There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
In all fairness to Duguid, he is not alone, the Fat former- Controller is trying to resurrect the unicorn dream despite all the evidence pointing to him having already royally f***** up.
I use Duggie as a prime example. Here is the man* who responds to his constituency being screwed over by his government by asking fawning lickspittle questions of the same PM Johnson who just screwed him.
He's proven he doesn't care about the interests of his constituency and the latest noise from him on Brexit just reinforces this. "I'm listening to fishermen, Brexit has been great" he says. That the local fishing industry association keeps detailing why Brexit has screwed them shows two things about Tories.
They aren't interested in making Brexit work. Their CAP/CFP payments system are a disaster as the industry keeps telling them. And they think voters are so stupid as to not notice the huge cost rises and lack of availability as the supermarket photos keep showing and wonder if the farmers and fishermen know more about it than their Tory MP.
Yes, people tend not to know how stuff works. And the Tories and their spiv media friends have worked very hard to weaponise that ignorance. But the polls show the scales are being washed from the eyes..
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
The figures I saw recently were that UK fishermen were landing nearly 20k tonnes more fish than pre-Brexit and that will increase for the next several years as EU rights wind down. The oddity was that nearly all of that extra 20k tonnes was being landed at Peterhead with most of the English ports pretty level. This piece from the BBC has some of the detail: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/64430216
- “… if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views…”
Oh look! Second post-resignation poll in a row with SNP well above that YouGov level (which was 38% incidentally, not the 29% shouted out in the PB piece.)
Funny how neither the Savanta (SNP 42%) nor this Survation poll got reported by PB. I thought this was meant to be a service for punters?
The SNP remain in a strong position in our 1st poll that has fieldwork conducted after Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last week. At 43% the party would be just 2% shy of their solid 2019 Westminster showing.
That is before the Labour attack machine lays into Kate Forbes as an anti abortion member of an anti homosexual marriage church, if as is likely she succeeds Sturgeon as FM
Wrong. On the new boundaries SLab would gain just 5 SNP seats, balanced out by the SNP gaining 4 SCon seats. The British Assimilationist parties would still be floundering:
SNP 47 seats (-1) Assimilationists 10 seats (+1)
As for your Forbes prediction: duly screenshotted.
- “… if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views…”
Oh look! Second post-resignation poll in a row with SNP well above that YouGov level (which was 38% incidentally, not the 29% shouted out in the PB piece.)
Funny how neither the Savanta (SNP 42%) nor this Survation poll got reported by PB. I thought this was meant to be a service for punters?
The SNP remain in a strong position in our 1st poll that has fieldwork conducted after Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last week. At 43% the party would be just 2% shy of their solid 2019 Westminster showing.
That is before the Labour attack machine lays into Kate Forbes as an anti abortion member of an anti homosexual marriage church, if as is likely she succeeds Sturgeon as FM
Don't think the Forbes thing will change that many votes TBH, apart from some middle class SNP types switching to the Greens. She can easily say I have my personal views but I recognise others don't and the laws remain the same.
"I feel confident in my Labour largest party in a hung parliament position, if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views but Starmer needs to up his game." @TSE
Good morning all.
1. Starmer doesn't need to up his game
2. It's good that he is no Blair. Boris and Cameron have made that kind of politician toxic.
3. Starmer has expunged Corbyn's anti-semitic legacy
4. Labour don't need Scotland but they are recovering well there.
5. Believe the polls
6. I am not merely confident, I am certain, that Labour will win a thumping great majority. We have witnessed a sea change.
7. But you are right. This won't be 1997 Redux. It will be far, far, worse for the tories. In 1997 the economy was in great shape. Now it has tanked. Everyone I know is STILL talking about that Liz Truss budget and Labour will continue to remind us of it. The tories have done 1000x worse in the last 4 years than they did back then on every level, including corruption and sleaze. Which is really saying something.
They are in for an absolute pounding. 100-150 seats but my latest reckoning is that they may go sub 100.
Did you hear that dreadful Rishi Sunak speech in Munich? OMFG. He sounds like a precocious 14 year old reading his script (the teacher gave it a C+) in front of the class, very poorly. Really eye-wateringly poorly. This man is going to get savaged during the election campaign.
The 100-150 band ought to be possible with a half-decent leader. But the Tories don’t have a half-decent leader.
I watched and it was fine and he answered questions well.
Compared to Starmer, whose speeches making watching paint dry exciting, Sunak is a perfectly good speaker
They’re both reasonable but not electrifying speakers.
In recent* years Blair, Hague, Cameron, Miliband, May and Johnson were all good orators. Brown, Howard, Corbyn, Starmer and Sunak mediocre. Truss and IDS awful. Kinnock was world class.
Corbyn was overrated as a speaker. His fans loved him but I always felt his oratory was awkward and disjointed.
*as I get older “recent” takes on a more extended meaning.
Where do we get the notion that Johnson is a great orator from exactly? From Johnson himself.
If florid language and outrageous pomposity is your bag well fair enough, but on the flip side we have Peppa Pig.
Partly that, and partly very good editing.
Doing a long set-piece speech well requires planning and effort, which have never been Johnson's strong points.
- “… if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views…”
Oh look! Second post-resignation poll in a row with SNP well above that YouGov level (which was 38% incidentally, not the 29% shouted out in the PB piece.)
Funny how neither the Savanta (SNP 42%) nor this Survation poll got reported by PB. I thought this was meant to be a service for punters?
The SNP remain in a strong position in our 1st poll that has fieldwork conducted after Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last week. At 43% the party would be just 2% shy of their solid 2019 Westminster showing.
That is before the Labour attack machine lays into Kate Forbes as an anti abortion member of an anti homosexual marriage church, if as is likely she succeeds Sturgeon as FM
Don't think the Forbes thing will change that many votes TBH, apart from some middle class SNP types switching to the Greens. She can easily say I have my personal views but I recognise others don't and the laws remain the same.
“The Forbes thing” is purely a figment of Franco boi’s imagination.
"I feel confident in my Labour largest party in a hung parliament position, if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views but Starmer needs to up his game." @TSE
Good morning all.
1. Starmer doesn't need to up his game
2. It's good that he is no Blair. Boris and Cameron have made that kind of politician toxic.
3. Starmer has expunged Corbyn's anti-semitic legacy
4. Labour don't need Scotland but they are recovering well there.
5. Believe the polls
6. I am not merely confident, I am certain, that Labour will win a thumping great majority. We have witnessed a sea change.
7. But you are right. This won't be 1997 Redux. It will be far, far, worse for the tories. In 1997 the economy was in great shape. Now it has tanked. Everyone I know is STILL talking about that Liz Truss budget and Labour will continue to remind us of it. The tories have done 1000x worse in the last 4 years than they did back then on every level, including corruption and sleaze. Which is really saying something.
They are in for an absolute pounding. 100-150 seats but my latest reckoning is that they may go sub 100.
Did you hear that dreadful Rishi Sunak speech in Munich? OMFG. He sounds like a precocious 14 year old reading his script (the teacher gave it a C+) in front of the class, very poorly. Really eye-wateringly poorly. This man is going to get savaged during the election campaign.
The 100-150 band ought to be possible with a half-decent leader. But the Tories don’t have a half-decent leader.
I watched and it was fine and he answered questions well.
Compared to Starmer, whose speeches making watching paint dry exciting, Sunak is a perfectly good speaker
They’re both reasonable but not electrifying speakers.
In recent* years Blair, Hague, Cameron, Miliband, May and Johnson were all good orators. Brown, Howard, Corbyn, Starmer and Sunak mediocre. Truss and IDS awful. Kinnock was world class.
Corbyn was overrated as a speaker. His fans loved him but I always felt his oratory was awkward and disjointed.
*as I get older “recent” takes on a more extended meaning.
Where do we get the notion that Johnson is a great orator from exactly? From Johnson himself.
If florid language and outrageous pomposity is your bag well fair enough, but on the flip side we have Peppa Pig.
Yes. Johnson is terrible. Throwing in lots of big words and classics references doesn't make someone who witters on about Peppa Pig World, tells people to get stuffed and hides in fridges a great orator.
Boris Johnson is the Gilderoy Lockhart of politics.
The spectacle of the last two Tory prime ministers, having failed abysmally in their own premierships, trying to undermine their successor in the most public way possible, is an absolute joy to behold.
Is it too much to hope that Theresa May will join in? Or David Cameron?
Yes, because they've got more class than that. Possibly not much more in Cameron's case, but sufficiently more.
Heck, even Heath stuck to sour muttering in the main.
Theresa May has made repeated interventions, the most recent being to advocate strongly against amending her ill-considered modern slavery bill which is being used as an unanswerable asylum claim by boat people. Cameron maintains a classy silence, but Osborne intervenes enough for both of them, constantly telling everyone what to do in the most strident of terms, and most recently seen cockily insisting that no Tory Government would ever leave the ECHR regardless of whether it was in their manifesto. He even runs a newspaper to do so.
The idea former PMs shouldn't intervene which some Express is a nonsense in my books. They may choose not to as being counter productive in most instances since most careers end in failure etc, but no reason they couldn't.
Both May and Boris absolutely should feel the right to do so as both are still MPs. Any interventions should be judged on merit.
Osborne was never leader so why shouldn't he become a pundit?
By contrast, the Sunakites spent the Truss era constantly briefing the papers about how deluded, mad, and awful Truss was, the dreadful fractious state of the party etc.
To be fair, Sunak was correct on this. Truss is the new Ratner.
Sometimes they were correct but disloyal, sometimes they lied outright. A Truss meeting with the PCP was widely briefed as a total disaster, but others who were there later said it was completely normal. I disagree with your opinion on Truss, but it doesn't alter the point either way.
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
In all fairness to Duguid, he is not alone, the Fat former- Controller is trying to resurrect the unicorn dream despite all the evidence pointing to him having already royally f***** up.
I use Duggie as a prime example. Here is the man* who responds to his constituency being screwed over by his government by asking fawning lickspittle questions of the same PM Johnson who just screwed him.
He's proven he doesn't care about the interests of his constituency and the latest noise from him on Brexit just reinforces this. "I'm listening to fishermen, Brexit has been great" he says. That the local fishing industry association keeps detailing why Brexit has screwed them shows two things about Tories.
They aren't interested in making Brexit work. Their CAP/CFP payments system are a disaster as the industry keeps telling them. And they think voters are so stupid as to not notice the huge cost rises and lack of availability as the supermarket photos keep showing and wonder if the farmers and fishermen know more about it than their Tory MP.
Yes, people tend not to know how stuff works. And the Tories and their spiv media friends have worked very hard to weaponise that ignorance. But the polls show the scales are being washed from the eyes..
TBF, as the child sex grooming scandals showed, there were a good number of Labour MPs and councils who were just as eager - if not more so - to turn a blind eye to their constituents literally getting screwed. And did so to protect their own political power
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
The figures I saw recently were that UK fishermen were landing nearly 20k tonnes more fish than pre-Brexit and that will increase for the next several years as EU rights wind down. The oddity was that nearly all of that extra 20k tonnes was being landed at Peterhead with most of the English ports pretty level. This piece from the BBC has some of the detail: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/64430216
Can't treat the fisheries as a single whole, as indeed the article points out. The Scottish inshore fishermen were always much unhappier about Brexit than the big pelagic skippers of which the Brexiters made much at the time.
"I feel confident in my Labour largest party in a hung parliament position, if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views but Starmer needs to up his game." @TSE
Good morning all.
1. Starmer doesn't need to up his game
2. It's good that he is no Blair. Boris and Cameron have made that kind of politician toxic.
3. Starmer has expunged Corbyn's anti-semitic legacy
4. Labour don't need Scotland but they are recovering well there.
5. Believe the polls
6. I am not merely confident, I am certain, that Labour will win a thumping great majority. We have witnessed a sea change.
7. But you are right. This won't be 1997 Redux. It will be far, far, worse for the tories. In 1997 the economy was in great shape. Now it has tanked. Everyone I know is STILL talking about that Liz Truss budget and Labour will continue to remind us of it. The tories have done 1000x worse in the last 4 years than they did back then on every level, including corruption and sleaze. Which is really saying something.
They are in for an absolute pounding. 100-150 seats but my latest reckoning is that they may go sub 100.
Did you hear that dreadful Rishi Sunak speech in Munich? OMFG. He sounds like a precocious 14 year old reading his script (the teacher gave it a C+) in front of the class, very poorly. Really eye-wateringly poorly. This man is going to get savaged during the election campaign.
The 100-150 band ought to be possible with a half-decent leader. But the Tories don’t have a half-decent leader.
I watched and it was fine and he answered questions well.
Compared to Starmer, whose speeches making watching paint dry exciting, Sunak is a perfectly good speaker
They’re both reasonable but not electrifying speakers.
In recent* years Blair, Hague, Cameron, Miliband, May and Johnson were all good orators. Brown, Howard, Corbyn, Starmer and Sunak mediocre. Truss and IDS awful. Kinnock was world class.
Corbyn was overrated as a speaker. His fans loved him but I always felt his oratory was awkward and disjointed.
*as I get older “recent” takes on a more extended meaning.
Hague, Cameron, Blair and Kinnock were by far the best speakers and orators of the last 40 years amongst the main party leaders. Though 2 of them won, 2 of them also lost so great oratory is not enough to win general elections.
Boris was more amusing than great speaker
Gordon Brown wrote good speeches but tended to the head down and gabble school of delivery. His speeches were better read than heard. Older PBers might remember Peter Lilley as a Conservative on those lines. Ken Clarke used to laugh at his own jokes, which rather spoiled them.
I am genuinely puzzled why modern politicians do not undertake training, since they will not have been able to learn their craft at the mass meetings of old.
"I feel confident in my Labour largest party in a hung parliament position, if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views but Starmer needs to up his game." @TSE
Good morning all.
1. Starmer doesn't need to up his game
2. It's good that he is no Blair. Boris and Cameron have made that kind of politician toxic.
3. Starmer has expunged Corbyn's anti-semitic legacy
4. Labour don't need Scotland but they are recovering well there.
5. Believe the polls
6. I am not merely confident, I am certain, that Labour will win a thumping great majority. We have witnessed a sea change.
7. But you are right. This won't be 1997 Redux. It will be far, far, worse for the tories. In 1997 the economy was in great shape. Now it has tanked. Everyone I know is STILL talking about that Liz Truss budget and Labour will continue to remind us of it. The tories have done 1000x worse in the last 4 years than they did back then on every level, including corruption and sleaze. Which is really saying something.
They are in for an absolute pounding. 100-150 seats but my latest reckoning is that they may go sub 100.
Did you hear that dreadful Rishi Sunak speech in Munich? OMFG. He sounds like a precocious 14 year old reading his script (the teacher gave it a C+) in front of the class, very poorly. Really eye-wateringly poorly. This man is going to get savaged during the election campaign.
The 100-150 band ought to be possible with a half-decent leader. But the Tories don’t have a half-decent leader.
I watched and it was fine and he answered questions well.
Compared to Starmer, whose speeches making watching paint dry exciting, Sunak is a perfectly good speaker
They’re both reasonable but not electrifying speakers.
In recent* years Blair, Hague, Cameron, Miliband, May and Johnson were all good orators. Brown, Howard, Corbyn, Starmer and Sunak mediocre. Truss and IDS awful. Kinnock was world class.
Corbyn was overrated as a speaker. His fans loved him but I always felt his oratory was awkward and disjointed.
*as I get older “recent” takes on a more extended meaning.
Where do we get the notion that Johnson is a great orator from exactly? From Johnson himself.
If florid language and outrageous pomposity is your bag well fair enough, but on the flip side we have Peppa Pig.
Boris is an entertaining and unconventional speaker, I've always thought the complaints about him being a poor orator somewhat miss the point by assessing on a more technical level than a casual user of the word means.
- “… if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views…”
Oh look! Second post-resignation poll in a row with SNP well above that YouGov level (which was 38% incidentally, not the 29% shouted out in the PB piece.)
Funny how neither the Savanta (SNP 42%) nor this Survation poll got reported by PB. I thought this was meant to be a service for punters?
The SNP remain in a strong position in our 1st poll that has fieldwork conducted after Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last week. At 43% the party would be just 2% shy of their solid 2019 Westminster showing.
That is before the Labour attack machine lays into Kate Forbes as an anti abortion member of an anti homosexual marriage church, if as is likely she succeeds Sturgeon as FM
Wrong. On the new boundaries SLab would gain just 5 SNP seats, balanced out by the SNP gaining 4 SCon seats. The British Assimilationist parties would still be floundering:
SNP 47 seats (-1) Assimilationists 10 seats (+1)
As for your Forbes prediction: duly screenshotted.
Forbes is an interesting one. There is some risk to being devoutly religious in politics in nations as secular as ours. Tim Farron being the obvious example.
My own Scottish ancestors were Free Presbyterian ministers, and it is still part of the family culture. It is one thing that would prevent me from standing for election myself.
On topic, true but the rules that generated a Labour landslide in 1997 might no longer be the same, so it isn't as simple as reading across to the maths.
Once things for sure, the Tories won't get no votes - they still have a base, and there's a centre-right coalition out there which is anti-Labour - so it depends to what extent that rallies and where.
As usual, Labour won't be their worst enemy - that will be themselves.
The spectacle of the last two Tory prime ministers, having failed abysmally in their own premierships, trying to undermine their successor in the most public way possible, is an absolute joy to behold.
Is it too much to hope that Theresa May will join in? Or David Cameron?
Yes, because they've got more class than that. Possibly not much more in Cameron's case, but sufficiently more.
Heck, even Heath stuck to sour muttering in the main.
Theresa May has made repeated interventions, the most recent being to advocate strongly against amending her ill-considered modern slavery bill which is being used as an unanswerable asylum claim by boat people. Cameron maintains a classy silence, but Osborne intervenes enough for both of them, constantly telling everyone what to do in the most strident of terms, and most recently seen cockily insisting that no Tory Government would ever leave the ECHR regardless of whether it was in their manifesto. He even runs a newspaper to do so.
The idea former PMs shouldn't intervene which some Express is a nonsense in my books. They may choose not to as being counter productive in most instances since most careers end in failure etc, but no reason they couldn't.
Both May and Boris absolutely should feel the right to do so as both are still MPs. Any interventions should be judged on merit.
Osborne was never leader so why shouldn't he become a pundit?
By contrast, the Sunakites spent the Truss era constantly briefing the papers about how deluded, mad, and awful Truss was, the dreadful fractious state of the party etc.
To be fair, Sunak was correct on this. Truss is the new Ratner, as in the phrase "she Trussed the brand".
"I feel confident in my Labour largest party in a hung parliament position, if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views but Starmer needs to up his game." @TSE
Good morning all.
1. Starmer doesn't need to up his game
2. It's good that he is no Blair. Boris and Cameron have made that kind of politician toxic.
3. Starmer has expunged Corbyn's anti-semitic legacy
4. Labour don't need Scotland but they are recovering well there.
5. Believe the polls
6. I am not merely confident, I am certain, that Labour will win a thumping great majority. We have witnessed a sea change.
7. But you are right. This won't be 1997 Redux. It will be far, far, worse for the tories. In 1997 the economy was in great shape. Now it has tanked. Everyone I know is STILL talking about that Liz Truss budget and Labour will continue to remind us of it. The tories have done 1000x worse in the last 4 years than they did back then on every level, including corruption and sleaze. Which is really saying something.
They are in for an absolute pounding. 100-150 seats but my latest reckoning is that they may go sub 100.
Did you hear that dreadful Rishi Sunak speech in Munich? OMFG. He sounds like a precocious 14 year old reading his script (the teacher gave it a C+) in front of the class, very poorly. Really eye-wateringly poorly. This man is going to get savaged during the election campaign.
The 100-150 band ought to be possible with a half-decent leader. But the Tories don’t have a half-decent leader.
I watched and it was fine and he answered questions well.
Compared to Starmer, whose speeches making watching paint dry exciting, Sunak is a perfectly good speaker
They’re both reasonable but not electrifying speakers.
In recent* years Blair, Hague, Cameron, Miliband, May and Johnson were all good orators. Brown, Howard, Corbyn, Starmer and Sunak mediocre. Truss and IDS awful. Kinnock was world class.
Corbyn was overrated as a speaker. His fans loved him but I always felt his oratory was awkward and disjointed.
*as I get older “recent” takes on a more extended meaning.
Hague, Cameron, Blair and Kinnock were by far the best speakers and orators of the last 40 years amongst the main party leaders. Though 2 of them won, 2 of them also lost so great oratory is not enough to win general elections.
Boris was more amusing than great speaker
Gordon Brown wrote good speeches but tended to the head down and gabble school of delivery. His speeches were better read than heard. Older PBers might remember Peter Lilley as a Conservative on those lines. Ken Clarke used to laugh at his own jokes, which rather spoiled them.
I am genuinely puzzled why modern politicians do not undertake training, since they will not have been able to learn their craft at the mass meetings of old.
I suspect that Brown's vision was too poor to use a teleprompter. Over the decades we have got used to politicians doing their speeches that way, rather than from written notes.
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
The figures I saw recently were that UK fishermen were landing nearly 20k tonnes more fish than pre-Brexit and that will increase for the next several years as EU rights wind down. The oddity w as that nearly all of that extra 20k tonnes was being landed at Peterhead with most of the English ports pretty level. This piece from the BBC has some of the detail: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/64430216
Can't treat the fisheries as a single whole, as indeed the article points out. The Scottish inshore fishermen were always much unhappier about Brexit than the big pelagic skippers of which the Brexiters made much at the time.
So, overall, UK fishing is gaining additional catches but some species are being restricted by conservation requirements. Or, put another way, the gains are Brexit gains and the losses are for causes that are not Brexit.
"I feel confident in my Labour largest party in a hung parliament position, if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views but Starmer needs to up his game." @TSE
Good morning all.
1. Starmer doesn't need to up his game
2. It's good that he is no Blair. Boris and Cameron have made that kind of politician toxic.
3. Starmer has expunged Corbyn's anti-semitic legacy
4. Labour don't need Scotland but they are recovering well there.
5. Believe the polls
6. I am not merely confident, I am certain, that Labour will win a thumping great majority. We have witnessed a sea change.
7. But you are right. This won't be 1997 Redux. It will be far, far, worse for the tories. In 1997 the economy was in great shape. Now it has tanked. Everyone I know is STILL talking about that Liz Truss budget and Labour will continue to remind us of it. The tories have done 1000x worse in the last 4 years than they did back then on every level, including corruption and sleaze. Which is really saying something.
They are in for an absolute pounding. 100-150 seats but my latest reckoning is that they may go sub 100.
Did you hear that dreadful Rishi Sunak speech in Munich? OMFG. He sounds like a precocious 14 year old reading his script (the teacher gave it a C+) in front of the class, very poorly. Really eye-wateringly poorly. This man is going to get savaged during the election campaign.
The 100-150 band ought to be possible with a half-decent leader. But the Tories don’t have a half-decent leader.
I watched and it was fine and he answered questions well.
Compared to Starmer, whose speeches making watching paint dry exciting, Sunak is a perfectly good speaker
They’re both reasonable but not electrifying speakers.
In recent* years Blair, Hague, Cameron, Miliband, May and Johnson were all good orators. Brown, Howard, Corbyn, Starmer and Sunak mediocre. Truss and IDS awful. Kinnock was world class.
Corbyn was overrated as a speaker. His fans loved him but I always felt his oratory was awkward and disjointed.
*as I get older “recent” takes on a more extended meaning.
Hague, Cameron, Blair and Kinnock were by far the best speakers and orators of the last 40 years amongst the main party leaders. Though 2 of them won, 2 of them also lost so great oratory is not enough to win general elections.
Boris was more amusing than great speaker
Gordon Brown wrote good speeches but tended to the head down and gabble school of delivery. His speeches were better read than heard. Older PBers might remember Peter Lilley as a Conservative on those lines. Ken Clarke used to laugh at his own jokes, which rather spoiled them.
I am genuinely puzzled why modern politicians do not undertake training, since they will not have been able to learn their craft at the mass meetings of old.
They only need training on soundbites in order to succeed.
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
The figures I saw recently were that UK fishermen were landing nearly 20k tonnes more fish than pre-Brexit and that will increase for the next several years as EU rights wind down. The oddity w as that nearly all of that extra 20k tonnes was being landed at Peterhead with most of the English ports pretty level. This piece from the BBC has some of the detail: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/64430216
Can't treat the fisheries as a single whole, as indeed the article points out. The Scottish inshore fishermen were always much unhappier about Brexit than the big pelagic skippers of which the Brexiters made much at the time.
So, overall, UK fishing is gaining additional catches but some species are being restricted by conservation requirements. Or, put another way, the gains are Brexit gains and the losses are for causes that are not Brexit.
Not relevant if you can't sell or export the stuff. Which my local processor was having great difficulty with.
Edit: sorry, bit too curt. You're quite right about the input stuff. But the output is also a worry.
- “… if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views…”
Oh look! Second post-resignation poll in a row with SNP well above that YouGov level (which was 38% incidentally, not the 29% shouted out in the PB piece.)
Funny how neither the Savanta (SNP 42%) nor this Survation poll got reported by PB. I thought this was meant to be a service for punters?
The SNP remain in a strong position in our 1st poll that has fieldwork conducted after Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last week. At 43% the party would be just 2% shy of their solid 2019 Westminster showing.
That is before the Labour attack machine lays into Kate Forbes as an anti abortion member of an anti homosexual marriage church, if as is likely she succeeds Sturgeon as FM
Wrong. On the new boundaries SLab would gain just 5 SNP seats, balanced out by the SNP gaining 4 SCon seats. The British Assimilationist parties would still be floundering:
SNP 47 seats (-1) Assimilationists 10 seats (+1)
As for your Forbes prediction: duly screenshotted.
Forbes is an interesting one. There is some risk to being devoutly religious in politics in nations as secular as ours. Tim Farron being the obvious example.
My own Scottish ancestors were Free Presbyterian ministers, and it is still part of the family culture. It is one thing that would prevent me from standing for election myself.
Tim Farron was a bit hard done by but he made a rod for his own back by dissembling and then lying about it.
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
The figures I saw recently were that UK fishermen were landing nearly 20k tonnes more fish than pre-Brexit and that will increase for the next several years as EU rights wind down. The oddity was that nearly all of that extra 20k tonnes was being landed at Peterhead with most of the English ports pretty level. This piece from the BBC has some of the detail: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/64430216
Can't treat the fisheries as a single whole, as indeed the article points out. The Scottish inshore fishermen were always much unhappier about Brexit than the big pelagic skippers of which the Brexiters made much at the time.
Peterhead fishing bods are amongst the most angry about it. Processing tons more mackerel whilst the rest of the industry - the majority which catches the things our market actually wants - shrinks is not good for the industry.
As I said @DavidL, if Tories want to tell the fishermen they are wrong about fishing then its an open door for that Tory wipoeout. Nothing tends to enrage voters more than people misquoting numbers to claim their lived reality and industrial expertise is wrong
The spectacle of the last two Tory prime ministers, having failed abysmally in their own premierships, trying to undermine their successor in the most public way possible, is an absolute joy to behold.
Is it too much to hope that Theresa May will join in? Or David Cameron?
Yes, because they've got more class than that. Possibly not much more in Cameron's case, but sufficiently more.
Heck, even Heath stuck to sour muttering in the main.
Theresa May has made repeated interventions, the most recent being to advocate strongly against amending her ill-considered modern slavery bill which is being used as an unanswerable asylum claim by boat people. Cameron maintains a classy silence, but Osborne intervenes enough for both of them, constantly telling everyone what to do in the most strident of terms, and most recently seen cockily insisting that no Tory Government would ever leave the ECHR regardless of whether it was in their manifesto. He even runs a newspaper to do so.
The idea former PMs shouldn't intervene which some Express is a nonsense in my books. They may choose not to as being counter productive in most instances since most careers end in failure etc, but no reason they couldn't.
Both May and Boris absolutely should feel the right to do so as both are still MPs. Any interventions should be judged on merit.
Osborne was never leader so why shouldn't he become a pundit?
By contrast, the Sunakites spent the Truss era constantly briefing the papers about how deluded, mad, and awful Truss was, the dreadful fractious state of the party etc.
To be fair, Sunak was correct on this. Truss is the new Ratner.
Sometimes they were correct but disloyal, sometimes they lied outright. A Truss meeting with the PCP was widely briefed as a total disaster, but others who were there later said it was completely normal. I disagree with your opinion on Truss, but it doesn't alter the point either way.
It's clear that those two accounts can't both be correct, but unless we were in the room ourselves, it's hard to say which is more truthful.
And the bottom line is this.Truss lasted about six weeks as PM, and about two of those were mourning our dear late Queen. Even if Team Sunak were ruthless political assassins, that still requires a hell of a screwup on her part.
I am not going to get drawn into this FBPE Sunday circle-jerk for the umpteenth time but you'd have largely empty supermarket shelves of fruit and vegetables late on a Saturday night 10 years ago too.
Domestic fruit (in Winter time) is grown in polytunnels and the increase in wholesale gas prices has meant these are now expensive to heat, together with higher fuel costs for transportation - this is the real problem.
The only contributing factor from Brexit would be health checks on seeds entering the UK, to rule out plant viruses that can affect crops, which wouldn't affect this year's haul because, um, there's no time for them to be planted and grow, and it's a pretty marginal issue anyway that can be planned for. You could just about argue that's there an issue of seasonal labour for harvesting, but that's also a European-wide and even a global issue now with war, inflation, inclement weather and unprecedented demand being the fundamental issues.
- “… if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views…”
Oh look! Second post-resignation poll in a row with SNP well above that YouGov level (which was 38% incidentally, not the 29% shouted out in the PB piece.)
Funny how neither the Savanta (SNP 42%) nor this Survation poll got reported by PB. I thought this was meant to be a service for punters?
The SNP remain in a strong position in our 1st poll that has fieldwork conducted after Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last week. At 43% the party would be just 2% shy of their solid 2019 Westminster showing.
That is before the Labour attack machine lays into Kate Forbes as an anti abortion member of an anti homosexual marriage church, if as is likely she succeeds Sturgeon as FM
Don't think the Forbes thing will change that many votes TBH, apart from some middle class SNP types switching to the Greens. She can easily say I have my personal views but I recognise others don't and the laws remain the same.
“The Forbes thing” is purely a figment of Franco boi’s imagination.
Has he said it yet today? *checks* Yes, so we're due two more statements today.
"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice: That alone should encourage the crew. Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."
I am not going to get drawn into this FBPE Sunday circle-jerk for the umpteenth time but you'd have largely empty supermarket shelves of fruit and vegetables late on a Saturday night 10 years ago too.
Domestic fruit (in Winter time) is grown in polytunnels and the increase in wholesale gas prices has meant these are now expensive to heat, together with higher fuel costs for transportation - this is the real problem.
The only contributing factor from Brexit would be health checks on seeds entering the UK, to rule out plant viruses that can affect crops, which wouldn't affect this year's haul because, um, there's no time for them to be planted and grow, and it's a pretty marginal issue anyway that can be planned for. You could just about argue that's there an issue of seasonal labour for harvesting, but that's also a European-wide and even a global issue now with war, inflation, inclement weather and unprecedented demand being the fundamental issues.
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
The figures I saw recently were that UK fishermen were landing nearly 20k tonnes more fish than pre-Brexit and that will increase for the next several years as EU rights wind down. The oddity w as that nearly all of that extra 20k tonnes was being landed at Peterhead with most of the English ports pretty level. This piece from the BBC has some of the detail: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/64430216
Can't treat the fisheries as a single whole, as indeed the article points out. The Scottish inshore fishermen were always much unhappier about Brexit than the big pelagic skippers of which the Brexiters made much at the time.
So, overall, UK fishing is gaining additional catches but some species are being restricted by conservation requirements. Or, put another way, the gains are Brexit gains and the losses are for causes that are not Brexit.
Not relevant if you can't sell or export the stuff. Which my local processor was having great difficulty with.
Edit: sorry, bit too curt. You're quite right about the input stuff. But the output is also a worry.
The regulations on that have certainly changed and like all change that was initially unwelcome. I think shellfish were particularly affected as being "live" exports. But is this still a problem? Not seen much grumbling recently.
I am not going to get drawn into this FBPE Sunday circle-jerk for the umpteenth time but you'd have largely empty supermarket shelves of fruit and vegetables late on a Saturday night 10 years ago too.
Domestic fruit (in Winter time) is grown in polytunnels and the increase in wholesale gas prices has meant these are now expensive to heat, together with higher fuel costs for transportation - this is the real problem.
The only contributing factor from Brexit would be health checks on seeds entering the UK, to rule out plant viruses that can affect crops, which wouldn't affect this year's haul because, um, there's no time for them to be planted and grow, and it's a pretty marginal issue anyway that can be planned for. You could just about argue that's there an issue of seasonal labour for harvesting, but that's also a European-wide and even a global issue now with war, inflation, inclement weather and unprecedented demand being the fundamental issues.
"I feel confident in my Labour largest party in a hung parliament position, if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views but Starmer needs to up his game." @TSE
Good morning all.
1. Starmer doesn't need to up his game
2. It's good that he is no Blair. Boris and Cameron have made that kind of politician toxic.
3. Starmer has expunged Corbyn's anti-semitic legacy
4. Labour don't need Scotland but they are recovering well there.
5. Believe the polls
6. I am not merely confident, I am certain, that Labour will win a thumping great majority. We have witnessed a sea change.
7. But you are right. This won't be 1997 Redux. It will be far, far, worse for the tories. In 1997 the economy was in great shape. Now it has tanked. Everyone I know is STILL talking about that Liz Truss budget and Labour will continue to remind us of it. The tories have done 1000x worse in the last 4 years than they did back then on every level, including corruption and sleaze. Which is really saying something.
They are in for an absolute pounding. 100-150 seats but my latest reckoning is that they may go sub 100.
Did you hear that dreadful Rishi Sunak speech in Munich? OMFG. He sounds like a precocious 14 year old reading his script (the teacher gave it a C+) in front of the class, very poorly. Really eye-wateringly poorly. This man is going to get savaged during the election campaign.
The 100-150 band ought to be possible with a half-decent leader. But the Tories don’t have a half-decent leader.
This is the bit that "Starmer isn't Blair" types miss. For all his weaknesses and his tendency to say "wunt", Major was (and is) a considerably effective at the basics of politics than Sunak. Bluntly, he needed to be to get where he did.
And given that Sunak's ratings are still falling from their honeymoon, I wouldn't be shocked if the gap between the two leaders ends up in a similar place to 1997.
If Starmer has a problem, and I don't think it's a major one, it's that he needs to demonstrate his real personality; if such a thing exits. The small target, managerial, at-least-we're-not-the-tories policy lite strategy is effective but it doesn't really give you a sense of what SKS is like. I've never met Sunak but I know exactly what he'd be like if I encountered him in person. A pathetic boring little dweeb who's never heard of Rodrigo Moreno but would try to tell me about Microsoft Azure or some fucking thing. I have no idea what to expect from a personal encounter with SKS. Maybe he's a right laugh?
He would bore the tits off you for sure. I think he is as empty and boring as he makes out, given he does not even know the difference between a man and a woman what hope he could be interesting.
I am not going to get drawn into this FBPE Sunday circle-jerk for the umpteenth time but you'd have largely empty supermarket shelves of fruit and vegetables late on a Saturday night 10 years ago too.
Domestic fruit (in Winter time) is grown in polytunnels and the increase in wholesale gas prices has meant these are now expensive to heat, together with higher fuel costs for transportation - this is the real problem.
The only contributing factor from Brexit would be health checks on seeds entering the UK, to rule out plant viruses that can affect crops, which wouldn't affect this year's haul because, um, there's no time for them to be planted and grow, and it's a pretty marginal issue anyway that can be planned for. You could just about argue that's there an issue of seasonal labour for harvesting, but that's also a European-wide and even a global issue now with war, inflation, inclement weather and unprecedented demand being the fundamental issues.
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Have a think about that again for a moment.
Reflect on what Twitter is, how it works, your self-selection bias in who you follow, and their selection bias in what they choose to post and how they choose to frame it.
For contrast, I could post a picture of totally full Morrison or Waitrose shelves, find one of a near-empty German one, and praise the genius and resilience of the British supply chain next to the uselessness of the Olaf government in managing high energy prices and labour shortages, if I wanted to.
I'd get loads of likes from my followers, which would then show up in their feeds, and few would question it.
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
The figures I saw recently were that UK fishermen were landing nearly 20k tonnes more fish than pre-Brexit and that will increase for the next several years as EU rights wind down. The oddity w as that nearly all of that extra 20k tonnes was being landed at Peterhead with most of the English ports pretty level. This piece from the BBC has some of the detail: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/64430216
Can't treat the fisheries as a single whole, as indeed the article points out. The Scottish inshore fishermen were always much unhappier about Brexit than the big pelagic skippers of which the Brexiters made much at the time.
So, overall, UK fishing is gaining additional catches but some species are being restricted by conservation requirements. Or, put another way, the gains are Brexit gains and the losses are for causes that are not Brexit.
Not relevant if you can't sell or export the stuff. Which my local processor was having great difficulty with.
Edit: sorry, bit too curt. You're quite right about the input stuff. But the output is also a worry.
The regulations on that have certainly changed and like all change that was initially unwelcome. I think shellfish were particularly affected as being "live" exports. But is this still a problem? Not seen much grumbling recently.
I am not going to get drawn into this FBPE Sunday circle-jerk for the umpteenth time but you'd have largely empty supermarket shelves of fruit and vegetables late on a Saturday night 10 years ago too.
Domestic fruit (in Winter time) is grown in polytunnels and the increase in wholesale gas prices has meant these are now expensive to heat, together with higher fuel costs for transportation - this is the real problem.
The only contributing factor from Brexit would be health checks on seeds entering the UK, to rule out plant viruses that can affect crops, which wouldn't affect this year's haul because, um, there's no time for them to be planted and grow, and it's a pretty marginal issue anyway that can be planned for. You could just about argue that's there an issue of seasonal labour for harvesting, but that's also a European-wide and even a global issue now with war, inflation, inclement weather and unprecedented demand being the fundamental issues.
A FORMER SNP minister has spoken out against Kate Forbes becoming leader of the party – saying her previous comments on LGBT rights were not "acceptable".
Marco Biagi, who voted for gay marriage while an MSP, said Forbes’s past refusal to say she supported the policy was “enough” for him to oppose any leadership pitch from the Finance Secretary.
Forbes made a comment against abortion at an event in 2018 and repeatedly evaded questions on her stance on equal marriage during a podcast interview with The Guardian in 2020.
Sturgeon's mob have the knives out for Forbes and unbelievably trying to make out Humza Useless the halfwit is a contender. They know Robertson is holed below the waterline due to being in Sturgeon's gang. Looks like it is either Forbes or Ash regan. Forbes will need to come out with her independence position soon give Ash's is front and centre. Still big big chance the Murrell's will rig it though.
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
"I feel confident in my Labour largest party in a hung parliament position, if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views but Starmer needs to up his game." @TSE
Good morning all.
1. Starmer doesn't need to up his game
2. It's good that he is no Blair. Boris and Cameron have made that kind of politician toxic.
3. Starmer has expunged Corbyn's anti-semitic legacy
4. Labour don't need Scotland but they are recovering well there.
5. Believe the polls
6. I am not merely confident, I am certain, that Labour will win a thumping great majority. We have witnessed a sea change.
7. But you are right. This won't be 1997 Redux. It will be far, far, worse for the tories. In 1997 the economy was in great shape. Now it has tanked. Everyone I know is STILL talking about that Liz Truss budget and Labour will continue to remind us of it. The tories have done 1000x worse in the last 4 years than they did back then on every level, including corruption and sleaze. Which is really saying something.
They are in for an absolute pounding. 100-150 seats but my latest reckoning is that they may go sub 100.
Did you hear that dreadful Rishi Sunak speech in Munich? OMFG. He sounds like a precocious 14 year old reading his script (the teacher gave it a C+) in front of the class, very poorly. Really eye-wateringly poorly. This man is going to get savaged during the election campaign.
The 100-150 band ought to be possible with a half-decent leader. But the Tories don’t have a half-decent leader.
This is the bit that "Starmer isn't Blair" types miss. For all his weaknesses and his tendency to say "wunt", Major was (and is) a considerably effective at the basics of politics than Sunak. Bluntly, he needed to be to get where he did.
And given that Sunak's ratings are still falling from their honeymoon, I wouldn't be shocked if the gap between the two leaders ends up in a similar place to 1997.
If Starmer has a problem, and I don't think it's a major one, it's that he needs to demonstrate his real personality; if such a thing exits. The small target, managerial, at-least-we're-not-the-tories policy lite strategy is effective but it doesn't really give you a sense of what SKS is like. I've never met Sunak but I know exactly what he'd be like if I encountered him in person. A pathetic boring little dweeb who's never heard of Rodrigo Moreno but would try to tell me about Microsoft Azure or some fucking thing. I have no idea what to expect from a personal encounter with SKS. Maybe he's a right laugh?
He would bore the tits off you for sure. I think he is as empty and boring as he makes out, given he does not even know the difference between a man and a woman what hope he could be interesting.
For me, it's always the eyes when it comes to Starmer - cold, quite mean, quite calculating and certainly not empathetic. In another life and another set of circumstances, he could easily be one of history's Adolf Eichmanns.
"Factionalism has to go... Jeremy Corbyn made our Party the Party of anti-austerity. He was right... He made us the Party that wanted to invest more heavily in our public services and he was right... We build on that, we don't trash it", said Starmer in 2020.
I am not going to get drawn into this FBPE Sunday circle-jerk for the umpteenth time but you'd have largely empty supermarket shelves of fruit and vegetables late on a Saturday night 10 years ago too.
Domestic fruit (in Winter time) is grown in polytunnels and the increase in wholesale gas prices has meant these are now expensive to heat, together with higher fuel costs for transportation - this is the real problem.
The only contributing factor from Brexit would be health checks on seeds entering the UK, to rule out plant viruses that can affect crops, which wouldn't affect this year's haul because, um, there's no time for them to be planted and grow, and it's a pretty marginal issue anyway that can be planned for. You could just about argue that's there an issue of seasonal labour for harvesting, but that's also a European-wide and even a global issue now with war, inflation, inclement weather and unprecedented demand being the fundamental issues.
"I feel confident in my Labour largest party in a hung parliament position, if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views but Starmer needs to up his game." @TSE
Good morning all.
1. Starmer doesn't need to up his game
2. It's good that he is no Blair. Boris and Cameron have made that kind of politician toxic.
3. Starmer has expunged Corbyn's anti-semitic legacy
4. Labour don't need Scotland but they are recovering well there.
5. Believe the polls
6. I am not merely confident, I am certain, that Labour will win a thumping great majority. We have witnessed a sea change.
7. But you are right. This won't be 1997 Redux. It will be far, far, worse for the tories. In 1997 the economy was in great shape. Now it has tanked. Everyone I know is STILL talking about that Liz Truss budget and Labour will continue to remind us of it. The tories have done 1000x worse in the last 4 years than they did back then on every level, including corruption and sleaze. Which is really saying something.
They are in for an absolute pounding. 100-150 seats but my latest reckoning is that they may go sub 100.
Did you hear that dreadful Rishi Sunak speech in Munich? OMFG. He sounds like a precocious 14 year old reading his script (the teacher gave it a C+) in front of the class, very poorly. Really eye-wateringly poorly. This man is going to get savaged during the election campaign.
The 100-150 band ought to be possible with a half-decent leader. But the Tories don’t have a half-decent leader.
I watched and it was fine and he answered questions well.
Compared to Starmer, whose speeches making watching paint dry exciting, Sunak is a perfectly good speaker
They’re both reasonable but not electrifying speakers.
In recent* years Blair, Hague, Cameron, Miliband, May and Johnson were all good orators. Brown, Howard, Corbyn, Starmer and Sunak mediocre. Truss and IDS awful. Kinnock was world class.
Corbyn was overrated as a speaker. His fans loved him but I always felt his oratory was awkward and disjointed.
*as I get older “recent” takes on a more extended meaning.
Hague, Cameron, Blair and Kinnock were by far the best speakers and orators of the last 40 years amongst the main party leaders. Though 2 of them won, 2 of them also lost so great oratory is not enough to win general elections.
Boris was more amusing than great speaker
I agree with all of that. I would be interested in your view of who would have made a good PM (that is not the politics, but the day to day management and dealing with the issues that turn up).
My view is that Michael Howard would have been competent and I think Hague would have been rather good, even though I disagree with their politics. I think Kinnock and IDS would have been poor. This is all a bit unfair of me as it is all a gut feeling.
My feeling about Liberals is most of those from my younger days were exceptionally good eg Kirkwood, Pardue, Carlile, Penhaligan, but the current lot are pretty weak.
I am not going to get drawn into this FBPE Sunday circle-jerk for the umpteenth time but you'd have largely empty supermarket shelves of fruit and vegetables late on a Saturday night 10 years ago too.
Domestic fruit (in Winter time) is grown in polytunnels and the increase in wholesale gas prices has meant these are now expensive to heat, together with higher fuel costs for transportation - this is the real problem.
The only contributing factor from Brexit would be health checks on seeds entering the UK, to rule out plant viruses that can affect crops, which wouldn't affect this year's haul because, um, there's no time for them to be planted and grow, and it's a pretty marginal issue anyway that can be planned for. You could just about argue that's there an issue of seasonal labour for harvesting, but that's also a European-wide and even a global issue now with war, inflation, inclement weather and unprecedented demand being the fundamental issues.
"I feel confident in my Labour largest party in a hung parliament position, if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views but Starmer needs to up his game." @TSE
Good morning all.
1. Starmer doesn't need to up his game
2. It's good that he is no Blair. Boris and Cameron have made that kind of politician toxic.
3. Starmer has expunged Corbyn's anti-semitic legacy
4. Labour don't need Scotland but they are recovering well there.
5. Believe the polls
6. I am not merely confident, I am certain, that Labour will win a thumping great majority. We have witnessed a sea change.
7. But you are right. This won't be 1997 Redux. It will be far, far, worse for the tories. In 1997 the economy was in great shape. Now it has tanked. Everyone I know is STILL talking about that Liz Truss budget and Labour will continue to remind us of it. The tories have done 1000x worse in the last 4 years than they did back then on every level, including corruption and sleaze. Which is really saying something.
They are in for an absolute pounding. 100-150 seats but my latest reckoning is that they may go sub 100.
Did you hear that dreadful Rishi Sunak speech in Munich? OMFG. He sounds like a precocious 14 year old reading his script (the teacher gave it a C+) in front of the class, very poorly. Really eye-wateringly poorly. This man is going to get savaged during the election campaign.
The 100-150 band ought to be possible with a half-decent leader. But the Tories don’t have a half-decent leader.
This is the bit that "Starmer isn't Blair" types miss. For all his weaknesses and his tendency to say "wunt", Major was (and is) a considerably effective at the basics of politics than Sunak. Bluntly, he needed to be to get where he did.
And given that Sunak's ratings are still falling from their honeymoon, I wouldn't be shocked if the gap between the two leaders ends up in a similar place to 1997.
If Starmer has a problem, and I don't think it's a major one, it's that he needs to demonstrate his real personality; if such a thing exits. The small target, managerial, at-least-we're-not-the-tories policy lite strategy is effective but it doesn't really give you a sense of what SKS is like. I've never met Sunak but I know exactly what he'd be like if I encountered him in person. A pathetic boring little dweeb who's never heard of Rodrigo Moreno but would try to tell me about Microsoft Azure or some fucking thing. I have no idea what to expect from a personal encounter with SKS. Maybe he's a right laugh?
He would bore the tits off you for sure. I think he is as empty and boring as he makes out, given he does not even know the difference between a man and a woman what hope he could be interesting.
For me, it's always the eyes when it comes to Starmer - cold, quite mean, quite calculating and certainly not empathetic. In another life and another set of circumstances, he could easily be one of history's Adolf Eichmanns.
The Tory platform at the next general election will essentially be: “It could be even worse than it is if you let Labour in” plus “women don’t have penises but Keir Starmer thinks they do”.
Remind me, what happened to the last politician who dismissed such concerns as “not valid”…..
Labour need to do some serious thinking beyond simply mouthing platitudes.
Bryson, 31, claims to have known she was a woman since she was four. Does that mean she was a woman when she raped her victims? Rayner looks puzzled.
“Well, I don’t know. Because I don’t know what’s inside that person’s head.” 8/
I agree, it is impossible for anyone to know. But according to the principle of self-ID, what’s inside someone’s head should determine their legal right to access female-only spaces. 9/
…“Yeah, sure, I mean …” She looks cross & flustered. “It doesn’t matter whether it was a penis or some implementation.” I think Bryson’s victims would say her penis played an important part in her crimes. Does the phrase “her penis” even make any sense? 12/
Anyway, I think we can assume that unless there is something unforeseen the current Brexit trend will continue. By which I mean punters feeling increasingly negative about the self-evident growing problems. Trying to deny the problems or spin them away only adds to their negativity.
Starmer has taken a lot of stick from trying to move on from Brexit, despite looking to fight an election on tomorrow's issues not on refighting yesterday's issues being eminently sensible. I do wonder though if that position will change as the public mood continues to slide against it.
I can see opportunity in some of the red wall seats to have a "lets face reality" conversation. Evolving from "rejoin" arguments to "how do we fix this". If he told people - or allowed a narrative to grow - that he would allow unchecked migration then the Tories could hold some of these seats. So its tricky.
Fundamentally though, red wall voters wanted hope. We've got to the place where they accept they were sold the moon on a stick. But winning them back isn't to call them stupid or to go back to status quo ante. Has to talk to them about the real issues which caused them to vote for the moon on a stick in the first place. And large chunks of that now will have to be about investment in jobs and services and that means removing the barriers...
On topic, and accepting points made in the article, there are also some balancing factors that suggest a BETTER position for Labour than in 1997.
Firstly, the economy was motoring along quite nicely in 1997. That's unlikely in 2024. So, whilst Black Wednesday cast a long shadow, growth tempered that.
Secondly, although internal divisions were a big issue in 1997 too, Theresa Gorman and Richard Body trying to be back seat drivers isn't quite as bad as a pair of crackers recent ex PMs.
Thirdly, the Lib Dems remain historically weak. They can hope for recovery in some seats to put them back in the game, but will be in lost deposit territory in Con/Lab marginals. Under Ashdown, whilst there was certainly a lot of tactical voting, the Lib Dems were getting decent votes in a lot of places in third place.
Finally, if Farage decides to give it a go in a way he didn't in 2019, he is more of a danger for the Tories than Jimmy Goldsmith was in 1997 (his candidates averaged under 3%).
On balance, I agree it's unlikely to be a 1997 situation. But important to recognise there are some factors that are even better for Starmer than they were for Blair (as well as some that are worse).
"I feel confident in my Labour largest party in a hung parliament position, if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views but Starmer needs to up his game." @TSE
Good morning all.
1. Starmer doesn't need to up his game
2. It's good that he is no Blair. Boris and Cameron have made that kind of politician toxic.
3. Starmer has expunged Corbyn's anti-semitic legacy
4. Labour don't need Scotland but they are recovering well there.
5. Believe the polls
6. I am not merely confident, I am certain, that Labour will win a thumping great majority. We have witnessed a sea change.
7. But you are right. This won't be 1997 Redux. It will be far, far, worse for the tories. In 1997 the economy was in great shape. Now it has tanked. Everyone I know is STILL talking about that Liz Truss budget and Labour will continue to remind us of it. The tories have done 1000x worse in the last 4 years than they did back then on every level, including corruption and sleaze. Which is really saying something.
They are in for an absolute pounding. 100-150 seats but my latest reckoning is that they may go sub 100.
Did you hear that dreadful Rishi Sunak speech in Munich? OMFG. He sounds like a precocious 14 year old reading his script (the teacher gave it a C+) in front of the class, very poorly. Really eye-wateringly poorly. This man is going to get savaged during the election campaign.
The 100-150 band ought to be possible with a half-decent leader. But the Tories don’t have a half-decent leader.
This is the bit that "Starmer isn't Blair" types miss. For all his weaknesses and his tendency to say "wunt", Major was (and is) a considerably effective at the basics of politics than Sunak. Bluntly, he needed to be to get where he did.
And given that Sunak's ratings are still falling from their honeymoon, I wouldn't be shocked if the gap between the two leaders ends up in a similar place to 1997.
If Starmer has a problem, and I don't think it's a major one, it's that he needs to demonstrate his real personality; if such a thing exits. The small target, managerial, at-least-we're-not-the-tories policy lite strategy is effective but it doesn't really give you a sense of what SKS is like. I've never met Sunak but I know exactly what he'd be like if I encountered him in person. A pathetic boring little dweeb who's never heard of Rodrigo Moreno but would try to tell me about Microsoft Azure or some fucking thing. I have no idea what to expect from a personal encounter with SKS. Maybe he's a right laugh?
He would bore the tits off you for sure. I think he is as empty and boring as he makes out, given he does not even know the difference between a man and a woman what hope he could be interesting.
For me, it's always the eyes when it comes to Starmer - cold, quite mean, quite calculating and certainly not empathetic. In another life and another set of circumstances, he could easily be one of history's Adolf Eichmanns.
Fckn hell, Korma law breaking to to engineering the Holocaust in record time. Top Godwinning, I salute you.
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
Somewhere else has a different shortage for entirely different reasons.
That's it? That's your Brexit defence?
You talk complete hyperbolic emotive bollocks on Brexit, and are regularly called out on it.
Stick to Tesla on YouTube, where you're both normal and good.
I thought we were talking specifics about supply chain disruptions of different products in different supply chains. We can debate whether or not you think Brexit is responsible for our specific problems like lack of seeds, lack of fertiliser, lack of workforce etc. Or you try and deflect with whataboutery.
Meanwhile, in the real world, we need to fix our specific problems like lack of seeds, lack of fertiliser, lack of workforce etc...
Sturgeon’s exit leaves the stage bare. The last of the big beasts has departed and Scottish politics, for so long a rich seam of significant political talent, suddenly seems an emptier place. At such a moment it is tempting to conclude that just as a once-bountiful seam of Scottish footballing talent was eventually exhausted, so Scotland no longer produces politicians of the stature of, say, John Smith, Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, Charles Kennedy and Malcolm Rifkind. There was a hint of Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sturgeon’s resignation speech: “I am big,” she all but said, “It’s Scottish politics that got small.”
"Factionalism has to go... Jeremy Corbyn made our Party the Party of anti-austerity. He was right... He made us the Party that wanted to invest more heavily in our public services and he was right... We build on that, we don't trash it", said Starmer in 2020.
But surely you and I are living proof that factionalism IS going from the Labour Party. You and I existed in the same party with very different politics. We both left. Factionalism which has gone.
The spectacle of the last two Tory prime ministers, having failed abysmally in their own premierships, trying to undermine their successor in the most public way possible, is an absolute joy to behold.
Is it too much to hope that Theresa May will join in? Or David Cameron?
Yes, because they've got more class than that. Possibly not much more in Cameron's case, but sufficiently more.
Heck, even Heath stuck to sour muttering in the main.
Theresa May has made repeated interventions, the most recent being to advocate strongly against amending her ill-considered modern slavery bill which is being used as an unanswerable asylum claim by boat people. Cameron maintains a classy silence, but Osborne intervenes enough for both of them, constantly telling everyone what to do in the most strident of terms, and most recently seen cockily insisting that no Tory Government would ever leave the ECHR regardless of whether it was in their manifesto. He even runs a newspaper to do so.
The idea former PMs shouldn't intervene which some Express is a nonsense in my books. They may choose not to as being counter productive in most instances since most careers end in failure etc, but no reason they couldn't.
Both May and Boris absolutely should feel the right to do so as both are still MPs. Any interventions should be judged on merit.
Osborne was never leader so why shouldn't he become a pundit?
No reason, I was just correcting a misleading impression. Some posters are very fond of complaining about the UNSPEAKABLY AWFUL behaviour of Johnson, and latterly Truss, and ignoring exactly the same behaviour from those who they support.
Another example is the anger toward Truss and the 'Growth Group', who have actually been very loyal, just formed a caucus and suggested pro-growth policies to the Chancellor and PM. By contrast, the Sunakites spent the Truss era constantly briefing the papers about how deluded, mad, and awful Truss was, the dreadful fractious state of the party etc. I didn't see them gathering a dossier of 'pro-tax' (or whatever they're into) policies and trying to make their case to Kwasi. But apparently they're the better behaved ones.
The Sunakites were quiet between Truss being elected and the disastrous mini-budget if I recall correctly. You can hardly blame them for saying 'we told you so'.
The spectacle of the last two Tory prime ministers, having failed abysmally in their own premierships, trying to undermine their successor in the most public way possible, is an absolute joy to behold.
Is it too much to hope that Theresa May will join in? Or David Cameron?
Yes, because they've got more class than that. Possibly not much more in Cameron's case, but sufficiently more.
Heck, even Heath stuck to sour muttering in the main.
Theresa May has made repeated interventions, the most recent being to advocate strongly against amending her ill-considered modern slavery bill which is being used as an unanswerable asylum claim by boat people. Cameron maintains a classy silence, but Osborne intervenes enough for both of them, constantly telling everyone what to do in the most strident of terms, and most recently seen cockily insisting that no Tory Government would ever leave the ECHR regardless of whether it was in their manifesto. He even runs a newspaper to do so.
The idea former PMs shouldn't intervene which some Express is a nonsense in my books. They may choose not to as being counter productive in most instances since most careers end in failure etc, but no reason they couldn't.
Both May and Boris absolutely should feel the right to do so as both are still MPs. Any interventions should be judged on merit.
Osborne was never leader so why shouldn't he become a pundit?
By contrast, the Sunakites spent the Truss era constantly briefing the papers about how deluded, mad, and awful Truss was, the dreadful fractious state of the party etc.
To be fair, Sunak was correct on this. Truss is the new Ratner.
Sometimes they were correct but disloyal, sometimes they lied outright. A Truss meeting with the PCP was widely briefed as a total disaster, but others who were there later said it was completely normal. I disagree with your opinion on Truss, but it doesn't alter the point either way.
It's clear that those two accounts can't both be correct, but unless we were in the room ourselves, it's hard to say which is more truthful.
And the bottom line is this.Truss lasted about six weeks as PM, and about two of those were mourning our dear late Queen. Even if Team Sunak were ruthless political assassins, that still requires a hell of a screwup on her part.
I agree - though with the radical reorientation of UK economic policy that Truss felt was urgently necessary, I think the landing strip for success was a lot narrower than you believe. But the point I am making is about unfair depiction of behaviour. Because Boris and Truss are polarising politicians, their behaviour and that of their supporters is often characterised here as always unprecedentedly poor, when it isn't. And as I've demonstrated, Truss supporters have been a lot more loyal than Sunak's were.
The SNP does not deserve to succeed at present because it has not done the work necessary to provide a plausible, let alone an attractive, blueprint for how independence might actually function. Currency? No idea. The Anglo-Scottish frontier? Not a clue. Joining the EU? Don’t worry about that. Better, instead, to simply assume all will be well, hold hands, and jump together.
Sturgeon’s tactic was route one all the time. If plan A didn’t work, switch to plan A but harder this time. For all her other qualities, the outgoing first minister is neither a deep thinker nor someone emotionally equipped to understand her opponents. Convinced of her own righteousness and armour-plated by her faith in destiny, she never paused to consider how she might look to those not already aboard the nationalist hype-train. The limitations of this approach should surely be apparent by now.
And this is my major problem with Scottish independence. I totally get it's appeal and the romance of it and "Iceland can do it" etc etc.
Yes. Fine. Now let's talk details. Because under any executive summary needs to be a fuckton of detail which can be called up for justification. And they simply don't know. Or in reality they do know but won't talk about it.
When you are selling romance, a warm fuzzy idea, the detail spoils it. What one person might prefer is bad to another. So they say nothing. And a big leap in the dark off a cliff is a Bad Idea. As Brexit demonstrated.
One thing is certain is that it cannot be as bad as England spaffing our money up the wall. What kind of clown needs someone else to decide how they spend their wages. Details are that it cannot be any worse than the current clowns wasting our money. Backbones are required and not having to beg England for a few more of our pounds back please. F**k romance just stop the robbery and neglect.
So it wasn't the local party. It wasn't region. We're then into HQ and the NEC. Which at the time was run by Corbynites. So whilst I am sure that Corbyn didn't personally select O'Mara, his team / associates / acolytes did for the advancement of Corbyn. Which is the same thing.
- “… if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views…”
Oh look! Second post-resignation poll in a row with SNP well above that YouGov level (which was 38% incidentally, not the 29% shouted out in the PB piece.)
Funny how neither the Savanta (SNP 42%) nor this Survation poll got reported by PB. I thought this was meant to be a service for punters?
The SNP remain in a strong position in our 1st poll that has fieldwork conducted after Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last week. At 43% the party would be just 2% shy of their solid 2019 Westminster showing.
That is before the Labour attack machine lays into Kate Forbes as an anti abortion member of an anti homosexual marriage church, if as is likely she succeeds Sturgeon as FM
Wrong. On the new boundaries SLab would gain just 5 SNP seats, balanced out by the SNP gaining 4 SCon seats. The British Assimilationist parties would still be floundering:
SNP 47 seats (-1) Assimilationists 10 seats (+1)
As for your Forbes prediction: duly screenshotted.
Forbes is an interesting one. There is some risk to being devoutly religious in politics in nations as secular as ours. Tim Farron being the obvious example.
My own Scottish ancestors were Free Presbyterian ministers, and it is still part of the family culture. It is one thing that would prevent me from standing for election myself.
Some enterprising journo should ask Forbes what her views are on evolution.
’Why do the polls seemed unmoved by the departure of Nicola Sturgeon, and who might replace her?’
Although early, it does not appear that SNP voters are apt to desert the party, or even become more undecided post the announced departure of Nicola Sturgeon – who is surely one of Britain’s most successful politicians ever in terms of winning elections. When we put to voters in the poll to what extent (did Sturgeon’s departure) make you more or less likely to vote for the SNP? looking at those who said more likely minus those saying less likely actually resulted in a +5% net more likely to vote SNP figure when viewing attitudes of those who voted for the party in the 2021 Holyrood constituency vote.
It is therefore entirely possible therefore that the SNP’s loyal voter base are really not voting for the party based on it’s leader to any meaningful extent, and/or potentially see the Sturgeon years as having run their course – a sentiment seemingly shared by the FM herself. Three-quarters of 2014 Yes voters would vote SNP at a Westminster election, and so it remains clear that independence attitudes loom large as a strong driver for SNP party choice.
ON topic, I wonder if - counter-intuitively - we might see the SNP stabilize in the polls, or even benefit from a slightly uptick
The reason? Patriotic Scots will clamour to the defense of THE patriotic Scotch party as everyone else - especially the Hunnish yoons - scoffs at Sturgeon’s departure and her failure on Indy. For the same reason we might see an uptick in Yes
it’s the same paradoxical psychology which saw a surge to the Nats after Scotland voted NO
However, unlike that earlier paradoxical uplift, I don’t expect this one to last. Sturgeon’s departure IS a blow, and she was a unifying figure in what is a deeply divided party, I can’t see any of the aspiring candidates matching her ability in this way - Forbes is too right wing and Wee Free, Robertson is too boring and tainted, etc
There will surely be tartan blood on the carpet. So the Nats will eventually suffer for this, and the YES vote might enter a gentle but less spectacular decline “
"I feel confident in my Labour largest party in a hung parliament position, if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views but Starmer needs to up his game." @TSE
Good morning all.
1. Starmer doesn't need to up his game
2. It's good that he is no Blair. Boris and Cameron have made that kind of politician toxic.
3. Starmer has expunged Corbyn's anti-semitic legacy
4. Labour don't need Scotland but they are recovering well there.
5. Believe the polls
6. I am not merely confident, I am certain, that Labour will win a thumping great majority. We have witnessed a sea change.
7. But you are right. This won't be 1997 Redux. It will be far, far, worse for the tories. In 1997 the economy was in great shape. Now it has tanked. Everyone I know is STILL talking about that Liz Truss budget and Labour will continue to remind us of it. The tories have done 1000x worse in the last 4 years than they did back then on every level, including corruption and sleaze. Which is really saying something.
They are in for an absolute pounding. 100-150 seats but my latest reckoning is that they may go sub 100.
Did you hear that dreadful Rishi Sunak speech in Munich? OMFG. He sounds like a precocious 14 year old reading his script (the teacher gave it a C+) in front of the class, very poorly. Really eye-wateringly poorly. This man is going to get savaged during the election campaign.
The 100-150 band ought to be possible with a half-decent leader. But the Tories don’t have a half-decent leader.
This is the bit that "Starmer isn't Blair" types miss. For all his weaknesses and his tendency to say "wunt", Major was (and is) a considerably effective at the basics of politics than Sunak. Bluntly, he needed to be to get where he did.
And given that Sunak's ratings are still falling from their honeymoon, I wouldn't be shocked if the gap between the two leaders ends up in a similar place to 1997.
If Starmer has a problem, and I don't think it's a major one, it's that he needs to demonstrate his real personality; if such a thing exits. The small target, managerial, at-least-we're-not-the-tories policy lite strategy is effective but it doesn't really give you a sense of what SKS is like. I've never met Sunak but I know exactly what he'd be like if I encountered him in person. A pathetic boring little dweeb who's never heard of Rodrigo Moreno but would try to tell me about Microsoft Azure or some fucking thing. I have no idea what to expect from a personal encounter with SKS. Maybe he's a right laugh?
He would bore the tits off you for sure. I think he is as empty and boring as he makes out, given he does not even know the difference between a man and a woman what hope he could be interesting.
For me, it's always the eyes when it comes to Starmer - cold, quite mean, quite calculating and certainly not empathetic. In another life and another set of circumstances, he could easily be one of history's Adolf Eichmanns.
Fckn hell, Korma law breaking to to engineering the Holocaust in record time. Top Godwinning, I salute you.
It’s comments like @thekitchencabinet’s that make me confident to ignore the ‘Starmer is a boring lawyer’ lines. Intentionally or not, TKC has taken it to such extremes that it merely exposes the fear on the right that Starmer is such an eminently reasonable proposition for our next PM that he must be compared to the Third Reich at any available opportunity.
@wesstreeting said Corbyn was responsible for selecting Jared O'Mara. That is a lie.
@RachelReevesMP said Corbyn left Labour's accounts in deficit. That is a lie
. SKS & SKS fans are liars.
Part of what Starmer has rather cleverly done is make the left-centre left debate in Labour all about a man in his 70s whose career ended on 12th December 2019.
In 2017, the Labour left briefly looked like the future - thrusting Momentum youngsters, cheering Glastonbury crowds, policy arguments being won. Starmer realised that Corbyn's vanity and his supporters' oddities meant that it could be turned into a death cult centred around the divine right of a cranky pensioner to be MP for Islington in perpetuity. Whatever the rights and wrongs of Corbyn's case, it all just looks f***ing weird to people who haven't spent decades involved in Labour internal politics.
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
In all fairness to Duguid, he is not alone, the Fat former- Controller is trying to resurrect the unicorn dream despite all the evidence pointing to him having already royally f***** up.
I use Duggie as a prime example. Here is the man* who responds to his constituency being screwed over by his government by asking fawning lickspittle questions of the same PM Johnson who just screwed him.
He's proven he doesn't care about the interests of his constituency and the latest noise from him on Brexit just reinforces this. "I'm listening to fishermen, Brexit has been great" he says. That the local fishing industry association keeps detailing why Brexit has screwed them shows two things about Tories.
They aren't interested in making Brexit work. Their CAP/CFP payments system are a disaster as the industry keeps telling them. And they think voters are so stupid as to not notice the huge cost rises and lack of availability as the supermarket photos keep showing and wonder if the farmers and fishermen know more about it than their Tory MP.
Yes, people tend not to know how stuff works. And the Tories and their spiv media friends have worked very hard to weaponise that ignorance. But the polls show the scales are being washed from the eyes..
The farmers and fishermen were all for the Tories , they were warned and are getting just what they deserve. We listened to the halfwits up here telling us how great Brexit would be and how they were seduced by Tories promises of lots of cash etc. F**k them ( the Tory framers & fishermen ) along with their Tory masters.
- “… if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views…”
Oh look! Second post-resignation poll in a row with SNP well above that YouGov level (which was 38% incidentally, not the 29% shouted out in the PB piece.)
Funny how neither the Savanta (SNP 42%) nor this Survation poll got reported by PB. I thought this was meant to be a service for punters?
The SNP remain in a strong position in our 1st poll that has fieldwork conducted after Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last week. At 43% the party would be just 2% shy of their solid 2019 Westminster showing.
That is before the Labour attack machine lays into Kate Forbes as an anti abortion member of an anti homosexual marriage church, if as is likely she succeeds Sturgeon as FM
Wrong. On the new boundaries SLab would gain just 5 SNP seats, balanced out by the SNP gaining 4 SCon seats. The British Assimilationist parties would still be floundering:
SNP 47 seats (-1) Assimilationists 10 seats (+1)
As for your Forbes prediction: duly screenshotted.
Forbes is an interesting one. There is some risk to being devoutly religious in politics in nations as secular as ours. Tim Farron being the obvious example.
My own Scottish ancestors were Free Presbyterian ministers, and it is still part of the family culture. It is one thing that would prevent me from standing for election myself.
Some enterprising journo should ask Forbes what her views are on evolution.
More interested on her views on devolution. So far Ash Regan is the only independence candidate, Forbes is unknown and the others are Sturgeon seat warmers who just want to feather their own nests and Macbeth & wife who have lusted after power for some time.
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
Somewhere else has a different shortage for entirely different reasons.
That's it? That's your Brexit defence?
You talk complete hyperbolic emotive bollocks on Brexit, and are regularly called out on it.
Stick to Tesla on YouTube, where you're both normal and good.
I thought we were talking specifics about supply chain disruptions of different products in different supply chains. We can debate whether or not you think Brexit is responsible for our specific problems like lack of seeds, lack of fertiliser, lack of workforce etc. Or you try and deflect with whataboutery.
Meanwhile, in the real world, we need to fix our specific problems like lack of seeds, lack of fertiliser, lack of workforce etc...
CR i thought you weren’t getting drawn in today?
Agree with you about reading the old Roal Dahl to my kids by the way, which is unusual given that we’re politically quite different
The spectacle of the last two Tory prime ministers, having failed abysmally in their own premierships, trying to undermine their successor in the most public way possible, is an absolute joy to behold.
Is it too much to hope that Theresa May will join in? Or David Cameron?
Yes, because they've got more class than that. Possibly not much more in Cameron's case, but sufficiently more.
Heck, even Heath stuck to sour muttering in the main.
Theresa May has made repeated interventions, the most recent being to advocate strongly against amending her ill-considered modern slavery bill which is being used as an unanswerable asylum claim by boat people. Cameron maintains a classy silence, but Osborne intervenes enough for both of them, constantly telling everyone what to do in the most strident of terms, and most recently seen cockily insisting that no Tory Government would ever leave the ECHR regardless of whether it was in their manifesto. He even runs a newspaper to do so.
The idea former PMs shouldn't intervene which some Express is a nonsense in my books. They may choose not to as being counter productive in most instances since most careers end in failure etc, but no reason they couldn't.
Both May and Boris absolutely should feel the right to do so as both are still MPs. Any interventions should be judged on merit.
Osborne was never leader so why shouldn't he become a pundit?
No reason, I was just correcting a misleading impression. Some posters are very fond of complaining about the UNSPEAKABLY AWFUL behaviour of Johnson, and latterly Truss, and ignoring exactly the same behaviour from those who they support.
Another example is the anger toward Truss and the 'Growth Group', who have actually been very loyal, just formed a caucus and suggested pro-growth policies to the Chancellor and PM. By contrast, the Sunakites spent the Truss era constantly briefing the papers about how deluded, mad, and awful Truss was, the dreadful fractious state of the party etc. I didn't see them gathering a dossier of 'pro-tax' (or whatever they're into) policies and trying to make their case to Kwasi. But apparently they're the better behaved ones.
The Sunakites were quiet between Truss being elected and the disastrous mini-budget if I recall correctly. You can hardly blame them for saying 'we told you so'.
We would have to check. The Growth group have waited longer, and it is now very clear that if implemented in full, Sunak/Hunts misery agenda will lead to less growth, is already leading to less energy security, and will plunge the economy into a prolonged recession that will depress tax receipts and make it harder to balance the books. But still there's no snarky briefing campaign - in fact it's still on the other side, with remarks about Truss's sanity following her essay and interview. Sunak's people just aren't very nice, expecially when their divine right to govern (I use the term loosely) is questioned.
"I feel confident in my Labour largest party in a hung parliament position, if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views but Starmer needs to up his game." @TSE
Good morning all.
1. Starmer doesn't need to up his game
2. It's good that he is no Blair. Boris and Cameron have made that kind of politician toxic.
3. Starmer has expunged Corbyn's anti-semitic legacy
4. Labour don't need Scotland but they are recovering well there.
5. Believe the polls
6. I am not merely confident, I am certain, that Labour will win a thumping great majority. We have witnessed a sea change.
7. But you are right. This won't be 1997 Redux. It will be far, far, worse for the tories. In 1997 the economy was in great shape. Now it has tanked. Everyone I know is STILL talking about that Liz Truss budget and Labour will continue to remind us of it. The tories have done 1000x worse in the last 4 years than they did back then on every level, including corruption and sleaze. Which is really saying something.
They are in for an absolute pounding. 100-150 seats but my latest reckoning is that they may go sub 100.
Did you hear that dreadful Rishi Sunak speech in Munich? OMFG. He sounds like a precocious 14 year old reading his script (the teacher gave it a C+) in front of the class, very poorly. Really eye-wateringly poorly. This man is going to get savaged during the election campaign.
The 100-150 band ought to be possible with a half-decent leader. But the Tories don’t have a half-decent leader.
This is the bit that "Starmer isn't Blair" types miss. For all his weaknesses and his tendency to say "wunt", Major was (and is) a considerably effective at the basics of politics than Sunak. Bluntly, he needed to be to get where he did.
And given that Sunak's ratings are still falling from their honeymoon, I wouldn't be shocked if the gap between the two leaders ends up in a similar place to 1997.
If Starmer has a problem, and I don't think it's a major one, it's that he needs to demonstrate his real personality; if such a thing exits. The small target, managerial, at-least-we're-not-the-tories policy lite strategy is effective but it doesn't really give you a sense of what SKS is like. I've never met Sunak but I know exactly what he'd be like if I encountered him in person. A pathetic boring little dweeb who's never heard of Rodrigo Moreno but would try to tell me about Microsoft Azure or some fucking thing. I have no idea what to expect from a personal encounter with SKS. Maybe he's a right laugh?
He would bore the tits off you for sure. I think he is as empty and boring as he makes out, given he does not even know the difference between a man and a woman what hope he could be interesting.
For me, it's always the eyes when it comes to Starmer - cold, quite mean, quite calculating and certainly not empathetic. In another life and another set of circumstances, he could easily be one of history's Adolf Eichmanns.
Fckn hell, Korma law breaking to to engineering the Holocaust in record time. Top Godwinning, I salute you.
It’s comments like @thekitchencabinet’s that make me confident to ignore the ‘Starmer is a boring lawyer’ lines. Intentionally or not, TKC has taken it to such extremes that it merely exposes the fear on the right that Starmer is such an eminently reasonable proposition for our next PM that he must be compared to the Third Reich at any available opportunity.
Quite so. If the more deranged righties aren’t careful they’ll end up making Starmer seem interesting.
- “… if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views…”
Oh look! Second post-resignation poll in a row with SNP well above that YouGov level (which was 38% incidentally, not the 29% shouted out in the PB piece.)
Funny how neither the Savanta (SNP 42%) nor this Survation poll got reported by PB. I thought this was meant to be a service for punters?
The SNP remain in a strong position in our 1st poll that has fieldwork conducted after Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last week. At 43% the party would be just 2% shy of their solid 2019 Westminster showing.
That is before the Labour attack machine lays into Kate Forbes as an anti abortion member of an anti homosexual marriage church, if as is likely she succeeds Sturgeon as FM
Don't think the Forbes thing will change that many votes TBH, apart from some middle class SNP types switching to the Greens. She can easily say I have my personal views but I recognise others don't and the laws remain the same.
“The Forbes thing” is purely a figment of Franco boi’s imagination.
Has he said it yet today? *checks* Yes, so we're due two more statements today.
"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice: That alone should encourage the crew. Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."
Biagi is a total nobody, another Sturgeon butt licker. Will hardly be noted in Scotland that yet another trougher is feeding lines to the unionist media. What will matter is what she says in the next few weeks. Regan has already nailed her colours to the mast.
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
The figures I saw recently were that UK fishermen were landing nearly 20k tonnes more fish than pre-Brexit and that will increase for the next several years as EU rights wind down. The oddity w as that nearly all of that extra 20k tonnes was being landed at Peterhead with most of the English ports pretty level. This piece from the BBC has some of the detail: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/64430216
Can't treat the fisheries as a single whole, as indeed the article points out. The Scottish inshore fishermen were always much unhappier about Brexit than the big pelagic skippers of which the Brexiters made much at the time.
So, overall, UK fishing is gaining additional catches but some species are being restricted by conservation requirements. Or, put another way, the gains are Brexit gains and the losses are for causes that are not Brexit.
- “… if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views…”
Oh look! Second post-resignation poll in a row with SNP well above that YouGov level (which was 38% incidentally, not the 29% shouted out in the PB piece.)
Funny how neither the Savanta (SNP 42%) nor this Survation poll got reported by PB. I thought this was meant to be a service for punters?
The SNP remain in a strong position in our 1st poll that has fieldwork conducted after Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last week. At 43% the party would be just 2% shy of their solid 2019 Westminster showing.
That is before the Labour attack machine lays into Kate Forbes as an anti abortion member of an anti homosexual marriage church, if as is likely she succeeds Sturgeon as FM
Wrong. On the new boundaries SLab would gain just 5 SNP seats, balanced out by the SNP gaining 4 SCon seats. The British Assimilationist parties would still be floundering:
SNP 47 seats (-1) Assimilationists 10 seats (+1)
As for your Forbes prediction: duly screenshotted.
Forbes is an interesting one. There is some risk to being devoutly religious in politics in nations as secular as ours. Tim Farron being the obvious example.
My own Scottish ancestors were Free Presbyterian ministers, and it is still part of the family culture. It is one thing that would prevent me from standing for election myself.
Some enterprising journo should ask Forbes what her views are on evolution.
I would think her views on it would be irrelevant.
- “… if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views…”
Oh look! Second post-resignation poll in a row with SNP well above that YouGov level (which was 38% incidentally, not the 29% shouted out in the PB piece.)
Funny how neither the Savanta (SNP 42%) nor this Survation poll got reported by PB. I thought this was meant to be a service for punters?
The SNP remain in a strong position in our 1st poll that has fieldwork conducted after Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last week. At 43% the party would be just 2% shy of their solid 2019 Westminster showing.
That is before the Labour attack machine lays into Kate Forbes as an anti abortion member of an anti homosexual marriage church, if as is likely she succeeds Sturgeon as FM
Don't think the Forbes thing will change that many votes TBH, apart from some middle class SNP types switching to the Greens. She can easily say I have my personal views but I recognise others don't and the laws remain the same.
“The Forbes thing” is purely a figment of Franco boi’s imagination.
Has he said it yet today? *checks* Yes, so we're due two more statements today.
"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice: That alone should encourage the crew. Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."
Biagi is a total nobody, another Sturgeon butt licker. Will hardly be noted in Scotland that yet another trougher is feeding lines to the unionist media. What will matter is what she says in the next few weeks. Regan has already nailed her colours to the mast.
Morning Malc.
Hope you’re well. Are you optimistic this defenestration of Sturgeon will get the Indy movement back on track with the SNP leading it.
The spectacle of the last two Tory prime ministers, having failed abysmally in their own premierships, trying to undermine their successor in the most public way possible, is an absolute joy to behold.
Is it too much to hope that Theresa May will join in? Or David Cameron?
Yes, because they've got more class than that. Possibly not much more in Cameron's case, but sufficiently more.
Heck, even Heath stuck to sour muttering in the main.
Theresa May has made repeated interventions, the most recent being to advocate strongly against amending her ill-considered modern slavery bill which is being used as an unanswerable asylum claim by boat people. Cameron maintains a classy silence, but Osborne intervenes enough for both of them, constantly telling everyone what to do in the most strident of terms, and most recently seen cockily insisting that no Tory Government would ever leave the ECHR regardless of whether it was in their manifesto. He even runs a newspaper to do so.
The idea former PMs shouldn't intervene which some Express is a nonsense in my books. They may choose not to as being counter productive in most instances since most careers end in failure etc, but no reason they couldn't.
Both May and Boris absolutely should feel the right to do so as both are still MPs. Any interventions should be judged on merit.
Osborne was never leader so why shouldn't he become a pundit?
By contrast, the Sunakites spent the Truss era constantly briefing the papers about how deluded, mad, and awful Truss was, the dreadful fractious state of the party etc.
To be fair, Sunak was correct on this. Truss is the new Ratner.
Sometimes they were correct but disloyal, sometimes they lied outright. A Truss meeting with the PCP was widely briefed as a total disaster, but others who were there later said it was completely normal.
Some people said it was a disaster, but obviously they were lying because other people said it wasn't!
"I feel confident in my Labour largest party in a hung parliament position, if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views but Starmer needs to up his game." @TSE
Good morning all.
1. Starmer doesn't need to up his game
2. It's good that he is no Blair. Boris and Cameron have made that kind of politician toxic.
3. Starmer has expunged Corbyn's anti-semitic legacy
4. Labour don't need Scotland but they are recovering well there.
5. Believe the polls
6. I am not merely confident, I am certain, that Labour will win a thumping great majority. We have witnessed a sea change.
7. But you are right. This won't be 1997 Redux. It will be far, far, worse for the tories. In 1997 the economy was in great shape. Now it has tanked. Everyone I know is STILL talking about that Liz Truss budget and Labour will continue to remind us of it. The tories have done 1000x worse in the last 4 years than they did back then on every level, including corruption and sleaze. Which is really saying something.
They are in for an absolute pounding. 100-150 seats but my latest reckoning is that they may go sub 100.
Did you hear that dreadful Rishi Sunak speech in Munich? OMFG. He sounds like a precocious 14 year old reading his script (the teacher gave it a C+) in front of the class, very poorly. Really eye-wateringly poorly. This man is going to get savaged during the election campaign.
The 100-150 band ought to be possible with a half-decent leader. But the Tories don’t have a half-decent leader.
This is the bit that "Starmer isn't Blair" types miss. For all his weaknesses and his tendency to say "wunt", Major was (and is) a considerably effective at the basics of politics than Sunak. Bluntly, he needed to be to get where he did.
And given that Sunak's ratings are still falling from their honeymoon, I wouldn't be shocked if the gap between the two leaders ends up in a similar place to 1997.
If Starmer has a problem, and I don't think it's a major one, it's that he needs to demonstrate his real personality; if such a thing exits. The small target, managerial, at-least-we're-not-the-tories policy lite strategy is effective but it doesn't really give you a sense of what SKS is like. I've never met Sunak but I know exactly what he'd be like if I encountered him in person. A pathetic boring little dweeb who's never heard of Rodrigo Moreno but would try to tell me about Microsoft Azure or some fucking thing. I have no idea what to expect from a personal encounter with SKS. Maybe he's a right laugh?
He would bore the tits off you for sure. I think he is as empty and boring as he makes out, given he does not even know the difference between a man and a woman what hope he could be interesting.
For me, it's always the eyes when it comes to Starmer - cold, quite mean, quite calculating and certainly not empathetic. In another life and another set of circumstances, he could easily be one of history's Adolf Eichmanns.
Fckn hell, Korma law breaking to to engineering the Holocaust in record time. Top Godwinning, I salute you.
It’s comments like @thekitchencabinet’s that make me confident to ignore the ‘Starmer is a boring lawyer’ lines. Intentionally or not, TKC has taken it to such extremes that it merely exposes the fear on the right that Starmer is such an eminently reasonable proposition for our next PM that he must be compared to the Third Reich at any available opportunity.
I thought Thekitchencabinet's comments were spot on, dead eyes , no clue the difference between a man and a woman and no charisma, he will be nearly as bad as the Tories.
- “… if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views…”
Oh look! Second post-resignation poll in a row with SNP well above that YouGov level (which was 38% incidentally, not the 29% shouted out in the PB piece.)
Funny how neither the Savanta (SNP 42%) nor this Survation poll got reported by PB. I thought this was meant to be a service for punters?
The SNP remain in a strong position in our 1st poll that has fieldwork conducted after Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last week. At 43% the party would be just 2% shy of their solid 2019 Westminster showing.
That is before the Labour attack machine lays into Kate Forbes as an anti abortion member of an anti homosexual marriage church, if as is likely she succeeds Sturgeon as FM
Wrong. On the new boundaries SLab would gain just 5 SNP seats, balanced out by the SNP gaining 4 SCon seats. The British Assimilationist parties would still be floundering:
SNP 47 seats (-1) Assimilationists 10 seats (+1)
As for your Forbes prediction: duly screenshotted.
Forbes is an interesting one. There is some risk to being devoutly religious in politics in nations as secular as ours. Tim Farron being the obvious example.
My own Scottish ancestors were Free Presbyterian ministers, and it is still part of the family culture. It is one thing that would prevent me from standing for election myself.
Some enterprising journo should ask Forbes what her views are on evolution.
To be fair to the Free Church, not something I'm massively inclined to do, I'm not aware that they reject evolution as doctrine.
It seems that the GRA stuff may not be the all consuming obsession of voters that the all consumed obsessives think it is.
Unfortunately TUD almost all Scottish politician's are obsessed with it which is the big problem, courtesy of Imelda and her weird Green little helpers. Should be returned to where it came from , a totally minor issue only there due to Sturgeon and promoted by some zealot Sturgeon funded charities.
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
Somewhere else has a different shortage for entirely different reasons.
That's it? That's your Brexit defence?
You talk complete hyperbolic emotive bollocks on Brexit, and are regularly called out on it.
Stick to Tesla on YouTube, where you're both normal and good.
I thought we were talking specifics about supply chain disruptions of different products in different supply chains. We can debate whether or not you think Brexit is responsible for our specific problems like lack of seeds, lack of fertiliser, lack of workforce etc. Or you try and deflect with whataboutery.
Meanwhile, in the real world, we need to fix our specific problems like lack of seeds, lack of fertiliser, lack of workforce etc...
CR i thought you weren’t getting drawn in today?
Agree with you about reading the old Roal Dahl to my kids by the way, which is unusual given that we’re politically quite different
I heard some interesting stuff on the supply chains issues.
It’s not so much shortages of produce as price.
COVID, BREXIT, Ukraine etc have pushed prices up.
In the US and U.K., in particular, the culture was ultra cheap food. Narrow margins.
The story of how Tesco built a special negotiation facility, where teams of Tesco negotiators would brow beat individuals from suppliers is extraordinary - but typical of this approach.
The reaction of some managers in the big chains to these price rises is a form of denial combined with a buyers strike. They can’t imagine a world in which they can’t just demand a price - “quote me happy”
To them, the idea that suppliers can raise prices like this is somewhere between impossible and immoral.
I’ve dealt this this kind of thinking outside the food industry, so I find this very believable - people who believe that they have a right to minimum wage labour, prices to go down every time they negotiate.
Others have accepted reality - hence, I think, the regional differences and how these issues come and go.
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
You may be right but you'll need to provide a bit more detail than that.
- “… if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views…”
Oh look! Second post-resignation poll in a row with SNP well above that YouGov level (which was 38% incidentally, not the 29% shouted out in the PB piece.)
Funny how neither the Savanta (SNP 42%) nor this Survation poll got reported by PB. I thought this was meant to be a service for punters?
The SNP remain in a strong position in our 1st poll that has fieldwork conducted after Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last week. At 43% the party would be just 2% shy of their solid 2019 Westminster showing.
That is before the Labour attack machine lays into Kate Forbes as an anti abortion member of an anti homosexual marriage church, if as is likely she succeeds Sturgeon as FM
Wrong. On the new boundaries SLab would gain just 5 SNP seats, balanced out by the SNP gaining 4 SCon seats. The British Assimilationist parties would still be floundering:
SNP 47 seats (-1) Assimilationists 10 seats (+1)
As for your Forbes prediction: duly screenshotted.
Forbes is an interesting one. There is some risk to being devoutly religious in politics in nations as secular as ours. Tim Farron being the obvious example.
My own Scottish ancestors were Free Presbyterian ministers, and it is still part of the family culture. It is one thing that would prevent me from standing for election myself.
Some enterprising journo should ask Forbes what her views are on evolution.
She could just say she believes that a benign, creative force called God made the earth, but whether he did so over seven 24 hour days or over millennia of evolution is more information than she has access to. I think it's fair enough if you support gay marriage to be concerned about the possibility of her opposing it, but it is a stretch to say her very belief in God is a liability. Theresa May was a Churchgoer. Rishi Sunak is a practising Hindu - are you recommending he be quizzed on hinduism's creation myths?
I am not going to get drawn into this FBPE Sunday circle-jerk for the umpteenth time but you'd have largely empty supermarket shelves of fruit and vegetables late on a Saturday night 10 years ago too.
Domestic fruit (in Winter time) is grown in polytunnels and the increase in wholesale gas prices has meant these are now expensive to heat, together with higher fuel costs for transportation - this is the real problem.
The only contributing factor from Brexit would be health checks on seeds entering the UK, to rule out plant viruses that can affect crops, which wouldn't affect this year's haul because, um, there's no time for them to be planted and grow, and it's a pretty marginal issue anyway that can be planned for. You could just about argue that's there an issue of seasonal labour for harvesting, but that's also a European-wide and even a global issue now with war, inflation, inclement weather and unprecedented demand being the fundamental issues.
The facts are irrelevant. Brexit's getting the blame. That's just the way it goes.
Exactly. The Eurosceptics blamed absolutely everything on Europe incessantly. Now they are going to get a taste of their own medicine. They are going to hate it. Which only increases the joy of the exercise.
On topic, if the current polling were reflected in a General Election, the result would be a Labour landslide beyond 1997 in terms of reducing the Conservative Party to a rump of 100-140 seats (depending on which poll and looking at the detailed data tables for England rather than the headline figures).
The 1997 landslide was well trailed - the 1995 local elections which saw the Conservatives lose 2000 Councillors in one evening was based on notional national vote shares of Labour 47%, Conservative 25% and LD 22%. That suggested Labour with more than 400 seats and the Conservatives at about 150.
The final tally was different inasmuch as there was a small move of voters who voted LD locally but Conservative nationally and some Labour supporters stayed at home thinking the election a foregone conclusion.
The polling done at the time, we now know, was flawed in terms of sampling and methodology and produced very large Labour leads based on the "shy Tory" phenomenon.
The sole question now is how much "swingback" Sunak can achieve before polling day. We have the lesson of the 2005-10 Parliament - in the summer of 2008, David Cameron's Conservatives enjoyed leads akin to what Starmer's Labour are showing now but on polling day 2010, the Conservative lead was just seven points so a possible landslide turned into largest party in a hung parliament.
It could happen again -the period 2008-10 was turbulent with the GFC, expenses scandal and a remarkable election campaign (Cleggmania anyone?) but the crucial difference between then and now is while the two main parties are still getting round 75% of the vote, the reminder has fragmented and that will impact in an FPTP election.
This May's local elections will be informative, next May's more so - Starmer doesn't need to claw back 10-15 seats in Scotland if he can win 150 in England and Wales. Similarly, if the current figures remain until polling day,he will win and win big and all that will save the Conservatives from a real rout will be the fragmented third party vote which would limit losses in seats where Labour isn't the main challenger.
The spectacle of the last two Tory prime ministers, having failed abysmally in their own premierships, trying to undermine their successor in the most public way possible, is an absolute joy to behold.
Is it too much to hope that Theresa May will join in? Or David Cameron?
Yes, because they've got more class than that. Possibly not much more in Cameron's case, but sufficiently more.
Heck, even Heath stuck to sour muttering in the main.
Theresa May has made repeated interventions, the most recent being to advocate strongly against amending her ill-considered modern slavery bill which is being used as an unanswerable asylum claim by boat people. Cameron maintains a classy silence, but Osborne intervenes enough for both of them, constantly telling everyone what to do in the most strident of terms, and most recently seen cockily insisting that no Tory Government would ever leave the ECHR regardless of whether it was in their manifesto. He even runs a newspaper to do so.
The idea former PMs shouldn't intervene which some Express is a nonsense in my books. They may choose not to as being counter productive in most instances since most careers end in failure etc, but no reason they couldn't.
Both May and Boris absolutely should feel the right to do so as both are still MPs. Any interventions should be judged on merit.
Osborne was never leader so why shouldn't he become a pundit?
No reason, I was just correcting a misleading impression. Some posters are very fond of complaining about the UNSPEAKABLY AWFUL behaviour of Johnson, and latterly Truss, and ignoring exactly the same behaviour from those who they support.
Another example is the anger toward Truss and the 'Growth Group', who have actually been very loyal, just formed a caucus and suggested pro-growth policies to the Chancellor and PM. By contrast, the Sunakites spent the Truss era constantly briefing the papers about how deluded, mad, and awful Truss was, the dreadful fractious state of the party etc. I didn't see them gathering a dossier of 'pro-tax' (or whatever they're into) policies and trying to make their case to Kwasi. But apparently they're the better behaved ones.
The Sunakites were quiet between Truss being elected and the disastrous mini-budget if I recall correctly. You can hardly blame them for saying 'we told you so'.
We would have to check. The Growth group have waited longer, and it is now very clear that if implemented in full, Sunak/Hunts misery agenda will lead to less growth, is already leading to less energy security, and will plunge the economy into a prolonged recession that will depress tax receipts and make it harder to balance the books. But still there's no snarky briefing campaign - in fact it's still on the other side, with remarks about Truss's sanity following her essay and interview. Sunak's people just aren't very nice, expecially when their divine right to govern (I use the term loosely) is questioned.
I appreciate you are very pro Truss’ plans for growth etc and I would agree with them if they were introduced at a time where the economy is stable - if Boris had implemented them for example when he was elected or, and I hope this will happen, if Sunak has time once stabilising the economy and winning back the trust of markets.
I disagree with you about the whole briefing situation though - the briefing against Sunak ahead of the first leadership campaign was brutal and that side of the party - the idiots who want Boris back and the people who wanted the Truss revolution - can have no complaints whatsoever about shit being flung in their direction.
I also think that it’s not that Truss fans are lovely and not briefing because they are honourable it’s more that they have been shown to be wrong and keeping their heads down in a period of quiet self-reflection - something Truss herself would be advised to do as well.
They aren’t angels and probably realise their best chance of holding onto their seats now is to hope Sunak pulls something out of his arse because more infighting and turmoil will cost them their jobs.
- “… if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views…”
Oh look! Second post-resignation poll in a row with SNP well above that YouGov level (which was 38% incidentally, not the 29% shouted out in the PB piece.)
Funny how neither the Savanta (SNP 42%) nor this Survation poll got reported by PB. I thought this was meant to be a service for punters?
The SNP remain in a strong position in our 1st poll that has fieldwork conducted after Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last week. At 43% the party would be just 2% shy of their solid 2019 Westminster showing.
That is before the Labour attack machine lays into Kate Forbes as an anti abortion member of an anti homosexual marriage church, if as is likely she succeeds Sturgeon as FM
Don't think the Forbes thing will change that many votes TBH, apart from some middle class SNP types switching to the Greens. She can easily say I have my personal views but I recognise others don't and the laws remain the same.
“The Forbes thing” is purely a figment of Franco boi’s imagination.
Has he said it yet today? *checks* Yes, so we're due two more statements today.
"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice: That alone should encourage the crew. Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."
Biagi is a total nobody, another Sturgeon butt licker. Will hardly be noted in Scotland that yet another trougher is feeding lines to the unionist media. What will matter is what she says in the next few weeks. Regan has already nailed her colours to the mast.
Morning Malc.
Hope you’re well. Are you optimistic this defenestration of Sturgeon will get the Indy movement back on track with the SNP leading it.
Morning Taz, Not at present , still too likely that Murrell's will pick the winner, can only hope the legal matters speed up now. Currently the party system is setup like Russia, they pick the winner and so we will see if it is a public vote with a real count or one they just announce the winner. There are few decent candidates , most are just imitation Sturgeon lickspittles. Forbes or Ash Regan are the only two I can see as not being butt lickers. Forbes we don't know her opinions as she avoided being sacked if opposing Sturgeon so will need to see. Ash Regan is for independence and only one that has ever went against Sturgeon, she would be my choice at this time though it would be interesting to hear Forbe's real views. Rest are dogfood , especially Humza Useless and Macbeth Robertson.
In the real world I did my Sainsbury's weekly shop this morning, shockingly, compared to the last few weeks, it's actually gone down in price. It's the same list I always do on a Sunday morning, not much variation in what I bought so prices are definitely falling for the stuff we need.
Shortages in store - they didn't have all of the tomato varieties but I get mine from Natura anyway and they don't seem to have any issues importing from Italy. Everything else was available, potatoes seem to have dropped in price the most and onions are down as well if, like us, you buy loose ones not in the bag.
Overall comparing this week to last week it was down about 4% in value terms but there's no account of quantity there, pack sizes may have changed and surprisingly I've got better things to do than check pack weights vs last week.
- “… if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views…”
Oh look! Second post-resignation poll in a row with SNP well above that YouGov level (which was 38% incidentally, not the 29% shouted out in the PB piece.)
Funny how neither the Savanta (SNP 42%) nor this Survation poll got reported by PB. I thought this was meant to be a service for punters?
The SNP remain in a strong position in our 1st poll that has fieldwork conducted after Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last week. At 43% the party would be just 2% shy of their solid 2019 Westminster showing.
That is before the Labour attack machine lays into Kate Forbes as an anti abortion member of an anti homosexual marriage church, if as is likely she succeeds Sturgeon as FM
Wrong. On the new boundaries SLab would gain just 5 SNP seats, balanced out by the SNP gaining 4 SCon seats. The British Assimilationist parties would still be floundering:
SNP 47 seats (-1) Assimilationists 10 seats (+1)
As for your Forbes prediction: duly screenshotted.
Forbes is an interesting one. There is some risk to being devoutly religious in politics in nations as secular as ours. Tim Farron being the obvious example.
My own Scottish ancestors were Free Presbyterian ministers, and it is still part of the family culture. It is one thing that would prevent me from standing for election myself.
Tim Farron was a bit hard done by but he made a rod for his own back by dissembling and then lying about it.
I think this is a little harsh on Farron, the core of whose problem was the public anguish over trying to avoid telling a lie about his religious beliefs (he had a couple of years to formulate a decent answer, and that he didn't is pretty poor but there we are).
It's easy to lie about political beliefs and happens all the time from politicians of all parties. You might privately believe that Britain would be better off in the Euro, or that the monarchy is a bit daft, or that the Rwanda policy is a gimmick. But you don't say that asked the direct question.
The problem with religious beliefs is that, confronted with certain questions, you're not just a pragmatist realising that telling the truth about your views would harm your ability to get anyone done... you're suddenly Peter denying Christ three times. That does make it incredibly difficult for certain religious politicians to get on - and perhaps it should too.
"I feel confident in my Labour largest party in a hung parliament position, if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views but Starmer needs to up his game." @TSE
Good morning all.
1. Starmer doesn't need to up his game
2. It's good that he is no Blair. Boris and Cameron have made that kind of politician toxic.
3. Starmer has expunged Corbyn's anti-semitic legacy
4. Labour don't need Scotland but they are recovering well there.
5. Believe the polls
6. I am not merely confident, I am certain, that Labour will win a thumping great majority. We have witnessed a sea change.
7. But you are right. This won't be 1997 Redux. It will be far, far, worse for the tories. In 1997 the economy was in great shape. Now it has tanked. Everyone I know is STILL talking about that Liz Truss budget and Labour will continue to remind us of it. The tories have done 1000x worse in the last 4 years than they did back then on every level, including corruption and sleaze. Which is really saying something.
They are in for an absolute pounding. 100-150 seats but my latest reckoning is that they may go sub 100.
Did you hear that dreadful Rishi Sunak speech in Munich? OMFG. He sounds like a precocious 14 year old reading his script (the teacher gave it a C+) in front of the class, very poorly. Really eye-wateringly poorly. This man is going to get savaged during the election campaign.
The 100-150 band ought to be possible with a half-decent leader. But the Tories don’t have a half-decent leader.
This is the bit that "Starmer isn't Blair" types miss. For all his weaknesses and his tendency to say "wunt", Major was (and is) a considerably effective at the basics of politics than Sunak. Bluntly, he needed to be to get where he did.
And given that Sunak's ratings are still falling from their honeymoon, I wouldn't be shocked if the gap between the two leaders ends up in a similar place to 1997.
If Starmer has a problem, and I don't think it's a major one, it's that he needs to demonstrate his real personality; if such a thing exits. The small target, managerial, at-least-we're-not-the-tories policy lite strategy is effective but it doesn't really give you a sense of what SKS is like. I've never met Sunak but I know exactly what he'd be like if I encountered him in person. A pathetic boring little dweeb who's never heard of Rodrigo Moreno but would try to tell me about Microsoft Azure or some fucking thing. I have no idea what to expect from a personal encounter with SKS. Maybe he's a right laugh?
He would bore the tits off you for sure. I think he is as empty and boring as he makes out, given he does not even know the difference between a man and a woman what hope he could be interesting.
For me, it's always the eyes when it comes to Starmer - cold, quite mean, quite calculating and certainly not empathetic. In another life and another set of circumstances, he could easily be one of history's Adolf Eichmanns.
Fckn hell, Korma law breaking to to engineering the Holocaust in record time. Top Godwinning, I salute you.
It’s comments like @thekitchencabinet’s that make me confident to ignore the ‘Starmer is a boring lawyer’ lines. Intentionally or not, TKC has taken it to such extremes that it merely exposes the fear on the right that Starmer is such an eminently reasonable proposition for our next PM that he must be compared to the Third Reich at any available opportunity.
I thought Thekitchencabinet's comments were spot on, dead eyes , no clue the difference between a man and a woman and no charisma, he will be nearly as bad as the Tories.
Ah but Malc you missed the bit about sending kiddies to the gas chambers. I feel that was more pertinent than your reply acknowledges.
It seems that the GRA stuff may not be the all consuming obsession of voters that the all consumed obsessives think it is.
I think most would agree, so why is Forbe's Christianity causing SNP figures to threaten to flounce?
It’s certainly got lots of tabloids and ALBA supporters saying it’s causing SNP figures threatening to flounce, not necessarily the same thing.
Interesting point is that it appears Sturgeon is backing Humza Useless, her pets are out this morning punting him big time. Surely unless her and Peter are counting the votes, she cannot believe he has even a remote hope. Also why not promoting her pet Macbeth who has always been groomed as her successor, skeletons must be rattling in the cupboards right enough.
In the real world I did my Sainsbury's weekly shop this morning, shockingly, compared to the last few weeks, it's actually gone down in price. It's the same list I always do on a Sunday morning, not much variation in what I bought so prices are definitely falling for the stuff we need.
Shortages in store - they didn't have all of the tomato varieties but I get mine from Natura anyway and they don't seem to have any issues importing from Italy. Everything else was available, potatoes seem to have dropped in price the most and onions are down as well if, like us, you buy loose ones not in the bag.
Overall comparing this week to last week it was down about 4% in value terms but there's no account of quantity there, pack sizes may have changed and surprisingly I've got better things to do than check pack weights vs last week.
I noticed my shop had gone down too this week. Only by a small amount but it had gone down.
There weren’t many shortages in the fruit and veg aisle either.
I am not going to get drawn into this FBPE Sunday circle-jerk for the umpteenth time but you'd have largely empty supermarket shelves of fruit and vegetables late on a Saturday night 10 years ago too.
Domestic fruit (in Winter time) is grown in polytunnels and the increase in wholesale gas prices has meant these are now expensive to heat, together with higher fuel costs for transportation - this is the real problem.
The only contributing factor from Brexit would be health checks on seeds entering the UK, to rule out plant viruses that can affect crops, which wouldn't affect this year's haul because, um, there's no time for them to be planted and grow, and it's a pretty marginal issue anyway that can be planned for. You could just about argue that's there an issue of seasonal labour for harvesting, but that's also a European-wide and even a global issue now with war, inflation, inclement weather and unprecedented demand being the fundamental issues.
The facts are irrelevant. Brexit's getting the blame. That's just the way it goes.
Exactly. The Eurosceptics blamed absolutely everything on Europe incessantly. Now they are going to get a taste of their own medicine. They are going to hate it. Which only increases the joy of the exercise.
So all of your future posts blaming Brexit for things can be dismissed as disingenuous, but that's ok because of fairness
Course the 1997 Tory campaign was the same. Blair was both deadly dull, and no different to them. And sinister and dangerous. (Remember Bambi and demon eyes?). You can't be both. Choose one and run with it.
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
Somewhere else has a different shortage for entirely different reasons.
That's it? That's your Brexit defence?
You talk complete hyperbolic emotive bollocks on Brexit, and are regularly called out on it.
Stick to Tesla on YouTube, where you're both normal and good.
I thought we were talking specifics about supply chain disruptions of different products in different supply chains. We can debate whether or not you think Brexit is responsible for our specific problems like lack of seeds, lack of fertiliser, lack of workforce etc. Or you try and deflect with whataboutery.
Meanwhile, in the real world, we need to fix our specific problems like lack of seeds, lack of fertiliser, lack of workforce etc...
CR i thought you weren’t getting drawn in today?
Agree with you about reading the old Roal Dahl to my kids by the way, which is unusual given that we’re politically quite different
I heard some interesting stuff on the supply chains issues.
It’s not so much shortages of produce as price.
COVID, BREXIT, Ukraine etc have pushed prices up.
In the US and U.K., in particular, the culture was ultra cheap food. Narrow margins.
The story of how Tesco built a special negotiation facility, where teams of Tesco negotiators would brow beat individuals from suppliers is extraordinary - but typical of this approach.
The reaction of some managers in the big chains to these price rises is a form of denial combined with a buyers strike. They can’t imagine a world in which they can’t just demand a price - “quote me happy”
To them, the idea that suppliers can raise prices like this is somewhere between impossible and immoral.
I’ve dealt this this kind of thinking outside the food industry, so I find this very believable - people who believe that they have a right to minimum wage labour, prices to go down every time they negotiate.
Others have accepted reality - hence, I think, the regional differences and how these issues come and go.
I have little sympathy for any of the big supermarkets. They can't compete with Aldi and Lidl on front margin. They have huge stores with huge operating costs and large numbers of staff who aren't as flexibly rostered and thus less efficient. Nor will they reform how they operate to try and compete with the Germans, and their attempts to out-german them (Sainsbury's revival of "Netto" and Tesco's painfully bad Jack's format) were dismal failures.
In reality Tesco and Sainsburys are banks. Supplier sends them products. They sell said products inside a week and take the revenue. They don't need to pay for the good for another 4-6 weeks and the cash is a handy thing to have if you want to do things like offer banking and credit to consumers.
As for the Tesco "special negotiation facility" it was neither special nor a facility. Having summonsed for a laughably staged 7 minute "we'll delist you" shouting session is what we all go through. Its satisfying when you get to face them down - I put a £25m business in Sainsbury's on stop (as in no more products) when they decided they could refuse one price increase. That was quickly resolved in our favour, followed by widescale delists and replacement with inferior products which shrank their sales and market share.
- “… if the YouGov Scotland poll turns out to be harbinger rather than an outlier then I may revise my views…”
Oh look! Second post-resignation poll in a row with SNP well above that YouGov level (which was 38% incidentally, not the 29% shouted out in the PB piece.)
Funny how neither the Savanta (SNP 42%) nor this Survation poll got reported by PB. I thought this was meant to be a service for punters?
The SNP remain in a strong position in our 1st poll that has fieldwork conducted after Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last week. At 43% the party would be just 2% shy of their solid 2019 Westminster showing.
That is before the Labour attack machine lays into Kate Forbes as an anti abortion member of an anti homosexual marriage church, if as is likely she succeeds Sturgeon as FM
Wrong. On the new boundaries SLab would gain just 5 SNP seats, balanced out by the SNP gaining 4 SCon seats. The British Assimilationist parties would still be floundering:
SNP 47 seats (-1) Assimilationists 10 seats (+1)
As for your Forbes prediction: duly screenshotted.
Forbes is an interesting one. There is some risk to being devoutly religious in politics in nations as secular as ours. Tim Farron being the obvious example.
My own Scottish ancestors were Free Presbyterian ministers, and it is still part of the family culture. It is one thing that would prevent me from standing for election myself.
Some enterprising journo should ask Forbes what her views are on evolution.
To be fair to the Free Church, not something I'm massively inclined to do, I'm not aware that they reject evolution as doctrine.
Free Church Doctrine is that the word of the Bible outweighs everything else. So in a narrow sense it is likely she is a creationist. I think though that there is a reasonable interpretation that some passages are parables rather than literally true, for example Jesus's parable of The Good Samaritan is not thought to have literally happened, but was told by him to illustrate a point.
There’s loads of these type of pics popping up on my Twitter feed from all across the UK, often helpfully contrasted with shelves groaning under the weight of fresh produce in the EU.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
And Twitter delivers right on cue.
Of course it's sodding Brexit. It has totally fucked over farmers and fishermen. As they are telling anyone who will listen. And yet wazzock Tories (David Duguid as an example) keep saying how it's great and that they are listening to the very same farmers and fishermen detailing why it isn't great.
Somewhere else has a different shortage for entirely different reasons.
That's it? That's your Brexit defence?
You talk complete hyperbolic emotive bollocks on Brexit, and are regularly called out on it.
Stick to Tesla on YouTube, where you're both normal and good.
I thought we were talking specifics about supply chain disruptions of different products in different supply chains. We can debate whether or not you think Brexit is responsible for our specific problems like lack of seeds, lack of fertiliser, lack of workforce etc. Or you try and deflect with whataboutery.
Meanwhile, in the real world, we need to fix our specific problems like lack of seeds, lack of fertiliser, lack of workforce etc...
CR i thought you weren’t getting drawn in today?
Agree with you about reading the old Roal Dahl to my kids by the way, which is unusual given that we’re politically quite different
I heard some interesting stuff on the supply chains issues.
It’s not so much shortages of produce as price.
COVID, BREXIT, Ukraine etc have pushed prices up.
In the US and U.K., in particular, the culture was ultra cheap food. Narrow margins.
The story of how Tesco built a special negotiation facility, where teams of Tesco negotiators would brow beat individuals from suppliers is extraordinary - but typical of this approach.
The reaction of some managers in the big chains to these price rises is a form of denial combined with a buyers strike. They can’t imagine a world in which they can’t just demand a price - “quote me happy”
To them, the idea that suppliers can raise prices like this is somewhere between impossible and immoral.
I’ve dealt this this kind of thinking outside the food industry, so I find this very believable - people who believe that they have a right to minimum wage labour, prices to go down every time they negotiate.
Others have accepted reality - hence, I think, the regional differences and how these issues come and go.
And if it really is the getting rid of minimum wage labour that is pushing prices up, I'd argue that's actually a benefit of Brexit. You have much more knowledge on this than me, though.
Comments
He's proven he doesn't care about the interests of his constituency and the latest noise from him on Brexit just reinforces this. "I'm listening to fishermen, Brexit has been great" he says. That the local fishing industry association keeps detailing why Brexit has screwed them shows two things about Tories.
They aren't interested in making Brexit work. Their CAP/CFP payments system are a disaster as the industry keeps telling them. And they think voters are so stupid as to not notice the huge cost rises and lack of availability as the supermarket photos keep showing and wonder if the farmers and fishermen know more about it than their Tory MP.
Yes, people tend not to know how stuff works. And the Tories and their spiv media friends have worked very hard to weaponise that ignorance. But the polls show the scales are being washed from the eyes..
This piece from the BBC has some of the detail: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/64430216
SNP 47 seats (-1)
Assimilationists 10 seats (+1)
As for your Forbes prediction: duly screenshotted.
Doing a long set-piece speech well requires planning and effort, which have never been Johnson's strong points.
Boris Johnson is the Gilderoy Lockhart of politics.
https://restaurantclicks.com/food-shortages-2023/
I am genuinely puzzled why modern politicians do not undertake training, since they will not have been able to learn their craft at the mass meetings of old.
My own Scottish ancestors were Free Presbyterian ministers, and it is still part of the family culture. It is one thing that would prevent me from standing for election myself.
Once things for sure, the Tories won't get no votes - they still have a base, and there's a centre-right coalition out there which is anti-Labour - so it depends to what extent that rallies and where.
As usual, Labour won't be their worst enemy - that will be themselves.
So, overall, UK fishing is gaining additional catches but some species are being restricted by conservation requirements. Or, put another way, the gains are Brexit gains and the losses are for causes that are not Brexit.
That's it? That's your Brexit defence?
Edit: sorry, bit too curt. You're quite right about the input stuff. But the output is also a worry.
As I said @DavidL, if Tories want to tell the fishermen they are wrong about fishing then its an open door for that Tory wipoeout. Nothing tends to enrage voters more than people misquoting numbers to claim their lived reality and industrial expertise is wrong
And the bottom line is this.Truss lasted about six weeks as PM, and about two of those were mourning our dear late Queen. Even if Team Sunak were ruthless political assassins, that still requires a hell of a screwup on her part.
Domestic fruit (in Winter time) is grown in polytunnels and the increase in wholesale gas prices has meant these are now expensive to heat, together with higher fuel costs for transportation - this is the real problem.
The only contributing factor from Brexit would be health checks on seeds entering the UK, to rule out plant viruses that can affect crops, which wouldn't affect this year's haul because, um, there's no time for them to be planted and grow, and it's a pretty marginal issue anyway that can be planned for. You could just about argue that's there an issue of seasonal labour for harvesting, but that's also a European-wide and even a global issue now with war, inflation, inclement weather and unprecedented demand being the fundamental issues.
Which is a problem in Spain: https://www.freshplaza.com/asia/article/9503988/shortage-of-vegetables-in-almeria-due-to-the-cold/
And in the USA: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11736999/All-food-shortages-watch-2023.html
"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true."
Reflect on what Twitter is, how it works, your self-selection bias in who you follow, and their selection bias in what they choose to post and how they choose to frame it.
For contrast, I could post a picture of totally full Morrison or Waitrose shelves, find one of a near-empty German one, and praise the genius and resilience of the British supply chain next to the uselessness of the Olaf government in managing high energy prices and labour shortages, if I wanted to.
I'd get loads of likes from my followers, which would then show up in their feeds, and few would question it.
Thank you.
Looks like it is either Forbes or Ash regan. Forbes will need to come out with her independence position soon give Ash's is front and centre.
Still big big chance the Murrell's will rig it though.
Stick to Tesla on YouTube, where you're both normal and good.
"Factionalism has to go... Jeremy Corbyn made our Party the Party of anti-austerity. He was right... He made us the Party that wanted to invest more heavily in our public services and he was right... We build on that, we don't trash it", said Starmer in 2020.
And from a purely political point of view, telling people they're wrong about stuff is one of the reasons Remain lost in 2016.
My view is that Michael Howard would have been competent and I think Hague would have been rather good, even though I disagree with their politics. I think Kinnock and IDS would have been poor. This is all a bit unfair of me as it is all a gut feeling.
My feeling about Liberals is most of those from my younger days were exceptionally good eg Kirkwood, Pardue, Carlile, Penhaligan, but the current lot are pretty weak.
.
@edballs
said Corbyn is not a
@UKLabour
member. That is a lie.
@wesstreeting
said Corbyn was responsible for selecting Jared O'Mara. That is a lie.
@RachelReevesMP
said Corbyn left Labour's accounts in deficit. That is a lie
.
SKS & SKS fans are liars.
Starmer has taken a lot of stick from trying to move on from Brexit, despite looking to fight an election on tomorrow's issues not on refighting yesterday's issues being eminently sensible. I do wonder though if that position will change as the public mood continues to slide against it.
I can see opportunity in some of the red wall seats to have a "lets face reality" conversation. Evolving from "rejoin" arguments to "how do we fix this". If he told people - or allowed a narrative to grow - that he would allow unchecked migration then the Tories could hold some of these seats. So its tricky.
Fundamentally though, red wall voters wanted hope. We've got to the place where they accept they were sold the moon on a stick. But winning them back isn't to call them stupid or to go back to status quo ante. Has to talk to them about the real issues which caused them to vote for the moon on a stick in the first place. And large chunks of that now will have to be about investment in jobs and services and that means removing the barriers...
Firstly, the economy was motoring along quite nicely in 1997. That's unlikely in 2024. So, whilst Black Wednesday cast a long shadow, growth tempered that.
Secondly, although internal divisions were a big issue in 1997 too, Theresa Gorman and Richard Body trying to be back seat drivers isn't quite as bad as a pair of crackers recent ex PMs.
Thirdly, the Lib Dems remain historically weak. They can hope for recovery in some seats to put them back in the game, but will be in lost deposit territory in Con/Lab marginals. Under Ashdown, whilst there was certainly a lot of tactical voting, the Lib Dems were getting decent votes in a lot of places in third place.
Finally, if Farage decides to give it a go in a way he didn't in 2019, he is more of a danger for the Tories than Jimmy Goldsmith was in 1997 (his candidates averaged under 3%).
On balance, I agree it's unlikely to be a 1997 situation. But important to recognise there are some factors that are even better for Starmer than they were for Blair (as well as some that are worse).
Meanwhile, in the real world, we need to fix our specific problems like lack of seeds, lack of fertiliser, lack of workforce etc...
So it wasn't the local party. It wasn't region. We're then into HQ and the NEC. Which at the time was run by Corbynites. So whilst I am sure that Corbyn didn't personally select O'Mara, his team / associates / acolytes did for the advancement of Corbyn. Which is the same thing.
In 2017, the Labour left briefly looked like the future - thrusting Momentum youngsters, cheering Glastonbury crowds, policy arguments being won. Starmer realised that Corbyn's vanity and his supporters' oddities meant that it could be turned into a death cult centred around the divine right of a cranky pensioner to be MP for Islington in perpetuity. Whatever the rights and wrongs of Corbyn's case, it all just looks f***ing weird to people who haven't spent decades involved in Labour internal politics.
I wrote this three years ago today. At the time, it was criticised for being far too alarmist. I wish it had been.
https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/02/19/a-journal-of-the-plague-year-the-politics-of-covid-19/
https://twitter.com/alastairmeeks/status/1627236044365090819?s=46&t=eNsBLMSATSn17GYQMqF1Tw
Agree with you about reading the old Roal Dahl to my kids by the way, which is unusual given that we’re politically quite different
Only joking!
What will matter is what she says in the next few weeks. Regan has already nailed her colours to the mast.
Hope you’re well. Are you optimistic this defenestration of Sturgeon will get the Indy movement back on track with the SNP leading it.
Talk about confirmation bias ...
It’s not so much shortages of produce as price.
COVID, BREXIT, Ukraine etc have pushed prices up.
In the US and U.K., in particular, the culture was ultra cheap food. Narrow margins.
The story of how Tesco built a special negotiation facility, where teams of Tesco negotiators would brow beat individuals from suppliers is extraordinary - but typical of this approach.
The reaction of some managers in the big chains to these price rises is a form of denial combined with a buyers strike. They can’t imagine a world in which they can’t just demand a price - “quote me happy”
To them, the idea that suppliers can raise prices like this is somewhere between impossible and immoral.
I’ve dealt this this kind of thinking outside the food industry, so I find this very believable - people who believe that they have a right to minimum wage labour, prices to go down every time they negotiate.
Others have accepted reality - hence, I think, the regional differences and how these issues come and go.
On topic, if the current polling were reflected in a General Election, the result would be a Labour landslide beyond 1997 in terms of reducing the Conservative Party to a rump of 100-140 seats (depending on which poll and looking at the detailed data tables for England rather than the headline figures).
The 1997 landslide was well trailed - the 1995 local elections which saw the Conservatives lose 2000 Councillors in one evening was based on notional national vote shares of Labour 47%, Conservative 25% and LD 22%. That suggested Labour with more than 400 seats and the Conservatives at about 150.
The final tally was different inasmuch as there was a small move of voters who voted LD locally but Conservative nationally and some Labour supporters stayed at home thinking the election a foregone conclusion.
The polling done at the time, we now know, was flawed in terms of sampling and methodology and produced very large Labour leads based on the "shy Tory" phenomenon.
The sole question now is how much "swingback" Sunak can achieve before polling day. We have the lesson of the 2005-10 Parliament - in the summer of 2008, David Cameron's Conservatives enjoyed leads akin to what Starmer's Labour are showing now but on polling day 2010, the Conservative lead was just seven points so a possible landslide turned into largest party in a hung parliament.
It could happen again -the period 2008-10 was turbulent with the GFC, expenses scandal and a remarkable election campaign (Cleggmania anyone?) but the crucial difference between then and now is while the two main parties are still getting round 75% of the vote, the reminder has fragmented and that will impact in an FPTP election.
This May's local elections will be informative, next May's more so - Starmer doesn't need to claw back 10-15 seats in Scotland if he can win 150 in England and Wales. Similarly, if the current figures remain until polling day,he will win and win big and all that will save the Conservatives from a real rout will be the fragmented third party vote which would limit losses in seats where Labour isn't the main challenger.
I disagree with you about the whole briefing situation though - the briefing against Sunak ahead of the first leadership campaign was brutal and that side of the party - the idiots who want Boris back and the people who wanted the Truss revolution - can have no complaints whatsoever about shit being flung in their direction.
I also think that it’s not that Truss fans are lovely and not briefing because they are honourable it’s more that they have been shown to be wrong and keeping their heads down in a period of quiet self-reflection - something Truss herself would be advised to do as well.
They aren’t angels and probably realise their best chance of holding onto their seats now is to hope Sunak pulls something out of his arse because more infighting and turmoil will cost them their jobs.
Thank-you for the comment son the Plymouth Road Scheme, yesterday
Currently the party system is setup like Russia, they pick the winner and so we will see if it is a public vote with a real count or one they just announce the winner.
There are few decent candidates , most are just imitation Sturgeon lickspittles. Forbes or Ash Regan are the only two I can see as not being butt lickers. Forbes we don't know her opinions as she avoided being sacked if opposing Sturgeon so will need to see. Ash Regan is for independence and only one that has ever went against Sturgeon, she would be my choice at this time though it would be interesting to hear Forbe's real views. Rest are dogfood , especially Humza Useless and Macbeth Robertson.
Shortages in store - they didn't have all of the tomato varieties but I get mine from Natura anyway and they don't seem to have any issues importing from Italy. Everything else was available, potatoes seem to have dropped in price the most and onions are down as well if, like us, you buy loose ones not in the bag.
Overall comparing this week to last week it was down about 4% in value terms but there's no account of quantity there, pack sizes may have changed and surprisingly I've got better things to do than check pack weights vs last week.
It's easy to lie about political beliefs and happens all the time from politicians of all parties. You might privately believe that Britain would be better off in the Euro, or that the monarchy is a bit daft, or that the Rwanda policy is a gimmick. But you don't say that asked the direct question.
The problem with religious beliefs is that, confronted with certain questions, you're not just a pragmatist realising that telling the truth about your views would harm your ability to get anyone done... you're suddenly Peter denying Christ three times. That does make it incredibly difficult for certain religious politicians to get on - and perhaps it should too.
https://twitter.com/bbcpolitics/status/1627251986155335681?s=61&t=G_JkJMQSVOpT9YbsXj66Ug
"He's got Adolf Eichmann Eyes."
Singalong everyone.
There weren’t many shortages in the fruit and veg aisle either.
Blair was both deadly dull, and no different to them. And sinister and dangerous. (Remember Bambi and demon eyes?).
You can't be both.
Choose one and run with it.
In reality Tesco and Sainsburys are banks. Supplier sends them products. They sell said products inside a week and take the revenue. They don't need to pay for the good for another 4-6 weeks and the cash is a handy thing to have if you want to do things like offer banking and credit to consumers.
As for the Tesco "special negotiation facility" it was neither special nor a facility. Having summonsed for a laughably staged 7 minute "we'll delist you" shouting session is what we all go through. Its satisfying when you get to face them down - I put a £25m business in Sainsbury's on stop (as in no more products) when they decided they could refuse one price increase. That was quickly resolved in our favour, followed by widescale delists and replacement with inferior products which shrank their sales and market share.