Would I have put these posters out? No. Do I understand why they have done so? Yes. The Tories are already fighting dirty and seem convinced that even flecks of mud are sticking.
So go straight back at them. One of two things will happen - the Tories ramp it up to spectacular levels but can't deliver on their "shoot the migrants" policy. Or the Tories back off and stop fighting dirty. What Labour think is that if they slam home these messages, the big takeaway is how broken things are in Britain.
Either way, this far out from the election, screw it. The Tories have no moral leg to stand on anyway..
Politics has always been dirty, and fought dirtily. Remember McBride? Nothing here compares to that little sh*tty episode.
But the point is this: if Labour are descending to the gutter - and if Starmer has okayed these attack lines, then it shows at least three things:
*) Labour does not have a moral leg to stand on, either. If they do this to gain power, they'll have no problem doing it whilst in power as well. *) Starmer is an idiot. His time as DPP - when this was all going on - has always had potential to be a problem for him. This just highlights it - and not in a good way. *) Labour is willing to lie and misrepresent just as much as the government. That, as much as anything else, will lose them my vote.
(Sighs), so I guess it'll be the Lib Dems then, who aren't exactly running the local council on my patch well...
The Lib Dems have a moral leg to stand on?
What happened?
What else would they put their moral sandals at the end of?
I think the Labour ad is poor and has been designed to cause a furore . There were plenty of ads that could be done to attack the Tories on law and order which would have been far better .
Having said this the Tory MPs and their arse licking right wing press should stfu with the moral outrage .
Anyone saying though they’ll not vote Labour over an ill advised ad clearly wouldn’t be voting for them anyway .
Comparing 13 years of the cesspit Tories against one dodgy ad is hardly a fair equivalence.
Let me get this right: you are not allowed to like and link to posts that contain Substack links, because Musk thinks it might be a competitor to Twitter*, but Putin and Russian government accounts are OK? (And bear in mind that there are sanctions on businesses operating in Russia, so Twitter is presumably recieving money for the cherished "Blue Tick")
Turns out the "Twitter Files" was a load of bullshit, too.
Mehdi Hasan Dismantles The Entire Foundation Of The Twitter Files As Matt Taibbi Stumbles To Defend It https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-dismantles-the-entire-foundation-of-the-twitter-files-as-matt-taibbi-stumbles-to-defend-it/ ...The errors that Hasan highlights matter a lot. A key one is Taibbi’s claim that the Election Integrity Partnership flagged 22 million tweets for Twitter to take down in partnership with the government. This is flat out wrong. The EIP, which was focused on studying election interference, flagged less than 3,000 tweets for Twitter to review (2,890 to be exact). And they were quite clear in their report on how all this worked. EIP was an academic project to track election interference information and how it flowed across social media. The 22 million figure shows up in the report, but it was just a count of how many tweets they tracked in trying to follow how this information spread, not seeking to remove it. And the vast majority of those tweets weren’t even related to the ones they did explicitly create tickets on...
The sewage thing has been a great success for Labour. I have intelligent, educated floating-voter relatives who genuinely believe we never used to dump sewage in the sea, and that we started doing it last year.
The tactic - an opposition bill to ban something which the government then has to vote down - does not normally cut through. But this one has been a huge success for Labour.
I think that may evaporate when he becomes the one responsible for raising a couple of hundred billion to pay for it.
True. But also true that the Tories have done diddly squat about it. Ofwat, like many of the other post-privatisation regulators, is not fit for purpose.
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Warning shot across the bow.
Versus a lot of jumped-up bottom-feeders who are constantly claiming the moral high ground while continuously taking the low road.
In what sense does it work as a warning shot across the bow?
For that to work they would need to have 'escalation dominance' in this area, but the political nuclear option on sentencing for crimes against children is to bring back the death penalty, which is something that Labour strategists have long feared is a card the Tories could play at some point.
Promising to bring in the death penalty is like escalation to weapons of mass destruction.
It would be as likely to destroy the Conservatives as propel then back into serious electoral contention.
That's why I called it the nuclear option. The point is just that a bidding war doesn't work to Labour's advantage.
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Warning shot across the bow.
Versus a lot of jumped-up bottom-feeders who are constantly claiming the moral high ground while continuously taking the low road.
If Labour want to personally attack Sunak then the obvious target is his wealth and his non Dom wife and his “don’t know a working class person”
That would be brutal but fair. Sunak is weak there
If Labour want to attack on crime - and fair enough they can do that - then they should really really avoid ads which remind people of the association between “Asian men” and pedophilia because that is a whole world of pain for Labour. AND Starmer was DPP during much of this time!
It a stupid self destructive ad on a dozen levels. Mad it’s so bad it feels like an a bit of internal sabotage. A Tory mole in the Labour ranks
Crime is the issue de jour, because of Tory criminality. Writ large and well-rubbed in the noses of the Great British Public.
Attacking Rishi Rich is pointless for Blue Wallers, and not exactly killer ap with Red Wallers either?
There are a billion ways of attacking the Tories on crime without saying “hey we’re just as racist as the Tories and proud of it” like this is a surprise positive
They could for instance have a photo of some poor woman who was attacked and has been waiting three years for the trial of her attacker because the Tories have fucked up and underfunded the judicial system
That would be emotive and would engage the swing voter. It would also have the advantage of
1 being at least adjacent to the truth
And
2 not making Labour look like hypocritical lunatics who have forgotten that their leader was DPP for many years
Sorry, but am finding your arguments on this, less persuasive than your outrage and discomfort.
On specific points;
1. - close enough
2. - Tories have been spending LOTS of effort on THAT, and will keep on doing so, regardless of whether Labour fights back, or not.
No. You just don’t understand the British political environment surrounding all these issues
The ad is a crass and unforced error. That’s it
But might it not surprise on the upside?
BTW, sounds like you & yours gave your gov a great sendoff. And yourselves a healthy outing (old school).
Let me get this right: you are not allowed to like and link to posts that contain Substack links, because Musk thinks it might be a competitor to Twitter*, but Putin and Russian government accounts are OK? (And bear in mind that there are sanctions on businesses operating in Russia, so Twitter is presumably recieving money for the cherished "Blue Tick")
Turns out the "Twitter Files" was a load of bullshit, too.
Mehdi Hasan Dismantles The Entire Foundation Of The Twitter Files As Matt Taibbi Stumbles To Defend It https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-dismantles-the-entire-foundation-of-the-twitter-files-as-matt-taibbi-stumbles-to-defend-it/ ...The errors that Hasan highlights matter a lot. A key one is Taibbi’s claim that the Election Integrity Partnership flagged 22 million tweets for Twitter to take down in partnership with the government. This is flat out wrong. The EIP, which was focused on studying election interference, flagged less than 3,000 tweets for Twitter to review (2,890 to be exact). And they were quite clear in their report on how all this worked. EIP was an academic project to track election interference information and how it flowed across social media. The 22 million figure shows up in the report, but it was just a count of how many tweets they tracked in trying to follow how this information spread, not seeking to remove it. And the vast majority of those tweets weren’t even related to the ones they did explicitly create tickets on...
Musk lies.
No shit.
Bold election slogan? It's so versatile.
The first party that calls itself The No Shit Sherlock Party will definitely get my vote.
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Warning shot across the bow.
Versus a lot of jumped-up bottom-feeders who are constantly claiming the moral high ground while continuously taking the low road.
If Labour want to personally attack Sunak then the obvious target is his wealth and his non Dom wife and his “don’t know a working class person”
That would be brutal but fair. Sunak is weak there
If Labour want to attack on crime - and fair enough they can do that - then they should really really avoid ads which remind people of the association between “Asian men” and pedophilia because that is a whole world of pain for Labour. AND Starmer was DPP during much of this time!
It a stupid self destructive ad on a dozen levels. Mad it’s so bad it feels like an a bit of internal sabotage. A Tory mole in the Labour ranks
Crime is the issue de jour, because of Tory criminality. Writ large and well-rubbed in the noses of the Great British Public.
Attacking Rishi Rich is pointless for Blue Wallers, and not exactly killer ap with Red Wallers either?
There are a billion ways of attacking the Tories on crime without saying “hey we’re just as racist as the Tories and proud of it” like this is a surprise positive
They could for instance have a photo of some poor woman who was attacked and has been waiting three years for the trial of her attacker because the Tories have fucked up and underfunded the judicial system
That would be emotive and would engage the swing voter. It would also have the advantage of
1 being at least adjacent to the truth
And
2 not making Labour look like hypocritical lunatics who have forgotten that their leader was DPP for many years
Sorry, but am finding your arguments on this, less persuasive than your outrage and discomfort.
On specific points;
1. - close enough
2. - Tories have been spending LOTS of effort on THAT, and will keep on doing so, regardless of whether Labour fights back, or not.
No. You just don’t understand the British political environment surrounding all these issues
The ad is a crass and unforced error. That’s it
Thank you Lord Astor.
Although unusually, on this occasion your second paragraph is correct.
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Warning shot across the bow.
Versus a lot of jumped-up bottom-feeders who are constantly claiming the moral high ground while continuously taking the low road.
If Labour want to personally attack Sunak then the obvious target is his wealth and his non Dom wife and his “don’t know a working class person”
That would be brutal but fair. Sunak is weak there
If Labour want to attack on crime - and fair enough they can do that - then they should really really avoid ads which remind people of the association between “Asian men” and pedophilia because that is a whole world of pain for Labour. AND Starmer was DPP during much of this time!
It a stupid self destructive ad on a dozen levels. Mad it’s so bad it feels like an a bit of internal sabotage. A Tory mole in the Labour ranks
Crime is the issue de jour, because of Tory criminality. Writ large and well-rubbed in the noses of the Great British Public.
Attacking Rishi Rich is pointless for Blue Wallers, and not exactly killer ap with Red Wallers either?
There are a billion ways of attacking the Tories on crime without saying “hey we’re just as racist as the Tories and proud of it” like this is a surprise positive
They could for instance have a photo of some poor woman who was attacked and has been waiting three years for the trial of her attacker because the Tories have fucked up and underfunded the judicial system
That would be emotive and would engage the swing voter. It would also have the advantage of
1 being at least adjacent to the truth
And
2 not making Labour look like hypocritical lunatics who have forgotten that their leader was DPP for many years
Sorry, but am finding your arguments on this, less persuasive than your outrage and discomfort.
On specific points;
1. - close enough
2. - Tories have been spending LOTS of effort on THAT, and will keep on doing so, regardless of whether Labour fights back, or not.
No. You just don’t understand the British political environment surrounding all these issues
The ad is a crass and unforced error. That’s it
I’m not so sure.
It does allow for legitimately going for Starmer’s record at the DPP. Since the DPP has direct input into sentencing guidelines.
No shit he considered them amongst his dearest friends, considering they spot him free luxury trips on an annual basis. I'd consider people good friends if they showered me with freebies well beyond my official means too.
Classic politician's dodging though.
US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has said he believed luxury trips taken with a billionaire Republican donor followed guidelines.
A ProPublica report earlier this week said Mr Thomas had accepted vacations from real estate mogul Harlan Crow nearly every year for two decades.
Supreme Court justices are required to file annual disclosures of gifts.
Mr Thomas said that he had been led to believe that "this sort of personal hospitality" did not apply...
"I have endeavoured to follow that counsel throughout my tenure, and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines," the statement added.
Mr Thomas described Mr Crow and his wife Kathy Crow as "among our dearest friends, and we have been friends for over twenty-five years".
carnforth said: :I have intelligent, educated floating-voter relatives who genuinely believe we never used to dump sewage in the sea, and that we started doing it last year."
It continues to surprise me how many people don't think about the fact that whales, fish, cephalopods, and all the other sea creatures excrete wastes into the sea. (Anyone who has ever had a home aquarium should know that.)
That's not to say that we here in the US can't do better at handling wastes -- and should. And it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the UK could do better, too. But it's a problem that is literally billions of years old, so I don't think the Conservatives are solely to blame.
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Warning shot across the bow.
Versus a lot of jumped-up bottom-feeders who are constantly claiming the moral high ground while continuously taking the low road.
If Labour want to personally attack Sunak then the obvious target is his wealth and his non Dom wife and his “don’t know a working class person”
That would be brutal but fair. Sunak is weak there
If Labour want to attack on crime - and fair enough they can do that - then they should really really avoid ads which remind people of the association between “Asian men” and pedophilia because that is a whole world of pain for Labour. AND Starmer was DPP during much of this time!
It a stupid self destructive ad on a dozen levels. Mad it’s so bad it feels like an a bit of internal sabotage. A Tory mole in the Labour ranks
Crime is the issue de jour, because of Tory criminality. Writ large and well-rubbed in the noses of the Great British Public.
Attacking Rishi Rich is pointless for Blue Wallers, and not exactly killer ap with Red Wallers either?
There are a billion ways of attacking the Tories on crime without saying “hey we’re just as racist as the Tories and proud of it” like this is a surprise positive
They could for instance have a photo of some poor woman who was attacked and has been waiting three years for the trial of her attacker because the Tories have fucked up and underfunded the judicial system
That would be emotive and would engage the swing voter. It would also have the advantage of
1 being at least adjacent to the truth
And
2 not making Labour look like hypocritical lunatics who have forgotten that their leader was DPP for many years
Sorry, but am finding your arguments on this, less persuasive than your outrage and discomfort.
On specific points;
1. - close enough
2. - Tories have been spending LOTS of effort on THAT, and will keep on doing so, regardless of whether Labour fights back, or not.
No. You just don’t understand the British political environment surrounding all these issues
The ad is a crass and unforced error. That’s it
I’m not so sure.
It does allow for legitimately going for Starmer’s record at the DPP. Since the DPP has direct input into sentencing guidelines.
I suspect that was a given anyway, whether Labour had gone for Sunak or not
My issue is we expect this of the post-May Conservatives, we would be upset if they weren't looking for the lowest common denominator, we don't of Labour and the fact they are trawling around the gutter is unacceptable.
I think the Labour ad is poor and has been designed to cause a furore . There were plenty of ads that could be done to attack the Tories on law and order which would have been far better .
Having said this the Tory MPs and their arse licking right wing press should stfu with the moral outrage .
Anyone saying though they’ll not vote Labour over an ill advised ad clearly wouldn’t be voting for them anyway .
Comparing 13 years of the cesspit Tories against one dodgy ad is hardly a fair equivalence.
The Guardian seems to be leading the attack, hardly right wing press
A lot of polling coming out of Greece where the legislative election takes place on May 21st.
The incumbent New Democracy Government won in 2019 getting 40% of the vote to Syriza’s 31.5%. That was under the electoral system which handed 50 extra seats to the party topping the poll which left ND with 158 and a majority,
That system has gone with the revised system brought in by Syriza in 2016 in effect which means no 50-seat bonus this time. Now, if you’re wondering why this is only happening now, under Greek law, if you don’t have a two thirds majority the law doesn’t change until after another election.
This means all 300 seats will be fought and as it seems unlikely any party will win an overall majority the question then becomes how ND could form a Government or whether a Syriza-PASOK coalition might be possible.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
I think the Tories should call Labour’s bluff - say “ok Keir, if you publicly list the tougher sentences you want we will push them through with Labour’s wholehearted support this parliament.”
Either Labour have to put up, which will cause ructions in the party with those who don’t want tougher sentences, or will make them look stupid when they don’t actually have any idea what these tougher sentences will be and will also likely crash against sentencing guidelines softened whilst SKS was DPP.
Suella just has to restore capital punishment, something Starmer couldn't countenance. A landslide win for Sunak and Suella, and a very sorry state of affairs for the nation, but a win is a win.
More like - “we will move sentencing guidelines from the committee on which the DPP sits, to parliament.”
I would have thought by recent parole change proposals (i.e the HS has the final say) it would be the HS rather than Parliament that decides sentencing for Suella.
The big problem with having parliament or the HS do things like this should be obvious - they are idiots who have to pander to morons.
Politicians shaping policy for justice? Fine. But not a hate mob prompting politicians to hand out panicky sentences. We have had this for decades now - but it's difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. Especially when the lunatics have been told that *everyone* who is right-minded agrees with them that Pakistani paedo invader boat criminals should be jailed for 437 years minimum.
Ironically, the "bar" at which convicted felons get a whole life tariff seems to have been lowered since it was taken out of the Home Setretary's powers.
A lot of polling coming out of Greece where the legislative election takes place on May 21st.
The incumbent New Democracy Government won in 2019 getting 40% of the vote to Syriza’s 31.5%. That was under the electoral system which handed 50 extra seats to the party topping the poll which left ND with 158 and a majority,
That system has gone with the revised system brought in by Syriza in 2016 in effect which means no 50-seat bonus this time. Now, if you’re wondering why this is only happening now, under Greek law, if you don’t have a two thirds majority the law doesn’t change until after another election.
This means all 300 seats will be fought and as it seems unlikely any party will win an overall majority the question then becomes how ND could form a Government or whether a Syriza-PASOK coalition might be possible.
It’s going to be interesting,
Intersting detail. Given the whole point of the last system was no one was going to get 2/3, or even half, so got a boost, it seems an odd one.
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Maybe the people running political parties in this country are significantly less intelligent than we'd previous assumed. I don't just mean the public figures; the backroom staff as well.
Labour’s latest position is that “the Tories are dog whistling racists but - get this - so are we! Hah! Bet you weren’t expecting that eh?”
As you say, this does not strike me as evidence of high intelligence in their PR department
What us the racist element to this?
Because there is an association between the concept “Asian man” and pedophilia for sad and horrible reasons which we don’t need to rehearse. This is particularly the case right now after the braverman and Sunak interventions on the issue of Asian grooming gangs. To which this seems to be a response. Because Labour have actually SAID this is their response
So they put out an ad with a photo of the prime minister, an Asian man, associating him with unprosecuted pedophilia.
Ash Sarkar agrees with me.
1) If the Tories had mocked up this ad with the photo of an Asian Labour MP, they'd be decried as racist.
2) Next time the right hit Keir Starmer with the Jimmy Savile smears, Labour will not have a leg to stand on re: playing fair.”
Would I have put these posters out? No. Do I understand why they have done so? Yes. The Tories are already fighting dirty and seem convinced that even flecks of mud are sticking.
So go straight back at them. One of two things will happen - the Tories ramp it up to spectacular levels but can't deliver on their "shoot the migrants" policy. Or the Tories back off and stop fighting dirty. What Labour think is that if they slam home these messages, the big takeaway is how broken things are in Britain.
Either way, this far out from the election, screw it. The Tories have no moral leg to stand on anyway..
Politics has always been dirty, and fought dirtily. Remember McBride? Nothing here compares to that little sh*tty episode.
But the point is this: if Labour are descending to the gutter - and if Starmer has okayed these attack lines, then it shows at least three things:
*) Labour does not have a moral leg to stand on, either. If they do this to gain power, they'll have no problem doing it whilst in power as well. *) Starmer is an idiot. His time as DPP - when this was all going on - has always had potential to be a problem for him. This just highlights it - and not in a good way. *) Labour is willing to lie and misrepresent just as much as the government. That, as much as anything else, will lose them my vote.
(Sighs), so I guess it'll be the Lib Dems then, who aren't exactly running the local council on my patch well...
I think it shows that Labour are not confident that their lead is a solid one.
If you’re strolling to victory, why bother?
The rules of politics have changed.
Unlike in the 1990s, when voter loyalties were more established and when people shifted they really really shifted, today everyone is far more fickle.
I don't view the 15-20 point lead as either predetermined or insurmountable.
It's pretty hilarious reading some of the vitriol aimed at Labour on here and elsewhere today. Personally I'm not keen on this law and order campaign. But given the Tories' desperate efforts to equate Labour with turning a blind eye to "British Pakistani grooming gangs", and to tell us all that Labour would open our borders to any criminals who could be arsed to cross them, along with frequent pronouncements from Sunak, Braverman and others about Labour being soft on crime, it's a bit rich for them to moan about Labour attacking back.
Methinks the Tories doth protest too much.
They are such snowflakes.
"They".
Speaks a 'Tory party member'.
A disillusioned one, by the sound if it. Or are you going to call him a traitor ?
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Maybe the people running political parties in this country are significantly less intelligent than we'd previous assumed. I don't just mean the public figures; the backroom staff as well.
Labour’s latest position is that “the Tories are dog whistling racists but - get this - so are we! Hah! Bet you weren’t expecting that eh?”
As you say, this does not strike me as evidence of high intelligence in their PR department
Perhaps they don’t see why they should do politics with one hand tied behind their back while the Conservatives throw whatever time and considerable money they have to stay in office.
We all know the Conservatives are going to be a useless and ineffective opposition and will only find their way back to power when Labour self-destructs.
A Twitter account claiming to be state Rep. Joel McEntire, R-Cathlamet, has been calling users of the platform various demeaning words, including “straight up loser,” “dim wit dem,” “lazy” and “utterly pathetic.”
While he initially said on his Facebook page that screenshots of the posts were “photoshopped,” the state representative this week told The Chronicle the account is, in fact, his.
But, he’s not the one running it.
“I started this Twitter page a few months ago but handed it off to a kid from Vancouver to use,” McEntire wrote in an email.
McEntire has promoted the Twitter account — which has multiple times assured people it is run by the representative himself — on his Facebook page.
He said the account was meant as an “election tool” against Cara Cusack, the Democratic candidate who he beat in 2022 in a nearly 60% to 40% split.
“He is trying to generate support for Cara Cusack for me. If Democrats around the region support her early, since she has already declared she is running, it lowers the chances of a strong candidate jumping in the race in 2024,” McEntire wrote, later adding, “I don’t much care what he says or does on it.”
One woman in particular, a Grays Harbor County resident who asked that her name be kept out of this report, has received much of the account’s attention.
Tweets have said “I am not surprised you are single,” “You are so slow it hurts,” and has been asked “Don’t you have children to raise?”
She has repeatedly asked the account to stop interacting with her, but it hasn’t.
Cusack wrote on Twitter, “I don’t know if this is actually Joel, but he may as well be since I hear he is promoting the account on Facebook.”
Asked whether McEntire sanctioning the account is a violation of any legislative code of conduct, J.T. Wilcox, House Minority Leader said “others are free to manage their communications in a manner” that best suits them and their style.
“This is the first time I’ve seen any of these tweets,” Wilcox said. “I personally control all of my social media accounts.”
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Maybe the people running political parties in this country are significantly less intelligent than we'd previous assumed. I don't just mean the public figures; the backroom staff as well.
The backroom staff are a few grads who've got a 2:2 at a redbrick university,.hob-nobbed in their free time at party conferences, and have secured a job on £25k a year in Westminster and now think they're Leo McGarry because they carry the bags of a public figure.
It occurs to me that we could send Lord Trimble to the US to try and negotiate a peaceful resolution to the behaviour of a large chunk of the… Republican Party.
He has some small success with negotiating with violent tossers with lots of Armalites*
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
No shit he considered them amongst his dearest friends, considering they spot him free luxury trips on an annual basis. I'd consider people good friends if they showered me with freebies well beyond my official means too.
Classic politician's dodging though.
US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has said he believed luxury trips taken with a billionaire Republican donor followed guidelines.
A ProPublica report earlier this week said Mr Thomas had accepted vacations from real estate mogul Harlan Crow nearly every year for two decades.
Supreme Court justices are required to file annual disclosures of gifts.
Mr Thomas said that he had been led to believe that "this sort of personal hospitality" did not apply...
"I have endeavoured to follow that counsel throughout my tenure, and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines," the statement added.
Mr Thomas described Mr Crow and his wife Kathy Crow as "among our dearest friends, and we have been friends for over twenty-five years".
Would I have put these posters out? No. Do I understand why they have done so? Yes. The Tories are already fighting dirty and seem convinced that even flecks of mud are sticking.
So go straight back at them. One of two things will happen - the Tories ramp it up to spectacular levels but can't deliver on their "shoot the migrants" policy. Or the Tories back off and stop fighting dirty. What Labour think is that if they slam home these messages, the big takeaway is how broken things are in Britain.
Either way, this far out from the election, screw it. The Tories have no moral leg to stand on anyway..
Politics has always been dirty, and fought dirtily. Remember McBride? Nothing here compares to that little sh*tty episode.
But the point is this: if Labour are descending to the gutter - and if Starmer has okayed these attack lines, then it shows at least three things:
*) Labour does not have a moral leg to stand on, either. If they do this to gain power, they'll have no problem doing it whilst in power as well. *) Starmer is an idiot. His time as DPP - when this was all going on - has always had potential to be a problem for him. This just highlights it - and not in a good way. *) Labour is willing to lie and misrepresent just as much as the government. That, as much as anything else, will lose them my vote.
(Sighs), so I guess it'll be the Lib Dems then, who aren't exactly running the local council on my patch well...
I think it shows that Labour are not confident that their lead is a solid one.
If you’re strolling to victory, why bother?
Ahead of the 1997 General Election, Blair was obsessed by keeping the door open to Ashdown with promises of a Royal Commission on electoral reform.
He didn't think Labour was strolling to victory.
It's a mistake to think the Labour (or the Conservatives) has any better idea about the likely result of the next General Election than we do.
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Maybe the people running political parties in this country are significantly less intelligent than we'd previous assumed. I don't just mean the public figures; the backroom staff as well.
The backroom staff are a few grads who've got a 2:2 at a redbrick university,.hob-nobbed in their free time at party conferences, and have secured a job on £25k a year in Westminster and now think they're Leo McGarry because they carry the bags of a public figure.
It goes to their head.
Peak snobbery?
That said, some years ago I and a friend overheard some “top strategist” types in a bar discussing their really really stupid plan to be the hero of an episode of in The Thick Of It.
It was so novel and bold, that we immediately wrote down our joint recollection of it, for the criminal case that would have followed its implementation.
carnforth said: :I have intelligent, educated floating-voter relatives who genuinely believe we never used to dump sewage in the sea, and that we started doing it last year."
It continues to surprise me how many people don't think about the fact that whales, fish, cephalopods, and all the other sea creatures excrete wastes into the sea. (Anyone who has ever had a home aquarium should know that.)
That's not to say that we here in the US can't do better at handling wastes -- and should. And it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the UK could do better, too. But it's a problem that is literally billions of years old, so I don't think the Conservatives are solely to blame.
I think you might fairly characterise a 25 fold increase in sewage discharge over the last five or so years that way.
carnforth said: :I have intelligent, educated floating-voter relatives who genuinely believe we never used to dump sewage in the sea, and that we started doing it last year."
It continues to surprise me how many people don't think about the fact that whales, fish, cephalopods, and all the other sea creatures excrete wastes into the sea. (Anyone who has ever had a home aquarium should know that.)
That's not to say that we here in the US can't do better at handling wastes -- and should. And it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the UK could do better, too. But it's a problem that is literally billions of years old, so I don't think the Conservatives are solely to blame.
I think you might fairly characterise a 25 fold increase in sewage discharge over the last five or so years that way.
Unsuprisingly, the amount of discharge measured by live electronic discharge monitors has gone up since they started to be installed in 2015 - because more and more have been installed. They must all be installed by the end of 2023.
carnforth said: :I have intelligent, educated floating-voter relatives who genuinely believe we never used to dump sewage in the sea, and that we started doing it last year."
It continues to surprise me how many people don't think about the fact that whales, fish, cephalopods, and all the other sea creatures excrete wastes into the sea. (Anyone who has ever had a home aquarium should know that.)
That's not to say that we here in the US can't do better at handling wastes -- and should. And it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the UK could do better, too. But it's a problem that is literally billions of years old, so I don't think the Conservatives are solely to blame.
I think you might fairly characterise a 25 fold increase in sewage discharge over the last five or so years that way.
Is that a 25-fold increase in discharges, or a 25-fold increase in monitoring?
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
The advert seems quite grotesque to me, and also pointless and politically self harming
Labour are cruising to victory against a soiled Tory party seen as corrupt and amoral. So Labour produces an ad which says “hey we’re just as amoral” and “we’re soiled as well”
Why on earth?
Maybe the people running political parties in this country are significantly less intelligent than we'd previous assumed. I don't just mean the public figures; the backroom staff as well.
Labour’s latest position is that “the Tories are dog whistling racists but - get this - so are we! Hah! Bet you weren’t expecting that eh?”
As you say, this does not strike me as evidence of high intelligence in their PR department
Perhaps they don’t see why they should do politics with one hand tied behind their back while the Conservatives throw whatever time and considerable money they have to stay in office…
I wouldn’t argue they should. But if they’re taking the gloves off, they ought to do a better job.
carnforth said: :I have intelligent, educated floating-voter relatives who genuinely believe we never used to dump sewage in the sea, and that we started doing it last year."
It continues to surprise me how many people don't think about the fact that whales, fish, cephalopods, and all the other sea creatures excrete wastes into the sea. (Anyone who has ever had a home aquarium should know that.)
That's not to say that we here in the US can't do better at handling wastes -- and should. And it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the UK could do better, too. But it's a problem that is literally billions of years old, so I don't think the Conservatives are solely to blame.
I think you might fairly characterise a 25 fold increase in sewage discharge over the last five or so years that way.
Unsuprisingly, the amount of discharge measured by live electronic discharge monitors has gone up since they started to be installed in 2015 - because more and more have been installed. They must all be installed by the end of 2023.
That does rather put a different slant on the figures.
Yeah, Tory tweeted about that when it happened. Still, better for it to be caught on the test stand than in-flight.
As an aside, have you seen the state of the tiles on SS for the upcoming launch? Seems remarkably... slipshod to me.
They are not expecting Starship 24 or Booster 7 back, as I understand it. Both are being expended on this launch. Though there is some indication they have applied for a license to bring Booster 7 back to the Chopsticks, if they want. Which is bold, if true.
EDIT: Tory should really catch a break - he has done far more than Stephan Israel to turn his operation around and try and do sensible improvements. If ULA can get free of the parents, I suspect he would be even bolder.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
I'd say significant increases in tax and borrowing - eg taxes from electric motor vehicles (to maintain the revenue that used to come from ICE vehicles) and ICE vehicles (to encourage for environmental reasons the move to electric).
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
After the fascinating week the SNP have had, perhaps they could cheer themselves up by proposing the introduction of bears, wolves, tigers and black mambas as an experiment confined to the constituency of Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
There must be lots that could be done that wouldn't involve net increases in public spending. Things like abolishing leasehold and a variety of other reforms that would aim to reduce the extent to which ordinary people are ripped off by big companies and the rentier class.
But there's not much sign of Labour having plans for these sorts of reforms either.
After the fascinating week the SNP have had, perhaps they could cheer themselves up by proposing the introduction of bears, wolves, tigers and black mambas as an experiment confined to the constituency of Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch.
Already here in Saône et Loire and decimating herds / flocks (or rather, killing about 1/1,000 of what goes to the abattoir.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
There must be lots that could be done that wouldn't involve net increases in public spending. Things like abolishing leasehold and a variety of other reforms that would aim to reduce the extent to which ordinary people are ripped off by big companies and the rentier class.
But there's not much sign of Labour having plans for these sorts of reforms either.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
There must be lots that could be done that wouldn't involve net increases in public spending. Things like abolishing leasehold and a variety of other reforms that would aim to reduce the extent to which ordinary people are ripped off by big companies and the rentier class.
But there's not much sign of Labour having plans for these sorts of reforms either.
Reforming public sector employment to remove 1950s style industrial relations would save money.
The Economist did an article, years back, in which they showed that the Years of Strife were a loser for both employers and employees - just in terms of lost wages and production. Vs the modern pay negotiation agreements.
Think of changing the bizarre system of not having enough workers. Then hiring the same workers via an agency at vast rates…
With the added benefit that getting rid of the “beatings will continue until moral improves” style of management will probably improve staff retention no end.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
There must be lots that could be done that wouldn't involve net increases in public spending. Things like abolishing leasehold and a variety of other reforms that would aim to reduce the extent to which ordinary people are ripped off by big companies and the rentier class.
But there's not much sign of Labour having plans for these sorts of reforms either.
Starmer was on the review board that approved the 2012 sentencing guidelines. This won't end well for him, it will get brought up in every single debate and every single Tory ad that he wrote and approved these sentencing guidelines.
I'm honestly not sure that they've thought this though at all.
After the fascinating week the SNP have had, perhaps they could cheer themselves up by proposing the introduction of bears, wolves, tigers and black mambas as an experiment confined to the constituency of Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch.
After the fascinating week the SNP have had, perhaps they could cheer themselves up by proposing the introduction of bears, wolves, tigers and black mambas as an experiment confined to the constituency of Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch.
They need to eradicate slugs first.
You're not allowed to do that. It counts as murder. MPs have as much right to live as the rest of us.
carnforth said: :I have intelligent, educated floating-voter relatives who genuinely believe we never used to dump sewage in the sea, and that we started doing it last year."
It continues to surprise me how many people don't think about the fact that whales, fish, cephalopods, and all the other sea creatures excrete wastes into the sea. (Anyone who has ever had a home aquarium should know that.)
That's not to say that we here in the US can't do better at handling wastes -- and should. And it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the UK could do better, too. But it's a problem that is literally billions of years old, so I don't think the Conservatives are solely to blame.
I think you might fairly characterise a 25 fold increase in sewage discharge over the last five or so years that way.
Unsuprisingly, the amount of discharge measured by live electronic discharge monitors has gone up since they started to be installed in 2015 - because more and more have been installed. They must all be installed by the end of 2023.
If the government want to reduce the amount of sewage in the sea, they need tostop their members swimming in it, especially in places like Skegness and Clacton.
carnforth said: :I have intelligent, educated floating-voter relatives who genuinely believe we never used to dump sewage in the sea, and that we started doing it last year."
It continues to surprise me how many people don't think about the fact that whales, fish, cephalopods, and all the other sea creatures excrete wastes into the sea. (Anyone who has ever had a home aquarium should know that.)
That's not to say that we here in the US can't do better at handling wastes -- and should. And it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the UK could do better, too. But it's a problem that is literally billions of years old, so I don't think the Conservatives are solely to blame.
I think you might fairly characterise a 25 fold increase in sewage discharge over the last five or so years that way.
Unsuprisingly, the amount of discharge measured by live electronic discharge monitors has gone up since they started to be installed in 2015 - because more and more have been installed. They must all be installed by the end of 2023.
If the government want to reduce the amount of sewage in the sea, they need tostop their members swimming in it, especially in places like Skegness and Clacton.
Just stopping them talking to journalists would do.
After all, stopping members from leaking would reduce the sewage.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
There must be lots that could be done that wouldn't involve net increases in public spending. Things like abolishing leasehold and a variety of other reforms that would aim to reduce the extent to which ordinary people are ripped off by big companies and the rentier class.
But there's not much sign of Labour having plans for these sorts of reforms either.
Abolishing leasehold? Done years ago in Scotland.
I remember paying a sum of money to redeem our feu. I think it was in 1975.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
There must be lots that could be done that wouldn't involve net increases in public spending. Things like abolishing leasehold and a variety of other reforms that would aim to reduce the extent to which ordinary people are ripped off by big companies and the rentier class.
But there's not much sign of Labour having plans for these sorts of reforms either.
Abolishing leasehold? Done years ago in Scotland.
I remember paying a sum of money to redeem our feu. I think it was in 1975.
That too, but it's separate, I think. Just been looking at some old legal deeds for a relative's flat.
Edit: abolition of feudalities happened almost as the first thing the reconvened Scottish Parliament did in the 1990s.
After the fascinating week the SNP have had, perhaps they could cheer themselves up by proposing the introduction of bears, wolves, tigers and black mambas as an experiment confined to the constituency of Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch.
They need to eradicate slugs first.
You're not allowed to do that. It counts as murder. MPs have as much right to live as the rest of us.
What about DoE officials and Ofsted officials, though?
Just having a think, was Rishi even an MP in 2012? Pretty sure he wasn't. This is going to end badly for Labour because they're attempting ro pin it to Rishi. They're reading the same runes as everyone else and have realised 1992 is on as long as Rishi sticks around and continues to be seen as competent and decent by voters.
Throwing mud only works if it sticks, and this won't. If anything it will raise a lot of questions for Starmer, if he is so against all of these low or no prison time sentences then why didn't he block them back in 2012 when he has the chance as DPP?
Starmer was on the review board that approved the 2012 sentencing guidelines. This won't end well for him, it will get brought up in every single debate and every single Tory ad that he wrote and approved these sentencing guidelines.
I'm honestly not sure that they've thought this though at all.
They’ve been lured successfully into the losing game that is trying to be more thuggish than the government.
This has really irritated me. If I lived in a marginal I’d be feeling a bit like OGH now. But I don’t, I’m in a constituency with a 30k+ Labour majority.
After the fascinating week the SNP have had, perhaps they could cheer themselves up by proposing the introduction of bears, wolves, tigers and black mambas as an experiment confined to the constituency of Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch.
They need to eradicate slugs first.
You're not allowed to do that. It counts as murder. MPs have as much right to live as the rest of us.
What about DoE officials and Ofsted officials, though?
As if I would compare them to slugs. Slugs have never done anything to deserve that.
carnforth said: :I have intelligent, educated floating-voter relatives who genuinely believe we never used to dump sewage in the sea, and that we started doing it last year."
It continues to surprise me how many people don't think about the fact that whales, fish, cephalopods, and all the other sea creatures excrete wastes into the sea. (Anyone who has ever had a home aquarium should know that.)
That's not to say that we here in the US can't do better at handling wastes -- and should. And it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the UK could do better, too. But it's a problem that is literally billions of years old, so I don't think the Conservatives are solely to blame.
I think you might fairly characterise a 25 fold increase in sewage discharge over the last five or so years that way.
Is that a 25-fold increase in discharges, or a 25-fold increase in monitoring?
That is a fair question. But digging a bit deeper, there’s a reason for that.
https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/sewage-water-firms-wont-tell-us/ … But as a geographer and geomorphologist who specialises in rivers and has taken a keen interest in this sewage crisis, I know there is something missing in the data. Sewage discharges to rivers are recorded by sensors known as event duration monitors. These measure the start and end time of any flow, but are rarely set up to measure the volume of that flow.
This leaves the data open to manipulation. Was an “event” 100 litres or 1 billion litres? 1 billion might sound far-fetched, but Mogden sewage works next to Twickenham Stadium discharged over 1 billion litres of sewage directly into the River Thames on each of two days in October 2021.
So a water company could in theory reduce the duration and frequency of discharge events – turning the above map from red to green – but still increase the total amount of sewage dumped into rivers.
The absence of reliable baseline data on sewage dumping is a major problem and research has shown that water companies have not reported the full scale of their discharges.
The Environment Agency has a poor record of sewage pollution data scrutiny and several water companies are now routinely declining environmental information requests. How can we address the biodiversity crisis and make rivers safe for recreation if we don’t have reliable data on the volumes of pollutants pumped into them?..
Starmer was on the review board that approved the 2012 sentencing guidelines. This won't end well for him, it will get brought up in every single debate and every single Tory ad that he wrote and approved these sentencing guidelines.
I'm honestly not sure that they've thought this though at all.
They’ve been lured successfully into the losing game that is trying to be more thuggish than the government.
This has really irritated me. If I lived in a marginal I’d be feeling a bit like OGH now. But I don’t, I’m in a constituency with a 30k+ Labour majority.
Vote Lib Dem if you don’t like this shit.
It won't win them any votes in red wall seats and it will lose them votes elsewhere. I don't really understand the strategy at all. If they'd gone after the party in general it may have worked, but attempting to pin it on Rishi who's been PM for five minutes and wasn't an MP when the sentencing guidelines changed is a huge leap and voters are going to see through it.
Although the Tories as a party are a bunch of unscrupulous scumbags, Rishi seems a decent chap. If Labour want to fight in the gutter, they should fight the Tory party, not their leader.
After the fascinating week the SNP have had, perhaps they could cheer themselves up by proposing the introduction of bears, wolves, tigers and black mambas as an experiment confined to the constituency of Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch.
They need to eradicate slugs first.
You're not allowed to do that. It counts as murder. MPs have as much right to live as the rest of us.
What about DoE officials and Ofsted officials, though?
As if I would compare them to slugs. Slugs have never done anything to deserve that.
I now feel very tempted to try sprinkling salt on various kinds of public servant....
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
There must be lots that could be done that wouldn't involve net increases in public spending. Things like abolishing leasehold and a variety of other reforms that would aim to reduce the extent to which ordinary people are ripped off by big companies and the rentier class.
But there's not much sign of Labour having plans for these sorts of reforms either.
Abolishing leasehold? Done years ago in Scotland.
Isn’t it being scrapped in England, too?
Maybe, apparently. Some fiddling with the system rather than outright abolition, it would seem.
After the fascinating week the SNP have had, perhaps they could cheer themselves up by proposing the introduction of bears, wolves, tigers and black mambas as an experiment confined to the constituency of Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch.
They need to eradicate slugs first.
You're not allowed to do that. It counts as murder. MPs have as much right to live as the rest of us.
What about DoE officials and Ofsted officials, though?
As if I would compare them to slugs. Slugs have never done anything to deserve that.
I now feel very tempted to try sprinkling salt on various kinds of public servant....
After the fascinating week the SNP have had, perhaps they could cheer themselves up by proposing the introduction of bears, wolves, tigers and black mambas as an experiment confined to the constituency of Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch.
They need to eradicate slugs first.
You're not allowed to do that. It counts as murder. MPs have as much right to live as the rest of us.
What about DoE officials and Ofsted officials, though?
As if I would compare them to slugs. Slugs have never done anything to deserve that.
I now feel very tempted to try sprinkling salt on various kinds of public servant....
Who do you think would be the most likely to curl up?
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
There must be lots that could be done that wouldn't involve net increases in public spending. Things like abolishing leasehold and a variety of other reforms that would aim to reduce the extent to which ordinary people are ripped off by big companies and the rentier class.
But there's not much sign of Labour having plans for these sorts of reforms either.
Abolishing leasehold? Done years ago in Scotland.
Isn’t it being scrapped in England, too?
Maybe, apparently. Some fiddling with the system rather than outright abolition, it would seem.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
There must be lots that could be done that wouldn't involve net increases in public spending. Things like abolishing leasehold and a variety of other reforms that would aim to reduce the extent to which ordinary people are ripped off by big companies and the rentier class.
But there's not much sign of Labour having plans for these sorts of reforms either.
Abolishing leasehold? Done years ago in Scotland.
Isn’t it being scrapped in England, too?
Maybe, apparently. Some fiddling with the system rather than outright abolition, it would seem.
"Cap the treatment of ground rents at 0.1% of the freehold value and prescribe rates for the calculations at market value. An online calculator will simplify and standardise the process of enfranchisement."
'Give leaseholders of flats and houses the same right to extend their lease agreements “as often as they wish, at zero ground rent, for a term of 990 years”.'
Which is basically abolition, but with stupid, complex steps.
Although the Tories as a party are a bunch of unscrupulous scumbags, Rishi seems a decent chap. If Labour want to fight in the gutter, they should fight the Tory party, not their leader.
They need to get something to stick to Rishi because they know if he's PM in 2024 with a growing economy and growing wages there's a 1992 shock result on. Labour has failed to convince voters it is ready for government and if the existing one isn't so bad and not led by Boris or some other chancer people won't take the chance and Rishi delivers a majority of 10-20.
After the fascinating week the SNP have had, perhaps they could cheer themselves up by proposing the introduction of bears, wolves, tigers and black mambas as an experiment confined to the constituency of Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch.
They need to eradicate slugs first.
You're not allowed to do that. It counts as murder. MPs have as much right to live as the rest of us.
What about DoE officials and Ofsted officials, though?
As if I would compare them to slugs. Slugs have never done anything to deserve that.
I now feel very tempted to try sprinkling salt on various kinds of public servant....
Holy water would be more use against the DfE.
Silver bullets, perhaps, as needed to deal with Stuart and Royalist malignants such as Graham of Claverhouse (aka Bonnie Dundee for some reason).
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
There must be lots that could be done that wouldn't involve net increases in public spending. Things like abolishing leasehold and a variety of other reforms that would aim to reduce the extent to which ordinary people are ripped off by big companies and the rentier class.
But there's not much sign of Labour having plans for these sorts of reforms either.
Abolishing leasehold? Done years ago in Scotland.
Isn’t it being scrapped in England, too?
Maybe, apparently. Some fiddling with the system rather than outright abolition, it would seem.
"Cap the treatment of ground rents at 0.1% of the freehold value and prescribe rates for the calculations at market value. An online calculator will simplify and standardise the process of enfranchisement."
'Give leaseholders of flats and houses the same right to extend their lease agreements “as often as they wish, at zero ground rent, for a term of 990 years”.'
Which is basically abolition, but with stupid, complex steps.
And leaving open the option of restoration in the future. Yes, I don't understand it either.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
There must be lots that could be done that wouldn't involve net increases in public spending. Things like abolishing leasehold and a variety of other reforms that would aim to reduce the extent to which ordinary people are ripped off by big companies and the rentier class.
But there's not much sign of Labour having plans for these sorts of reforms either.
Abolishing leasehold? Done years ago in Scotland.
Isn’t it being scrapped in England, too?
Maybe, apparently. Some fiddling with the system rather than outright abolition, it would seem.
Some fiddling doesn’t do it justice given the effective abolition of ground rents.
But it still preserves the system. And the legal costs involved. Even vestigial systems can be gamed, as happened with feudalities in Scotland till the final and definitve extermination.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
There must be lots that could be done that wouldn't involve net increases in public spending. Things like abolishing leasehold and a variety of other reforms that would aim to reduce the extent to which ordinary people are ripped off by big companies and the rentier class.
But there's not much sign of Labour having plans for these sorts of reforms either.
Abolishing leasehold? Done years ago in Scotland.
Isn’t it being scrapped in England, too?
Maybe, apparently. Some fiddling with the system rather than outright abolition, it would seem.
Some fiddling doesn’t do it justice given the effective abolition of ground rents.
But it still preserves the system. And the legal costs involved. Even vestigial systems can be gamed, as happened with feudalities in Scotland till the final and definitve extermination.
But it’s a huge change, with ground rents being effectively abolished. Some fiddling implies that the average person who would otherwise be affected by this wouldn’t see any difference.
After the fascinating week the SNP have had, perhaps they could cheer themselves up by proposing the introduction of bears, wolves, tigers and black mambas as an experiment confined to the constituency of Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch.
They need to eradicate slugs first.
You're not allowed to do that. It counts as murder. MPs have as much right to live as the rest of us.
What about DoE officials and Ofsted officials, though?
As if I would compare them to slugs. Slugs have never done anything to deserve that.
I now feel very tempted to try sprinkling salt on various kinds of public servant....
Holy water would be more use against the DfE.
Silver bullets, perhaps, as needed to deal with Stuart and Royalist malignants such as Graham of Claverhouse (aka Bonnie Dundee for some reason).
Why not all of the above?
{Hellboy has entered the chat, and is waving an unlicensed firearm around}
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
I'd say significant increases in tax and borrowing - eg taxes from electric motor vehicles (to maintain the revenue that used to come from ICE vehicles) and ICE vehicles (to encourage for environmental reasons the move to electric).
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
Applying the hammer of more taxes to motor vehicles (which huge numbers of people, including millions on low incomes, cannot manage without) is little better than simply extracting an ever-rising percentage of people's earned incomes to plug gaps in the budget. What's needed is a far more thoroughgoing reform of the tax system, centred on shifting the burden from incomes to assets.
The most effective way for Labour to help its own core vote, rather than that of the Tories, is to cut income tax and implement enormous increases in asset taxation. If, now that pensioner households have more disposable income than working age households, they still refuse to abandon the triple lock, then fine - just so long as land value taxes and huge hikes in IHT are used to bleed the necessary cash back out of the well-off elderly, rather than utterly immiserating their grandkids. Equalising CGT rates with income tax rates is an immediate necessity, as is a wealth tax.
Labour's massive mistake in all of this is to uphold the status quo because it thinks it can only win by a direct appeal to the wallets of the Tories' own vote, and that means promising a continuation of Tory policy in almost every area - just with a few cosmetic irrelevances designed to make it look as if change has arrived when all they are doing is offering more of the same whilst enjoying their ministerial salaries and limos. They have entirely forgotten that even a candidate as patently unsuitable as Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of vanquishing a Conservative Government by offering hope to Labour's natural sympathisers and getting them to turn out in large numbers.
If Labour is just going to ape George Osborne and offer yet more austerity, in order that wealthy people get to keep all their money and pass their estates onto their heirs intact, then what is the earthly point of it? Do they want to effect actual, meaningful social change or are they just self-serving office seekers?
I reckon they'll turn out to be the latter. Watch.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
There must be lots that could be done that wouldn't involve net increases in public spending. Things like abolishing leasehold and a variety of other reforms that would aim to reduce the extent to which ordinary people are ripped off by big companies and the rentier class.
But there's not much sign of Labour having plans for these sorts of reforms either.
Abolishing leasehold? Done years ago in Scotland.
Isn’t it being scrapped in England, too?
Maybe, apparently. Some fiddling with the system rather than outright abolition, it would seem.
"Cap the treatment of ground rents at 0.1% of the freehold value and prescribe rates for the calculations at market value. An online calculator will simplify and standardise the process of enfranchisement."
'Give leaseholders of flats and houses the same right to extend their lease agreements “as often as they wish, at zero ground rent, for a term of 990 years”.'
Which is basically abolition, but with stupid, complex steps.
And leaving open the option of restoration in the future. Yes, I don't understand it either.
The best explanation is slow strangulation - the grifters will opt out and so will their lawyers.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
There must be lots that could be done that wouldn't involve net increases in public spending. Things like abolishing leasehold and a variety of other reforms that would aim to reduce the extent to which ordinary people are ripped off by big companies and the rentier class.
But there's not much sign of Labour having plans for these sorts of reforms either.
Abolishing leasehold? Done years ago in Scotland.
Isn’t it being scrapped in England, too?
Maybe, apparently. Some fiddling with the system rather than outright abolition, it would seem.
"Cap the treatment of ground rents at 0.1% of the freehold value and prescribe rates for the calculations at market value. An online calculator will simplify and standardise the process of enfranchisement."
'Give leaseholders of flats and houses the same right to extend their lease agreements “as often as they wish, at zero ground rent, for a term of 990 years”.'
Which is basically abolition, but with stupid, complex steps.
And leaving open the option of restoration in the future. Yes, I don't understand it either.
I’d imagine that abolition creates a claim for compensation, while limiting the amount that can be charged basically resolves the problem without any knock on implications
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
I'd say significant increases in tax and borrowing - eg taxes from electric motor vehicles (to maintain the revenue that used to come from ICE vehicles) and ICE vehicles (to encourage for environmental reasons the move to electric).
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
Applying the hammer of more taxes to motor vehicles (which huge numbers of people, including millions on low incomes, cannot manage without) is little better than simply extracting an ever-rising percentage of people's earned incomes to plug gaps in the budget. What's needed is a far more thoroughgoing reform of the tax system, centred on shifting the burden from incomes to assets.
The most effective way for Labour to help its own core vote, rather than that of the Tories, is to cut income tax and implement enormous increases in asset taxation. If, now that pensioner households have more disposable income than working age households, they still refuse to abandon the triple lock, then fine - just so long as land value taxes and huge hikes in IHT are used to bleed the necessary cash back out of the well-off elderly, rather than utterly immiserating their grandkids. Equalising CGT rates with income tax rates is an immediate necessity, as is a wealth tax.
Labour's massive mistake in all of this is to uphold the status quo because it thinks it can only win by a direct appeal to the wallets of the Tories' own vote, and that means promising a continuation of Tory policy in almost every area - just with a few cosmetic irrelevances designed to make it look as if change has arrived when all they are doing is offering more of the same whilst enjoying their ministerial salaries and limos. They have entirely forgotten that even a candidate as patently unsuitable as Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of vanquishing a Conservative Government by offering hope to Labour's natural sympathisers and getting them to turn out in large numbers.
If Labour is just going to ape George Osborne and offer yet more austerity, in order that wealthy people get to keep all their money and pass their estates onto their heirs intact, then what is the earthly point of it? Do they want to effect actual, meaningful social change or are they just self-serving office seekers?
I reckon they'll turn out to be the latter. Watch.
The problem is that much of the "wealth" you describe is in the form of not especially large houses.
Forcing people to move from 3 bed semis via property taxes is not the look Labour is er.... looking for. Especially since the people buying the properties will be wealthier than the sellers.
What the UK needs is a reduction in value of property. The only way to let the air out of those tires, politically, is building enough property that property *rises* fall behind inflation.
Of course, just look at the media reporting crime stats for a similar issue. You would think there was far more crime going on, particularly sexual offenses, when in many cases it's simply that the police are now recording if not investigating such crimes, in the past the police and wider society didn't even bother to do that.
Although the Tories as a party are a bunch of unscrupulous scumbags, Rishi seems a decent chap. If Labour want to fight in the gutter, they should fight the Tory party, not their leader.
They need to get something to stick to Rishi because they know if he's PM in 2024 with a growing economy and growing wages there's a 1992 shock result on. Labour has failed to convince voters it is ready for government and if the existing one isn't so bad and not led by Boris or some other chancer people won't take the chance and Rishi delivers a majority of 10-20.
Labour is at risk of spending so much time pandering to the Conservatives' natural backers that many of its own won't bother to turn out, whilst all those aged homeowners and their expectant heirs will see absolutely no reason to gamble on a change of management when that nice Rishi is already in Downing St and delivering everything that's most important to them.
The Tories aren't much good at governing and the current polling numbers merely reflect the accurate impression of uselessness that they convey to the voters, but if Labour doesn't buck its ideas up and offer an actual alternative rather than a vacuum then, yes, a Conservative majority is back in play.
If the election ends up being a contest between real and counterfeit Tories then nobody should be surprised if people reject the knock-offs.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
There must be lots that could be done that wouldn't involve net increases in public spending. Things like abolishing leasehold and a variety of other reforms that would aim to reduce the extent to which ordinary people are ripped off by big companies and the rentier class.
But there's not much sign of Labour having plans for these sorts of reforms either.
Abolishing leasehold? Done years ago in Scotland.
Isn’t it being scrapped in England, too?
Maybe, apparently. Some fiddling with the system rather than outright abolition, it would seem.
"Cap the treatment of ground rents at 0.1% of the freehold value and prescribe rates for the calculations at market value. An online calculator will simplify and standardise the process of enfranchisement."
'Give leaseholders of flats and houses the same right to extend their lease agreements “as often as they wish, at zero ground rent, for a term of 990 years”.'
Which is basically abolition, but with stupid, complex steps.
And leaving open the option of restoration in the future. Yes, I don't understand it either.
I’d imagine that abolition creates a claim for compensation, while limiting the amount that can be charged basically resolves the problem without any knock on implications
Didn't seem to be a problem with feudality in Scotland, because of inflation. IIRC the real problem was the blackmail levied on property holders by the more malignant feudal superiors.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
There must be lots that could be done that wouldn't involve net increases in public spending. Things like abolishing leasehold and a variety of other reforms that would aim to reduce the extent to which ordinary people are ripped off by big companies and the rentier class.
But there's not much sign of Labour having plans for these sorts of reforms either.
Abolishing leasehold? Done years ago in Scotland.
Isn’t it being scrapped in England, too?
Maybe, apparently. Some fiddling with the system rather than outright abolition, it would seem.
Some fiddling doesn’t do it justice given the effective abolition of ground rents.
But it still preserves the system. And the legal costs involved. Even vestigial systems can be gamed, as happened with feudalities in Scotland till the final and definitve extermination.
But it’s a huge change, with ground rents being effectively abolished. Some fiddling implies that the average person who would otherwise be affected by this wouldn’t see any difference.
The problem with feu duties wasn't so much the basic cost as the scope for extortion of extra charges for having a pink and white parasol over your patio table, as I recall.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
There must be lots that could be done that wouldn't involve net increases in public spending. Things like abolishing leasehold and a variety of other reforms that would aim to reduce the extent to which ordinary people are ripped off by big companies and the rentier class.
But there's not much sign of Labour having plans for these sorts of reforms either.
Abolishing leasehold? Done years ago in Scotland.
Isn’t it being scrapped in England, too?
Maybe, apparently. Some fiddling with the system rather than outright abolition, it would seem.
"Cap the treatment of ground rents at 0.1% of the freehold value and prescribe rates for the calculations at market value. An online calculator will simplify and standardise the process of enfranchisement."
'Give leaseholders of flats and houses the same right to extend their lease agreements “as often as they wish, at zero ground rent, for a term of 990 years”.'
Which is basically abolition, but with stupid, complex steps.
And leaving open the option of restoration in the future. Yes, I don't understand it either.
I’d imagine that abolition creates a claim for compensation, while limiting the amount that can be charged basically resolves the problem without any knock on implications
Didn't seem to be a problem with feudality in Scotland, because of inflation. IIRC the real problem was the blackmail levied on property holders by the more malignant feudal superiors.
The ones in England have not been frozen for years (which is the whole problem), as was the case in Scotland when this act was passed. I suspect that’s the reason why it has been done like this, rather than being some dastardly plan to reintroduce them after effectively abolishing them.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
I'd say significant increases in tax and borrowing - eg taxes from electric motor vehicles (to maintain the revenue that used to come from ICE vehicles) and ICE vehicles (to encourage for environmental reasons the move to electric).
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
Applying the hammer of more taxes to motor vehicles (which huge numbers of people, including millions on low incomes, cannot manage without) is little better than simply extracting an ever-rising percentage of people's earned incomes to plug gaps in the budget. What's needed is a far more thoroughgoing reform of the tax system, centred on shifting the burden from incomes to assets.
The most effective way for Labour to help its own core vote, rather than that of the Tories, is to cut income tax and implement enormous increases in asset taxation. If, now that pensioner households have more disposable income than working age households, they still refuse to abandon the triple lock, then fine - just so long as land value taxes and huge hikes in IHT are used to bleed the necessary cash back out of the well-off elderly, rather than utterly immiserating their grandkids. Equalising CGT rates with income tax rates is an immediate necessity, as is a wealth tax.
Labour's massive mistake in all of this is to uphold the status quo because it thinks it can only win by a direct appeal to the wallets of the Tories' own vote, and that means promising a continuation of Tory policy in almost every area - just with a few cosmetic irrelevances designed to make it look as if change has arrived when all they are doing is offering more of the same whilst enjoying their ministerial salaries and limos. They have entirely forgotten that even a candidate as patently unsuitable as Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of vanquishing a Conservative Government by offering hope to Labour's natural sympathisers and getting them to turn out in large numbers.
If Labour is just going to ape George Osborne and offer yet more austerity, in order that wealthy people get to keep all their money and pass their estates onto their heirs intact, then what is the earthly point of it? Do they want to effect actual, meaningful social change or are they just self-serving office seekers?
I reckon they'll turn out to be the latter. Watch.
The problem is that much of the "wealth" you describe is in the form of not especially large houses.
Forcing people to move from 3 bed semis via property taxes is not the look Labour is er.... looking for. Especially since the people buying the properties will be wealthier than the sellers.
What the UK needs is a reduction in value of property. The only way to let the air out of those tires, politically, is building enough property that property *rises* fall behind inflation.
Mass housebuilding (which ought hopefully to help house prices to stabilise, and give wages a chance to rise faster than them in future,) is a necessity. But it will also take many years to have any measurable effect. Distressed people on low incomes and public services struggling to recruit and retain staff because they keep running off to stack shelves in Aldi need relief immediately, not in 2035 or 2040. If we are to help the people most in need and repair the damage to public services and the public finances alike, then we must tax incomes a bit less and tax assets an awful lot more to compensate.
Comments
But, covering up child sexual abuse is something this government can’t credibly be accused of.
That’s why the advert is inept. It fuels the perception that Labour is just as shitty as the government is.
It reminds me of Adrian Rogers campaigning that “Your children aren’t safe with this man” against Ben Bradshaw.
Bradshaw is is a piece of work, but it was still a nasty innuendo and quite self-defeating.
Having said this the Tory MPs and their arse licking right wing press should stfu with the moral outrage .
Anyone saying though they’ll not vote Labour over an ill advised ad clearly wouldn’t be voting for them anyway .
Comparing 13 years of the cesspit Tories against one dodgy ad is hardly a fair equivalence.
BTW, sounds like you & yours gave your gov a great sendoff. And yourselves a healthy outing (old school).
Always made me laugh. Someone should bring it back in these febrile times...
Although unusually, on this occasion your second paragraph is correct.
It does allow for legitimately going for Starmer’s record at the DPP. Since the DPP has direct input into sentencing guidelines.
https://conservativehome.com/2023/04/06/benton-gambling-and-the-strange-story-of-the-persistently-growing-number-of-independent-mps/
Classic politician's dodging though.
US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has said he believed luxury trips taken with a billionaire Republican donor followed guidelines.
A ProPublica report earlier this week said Mr Thomas had accepted vacations from real estate mogul Harlan Crow nearly every year for two decades.
Supreme Court justices are required to file annual disclosures of gifts.
Mr Thomas said that he had been led to believe that "this sort of personal hospitality" did not apply...
"I have endeavoured to follow that counsel throughout my tenure, and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines," the statement added.
Mr Thomas described Mr Crow and his wife Kathy Crow as "among our dearest friends, and we have been friends for over twenty-five years".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65215407
Never listen to a Mr Thomas.
It continues to surprise me how many people don't think about the fact that whales, fish, cephalopods, and all the other sea creatures excrete wastes into the sea. (Anyone who has ever had a home aquarium should know that.)
That's not to say that we here in the US can't do better at handling wastes -- and should. And it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the UK could do better, too. But it's a problem that is literally billions of years old, so I don't think the Conservatives are solely to blame.
My issue is we expect this of the post-May Conservatives, we would be upset if they weren't looking for the lowest common denominator, we don't of Labour and the fact they are trawling around the gutter is unacceptable.
The incumbent New Democracy Government won in 2019 getting 40% of the vote to Syriza’s 31.5%. That was under the electoral system which handed 50 extra seats to the party topping the poll which left ND with 158 and a majority,
That system has gone with the revised system brought in by Syriza in 2016 in effect which means no 50-seat bonus this time. Now, if you’re wondering why this is only happening now, under Greek law, if you don’t have a two thirds majority the law doesn’t change until after another election.
This means all 300 seats will be fought and as it seems unlikely any party will win an overall majority the question then becomes how ND could form a Government or whether a Syriza-PASOK coalition might be possible.
It’s going to be interesting,
So they put out an ad with a photo of the prime minister, an Asian man, associating him with unprosecuted pedophilia.
Ash Sarkar agrees with me.
1) If the Tories had mocked up this ad with the photo of an Asian Labour MP, they'd be decried as racist.
2) Next time the right hit Keir Starmer with the Jimmy Savile smears, Labour will not have a leg to stand on re: playing fair.”
https://twitter.com/ayocaesar/status/1644035137233993728?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
Unlike in the 1990s, when voter loyalties were more established and when people shifted they really really shifted, today everyone is far more fickle.
I don't view the 15-20 point lead as either predetermined or insurmountable.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
We all know the Conservatives are going to be a useless and ineffective opposition and will only find their way back to power when Labour self-destructs.
Centralia WA Daily Chronicle -
A Twitter account claiming to be state Rep. Joel McEntire, R-Cathlamet, has been calling users of the platform various demeaning words, including “straight up loser,” “dim wit dem,” “lazy” and “utterly pathetic.”
While he initially said on his Facebook page that screenshots of the posts were “photoshopped,” the state representative this week told The Chronicle the account is, in fact, his.
But, he’s not the one running it.
“I started this Twitter page a few months ago but handed it off to a kid from Vancouver to use,” McEntire wrote in an email.
McEntire has promoted the Twitter account — which has multiple times assured people it is run by the representative himself — on his Facebook page.
He said the account was meant as an “election tool” against Cara Cusack, the Democratic candidate who he beat in 2022 in a nearly 60% to 40% split.
“He is trying to generate support for Cara Cusack for me. If Democrats around the region support her early, since she has already declared she is running, it lowers the chances of a strong candidate jumping in the race in 2024,” McEntire wrote, later adding, “I don’t much care what he says or does on it.”
One woman in particular, a Grays Harbor County resident who asked that her name be kept out of this report, has received much of the account’s attention.
Tweets have said “I am not surprised you are single,” “You are so slow it hurts,” and has been asked “Don’t you have children to raise?”
She has repeatedly asked the account to stop interacting with her, but it hasn’t.
Cusack wrote on Twitter, “I don’t know if this is actually Joel, but he may as well be since I hear he is promoting the account on Facebook.”
Asked whether McEntire sanctioning the account is a violation of any legislative code of conduct, J.T. Wilcox, House Minority Leader said “others are free to manage their communications in a manner” that best suits them and their style.
“This is the first time I’ve seen any of these tweets,” Wilcox said. “I personally control all of my social media accounts.”
https://www.chronline.com/stories/rep-joel-mcentire-okd-twitter-account-in-his-name-calling-people-loser-pathetic,316859?emci=ed08f9fe-4fd5-ed11-8e8b-00224832eb73&emdi=16883d0c-73d5-ed11-8e8b-00224832eb73&ceid=2953241
It goes to their head.
He has some small success with negotiating with violent tossers with lots of Armalites*
*AKA AR-15 platform variants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5zXeZiHlLc
Vesta curries were a fncking crime.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/04/ula-continues-investigation-of-centaur-stage-anomaly/ - looks like more delays to the Vulcan debut launch. Tory Bruno really isn’t catching a break.
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1244h2c/will_smith_eating_spaghetti/
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
He didn't think Labour was strolling to victory.
It's a mistake to think the Labour (or the Conservatives) has any better idea about the likely result of the next General Election than we do.
Very very sad - 46, no age at all.
That said, some years ago I and a friend overheard some “top strategist” types in a bar discussing their really really stupid plan to be the hero of an episode of in The Thick Of It.
It was so novel and bold, that we immediately wrote down our joint recollection of it, for the criminal case that would have followed its implementation.
That lot need the unmessable white suit from the film.
As an aside, have you seen the state of the tiles on SS for the upcoming launch? Seems remarkably... slipshod to me.
https://deframedia.blog.gov.uk/2021/11/25/new-report-into-sewage-discharges-during-the-bathing-season/
Our media does not seem to be able to tell the difference:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/sewage-beaches-water-companies-b2149608.html
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
But if they’re taking the gloves off, they ought to do a better job.
EDIT: Tory should really catch a break - he has done far more than Stephan Israel to turn his operation around and try and do sensible improvements. If ULA can get free of the parents, I suspect he would be even bolder.
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/07/bear-kills-jogger-on-woodland-path-in-northern-italy
After the fascinating week the SNP have had, perhaps they could cheer themselves up by proposing the introduction of bears, wolves, tigers and black mambas as an experiment confined to the constituency of Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch.
But there's not much sign of Labour having plans for these sorts of reforms either.
https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/bourgogne-franche-comte/saone-et-loire/saone-et-loire-apres-de-nouvelles-attaques-imputees-au-loup-les-eleveurs-a-bout-de-nerfs-2581324.html
The Economist did an article, years back, in which they showed that the Years of Strife were a loser for both employers and employees - just in terms of lost wages and production. Vs the modern pay negotiation agreements.
Think of changing the bizarre system of not having enough workers. Then hiring the same workers via an agency at vast rates…
With the added benefit that getting rid of the “beatings will continue until moral improves” style of management will probably improve staff retention no end.
I'm honestly not sure that they've thought this though at all.
After all, stopping members from leaking would reduce the sewage.
Edit: abolition of feudalities happened almost as the first thing the reconvened Scottish Parliament did in the 1990s.
Throwing mud only works if it sticks, and this won't. If anything it will raise a lot of questions for Starmer, if he is so against all of these low or no prison time sentences then why didn't he block them back in 2012 when he has the chance as DPP?
This has really irritated me. If I lived in a marginal I’d be feeling a bit like OGH now. But I don’t, I’m in a constituency with a 30k+ Labour majority.
Vote Lib Dem if you don’t like this shit.
But digging a bit deeper, there’s a reason for that.
https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/sewage-water-firms-wont-tell-us/
… But as a geographer and geomorphologist who specialises in rivers and has taken a keen interest in this sewage crisis, I know there is something missing in the data. Sewage discharges to rivers are recorded by sensors known as event duration monitors. These measure the start and end time of any flow, but are rarely set up to measure the volume of that flow.
This leaves the data open to manipulation. Was an “event” 100 litres or 1 billion litres? 1 billion might sound far-fetched, but Mogden sewage works next to Twickenham Stadium discharged over 1 billion litres of sewage directly into the River Thames on each of two days in October 2021.
So a water company could in theory reduce the duration and frequency of discharge events – turning the above map from red to green – but still increase the total amount of sewage dumped into rivers.
The absence of reliable baseline data on sewage dumping is a major problem and research has shown that water companies have not reported the full scale of their discharges.
The Environment Agency has a poor record of sewage pollution data scrutiny and several water companies are now routinely declining environmental information requests. How can we address the biodiversity crisis and make rivers safe for recreation if we don’t have reliable data on the volumes of pollutants pumped into them?..
This likely hasn’t helped.
Environment Agency funding cut by 50% over past decade, analysis shows
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/water-pollution-sewage-environment-agency-funding-b2154848.html
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/leasehold-reform-in-england-and-wales/
Seems to
'Give leaseholders of flats and houses the same right to extend their lease agreements “as often as they wish, at zero ground rent, for a term of 990 years”.'
Which is basically abolition, but with stupid, complex steps.
{Hellboy has entered the chat, and is waving an unlicensed firearm around}
The most effective way for Labour to help its own core vote, rather than that of the Tories, is to cut income tax and implement enormous increases in asset taxation. If, now that pensioner households have more disposable income than working age households, they still refuse to abandon the triple lock, then fine - just so long as land value taxes and huge hikes in IHT are used to bleed the necessary cash back out of the well-off elderly, rather than utterly immiserating their grandkids. Equalising CGT rates with income tax rates is an immediate necessity, as is a wealth tax.
Labour's massive mistake in all of this is to uphold the status quo because it thinks it can only win by a direct appeal to the wallets of the Tories' own vote, and that means promising a continuation of Tory policy in almost every area - just with a few cosmetic irrelevances designed to make it look as if change has arrived when all they are doing is offering more of the same whilst enjoying their ministerial salaries and limos. They have entirely forgotten that even a candidate as patently unsuitable as Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of vanquishing a Conservative Government by offering hope to Labour's natural sympathisers and getting them to turn out in large numbers.
If Labour is just going to ape George Osborne and offer yet more austerity, in order that wealthy people get to keep all their money and pass their estates onto their heirs intact, then what is the earthly point of it? Do they want to effect actual, meaningful social change or are they just self-serving office seekers?
I reckon they'll turn out to be the latter. Watch.
Forcing people to move from 3 bed semis via property taxes is not the look Labour is er.... looking for. Especially since the people buying the properties will be wealthier than the sellers.
What the UK needs is a reduction in value of property. The only way to let the air out of those tires, politically, is building enough property that property *rises* fall behind inflation.
The Tories aren't much good at governing and the current polling numbers merely reflect the accurate impression of uselessness that they convey to the voters, but if Labour doesn't buck its ideas up and offer an actual alternative rather than a vacuum then, yes, a Conservative majority is back in play.
If the election ends up being a contest between real and counterfeit Tories then nobody should be surprised if people reject the knock-offs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_Feudal_Tenure_etc._(Scotland)_Act_2000