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The logic behind this is hard to justify explain – politicalbetting.com
The logic behind this is hard to justify explain – politicalbetting.com
Long-awaited details of the government’s voter ID scheme have now been released, including details of which IDs will be accepted at the polling station. The list contains plenty of options for older voters, but few for younger voters. https://t.co/r0YWFXbztw pic.twitter.com/Ck1gro9e0h
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The majority of those “Wiping someone else's elderly parent's arse” are U.K. citizens and always have been.
The belief that all low paid jobs used to be done by migrants is a very London centric view and wrong, even there.
You presume that they should be happy to do so for minimum wage. They don’t agree.
Of course it can and will be spun as an attempt to stop younger voters, Having read the debate last night I now think it is cack-handed but not malicious.
I have always said that ID should only be needed to vote if you do not bring your Polling Card. Job done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubRBLAHjkTo
"When they decided on Qatar
Should have checked VAR"
Which the voting public have been notably reluctant to do.
Literally while the discussion was happening, the news of the case (in Birmingham IIRC) where several councillor were arrested while supervising a literal vote forging factory came in.
The line then changed to "of course local elections are corrupt, we were talking about *national* elections"
Given the experience of a friend who tried to report his vote stolen in Tower Hamlets (for a national election, among others), I wonder how much suppression of reporting of voting irregularities is going on.
Incidentally, the changes bring the rest of the UK into line with NI.
My personal take would be that there would be a huge overlap between the younger strata of society who do not have a form of acceptable ID - and those who would not vote anyway.
Anecdotally, the areas where vote farming and impersonation seem to be a problem are inner city areas where it comes into play in voting for local councillors. It is hard to imagine a situation where it would change the outcome of a Westminster seat. They have Labour majorities in the tens of thousands.
Would love to hear if those assumptions are wrong.
The claim that in person vote fraud is a real problem doesn’t stand up - if it was a real problem then spot checks ought to catch enough examples to demonstrate that it’s serious enough to need fixing. As far as I know nobody is even bothering to do the spot checks, so we simply have a void where we need actual information. A very useful void if you need to use the possibility of fraud as a justification for your undemocratic changes to the system.
The actual, known vote fraud (and also the possibility of coercion of people’s votes) has come predominantly from postal votes. But the government is not doing anything about reforming that system, which strongly suggests that vote fraud is not the real motivation for their voter ID changes.
(I do agree with Malmesbury that there could be a real problem with voter impersonation going unreported. If the police don’t take existing cases seriously then we would never find out if there was organised voter impersonation occurring.)
(Bottom line: this plan will probably make election results a less accurate reflection of the will of the people than the status quo. Even if it's not by much, that seems like a bad thing.)
So the idea that free movement is required because Britons won't do the job is preposterous and always was.
If people won't do the job for minimum wage, then pay more.
https://news.sky.com/story/qatar-world-cup-beer-could-be-banned-from-all-stadiums-12750052
Fans will not be allowed to buy alcohol around World Cup stadiums, Sky News understands.
The U-turn comes ahead of the tournament's opening game in Qatar on Sunday.
No-one gives pay rises just because. The workers have to er... insist?
Which is the whole point of industrial relations - two parties pulling in various directions. The result is something of a compromise.
The issue comes when employers which includes the NHS - one of the biggest employers of the very low paid - have an unlimited supply of low skilled labour to draw on. Then the minimum wage become the norm, not the floor.
This is awesome for me (I work in a skilled profession where there is a world wide shortage), so Deliveroo can get me my takeaway for a couple of quid, when I am too lazy to go out in the rain. This is not so awesome for the Deliveroo riders, or the low end staff in the restaurant.
The Collapse of Everything. A bizarro-world where what can fall apart WILL fall apart - from the World Cup to Twitter to Britain
Where was your outrage when we had election after election that was on very outdated boundaries? Where the new boundaries would have actively changed the result from a Theresa May minority to a majority Government, for example.
Revolting and desperate stuff only goes one way, it seems.
https://twitter.com/scottygb/status/1593529992150933510
It does make you wonder why Qatar bid for this thing when they don't appear to like the rest of the world or its values very much. Its hard to imagine it will make money out of it. The usual answer is to increase the profile of Qatar in the world, but its increasing its profile as a medieval hellhole where everything is awful. I must admit, up until 2012, I rarely thought of Qatar. Nothing I have learned about it since has increased my admiration for it.
Soon, they will go to the Trafford Centre and take their pre-teen exuberance elsewhere.
It's not a big thing. But, you know, not everything is doom and gloom.
One X-55 missile that was shot down over Kyiv yesterday had a block that acted as a nuclear warhead imitator, Defense Express reports. For this strike, Russia took a X-55 from their "nuclear arsenal", "unscrewed" a nuclear warhead and instead put an empty "blank" in its place.
https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1593499401716224000
But instead, it looks like the mullahs are still in charge, and we’ll be instead watching the Fyre Festival.
I dunno what will solve our problems. They stem from the GFC not Brexit. But freeing up trade might help as we work out what to do next
Bring back Henry VIII’s maximum wage laws. The villeins are revolting.
https://twitter.com/christopherhope/status/1593551031492911107
https://twitter.com/faisalislam/status/1593520964934897666
Somewhat weirdly, I have just had a proxy vote in a local council election. I say somewhat weirdly, because all we had to do was my wife contact the local council and say I was in hospital. I didn’t I didn’t have to say or sign anything!
A 99-year-old veteran who fed a French girl during the Second World War has been reunited with her 78 years on.
https://news.sky.com/story/second-world-war-veteran-reunited-with-girl-he-helped-in-france-12750086
Unfortunately I think the pessimistic take is the right one, at the moment. And yet on the other hand the Iranian regime might be on the verge of collapse so Yay?
“Astonishing scenes from #Iran. Protesters have burned down the house of Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic’s founder.
The house has been a museum for the past 30 years. This is an attack in the essence of the republic itself.”
https://twitter.com/dpatrikarakos/status/1593529893907832832?s=46&t=0MObbqWY4TXPWCt0k8RH3g
Elon Trussk
Is that even a real crown you're wearing?
Adding a million unskilled immigrants to the population, who pay little tax, use schools, hospitals, roads and houses - but raise the headline GDP figure - make everyone feel poorer, especially those who are relatively poor already, except for the owners of capital.
Truss
Musk
Sunak
Not in ways that could have been forseen, but unfortunate all the same.
Are there any signs this will be made easy? The finale of the sitcom Derry Girls, set on the day of the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement referendum, starts with one of the girls collecting her NI voting card. It seems reasonably straightforward. Watch it (or the first couple of minutes) on
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/derry-girls/on-demand/68257-007
I was all ready to sign on the dotted line, then the UAE diplomatic crisis kicked off, the Qatari stock market crashed and the job offer fell through. I would have signed in a heartbeat back in 2017 - but knowing what I know now, I wouldn't go out there for double the money.
This is a PR disaster for Qatar, and it hasn't even started yet.
(Disclosure: I did think austerity was necessary at time. Now think I was wrong)
Voting should be easy – a fundamental human right – it should not involve jumping through various bureaucratic hoops set by some governmental shill in Whitehall and fully endorsed by 'Morris Dancer'.
*Phrase not often heard on pb.com.
And heaven knows how you get people in their late 50s and 60s, who have paid off their mortgage, built up a retirement pot and are comfortable and rather enjoying not being in the rat race back into work.
There's no way to avoid a crap decade or two, but, if the right things are done now there's at least a chance they will improve. I'd suggest the two most important things are, (1) weaken rent-seeking in the economy, (2) boost investment in science, technology and productivity.
Don't ignore
The reasons people don’t like Qatar
You are a poet and but you don't know it
Only the Greens of main UK parties are committed to rejoin the full EU
1) That stealing a vote wasn't a crime
2) That it might be a crime, but wasn't worth reporting
3) That he was being rouble
4) That he was a racist - somehow giving the name of the occupier of the flat your vote has been diverted to is evil. The chap in question is an old school Lib Dem - not really one of Nature's Nazis.
After that he still went ahead and register a compliant. And then had to demand a crime number. Which they gave him. Except when he called back, the crime number was invalid....
Makes you wonder how many other complaints got shoved into NFA....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHjbay54F4U
While I was well aware of the likes of Jack Warner, I was less aware of the French government connection. I thought Michel Platini was just doing a Blatter, but accusation that it went to the top of France.
These arrangements are pathetic.
As for MM's 10:25 whataboutery, FPTP is a pile of crap anyway. Give us PR.
The ideal time was probably some time in the 70s. The more time passed, the less ideal the timing. But there would never be a better time. The question 'if not now, when?' was pertinent. And the answer '30 years ago' probably not that helpful.
2 Alex Coxes - Winston Churchill and the other Winston Churchill comes to mind...
It is just FP1, of course.
NEW Did the campaign to restore Boris Johnson to the Conservative leadership start in a Soho restaurant on Wednesday night at a meeting of the Bring Back Boris WhatsApp group?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/11/18/what-happened-when-bring-back-boris-whatsapp-group-met-soho/
I’m not there this year, watching from home.
Labour tend to take a frustratingly relaxed view of electoral fraud because it benefits them. (I remember when all-postal votes were introduced for the 2002 (or thereabouts) European elections someone from Labour (Peter Hain, or someone like him) declaring that increased electoral fraud was an acceptable price to pay for increased turnout.)
But I do see your point as well.
Both sides here see themselves as morally in the right, and have a reasonably good case in doing so.
https://twitter.com/steverichards14/status/1593560581591560192
It's basically the same trick as they played with individual electoral registration.
Come up with a new system which is going to have little impact on older voters but will just happen to disenfranchise many younger voters unless they really get their finger out to avoid their vote being suppressed. But many won't until its too late.
Then it worked a treat for Cameron (in 2015) because older people didn't move around a lot, in contrast to younger people, so pensioners were pretty well all transferred automatically onto the new electoral roll with little difficulty but young people weren't. Areas of poorer private rented accommodation and ethnic minority populations saw the most problems. It probably did personally for Cameron, as the problem was still there in 2016 at the Brexit referendum after which he went.
Now something similar is going to apply to when you actually go to the polling station.
The way things are going, voter suppression in the UK is going to reach levels unseen outside of a few US states.
This new political reality will take time to sink in, but when it does the Tories have some big challenges. What's the point of a high tax Tory party?
I live in the most multicultural country in the world, one where the indigenous population have to learn another language just to be able to go shopping in the local mall. I worked for a company with 115 nationalities among its staff, all working in the same country.
Part of me is hoping England fans still manage to disgrace themselves even in the face of utter Qatari joylessness. Something to be obscurely proud of.
Blackburn with Darwen (Darwen South) - Lab GAIN from Con
Bolsover (Pinxton) - Lab Hold
Blackpool (Greenlands) - Lab GAIN from Con
Glasgow (Linn) - Lab Hold
Oldham (Hollinwood) - Lab Hold
Rhondda Cynon Taf (Abercynon) - Lab Hold
Shetland (Shetland West) - Ind Hold
Suffolk (Beccles) - Grn Hold
Good Week/Bad Week Index
Lab +316
Grn +50
SNP -7
PC -7
LDm -14
Con -129
Adjusted Seat Value
Lab +5.3
Grn +0.8
SNP -0.1
PC -0.1
LDm -0.2
Con -2.2
Labour doing positively across the board, ranging from decent in Oldham to very good n Bolsover and Glasgow.
Green held very well in Suffolk. Not much for the LibDems, SNP or PC to celebrate.
Another poor week for the Cons - not their worst recently, but still pretty terrible.
Of course it is true that younger people move around more and have more temporary addresses as they look to get going in their careers or their studies. It is inevitable that more of them will fall through the cracks once they have left home. Efforts should be made to encourage them to take this seriously and to be registered. But I do not see anything in this country that comes within a million miles of the US systems which can prevent those with a conviction from voting (when convicts for lots of social reasons and naked racism are preponderately black) in the UK, and that is a good thing.