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Will the Tories ever get over the Kwasi Budget? – politicalbetting.com

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  • Ishmael_ZIshmael_Z Posts: 8,981

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    So I guess "The Faith" is now OK with adultery, since its Defender is an adulterer?

    I nice line up of adulterous Tory ex-PMs at the Cenotaph yesterday, btw.
    The Church of England was established by an adulterer, Henry VIII, so he could break with Rome and Papal Supremacy and marry Anne Boleyn. What a ridiculous question. The Monarch is only Supreme Governor of the Church of England, its Leader is the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    I haven't heard any evidence May, Cameron or Sunak have been adulterers even if Major, Johnson and Truss have. Of the 2 Labour PMs Blair has had the Wendy Deng rumours of course but we will give him the benefit of that. Not to mention the Marcia Williams rumours around Wilson when he was Labour PM

    Was Henry an adulterer? Or did he wait until the previous wife was divorced or dead before he started banging the next one?

    Either way, less of a role model than Jesus, the Buddha or Guru Nanak. Maybe on a par with the Prophet. And yet his is the faith you choose to follow.

    So only 50% of recent Tory PMs are adulterers. Fair enough.
    It is not Henry's faith, the Church of England is a denomination of the Christian faith, just the Monarch is Supreme Governor of it to stop the Pope being its head on earth with its Leader the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    Of the 2 recent Labour PMs, we know the Wendy Deng rumours about Blair as I said. That would be 50% of living Labour PMs if true but I give Blair the benefit of the doubt and say not true
    Seeing as Henry VIIIth had illegitimate children, one of whom nearly became legitamized, I’d say he definitely had adulterous relations.
    Doesn't follow, unmarried fornication isn't adultery.
  • OmniumOmnium Posts: 10,765

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    So I guess "The Faith" is now OK with adultery, since its Defender is an adulterer?

    I nice line up of adulterous Tory ex-PMs at the Cenotaph yesterday, btw.
    The Church of England was established by an adulterer, Henry VIII, so he could break with Rome and Papal Supremacy and marry Anne Boleyn. What a ridiculous question. The Monarch is only Supreme Governor of the Church of England, its Leader is the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    I haven't heard any evidence May, Cameron or Sunak have been adulterers even if Major, Johnson and Truss have. Of the 2 Labour PMs Blair has had the Wendy Deng rumours of course but we will give him the benefit of that. Not to mention the Marcia Williams rumours around Wilson when he was Labour PM

    Was Henry an adulterer? Or did he wait until the previous wife was divorced or dead before he started banging the next one?

    Either way, less of a role model than Jesus, the Buddha or Guru Nanak. Maybe on a par with the Prophet. And yet his is the faith you choose to follow.

    So only 50% of recent Tory PMs are adulterers. Fair enough.
    It is not Henry's faith, the Church of England is a denomination of the Christian faith, just the Monarch is Supreme Governor of it to stop the Pope being its head on earth with its Leader the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    Of the 2 recent Labour PMs, we know the Wendy Deng rumours about Blair as I said. That would be 50% of living Labour PMs if true but I give Blair the benefit of the doubt and say not true
    Seeing as Henry VIIIth had illegitimate children, one of whom nearly became legitamized, I’d say he definitely had adulterous relations.
    You're not suggesting that the CoE has shaky foundations surely!
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,592

    rcs1000 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Eustice: "We did not actually need to give Australia nor New Zealand full liberalisation of beef and sheep. It was not in our economic interests to do so. And neither Australia nor New Zealand had anything to offer in return for such a grand concession."

    https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1592209448986198016

    Perhaps she had a, not unreasonable, view that free trade was a good thing, and that British consumers would benefit from cheaper lamb?
    I never understand why pork is so cheap and lamb is so expensive.

    I mean, pork requires more infra and work than sheep.

    Weird.
    Looking at pig farms (notably in Norfolk), and sheep farms; pigs can be kept in much closer captivity than sheep. My *guess* is that you get far fewer sheep per hectare (*) than pigs, much reducing the cost.

    As an aside, my dad says that pigs are not dirty; they are very clean animals. It's only the way we keep them that makes them dirty.

    (*) Acre for you ;)
    The other strange thing about sheep is how the fleece these days has virtually no value.

    I think they get something like 50p for a fleece? And it's much more sustainable to use wool for clothes than synthetics.

    Learnt from Clarkson's farm. More weird.
    About twenty years ago, I went for a walk in the Peak District, on the slightly less touristy western (Staffordshire) side. I talked to a farming couple, in their sixties or seventies, who were the last generation of their family to farm that land. Their kids and grandkids had no interest in farming and had moved away. It was a sheep farm, and I think only their family history was keeping them at it.

    I found it unutterably sad. I could probably find out where it was and see what's happened to the farm (probably part of a larger one), but it would depress me.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,840
    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    But your King and your PM ARE religious leaders. C of E, remember.
    No they are not.

    As the 37th Article Ishmael identified showed the Monarch can neither administer the sacraments or preach the word of the Bible.

    The Archbishop of Canterbury is leader of the Church of England not the monarch. The Monarch is only Supreme Governor and Protector of it.

    The PM has no position in it at all other than if they are not Roman Catholic being able to confirm the appointment of Bishops
    Selecting senior managent IS a leadership role - and if it is determined by religion then the PM IS a religious leader.

    And being the chair IS a leadership role, e.g. HMtQ (late lamented).

    It's not just the CEOs like Welby Cantuar ++ who are leaders.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,437

    Scott_xP said:

    You're being incredibly childish.

    The entire Brexit project was childish.

    A toddler having a temper tantrum, except it costs us billions and trashed the future for millions.

    But the Brexiteers will continue to scweam and scweam about how unfair it to mock them, and I shall continue to do so
    If we'd never Brexited, how would you have filled your time?
    I'm still reeling from the news that Scott's posts are intended to mock *other* people.
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 17,220
    edited November 2022

    This is pissing more money up the wall when we all know what the solution is.

    Tory MPs have warned Suella Braverman that she risks throwing “good money after bad” with the government’s new deal with France to stop cross-channel migrants.

    The home secretary this morning signed a £70 million deal as part of a bid to reduce the number of migrants crossing the English Channel. However, in the Commons Tory MPs highlighted the risk that it does not oblige French police to detain and arrest people.

    Tim Loughton, a former minister, said: “Whilst co-operation with the French is no doubt welcome, is it not the case that since 2015 the British taxpayer has subsidised French police force to tune of £215m.

    “There is nothing in this agreement today that obliges the French police to detain and arrest anybody they intercept so they are free to come back the following night and try again, in which case we are throwing good money after bad.”


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rishi-sunak-suella-braverman-latest-news-channel-migrants-deal-france-uk-7hw96r6w8

    We need to get rid of Sunak and Braverman.

    The deal is a complete non starter, and it is not Braverman's fault, this was cooked up by Sunak as part of his new gooey embrace of Europe.
    Braverman is out there signing the deal. So it is her deal - for good or ill.
    Wasn't the chatter that the deal was being worked on under Johnson and Patel, until Truss put a spanner in the works?

    https://www.cityam.com/france-pulls-out-of-channel-migrant-deal-over-truss-friend-or-foe-comments/?amp=1




  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,158
    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    Scott_xP said:

    You're being incredibly childish.

    The entire Brexit project was childish.

    A toddler having a temper tantrum, except it costs us billions and trashed the future for millions.

    But the Brexiteers will continue to scweam and scweam about how unfair it to mock them, and I shall continue to do so
    If you want to get better at mocking them, you should try harder to understand them. Brexit was not about renouncing all international cooperation, just withdrawing from the project to create a European superstate.
    A project more imaginary than real and of which we weren't in any case a part.
    A bit of a shame they kept putting the nutters in whose imagination it existed in charge of things in Brussels, though.

    Especially since so many of them would have made Al Capone look positively honest.
    The big path is set by national leaders though. And they are constrained by their electorates. No way is a USE coming in by stealth. Might be possible one day but it's far far off and it'd need a sea change in circumstances and popular sentiment. Grains of truth in it but in essence it's a bogeyman, that's my view.
    Bluntly, I think that is naive.

    In fact, I will go further. It's already been created by stealth, through the creation of the Euro and the increasing pooling of financial sovereignty to pay for it.

    At some point, either the EU will have to give up the euro, or it will have to federate. There are no middle paths. Indeed, that was a key reason behind the creation of the euro, based on the Zollverein of the nineteenth century. It didn't quite happen with the crash of 2008, but with the disaster that are public finances across the EU it will have to face this choice next time, which you would assume will be in the next two to three years.

    And as we saw in Scotland, people will be very reluctant to break away from a currency unit, with all the chaos that entails. There is a very strong chance they will prefer political union even if it isn't what they actually want.

    I would have considerably more respect for the leaders of the EU if they were honest about this, but most of them aren't. And the ones like Delors, Giscard and Juncker, who are, tend to be loathsome scum anyway whom only a genuine lunatic would respect.
    Oh no, not the old "naive" again - this time for an actually rather hard-headed recognition of the constraints on EU utopianism. My view is there isn't now (or the foreseeable prospect of) the requisite popular support for a fully federal Europe replacing the nation states. Technical arguments about the Euro, and whether a common currency dictates the demise of nation states using it - I'd say not but it's complex and arguable - don't override this imo. The "elites" can't "slip it in" without people noticing. To throw a bit of shade back, I think it's paranoia to think they either can or want to.
  • Big_G_NorthWalesBig_G_NorthWales Posts: 63,063
    edited November 2022

    So of the last 6 published polls the Con vote share is up in one (by one percent), level in one and down in four. I'm not yet ready to call the Con revival having peaked but that isn't too promising for them.

    This weeks Autumn Statement and the publics response over the next couple of weeks will be interesting

    Seems pensions and benefits to rise by inflation but that taxes to rise considerably for the better off is quite a change for a conservative administration though welcome if confirmed

    I would just comment though that the triple lock should go and I say that as a pensioner
  • rcs1000 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Eustice: "We did not actually need to give Australia nor New Zealand full liberalisation of beef and sheep. It was not in our economic interests to do so. And neither Australia nor New Zealand had anything to offer in return for such a grand concession."

    https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1592209448986198016

    Perhaps she had a, not unreasonable, view that free trade was a good thing, and that British consumers would benefit from cheaper lamb?
    I never understand why pork is so cheap and lamb is so expensive.

    I mean, pork requires more infra and work than sheep.

    Weird.
    Looking at pig farms (notably in Norfolk), and sheep farms; pigs can be kept in much closer captivity than sheep. My *guess* is that you get far fewer sheep per hectare (*) than pigs, much reducing the cost.

    As an aside, my dad says that pigs are not dirty; they are very clean animals. It's only the way we keep them that makes them dirty.

    (*) Acre for you ;)
    My understanding from working on farms 40 years ago, was that sheep are far more prone to disease and therefore need far more in the way of veterinary intervention and prophylactic treatments. In addition, meat yields are far lower per animal. So a typical 100 lb live lamb will yield about 50lbs of meat whereas a typical 200lb pig will yield around 140-150lbs of pork products.

    Hence higher costs and lower returns.
  • OmniumOmnium Posts: 10,765
    Ishmael_Z said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and puIsn't blic executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    So I guess "The Faith" is now OK with adultery, since its Defender is an adulterer?

    I nice line up of adulterous Tory ex-PMs at the Cenotaph yesterday, btw.
    The Church of England was established by an adulterer, Henry VIII, so he could break with Rome and Papal Supremacy and marry Anne Boleyn. What a ridiculous question. The Monarch is only Supreme Governor of the Church of England, its Leader is the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    I haven't heard any evidence May, Cameron or Sunak have been adulterers even if Major, Johnson and Truss have. Of the 2 Labour PMs Blair has had the Wendy Deng rumours of course but we will give him the benefit of that. Not to mention the Marcia Williams rumours around Wilson when he was Labour PM

    Was Henry an adulterer? Or did he wait until the previous wife was divorced or dead before he started banging the next one?

    Either way, less of a role model than Jesus, the Buddha or Guru Nanak. Maybe on a par with the Prophet. And yet his is the faith you choose to follow.

    So only 50% of recent Tory PMs are adulterers. Fair enough.
    It is not Henry's faith, the Church of England is a denomination of the Christian faith, just the Monarch is Supreme Governor of it to stop the Pope being its head on earth with its Leader the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    Of the 2 recent Labour PMs, we know the Wendy Deng rumours about Blair as I said. That would be 50% of living Labour PMs if true but I give Blair the benefit of the doubt and say not true
    Seeing as Henry VIIIth had illegitimate children, one of whom nearly became legitamized, I’d say he definitely had adulterous relations.
    Doesn't follow, unmarried fornication isn't adultery.
    Isn't that something like Worther's originals sins? I lose track.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,397
    kinabalu said:

    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    Scott_xP said:

    You're being incredibly childish.

    The entire Brexit project was childish.

    A toddler having a temper tantrum, except it costs us billions and trashed the future for millions.

    But the Brexiteers will continue to scweam and scweam about how unfair it to mock them, and I shall continue to do so
    If you want to get better at mocking them, you should try harder to understand them. Brexit was not about renouncing all international cooperation, just withdrawing from the project to create a European superstate.
    A project more imaginary than real and of which we weren't in any case a part.
    A bit of a shame they kept putting the nutters in whose imagination it existed in charge of things in Brussels, though.

    Especially since so many of them would have made Al Capone look positively honest.
    The big path is set by national leaders though. And they are constrained by their electorates. No way is a USE coming in by stealth. Might be possible one day but it's far far off and it'd need a sea change in circumstances and popular sentiment. Grains of truth in it but in essence it's a bogeyman, that's my view.
    Bluntly, I think that is naive.

    In fact, I will go further. It's already been created by stealth, through the creation of the Euro and the increasing pooling of financial sovereignty to pay for it.

    At some point, either the EU will have to give up the euro, or it will have to federate. There are no middle paths. Indeed, that was a key reason behind the creation of the euro, based on the Zollverein of the nineteenth century. It didn't quite happen with the crash of 2008, but with the disaster that are public finances across the EU it will have to face this choice next time, which you would assume will be in the next two to three years.

    And as we saw in Scotland, people will be very reluctant to break away from a currency unit, with all the chaos that entails. There is a very strong chance they will prefer political union even if it isn't what they actually want.

    I would have considerably more respect for the leaders of the EU if they were honest about this, but most of them aren't. And the ones like Delors, Giscard and Juncker, who are, tend to be loathsome scum anyway whom only a genuine lunatic would respect.
    Oh no, not the old "naive" again - this time for an actually rather hard-headed recognition of the constraints on EU utopianism. My view is there isn't now (or the foreseeable prospect of) the requisite popular support for a fully federal Europe replacing the nation states. Technical arguments about the Euro, and whether a common currency dictates the demise of nation states using it - I'd say not but it's complex and arguable - don't override this imo. The "elites" can't "slip it in" without people noticing. To throw a bit of shade back, I think it's paranoia to think they either can or want to.
    I'd agree with you. And I'm in no doubt that is your view.

    I am merely pointing out it is utterly irrelevant whether they *want* it or not given the economic situation they are now in.

    Do you think the people of Scotland wanted Union with England in 1707? Most of them didn't, even the ones who supported it. They just realised they had pretty much no choice in the matter. It was that or starve.

    (Sadly for the Irish a hundred years later it was that *and* starve.)
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,592
    I wonder if I'm he only person who's picked up on Toto Wolff's "They are both alpha drivers. And this is good. We don't want anything... we don't want a poof in the car. And neither outside." comment.

    ;)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2QimOi0UYo
    (1 min 35 in at the above video)
  • sladeslade Posts: 2,041
    AlistairM said:

    Rumours that Ukraine may have taken a town on the far side of the Dnipro.

    News coming in from #Olehsky, UA forces seem to have liberated the town. 🇷🇺 forces left after a heavy barrage of artillery & HIMARS fire all night and morning. Apperently 🇺🇦 SOF entered the city this morning.

    Caution this news is still un-confirmed.

    https://twitter.com/NLwartracker/status/1592195331181416448?t=obCaM87DJnmsNksVm0yAAg&s=19

    There was a video yesterday of the Ukrainian flag flying on the Antonivsky bridge. Olehsky is at the eastern end of the bridge. Perhaps a unit of UA tagged along behind the retreating Russians and just walked into town. But maybe A Bridge Too Far?
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,103

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    So I guess "The Faith" is now OK with adultery, since its Defender is an adulterer?

    I nice line up of adulterous Tory ex-PMs at the Cenotaph yesterday, btw.
    The Church of England was established by an adulterer, Henry VIII, so he could break with Rome and Papal Supremacy and marry Anne Boleyn. What a ridiculous question. The Monarch is only Supreme Governor of the Church of England, its Leader is the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    I haven't heard any evidence May, Cameron or Sunak have been adulterers even if Major, Johnson and Truss have. Of the 2 Labour PMs Blair has had the Wendy Deng rumours of course but we will give him the benefit of that. Not to mention the Marcia Williams rumours around Wilson when he was Labour PM

    Was Henry an adulterer? Or did he wait until the previous wife was divorced or dead before he started banging the next one?

    Either way, less of a role model than Jesus, the Buddha or Guru Nanak. Maybe on a par with the Prophet. And yet his is the faith you choose to follow.

    So only 50% of recent Tory PMs are adulterers. Fair enough.
    It is not Henry's faith, the Church of England is a denomination of the Christian faith, just the Monarch is Supreme Governor of it to stop the Pope being its head on earth with its Leader the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    Of the 2 recent Labour PMs, we know the Wendy Deng rumours about Blair as I said. That would be 50% of living Labour PMs if true but I give Blair the benefit of the doubt and say not true
    Seeing as Henry VIIIth had illegitimate children, one of whom nearly became legitamized, I’d say he definitely had adulterous relations.
    Legitimization seems like it would have been a lot less faff and aggravation for all concerned, had they had the chance.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 13,803

    Driver said:

    Driver said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    TimS said:

    If Corbyn stands as an Independent , he is very likely to win with the active support of most of the Islington North CLP. After close of nominations he might well receive endorsement from John Mcdonell, Diane Abbot and most of the Campaign group of Labour MPs. Starmer would be unwise to reopen this wound , and by doing so he risks lending credibility to Tory attacks which they no longer have with the wider electorate.For the vast majority of voters this is very much 'water under the bridge.'

    I can't really even believe he's considering all this. It draws all the attention back to Corbyn and his wing of the party. It seems like a big own goal.
    It enables Labour to bat back Tory attack lines on Corbyn: “we removed our batshit crazy wing nut, you put yours in the home office”.
    It risks a serious Labour split in the middle of the GE campaign if a significant number of Labour MPs openly declare support for him and proceed to campaign on his behalf.
    I personally don't want Corbyn expelled but I'm starting to really trust Starmer on what's best for maximizing the GE24 result. I think he'll do that calculation here and get it right.
    "Maximising the GE24 result" is what bothers me about Sir Keir, I think - that's supposed to be a means to an end not an end in itself. I'd rather he had a 40 majority and a decent plan of what to do with it than a 100 majority and no such plan.
    A "plan" is a bit much to expect - but hopefully there'll be the impression of integrity and competence plus some workable proposals in the manifesto to improve the lives of ordinary people.
    Wow. If that's the case, no wonder I'm bothered by him!
    But you weren't bothered by Johnson who had no post Brexit plan.

    When Labour propose an economic recovery plan, let's face it, you won't like it anyway.
    Boris at least had a plan to end the antidemocratic nonsense of the 2017 parliament.

    As for the latter point - we'll have to see it to judge on that!
    Anti-democratic? Parliament was sovereign even if you didn't like it.

    Johnson's post election plan was simply to "do Brexit". He had no idea what that meant. The biggest dilemma facing the May Parliament was resolving the Irish issue. Johnson "resolved" that by putting a border in the North Channel. How is that working?
    Yes, and for about the eleventy billionth time we elect Parliament to do our bidding. A direct instruction in a referendum democratically trumps "we're MPs, so ner".
    The EURef was advisory, so no it doesn't trump "we're (Sovereign Parliament) MPs so there".
    Well you are correct technically and Driver is correct in spirit.
    But if MPs do insist on "we're MPs and we'll do what we want" they do rather run the risk of otger MPs being elected. As, sort of, happened. Democracy gets there in the end.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,397
    kle4 said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    So I guess "The Faith" is now OK with adultery, since its Defender is an adulterer?

    I nice line up of adulterous Tory ex-PMs at the Cenotaph yesterday, btw.
    The Church of England was established by an adulterer, Henry VIII, so he could break with Rome and Papal Supremacy and marry Anne Boleyn. What a ridiculous question. The Monarch is only Supreme Governor of the Church of England, its Leader is the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    I haven't heard any evidence May, Cameron or Sunak have been adulterers even if Major, Johnson and Truss have. Of the 2 Labour PMs Blair has had the Wendy Deng rumours of course but we will give him the benefit of that. Not to mention the Marcia Williams rumours around Wilson when he was Labour PM

    Was Henry an adulterer? Or did he wait until the previous wife was divorced or dead before he started banging the next one?

    Either way, less of a role model than Jesus, the Buddha or Guru Nanak. Maybe on a par with the Prophet. And yet his is the faith you choose to follow.

    So only 50% of recent Tory PMs are adulterers. Fair enough.
    It is not Henry's faith, the Church of England is a denomination of the Christian faith, just the Monarch is Supreme Governor of it to stop the Pope being its head on earth with its Leader the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    Of the 2 recent Labour PMs, we know the Wendy Deng rumours about Blair as I said. That would be 50% of living Labour PMs if true but I give Blair the benefit of the doubt and say not true
    Seeing as Henry VIIIth had illegitimate children, one of whom nearly became legitamized, I’d say he definitely had adulterous relations.
    Legitimization seems like it would have been a lot less faff and aggravation for all concerned, had they had the chance.
    At risk of being picky, he deligitimized both Mary and Elizabeth, then religitimized them later when he was running out of heirs.

    So I'm not sure I agree there...
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,103

    So of the last 6 published polls the Con vote share is up in one (by one percent), level in one and down in four. I'm not yet ready to call the Con revival having peaked but that isn't too promising for them.

    I'm ready to call it, especially ahead of the budget statement having its likely impact.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,969
    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    But your King and your PM ARE religious leaders. C of E, remember.
    No they are not.

    As the 37th Article Ishmael identified showed the Monarch can neither administer the sacraments or preach the word of the Bible.

    The Archbishop of Canterbury is leader of the Church of England not the monarch. The Monarch is only Supreme Governor and Protector of it.

    The PM has no position in it at all other than if they are not Roman Catholic being able to confirm the appointment of Bishops
    Selecting senior managent IS a leadership role - and if it is determined by religion then the PM IS a religious leader.

    And being the chair IS a leadership role, e.g. HMtQ (late lamented).

    It's not just the CEOs like Welby Cantuar ++ who are leaders.
    No it isn't, you can be invited to be on a selection panel without having any leadership role at all in the organisation being selected for. That applies to religious bodies as much as any other.

    The Monarch is not even the chair of the Church of England, just a symbolic titular role to ensure the Pope does not head it.

    The Archbishop of Canterbury is the leader of the Church of England

  • Ishmael_ZIshmael_Z Posts: 8,981

    I wonder if I'm he only person who's picked up on Toto Wolff's "They are both alpha drivers. And this is good. We don't want anything... we don't want a poof in the car. And neither outside." comment.

    ;)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2QimOi0UYo
    (1 min 35 in at the above video)

    Are you sure it isn't pup?
  • OllyT said:

    An aspect of the US mid-terms that had passed me by till now.

    There were 6 GOP candidates up for election as Secretary of State in swing states that claimed that the 2020 election was "stolen". SOS is the top election official in a state . All 6 lost.

    Begins to restore my faith in the American electorate a little.

    Yes!

    Also worth noting (at least in passing) that in great Peach State of Georgia, both Governor Kemp and SOS Raffensperger, who both defied the ire of Trump re: 2020 election, were both re-nominated & re-elected without undue difficulty.

    Their re-nomination an early sign that many who voted for Trump in 2020 were NOT going to follow him down the rabbit hole of what you might call the "new ED" = Election Denial.

    BTW (also fyi) fact that Kari Lake is doubling down on THAT possum-poop, is a sign that she really must be a major-league dumb-bunny.

    For those of you who may recall "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" former TV newscaster KL has always reminded me of Ted Baxter in a dress. But without the occasional humanity (if not humility).

    PLUS more than a pinch (or rather a shitload) of Fucker Carlson/Alex Jones just for nastiness.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,073

    rcs1000 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Eustice: "We did not actually need to give Australia nor New Zealand full liberalisation of beef and sheep. It was not in our economic interests to do so. And neither Australia nor New Zealand had anything to offer in return for such a grand concession."

    https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1592209448986198016

    Perhaps she had a, not unreasonable, view that free trade was a good thing, and that British consumers would benefit from cheaper lamb?
    I never understand why pork is so cheap and lamb is so expensive.

    I mean, pork requires more infra and work than sheep.

    Weird.
    Looking at pig farms (notably in Norfolk), and sheep farms; pigs can be kept in much closer captivity than sheep. My *guess* is that you get far fewer sheep per hectare (*) than pigs, much reducing the cost.

    As an aside, my dad says that pigs are not dirty; they are very clean animals. It's only the way we keep them that makes them dirty.

    (*) Acre for you ;)
    The other strange thing about sheep is how the fleece these days has virtually no value.

    I think they get something like 50p for a fleece? And it's much more sustainable to use wool for clothes than synthetics.

    Learnt from Clarkson's farm. More weird.
    Shearing costs money; scouring the wool costs more, and is an energy intensive process. Turning the fibre into cloth is again considerably more expensive than processing synthetics.
    A lot of UK wool is way too coarse for garments anyway.

    Annual cotton production is about ten times that of wool; synthetics nearly four times that of cotton.
    In worldwide clothing terms, wool is essentially an irrelevance.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,158
    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    Scott_xP said:

    You're being incredibly childish.

    The entire Brexit project was childish.

    A toddler having a temper tantrum, except it costs us billions and trashed the future for millions.

    But the Brexiteers will continue to scweam and scweam about how unfair it to mock them, and I shall continue to do so
    If you want to get better at mocking them, you should try harder to understand them. Brexit was not about renouncing all international cooperation, just withdrawing from the project to create a European superstate.
    A project more imaginary than real and of which we weren't in any case a part.
    A bit of a shame they kept putting the nutters in whose imagination it existed in charge of things in Brussels, though.

    Especially since so many of them would have made Al Capone look positively honest.
    The big path is set by national leaders though. And they are constrained by their electorates. No way is a USE coming in by stealth. Might be possible one day but it's far far off and it'd need a sea change in circumstances and popular sentiment. Grains of truth in it but in essence it's a bogeyman, that's my view.
    Bluntly, I think that is naive.

    In fact, I will go further. It's already been created by stealth, through the creation of the Euro and the increasing pooling of financial sovereignty to pay for it.

    At some point, either the EU will have to give up the euro, or it will have to federate. There are no middle paths. Indeed, that was a key reason behind the creation of the euro, based on the Zollverein of the nineteenth century. It didn't quite happen with the crash of 2008, but with the disaster that are public finances across the EU it will have to face this choice next time, which you would assume will be in the next two to three years.

    And as we saw in Scotland, people will be very reluctant to break away from a currency unit, with all the chaos that entails. There is a very strong chance they will prefer political union even if it isn't what they actually want.

    I would have considerably more respect for the leaders of the EU if they were honest about this, but most of them aren't. And the ones like Delors, Giscard and Juncker, who are, tend to be loathsome scum anyway whom only a genuine lunatic would respect.
    Oh no, not the old "naive" again - this time for an actually rather hard-headed recognition of the constraints on EU utopianism. My view is there isn't now (or the foreseeable prospect of) the requisite popular support for a fully federal Europe replacing the nation states. Technical arguments about the Euro, and whether a common currency dictates the demise of nation states using it - I'd say not but it's complex and arguable - don't override this imo. The "elites" can't "slip it in" without people noticing. To throw a bit of shade back, I think it's paranoia to think they either can or want to.
    I'd agree with you. And I'm in no doubt that is your view.

    I am merely pointing out it is utterly irrelevant whether they *want* it or not given the economic situation they are now in.

    Do you think the people of Scotland wanted Union with England in 1707? Most of them didn't, even the ones who supported it. They just realised they had pretty much no choice in the matter. It was that or starve.

    (Sadly for the Irish a hundred years later it was that *and* starve.)
    The USE comes in as the only way to keep various places afloat? Hmm, I do not see that as at all likely. Let's see. If we both stay on here for the next 10 years it'll become obvious that I'm ... sorry obvious who's right.
  • rcs1000 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Eustice: "We did not actually need to give Australia nor New Zealand full liberalisation of beef and sheep. It was not in our economic interests to do so. And neither Australia nor New Zealand had anything to offer in return for such a grand concession."

    https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1592209448986198016

    Perhaps she had a, not unreasonable, view that free trade was a good thing, and that British consumers would benefit from cheaper lamb?
    I never understand why pork is so cheap and lamb is so expensive.

    I mean, pork requires more infra and work than sheep.

    Weird.
    Looking at pig farms (notably in Norfolk), and sheep farms; pigs can be kept in much closer captivity than sheep. My *guess* is that you get far fewer sheep per hectare (*) than pigs, much reducing the cost.

    As an aside, my dad says that pigs are not dirty; they are very clean animals. It's only the way we keep them that makes them dirty.

    (*) Acre for you ;)
    The other strange thing about sheep is how the fleece these days has virtually no value.

    I think they get something like 50p for a fleece? And it's much more sustainable to use wool for clothes than synthetics.

    Learnt from Clarkson's farm. More weird.
    Sheepswool is fabulous home insulation. Very effective, lovely to work with (non itchy) no nasty chemicals. I don't know what central Government can do to incentivise its use, but it would be a very good idea.
    Except it's combustible. After Grenfell, not a great selling point.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,592
    slade said:

    AlistairM said:

    Rumours that Ukraine may have taken a town on the far side of the Dnipro.

    News coming in from #Olehsky, UA forces seem to have liberated the town. 🇷🇺 forces left after a heavy barrage of artillery & HIMARS fire all night and morning. Apperently 🇺🇦 SOF entered the city this morning.

    Caution this news is still un-confirmed.

    https://twitter.com/NLwartracker/status/1592195331181416448?t=obCaM87DJnmsNksVm0yAAg&s=19

    There was a video yesterday of the Ukrainian flag flying on the Antonivsky bridge. Olehsky is at the eastern end of the bridge. Perhaps a unit of UA tagged along behind the retreating Russians and just walked into town. But maybe A Bridge Too Far?
    Front lines are often vague, especially in a moving conflict. You can have advance recon forces miles ahead of the main forces, and laggard troops left behind in a retreat. We are perhaps too used to definitive lines on a map in a rapidly-changing conflict.

    But there have been several reports of Ukrainian forces on different areas of land east of the river, and it does appear there is something going on. Whether that 'something' is an advance by a large body of troops (unlikely), a speculative probe, or just special forces harrying Russian weak spots, will come clear with time.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,592

    rcs1000 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Eustice: "We did not actually need to give Australia nor New Zealand full liberalisation of beef and sheep. It was not in our economic interests to do so. And neither Australia nor New Zealand had anything to offer in return for such a grand concession."

    https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1592209448986198016

    Perhaps she had a, not unreasonable, view that free trade was a good thing, and that British consumers would benefit from cheaper lamb?
    I never understand why pork is so cheap and lamb is so expensive.

    I mean, pork requires more infra and work than sheep.

    Weird.
    Looking at pig farms (notably in Norfolk), and sheep farms; pigs can be kept in much closer captivity than sheep. My *guess* is that you get far fewer sheep per hectare (*) than pigs, much reducing the cost.

    As an aside, my dad says that pigs are not dirty; they are very clean animals. It's only the way we keep them that makes them dirty.

    (*) Acre for you ;)
    The other strange thing about sheep is how the fleece these days has virtually no value.

    I think they get something like 50p for a fleece? And it's much more sustainable to use wool for clothes than synthetics.

    Learnt from Clarkson's farm. More weird.
    Sheepswool is fabulous home insulation. Very effective, lovely to work with (non itchy) no nasty chemicals. I don't know what central Government can do to incentivise its use, but it would be a very good idea.
    Except it's combustible. After Grenfell, not a great selling point.
    From memory, wool is much less combustible than (say) cotton. It is also not easily combustible; in fact, it is often a flame retardant.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,103
    ydoethur said:

    kle4 said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    So I guess "The Faith" is now OK with adultery, since its Defender is an adulterer?

    I nice line up of adulterous Tory ex-PMs at the Cenotaph yesterday, btw.
    The Church of England was established by an adulterer, Henry VIII, so he could break with Rome and Papal Supremacy and marry Anne Boleyn. What a ridiculous question. The Monarch is only Supreme Governor of the Church of England, its Leader is the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    I haven't heard any evidence May, Cameron or Sunak have been adulterers even if Major, Johnson and Truss have. Of the 2 Labour PMs Blair has had the Wendy Deng rumours of course but we will give him the benefit of that. Not to mention the Marcia Williams rumours around Wilson when he was Labour PM

    Was Henry an adulterer? Or did he wait until the previous wife was divorced or dead before he started banging the next one?

    Either way, less of a role model than Jesus, the Buddha or Guru Nanak. Maybe on a par with the Prophet. And yet his is the faith you choose to follow.

    So only 50% of recent Tory PMs are adulterers. Fair enough.
    It is not Henry's faith, the Church of England is a denomination of the Christian faith, just the Monarch is Supreme Governor of it to stop the Pope being its head on earth with its Leader the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    Of the 2 recent Labour PMs, we know the Wendy Deng rumours about Blair as I said. That would be 50% of living Labour PMs if true but I give Blair the benefit of the doubt and say not true
    Seeing as Henry VIIIth had illegitimate children, one of whom nearly became legitamized, I’d say he definitely had adulterous relations.
    Legitimization seems like it would have been a lot less faff and aggravation for all concerned, had they had the chance.
    At risk of being picky, he deligitimized both Mary and Elizabeth, then religitimized them later when he was running out of heirs.

    So I'm not sure I agree there...
    But perhaps if he'd just legitimized a male bastard right at the start rather than all the going back and forth and triggering massive social and religious changes, with some regret later, it'd have worked out ok.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,397
    kinabalu said:

    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    Scott_xP said:

    You're being incredibly childish.

    The entire Brexit project was childish.

    A toddler having a temper tantrum, except it costs us billions and trashed the future for millions.

    But the Brexiteers will continue to scweam and scweam about how unfair it to mock them, and I shall continue to do so
    If you want to get better at mocking them, you should try harder to understand them. Brexit was not about renouncing all international cooperation, just withdrawing from the project to create a European superstate.
    A project more imaginary than real and of which we weren't in any case a part.
    A bit of a shame they kept putting the nutters in whose imagination it existed in charge of things in Brussels, though.

    Especially since so many of them would have made Al Capone look positively honest.
    The big path is set by national leaders though. And they are constrained by their electorates. No way is a USE coming in by stealth. Might be possible one day but it's far far off and it'd need a sea change in circumstances and popular sentiment. Grains of truth in it but in essence it's a bogeyman, that's my view.
    Bluntly, I think that is naive.

    In fact, I will go further. It's already been created by stealth, through the creation of the Euro and the increasing pooling of financial sovereignty to pay for it.

    At some point, either the EU will have to give up the euro, or it will have to federate. There are no middle paths. Indeed, that was a key reason behind the creation of the euro, based on the Zollverein of the nineteenth century. It didn't quite happen with the crash of 2008, but with the disaster that are public finances across the EU it will have to face this choice next time, which you would assume will be in the next two to three years.

    And as we saw in Scotland, people will be very reluctant to break away from a currency unit, with all the chaos that entails. There is a very strong chance they will prefer political union even if it isn't what they actually want.

    I would have considerably more respect for the leaders of the EU if they were honest about this, but most of them aren't. And the ones like Delors, Giscard and Juncker, who are, tend to be loathsome scum anyway whom only a genuine lunatic would respect.
    Oh no, not the old "naive" again - this time for an actually rather hard-headed recognition of the constraints on EU utopianism. My view is there isn't now (or the foreseeable prospect of) the requisite popular support for a fully federal Europe replacing the nation states. Technical arguments about the Euro, and whether a common currency dictates the demise of nation states using it - I'd say not but it's complex and arguable - don't override this imo. The "elites" can't "slip it in" without people noticing. To throw a bit of shade back, I think it's paranoia to think they either can or want to.
    I'd agree with you. And I'm in no doubt that is your view.

    I am merely pointing out it is utterly irrelevant whether they *want* it or not given the economic situation they are now in.

    Do you think the people of Scotland wanted Union with England in 1707? Most of them didn't, even the ones who supported it. They just realised they had pretty much no choice in the matter. It was that or starve.

    (Sadly for the Irish a hundred years later it was that *and* starve.)
    The USE comes in as the only way to keep various places afloat? Hmm, I do not see that as at all likely. Let's see. If we both stay on here for the next 10 years it'll become obvious that I'm ... sorry obvious who's right.
    Really? I would never have guessed from your posts.

    It will become obvious you're wrong, but don't worry, I'm not a gloater. I'm wrong too often myself for that,

    Even for purely selfish reasons, I hope you are wrong and they don't give up their currency because the chaos unleashed would definitely consume us too.
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 13,507
    Heathener said:

    So the last three opinions polls have Labour 23%, 24%, and 23% ahead respectively.

    They were already in trouble but Truss & Kwarteng trashed the brand for a generation.

    Sigh. 🙇‍♀️ Lib Dem on six is because the Starmergasm has gobbled it up for silly 50+ scores they won’t be getting anywhere near in General Election, will they?

    Which is why I argue don’t look at size of lead to work out where things are, look at the Con % for how they are climbing back into contention.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,592
    Ishmael_Z said:

    I wonder if I'm he only person who's picked up on Toto Wolff's "They are both alpha drivers. And this is good. We don't want anything... we don't want a poof in the car. And neither outside." comment.

    ;)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2QimOi0UYo
    (1 min 35 in at the above video)

    Are you sure it isn't pup?
    Thanks; it might be; with his accent at the poor line it is hard to tell.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,969
    Rishu Sunak meets Justin Trudeau for a beer and mango spritz at the G20

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11426083/Justin-Trudeau-beer-Rishi-Sunak-tucks-mango-spritz-G20.html
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,405

    rcs1000 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Eustice: "We did not actually need to give Australia nor New Zealand full liberalisation of beef and sheep. It was not in our economic interests to do so. And neither Australia nor New Zealand had anything to offer in return for such a grand concession."

    https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1592209448986198016

    Perhaps she had a, not unreasonable, view that free trade was a good thing, and that British consumers would benefit from cheaper lamb?
    I never understand why pork is so cheap and lamb is so expensive.

    I mean, pork requires more infra and work than sheep.

    Weird.
    Pigs produce a hell of a lot more per beast than sheep.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,103
    edited November 2022

    OllyT said:

    An aspect of the US mid-terms that had passed me by till now.

    There were 6 GOP candidates up for election as Secretary of State in swing states that claimed that the 2020 election was "stolen". SOS is the top election official in a state . All 6 lost.

    Begins to restore my faith in the American electorate a little.

    Yes!

    Also worth noting (at least in passing) that in great Peach State of Georgia, both Governor Kemp and SOS Raffensperger, who both defied the ire of Trump re: 2020 election, were both re-nominated & re-elected without undue difficulty.

    53-46 and 53-44 respectively, vs 48.5-49.4 for the Senate election. Is Walker an election denier or just a terrible candidate for other reasons?

    Also, how great are these Georgia peaches exactly?

    My county is known more for ham, but sadly I don't think Hamshire works.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,405

    rcs1000 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Eustice: "We did not actually need to give Australia nor New Zealand full liberalisation of beef and sheep. It was not in our economic interests to do so. And neither Australia nor New Zealand had anything to offer in return for such a grand concession."

    https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1592209448986198016

    Perhaps she had a, not unreasonable, view that free trade was a good thing, and that British consumers would benefit from cheaper lamb?
    I never understand why pork is so cheap and lamb is so expensive.

    I mean, pork requires more infra and work than sheep.

    Weird.
    Looking at pig farms (notably in Norfolk), and sheep farms; pigs can be kept in much closer captivity than sheep. My *guess* is that you get far fewer sheep per hectare (*) than pigs, much reducing the cost.

    As an aside, my dad says that pigs are not dirty; they are very clean animals. It's only the way we keep them that makes them dirty.

    (*) Acre for you ;)
    The other strange thing about sheep is how the fleece these days has virtually no value.

    I think they get something like 50p for a fleece? And it's much more sustainable to use wool for clothes than synthetics.

    Learnt from Clarkson's farm. More weird.
    Sheepswool is fabulous home insulation. Very effective, lovely to work with (non itchy) no nasty chemicals. I don't know what central Government can do to incentivise its use, but it would be a very good idea.
    Not all wool is so cheap - the decent wools get used for knitting, spinning, carpets etc. However a lot of the meat breeds wool is low value, but needs removing from the sheep for welfare reasons. I do think there should be a decent market for use as insulation, but I suspect traditional materials are probably cheaper. The wool would probably need at least cleaning, which adds to the costs.
  • OmniumOmnium Posts: 10,765

    Heathener said:

    So the last three opinions polls have Labour 23%, 24%, and 23% ahead respectively.

    They were already in trouble but Truss & Kwarteng trashed the brand for a generation.

    Sigh. 🙇‍♀️ Lib Dem on six is because the Starmergasm has gobbled it up for silly 50+ scores they won’t be getting anywhere near in General Election, will they?

    Which is why I argue don’t look at size of lead to work out where things are, look at the Con % for how they are climbing back into contention.
    Much of the current Labour polling is just 'not-Tory'. When the likes of Truss are loose you don't want to mess about with fine detail.

  • In leadup to 2022 general election, yours truly opined about the grand old American custom of ticket splitting.

    AND here's yet another example from 2022 results:

    Seattle Times ($) - Danny Westneat: Is the fever breaking? Ticket splitters in WA election are signs of hope

    It didn’t take long, when the election of 2022 didn’t go as hoped, for some Republicans to head straight for their dark place.

    “It’s obvious now: America’s voting system is rigged!” posted the Skagit County Republicans on the party’s website. The chair of that group also runs the state Republicans’ “election integrity” committee.

    Joe Kent, the Donald Trump-endorsed GOP candidate in Southwest Washington, went on national shows to claim that the snail’s pace of vote counting here in Washington state is a plot.

    “Best case is, it’s psychological warfare,” the former CIA operative conspiratorially told a host, who seemed to be pretending to be alarmed. “Worst case is, there’s sleight of hand going on behind the scenes.”

    Boring case is: Votes were still arriving in the mail?

    What’s so insincere about these complaints is that these late-arriving votes, a reality in every election, were helping Kent gain on his Democratic opponent, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. But the Trump fever runs hot. It feeds itself on grievance and the casting of aspersions, even when nothing is going wrong. . . .

    [But] did you notice that most candidates around the country have accepted the election results with a traditional concession, or at a minimum, silence? . . .

    A phenomenon happened here, in the Joe Kent race, that is even more hopeful. After years of increasing partisanship and tribalism in politics, the “ticket splitter” suddenly reemerged.

    These are voters who cross over from one party to the other on the same ballot. They were thought to be all but extinct. Partisanship has grown so controlling that Democrats and Republicans were essentially conducting two different elections, broadcasting separate messages to distinct groups of people believed to be living in parallel worlds.

    In the 3rd Congressional District, a handful of Republicans had announced last month that they were crossing over . . .

    It turns out it became a real movement.

    Kent, as of Friday’s vote counts, was performing about 5% below the party’s U.S. Senate candidate in the district, Tiffany Smiley. Most of those voters marked their ballots for Smiley, and then crossed over and backed the Democrat, Gluesenkamp Perez, who did about 4% better in the district than Democratic U.S. Sen. Patty Murray did.

    It adds up to about 11,000 people. That’s far more than the margin separating the two candidates.. . . Had Kent performed only as well in this district as Smiley, a newcomer facing a 30-year incumbent, the congressional race would have been called in favor of the Republicans on election night. As it is, he is trailing and at this point unlikely to catch up. The ticket-splitters may well have cost Kent the seat. . . .
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,405
    Ishmael_Z said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    So I guess "The Faith" is now OK with adultery, since its Defender is an adulterer?

    I nice line up of adulterous Tory ex-PMs at the Cenotaph yesterday, btw.
    The Church of England was established by an adulterer, Henry VIII, so he could break with Rome and Papal Supremacy and marry Anne Boleyn. What a ridiculous question. The Monarch is only Supreme Governor of the Church of England, its Leader is the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    I haven't heard any evidence May, Cameron or Sunak have been adulterers even if Major, Johnson and Truss have. Of the 2 Labour PMs Blair has had the Wendy Deng rumours of course but we will give him the benefit of that. Not to mention the Marcia Williams rumours around Wilson when he was Labour PM

    Was Henry an adulterer? Or did he wait until the previous wife was divorced or dead before he started banging the next one?

    Either way, less of a role model than Jesus, the Buddha or Guru Nanak. Maybe on a par with the Prophet. And yet his is the faith you choose to follow.

    So only 50% of recent Tory PMs are adulterers. Fair enough.
    It is not Henry's faith, the Church of England is a denomination of the Christian faith, just the Monarch is Supreme Governor of it to stop the Pope being its head on earth with its Leader the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    Of the 2 recent Labour PMs, we know the Wendy Deng rumours about Blair as I said. That would be 50% of living Labour PMs if true but I give Blair the benefit of the doubt and say not true
    Seeing as Henry VIIIth had illegitimate children, one of whom nearly became legitamized, I’d say he definitely had adulterous relations.
    Doesn't follow, unmarried fornication isn't adultery.
    Pedantry, here, on PB? Really! :)
    Most people regard having an affair as adultery.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,073

    rcs1000 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Eustice: "We did not actually need to give Australia nor New Zealand full liberalisation of beef and sheep. It was not in our economic interests to do so. And neither Australia nor New Zealand had anything to offer in return for such a grand concession."

    https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1592209448986198016

    Perhaps she had a, not unreasonable, view that free trade was a good thing, and that British consumers would benefit from cheaper lamb?
    I never understand why pork is so cheap and lamb is so expensive.

    I mean, pork requires more infra and work than sheep.

    Weird.
    Looking at pig farms (notably in Norfolk), and sheep farms; pigs can be kept in much closer captivity than sheep. My *guess* is that you get far fewer sheep per hectare (*) than pigs, much reducing the cost.

    As an aside, my dad says that pigs are not dirty; they are very clean animals. It's only the way we keep them that makes them dirty.

    (*) Acre for you ;)
    The other strange thing about sheep is how the fleece these days has virtually no value.

    I think they get something like 50p for a fleece? And it's much more sustainable to use wool for clothes than synthetics.

    Learnt from Clarkson's farm. More weird.
    Sheepswool is fabulous home insulation. Very effective, lovely to work with (non itchy) no nasty chemicals. I don't know what central Government can do to incentivise its use, but it would be a very good idea.
    Except it's combustible. After Grenfell, not a great selling point.
    It’s not, particularly if treated.
    Theatre fire curtains were often made from wool.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,103
    edited November 2022
    Omnium said:

    Heathener said:

    So the last three opinions polls have Labour 23%, 24%, and 23% ahead respectively.

    They were already in trouble but Truss & Kwarteng trashed the brand for a generation.

    Sigh. 🙇‍♀️ Lib Dem on six is because the Starmergasm has gobbled it up for silly 50+ scores they won’t be getting anywhere near in General Election, will they?

    Which is why I argue don’t look at size of lead to work out where things are, look at the Con % for how they are climbing back into contention.
    Much of the current Labour polling is just 'not-Tory'. When the likes of Truss are loose you don't want to mess about with fine detail.

    I don't think you get this high simply from being 'not-Tory'. I don't doubt a chunk of support is from that, but they must be doing something right, not just not doing wrong, to get to 50, even if temporarily.
  • TimSTimS Posts: 12,995

    rcs1000 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Eustice: "We did not actually need to give Australia nor New Zealand full liberalisation of beef and sheep. It was not in our economic interests to do so. And neither Australia nor New Zealand had anything to offer in return for such a grand concession."

    https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1592209448986198016

    Perhaps she had a, not unreasonable, view that free trade was a good thing, and that British consumers would benefit from cheaper lamb?
    I never understand why pork is so cheap and lamb is so expensive.

    I mean, pork requires more infra and work than sheep.

    Weird.
    Looking at pig farms (notably in Norfolk), and sheep farms; pigs can be kept in much closer captivity than sheep. My *guess* is that you get far fewer sheep per hectare (*) than pigs, much reducing the cost.

    As an aside, my dad says that pigs are not dirty; they are very clean animals. It's only the way we keep them that makes them dirty.

    (*) Acre for you ;)
    The other strange thing about sheep is how the fleece these days has virtually no value.

    I think they get something like 50p for a fleece? And it's much more sustainable to use wool for clothes than synthetics.

    Learnt from Clarkson's farm. More weird.
    Sheepswool is fabulous home insulation. Very effective, lovely to work with (non itchy) no nasty chemicals. I don't know what central Government can do to incentivise its use, but it would be a very good idea.
    Not all wool is so cheap - the decent wools get used for knitting, spinning, carpets etc. However a lot of the meat breeds wool is low value, but needs removing from the sheep for welfare reasons. I do think there should be a decent market for use as insulation, but I suspect traditional materials are probably cheaper. The wool would probably need at least cleaning, which adds to the costs.
    It’s an area where some covert government subsidy could work well, French style.

    First, subsidise wall and loft insulation (as has been recommended widely) to reduce heating demand ahead of next winter.

    Second, legislate that x% of all insulation fabric needs to be from organic sources rather than synthetic. Some will then be sourced from wood and paper products but a lot from (hopefully locally produced) wool.

    Support British sheep farming and help us towards net zero.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,073

    rcs1000 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Eustice: "We did not actually need to give Australia nor New Zealand full liberalisation of beef and sheep. It was not in our economic interests to do so. And neither Australia nor New Zealand had anything to offer in return for such a grand concession."

    https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1592209448986198016

    Perhaps she had a, not unreasonable, view that free trade was a good thing, and that British consumers would benefit from cheaper lamb?
    I never understand why pork is so cheap and lamb is so expensive.

    I mean, pork requires more infra and work than sheep.

    Weird.
    Looking at pig farms (notably in Norfolk), and sheep farms; pigs can be kept in much closer captivity than sheep. My *guess* is that you get far fewer sheep per hectare (*) than pigs, much reducing the cost.

    As an aside, my dad says that pigs are not dirty; they are very clean animals. It's only the way we keep them that makes them dirty.

    (*) Acre for you ;)
    The other strange thing about sheep is how the fleece these days has virtually no value.

    I think they get something like 50p for a fleece? And it's much more sustainable to use wool for clothes than synthetics.

    Learnt from Clarkson's farm. More weird.
    Sheepswool is fabulous home insulation. Very effective, lovely to work with (non itchy) no nasty chemicals. I don't know what central Government can do to incentivise its use, but it would be a very good idea.
    Not all wool is so cheap - the decent wools get used for knitting, spinning, carpets etc. However a lot of the meat breeds wool is low value, but needs removing from the sheep for welfare reasons. I do think there should be a decent market for use as insulation, but I suspect traditional materials are probably cheaper. The wool would probably need at least cleaning, which adds to the costs.
    Definitely.
    Before scouring, half of it is lanolin, which is certainly combustible.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,840
    TimS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Eustice: "We did not actually need to give Australia nor New Zealand full liberalisation of beef and sheep. It was not in our economic interests to do so. And neither Australia nor New Zealand had anything to offer in return for such a grand concession."

    https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1592209448986198016

    Perhaps she had a, not unreasonable, view that free trade was a good thing, and that British consumers would benefit from cheaper lamb?
    I never understand why pork is so cheap and lamb is so expensive.

    I mean, pork requires more infra and work than sheep.

    Weird.
    Looking at pig farms (notably in Norfolk), and sheep farms; pigs can be kept in much closer captivity than sheep. My *guess* is that you get far fewer sheep per hectare (*) than pigs, much reducing the cost.

    As an aside, my dad says that pigs are not dirty; they are very clean animals. It's only the way we keep them that makes them dirty.

    (*) Acre for you ;)
    The other strange thing about sheep is how the fleece these days has virtually no value.

    I think they get something like 50p for a fleece? And it's much more sustainable to use wool for clothes than synthetics.

    Learnt from Clarkson's farm. More weird.
    Sheepswool is fabulous home insulation. Very effective, lovely to work with (non itchy) no nasty chemicals. I don't know what central Government can do to incentivise its use, but it would be a very good idea.
    Not all wool is so cheap - the decent wools get used for knitting, spinning, carpets etc. However a lot of the meat breeds wool is low value, but needs removing from the sheep for welfare reasons. I do think there should be a decent market for use as insulation, but I suspect traditional materials are probably cheaper. The wool would probably need at least cleaning, which adds to the costs.
    It’s an area where some covert government subsidy could work well, French style.

    First, subsidise wall and loft insulation (as has been recommended widely) to reduce heating demand ahead of next winter.

    Second, legislate that x% of all insulation fabric needs to be from organic sources rather than synthetic. Some will then be sourced from wood and paper products but a lot from (hopefully locally produced) wool.

    Support British sheep farming and help us towards net zero.
    I've sometimes wondered, how do they stop the moths?
  • TimSTimS Posts: 12,995
    Omnium said:

    Heathener said:

    So the last three opinions polls have Labour 23%, 24%, and 23% ahead respectively.

    They were already in trouble but Truss & Kwarteng trashed the brand for a generation.

    Sigh. 🙇‍♀️ Lib Dem on six is because the Starmergasm has gobbled it up for silly 50+ scores they won’t be getting anywhere near in General Election, will they?

    Which is why I argue don’t look at size of lead to work out where things are, look at the Con % for how they are climbing back into contention.
    Much of the current Labour polling is just 'not-Tory'. When the likes of Truss are loose you don't want to mess about with fine detail.

    LLG has been much more reliable and less volatile than either Tory or Labour voteshare, or Labour lead.

    Almost all since Truss’s cataclysm have been in the 60-65%. In early Boris it was mid 40s, mid to late Boris (post-Patterson) between 53-57% and above 60% pretty much ever since.

    Lab 50, LD 6, Green 5 is electorally probably pretty similar to Lab 44, LD 10, Green 7 given propensity to tactical voting.
  • kle4 said:

    OllyT said:

    An aspect of the US mid-terms that had passed me by till now.

    There were 6 GOP candidates up for election as Secretary of State in swing states that claimed that the 2020 election was "stolen". SOS is the top election official in a state . All 6 lost.

    Begins to restore my faith in the American electorate a little.

    Yes!

    Also worth noting (at least in passing) that in great Peach State of Georgia, both Governor Kemp and SOS Raffensperger, who both defied the ire of Trump re: 2020 election, were both re-nominated & re-elected without undue difficulty.

    53-46 and 53-44 respectively, vs 48.5-49.4 for the Senate election. Is Walker an election denier or just a terrible candidate for other reasons?

    Also, how great are these Georgia peaches exactly?

    My county is known more for ham, but sadly I don't think Hamshire works.
    Well, Washington State peaches can't be beat! But Georgia must be #2 and also much more renowned.

    ED is part and parcel of Hershel Walker's MAGA-maniac persona.

    Which methinks cost him, and will continue to cost him, more votes than his personal (as opposed to political) support for pro-choice.

    Even IF he tries back-tracking. Seeing how well that did NOT work out for his fellow idiot Bolduc in NH.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,568

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    So I guess "The Faith" is now OK with adultery, since its Defender is an adulterer?

    I nice line up of adulterous Tory ex-PMs at the Cenotaph yesterday, btw.
    Idly wondering how many monarchs since Henry VIII were NOT adulterers....
    Queens Elizabeth I, Mary, Anne, Victoria and Elizabeth II would be my nominations.

    Mary & Vicki NOT being married when they had their flings (Earl of Essex & John Brown respectively) though personally doubt that the fellows involved actually scored any royal home runs, as opposed to (maybe) getting to first base.
    Elizabeth II? Hmmm.
    Did say nomination, not certification!

    And am thinking, that any hanky-panky by QEII would likely NOT have gone as far as our depraved age (my own being 60+) might assume . . .
    It is widely said that one of her children was conceived with her racing manager, Lord Porchester.

    And another by another who was not the Duke of Edinburgh.
  • TimSTimS Posts: 12,995
    Carnyx said:

    TimS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Eustice: "We did not actually need to give Australia nor New Zealand full liberalisation of beef and sheep. It was not in our economic interests to do so. And neither Australia nor New Zealand had anything to offer in return for such a grand concession."

    https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1592209448986198016

    Perhaps she had a, not unreasonable, view that free trade was a good thing, and that British consumers would benefit from cheaper lamb?
    I never understand why pork is so cheap and lamb is so expensive.

    I mean, pork requires more infra and work than sheep.

    Weird.
    Looking at pig farms (notably in Norfolk), and sheep farms; pigs can be kept in much closer captivity than sheep. My *guess* is that you get far fewer sheep per hectare (*) than pigs, much reducing the cost.

    As an aside, my dad says that pigs are not dirty; they are very clean animals. It's only the way we keep them that makes them dirty.

    (*) Acre for you ;)
    The other strange thing about sheep is how the fleece these days has virtually no value.

    I think they get something like 50p for a fleece? And it's much more sustainable to use wool for clothes than synthetics.

    Learnt from Clarkson's farm. More weird.
    Sheepswool is fabulous home insulation. Very effective, lovely to work with (non itchy) no nasty chemicals. I don't know what central Government can do to incentivise its use, but it would be a very good idea.
    Not all wool is so cheap - the decent wools get used for knitting, spinning, carpets etc. However a lot of the meat breeds wool is low value, but needs removing from the sheep for welfare reasons. I do think there should be a decent market for use as insulation, but I suspect traditional materials are probably cheaper. The wool would probably need at least cleaning, which adds to the costs.
    It’s an area where some covert government subsidy could work well, French style.

    First, subsidise wall and loft insulation (as has been recommended widely) to reduce heating demand ahead of next winter.

    Second, legislate that x% of all insulation fabric needs to be from organic sources rather than synthetic. Some will then be sourced from wood and paper products but a lot from (hopefully locally produced) wool.

    Support British sheep farming and help us towards net zero.
    I've sometimes wondered, how do they stop the moths?
    I would guess because moths need open space to fly and mate. The first generation of caterpillars might live handsomely on a big thick wool insulation layer but procreation I imagine would be more of a challenge. Presumably wool would need to be covered by board.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,103

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    So I guess "The Faith" is now OK with adultery, since its Defender is an adulterer?

    I nice line up of adulterous Tory ex-PMs at the Cenotaph yesterday, btw.
    Idly wondering how many monarchs since Henry VIII were NOT adulterers....
    Queens Elizabeth I, Mary, Anne, Victoria and Elizabeth II would be my nominations.

    Mary & Vicki NOT being married when they had their flings (Earl of Essex & John Brown respectively) though personally doubt that the fellows involved actually scored any royal home runs, as opposed to (maybe) getting to first base.
    Elizabeth II? Hmmm.
    Did say nomination, not certification!

    And am thinking, that any hanky-panky by QEII would likely NOT have gone as far as our depraved age (my own being 60+) might assume . . .
    It is widely said that one of her children was conceived with her racing manager, Lord Porchester.

    And another by another who was not the Duke of Edinburgh.
    Can't be that widely, I'd never heard that.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,073
    Carnyx said:

    TimS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Eustice: "We did not actually need to give Australia nor New Zealand full liberalisation of beef and sheep. It was not in our economic interests to do so. And neither Australia nor New Zealand had anything to offer in return for such a grand concession."

    https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1592209448986198016

    Perhaps she had a, not unreasonable, view that free trade was a good thing, and that British consumers would benefit from cheaper lamb?
    I never understand why pork is so cheap and lamb is so expensive.

    I mean, pork requires more infra and work than sheep.

    Weird.
    Looking at pig farms (notably in Norfolk), and sheep farms; pigs can be kept in much closer captivity than sheep. My *guess* is that you get far fewer sheep per hectare (*) than pigs, much reducing the cost.

    As an aside, my dad says that pigs are not dirty; they are very clean animals. It's only the way we keep them that makes them dirty.

    (*) Acre for you ;)
    The other strange thing about sheep is how the fleece these days has virtually no value.

    I think they get something like 50p for a fleece? And it's much more sustainable to use wool for clothes than synthetics.

    Learnt from Clarkson's farm. More weird.
    Sheepswool is fabulous home insulation. Very effective, lovely to work with (non itchy) no nasty chemicals. I don't know what central Government can do to incentivise its use, but it would be a very good idea.
    Not all wool is so cheap - the decent wools get used for knitting, spinning, carpets etc. However a lot of the meat breeds wool is low value, but needs removing from the sheep for welfare reasons. I do think there should be a decent market for use as insulation, but I suspect traditional materials are probably cheaper. The wool would probably need at least cleaning, which adds to the costs.
    It’s an area where some covert government subsidy could work well, French style.

    First, subsidise wall and loft insulation (as has been recommended widely) to reduce heating demand ahead of next winter.

    Second, legislate that x% of all insulation fabric needs to be from organic sources rather than synthetic. Some will then be sourced from wood and paper products but a lot from (hopefully locally produced) wool.

    Support British sheep farming and help us towards net zero.
    I've sometimes wondered, how do they stop the moths?
    A flamethrower might work.
    But probably a lot of chemicals; otherwise your insulation might not be there is a few years’ time.

    Or perhaps not ?
    https://www.heritage-house.org/stuff-about-old-buildings/insulation/sheepwool-insulation-and-moth-infestation.html
  • Northern_AlNorthern_Al Posts: 8,383
    HYUFD said:
    Strange combination, doesn't sound very appetising. (Beer and mango spritz, not Sunak and Trudeau).
  • HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    So I guess "The Faith" is now OK with adultery, since its Defender is an adulterer?

    I nice line up of adulterous Tory ex-PMs at the Cenotaph yesterday, btw.
    Idly wondering how many monarchs since Henry VIII were NOT adulterers....
    Queens Elizabeth I, Mary, Anne, Victoria and Elizabeth II would be my nominations.

    Mary & Vicki NOT being married when they had their flings (Earl of Essex & John Brown respectively) though personally doubt that the fellows involved actually scored any royal home runs, as opposed to (maybe) getting to first base.
    Elizabeth II? Hmmm.
    Did say nomination, not certification!

    And am thinking, that any hanky-panky by QEII would likely NOT have gone as far as our depraved age (my own being 60+) might assume . . .
    It is widely said that one of her children was conceived with her racing manager, Lord Porchester.

    And another by another who was not the Duke of Edinburgh.
    Also widely said that Brendan Bracken was Winston Churchill's love child?

    Lots of utter crap getting said all the time!
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 38,829

    HYUFD said:
    Strange combination, doesn't sound very appetising. (Beer and mango spritz, not Sunak and Trudeau).
    Separate drinks, one assumes.
  • Ishmael_ZIshmael_Z Posts: 8,981

    Ishmael_Z said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    So I guess "The Faith" is now OK with adultery, since its Defender is an adulterer?

    I nice line up of adulterous Tory ex-PMs at the Cenotaph yesterday, btw.
    The Church of England was established by an adulterer, Henry VIII, so he could break with Rome and Papal Supremacy and marry Anne Boleyn. What a ridiculous question. The Monarch is only Supreme Governor of the Church of England, its Leader is the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    I haven't heard any evidence May, Cameron or Sunak have been adulterers even if Major, Johnson and Truss have. Of the 2 Labour PMs Blair has had the Wendy Deng rumours of course but we will give him the benefit of that. Not to mention the Marcia Williams rumours around Wilson when he was Labour PM

    Was Henry an adulterer? Or did he wait until the previous wife was divorced or dead before he started banging the next one?

    Either way, less of a role model than Jesus, the Buddha or Guru Nanak. Maybe on a par with the Prophet. And yet his is the faith you choose to follow.

    So only 50% of recent Tory PMs are adulterers. Fair enough.
    It is not Henry's faith, the Church of England is a denomination of the Christian faith, just the Monarch is Supreme Governor of it to stop the Pope being its head on earth with its Leader the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    Of the 2 recent Labour PMs, we know the Wendy Deng rumours about Blair as I said. That would be 50% of living Labour PMs if true but I give Blair the benefit of the doubt and say not true
    Seeing as Henry VIIIth had illegitimate children, one of whom nearly became legitamized, I’d say he definitely had adulterous relations.
    Doesn't follow, unmarried fornication isn't adultery.
    Pedantry, here, on PB? Really! :)
    Most people regard having an affair as adultery.
    Well, they can regard pigs as fish. It depends what you mean by affair, but adultery is penetrative straight sex where one party is married and one not (both parties are then adulterers) or both parties are married but not to each other.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,269
    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    All of them?
    I thought being an adulterer was practically mandatory for monarchs. Just like Presidents of France.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,158
    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    Scott_xP said:

    You're being incredibly childish.

    The entire Brexit project was childish.

    A toddler having a temper tantrum, except it costs us billions and trashed the future for millions.

    But the Brexiteers will continue to scweam and scweam about how unfair it to mock them, and I shall continue to do so
    If you want to get better at mocking them, you should try harder to understand them. Brexit was not about renouncing all international cooperation, just withdrawing from the project to create a European superstate.
    A project more imaginary than real and of which we weren't in any case a part.
    A bit of a shame they kept putting the nutters in whose imagination it existed in charge of things in Brussels, though.

    Especially since so many of them would have made Al Capone look positively honest.
    The big path is set by national leaders though. And they are constrained by their electorates. No way is a USE coming in by stealth. Might be possible one day but it's far far off and it'd need a sea change in circumstances and popular sentiment. Grains of truth in it but in essence it's a bogeyman, that's my view.
    Bluntly, I think that is naive.

    In fact, I will go further. It's already been created by stealth, through the creation of the Euro and the increasing pooling of financial sovereignty to pay for it.

    At some point, either the EU will have to give up the euro, or it will have to federate. There are no middle paths. Indeed, that was a key reason behind the creation of the euro, based on the Zollverein of the nineteenth century. It didn't quite happen with the crash of 2008, but with the disaster that are public finances across the EU it will have to face this choice next time, which you would assume will be in the next two to three years.

    And as we saw in Scotland, people will be very reluctant to break away from a currency unit, with all the chaos that entails. There is a very strong chance they will prefer political union even if it isn't what they actually want.

    I would have considerably more respect for the leaders of the EU if they were honest about this, but most of them aren't. And the ones like Delors, Giscard and Juncker, who are, tend to be loathsome scum anyway whom only a genuine lunatic would respect.
    Oh no, not the old "naive" again - this time for an actually rather hard-headed recognition of the constraints on EU utopianism. My view is there isn't now (or the foreseeable prospect of) the requisite popular support for a fully federal Europe replacing the nation states. Technical arguments about the Euro, and whether a common currency dictates the demise of nation states using it - I'd say not but it's complex and arguable - don't override this imo. The "elites" can't "slip it in" without people noticing. To throw a bit of shade back, I think it's paranoia to think they either can or want to.
    I'd agree with you. And I'm in no doubt that is your view.

    I am merely pointing out it is utterly irrelevant whether they *want* it or not given the economic situation they are now in.

    Do you think the people of Scotland wanted Union with England in 1707? Most of them didn't, even the ones who supported it. They just realised they had pretty much no choice in the matter. It was that or starve.

    (Sadly for the Irish a hundred years later it was that *and* starve.)
    The USE comes in as the only way to keep various places afloat? Hmm, I do not see that as at all likely. Let's see. If we both stay on here for the next 10 years it'll become obvious that I'm ... sorry obvious who's right.
    Really? I would never have guessed from your posts.

    It will become obvious you're wrong, but don't worry, I'm not a gloater. I'm wrong too often myself for that,

    Even for purely selfish reasons, I hope you are wrong and they don't give up their currency because the chaos unleashed would definitely consume us too.
    Did you vote Leave then? Fear of USE etc. I didn't think you did but can't recall you saying either way.
  • Ishmael_ZIshmael_Z Posts: 8,981

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    So I guess "The Faith" is now OK with adultery, since its Defender is an adulterer?

    I nice line up of adulterous Tory ex-PMs at the Cenotaph yesterday, btw.
    Idly wondering how many monarchs since Henry VIII were NOT adulterers....
    Queens Elizabeth I, Mary, Anne, Victoria and Elizabeth II would be my nominations.

    Mary & Vicki NOT being married when they had their flings (Earl of Essex & John Brown respectively) though personally doubt that the fellows involved actually scored any royal home runs, as opposed to (maybe) getting to first base.
    Elizabeth II? Hmmm.
    Did say nomination, not certification!

    And am thinking, that any hanky-panky by QEII would likely NOT have gone as far as our depraved age (my own being 60+) might assume . . .
    It is widely said that one of her children was conceived with her racing manager, Lord Porchester.

    And another by another who was not the Duke of Edinburgh.
    Also widely said that Brendan Bracken was Winston Churchill's love child?

    Lots of utter crap getting said all the time!
    Look at photos of Lord p and of the Duke of York.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,405
    Ishmael_Z said:

    Ishmael_Z said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    So I guess "The Faith" is now OK with adultery, since its Defender is an adulterer?

    I nice line up of adulterous Tory ex-PMs at the Cenotaph yesterday, btw.
    The Church of England was established by an adulterer, Henry VIII, so he could break with Rome and Papal Supremacy and marry Anne Boleyn. What a ridiculous question. The Monarch is only Supreme Governor of the Church of England, its Leader is the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    I haven't heard any evidence May, Cameron or Sunak have been adulterers even if Major, Johnson and Truss have. Of the 2 Labour PMs Blair has had the Wendy Deng rumours of course but we will give him the benefit of that. Not to mention the Marcia Williams rumours around Wilson when he was Labour PM

    Was Henry an adulterer? Or did he wait until the previous wife was divorced or dead before he started banging the next one?

    Either way, less of a role model than Jesus, the Buddha or Guru Nanak. Maybe on a par with the Prophet. And yet his is the faith you choose to follow.

    So only 50% of recent Tory PMs are adulterers. Fair enough.
    It is not Henry's faith, the Church of England is a denomination of the Christian faith, just the Monarch is Supreme Governor of it to stop the Pope being its head on earth with its Leader the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    Of the 2 recent Labour PMs, we know the Wendy Deng rumours about Blair as I said. That would be 50% of living Labour PMs if true but I give Blair the benefit of the doubt and say not true
    Seeing as Henry VIIIth had illegitimate children, one of whom nearly became legitamized, I’d say he definitely had adulterous relations.
    Doesn't follow, unmarried fornication isn't adultery.
    Pedantry, here, on PB? Really! :)
    Most people regard having an affair as adultery.
    Well, they can regard pigs as fish. It depends what you mean by affair, but adultery is penetrative straight sex where one party is married and one not (both parties are then adulterers) or both parties are married but not to each other.
    Well I don’t get your point. Henry Fitzroy, son of Elizabeth Blount, when Henry was married to Catherine. If you are going to pedant, shouldn’t you pedant correctly? Standards!
  • Ishmael_Z said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    So I guess "The Faith" is now OK with adultery, since its Defender is an adulterer?

    I nice line up of adulterous Tory ex-PMs at the Cenotaph yesterday, btw.
    Idly wondering how many monarchs since Henry VIII were NOT adulterers....
    Queens Elizabeth I, Mary, Anne, Victoria and Elizabeth II would be my nominations.

    Mary & Vicki NOT being married when they had their flings (Earl of Essex & John Brown respectively) though personally doubt that the fellows involved actually scored any royal home runs, as opposed to (maybe) getting to first base.
    Elizabeth II? Hmmm.
    Did say nomination, not certification!

    And am thinking, that any hanky-panky by QEII would likely NOT have gone as far as our depraved age (my own being 60+) might assume . . .
    It is widely said that one of her children was conceived with her racing manager, Lord Porchester.

    And another by another who was not the Duke of Edinburgh.
    Also widely said that Brendan Bracken was Winston Churchill's love child?

    Lots of utter crap getting said all the time!
    Look at photos of Lord p and of the Duke of York.
    Passing resemblance ain't proof positive.

    At least that's what years of watching "Paternity Court" have taught yours truly.
  • FrankBoothFrankBooth Posts: 9,840
    Totally off topic:

    I'm going on a trip to Scotand but I'm worried about the Scotrail strikes. What do people think of coach travel nowadays? I found the experience quite good when I had a bus replacement service not long ago. Edinburgh to Aberdeen is only about half an hour extra by coach.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,635
    edited November 2022

    Ishmael_Z said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    So I guess "The Faith" is now OK with adultery, since its Defender is an adulterer?

    I nice line up of adulterous Tory ex-PMs at the Cenotaph yesterday, btw.
    The Church of England was established by an adulterer, Henry VIII, so he could break with Rome and Papal Supremacy and marry Anne Boleyn. What a ridiculous question. The Monarch is only Supreme Governor of the Church of England, its Leader is the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    I haven't heard any evidence May, Cameron or Sunak have been adulterers even if Major, Johnson and Truss have. Of the 2 Labour PMs Blair has had the Wendy Deng rumours of course but we will give him the benefit of that. Not to mention the Marcia Williams rumours around Wilson when he was Labour PM

    Was Henry an adulterer? Or did he wait until the previous wife was divorced or dead before he started banging the next one?

    Either way, less of a role model than Jesus, the Buddha or Guru Nanak. Maybe on a par with the Prophet. And yet his is the faith you choose to follow.

    So only 50% of recent Tory PMs are adulterers. Fair enough.
    It is not Henry's faith, the Church of England is a denomination of the Christian faith, just the Monarch is Supreme Governor of it to stop the Pope being its head on earth with its Leader the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    Of the 2 recent Labour PMs, we know the Wendy Deng rumours about Blair as I said. That would be 50% of living Labour PMs if true but I give Blair the benefit of the doubt and say not true
    Seeing as Henry VIIIth had illegitimate children, one of whom nearly became legitamized, I’d say he definitely had adulterous relations.
    Doesn't follow, unmarried fornication isn't adultery.
    Pedantry, here, on PB? Really! :)
    Most people regard having an affair as adultery.
    Bill Clinton has entered the chat.

    I generally support the post code rule.

    #MonogamyIsTooCruelARule
  • Totally off topic:

    I'm going on a trip to Scotand but I'm worried about the Scotrail strikes. What do people think of coach travel nowadays? I found the experience quite good when I had a bus replacement service not long ago. Edinburgh to Aberdeen is only about half an hour extra by coach.

    Don’t use a peasant wagon.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,840

    Totally off topic:

    I'm going on a trip to Scotand but I'm worried about the Scotrail strikes. What do people think of coach travel nowadays? I found the experience quite good when I had a bus replacement service not long ago. Edinburgh to Aberdeen is only about half an hour extra by coach.

    Strikes still up in the air.

    https://www.scotrail.co.uk/plan-your-journey/passenger-disruption/industrial-action
  • Ishmael_ZIshmael_Z Posts: 8,981

    Ishmael_Z said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    So I guess "The Faith" is now OK with adultery, since its Defender is an adulterer?

    I nice line up of adulterous Tory ex-PMs at the Cenotaph yesterday, btw.
    Idly wondering how many monarchs since Henry VIII were NOT adulterers....
    Queens Elizabeth I, Mary, Anne, Victoria and Elizabeth II would be my nominations.

    Mary & Vicki NOT being married when they had their flings (Earl of Essex & John Brown respectively) though personally doubt that the fellows involved actually scored any royal home runs, as opposed to (maybe) getting to first base.
    Elizabeth II? Hmmm.
    Did say nomination, not certification!

    And am thinking, that any hanky-panky by QEII would likely NOT have gone as far as our depraved age (my own being 60+) might assume . . .
    It is widely said that one of her children was conceived with her racing manager, Lord Porchester.

    And another by another who was not the Duke of Edinburgh.
    Also widely said that Brendan Bracken was Winston Churchill's love child?

    Lots of utter crap getting said all the time!
    Look at photos of Lord p and of the Duke of York.
    Passing resemblance ain't proof positive.

    At least that's what years of watching "Paternity Court" have taught yours truly.
    Golly, hadn't heard of that. Must watch.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,648
    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,840

    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    To the benefit of landlords. Which are well represented in the HoC IIRC.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,269
    kinabalu said:

    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    Scott_xP said:

    You're being incredibly childish.

    The entire Brexit project was childish.

    A toddler having a temper tantrum, except it costs us billions and trashed the future for millions.

    But the Brexiteers will continue to scweam and scweam about how unfair it to mock them, and I shall continue to do so
    If you want to get better at mocking them, you should try harder to understand them. Brexit was not about renouncing all international cooperation, just withdrawing from the project to create a European superstate.
    A project more imaginary than real and of which we weren't in any case a part.
    A bit of a shame they kept putting the nutters in whose imagination it existed in charge of things in Brussels, though.

    Especially since so many of them would have made Al Capone look positively honest.
    The big path is set by national leaders though. And they are constrained by their electorates. No way is a USE coming in by stealth. Might be possible one day but it's far far off and it'd need a sea change in circumstances and popular sentiment. Grains of truth in it but in essence it's a bogeyman, that's my view.
    Bluntly, I think that is naive.

    In fact, I will go further. It's already been created by stealth, through the creation of the Euro and the increasing pooling of financial sovereignty to pay for it.

    At some point, either the EU will have to give up the euro, or it will have to federate. There are no middle paths. Indeed, that was a key reason behind the creation of the euro, based on the Zollverein of the nineteenth century. It didn't quite happen with the crash of 2008, but with the disaster that are public finances across the EU it will have to face this choice next time, which you would assume will be in the next two to three years.

    And as we saw in Scotland, people will be very reluctant to break away from a currency unit, with all the chaos that entails. There is a very strong chance they will prefer political union even if it isn't what they actually want.

    I would have considerably more respect for the leaders of the EU if they were honest about this, but most of them aren't. And the ones like Delors, Giscard and Juncker, who are, tend to be loathsome scum anyway whom only a genuine lunatic would respect.
    Oh no, not the old "naive" again - this time for an actually rather hard-headed recognition of the constraints on EU utopianism. My view is there isn't now (or the foreseeable prospect of) the requisite popular support for a fully federal Europe replacing the nation states. Technical arguments about the Euro, and whether a common currency dictates the demise of nation states using it - I'd say not but it's complex and arguable - don't override this imo. The "elites" can't "slip it in" without people noticing. To throw a bit of shade back, I think it's paranoia to think they either can or want to.
    It's ever closer union, remember.

    The next fun piece of the puzzle will be increasing the power and independence of ECB. That and integration of health services.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 34,664

    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    Simply subsidising BTL landlords.
  • Ishmael_Z said:

    Ishmael_Z said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    News from the Neolithic


    “Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings, floggings and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/afghanistan-supreme-leader-orders-full-implementation-of-sharia-law-taliban

    The new 'moderate' Taliban. Merely amputation of limbs for thieves rather than being hung drawn and quartered and public executions not televised, merely first come first served for best view in the crowd?
    And yet they were allowed to play in the cricket world cup a few days ago.
    Saudi Arabia has similar laws and gets to play in the Football World Cup.

    (Death by stoning is the punishment for adultery in Saudi Arabia.)
    An utter scandal that in this country we make adulterers King and Queen.
    Well Charles has a less prolific record of adultery than virtually every French President except De Gaulle or many US Presidents, notably JFK and
    Clinton.
    "It's OK for our Kings to be mass murderers because Genghis Khan was a bigger mass murderer."

    Seriously, that's the coruscating logic and quality of apologetics on display here.
    Half the Presidents in the world and half the monarchs in history have been adulterers. Being a Saint in your personal life does not mean you will be an effective Head of your country, see Jimmy Carter.

    Religious leaders should normally have impeccable personal lives like the Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope. For Presidents or Kings or PMs it is an optional extra, desirable but not a requirement
    So I guess "The Faith" is now OK with adultery, since its Defender is an adulterer?

    I nice line up of adulterous Tory ex-PMs at the Cenotaph yesterday, btw.
    Idly wondering how many monarchs since Henry VIII were NOT adulterers....
    Queens Elizabeth I, Mary, Anne, Victoria and Elizabeth II would be my nominations.

    Mary & Vicki NOT being married when they had their flings (Earl of Essex & John Brown respectively) though personally doubt that the fellows involved actually scored any royal home runs, as opposed to (maybe) getting to first base.
    Elizabeth II? Hmmm.
    Did say nomination, not certification!

    And am thinking, that any hanky-panky by QEII would likely NOT have gone as far as our depraved age (my own being 60+) might assume . . .
    It is widely said that one of her children was conceived with her racing manager, Lord Porchester.

    And another by another who was not the Duke of Edinburgh.
    Also widely said that Brendan Bracken was Winston Churchill's love child?

    Lots of utter crap getting said all the time!
    Look at photos of Lord p and of the Duke of York.
    Passing resemblance ain't proof positive.

    At least that's what years of watching "Paternity Court" have taught yours truly.
    Golly, hadn't heard of that. Must watch.
    Just for you!

    Triple Episode: Two Out Of Control Grandmothers Face Off Over Paternity | Paternity Court
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quMGfjPl9wQ

    (posted on YT one day ago)
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,073
    TimS said:

    Carnyx said:

    TimS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Eustice: "We did not actually need to give Australia nor New Zealand full liberalisation of beef and sheep. It was not in our economic interests to do so. And neither Australia nor New Zealand had anything to offer in return for such a grand concession."

    https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1592209448986198016

    Perhaps she had a, not unreasonable, view that free trade was a good thing, and that British consumers would benefit from cheaper lamb?
    I never understand why pork is so cheap and lamb is so expensive.

    I mean, pork requires more infra and work than sheep.

    Weird.
    Looking at pig farms (notably in Norfolk), and sheep farms; pigs can be kept in much closer captivity than sheep. My *guess* is that you get far fewer sheep per hectare (*) than pigs, much reducing the cost.

    As an aside, my dad says that pigs are not dirty; they are very clean animals. It's only the way we keep them that makes them dirty.

    (*) Acre for you ;)
    The other strange thing about sheep is how the fleece these days has virtually no value.

    I think they get something like 50p for a fleece? And it's much more sustainable to use wool for clothes than synthetics.

    Learnt from Clarkson's farm. More weird.
    Sheepswool is fabulous home insulation. Very effective, lovely to work with (non itchy) no nasty chemicals. I don't know what central Government can do to incentivise its use, but it would be a very good idea.
    Not all wool is so cheap - the decent wools get used for knitting, spinning, carpets etc. However a lot of the meat breeds wool is low value, but needs removing from the sheep for welfare reasons. I do think there should be a decent market for use as insulation, but I suspect traditional materials are probably cheaper. The wool would probably need at least cleaning, which adds to the costs.
    It’s an area where some covert government subsidy could work well, French style.

    First, subsidise wall and loft insulation (as has been recommended widely) to reduce heating demand ahead of next winter.

    Second, legislate that x% of all insulation fabric needs to be from organic sources rather than synthetic. Some will then be sourced from wood and paper products but a lot from (hopefully locally produced) wool.

    Support British sheep farming and help us towards net zero.
    I've sometimes wondered, how do they stop the moths?
    I would guess because moths need open space to fly and mate…
    They don’t. If you have an infestation, it just goes on.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tineola_bisselliella

  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 22,662

    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    Simply subsidising BTL landlords.
    Successive Neo Liberal Govts since 1979 all believe it is the role of the taxpayer to subsidise the asset rich

    Its a mystery on par with why did they build Stonehenge so close to the A303 in the first place?!!
  • TimSTimS Posts: 12,995
    Nigelb said:

    TimS said:

    Carnyx said:

    TimS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Eustice: "We did not actually need to give Australia nor New Zealand full liberalisation of beef and sheep. It was not in our economic interests to do so. And neither Australia nor New Zealand had anything to offer in return for such a grand concession."

    https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1592209448986198016

    Perhaps she had a, not unreasonable, view that free trade was a good thing, and that British consumers would benefit from cheaper lamb?
    I never understand why pork is so cheap and lamb is so expensive.

    I mean, pork requires more infra and work than sheep.

    Weird.
    Looking at pig farms (notably in Norfolk), and sheep farms; pigs can be kept in much closer captivity than sheep. My *guess* is that you get far fewer sheep per hectare (*) than pigs, much reducing the cost.

    As an aside, my dad says that pigs are not dirty; they are very clean animals. It's only the way we keep them that makes them dirty.

    (*) Acre for you ;)
    The other strange thing about sheep is how the fleece these days has virtually no value.

    I think they get something like 50p for a fleece? And it's much more sustainable to use wool for clothes than synthetics.

    Learnt from Clarkson's farm. More weird.
    Sheepswool is fabulous home insulation. Very effective, lovely to work with (non itchy) no nasty chemicals. I don't know what central Government can do to incentivise its use, but it would be a very good idea.
    Not all wool is so cheap - the decent wools get used for knitting, spinning, carpets etc. However a lot of the meat breeds wool is low value, but needs removing from the sheep for welfare reasons. I do think there should be a decent market for use as insulation, but I suspect traditional materials are probably cheaper. The wool would probably need at least cleaning, which adds to the costs.
    It’s an area where some covert government subsidy could work well, French style.

    First, subsidise wall and loft insulation (as has been recommended widely) to reduce heating demand ahead of next winter.

    Second, legislate that x% of all insulation fabric needs to be from organic sources rather than synthetic. Some will then be sourced from wood and paper products but a lot from (hopefully locally produced) wool.

    Support British sheep farming and help us towards net zero.
    I've sometimes wondered, how do they stop the moths?
    I would guess because moths need open space to fly and mate…
    They don’t. If you have an infestation, it just goes on.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tineola_bisselliella

    Yuck. “They prefer to scuttle”.
    I don’t like things that scuttle.
  • The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    Should be abolished. 😠
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 26,175
    Sky trying to be down with the kids going well…

    https://www.dailystar.co.uk/sport/football/sky-sports-ishowspeed-youtube-streamer-28487169.amp

    Sky Sports axe IShowSpeed ties after being alerted to awful rants over 'b****' females

    YouTube star and streamer IShowSpeed appeared on Sky Sports' coverage of Fulham vs Manchester United on Sunday but all traces of the segment have now been deleted
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,648

    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    Simply subsidising BTL landlords.
    Successive Neo Liberal Govts since 1979 all believe it is the role of the taxpayer to subsidise the asset rich

    Its a mystery on par with why did they build Stonehenge so close to the A303 in the first place?!!
    That's ahistorical Fatcha-blaming. It wasn't until Gordon Brown that buy-to-let took off and then props were put under the housing market to prevent a correction.
  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 22,662

    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    Simply subsidising BTL landlords.
    Successive Neo Liberal Govts since 1979 all believe it is the role of the taxpayer to subsidise the asset rich

    Its a mystery on par with why did they build Stonehenge so close to the A303 in the first place?!!
    Clearly built Stonehenge by the road as it was easy to access the site. I mean you don’t want to drag those stones across country any distance.
    Could have built it next to a freight line railway though
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,840

    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    Simply subsidising BTL landlords.
    Successive Neo Liberal Govts since 1979 all believe it is the role of the taxpayer to subsidise the asset rich

    Its a mystery on par with why did they build Stonehenge so close to the A303 in the first place?!!
    Clearly built Stonehenge by the road as it was easy to access the site. I mean you don’t want to drag those stones across country any distance.
    Could have built it next to a freight line railway though
    Even better, a canal. Or the seaside.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,969

    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    Should be abolished. 😠
    And how are those on low incomes supposed to house themselves if they cannot afford to rent without housing benefit and there is not enough public housing, even if more is being built again?
  • stodgestodge Posts: 13,876
    Mid evening all :)

    I presume we've disembowelled Redfield & Wilton - an 18% swing from Conservatives to Labour leaves the former well below 100 seats and adding on the likelihood of tactical voting and you have the SNP as the official opposition in the new Commons.

    The option for Sunak/Hunt is to get the pain in place and hope, pace Micawber, something will turn up in early 2024 to make the Conservatives seem wonderful again.

    There's a key ingredient for Labour here and it's one of the many areas where they conspicuously failed against Johnson in 2019. Starmer can't be too downbeat, too negative, too gloomy (well, he can now) but as we near an election, he will need to offer some form of "sunlit uplands". Blair did this successfully but this will be Starmer's big test. There are plenty of reasons to vote against the Conservatives but he needs to offer reasons to vote for Labour and one of them will be to inculcate the notion "things can only bet better" (yes, I know) under Labour.

    Offering light when all around seems dark can be very persuasive if done well. Even Hunt, who knows he has to raise taxes, caveats this with a call for resilience and a promise of a better future. Starmer and Reeves need to show how life under Labour will be better or at the very least not worse.

    If I were Starmer, I'd be easing off on the technocratic managerialism and taking a few pages out of the Johnson playbook in terms of communicating upbeat optimism and talking up Britain's prospects "once we get rid of the Conservatives" thus making the act of voting Labour a positive as well as cathartic duty.

    If he can do this, you'll be able to put a fork in the Conservatives - they'll be toast (not as in the Matt Berry character but the bready comestible).
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,840
    HYUFD said:

    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    Should be abolished. 😠
    And how are those on low incomes supposed to house themselves if they cannot afford to rent without housing benefit and there is not enough public housing, even if more is being built again?
    That's right, keep house prices inflated for inheritances.
  • .
    HYUFD said:

    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    Should be abolished. 😠
    And how are those on low incomes supposed to house themselves if they cannot afford to rent without housing benefit and there is not enough public housing, even if more is being built again?
    Boost their income.

    People should have enough to live on and pay for housing however they please to spend it, free market.

    It would be cheaper for most people to pay for a mortgage than rent most of the time, but landlord's benefit ensures BTL mortgages get paid rather than people paying for their own accomodation.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 35,990
    @sampullara Part of today will be turning off the “microservices” bloatware. Less than 20% are actually needed for Twitter to work!
    https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592177471654604800

    Yeah, this guy is a GENIUS...

    apparently they didnt turn off 2-factor authentication but they DID turn off the service that sends you the 2-factor authentication code. so if you log out and try to log in with an authentication code you simply wont receive one. lol. lmao https://twitter.com/zachsilberberg/status/1592228112770924544
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,648
    HYUFD said:

    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    Should be abolished. 😠
    And how are those on low incomes supposed to house themselves if they cannot afford to rent without housing benefit and there is not enough public housing, even if more is being built again?
    When the overall housing benefit bill is so large, it distorts the market and pushes prices up for everyone.
  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 22,662
    HYUFD said:

    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    Should be abolished. 😠
    And how are those on low incomes supposed to house themselves if they cannot afford to rent without housing benefit and there is not enough public housing, even if more is being built again?
    Workhouses?

    They seem to have closed a lot of them. Still one at Southwell though I had to pay £10 to get in or was it to get out I forget
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,969
    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    Should be abolished. 😠
    And how are those on low incomes supposed to house themselves if they cannot afford to rent without housing benefit and there is not enough public housing, even if more is being built again?
    That's right, keep house prices inflated for inheritances.
    They couldn't afford to buy a house anyone by definition if they are on a low income even if house prices fell significantly (ironically the only way they could is through a significant inheritance).

    We are talking about them not even being able to afford to rent a property without housing benefit

  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,158

    kinabalu said:

    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    Scott_xP said:

    You're being incredibly childish.

    The entire Brexit project was childish.

    A toddler having a temper tantrum, except it costs us billions and trashed the future for millions.

    But the Brexiteers will continue to scweam and scweam about how unfair it to mock them, and I shall continue to do so
    If you want to get better at mocking them, you should try harder to understand them. Brexit was not about renouncing all international cooperation, just withdrawing from the project to create a European superstate.
    A project more imaginary than real and of which we weren't in any case a part.
    A bit of a shame they kept putting the nutters in whose imagination it existed in charge of things in Brussels, though.

    Especially since so many of them would have made Al Capone look positively honest.
    The big path is set by national leaders though. And they are constrained by their electorates. No way is a USE coming in by stealth. Might be possible one day but it's far far off and it'd need a sea change in circumstances and popular sentiment. Grains of truth in it but in essence it's a bogeyman, that's my view.
    Bluntly, I think that is naive.

    In fact, I will go further. It's already been created by stealth, through the creation of the Euro and the increasing pooling of financial sovereignty to pay for it.

    At some point, either the EU will have to give up the euro, or it will have to federate. There are no middle paths. Indeed, that was a key reason behind the creation of the euro, based on the Zollverein of the nineteenth century. It didn't quite happen with the crash of 2008, but with the disaster that are public finances across the EU it will have to face this choice next time, which you would assume will be in the next two to three years.

    And as we saw in Scotland, people will be very reluctant to break away from a currency unit, with all the chaos that entails. There is a very strong chance they will prefer political union even if it isn't what they actually want.

    I would have considerably more respect for the leaders of the EU if they were honest about this, but most of them aren't. And the ones like Delors, Giscard and Juncker, who are, tend to be loathsome scum anyway whom only a genuine lunatic would respect.
    Oh no, not the old "naive" again - this time for an actually rather hard-headed recognition of the constraints on EU utopianism. My view is there isn't now (or the foreseeable prospect of) the requisite popular support for a fully federal Europe replacing the nation states. Technical arguments about the Euro, and whether a common currency dictates the demise of nation states using it - I'd say not but it's complex and arguable - don't override this imo. The "elites" can't "slip it in" without people noticing. To throw a bit of shade back, I think it's paranoia to think they either can or want to.
    It's ever closer union, remember.

    The next fun piece of the puzzle will be increasing the power and independence of ECB. That and integration of health services.
    They have their work cut out maintaining the degree of integration they have now imo. The prospect of fracture into competing nationalisms is much greater than that of a federal union.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,648
    Scott_xP said:

    @sampullara Part of today will be turning off the “microservices” bloatware. Less than 20% are actually needed for Twitter to work!
    https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592177471654604800

    Yeah, this guy is a GENIUS...

    apparently they didnt turn off 2-factor authentication but they DID turn off the service that sends you the 2-factor authentication code. so if you log out and try to log in with an authentication code you simply wont receive one. lol. lmao https://twitter.com/zachsilberberg/status/1592228112770924544

    All the people calling Elon Musk a moron will look pretty stupid if he turns Twitter around.
  • HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    Should be abolished. 😠
    And how are those on low incomes supposed to house themselves if they cannot afford to rent without housing benefit and there is not enough public housing, even if more is being built again?
    That's right, keep house prices inflated for inheritances.
    They couldn't afford to buy a house anyone by definition if they are on a low income even if house prices fell significantly (ironically the only way they could is through a significant inheritance).

    We are talking about them not even being able to afford to rent a property without housing benefit

    If they can afford to pay a landlord's mortgage, they can afford to pay their own.

    Cut out the landlord.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,592

    Scott_xP said:

    @sampullara Part of today will be turning off the “microservices” bloatware. Less than 20% are actually needed for Twitter to work!
    https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592177471654604800

    Yeah, this guy is a GENIUS...

    apparently they didnt turn off 2-factor authentication but they DID turn off the service that sends you the 2-factor authentication code. so if you log out and try to log in with an authentication code you simply wont receive one. lol. lmao https://twitter.com/zachsilberberg/status/1592228112770924544

    All the people calling Elon Musk a moron will look pretty stupid if he turns Twitter around.
    That *if* is doing some fairly heavy lifting atm.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,405

    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    Simply subsidising BTL landlords.
    Successive Neo Liberal Govts since 1979 all believe it is the role of the taxpayer to subsidise the asset rich

    Its a mystery on par with why did they build Stonehenge so close to the A303 in the first place?!!
    Clearly built Stonehenge by the road as it was easy to access the site. I mean you don’t want to drag those stones across country any distance.
    Could have built it next to a freight line railway though
    There was once a rail line from Amesbury to Rollestone camp, which would have passed nearby, but it’s long since vanished.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,969

    HYUFD said:

    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    Should be abolished. 😠
    And how are those on low incomes supposed to house themselves if they cannot afford to rent without housing benefit and there is not enough public housing, even if more is being built again?
    Workhouses?

    They seem to have closed a lot of them. Still one at Southwell though I had to pay £10 to get in or was it to get out I forget
    Workhouses being reintroduced having been originally introduced by a classical Liberal government in the 19th century would I am sure suit Bart fine
  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 22,662
    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    Should be abolished. 😠
    And how are those on low incomes supposed to house themselves if they cannot afford to rent without housing benefit and there is not enough public housing, even if more is being built again?
    That's right, keep house prices inflated for inheritances.
    They couldn't afford to buy a house anyone by definition if they are on a low income even if house prices fell significantly (ironically the only way they could is through a significant inheritance).

    We are talking about them not even being able to afford to rent a property without housing benefit

    Should reduce demand led rent inflation a bit though
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,969

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    Should be abolished. 😠
    And how are those on low incomes supposed to house themselves if they cannot afford to rent without housing benefit and there is not enough public housing, even if more is being built again?
    That's right, keep house prices inflated for inheritances.
    They couldn't afford to buy a house anyone by definition if they are on a low income even if house prices fell significantly (ironically the only way they could is through a significant inheritance).

    We are talking about them not even being able to afford to rent a property without housing benefit

    If they can afford to pay a landlord's mortgage, they can afford to pay their own.

    Cut out the landlord.
    No they can't, if you are on less than £15k a year for instance you would never be able to afford a mortgage to buy a property, for even just a £150k property never mind higher.

    If you are unemployed and only on UC, which is paid with housing benefit now, that applies even more
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,397

    The government now spends more on housing benefit than on transport or the Home Office.

    https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1592164903544315905

    Should be abolished. 😠
    I've been saying this for ages.

    Oh sorry, do you mean housing benefit not the government?
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,103

    Scott_xP said:

    @sampullara Part of today will be turning off the “microservices” bloatware. Less than 20% are actually needed for Twitter to work!
    https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592177471654604800

    Yeah, this guy is a GENIUS...

    apparently they didnt turn off 2-factor authentication but they DID turn off the service that sends you the 2-factor authentication code. so if you log out and try to log in with an authentication code you simply wont receive one. lol. lmao https://twitter.com/zachsilberberg/status/1592228112770924544

    All the people calling Elon Musk a moron will look pretty stupid if he turns Twitter around.
    Perhaps. But if he doesn't they won't. So worth a gamble.

    Plus, even if he does turn it around it doesn't mean every action he took was a good one.
  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 22,662
    Speaking of lifes little mysteries

    Why do they always build castles at the top of hills


    Plays hell with my angina


    Very inconsiderate
  • carnforthcarnforth Posts: 4,587
    Carnyx said:

    TimS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Eustice: "We did not actually need to give Australia nor New Zealand full liberalisation of beef and sheep. It was not in our economic interests to do so. And neither Australia nor New Zealand had anything to offer in return for such a grand concession."

    https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1592209448986198016

    Perhaps she had a, not unreasonable, view that free trade was a good thing, and that British consumers would benefit from cheaper lamb?
    I never understand why pork is so cheap and lamb is so expensive.

    I mean, pork requires more infra and work than sheep.

    Weird.
    Looking at pig farms (notably in Norfolk), and sheep farms; pigs can be kept in much closer captivity than sheep. My *guess* is that you get far fewer sheep per hectare (*) than pigs, much reducing the cost.

    As an aside, my dad says that pigs are not dirty; they are very clean animals. It's only the way we keep them that makes them dirty.

    (*) Acre for you ;)
    The other strange thing about sheep is how the fleece these days has virtually no value.

    I think they get something like 50p for a fleece? And it's much more sustainable to use wool for clothes than synthetics.

    Learnt from Clarkson's farm. More weird.
    Sheepswool is fabulous home insulation. Very effective, lovely to work with (non itchy) no nasty chemicals. I don't know what central Government can do to incentivise its use, but it would be a very good idea.
    Not all wool is so cheap - the decent wools get used for knitting, spinning, carpets etc. However a lot of the meat breeds wool is low value, but needs removing from the sheep for welfare reasons. I do think there should be a decent market for use as insulation, but I suspect traditional materials are probably cheaper. The wool would probably need at least cleaning, which adds to the costs.
    It’s an area where some covert government subsidy could work well, French style.

    First, subsidise wall and loft insulation (as has been recommended widely) to reduce heating demand ahead of next winter.

    Second, legislate that x% of all insulation fabric needs to be from organic sources rather than synthetic. Some will then be sourced from wood and paper products but a lot from (hopefully locally produced) wool.

    Support British sheep farming and help us towards net zero.
    I've sometimes wondered, how do they stop the moths?
    They claim to treat it. As a friend of a friend found out about 15 years ago, sometimes it doesn't work. Enormous costs to have it removed from a listed house with lath and plaster walls plus replacing all the carpets, then replastering and reinsulating in proper materials.

  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 35,990
    Gloss coming off Brexit almost by the day now as leading Brexiteer George Eustice, more honest than most (ex-)ministers, admits much championed post-Brexit trade deal with Australia ‘not very good for UK’…farmers will be furious https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/george-eustice-australia-brexit-trade-deal-uk-b1039875.html https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/george-eustice-australia-brexit-trade-deal-uk-b1039875.html
  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 22,662

    Scott_xP said:

    @sampullara Part of today will be turning off the “microservices” bloatware. Less than 20% are actually needed for Twitter to work!
    https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592177471654604800

    Yeah, this guy is a GENIUS...

    apparently they didnt turn off 2-factor authentication but they DID turn off the service that sends you the 2-factor authentication code. so if you log out and try to log in with an authentication code you simply wont receive one. lol. lmao https://twitter.com/zachsilberberg/status/1592228112770924544

    All the people calling Elon Musk a moron will look pretty stupid if he turns Twitter around.
    That *if* is doing some fairly heavy lifting atm.
    Bit like Stonehenge and Castle turrets
This discussion has been closed.