finely balanced it is
Let's assume I am drinking a glass of wine, and there is a debate as to whether it is red or white wine. If you stipulate that white is the default you are likely to win on the basis of that stipulation, because there is no actual evidence available. But there is absolutely no reason not to stipulate the opposite, which then wins.
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.
It is fun, so long as its fake.
That's why we just had Halloween. Its fun. Gruesome is fun, not awful.
Though certainly for too long in the past people used to be taught to be afraid of "witches" and not those who burned them alive.
If people don't like effigies being burnt don't move to Sussex and parts of Kent particularly between September and November. The bonfire societies are great. It is generally considered an honour to be picked for the humiliation. Lewes of course burns the pope every year in addition to others in the news. Really enjoyed the events when I lived in Sussex.
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.
It is fun, so long as its fake.
That's why we just had Halloween. Its fun. Gruesome is fun, not awful.
Though certainly for too long in the past people used to be taught to be afraid of "witches" and not those who burned them alive.
Admittedly, I think if we revived publicly torturing people to death, it would attract considerable popular support, so long as the victims were detested.
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.
I took my two boys there a few years back. The only time I have been. We did the full Monty - oysters, three courses, cheese and then went off and had cigars. Basically, all the things I would love to have done with my Dad but couldn't because he had no money and he didn't drink! And we really did get very, very drunk. What I remember about the roasts is that the potatoes were as good as you get at home which, in my experience, is beyond unusual when you eat out.
'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.
There have been suggestions of this voting-by-housing-tenure hypothesis before. It is interesting and believable, but I don't know of studies that examine it carefully. Do you?
I've seen many studies on it before, none to hand, but this excellent chart is in the article I linked to above and sums it up well.
The vast construction in the Red Wall, one of the only places in the country where there has been a semi-reasonable amount of construction, has led to home ownership rates here moving from Labour levels to Tory levels. The seats then swung accordingly.
I'd be interested in this chart even more if it was also controlled for age.
It looks like the Republicans' decision to focus on crime is going to pay off, since that is the issue with the most salience atm according to various polls.
Of course the fact that Republicans are focusing on it and backing that focus up with big spending on election ads about it is probably rather helping to push it up the salience list, so there's an chicken-and-egg element here...
“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).
Yes, it's the same old narrative against the lab leak theory. They're just mouthing the same words like "preposterous" and "train wreck" but only the simpletons are listening now. It's pretty obvious that it leaked from a lab, it's not even controversial for that to happen, lab leaks happen from time to time. The denial of the lab leak has almost become an article of faith for these people who are so invested in it now that they can see no way back. The lab leak theory is racist, it's sinophobic, it's anti-science, it's only believed by conspiracy theorists, the intelligence services who say it probably happened are clueless and politicised. It's almost as if they are worried that if they're wrong about this then they may end being proved wrong about all of the other stuff they have tried to cancel discussion about. You'll notice those denying the lab leak are almost a concentric circle on the Venn diagram with transgender rights and those who seem to think the whole of Albania could migrate here and no one would notice and suggesting otherwise is "racist", Albanophobic, a conspiracy etc...
What is striking is how feeble the arguments for zoonosis, and against lab leak, have become. Wearied and palsied. Like a boxer who knows it’s probably over but can’t quite give up. The punches go out but they have no sting
You also appear to have no clue as to the organisational difference between the Wuhan Institute of Virolology (WIV) and the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control (CDC). The Wuhan CDC is not, as you say, part of the "same lab netowrk" as the WIV. They're organisationally separate. The Wuhan CDC is a branch office of the Beijing CDC
The WIV, on the other hand, is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Now, in a centralised country like China, clearly there will be linkages, but it is disingenuous at best to say they are part of the same "network".
The initial draft of your theory, penned by the WSJ IIRC, was that two people at the WIV got ill in late November 2019. That has now shifted to pointing at the geographic proximity to of the CDC to the market. Which is it?
It might have been a lab leak but it might not. You protest far too much in your dismissal of zoonosis.
Because viruses definiytely travel along corporate pathways.
That Science piece you keep linking to is not evidence of anything, it is second-order stuff. A meta study by a panel which was subsequently dissolved on grounds of bias.
O/T but 538 now have the Republicans with a 53% chance of taking the Senate, and an 85% chance of taking the House.
That's still basically a coin flip, though, and suggests that the betting markets being priced as they are (a 67% chance) that the value is to lay the Republicans taking control.
Just a week ago it was Dem 55%, GOP 45% if I remember correctly. That's a pretty big change in a short time.
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.
I took my two boys there a few years back. The only time I have been. We did the full Monty - oysters, three courses, cheese and then went off and had cigars. Basically, all the things I would love to have done with my Dad but couldn't because he had no money and he didn't drink! And we really did get very, very drunk. What I remember about the roasts is that the potatoes were as good as you get at home which, in my experience, is beyond unusual when you eat out.
O/T but 538 now have the Republicans with a 53% chance of taking the Senate, and an 85% chance of taking the House.
That's still basically a coin flip, though, and suggests that the betting markets being priced as they are (a 67% chance) that the value is to lay the Republicans taking control.
Maybe this thing about polls understating the populist right is getting priced in.
'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.
There have been suggestions of this voting-by-housing-tenure hypothesis before. It is interesting and believable, but I don't know of studies that examine it carefully. Do you?
I've seen many studies on it before, none to hand, but this excellent chart is in the article I linked to above and sums it up well.
The vast construction in the Red Wall, one of the only places in the country where there has been a semi-reasonable amount of construction, has led to home ownership rates here moving from Labour levels to Tory levels. The seats then swung accordingly.
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.
It is fun, so long as its fake.
That's why we just had Halloween. Its fun. Gruesome is fun, not awful.
Though certainly for too long in the past people used to be taught to be afraid of "witches" and not those who burned them alive.
Admittedly, I think if we revived publicly torturing people to death, it would attract considerable popular support, so long as the victims were detested.
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.
I took my two boys there a few years back. The only time I have been. We did the full Monty - oysters, three courses, cheese and then went off and had cigars. Basically, all the things I would love to have done with my Dad but couldn't because he had no money and he didn't drink! And we really did get very, very drunk. What I remember about the roasts is that the potatoes were as good as you get at home which, in my experience, is beyond unusual when you eat out.
I don’t think I’ve ever had roast potatoes remotely as good as home ones anywhere eating out, even at otherwise pretty good places. Interesting.
I think the issue is mass catering meaning insufficient time to do what’s needed. They tend to be insufficiently parboiled, not rough enough on the edges and nowhere near fatty or crispy enough. All of which should be achievable with a bit more boiling, smaller roasting trays and plenty of fat.
O/T but 538 now have the Republicans with a 53% chance of taking the Senate, and an 85% chance of taking the House.
Which would effectively force Biden to shift to the centre on domestic policy, cutting spending especially, as was the case for Bill Clinton when the Democrats lost the House and Senate in 1994.
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.
It is fun, so long as its fake.
That's why we just had Halloween. Its fun. Gruesome is fun, not awful.
Though certainly for too long in the past people used to be taught to be afraid of "witches" and not those who burned them alive.
Admittedly, I think if we revived publicly torturing people to death, it would attract considerable popular support, so long as the victims were detested.
"History Today", you say? Sorry, that's always going to mean only one thing to me.
Showing my age but when I was at school this phrase was used repeatedly by everyone as a put-down. Fun times!
Ah, the 1990s.
On this effigy and torture topic one thing I am thankful for in Britush culture (with the obvious exception of Northern Ireland) is the fact people don’t hold long historical grudges or resentments. History is an entertainment not a casus belli. Yes there’s smugness and a willingness to erase the bad bits of our history, but the flip side is everything pre about 1980 is viewed as amusing horrible histories.
“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).
Yes, it's the same old narrative against the lab leak theory. They're just mouthing the same words like "preposterous" and "train wreck" but only the simpletons are listening now. It's pretty obvious that it leaked from a lab, it's not even controversial for that to happen, lab leaks happen from time to time. The denial of the lab leak has almost become an article of faith for these people who are so invested in it now that they can see no way back. The lab leak theory is racist, it's sinophobic, it's anti-science, it's only believed by conspiracy theorists, the intelligence services who say it probably happened are clueless and politicised. It's almost as if they are worried that if they're wrong about this then they may end being proved wrong about all of the other stuff they have tried to cancel discussion about. You'll notice those denying the lab leak are almost a concentric circle on the Venn diagram with transgender rights and those who seem to think the whole of Albania could migrate here and no one would notice and suggesting otherwise is "racist", Albanophobic, a conspiracy etc...
What is striking is how feeble the arguments for zoonosis, and against lab leak, have become. Wearied and palsied. Like a boxer who knows it’s probably over but can’t quite give up. The punches go out but they have no sting.
It's the default though. The evidence for something else needs to be strong to overturn the default. Not there yet imho.
It has zero claim to defaulthood. Here's how finely balanced it is
Let's assume I am drinking a glass of wine, and there is a debate as to whether it is red or white wine. If you stipulate that white is the default you are likely to win on the basis of that stipulation, because there is no actual evidence available. But there is absolutely no reason not to stipulate the opposite, which then wins.
Don't know about 50/50 but I'm not saying it isn't somewhat in the balance - clearly the case from what I've read. What I mean is "natural jump" is default in the sense that it's the commonest origin for this sort of thing. So to definitively junk this for something else one would want some good strong evidence that is compatible with the something else and at the same time incompatible with the default.
Had some computer problems (my PC turned itself into a brick, it seems). Likely won't be on much at all for the next few days, perhaps longer, likewise no tips. Just a heads up in case anyone wonders if I've suddenly had my head lopped off by a low-flying flamingo.
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.
I took my two boys there a few years back. The only time I have been. We did the full Monty - oysters, three courses, cheese and then went off and had cigars. Basically, all the things I would love to have done with my Dad but couldn't because he had no money and he didn't drink! And we really did get very, very drunk. What I remember about the roasts is that the potatoes were as good as you get at home which, in my experience, is beyond unusual when you eat out.
I don’t think I’ve ever had roast potatoes remotely as good as home ones anywhere eating out, even at otherwise pretty good places. Interesting.
I think the issue is mass catering meaning insufficient time to do what’s needed. They tend to be insufficiently parboiled, not rough enough on the edges and nowhere near fatty or crispy enough. All of which should be achievable with a bit more boiling, smaller roasting trays and plenty of fat.
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.
But kids (and many adults) find it very amusing. My teachers always got a rapturous response from the classroom, when telling us about gruesome medieval and early modern executions (the demise of Hugh de Spenser the Younger, I recall, caused particular merriment).
Had his penis cut off for being gay.
great LOLs.
No he didn't.
The charges against him were High Treason, robbery, making the King "ride in arms against the peers of the realm and others of his faithful liegemen, to destroy and disinherit them contrary to Magna Carta", murder of a couple of dozen nobles and waging a false war against Scotland.
He was hung, drawn and quartered which was the usual punishment for nobles and other notables found guilty of treason. That included having his genitals cut off and then his innards removed whilst he was still alive. It was practiced on many people and had nothing to do with him being gay. The same punishment was meted out to William Wallace and many other nobles over the next several hundred years.
'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.
There have been suggestions of this voting-by-housing-tenure hypothesis before. It is interesting and believable, but I don't know of studies that examine it carefully. Do you?
I've seen many studies on it before, none to hand, but this excellent chart is in the article I linked to above and sums it up well.
The vast construction in the Red Wall, one of the only places in the country where there has been a semi-reasonable amount of construction, has led to home ownership rates here moving from Labour levels to Tory levels. The seats then swung accordingly.
For now, on current polls they will almost all go back to Labour even if Sunak does save much of the blue wall.
In opposition therefore expect the Tories to become more NIMBY in terms of building in the greenbelt as bluewall Home counties MPs are again the majority of the party and with the NIMBY LDs the main threat to them. A Starmer Labour government meanwhile would build large numbers of new homes to take home ownership from 65% to 70%
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.
I took my two boys there a few years back. The only time I have been. We did the full Monty - oysters, three courses, cheese and then went off and had cigars. Basically, all the things I would love to have done with my Dad but couldn't because he had no money and he didn't drink! And we really did get very, very drunk. What I remember about the roasts is that the potatoes were as good as you get at home which, in my experience, is beyond unusual when you eat out.
Yes, great place, and if you're doing it why not do it properly. But this guy was lunching there - and "properly" - 3 or 4 times a week. Pretty courageous.
Why do British weather forecasters typically stand to the west of Britain, obscuring the direction where most British weather approaches from, rather than to the east, so that the weather approaching from the Atlantic is more easily visible?
Why do British weather forecasters typically stand to the west of Britain, obscuring the direction where most British weather approaches from, rather than to the east, so that the weather approaching from the Atlantic is more easily visible?
Handedness? Right handed people would want their right arm free to gesture, which means standing to the left as seen on screen.
Why do British weather forecasters typically stand to the west of Britain, obscuring the direction where most British weather approaches from, rather than to the east, so that the weather approaching from the Atlantic is more easily visible?
Because when they move they only obscure Cornwall, which doesn't matter - whereas if they were the other way around they would be obscuring London...
Why do British weather forecasters typically stand to the west of Britain, obscuring the direction where most British weather approaches from, rather than to the east, so that the weather approaching from the Atlantic is more easily visible?
Because they need to be able to show (Northern) Ireland on screen. If the presenter stood to the East they would be wasting lots of screen space on Benelux and Eastern France, and might need to cut out Ireland.
Why do British weather forecasters typically stand to the west of Britain, obscuring the direction where most British weather approaches from, rather than to the east, so that the weather approaching from the Atlantic is more easily visible?
It's the Remainer bias. They want to send a subliminal message about looking towards the continent rather than the open seas.
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.
But kids (and many adults) find it very amusing. My teachers always got a rapturous response from the classroom, when telling us about gruesome medieval and early modern executions (the demise of Hugh de Spenser the Younger, I recall, caused particular merriment).
Had his penis cut off for being gay.
great LOLs.
No he didn't.
The charges against him were High Treason, robbery, making the King "ride in arms against the peers of the realm and others of his faithful liegemen, to destroy and disinherit them contrary to Magna Carta", murder of a couple of dozen nobles and waging a false war against Scotland.
He was hung, drawn and quartered which was the usual punishment for nobles and other notables found guilty of treason. That included having his genitals cut off and then his innards removed whilst he was still alive. It was practiced on many people and had nothing to do with him being gay. The same punishment was meted out to William Wallace and many other nobles over the next several hundred years.
See, I deliberately didn't google it - because I find it hard to remove things like this from my head once they're in there - and here comes you with this graphic post.
On the Wuhan situation, let us not forget that the CDC (300m from the likely first super spreader event - the seafood market) was REALLY into bat research
“The circumstantial evidence for a lab escape. By way of introduction, there are two virology institutes in Wuhan to consider, not one: The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention (WHCDC) and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Both have conducted large projects on novel bat viruses and maintained large research collections of novel bat viruses, and at least the WIV possessed the virus that is the most closely related known virus in the world to the outbreak virus, bat virus RaTG13”
'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.
There have been suggestions of this voting-by-housing-tenure hypothesis before. It is interesting and believable, but I don't know of studies that examine it carefully. Do you?
I've seen many studies on it before, none to hand, but this excellent chart is in the article I linked to above and sums it up well.
The vast construction in the Red Wall, one of the only places in the country where there has been a semi-reasonable amount of construction, has led to home ownership rates here moving from Labour levels to Tory levels. The seats then swung accordingly.
For now, on current polls they will almost all go back to Labour even if Sunak does save much of the blue wall.
In opposition therefore expect the Tories to become more NIMBY in terms of building in the greenbelt as bluewall Home counties MPs are again the majority of the party and with the NIMBY LDs the main threat to them. A Starmer Labour government meanwhile would build large numbers of new homes to take home ownership from 65% to 70%
No, young HY, Wrong as usual. The Lib Dems are not against building houses. But they are against building the wrong sort of houses in the wrong places for the wrong sort of people.
You Conservatives are in favour of building large houses everywhere , second homes, speculative investment type houses for wealthy immigrants, tax dodgers, drug dealers etc. Often left empty and no earthly use to local people.
Why do British weather forecasters typically stand to the west of Britain, obscuring the direction where most British weather approaches from, rather than to the east, so that the weather approaching from the Atlantic is more easily visible?
Because by doing so they obscure the Republic of Ireland which doesn't matter for UK broadcasts.
Nb the wind figures on gridwatch have been several gw too low for a few weeks for some reason, I think possibly because they are under-stating exports to France.
'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.
There have been suggestions of this voting-by-housing-tenure hypothesis before. It is interesting and believable, but I don't know of studies that examine it carefully. Do you?
I've seen many studies on it before, none to hand, but this excellent chart is in the article I linked to above and sums it up well.
The vast construction in the Red Wall, one of the only places in the country where there has been a semi-reasonable amount of construction, has led to home ownership rates here moving from Labour levels to Tory levels. The seats then swung accordingly.
For now, on current polls they will almost all go back to Labour even if Sunak does save much of the blue wall.
In opposition therefore expect the Tories to become more NIMBY in terms of building in the greenbelt as bluewall Home counties MPs are again the majority of the party and with the NIMBY LDs the main threat to them. A Starmer Labour government meanwhile would build large numbers of new homes to take home ownership from 65% to 70%
No, young HY, Wrong as usual. The Lib Dems are not against building houses. But they are against building the wrong sort of houses in the wrong places for the wrong sort of people.
In theory, perhaps. In practice, they pander to NIMBYs to get votes.
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.
But kids (and many adults) find it very amusing. My teachers always got a rapturous response from the classroom, when telling us about gruesome medieval and early modern executions (the demise of Hugh de Spenser the Younger, I recall, caused particular merriment).
Had his penis cut off for being gay.
great LOLs.
No he didn't.
The charges against him were High Treason, robbery, making the King "ride in arms against the peers of the realm and others of his faithful liegemen, to destroy and disinherit them contrary to Magna Carta", murder of a couple of dozen nobles and waging a false war against Scotland.
He was hung, drawn and quartered which was the usual punishment for nobles and other notables found guilty of treason. That included having his genitals cut off and then his innards removed whilst he was still alive. It was practiced on many people and had nothing to do with him being gay. The same punishment was meted out to William Wallace and many other nobles over the next several hundred years.
See, I deliberately didn't google it - because I find it hard to remove things like this from my head once they're in there - and here comes you with this graphic post.
Sorry (genuinely). I find this stuff fascinating - not so much the detail but all the legal stuff around it. Most people just don't realise how tenuous and unstable most English governance was prior to the Tudors. We pick out the notable bits but miss the fact that for much of the rest of the time England was in a semi permanent state of war even under seemingly long living and well established monarchs like Henry III.
Why do British weather forecasters typically stand to the west of Britain, obscuring the direction where most British weather approaches from, rather than to the east, so that the weather approaching from the Atlantic is more easily visible?
Handedness? Right handed people would want their right arm free to gesture, which means standing to the left as seen on screen.
I suspect it is this
Plus it means they are pointing left to right on screen as we look - as we read left to right, it somehow feels correct that we look at them pointing that way?
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.
But kids (and many adults) find it very amusing. My teachers always got a rapturous response from the classroom, when telling us about gruesome medieval and early modern executions (the demise of Hugh de Spenser the Younger, I recall, caused particular merriment).
Had his penis cut off for being gay.
great LOLs.
No he didn't.
The charges against him were High Treason, robbery, making the King "ride in arms against the peers of the realm and others of his faithful liegemen, to destroy and disinherit them contrary to Magna Carta", murder of a couple of dozen nobles and waging a false war against Scotland.
He was hung, drawn and quartered which was the usual punishment for nobles and other notables found guilty of treason. That included having his genitals cut off and then his innards removed whilst he was still alive. It was practiced on many people and had nothing to do with him being gay. The same punishment was meted out to William Wallace and many other nobles over the next several hundred years.
Froissart says he was de-penised, and one can see it happening as an improv not in the original script. Anyway I am guessing that even if it is incorrect, that's the version which had @Sean_F's classmates in stitches
'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.
There have been suggestions of this voting-by-housing-tenure hypothesis before. It is interesting and believable, but I don't know of studies that examine it carefully. Do you?
I've seen many studies on it before, none to hand, but this excellent chart is in the article I linked to above and sums it up well.
The vast construction in the Red Wall, one of the only places in the country where there has been a semi-reasonable amount of construction, has led to home ownership rates here moving from Labour levels to Tory levels. The seats then swung accordingly.
For now, on current polls they will almost all go back to Labour even if Sunak does save much of the blue wall.
In opposition therefore expect the Tories to become more NIMBY in terms of building in the greenbelt as bluewall Home counties MPs are again the majority of the party and with the NIMBY LDs the main threat to them. A Starmer Labour government meanwhile would build large numbers of new homes to take home ownership from 65% to 70%
No, young HY, Wrong as usual. The Lib Dems are not against building houses. But they are against building the wrong sort of houses in the wrong places for the wrong sort of people.
In theory, perhaps. In practice, they pander to NIMBYs to get votes.
'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.
There have been suggestions of this voting-by-housing-tenure hypothesis before. It is interesting and believable, but I don't know of studies that examine it carefully. Do you?
I've seen many studies on it before, none to hand, but this excellent chart is in the article I linked to above and sums it up well.
The vast construction in the Red Wall, one of the only places in the country where there has been a semi-reasonable amount of construction, has led to home ownership rates here moving from Labour levels to Tory levels. The seats then swung accordingly.
For now, on current polls they will almost all go back to Labour even if Sunak does save much of the blue wall.
In opposition therefore expect the Tories to become more NIMBY in terms of building in the greenbelt as bluewall Home counties MPs are again the majority of the party and with the NIMBY LDs the main threat to them. A Starmer Labour government meanwhile would build large numbers of new homes to take home ownership from 65% to 70%
No, young HY, Wrong as usual. The Lib Dems are not against building houses. But they are against building the wrong sort of houses in the wrong places for the wrong sort of people.
In theory, perhaps. In practice, they pander to NIMBYs to get votes.
'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.
* Other brands are available.
The level of ignorance on here wrt the red wall gladdens my heart. L/M/C & U/W/C grafters is the essence. At the last election the northern redwall really mirrored places like the Medway towns in Kent. Obvious when you think about it.
'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.
There have been suggestions of this voting-by-housing-tenure hypothesis before. It is interesting and believable, but I don't know of studies that examine it carefully. Do you?
I've seen many studies on it before, none to hand, but this excellent chart is in the article I linked to above and sums it up well.
The vast construction in the Red Wall, one of the only places in the country where there has been a semi-reasonable amount of construction, has led to home ownership rates here moving from Labour levels to Tory levels. The seats then swung accordingly.
For now, on current polls they will almost all go back to Labour even if Sunak does save much of the blue wall.
In opposition therefore expect the Tories to become more NIMBY in terms of building in the greenbelt as bluewall Home counties MPs are again the majority of the party and with the NIMBY LDs the main threat to them. A Starmer Labour government meanwhile would build large numbers of new homes to take home ownership from 65% to 70%
No, young HY, Wrong as usual. The Lib Dems are not against building houses. But they are against building the wrong sort of houses in the wrong places for the wrong sort of people.
In theory, perhaps. In practice, they pander to NIMBYs to get votes.
I think he is saying the same thing in a joking kinda way.
'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.
There have been suggestions of this voting-by-housing-tenure hypothesis before. It is interesting and believable, but I don't know of studies that examine it carefully. Do you?
I've seen many studies on it before, none to hand, but this excellent chart is in the article I linked to above and sums it up well.
The vast construction in the Red Wall, one of the only places in the country where there has been a semi-reasonable amount of construction, has led to home ownership rates here moving from Labour levels to Tory levels. The seats then swung accordingly.
For now, on current polls they will almost all go back to Labour even if Sunak does save much of the blue wall.
In opposition therefore expect the Tories to become more NIMBY in terms of building in the greenbelt as bluewall Home counties MPs are again the majority of the party and with the NIMBY LDs the main threat to them. A Starmer Labour government meanwhile would build large numbers of new homes to take home ownership from 65% to 70%
No, young HY, Wrong as usual. The Lib Dems are not against building houses. But they are against building the wrong sort of houses in the wrong places for the wrong sort of people.
In theory, perhaps. In practice, they pander to NIMBYs to get votes.
As they did in Chesham and Amersham.
That was certainly one example I had in mind.
Plus in local council elections across the South of England the LDs go as NIMBY as possible to gain seats and sometimes control in Tory controlled council areas in opposition to Local Plans
'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.
* Other brands are available.
The level of ignorance on here wrt the red wall gladdens my heart. L/M/C & U/W/C grafters is the essence. At the last election the northern redwall really mirrored places like the Medway towns in Kent. Obvious when you think about it.
None of that means anything to me. Is L/M/C & U/W/C grafters the reality, or the misperception? WTF are places like the Medway towns in Kent like? How do you keep your finger so miraculously on the pulse from your villa on the costa de los jubilados?
Why do British weather forecasters typically stand to the west of Britain, obscuring the direction where most British weather approaches from, rather than to the east, so that the weather approaching from the Atlantic is more easily visible?
Like everyone else at the Beeb they stand on the Left!
Nb the wind figures on gridwatch have been several gw too low for a few weeks for some reason, I think possibly because they are under-stating exports to France.
It’s bloody windy here, that’s all I can say. The scaffolding is up to finally repair the damage done by that named storm back in the spring, but the named storm right now means it’s too windy for the contractors to go up there.
'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.
* Other brands are available.
The level of ignorance on here wrt the red wall gladdens my heart. L/M/C & U/W/C grafters is the essence. At the last election the northern redwall really mirrored places like the Medway towns in Kent. Obvious when you think about it.
None of that means anything to me. Is L/M/C & U/W/C grafters the reality, or the misperception? WTF are places like the Medway towns in Kent like? How do you keep your finger so miraculously on the pulse from your villa on the costa de los jubilados?
I worked in north Kent for 16 years and was brought up in Sunderland. You know even less about where I live now judging by the sneary smear. que tenga un buen noche gilipollas.
'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.
* Other brands are available.
The level of ignorance on here wrt the red wall gladdens my heart. L/M/C & U/W/C grafters is the essence. At the last election the northern redwall really mirrored places like the Medway towns in Kent. Obvious when you think about it.
None of that means anything to me. Is L/M/C & U/W/C grafters the reality, or the misperception? WTF are places like the Medway towns in Kent like? How do you keep your finger so miraculously on the pulse from your villa on the costa de los jubilados?
I worked in north Kent for 16 years and was brought up in Sunderland. You know even less about where I live now judging by the sneary smear. que tenga un buen noche gilipollas.
Comments
1) Never be on Twitter. If you are on it, stop now.
2) Look up the handful of people you really want to note (cartoonist Matt, there may be one or two others, in my case) as and when you feel like it, but not by being a 'follower'
3) Note that PBers links to Twitter can be useful, especially when the news agenda is frenetic; other kind people (thank you) act as your filter
4) Find a hobby or indulge in good works.
Twitter consists mostly of deranged narcissists shouting at each other. Elon Musk is a talented example. Most are not even talented.
Help is at hand, though. In the vanguard of local Nimbys Against Newbuild we find Labour MP Matt Western:
https://leamingtonobserver.co.uk/news/appeal-win-is-dark-day-for-democracy-says-warwick-and-leamington-mp/
That said I think they were joking.
When I was due to leave after the summer they were inundated by film school graduates and PhDs wanting the job which was essentially to take those cannisters around Soho and go out for cokes and ciggies for the staff.
When I did leave they asked me if I wanted to stay and work my way up but I said no thanks I need some more formal education. Parallel lives has occasionally made me wonder what would have happened if I'd stayed.
Whatever the truths of this “eviction” places like Simpson’s (City) should have their usage protected so they have to stay as pubs/hostelries
It’s older than the USA FFS!
Are you from round these parts?
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4191917#Comment_4191917
The fact is we'll likely never know for sure - we'll only ever be certain if it was a lab leak and the exact point of leak or genetic linkage to something studied there can be shown. Which is why the conspiracy theorists (not pointing at you) love the lab leak theory because, essentially, it cannot be disproven.
The evidence has, as with Andy Cooke (although he seems to have moved from more in favour of lab leak than I was) nudged me from the "don't know" to "zoonosis more likely" viewpoint.
But people can't afford them.
That's why we just had Halloween. Its fun. Gruesome is fun, not awful.
Though certainly for too long in the past people used to be taught to be afraid of "witches" and not those who burned them alive.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/23/snps-half-baked-scheme-house-ukrainian-refugees-sparks-pollution/
Let’s get some clarity from you.
1. You make out you believe Levelling Up clearly means levelling up the left behind North, to the investment levels of not left behind South - yes or no?
2. To be more than empty slogan, pitched at Brexit voting Labour constituencies, the ancient mismatch in scale and wealth between London and the secondary cities and their regions has to be achievable, you truly believe this is achievable - yes or no?
3. You come across as bought into Boris’s rhetoric and idea, but there is a reason why far smarter politicians than Boris Johnson declined to open Pandora’s Box with promises like these. Regardless what you think levelling up is, what do voters across the country think of it? Do all voters Up North, and despite whatever Them and Us divisions government rhetoric and policy is creating, really want investment for themselves ahead of deprived area’s in the South, like Tendering, Jaywick, Thanet, or do voters up north recognise places down south, in the South East of England, just as poor as themselves, so these voters want lots of new money and investment everywhere for everyone, so levelling up to Northern voters (not you obviously, your mind is in a different place alongside Boris) is we are all in it together to improve on deprivation and lack of investment wherever it is?
Its simple supply and demand. Add more supply, the price comes down, and the Red Wall in 2019 was not just where the most construction had happened it also had as a result the lowest price-earnings ratio of anywhere in England. Which is why it swung Tory, not because it was deprived of opportunity, but because people there now had an opportunity to get on the ladder and had taken it.
We see infectious diseases leak from labs quite often - Pirbright has entered the chat - and to some extent it is forgiveable. If however it turns out to be gain of function products that have gained all too much function then that is a very different story. While I don't quite support Leon's desire for a Nuremberg style tribunal and executions, serious questions need answers and sadly we won't get them from the Chinese. I work with many Chinese scientists and all too often their first instinct is to cover things up, even at a trivial - 'who broke that flask' level. Add in the regressive Chinese totalitarian state and its orders of magnitude worse.
Friday is topical, which means there's always a lot of dross, unfortunately.
Midweek can be brilliant. Anything with Milton Jones or John Finnemore is worth a listen. But some of it is too wry for its own good, or plucky failed experiments.
There's a limit to how much reliable funny the world can generate.
The vast construction in the Red Wall, one of the only places in the country where there has been a semi-reasonable amount of construction, has led to home ownership rates here moving from Labour levels to Tory levels. The seats then swung accordingly.
great LOLs.
Can we really just shrug and say “oh well yes it probably came from the lab, whatever, it’s all history now”?!
If you lost a brother or a wife or a mother to covid, if you lost a business or a job or you now have crippling long Covid, you would want and expect more than that
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/crime-remains-top-mind-midterm-voters-republicans-pounce/story?id=91257218
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/latimer-and-ridley-burned-stake#:~:text=The Oxford Martyrs were killed,the site of the execution.
It would come out again very quickly again here too, if things broke down and it was allowed to do so.
You also appear to have no clue as to the organisational difference between the Wuhan Institute of Virolology (WIV) and the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control (CDC). The Wuhan CDC is not, as you say, part of the "same lab netowrk" as the WIV. They're organisationally separate. The Wuhan CDC is a branch office of the Beijing CDC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Center_for_Disease_Control_and_Prevention
The WIV, on the other hand, is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Now, in a centralised country like China, clearly there will be linkages, but it is disingenuous at best to say they are part of the same "network".
The initial draft of your theory, penned by the WSJ IIRC, was that two people at the WIV got ill in late November 2019. That has now shifted to pointing at the geographic proximity to of the CDC to the market. Which is it?
It might have been a lab leak but it might not. You protest far too much in your dismissal of zoonosis.
#bantheunder50s
Are you a good loser or a bad loser?
All Britons: 61% good loser / 22% bad loser
18-24yr olds: 51% good loser / 28% bad loser
65+yr olds: 68% good loser / 13% bad loser
yougov.co.uk/topics/society…
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/05/the-wuhan-lab-and-the-gain-of-function-disagreement/
Let's assume I am drinking a glass of wine, and there is a debate as to whether it is red or white wine. If you stipulate that white is the default you are likely to win on the basis of that stipulation, because there is no actual evidence available. But there is absolutely no reason not to stipulate the opposite, which then wins.
That Science piece you keep linking to is not evidence of anything, it is second-order stuff. A meta study by a panel which was subsequently dissolved on grounds of bias.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/ge2019-how-did-demographics-affect-the-result/
I think the issue is mass catering meaning insufficient time to do what’s needed. They tend to be insufficiently parboiled, not rough enough on the edges and nowhere near fatty or crispy enough. All of which should be achievable with a bit more boiling, smaller roasting trays and plenty of fat.
On this effigy and torture topic one thing I am thankful for in Britush culture (with the obvious exception of Northern Ireland) is the fact people don’t hold long historical grudges or resentments. History is an entertainment not a casus belli. Yes there’s smugness and a willingness to erase the bad bits of our history, but the flip side is everything pre about 1980 is viewed as amusing horrible histories.
Had some computer problems (my PC turned itself into a brick, it seems). Likely won't be on much at all for the next few days, perhaps longer, likewise no tips. Just a heads up in case anyone wonders if I've suddenly had my head lopped off by a low-flying flamingo.
Play nicely.
The charges against him were High Treason, robbery, making the King "ride in arms against the peers of the realm and others of his faithful liegemen, to destroy and disinherit them contrary to Magna Carta", murder of a couple of dozen nobles and waging a false war against Scotland.
http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2009/04/charges-against-hugh-despenser-younger.html
He was hung, drawn and quartered which was the usual punishment for nobles and other notables found guilty of treason. That included having his genitals cut off and then his innards removed whilst he was still alive. It was practiced on many people and had nothing to do with him being gay. The same punishment was meted out to William Wallace and many other nobles over the next several hundred years.
In opposition therefore expect the Tories to become more NIMBY in terms of building in the greenbelt as bluewall Home counties MPs are again the majority of the party and with the NIMBY LDs the main threat to them. A Starmer Labour government meanwhile would build large numbers of new homes to take home ownership from 65% to 70%
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/britain-tories-liverpool-b2176507.html
“The circumstantial evidence for a lab escape. By way of introduction, there are two virology institutes in Wuhan to consider, not one: The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention (WHCDC) and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Both have conducted large projects on novel bat viruses and maintained large research collections of novel bat viruses, and at least the WIV possessed the virus that is the most closely related known virus in the world to the outbreak virus, bat virus RaTG13”
. https://twitter.com/bulletinatomic/status/1274303733938229250?s=46&t=rTCYr11YoJBPiyWTSmrj0g
You Conservatives are in favour of building large houses everywhere , second homes, speculative investment type houses for wealthy immigrants, tax dodgers, drug dealers etc. Often left empty and no earthly use to local people.
See the difference?
https://twitter.com/nationalgrideso/status/1587833040939945984?s=21&t=VSbT9dCqBbhEGXWcjVrXyg
Nb the wind figures on gridwatch have been several gw too low for a few weeks for some reason, I think possibly because they are under-stating exports to France.
Plus it means they are pointing left to right on screen as we look - as we read left to right, it somehow feels correct that we look at them pointing that way?
They've been to London about it, in an And shall Trelawney die? sort of way.
""We complained about the throwaway lines and presenters standing in front of the Isles of Scilly and sometimes west Cornwall."