@Casino_Royale I guess we could always seek a payout from Denmark and Norway, both very rich countries. I believe a vast number of Anglo-Saxon coins have been found on Danish sites.
Screw them. It's the French we should be going after. Look at the damage they did with the Hastings campaign of 1066 or the Harrying of the North in 1069. They owe us bigly.
“Harrying of the North in 1069” ??
I know they slaughter everyone and stole all the food… but are you saying they sent in the Ginger Whinger as well!!!
Posts show mall gunman researched attack, had Nazi tattoos https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/07/suspect-shooting-texas-mall-allen-00095708 ...The posts by Mauricio Garcia, whom authorities have identified as the gunman, on a Russian social networking site suggest the 33-year-old had been planning the attack for weeks before he stepped out of a silver sedan and opened fire Saturday. Garcia’s activity on the site also betrayed a fascination with white supremacy and mass shootings, which he described as sport. Photos he posted showed large Nazi tattoos on his arm and torso, including a swastika and the SS lightning bolt logo of Hitler’s paramilitary forces...
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
Even by the standards of its time, it was considered appalling. Orderic Vitalis was generally a great admirer of William, but said of it “I can say nothing good of this. God will punish him.”
Labour leads of>20 are unlikely to be true. More likely to be a need for an alteration to methodology... again....
Labour is the generic not the Tories party. In actual elections people refine their choice to pick the candidate who will actually beat the Tory. What the locals confirmed is that Labour + LD + Green is currently at 60%+, as the polls have been saying for a long time, and that the Tories are sub-30%, as the polls have also been saying.
The thread header seems to me to owe quite a bit to the latest R&W poll with a Lab lead down to 12% but with the LDs up to 16%, that is 4% higher than any other LD poll rating this year. No doubt the LD success in the local elections has done the LDs some good in GE polling, but whether that is anything more than a transitory blip remains to be seen. The general pattern from this and the most recent polling prior to the local elections is still a Labour average lead in the mid to high teens.
The last two polls from R&W and Omnisis, both newbie polling companies, deliver very different Labour net leads of 12% and 21% respectively, but have the combined Lab + LD + Green total at 61% in both cases. There is very little succour for the Conservatives in that.
It's not just R&W though is it.
Omnisis is highest Lab lead by some margin.
Fancy SKS fan liking that one and trying to convince us that one is accurate and all the others .....
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Labour leads of>20 are unlikely to be true. More likely to be a need for an alteration to methodology... again....
Labour is the generic not the Tories party. In actual elections people refine their choice to pick the candidate who will actually beat the Tory. What the locals confirmed is that Labour + LD + Green is currently at 60%+, as the polls have been saying for a long time, and that the Tories are sub-30%, as the polls have also been saying.
Something I need to spend a little more time wrapping my head round too is where the UKIP/BXP vote has gone. The Con+Kipper vote was consistently in the 45-50 range aggregate for much of the previous decade. Now Con+RefUK are down in the 35% range, a pretty fundamental shift.
My instinct is that the polling (and voting) reflected frustration with immigration (plus Get Brexit Done) rather than a truly rightward shift - and similarly I don’t think we’ve become a nation of social democrats either.
Now that Brexit has been done and realised practically zero benefit, least of all the cynical promises around healthcare, and the supposed party of immigration control has visibly failed to control immigration (plus I don’t think most of the electorate are daft enough to be fooled by the Rwanda plan) I guess the question is for many: why vote Tory again?
That they’ve shat the bed on the economy is as fundamental an issue too - again, you ask, what is the point of the Conservative Party if immigration is out of control, taxes are high and the economy is fucked?
I see immigration is in the news again, soon to be double pre Brexit figures. DT but not paywalled.
I guess part of the issue here (beyond many false economies of the 2010s) is that while Rishi is tough on boats, he is not tough on the causes of boats.
Most illegal immigrants are undertaking an expensive and dangerous journey, placing themselves in the clutches of dangerous and amoral criminal groups, simply because the alternative is worse. Hating, abusing and displacing the ones who get here is expensive and unproductive. Actively contributing to the up-fuckery of countries like Afghanistan has not helped.
There are push factors, as you mention. There are also pull factors. Why come to the UK, if they are already in France? Are they suffering those push factors there?
What would be your solution to the problem; if indeed you see it as a problem requiring a solution?
Vast numbers of Afghans fled the Taliban, well before 9/11.
The UK are getting tiny numbers of Afghans relative to other countries. There's 3m+ in Pakistan and 1m in Iran.
Only Macron can solve the boats issue so Sunak has to ask him to name his price. It'll surely be high as it would cause a significant domestic political problem in France. There's also the possibility that Le Pen will immediately do a Johnson on whatever is agreed when she is POTFR.
The problem needs to be sorted, before the boats get to France. That means co-operating with other governments and Friendly North African thugs.
There are too many overland routes through the Balkans and Eastern Europe now. Even a world striding foreign policy colossus like Sunak can't interdict them all. The focus has to be on France if there is going to be any discernible difference before Sunak gets "possed in shit", as my mother used to say, by the voters.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
The UK government really should pay reparations to the families/descendants of people who were ruled by the British Empire.
HMRC knows my bank details.
Scotland should be first in line given we are the last colony and have had it for the longest time.
Well, this is the thing.
Once people know that demanding an apology for historic injustice might potentially secure them a payout, then everyone will be asking for one - because they want a payout.
It's actually rational. You get free money and to feel all virtuous for little downside, except fuelling polarisation here.
If California can dole out $1m a head then I am all for it and waiting on London sending me a big fat cheque.
How does IBS come about and how do you get rid of it?
I had a tin of baked beans 12 hours ago and, well, it's like I have a CCGT station inside with no CCUS.
Peppermint
Specifically, peppermint tea.
It's the one thing herbal tea is good for.
Or peppermint pills.
I remember it very clearly, because the first sign of my partner's cancer was pain that resembled IBS, and she went to the doctor and he sent her away with that diagnosis and told her to take peppermint pills. Which we tried for several days until it became obvious it was something more serious, and the rest is, sadly, history.
Labour leads of>20 are unlikely to be true. More likely to be a need for an alteration to methodology... again....
Labour is the generic not the Tories party. In actual elections people refine their choice to pick the candidate who will actually beat the Tory. What the locals confirmed is that Labour + LD + Green is currently at 60%+, as the polls have been saying for a long time, and that the Tories are sub-30%, as the polls have also been saying.
Something I need to spend a little more time wrapping my head round too is where the UKIP/BXP vote has gone. The Con+Kipper vote was consistently in the 45-50 range aggregate for much of the previous decade. Now Con+RefUK are down in the 35% range, a pretty fundamental shift.
My instinct is that the polling (and voting) reflected frustration with immigration (plus Get Brexit Done) rather than a truly rightward shift - and similarly I don’t think we’ve become a nation of social democrats either.
Now that Brexit has been done and realised practically zero benefit, least of all the cynical promises around healthcare, and the supposed party of immigration control has visibly failed to control immigration (plus I don’t think most of the electorate are daft enough to be fooled by the Rwanda plan) I guess the question is for many: why vote Tory again?
That they’ve shat the bed on the economy is as fundamental an issue too - again, you ask, what is the point of the Conservative Party if immigration is out of control, taxes are high and the economy is fucked?
I see immigration is in the news again, soon to be double pre Brexit figures. DT but not paywalled.
I guess part of the issue here (beyond many false economies of the 2010s) is that while Rishi is tough on boats, he is not tough on the causes of boats.
Most illegal immigrants are undertaking an expensive and dangerous journey, placing themselves in the clutches of dangerous and amoral criminal groups, simply because the alternative is worse. Hating, abusing and displacing the ones who get here is expensive and unproductive. Actively contributing to the up-fuckery of countries like Afghanistan has not helped.
There are push factors, as you mention. There are also pull factors. Why come to the UK, if they are already in France? Are they suffering those push factors there?
What would be your solution to the problem; if indeed you see it as a problem requiring a solution?
Vast numbers of Afghans fled the Taliban, well before 9/11.
The UK are getting tiny numbers of Afghans relative to other countries. There's 3m+ in Pakistan and 1m in Iran.
Only Macron can solve the boats issue so Sunak has to ask him to name his price. It'll surely be high as it would cause a significant domestic political problem in France. There's also the possibility that Le Pen will immediately do a Johnson on whatever is agreed when she is POTFR.
The problem needs to be sorted, before the boats get to France. That means co-operating with other governments and Friendly North African thugs.
There are too many overland routes through the Balkans and Eastern Europe now. Even a world striding foreign policy colossus like Sunak can't interdict them all. The focus has to be on France if there is going to be any discernible difference before Sunak gets "possed in shit", as my mother used to say, by the voters.
Map needs updating.
Also, Switzerland seem pretty good at diverting them round.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
My daughter should definitely get those reparations, my better half's family all being from the north. However I'm afraid she might have to pay out to the Congo as she is 1/32 Belgium heritage.
@Casino_Royale I guess we could always seek a payout from Denmark and Norway, both very rich countries. I believe a vast number of Anglo-Saxon coins have been found on Danish sites.
Screw them. It's the French we should be going after. Look at the damage they did with the Hastings campaign of 1066 or the Harrying of the North in 1069. They owe us bigly.
I guess you could say we’re quits, after the campaigns of Edward III, the Black Prince, and John of Gaunt.
Italy need to dole out serious cash for the Romans and Gengis Khan's lot are done for , they will be pink lint with what they will have to pay out.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
@Casino_Royale I guess we could always seek a payout from Denmark and Norway, both very rich countries. I believe a vast number of Anglo-Saxon coins have been found on Danish sites.
Screw them. It's the French we should be going after. Look at the damage they did with the Hastings campaign of 1066 or the Harrying of the North in 1069. They owe us bigly.
“Harrying of the North in 1069” ??
I know they slaughter everyone and stole all the food… but are you saying they sent in the Ginger Whinger as well!!!
Labour leads of>20 are unlikely to be true. More likely to be a need for an alteration to methodology... again....
Labour is the generic not the Tories party. In actual elections people refine their choice to pick the candidate who will actually beat the Tory. What the locals confirmed is that Labour + LD + Green is currently at 60%+, as the polls have been saying for a long time, and that the Tories are sub-30%, as the polls have also been saying.
Something I need to spend a little more time wrapping my head round too is where the UKIP/BXP vote has gone. The Con+Kipper vote was consistently in the 45-50 range aggregate for much of the previous decade. Now Con+RefUK are down in the 35% range, a pretty fundamental shift.
My instinct is that the polling (and voting) reflected frustration with immigration (plus Get Brexit Done) rather than a truly rightward shift - and similarly I don’t think we’ve become a nation of social democrats either.
Now that Brexit has been done and realised practically zero benefit, least of all the cynical promises around healthcare, and the supposed party of immigration control has visibly failed to control immigration (plus I don’t think most of the electorate are daft enough to be fooled by the Rwanda plan) I guess the question is for many: why vote Tory again?
That they’ve shat the bed on the economy is as fundamental an issue too - again, you ask, what is the point of the Conservative Party if immigration is out of control, taxes are high and the economy is fucked?
I see immigration is in the news again, soon to be double pre Brexit figures. DT but not paywalled.
I guess part of the issue here (beyond many false economies of the 2010s) is that while Rishi is tough on boats, he is not tough on the causes of boats.
Most illegal immigrants are undertaking an expensive and dangerous journey, placing themselves in the clutches of dangerous and amoral criminal groups, simply because the alternative is worse. Hating, abusing and displacing the ones who get here is expensive and unproductive. Actively contributing to the up-fuckery of countries like Afghanistan has not helped.
There are push factors, as you mention. There are also pull factors. Why come to the UK, if they are already in France? Are they suffering those push factors there?
What would be your solution to the problem; if indeed you see it as a problem requiring a solution?
Vast numbers of Afghans fled the Taliban, well before 9/11.
The UK are getting tiny numbers of Afghans relative to other countries. There's 3m+ in Pakistan and 1m in Iran.
Only Macron can solve the boats issue so Sunak has to ask him to name his price. It'll surely be high as it would cause a significant domestic political problem in France. There's also the possibility that Le Pen will immediately do a Johnson on whatever is agreed when she is POTFR.
The problem needs to be sorted, before the boats get to France. That means co-operating with other governments and Friendly North African thugs.
There are too many overland routes through the Balkans and Eastern Europe now. Even a world striding foreign policy colossus like Sunak can't interdict them all. The focus has to be on France if there is going to be any discernible difference before Sunak gets "possed in shit", as my mother used to say, by the voters.
Where does the route North of Moscow go? Or should there be an arrow pointing TO Moscow from N. Finland?
@Casino_Royale I guess we could always seek a payout from Denmark and Norway, both very rich countries. I believe a vast number of Anglo-Saxon coins have been found on Danish sites.
Screw them. It's the French we should be going after. Look at the damage they did with the Hastings campaign of 1066 or the Harrying of the North in 1069. They owe us bigly.
“Harrying of the North in 1069” ??
I know they slaughter everyone and stole all the food… but are you saying they sent in the Ginger Whinger as well!!!
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
That’s kinda my point.
I mean my kids have Irish heritage in them, they are due even more than me.
There’s real injustices in the world today that we should focus on than ones centuries old.
Average lead over last 20 polls is 15 covering a 3 week period.
SKS fan on here says the highest Labour lead poll by Omnisis is correct and we should ignore the other 19
Centrists panic due to set in soon as inflation plummet s imo
Centrist here. Can't see inflation plummeting anytime soon, and when it does all that happens is the price increases slow down. So that £9 jar of coffee you can't afford stays, rather than reverting back to £5.
You sound very much like a Starmerite TBH. Both you and they think the only number that matters is the Labour number, that the only vote that counts (positively for them, negatively for you) is a Labour one.
Voters have wised up. The Anyone But Conservative vote is finding its voice once again, and that is bad news for you hard left agitators who need the country to be on its knees to finally bring about World Socialism Today or whatever.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
That’s kinda my point.
I mean my kids have Irish heritage in them, they are due even more than me.
There’s real injustices in the world today that we should focus on than ones centuries old.
Exactly it is a load of old bollocks. Look at what is happening today.
Average lead over last 20 polls is 15 covering a 3 week period.
SKS fan on here says the highest Labour lead poll by Omnisis is correct and we should ignore the other 19
Centrists panic due to set in soon as inflation plummet s imo
No-one is saying the Omnisis poll is correct. What I pointed out was that Omnisis polled the local election specifically and got the result almost spot on and that it is worth looking at their other polling in that light.
We also know that the locals results confirm the Tory polling. As things stand, I'd say the R&W poll is probably the most accurate reflectkion of current voter sentiment. It redistributes the ongoing Lab+LD+Green 60% in a way that does maximum damage to the Tories and makes a Labour majority even more likely.
There are a few anti-Starmer voters like you out there. But the are vastly outnumbered by anti-Tory ones. Please explain!
Labour leads of>20 are unlikely to be true. More likely to be a need for an alteration to methodology... again....
Labour is the generic not the Tories party. In actual elections people refine their choice to pick the candidate who will actually beat the Tory. What the locals confirmed is that Labour + LD + Green is currently at 60%+, as the polls have been saying for a long time, and that the Tories are sub-30%, as the polls have also been saying.
Something I need to spend a little more time wrapping my head round too is where the UKIP/BXP vote has gone. The Con+Kipper vote was consistently in the 45-50 range aggregate for much of the previous decade. Now Con+RefUK are down in the 35% range, a pretty fundamental shift.
My instinct is that the polling (and voting) reflected frustration with immigration (plus Get Brexit Done) rather than a truly rightward shift - and similarly I don’t think we’ve become a nation of social democrats either.
Now that Brexit has been done and realised practically zero benefit, least of all the cynical promises around healthcare, and the supposed party of immigration control has visibly failed to control immigration (plus I don’t think most of the electorate are daft enough to be fooled by the Rwanda plan) I guess the question is for many: why vote Tory again?
That they’ve shat the bed on the economy is as fundamental an issue too - again, you ask, what is the point of the Conservative Party if immigration is out of control, taxes are high and the economy is fucked?
I see immigration is in the news again, soon to be double pre Brexit figures. DT but not paywalled.
I guess part of the issue here (beyond many false economies of the 2010s) is that while Rishi is tough on boats, he is not tough on the causes of boats.
Most illegal immigrants are undertaking an expensive and dangerous journey, placing themselves in the clutches of dangerous and amoral criminal groups, simply because the alternative is worse. Hating, abusing and displacing the ones who get here is expensive and unproductive. Actively contributing to the up-fuckery of countries like Afghanistan has not helped.
There are push factors, as you mention. There are also pull factors. Why come to the UK, if they are already in France? Are they suffering those push factors there?
What would be your solution to the problem; if indeed you see it as a problem requiring a solution?
Vast numbers of Afghans fled the Taliban, well before 9/11.
The UK are getting tiny numbers of Afghans relative to other countries. There's 3m+ in Pakistan and 1m in Iran.
Only Macron can solve the boats issue so Sunak has to ask him to name his price. It'll surely be high as it would cause a significant domestic political problem in France. There's also the possibility that Le Pen will immediately do a Johnson on whatever is agreed when she is POTFR.
The problem needs to be sorted, before the boats get to France. That means co-operating with other governments and Friendly North African thugs.
There are too many overland routes through the Balkans and Eastern Europe now. Even a world striding foreign policy colossus like Sunak can't interdict them all. The focus has to be on France if there is going to be any discernible difference before Sunak gets "possed in shit", as my mother used to say, by the voters.
Where does the route North of Moscow go? Or should there be an arrow pointing TO Moscow from N. Finland?
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
Jesus would have been born here, except they couldn't find three wise men and a virgin.
Average lead over last 20 polls is 15 covering a 3 week period.
SKS fan on here says the highest Labour lead poll by Omnisis is correct and we should ignore the other 19
Centrists panic due to set in soon as inflation plummet s imo
Centrist here. Can't see inflation plummeting anytime soon, and when it does all that happens is the price increases slow down. So that £9 jar of coffee you can't afford stays, rather than reverting back to £5.
You sound very much like a Starmerite TBH. Both you and they think the only number that matters is the Labour number, that the only vote that counts (positively for them, negatively for you) is a Labour one.
Voters have wised up. The Anyone But Conservative vote is finding its voice once again, and that is bad news for you hard left agitators who need the country to be on its knees to finally bring about World Socialism Today or whatever.
I have no particular torch for SKS. In fact I suspect he is probably someone I would avoid having to engage with at a meeting.
But like many others, I will be voting with the hope and expectation that I will be doing my little bit to destroy the travesty of a Conservative party that is left after Johnson et al trashed it.
One day, I hope a centre right, economically competent, kinder, One Nation party replaces it and boots out the Bravermans and the numerous bedblockers with social attitudes locked in the 50s.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
That’s kinda my point.
I mean my kids have Irish heritage in them, they are due even more than me.
There’s real injustices in the world today that we should focus on than ones centuries old.
Exactly it is a load of old bollocks. Look at what is happening today.
Still a good case on present-day events for mass compensation from south to north, I'd say. Probably best to give it all to Yorkshire and then we'll oversee distribution to other deserving parts further north and west* as we see fit
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
Jesus would have been born here, except they couldn't find three wise men and a virgin.
There was one episode of Old Harry's Game, where the devil appears before a group of worshippers, who've just sacrificed a tortoise in his honour.
"A tortoise, that's pathetic! Couldn't you have found a virgin?"
Labour leads going down because the LibDem vote is going up are very bad news for the Tories. It probably means they lose a lot more seats while having next to no impact on Labour’s tally.
With Lab+LD+ Green stubbornly around the 60% mark, what they desperately need is a move back to them from that, but it is not (at least yet) happening. Until there are strong indications of this changing, Sunak would be mad to call a GE. So, October 2024 still looks the best bet, even though that means another potentially very damaging set of local election results next May (although if the Tories get their candidate right they may have a very good shot at the London mayor now they’ve changed the voting system and made it harder to vote for key Khan demographics).
On personal popularity, there seems to be evidence from recent polls that the Sunak rise has stalled and is even be going backwards slightly. Labour’s out of touch attack line may be more effective than the paedo one. Largely because it is rooted in some reality. Whoever could have imagined it?
"out of touch" fingers Sunak very neatly - he absolutely is and always has been. But then you take a step away from Sunak and look at other Tories, and suddenly "out of touch" is apt for so many of those as well.
The Tories have been selling fantasy politics for ages. A "war" on "woke" which is poorly defined and seems mainly to exist in gammony media outlets. "Levelling Up" - the red wall is almost uniform now in seeing this as a massive lie. "Stop The Boats"...
"Out of Touch" aptly describes Tory MPs like David Duguid, who proclaims to be working with the local fishing fleets and how great the new Brexit deal is for them, even as the local fishing bosses (who campaigned for Brexit) detail just how bad things are.
Eventually reality trumps unreality. I just wonder how many of the moron and simpleton ranks of the Tory MPs will understand this before they find themselves in mid-air falling into unemployment.
Very much this.
I looked at ConservativeHome this morning (forgive me - hayfever so I wasn't sleeping). In "Five Reflections on Thursday's Local Elections", they opine:
"Could it be that the problem Conservatives have is mostly that their natural supporters abstained rather than switched to other parties? I suspect so... It is not necessary to convert that chunk of the electorate to Conservatism – they still are Conservatives. The challenge rather is to convert the Government to Conservatism. Conservatives need to feel that they have a Government delivering on those Conservative missions of cutting tax and state spending, scrapping bureaucracy, fighting crime, widening home ownership, safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities."
In 2015 the Conservatives had 62 seats across Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire district councils. Today they have one (1).
Explaining this by "low turnout" and saying the way to winning them back is "safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities"... that's not just fantasy politics, that's actively delusional.
Labour leads going down because the LibDem vote is going up are very bad news for the Tories. It probably means they lose a lot more seats while having next to no impact on Labour’s tally.
With Lab+LD+ Green stubbornly around the 60% mark, what they desperately need is a move back to them from that, but it is not (at least yet) happening. Until there are strong indications of this changing, Sunak would be mad to call a GE. So, October 2024 still looks the best bet, even though that means another potentially very damaging set of local election results next May (although if the Tories get their candidate right they may have a very good shot at the London mayor now they’ve changed the voting system and made it harder to vote for key Khan demographics).
On personal popularity, there seems to be evidence from recent polls that the Sunak rise has stalled and is even be going backwards slightly. Labour’s out of touch attack line may be more effective than the paedo one. Largely because it is rooted in some reality. Whoever could have imagined it?
"out of touch" fingers Sunak very neatly - he absolutely is and always has been. But then you take a step away from Sunak and look at other Tories, and suddenly "out of touch" is apt for so many of those as well.
The Tories have been selling fantasy politics for ages. A "war" on "woke" which is poorly defined and seems mainly to exist in gammony media outlets. "Levelling Up" - the red wall is almost uniform now in seeing this as a massive lie. "Stop The Boats"...
"Out of Touch" aptly describes Tory MPs like David Duguid, who proclaims to be working with the local fishing fleets and how great the new Brexit deal is for them, even as the local fishing bosses (who campaigned for Brexit) detail just how bad things are.
Eventually reality trumps unreality. I just wonder how many of the moron and simpleton ranks of the Tory MPs will understand this before they find themselves in mid-air falling into unemployment.
Very much this.
I looked at ConservativeHome this morning (forgive me - hayfever so I wasn't sleeping). In "Five Reflections on Thursday's Local Elections", they opine:
"Could it be that the problem Conservatives have is mostly that their natural supporters abstained rather than switched to other parties? I suspect so... It is not necessary to convert that chunk of the electorate to Conservatism – they still are Conservatives. The challenge rather is to convert the Government to Conservatism. Conservatives need to feel that they have a Government delivering on those Conservative missions of cutting tax and state spending, scrapping bureaucracy, fighting crime, widening home ownership, safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities."
In 2015 the Conservatives had 62 seats across Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire district councils. Today they have one (1).
Explaining this by "low turnout" and saying the way to winning them back is "safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities"... that's not just fantasy politics, that's actively delusional.
Average lead over last 20 polls is 15 covering a 3 week period.
SKS fan on here says the highest Labour lead poll by Omnisis is correct and we should ignore the other 19
Centrists panic due to set in soon as inflation plummet s imo
Centrist here. Can't see inflation plummeting anytime soon, and when it does all that happens is the price increases slow down. So that £9 jar of coffee you can't afford stays, rather than reverting back to £5.
You sound very much like a Starmerite TBH. Both you and they think the only number that matters is the Labour number, that the only vote that counts (positively for them, negatively for you) is a Labour one.
Voters have wised up. The Anyone But Conservative vote is finding its voice once again, and that is bad news for you hard left agitators who need the country to be on its knees to finally bring about World Socialism Today or whatever.
There are not many Starmerites anywhere. That is a good thing.
Labour leads of>20 are unlikely to be true. More likely to be a need for an alteration to methodology... again....
Labour is the generic not the Tories party. In actual elections people refine their choice to pick the candidate who will actually beat the Tory. What the locals confirmed is that Labour + LD + Green is currently at 60%+, as the polls have been saying for a long time, and that the Tories are sub-30%, as the polls have also been saying.
Something I need to spend a little more time wrapping my head round too is where the UKIP/BXP vote has gone. The Con+Kipper vote was consistently in the 45-50 range aggregate for much of the previous decade. Now Con+RefUK are down in the 35% range, a pretty fundamental shift.
My instinct is that the polling (and voting) reflected frustration with immigration (plus Get Brexit Done) rather than a truly rightward shift - and similarly I don’t think we’ve become a nation of social democrats either.
Now that Brexit has been done and realised practically zero benefit, least of all the cynical promises around healthcare, and the supposed party of immigration control has visibly failed to control immigration (plus I don’t think most of the electorate are daft enough to be fooled by the Rwanda plan) I guess the question is for many: why vote Tory again?
That they’ve shat the bed on the economy is as fundamental an issue too - again, you ask, what is the point of the Conservative Party if immigration is out of control, taxes are high and the economy is fucked?
I see immigration is in the news again, soon to be double pre Brexit figures. DT but not paywalled.
I guess part of the issue here (beyond many false economies of the 2010s) is that while Rishi is tough on boats, he is not tough on the causes of boats.
Most illegal immigrants are undertaking an expensive and dangerous journey, placing themselves in the clutches of dangerous and amoral criminal groups, simply because the alternative is worse. Hating, abusing and displacing the ones who get here is expensive and unproductive. Actively contributing to the up-fuckery of countries like Afghanistan has not helped.
There are push factors, as you mention. There are also pull factors. Why come to the UK, if they are already in France? Are they suffering those push factors there?
What would be your solution to the problem; if indeed you see it as a problem requiring a solution?
Vast numbers of Afghans fled the Taliban, well before 9/11.
The UK are getting tiny numbers of Afghans relative to other countries. There's 3m+ in Pakistan and 1m in Iran.
Only Macron can solve the boats issue so Sunak has to ask him to name his price. It'll surely be high as it would cause a significant domestic political problem in France. There's also the possibility that Le Pen will immediately do a Johnson on whatever is agreed when she is POTFR.
The problem needs to be sorted, before the boats get to France. That means co-operating with other governments and Friendly North African thugs.
There are too many overland routes through the Balkans and Eastern Europe now. Even a world striding foreign policy colossus like Sunak can't interdict them all. The focus has to be on France if there is going to be any discernible difference before Sunak gets "possed in shit", as my mother used to say, by the voters.
Where does the route North of Moscow go? Or should there be an arrow pointing TO Moscow from N. Finland?
And Good Morning one and all.
The intriguing thing to me is why all the UK arrivals make a bee line for Birmingham.
Labour leads of>20 are unlikely to be true. More likely to be a need for an alteration to methodology... again....
Labour is the generic not the Tories party. In actual elections people refine their choice to pick the candidate who will actually beat the Tory. What the locals confirmed is that Labour + LD + Green is currently at 60%+, as the polls have been saying for a long time, and that the Tories are sub-30%, as the polls have also been saying.
The thread header seems to me to owe quite a bit to the latest R&W poll with a Lab lead down to 12% but with the LDs up to 16%, that is 4% higher than any other LD poll rating this year. No doubt the LD success in the local elections has done the LDs some good in GE polling, but whether that is anything more than a transitory blip remains to be seen. The general pattern from this and the most recent polling prior to the local elections is still a Labour average lead in the mid to high teens.
The last two polls from R&W and Omnisis, both newbie polling companies, deliver very different Labour net leads of 12% and 21% respectively, but have the combined Lab + LD + Green total at 61% in both cases. There is very little succour for the Conservatives in that.
It's not just R&W though is it.
Omnisis is highest Lab lead by some margin.
Fancy SKS fan liking that one and trying to convince us that one is accurate and all the others .....
There you go again, disparaging anyone on the left who isn't in your Corbyn fanclub and willing the Conservatives to win if it can't be Corbyn. By contrast, there are many on here who have had enough of 13 years of the Conservatives. Whether that comes about through a Labour majority or a Lab + LD government is secondary to me, I would prefer the former but am not going to lose sleep over the latter.
I was citing specifically the two most recently published polls, which happen to be the highest and lowest of the last 10. But alternatively take the average of the last 10 published polls and the Lab lead is 15.9%, entirely consistent with my point. I would rather that than a Labour deficit of 20%+, which was where we were at when your man was shown the door.
Labour leads going down because the LibDem vote is going up are very bad news for the Tories. It probably means they lose a lot more seats while having next to no impact on Labour’s tally.
With Lab+LD+ Green stubbornly around the 60% mark, what they desperately need is a move back to them from that, but it is not (at least yet) happening. Until there are strong indications of this changing, Sunak would be mad to call a GE. So, October 2024 still looks the best bet, even though that means another potentially very damaging set of local election results next May (although if the Tories get their candidate right they may have a very good shot at the London mayor now they’ve changed the voting system and made it harder to vote for key Khan demographics).
On personal popularity, there seems to be evidence from recent polls that the Sunak rise has stalled and is even be going backwards slightly. Labour’s out of touch attack line may be more effective than the paedo one. Largely because it is rooted in some reality. Whoever could have imagined it?
"out of touch" fingers Sunak very neatly - he absolutely is and always has been. But then you take a step away from Sunak and look at other Tories, and suddenly "out of touch" is apt for so many of those as well.
The Tories have been selling fantasy politics for ages. A "war" on "woke" which is poorly defined and seems mainly to exist in gammony media outlets. "Levelling Up" - the red wall is almost uniform now in seeing this as a massive lie. "Stop The Boats"...
"Out of Touch" aptly describes Tory MPs like David Duguid, who proclaims to be working with the local fishing fleets and how great the new Brexit deal is for them, even as the local fishing bosses (who campaigned for Brexit) detail just how bad things are.
Eventually reality trumps unreality. I just wonder how many of the moron and simpleton ranks of the Tory MPs will understand this before they find themselves in mid-air falling into unemployment.
Very much this.
I looked at ConservativeHome this morning (forgive me - hayfever so I wasn't sleeping). In "Five Reflections on Thursday's Local Elections", they opine:
"Could it be that the problem Conservatives have is mostly that their natural supporters abstained rather than switched to other parties? I suspect so... It is not necessary to convert that chunk of the electorate to Conservatism – they still are Conservatives. The challenge rather is to convert the Government to Conservatism. Conservatives need to feel that they have a Government delivering on those Conservative missions of cutting tax and state spending, scrapping bureaucracy, fighting crime, widening home ownership, safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities."
In 2015 the Conservatives had 62 seats across Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire district councils. Today they have one (1).
Explaining this by "low turnout" and saying the way to winning them back is "safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities"... that's not just fantasy politics, that's actively delusional.
The Conservatives probably would be riding high, if they actually *did* such things, rather than posturing about them.
After a lifetime of non-Conservative voting you are bringing me around to your way of thinking. Your compelling narrative that Starmer is so fundamentally malign is cutting through, maybe it's time to think the unthinkable and vote Conservative.
Wonder where all the tanks from previous years have gone?
Currently liberating the Ukrainians from Nazis.
Putin did make me laugh this morning by saying the West has forgotten who defeated the Nazis.
I also remember who formed a pact with the Nazis, a treaty so bad that treaties stopped being named after their authors after that.
I take that point. And, even if one leaves aside the importance of British and US military supplies to the USSR, it’s dishonest for Putin, to leave out Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Poles, Mongols etc. , millions of whom fought in the Red Army.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
Did those shoes in ancient times, walk upon England's mountains green...
...no. Probably not.
Leaving aside whether anything near Glastonbury constitutes a "mountain" - let's face it it's not the Himalaya, are they? - even the slightly rolling hills of the area will require the proper footwear. So to do your proper perambulation upon 1st century English grassy elevated environments, you will need proper hiking boots properly prepared and proofed.
And this piece of misplaced Berlin, complete with its own screaming eagles
I'm guessing: Sharston Baths? I think it closed down in the late 80s. I went there a few times. Had a massive high diving board, as I remember. And a non-negligible chance of getting smacked around the head for no particular reason.
And this piece of misplaced Berlin, complete with its own screaming eagles
I'm guessing: Sharston Baths? I think it closed down in the late 80s. I went there a few times. Had a massive high diving board, as I remember. And a non-negligible chance of getting smacked around the head for no particular reason.
@Casino_Royale I guess we could always seek a payout from Denmark and Norway, both very rich countries. I believe a vast number of Anglo-Saxon coins have been found on Danish sites.
Screw them. It's the French we should be going after. Look at the damage they did with the Hastings campaign of 1066 or the Harrying of the North in 1069. They owe us bigly.
“Harrying of the North in 1069” ??
I know they slaughter everyone and stole all the food… but are you saying they sent in the Ginger Whinger as well!!!
Great God, that is horrifying.
It was William's policy to mark all his enemies.
Sounds like OFSTED. Only more efficient.
I say, steady on there.
William the Barsteward was guilty of regicide, oathbreaking and genocide.
He is not guilty of committing school inspections. There are limits, you know
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
Did those shoes in ancient times, walk upon England's mountains green...
...no. Probably not.
Leaving aside whether anything near Glastonbury constitutes a "mountain" - let's face it it's not the Himalaya, are they? - even the slightly rolling hills of the area will require the proper footwear. So to do your proper perambulation upon 1st century English grassy elevated environments, you will need proper hiking boots properly prepared and proofed.
Isn't the Glastonbury legend more Joseph of Arimathea? But sandals would do for the (then) islands such as the Tor and Wearyall Hill (where the Thorn was planted). As seen in about a million brown-ricers and hippies visiting the area since 1968.
How does IBS come about and how do you get rid of it?
I had a tin of baked beans 12 hours ago and, well, it's like I have a CCGT station inside with no CCUS.
Classic stress related ailment. Buy a motorbike.
There is a Ducati dealer half a mile down the road.
I find a modicum of the Singing Ginger helps , but you need to be careful not to overdo it.
Not going to work. Casino doesn't like Angela Rayner. Too "woke".
A glass of port helps to bind it, and unlike bookshops, venison, RN, etc. it is not - so far as I know - woke.
I had venison for lunch on Sunday at a pub in Blairgowrie. Absolutely superb: pink, soft and juicy but lightly charred on the outside for flavour. Its "wokeness" or otherwise never occurred to me until I saw your post.
Labour leads going down because the LibDem vote is going up are very bad news for the Tories. It probably means they lose a lot more seats while having next to no impact on Labour’s tally.
With Lab+LD+ Green stubbornly around the 60% mark, what they desperately need is a move back to them from that, but it is not (at least yet) happening. Until there are strong indications of this changing, Sunak would be mad to call a GE. So, October 2024 still looks the best bet, even though that means another potentially very damaging set of local election results next May (although if the Tories get their candidate right they may have a very good shot at the London mayor now they’ve changed the voting system and made it harder to vote for key Khan demographics).
On personal popularity, there seems to be evidence from recent polls that the Sunak rise has stalled and is even be going backwards slightly. Labour’s out of touch attack line may be more effective than the paedo one. Largely because it is rooted in some reality. Whoever could have imagined it?
"out of touch" fingers Sunak very neatly - he absolutely is and always has been. But then you take a step away from Sunak and look at other Tories, and suddenly "out of touch" is apt for so many of those as well.
The Tories have been selling fantasy politics for ages. A "war" on "woke" which is poorly defined and seems mainly to exist in gammony media outlets. "Levelling Up" - the red wall is almost uniform now in seeing this as a massive lie. "Stop The Boats"...
"Out of Touch" aptly describes Tory MPs like David Duguid, who proclaims to be working with the local fishing fleets and how great the new Brexit deal is for them, even as the local fishing bosses (who campaigned for Brexit) detail just how bad things are.
Eventually reality trumps unreality. I just wonder how many of the moron and simpleton ranks of the Tory MPs will understand this before they find themselves in mid-air falling into unemployment.
Very much this.
I looked at ConservativeHome this morning (forgive me - hayfever so I wasn't sleeping). In "Five Reflections on Thursday's Local Elections", they opine:
"Could it be that the problem Conservatives have is mostly that their natural supporters abstained rather than switched to other parties? I suspect so... It is not necessary to convert that chunk of the electorate to Conservatism – they still are Conservatives. The challenge rather is to convert the Government to Conservatism. Conservatives need to feel that they have a Government delivering on those Conservative missions of cutting tax and state spending, scrapping bureaucracy, fighting crime, widening home ownership, safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities."
In 2015 the Conservatives had 62 seats across Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire district councils. Today they have one (1).
Explaining this by "low turnout" and saying the way to winning them back is "safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities"... that's not just fantasy politics, that's actively delusional.
The Conservatives probably would be riding high, if they actually *did* such things, rather than posturing about them.
It's remarkable how political opponents of the Conservatives think the way back to electoral success for them is to junk any semblance of Conservatism.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
Did those shoes in ancient times, walk upon England's mountains green...
...no. Probably not.
Leaving aside whether anything near Glastonbury constitutes a "mountain" - let's face it it's not the Himalaya, are they? - even the slightly rolling hills of the area will require the proper footwear. So to do your proper perambulation upon 1st century English grassy elevated environments, you will need proper hiking boots properly prepared and proofed.
Isn't the Glastonbury legend more Joseph of Arimathea? But sandals would do for the (then) islands such as the Tor and Wearyall Hill (where the Thorn was planted). As seen in about a million brown-ricers and hippies visiting the area since 1968.
Glastonbury is Joseph, but there is another myth that in the 'lost years' (before he started actively preaching as told in the Gospels), Jesus came to Britain, and was in some variants taught by the Druids.
Labour leads of>20 are unlikely to be true. More likely to be a need for an alteration to methodology... again....
Labour is the generic not the Tories party. In actual elections people refine their choice to pick the candidate who will actually beat the Tory. What the locals confirmed is that Labour + LD + Green is currently at 60%+, as the polls have been saying for a long time, and that the Tories are sub-30%, as the polls have also been saying.
Something I need to spend a little more time wrapping my head round too is where the UKIP/BXP vote has gone. The Con+Kipper vote was consistently in the 45-50 range aggregate for much of the previous decade. Now Con+RefUK are down in the 35% range, a pretty fundamental shift.
My instinct is that the polling (and voting) reflected frustration with immigration (plus Get Brexit Done) rather than a truly rightward shift - and similarly I don’t think we’ve become a nation of social democrats either.
Now that Brexit has been done and realised practically zero benefit, least of all the cynical promises around healthcare, and the supposed party of immigration control has visibly failed to control immigration (plus I don’t think most of the electorate are daft enough to be fooled by the Rwanda plan) I guess the question is for many: why vote Tory again?
That they’ve shat the bed on the economy is as fundamental an issue too - again, you ask, what is the point of the Conservative Party if immigration is out of control, taxes are high and the economy is fucked?
I see immigration is in the news again, soon to be double pre Brexit figures. DT but not paywalled.
I guess part of the issue here (beyond many false economies of the 2010s) is that while Rishi is tough on boats, he is not tough on the causes of boats.
Most illegal immigrants are undertaking an expensive and dangerous journey, placing themselves in the clutches of dangerous and amoral criminal groups, simply because the alternative is worse. Hating, abusing and displacing the ones who get here is expensive and unproductive. Actively contributing to the up-fuckery of countries like Afghanistan has not helped.
There are push factors, as you mention. There are also pull factors. Why come to the UK, if they are already in France? Are they suffering those push factors there?
What would be your solution to the problem; if indeed you see it as a problem requiring a solution?
Vast numbers of Afghans fled the Taliban, well before 9/11.
The UK are getting tiny numbers of Afghans relative to other countries. There's 3m+ in Pakistan and 1m in Iran.
Only Macron can solve the boats issue so Sunak has to ask him to name his price. It'll surely be high as it would cause a significant domestic political problem in France. There's also the possibility that Le Pen will immediately do a Johnson on whatever is agreed when she is POTFR.
The problem needs to be sorted, before the boats get to France. That means co-operating with other governments and Friendly North African thugs.
There are too many overland routes through the Balkans and Eastern Europe now. Even a world striding foreign policy colossus like Sunak can't interdict them all. The focus has to be on France if there is going to be any discernible difference before Sunak gets "possed in shit", as my mother used to say, by the voters.
Map needs updating.
Also, Switzerland seem pretty good at diverting them round.
How does IBS come about and how do you get rid of it?
I had a tin of baked beans 12 hours ago and, well, it's like I have a CCGT station inside with no CCUS.
Classic stress related ailment. Buy a motorbike.
There is a Ducati dealer half a mile down the road.
I find a modicum of the Singing Ginger helps , but you need to be careful not to overdo it.
Not going to work. Casino doesn't like Angela Rayner. Too "woke".
A glass of port helps to bind it, and unlike bookshops, venison, RN, etc. it is not - so far as I know - woke.
I had venison for lunch on Sunday at a pub in Blairgowrie. Absolutely superb: pink, soft and juicy but lightly charred on the outside for flavour. Its "wokeness" or otherwise never occurred to me until I saw your post.
Venison stew done with port is excellent, by the way.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Labour leads going down because the LibDem vote is going up are very bad news for the Tories. It probably means they lose a lot more seats while having next to no impact on Labour’s tally.
With Lab+LD+ Green stubbornly around the 60% mark, what they desperately need is a move back to them from that, but it is not (at least yet) happening. Until there are strong indications of this changing, Sunak would be mad to call a GE. So, October 2024 still looks the best bet, even though that means another potentially very damaging set of local election results next May (although if the Tories get their candidate right they may have a very good shot at the London mayor now they’ve changed the voting system and made it harder to vote for key Khan demographics).
On personal popularity, there seems to be evidence from recent polls that the Sunak rise has stalled and is even be going backwards slightly. Labour’s out of touch attack line may be more effective than the paedo one. Largely because it is rooted in some reality. Whoever could have imagined it?
"out of touch" fingers Sunak very neatly - he absolutely is and always has been. But then you take a step away from Sunak and look at other Tories, and suddenly "out of touch" is apt for so many of those as well.
The Tories have been selling fantasy politics for ages. A "war" on "woke" which is poorly defined and seems mainly to exist in gammony media outlets. "Levelling Up" - the red wall is almost uniform now in seeing this as a massive lie. "Stop The Boats"...
"Out of Touch" aptly describes Tory MPs like David Duguid, who proclaims to be working with the local fishing fleets and how great the new Brexit deal is for them, even as the local fishing bosses (who campaigned for Brexit) detail just how bad things are.
Eventually reality trumps unreality. I just wonder how many of the moron and simpleton ranks of the Tory MPs will understand this before they find themselves in mid-air falling into unemployment.
Very much this.
I looked at ConservativeHome this morning (forgive me - hayfever so I wasn't sleeping). In "Five Reflections on Thursday's Local Elections", they opine:
"Could it be that the problem Conservatives have is mostly that their natural supporters abstained rather than switched to other parties? I suspect so... It is not necessary to convert that chunk of the electorate to Conservatism – they still are Conservatives. The challenge rather is to convert the Government to Conservatism. Conservatives need to feel that they have a Government delivering on those Conservative missions of cutting tax and state spending, scrapping bureaucracy, fighting crime, widening home ownership, safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities."
In 2015 the Conservatives had 62 seats across Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire district councils. Today they have one (1).
Explaining this by "low turnout" and saying the way to winning them back is "safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities"... that's not just fantasy politics, that's actively delusional.
The Conservatives probably would be riding high, if they actually *did* such things, rather than posturing about them.
And that is my point. We can argue about the whys and wherefores of various policies if they were actually delivering them. But they are not. They have a fantasy list of objectives - delivering the Brexit benefits to fishermen who are detailing the opposite, Stop(ing) The Boats whilst more boats than ever come, Halving Inflation as inflation soars ever higher.
They are disconnected from reality and all but their most ardent supporters know it. Two other points from the locals: 1. Entirely possible for people to stomach voting for a local Tory councillor who delivers whilst planning to evict a Tory MP who doesn't. The gulf between local and national politics isn't uniform, but where it exists it is deep. Tory successes in places last week does not point to safety for local MPs 2. Those councils lost by the Tories to NOC. When you look at the numbers so many of these will have the Tories evicted from office...
How does IBS come about and how do you get rid of it?
I had a tin of baked beans 12 hours ago and, well, it's like I have a CCGT station inside with no CCUS.
Classic stress related ailment. Buy a motorbike.
There is a Ducati dealer half a mile down the road.
I find a modicum of the Singing Ginger helps , but you need to be careful not to overdo it.
Not going to work. Casino doesn't like Angela Rayner. Too "woke".
A glass of port helps to bind it, and unlike bookshops, venison, RN, etc. it is not - so far as I know - woke.
I had venison for lunch on Sunday at a pub in Blairgowrie. Absolutely superb: pink, soft and juicy but lightly charred on the outside for flavour. Its "wokeness" or otherwise never occurred to me until I saw your post.
Labour leads going down because the LibDem vote is going up are very bad news for the Tories. It probably means they lose a lot more seats while having next to no impact on Labour’s tally.
With Lab+LD+ Green stubbornly around the 60% mark, what they desperately need is a move back to them from that, but it is not (at least yet) happening. Until there are strong indications of this changing, Sunak would be mad to call a GE. So, October 2024 still looks the best bet, even though that means another potentially very damaging set of local election results next May (although if the Tories get their candidate right they may have a very good shot at the London mayor now they’ve changed the voting system and made it harder to vote for key Khan demographics).
On personal popularity, there seems to be evidence from recent polls that the Sunak rise has stalled and is even be going backwards slightly. Labour’s out of touch attack line may be more effective than the paedo one. Largely because it is rooted in some reality. Whoever could have imagined it?
"out of touch" fingers Sunak very neatly - he absolutely is and always has been. But then you take a step away from Sunak and look at other Tories, and suddenly "out of touch" is apt for so many of those as well.
The Tories have been selling fantasy politics for ages. A "war" on "woke" which is poorly defined and seems mainly to exist in gammony media outlets. "Levelling Up" - the red wall is almost uniform now in seeing this as a massive lie. "Stop The Boats"...
"Out of Touch" aptly describes Tory MPs like David Duguid, who proclaims to be working with the local fishing fleets and how great the new Brexit deal is for them, even as the local fishing bosses (who campaigned for Brexit) detail just how bad things are.
Eventually reality trumps unreality. I just wonder how many of the moron and simpleton ranks of the Tory MPs will understand this before they find themselves in mid-air falling into unemployment.
Very much this.
I looked at ConservativeHome this morning (forgive me - hayfever so I wasn't sleeping). In "Five Reflections on Thursday's Local Elections", they opine:
"Could it be that the problem Conservatives have is mostly that their natural supporters abstained rather than switched to other parties? I suspect so... It is not necessary to convert that chunk of the electorate to Conservatism – they still are Conservatives. The challenge rather is to convert the Government to Conservatism. Conservatives need to feel that they have a Government delivering on those Conservative missions of cutting tax and state spending, scrapping bureaucracy, fighting crime, widening home ownership, safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities."
In 2015 the Conservatives had 62 seats across Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire district councils. Today they have one (1).
Explaining this by "low turnout" and saying the way to winning them back is "safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities"... that's not just fantasy politics, that's actively delusional.
The Conservatives probably would be riding high, if they actually *did* such things, rather than posturing about them.
It's remarkable how political opponents of the Conservatives think the way back to electoral success for them is to junk any semblance of Conservatism.
Whilst that's true, conservatives also point and laugh at lefties who say "the trouble with socialism is that it's never been tried properly".
How does IBS come about and how do you get rid of it?
I had a tin of baked beans 12 hours ago and, well, it's like I have a CCGT station inside with no CCUS.
Classic stress related ailment. Buy a motorbike.
There is a Ducati dealer half a mile down the road.
I find a modicum of the Singing Ginger helps , but you need to be careful not to overdo it.
Not going to work. Casino doesn't like Angela Rayner. Too "woke".
A glass of port helps to bind it, and unlike bookshops, venison, RN, etc. it is not - so far as I know - woke.
I had venison for lunch on Sunday at a pub in Blairgowrie. Absolutely superb: pink, soft and juicy but lightly charred on the outside for flavour. Its "wokeness" or otherwise never occurred to me until I saw your post.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Labour leads going down because the LibDem vote is going up are very bad news for the Tories. It probably means they lose a lot more seats while having next to no impact on Labour’s tally.
With Lab+LD+ Green stubbornly around the 60% mark, what they desperately need is a move back to them from that, but it is not (at least yet) happening. Until there are strong indications of this changing, Sunak would be mad to call a GE. So, October 2024 still looks the best bet, even though that means another potentially very damaging set of local election results next May (although if the Tories get their candidate right they may have a very good shot at the London mayor now they’ve changed the voting system and made it harder to vote for key Khan demographics).
On personal popularity, there seems to be evidence from recent polls that the Sunak rise has stalled and is even be going backwards slightly. Labour’s out of touch attack line may be more effective than the paedo one. Largely because it is rooted in some reality. Whoever could have imagined it?
"out of touch" fingers Sunak very neatly - he absolutely is and always has been. But then you take a step away from Sunak and look at other Tories, and suddenly "out of touch" is apt for so many of those as well.
The Tories have been selling fantasy politics for ages. A "war" on "woke" which is poorly defined and seems mainly to exist in gammony media outlets. "Levelling Up" - the red wall is almost uniform now in seeing this as a massive lie. "Stop The Boats"...
"Out of Touch" aptly describes Tory MPs like David Duguid, who proclaims to be working with the local fishing fleets and how great the new Brexit deal is for them, even as the local fishing bosses (who campaigned for Brexit) detail just how bad things are.
Eventually reality trumps unreality. I just wonder how many of the moron and simpleton ranks of the Tory MPs will understand this before they find themselves in mid-air falling into unemployment.
Very much this.
I looked at ConservativeHome this morning (forgive me - hayfever so I wasn't sleeping). In "Five Reflections on Thursday's Local Elections", they opine:
"Could it be that the problem Conservatives have is mostly that their natural supporters abstained rather than switched to other parties? I suspect so... It is not necessary to convert that chunk of the electorate to Conservatism – they still are Conservatives. The challenge rather is to convert the Government to Conservatism. Conservatives need to feel that they have a Government delivering on those Conservative missions of cutting tax and state spending, scrapping bureaucracy, fighting crime, widening home ownership, safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities."
In 2015 the Conservatives had 62 seats across Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire district councils. Today they have one (1).
Explaining this by "low turnout" and saying the way to winning them back is "safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities"... that's not just fantasy politics, that's actively delusional.
The Conservatives probably would be riding high, if they actually *did* such things, rather than posturing about them.
It's remarkable how political opponents of the Conservatives think the way back to electoral success for them is to junk any semblance of Conservatism.
Whilst that's true, conservatives also point and laugh at lefties who say "the trouble with socialism is that it's never been tried properly".
And they are right to do so.
Substitute 'Brexit' into that sentence and we can all have a good laugh...
And this piece of misplaced Berlin, complete with its own screaming eagles
I'm guessing: Sharston Baths? I think it closed down in the late 80s. I went there a few times. Had a massive high diving board, as I remember. And a non-negligible chance of getting smacked around the head for no particular reason.
Labour leads of>20 are unlikely to be true. More likely to be a need for an alteration to methodology... again....
Labour is the generic not the Tories party. In actual elections people refine their choice to pick the candidate who will actually beat the Tory. What the locals confirmed is that Labour + LD + Green is currently at 60%+, as the polls have been saying for a long time, and that the Tories are sub-30%, as the polls have also been saying.
Something I need to spend a little more time wrapping my head round too is where the UKIP/BXP vote has gone. The Con+Kipper vote was consistently in the 45-50 range aggregate for much of the previous decade. Now Con+RefUK are down in the 35% range, a pretty fundamental shift.
My instinct is that the polling (and voting) reflected frustration with immigration (plus Get Brexit Done) rather than a truly rightward shift - and similarly I don’t think we’ve become a nation of social democrats either.
Now that Brexit has been done and realised practically zero benefit, least of all the cynical promises around healthcare, and the supposed party of immigration control has visibly failed to control immigration (plus I don’t think most of the electorate are daft enough to be fooled by the Rwanda plan) I guess the question is for many: why vote Tory again?
That they’ve shat the bed on the economy is as fundamental an issue too - again, you ask, what is the point of the Conservative Party if immigration is out of control, taxes are high and the economy is fucked?
I see immigration is in the news again, soon to be double pre Brexit figures. DT but not paywalled.
I guess part of the issue here (beyond many false economies of the 2010s) is that while Rishi is tough on boats, he is not tough on the causes of boats.
Most illegal immigrants are undertaking an expensive and dangerous journey, placing themselves in the clutches of dangerous and amoral criminal groups, simply because the alternative is worse. Hating, abusing and displacing the ones who get here is expensive and unproductive. Actively contributing to the up-fuckery of countries like Afghanistan has not helped.
There are push factors, as you mention. There are also pull factors. Why come to the UK, if they are already in France? Are they suffering those push factors there?
What would be your solution to the problem; if indeed you see it as a problem requiring a solution?
Vast numbers of Afghans fled the Taliban, well before 9/11.
The UK are getting tiny numbers of Afghans relative to other countries. There's 3m+ in Pakistan and 1m in Iran.
Only Macron can solve the boats issue so Sunak has to ask him to name his price. It'll surely be high as it would cause a significant domestic political problem in France. There's also the possibility that Le Pen will immediately do a Johnson on whatever is agreed when she is POTFR.
The problem needs to be sorted, before the boats get to France. That means co-operating with other governments and Friendly North African thugs.
There are too many overland routes through the Balkans and Eastern Europe now. Even a world striding foreign policy colossus like Sunak can't interdict them all. The focus has to be on France if there is going to be any discernible difference before Sunak gets "possed in shit", as my mother used to say, by the voters.
There is no reason for the French to help at all - the propensity of Sunak to piss money in their general direction for doing nothing is even greater incentive for them to let more through and worsen the issue, to get even more money.
We need to stop people wanting to come. It's as simple as that. Rwanda already worked partially - it massively drove down the price that traffickers were able to charge when it was a credible risk, now that it isn't any more, of course it's not working at all. The minute that people start getting flown or deported anywhere in semi-serious numbers, we will see a serious decline in boats.
Jeez and here am I feeling sorry for Anthony Joshua - who would want to be him climbing through the ropes of his next fight, whoever it is. What will be going through his head goodness only knows.
Imagine however if Lab were to lose the next GE. That would be so damaging to their collective psyche I'm not sure they could recover. Perhaps @bjo will form his much beloved core Lab to take their chances and banish all the Lab right wingers to the wilderness.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
Labour leads going down because the LibDem vote is going up are very bad news for the Tories. It probably means they lose a lot more seats while having next to no impact on Labour’s tally.
With Lab+LD+ Green stubbornly around the 60% mark, what they desperately need is a move back to them from that, but it is not (at least yet) happening. Until there are strong indications of this changing, Sunak would be mad to call a GE. So, October 2024 still looks the best bet, even though that means another potentially very damaging set of local election results next May (although if the Tories get their candidate right they may have a very good shot at the London mayor now they’ve changed the voting system and made it harder to vote for key Khan demographics).
On personal popularity, there seems to be evidence from recent polls that the Sunak rise has stalled and is even be going backwards slightly. Labour’s out of touch attack line may be more effective than the paedo one. Largely because it is rooted in some reality. Whoever could have imagined it?
"out of touch" fingers Sunak very neatly - he absolutely is and always has been. But then you take a step away from Sunak and look at other Tories, and suddenly "out of touch" is apt for so many of those as well.
The Tories have been selling fantasy politics for ages. A "war" on "woke" which is poorly defined and seems mainly to exist in gammony media outlets. "Levelling Up" - the red wall is almost uniform now in seeing this as a massive lie. "Stop The Boats"...
"Out of Touch" aptly describes Tory MPs like David Duguid, who proclaims to be working with the local fishing fleets and how great the new Brexit deal is for them, even as the local fishing bosses (who campaigned for Brexit) detail just how bad things are.
Eventually reality trumps unreality. I just wonder how many of the moron and simpleton ranks of the Tory MPs will understand this before they find themselves in mid-air falling into unemployment.
Very much this.
I looked at ConservativeHome this morning (forgive me - hayfever so I wasn't sleeping). In "Five Reflections on Thursday's Local Elections", they opine:
"Could it be that the problem Conservatives have is mostly that their natural supporters abstained rather than switched to other parties? I suspect so... It is not necessary to convert that chunk of the electorate to Conservatism – they still are Conservatives. The challenge rather is to convert the Government to Conservatism. Conservatives need to feel that they have a Government delivering on those Conservative missions of cutting tax and state spending, scrapping bureaucracy, fighting crime, widening home ownership, safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities."
In 2015 the Conservatives had 62 seats across Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire district councils. Today they have one (1).
Explaining this by "low turnout" and saying the way to winning them back is "safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities"... that's not just fantasy politics, that's actively delusional.
The Conservatives probably would be riding high, if they actually *did* such things, rather than posturing about them.
It's remarkable how political opponents of the Conservatives think the way back to electoral success for them is to junk any semblance of Conservatism.
Whilst that's true, conservatives also point and laugh at lefties who say "the trouble with socialism is that it's never been tried properly".
And they are right to do so.
The polling is pretty clear - it's delivery.
Note how very very few are now backing Labour because it aligns with their values or they agree with their policies.
If the Tories were delivering we'd still have a stalemate of around 40% for them and 40% for Labour, IMHO
Jeez and here am I feeling sorry for Anthony Joshua - who would want to be him climbing through the ropes of his next fight, whoever it is. What will be going through his head goodness only knows.
Imagine however if Lab were to lose the next GE. That would be so damaging to their collective psyche I'm not sure they could recover. Perhaps @bjo will form his much beloved core Lab to take their chances and banish all the Lab right wingers to the wilderness.
If Lab fail to form the next government, then there will have to be some kind of seismic change.
In that scenario, the centre left will have failed; the centre right doesn't exist any more, and LDs will continue to stutter along at near extinction rates. And goodness knows what will have happened in Scotland to produce that outcome: do the SNP cling on to their seats there?
Labour leads going down because the LibDem vote is going up are very bad news for the Tories. It probably means they lose a lot more seats while having next to no impact on Labour’s tally.
With Lab+LD+ Green stubbornly around the 60% mark, what they desperately need is a move back to them from that, but it is not (at least yet) happening. Until there are strong indications of this changing, Sunak would be mad to call a GE. So, October 2024 still looks the best bet, even though that means another potentially very damaging set of local election results next May (although if the Tories get their candidate right they may have a very good shot at the London mayor now they’ve changed the voting system and made it harder to vote for key Khan demographics).
On personal popularity, there seems to be evidence from recent polls that the Sunak rise has stalled and is even be going backwards slightly. Labour’s out of touch attack line may be more effective than the paedo one. Largely because it is rooted in some reality. Whoever could have imagined it?
"out of touch" fingers Sunak very neatly - he absolutely is and always has been. But then you take a step away from Sunak and look at other Tories, and suddenly "out of touch" is apt for so many of those as well.
The Tories have been selling fantasy politics for ages. A "war" on "woke" which is poorly defined and seems mainly to exist in gammony media outlets. "Levelling Up" - the red wall is almost uniform now in seeing this as a massive lie. "Stop The Boats"...
"Out of Touch" aptly describes Tory MPs like David Duguid, who proclaims to be working with the local fishing fleets and how great the new Brexit deal is for them, even as the local fishing bosses (who campaigned for Brexit) detail just how bad things are.
Eventually reality trumps unreality. I just wonder how many of the moron and simpleton ranks of the Tory MPs will understand this before they find themselves in mid-air falling into unemployment.
Very much this.
I looked at ConservativeHome this morning (forgive me - hayfever so I wasn't sleeping). In "Five Reflections on Thursday's Local Elections", they opine:
"Could it be that the problem Conservatives have is mostly that their natural supporters abstained rather than switched to other parties? I suspect so... It is not necessary to convert that chunk of the electorate to Conservatism – they still are Conservatives. The challenge rather is to convert the Government to Conservatism. Conservatives need to feel that they have a Government delivering on those Conservative missions of cutting tax and state spending, scrapping bureaucracy, fighting crime, widening home ownership, safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities."
In 2015 the Conservatives had 62 seats across Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire district councils. Today they have one (1).
Explaining this by "low turnout" and saying the way to winning them back is "safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities"... that's not just fantasy politics, that's actively delusional.
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
How does IBS come about and how do you get rid of it?
I had a tin of baked beans 12 hours ago and, well, it's like I have a CCGT station inside with no CCUS.
Classic stress related ailment. Buy a motorbike.
There is a Ducati dealer half a mile down the road.
I find a modicum of the Singing Ginger helps , but you need to be careful not to overdo it.
Not going to work. Casino doesn't like Angela Rayner. Too "woke".
A glass of port helps to bind it, and unlike bookshops, venison, RN, etc. it is not - so far as I know - woke.
I had venison for lunch on Sunday at a pub in Blairgowrie. Absolutely superb: pink, soft and juicy but lightly charred on the outside for flavour. Its "wokeness" or otherwise never occurred to me until I saw your post.
According to some it is a vegetable.
There is so much venision.. the deer Population has exploded... , I hear its being given to foodbanks in some areas.
How does IBS come about and how do you get rid of it?
I had a tin of baked beans 12 hours ago and, well, it's like I have a CCGT station inside with no CCUS.
Classic stress related ailment. Buy a motorbike.
There is a Ducati dealer half a mile down the road.
I find a modicum of the Singing Ginger helps , but you need to be careful not to overdo it.
Not going to work. Casino doesn't like Angela Rayner. Too "woke".
A glass of port helps to bind it, and unlike bookshops, venison, RN, etc. it is not - so far as I know - woke.
I had venison for lunch on Sunday at a pub in Blairgowrie. Absolutely superb: pink, soft and juicy but lightly charred on the outside for flavour. Its "wokeness" or otherwise never occurred to me until I saw your post.
According to some it is a vegetable.
There is so much venision.. the deer Population has exploded... , I hear its being given to foodbanks in some areas.
You certainly see venison dog food and treats more commonly of late
Jeez and here am I feeling sorry for Anthony Joshua - who would want to be him climbing through the ropes of his next fight, whoever it is. What will be going through his head goodness only knows.
Imagine however if Lab were to lose the next GE. That would be so damaging to their collective psyche I'm not sure they could recover. Perhaps @bjo will form his much beloved core Lab to take their chances and banish all the Lab right wingers to the wilderness.
That's in all seriousness a very germane point and one I think about a lot. I don't see it happening but ... shudder ... if the Cons were somehow to win again, a 5th in a row, despite the utter shambles of recent times, a bad economy, most people poorer, and with us here in the Labour Party having gone through a head to toe 'moderatisation' specifically to appeal to floating voters, I don't know where on earth we would go from there.
Jeez and here am I feeling sorry for Anthony Joshua - who would want to be him climbing through the ropes of his next fight, whoever it is. What will be going through his head goodness only knows.
Imagine however if Lab were to lose the next GE. That would be so damaging to their collective psyche I'm not sure they could recover. Perhaps @bjo will form his much beloved core Lab to take their chances and banish all the Lab right wingers to the wilderness.
It ought to be Wilder but you can make a case for Zhang.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
One for the armchair generals .... will we see the Ukrainian counterattack start today ?? It would be ironic if in years to come the Russians celebrated Victory Day on the first day of their eventual defeat in Ukraine??
Labour leads going down because the LibDem vote is going up are very bad news for the Tories. It probably means they lose a lot more seats while having next to no impact on Labour’s tally.
With Lab+LD+ Green stubbornly around the 60% mark, what they desperately need is a move back to them from that, but it is not (at least yet) happening. Until there are strong indications of this changing, Sunak would be mad to call a GE. So, October 2024 still looks the best bet, even though that means another potentially very damaging set of local election results next May (although if the Tories get their candidate right they may have a very good shot at the London mayor now they’ve changed the voting system and made it harder to vote for key Khan demographics).
On personal popularity, there seems to be evidence from recent polls that the Sunak rise has stalled and is even be going backwards slightly. Labour’s out of touch attack line may be more effective than the paedo one. Largely because it is rooted in some reality. Whoever could have imagined it?
"out of touch" fingers Sunak very neatly - he absolutely is and always has been. But then you take a step away from Sunak and look at other Tories, and suddenly "out of touch" is apt for so many of those as well.
The Tories have been selling fantasy politics for ages. A "war" on "woke" which is poorly defined and seems mainly to exist in gammony media outlets. "Levelling Up" - the red wall is almost uniform now in seeing this as a massive lie. "Stop The Boats"...
"Out of Touch" aptly describes Tory MPs like David Duguid, who proclaims to be working with the local fishing fleets and how great the new Brexit deal is for them, even as the local fishing bosses (who campaigned for Brexit) detail just how bad things are.
Eventually reality trumps unreality. I just wonder how many of the moron and simpleton ranks of the Tory MPs will understand this before they find themselves in mid-air falling into unemployment.
Very much this.
I looked at ConservativeHome this morning (forgive me - hayfever so I wasn't sleeping). In "Five Reflections on Thursday's Local Elections", they opine:
"Could it be that the problem Conservatives have is mostly that their natural supporters abstained rather than switched to other parties? I suspect so... It is not necessary to convert that chunk of the electorate to Conservatism – they still are Conservatives. The challenge rather is to convert the Government to Conservatism. Conservatives need to feel that they have a Government delivering on those Conservative missions of cutting tax and state spending, scrapping bureaucracy, fighting crime, widening home ownership, safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities."
In 2015 the Conservatives had 62 seats across Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire district councils. Today they have one (1).
Explaining this by "low turnout" and saying the way to winning them back is "safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities"... that's not just fantasy politics, that's actively delusional.
The Conservatives probably would be riding high, if they actually *did* such things, rather than posturing about them.
It's remarkable how political opponents of the Conservatives think the way back to electoral success for them is to junk any semblance of Conservatism.
Whilst that's true, conservatives also point and laugh at lefties who say "the trouble with socialism is that it's never been tried properly".
And they are right to do so.
The polling is pretty clear - it's delivery.
Note how very very few are now backing Labour because it aligns with their values or they agree with their policies.
If the Tories were delivering we'd still have a stalemate of around 40% for them and 40% for Labour, IMHO
The youngsters are pissed off because they they can't afford rent or a mortgage, the oldies are pissed off because they can't get a doctor's appointment, and the ones in the middle are pissed off because their adult children are still living at home and they can't find care for their ailing parents. This is what people need fixing.
Jeez and here am I feeling sorry for Anthony Joshua - who would want to be him climbing through the ropes of his next fight, whoever it is. What will be going through his head goodness only knows.
Imagine however if Lab were to lose the next GE. That would be so damaging to their collective psyche I'm not sure they could recover. Perhaps @bjo will form his much beloved core Lab to take their chances and banish all the Lab right wingers to the wilderness.
If Lab fail to form the next government, then there will have to be some kind of seismic change.
In that scenario, the centre left will have failed; the centre right doesn't exist any more, and LDs will continue to stutter along at near extinction rates. And goodness knows what will have happened in Scotland to produce that outcome: do the SNP cling on to their seats there?
Mr. F, the Harrying of the North killed about 75% of the people in Yorkshire, if memory serves (from Marc Morris' very good book on the period).
It's bizarre that some feel entitled for wrongs done to people who are not them, from people who did not do the wrongdoing. And pathetic that some feel inclined to indulge this irrational greed.
So I get double compensation for being a Yorkshireman of Pakistani heritage.
Hurrah.
I’ve often wondered just how successful I would have been in life if I didn’t live in such an oppressive country for minorities.
It might have given me the self confidence in myself to succeed.
Which 11th century Yorkshiremen are you a descendant of?
Look if Jesus can make it to the UK then it is entirely possible one of my antecedents made it to the UK in the 11th century.
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
On that “logic” we’re all entitled to reparations from everybody else
Hand it over, Blanche, or you lose your username.
While this is all very jolly, and I generally agree with the thrust that we're all descended from both victors and victims, the pedant in me can't help quibble with Eagles: surely his point should be that it is possible that an eleventh century Yorkshireman made his way to Pakistan? In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
Not me. Coal mining and Yorkshire as far back as the eye can see.
Labour leads of>20 are unlikely to be true. More likely to be a need for an alteration to methodology... again....
Labour is the generic not the Tories party. In actual elections people refine their choice to pick the candidate who will actually beat the Tory. What the locals confirmed is that Labour + LD + Green is currently at 60%+, as the polls have been saying for a long time, and that the Tories are sub-30%, as the polls have also been saying.
Something I need to spend a little more time wrapping my head round too is where the UKIP/BXP vote has gone. The Con+Kipper vote was consistently in the 45-50 range aggregate for much of the previous decade. Now Con+RefUK are down in the 35% range, a pretty fundamental shift.
My instinct is that the polling (and voting) reflected frustration with immigration (plus Get Brexit Done) rather than a truly rightward shift - and similarly I don’t think we’ve become a nation of social democrats either.
Now that Brexit has been done and realised practically zero benefit, least of all the cynical promises around healthcare, and the supposed party of immigration control has visibly failed to control immigration (plus I don’t think most of the electorate are daft enough to be fooled by the Rwanda plan) I guess the question is for many: why vote Tory again?
That they’ve shat the bed on the economy is as fundamental an issue too - again, you ask, what is the point of the Conservative Party if immigration is out of control, taxes are high and the economy is fucked?
I see immigration is in the news again, soon to be double pre Brexit figures. DT but not paywalled.
I guess part of the issue here (beyond many false economies of the 2010s) is that while Rishi is tough on boats, he is not tough on the causes of boats.
Most illegal immigrants are undertaking an expensive and dangerous journey, placing themselves in the clutches of dangerous and amoral criminal groups, simply because the alternative is worse. Hating, abusing and displacing the ones who get here is expensive and unproductive. Actively contributing to the up-fuckery of countries like Afghanistan has not helped.
There are push factors, as you mention. There are also pull factors. Why come to the UK, if they are already in France? Are they suffering those push factors there?
What would be your solution to the problem; if indeed you see it as a problem requiring a solution?
Vast numbers of Afghans fled the Taliban, well before 9/11.
The UK are getting tiny numbers of Afghans relative to other countries. There's 3m+ in Pakistan and 1m in Iran.
Only Macron can solve the boats issue so Sunak has to ask him to name his price. It'll surely be high as it would cause a significant domestic political problem in France. There's also the possibility that Le Pen will immediately do a Johnson on whatever is agreed when she is POTFR.
The problem needs to be sorted, before the boats get to France. That means co-operating with other governments and Friendly North African thugs.
There are too many overland routes through the Balkans and Eastern Europe now. Even a world striding foreign policy colossus like Sunak can't interdict them all. The focus has to be on France if there is going to be any discernible difference before Sunak gets "possed in shit", as my mother used to say, by the voters.
Where does the route North of Moscow go? Or should there be an arrow pointing TO Moscow from N. Finland?
I read the story. What a way to travel! What was also notable was while Norway will give asylum to ‘deserving’ cases it also returns ‘undeserving’ cases to countries they consider safe.
Jeez and here am I feeling sorry for Anthony Joshua - who would want to be him climbing through the ropes of his next fight, whoever it is. What will be going through his head goodness only knows.
Imagine however if Lab were to lose the next GE. That would be so damaging to their collective psyche I'm not sure they could recover. Perhaps @bjo will form his much beloved core Lab to take their chances and banish all the Lab right wingers to the wilderness.
If Lab fail to form the next government, then there will have to be some kind of seismic change.
In that scenario, the centre left will have failed; the centre right doesn't exist any more, and LDs will continue to stutter along at near extinction rates. And goodness knows what will have happened in Scotland to produce that outcome: do the SNP cling on to their seats there?
If the Conservatives achieved a 1992 result at the GE, the ensuing rounds of local elections would be as bad as 1993-97, and the GE after that a rout.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
One for the armchair generals .... will we see the Ukrainian counterattack start today ?? It would be ironic if in years to come the Russians celebrated Victory Day on the first day of their eventual defeat in Ukraine??
Maybe. Or try the Russians will try a grand (probably futile) gesture. STONK!
Wonder where all the tanks from previous years have gone?
...
The Russian military just bought a whole pile of T-34/85 from Yugoslavia, just for such parades.
I stand by my prediction, that T-34s are going to be pulled from Russian museums and war memorials by the summer, to be sent to Ukraine - for five minutes each, when up against Abrams, Leopard, and Challenger.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
Wonder where all the tanks from previous years have gone?
...
The Russian military just bought a whole pile of T-34/85 from Yugoslavia, just for such parades.
I stand by my prediction, that T-34s are going to be pulled from Russian museums and war memorials by the summer, to be sent to Ukraine - for five minutes each, when up against Abrams, Leopard, and Challenger.
One for the armchair generals .... will we see the Ukrainian counterattack start today ?? It would be ironic if in years to come the Russians celebrated Victory Day on the first day of their eventual defeat in Ukraine??
Maybe. Or try the Russians will try a grand (probably futile) gesture. STONK!
They tried that last night - but could only muster a handful of proper missiles, which either missed targets or were shot down.
Labour leads going down because the LibDem vote is going up are very bad news for the Tories. It probably means they lose a lot more seats while having next to no impact on Labour’s tally.
With Lab+LD+ Green stubbornly around the 60% mark, what they desperately need is a move back to them from that, but it is not (at least yet) happening. Until there are strong indications of this changing, Sunak would be mad to call a GE. So, October 2024 still looks the best bet, even though that means another potentially very damaging set of local election results next May (although if the Tories get their candidate right they may have a very good shot at the London mayor now they’ve changed the voting system and made it harder to vote for key Khan demographics).
On personal popularity, there seems to be evidence from recent polls that the Sunak rise has stalled and is even be going backwards slightly. Labour’s out of touch attack line may be more effective than the paedo one. Largely because it is rooted in some reality. Whoever could have imagined it?
"out of touch" fingers Sunak very neatly - he absolutely is and always has been. But then you take a step away from Sunak and look at other Tories, and suddenly "out of touch" is apt for so many of those as well.
The Tories have been selling fantasy politics for ages. A "war" on "woke" which is poorly defined and seems mainly to exist in gammony media outlets. "Levelling Up" - the red wall is almost uniform now in seeing this as a massive lie. "Stop The Boats"...
"Out of Touch" aptly describes Tory MPs like David Duguid, who proclaims to be working with the local fishing fleets and how great the new Brexit deal is for them, even as the local fishing bosses (who campaigned for Brexit) detail just how bad things are.
Eventually reality trumps unreality. I just wonder how many of the moron and simpleton ranks of the Tory MPs will understand this before they find themselves in mid-air falling into unemployment.
Very much this.
I looked at ConservativeHome this morning (forgive me - hayfever so I wasn't sleeping). In "Five Reflections on Thursday's Local Elections", they opine:
"Could it be that the problem Conservatives have is mostly that their natural supporters abstained rather than switched to other parties? I suspect so... It is not necessary to convert that chunk of the electorate to Conservatism – they still are Conservatives. The challenge rather is to convert the Government to Conservatism. Conservatives need to feel that they have a Government delivering on those Conservative missions of cutting tax and state spending, scrapping bureaucracy, fighting crime, widening home ownership, safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities."
In 2015 the Conservatives had 62 seats across Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire district councils. Today they have one (1).
Explaining this by "low turnout" and saying the way to winning them back is "safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities"... that's not just fantasy politics, that's actively delusional.
Well I abstained....
I didn't vote either. But as I am in London there is good reason for this!
Labour leads going down because the LibDem vote is going up are very bad news for the Tories. It probably means they lose a lot more seats while having next to no impact on Labour’s tally.
With Lab+LD+ Green stubbornly around the 60% mark, what they desperately need is a move back to them from that, but it is not (at least yet) happening. Until there are strong indications of this changing, Sunak would be mad to call a GE. So, October 2024 still looks the best bet, even though that means another potentially very damaging set of local election results next May (although if the Tories get their candidate right they may have a very good shot at the London mayor now they’ve changed the voting system and made it harder to vote for key Khan demographics).
On personal popularity, there seems to be evidence from recent polls that the Sunak rise has stalled and is even be going backwards slightly. Labour’s out of touch attack line may be more effective than the paedo one. Largely because it is rooted in some reality. Whoever could have imagined it?
"out of touch" fingers Sunak very neatly - he absolutely is and always has been. But then you take a step away from Sunak and look at other Tories, and suddenly "out of touch" is apt for so many of those as well.
The Tories have been selling fantasy politics for ages. A "war" on "woke" which is poorly defined and seems mainly to exist in gammony media outlets. "Levelling Up" - the red wall is almost uniform now in seeing this as a massive lie. "Stop The Boats"...
"Out of Touch" aptly describes Tory MPs like David Duguid, who proclaims to be working with the local fishing fleets and how great the new Brexit deal is for them, even as the local fishing bosses (who campaigned for Brexit) detail just how bad things are.
Eventually reality trumps unreality. I just wonder how many of the moron and simpleton ranks of the Tory MPs will understand this before they find themselves in mid-air falling into unemployment.
Very much this.
I looked at ConservativeHome this morning (forgive me - hayfever so I wasn't sleeping). In "Five Reflections on Thursday's Local Elections", they opine:
"Could it be that the problem Conservatives have is mostly that their natural supporters abstained rather than switched to other parties? I suspect so... It is not necessary to convert that chunk of the electorate to Conservatism – they still are Conservatives. The challenge rather is to convert the Government to Conservatism. Conservatives need to feel that they have a Government delivering on those Conservative missions of cutting tax and state spending, scrapping bureaucracy, fighting crime, widening home ownership, safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities."
In 2015 the Conservatives had 62 seats across Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire district councils. Today they have one (1).
Explaining this by "low turnout" and saying the way to winning them back is "safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities"... that's not just fantasy politics, that's actively delusional.
The Conservatives probably would be riding high, if they actually *did* such things, rather than posturing about them.
It's remarkable how political opponents of the Conservatives think the way back to electoral success for them is to junk any semblance of Conservatism.
The way back to electoral success is to be first seen as a serious party of government. Sunak has put them on that path, though whether he can detoxify the brand from the populist "fuck business" years (or the "fuck the markets" of the Truss/Kwarteng months) in time for the next GE is possibly improbable.
I like Starmer, but I still don't trust his party. They don't understand business and they never will. It is through creating the right conditions for private enterprise that will create a successful economy, as Blair and Brown understood. I am not at all convinced this version of Labour gets that at all. They will be more interested in shoving more money into the already vastly inflated greedy pension funds of the public sector rather than creating the conditions for enterprise.
Although Rishi Sunak is justly proud of becoming Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, he has never openly discussed the extraordinary history of his paternal grandfather.
The Times has pieced together the background of Ram Dass Sunak and can reveal that he was two years old when his Punjabi town was attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 injured.
Ram Dass was born in 1917, two years before police, soldiers and pilots carried out a two-day massacre against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala.
Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs and machinegun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages. It is understood that the family, including the prime minister, had no idea about their grandfather’s roots.
Video of the Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition in 1947 and now derelict, is accessible online and the house is only a short distance from the town centre and the school that came under fire.
Surviving records confirm that ten bombs and 1,000 rounds of machinegun fire were directed at the Indian targets. One bomb was dropped deliberately on the school.
During the atrocities on April 14 and 15, 1919, police, army and air force units were ordered to tackle civilian protesters responding to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.
The Amritsar atrocity, highlighted in the 1982 film Gandhi, is well documented. Less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings were noted six months later by the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.
The UK government really should pay reparations to the families/descendants of people who were ruled by the British Empire.
HMRC knows my bank details.
The Irish are ahead of you (and the Scots) in the queue.
What about Cymru? The Scottish parliament voted for the Union. Cymru’s history is one of piecemeal conquest by its larger neighbour.
The Tudors managed a reverse takeover, as did the Stuarts much later. The mainland of the British Isles is historically interwoven and the grievances of Wales and Scotland are largely manufactured and have no more validity than any other region of this island.
Wonder where all the tanks from previous years have gone?
...
The Russian military just bought a whole pile of T-34/85 from Yugoslavia, just for such parades.
I stand by my prediction, that T-34s are going to be pulled from Russian museums and war memorials by the summer, to be sent to Ukraine - for five minutes each, when up against Abrams, Leopard, and Challenger.
We haven’t seen the promised T-55s yet.
They were seen on a train a few weeks back, heading from ‘storage’ (outside, wet, half a century) to the refurb facility, where presumably a few of them will be made serviceable, or at least a Russian definition of serviceable.
Comments
SKS fans please explain
I know they slaughter everyone and stole all the food… but are you saying they sent in the Ginger Whinger as well!!!
Great God, that is horrifying.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/07/suspect-shooting-texas-mall-allen-00095708
...The posts by Mauricio Garcia, whom authorities have identified as the gunman, on a Russian social networking site suggest the 33-year-old had been planning the attack for weeks before he stepped out of a silver sedan and opened fire Saturday.
Garcia’s activity on the site also betrayed a fascination with white supremacy and mass shootings, which he described as sport. Photos he posted showed large Nazi tattoos on his arm and torso, including a swastika and the SS lightning bolt logo of Hitler’s paramilitary forces...
Omnisis is highest Lab lead by some margin.
Fancy SKS fan liking that one and trying to convince us that one is accurate and all the others .....
And did these feet in ancient times etc.
Also, Switzerland seem pretty good at diverting them round.
Average lead over last 20 polls is 15 covering a 3 week period.
SKS fan on here says the highest Labour lead poll by Omnisis is correct and we should ignore the other 19
Centrists panic due to set in soon as inflation plummet s imo
And Good Morning one and all.
Only more efficient.
I mean my kids have Irish heritage in them, they are due even more than me.
There’s real injustices in the world today that we should focus on than ones centuries old.
You sound very much like a Starmerite TBH. Both you and they think the only number that matters is the Labour number, that the only vote that counts (positively for them, negatively for you) is a Labour one.
Voters have wised up. The Anyone But Conservative vote is finding its voice once again, and that is bad news for you hard left agitators who need the country to be on its knees to finally bring about World Socialism Today or whatever.
List Of Tanks That Took Part In #Russia’s 2023 Victory Parade 🇷🇺
- 1 T-34/85
https://twitter.com/oryxspioenkop/status/1655846812723412992
We also know that the locals results confirm the Tory polling. As things stand, I'd say the R&W poll is probably the most accurate reflectkion of current voter sentiment. It redistributes the ongoing Lab+LD+Green 60% in a way that does maximum damage to the Tories and makes a Labour majority even more likely.
There are a few anti-Starmer voters like you out there. But the are vastly outnumbered by anti-Tory ones. Please explain!
https://abcnews.go.com/International/refugees-biking-norway-tiny-remote-russian-arctic-border/story?id=35978710
But like many others, I will be voting with the hope and expectation that I will be doing my little bit to destroy the travesty of a Conservative party that is left after Johnson et al trashed it.
One day, I hope a centre right, economically competent, kinder, One Nation party replaces it and boots out the Bravermans and the numerous bedblockers with social attitudes locked in the 50s.
*excluding the yonners, natch
"A tortoise, that's pathetic! Couldn't you have found a virgin?"
"Well, this is Essex, your Highness!"
I looked at ConservativeHome this morning (forgive me - hayfever so I wasn't sleeping). In "Five Reflections on Thursday's Local Elections", they opine:
"Could it be that the problem Conservatives have is mostly that their natural supporters abstained rather than switched to other parties? I suspect so... It is not necessary to convert that chunk of the electorate to Conservatism – they still are Conservatives. The challenge rather is to convert the Government to Conservatism. Conservatives need to feel that they have a Government delivering on those Conservative missions of cutting tax and state spending, scrapping bureaucracy, fighting crime, widening home ownership, safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities."
In 2015 the Conservatives had 62 seats across Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire district councils. Today they have one (1).
Explaining this by "low turnout" and saying the way to winning them back is "safeguarding our borders, championing free enterprise, and refuting woke absurdities"... that's not just fantasy politics, that's actively delusional.
Putin did make me laugh this morning by saying the West has forgotten who defeated the Nazis.
I also remember who formed a pact with the Nazis, a treaty so bad that treaties stopped being named after their authors after that.
But I wonder why you thought the polls were wrong when they showed Jezza over 10 points behind which is what he ended up losing by?
I was citing specifically the two most recently published polls, which happen to be the highest and lowest of the last 10. But alternatively take the average of the last 10 published polls and the Lab lead is 15.9%, entirely consistent with my point. I would rather that than a Labour deficit of 20%+, which was where we were at when your man was shown the door.
AI to do the heavy lifting.
AI cannot go on strike.
https://twitter.com/telegraph/status/1655850360756371456?s=61&t=s0ae0IFncdLS1Dc7J0P_TQ
...no. Probably not.
Leaving aside whether anything near Glastonbury constitutes a "mountain" - let's face it it's not the Himalaya, are they? - even the slightly rolling hills of the area will require the proper footwear. So to do your proper perambulation upon 1st century English grassy elevated environments, you will need proper hiking boots properly prepared and proofed.
Edit: found a bulk supplier for the china clay, which might be useful for CR. Approved English manufacture, too. https://www.rbhltd.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/BP-Light-Kaolin.pdf
https://manchesterhistory.net/architecture/1960/crowncourt.html
The Report in which they lied about the bonus scheme was laid before Parliament so the Post Office has misled Parliament as well.
William the Barsteward was guilty of regicide, oathbreaking and genocide.
He is not guilty of committing school inspections. There are limits, you know
They are disconnected from reality and all but their most ardent supporters know it. Two other points from the locals:
1. Entirely possible for people to stomach voting for a local Tory councillor who delivers whilst planning to evict a Tory MP who doesn't. The gulf between local and national politics isn't uniform, but where it exists it is deep. Tory successes in places last week does not point to safety for local MPs
2. Those councils lost by the Tories to NOC. When you look at the numbers so many of these will have the Tories evicted from office...
And they are right to do so.
I've just googled it - it looked like this:
We need to stop people wanting to come. It's as simple as that. Rwanda already worked partially - it massively drove down the price that traffickers were able to charge when it was a credible risk, now that it isn't any more, of course it's not working at all. The minute that people start getting flown or deported anywhere in semi-serious numbers, we will see a serious decline in boats.
Jeez and here am I feeling sorry for Anthony Joshua - who would want to be him climbing through the ropes of his next fight, whoever it is. What will be going through his head goodness only knows.
Imagine however if Lab were to lose the next GE. That would be so damaging to their collective psyche I'm not sure they could recover. Perhaps @bjo will form his much beloved core Lab to take their chances and banish all the Lab right wingers to the wilderness.
Note how very very few are now backing Labour because it aligns with their values or they agree with their policies.
If the Tories were delivering we'd still have a stalemate of around 40% for them and 40% for Labour, IMHO
What a Victory Day parade looks like in 2023 Moscow.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12062341/Putin-arrives-Red-Square-Russias-annual-Victory-Parade-gets-underway.html
It’s almost as if there’s little left, of their once-mighty military force.
In that scenario, the centre left will have failed; the centre right doesn't exist any more, and LDs will continue to stutter along at near extinction rates. And goodness knows what will have happened in Scotland to produce that outcome: do the SNP cling on to their seats there?
In any case, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There wasn't much intercontinental travel in the 11th century, but there was some. I believe that there is an area of Pakistan where blue eyes are quite common after a bit of medieval migration.
I am genuinely interested to know how foreign we all are (and indeed how British the rest of the world is). It's almost certainly the case that of the set of tenth century inhabitants of the British Isles who has any descendants in Britain today, that everyone in the British Isles today of broadly White British origin is descended from all of them. It might or might not be true that this logic can be applied more widely (i.e. am I also descended from everyone in Europe from the tenth century who had descendants?)
I recently found out I am descended from the artist Velasquez. Foreign genes have likely crept in somewhere to even the most British of us.
What was also notable was while Norway will give asylum to ‘deserving’ cases it also returns ‘undeserving’ cases to countries they consider safe.
I like Starmer, but I still don't trust his party. They don't understand business and they never will. It is through creating the right conditions for private enterprise that will create a successful economy, as Blair and Brown understood. I am not at all convinced this version of Labour gets that at all. They will be more interested in shoving more money into the already vastly inflated greedy pension funds of the public sector rather than creating the conditions for enterprise.