There's so much to be said about this, from many angles. But I'll just say this: would the mocking soldiers have been so contemptuous if they'd required her services on the field? Or whether they'd have said the same to a male medic?
I think soldiers generally mock others who have medals - its a banter thing ? I certainly used to do with colleagues who had won employee of the month!
"So that gives fair gap for LAB in the latest round of polling but, of course, the five-week general election campaign could change all of that. Just remember what happened to TMay at GE2017"
Can easily see SKS being as bad as TM when under scrutiny. Fortunately for him RS is no Jeremy Corbyn and wont gain ground as quick as Jezza did
Hung Parliament nailed on as by GE 2024 inflation will be less than 3% and the Tories will get credit for solving the cost of living crisis (undeserved) so will start with a small deficit of no less than 10% and will pull a few points back as Sunak outperforms SKS and the Right wing press do their thing
The Sun always back the winner. Nobody aged under 70 has ever voted in a general election in which they didn't. (Although Rupe was narky in 2010 when the Tories only won most seats and failed to win a majority.)
2017 Rupe nearly fooked it despite throwing everything at Jezza due to the threat to end the Billionaire gravy train
2024 will be Rupes last ever GE you would have thought
SKS has been bought by Rupe.
I predict SKS will get less votes for LAB in 2024 than the 12m Jezza got in 2017 but may well win most seats
I sincerely hope 2024 won't be Rupe's last election...
The problem bro is that you claim to be Labour yet hate the man who is likely to deliver the first Labour Government since 2010. Why?
1 I dont claim to be Labour I stopped being Labour in 2020
2 I have explained many times why I will never vote Labour under SKS
3. He has gambled on winning over Tories and can afford to lose Socialists
I think it will backfire (we only have 18 months max to see if you with your massive Lab Majority or me with a hung Parliament is right
Do you not think that Labour being socialist will NEVER win as per 2017 and 2019?
No Labour being Socialist and offering something for the Many not the few produced the biggest swing to Lab since WW2 in 2017. 2019 was about an oven ready deal vs a 2nd Referendum nothing to do with Socialism
2017 was actually about stopping a hard Brexit, as soon as it looked like Corbyn's socialism might win you got 2019.
The Tory vote actually only rose 1.2% from 2017 to 2019, the main swing from 2017 to 2019 was Labour to LD. The LD voteshare in 2019 was up 4.2% on 2017 and the Labour voteshare down 7.9%
What a load of rubbish. You are saying with a straight face 2017 was more of a Brexit election than 2019. Can only assume you didnt knock many doors in 2017 or 2019
Left and right seem to have one thing in common at the moment. They both believe the end of the world may be nigh.
"Humanity’s annihilation is far more likely than anyone dares contemplate The obsession with net zero has left elites bizarrely blind to the risks posed by AI, biowarfare and nukes Allister Heath" (£)
Not just 'net zero'... add other time consuming hobby horses like Brexit to the list.
It has been clear for many years that surveillance capitalism was advancing out of control and also that AI is an existential risk, poorly understood by policymakers and not taken seriously. Even now it seems to be naively underestimated, people try and find answers and settle on something like 'you can't stop human learning', or come up with false reassurances that 'the risk of existential collapse is low', or 'it is not very advanced'.
Ai is not a direct risk, as it stands at the moment or in the foreseeable future (unless there is another technological stepchange).
The direct risk comes from idiots believing AI's are actually intelligent, and trusting them more than their own common sense, because the computer must be correct.
"Yes, I should put this screwdriver into the mains electrical socket. The AI told me too..."
From what I can see I would say the problem is with the rate it is advancing and the lack of control and oversight, which will lead to rapid 'paradigm shifts' - as we saw with the rapid advance of chatbots and image generation technology.
I'll say something controversial here: it's not advancing fast. elizabots would fool some people thirty years ago. There is no massively new innovative breakthrough; just more computer power and massively larger data sets.
(runs for cover)
You're absolutely right. The recent wave of enthusiasm is a classic hype bubble. We have not crossed an inflection point and nor are we close to one.
The problem bro is that you claim to be Labour yet hate the man who is likely to deliver the first Labour Government since 2010. Why?
1 I dont claim to be Labour I stopped being Labour in 2020
2 I have explained many times why I will never vote Labour under SKS
3. He has gambled on winning over Tories and can afford to lose Socialists
I think it will backfire (we only have 18 months max to see if you with your massive Lab Majority or me with a hung Parliament is right
Do you not think that Labour being socialist will NEVER win as per 2017 and 2019?
He doesn't care - he's one of those socialists who will always be condemning everyone else as a traitor to the cause.
Which is why the left wing always end up with the Judean People's Front, the People's Front of Judea and the Front Judean people all calling everyone else traitors.
The problem bro is that you claim to be Labour yet hate the man who is likely to deliver the first Labour Government since 2010. Why?
1 I dont claim to be Labour I stopped being Labour in 2020
2 I have explained many times why I will never vote Labour under SKS
3. He has gambled on winning over Tories and can afford to lose Socialists
I think it will backfire (we only have 18 months max to see if you with your massive Lab Majority or me with a hung Parliament is right
Do you not think that Labour being socialist will NEVER win as per 2017 and 2019?
No Labour being Socialist and offering something for the Many not the few produced the biggest swing to Lab since WW2 in 2017. 2019 was about an oven ready deal vs a 2nd Referendum nothing to do with Socialism
The problem bro is that you claim to be Labour yet hate the man who is likely to deliver the first Labour Government since 2010. Why?
1 I dont claim to be Labour I stopped being Labour in 2020
2 I have explained many times why I will never vote Labour under SKS
3. He has gambled on winning over Tories and can afford to lose Socialists
I think it will backfire (we only have 18 months max to see if you with your massive Lab Majority or me with a hung Parliament is right
Do you not think that Labour being socialist will NEVER win as per 2017 and 2019?
No Labour being Socialist and offering something for the Many not the few produced the biggest swing to Lab since WW2 in 2017. 2019 was about an oven ready deal vs a 2nd Referendum nothing to do with Socialism
The problem bro is that you claim to be Labour yet hate the man who is likely to deliver the first Labour Government since 2010. Why?
1 I dont claim to be Labour I stopped being Labour in 2020
2 I have explained many times why I will never vote Labour under SKS
3. He has gambled on winning over Tories and can afford to lose Socialists
I think it will backfire (we only have 18 months max to see if you with your massive Lab Majority or me with a hung Parliament is right
Do you not think that Labour being socialist will NEVER win as per 2017 and 2019?
No Labour being Socialist and offering something for the Many not the few produced the biggest swing to Lab since WW2 in 2017. 2019 was about an oven ready deal vs a 2nd Referendum nothing to do with Socialism
The problem bro is that you claim to be Labour yet hate the man who is likely to deliver the first Labour Government since 2010. Why?
1 I dont claim to be Labour I stopped being Labour in 2020
2 I have explained many times why I will never vote Labour under SKS
3. He has gambled on winning over Tories and can afford to lose Socialists
I think it will backfire (we only have 18 months max to see if you with your massive Lab Majority or me with a hung Parliament is right
Do you not think that Labour being socialist will NEVER win as per 2017 and 2019?
No Labour being Socialist and offering something for the Many not the few produced the biggest swing to Lab since WW2 in 2017. 2019 was about an oven ready deal vs a 2nd Referendum nothing to do with Socialism
Since Labour won the 2017 election, do you concede that Gordon Brown then is a better leader than Corbyn since he won more seats?
Brown didnt achieve the biggest swing to Lab since WW2 he lost seats
The facts about 2017 are clear, the fact you cant admit it is your issue not mine Even Fraser Nelson, hardly a raving Corbynite, can do that mate
Your facts are cheapened when you are cherry-picking them so shamelessly. You keep banging the same "but the swing!!!ONE!" drum like it's the only thing that matters.
The problem bro is that you claim to be Labour yet hate the man who is likely to deliver the first Labour Government since 2010. Why?
1 I dont claim to be Labour I stopped being Labour in 2020
2 I have explained many times why I will never vote Labour under SKS
3. He has gambled on winning over Tories and can afford to lose Socialists
I think it will backfire (we only have 18 months max to see if you with your massive Lab Majority or me with a hung Parliament is right
Do you not think that Labour being socialist will NEVER win as per 2017 and 2019?
No Labour being Socialist and offering something for the Many not the few produced the biggest swing to Lab since WW2 in 2017. 2019 was about an oven ready deal vs a 2nd Referendum nothing to do with Socialism
2017 was actually about stopping a hard Brexit, as soon as it looked like Corbyn's socialism might win you got 2019.
The Tory vote actually only rose 1.2% from 2017 to 2019, the main swing from 2017 to 2019 was Labour to LD. The LD voteshare in 2019 was up 4.2% on 2017 and the Labour voteshare down 7.9%
What a load of rubbish. You are saying with a straight face 2017 was more of a Brexit election than 2019. Can only assume you didnt knock many doors in 2017 or 2019
And 2019 was a one issue election and it wasnt Socialism it was about the will of the people and the oven ready deal lie
2019 was more of a Brexit election for those who voted Tory to deliver Brexit and those who voted LD to stop a hard Brexit (many of the latter having lent their votes to Labour in 2017 to do the same). Plenty also voted Tory to stop Corbyn of course and plenty who lent their votes to Corbyn in 2017 thinking he had zero chance of becoming PM but wanted to get a Remainer hung parliament went LD in 2019 to try and still do the latter without risking a Corbyn premiership.
For the 32% who voted for Corbyn in 2019 as well as 2017 it was about opposing austerity and delivering socialism and redistribution from the rich and cancelling tuition fees etc yes. However 2019 showed their true numbers, not 2017
The problem bro is that you claim to be Labour yet hate the man who is likely to deliver the first Labour Government since 2010. Why?
1 I dont claim to be Labour I stopped being Labour in 2020
2 I have explained many times why I will never vote Labour under SKS
3. He has gambled on winning over Tories and can afford to lose Socialists
I think it will backfire (we only have 18 months max to see if you with your massive Lab Majority or me with a hung Parliament is right
Do you not think that Labour being socialist will NEVER win as per 2017 and 2019?
He doesn't care - he's one of those socialists who will always be condemning everyone else as a traitor to the cause.
Which is why the left wing always end up with the Judean People's Front, the People's Front of Judea and the Front Judean people all calling everyone else traitors.
I think you will find its Centrists within Labour who would rather have Tories win than a Socialist as per the report SKS has decided to pretend he never commissioned and ;hasn't implemented
Okay, this is a bit of a PR puff piece, but it's still interesting. Who'd have thought a 23-mile long tunnel with its own railway was the *least* innovative part of a project? Because it also includes Europe's deepest mine, and buried winding gear. Oh, and it's named after two geologists - will we see a @Richard_Tyndall mine?
Oh, and it's in Britain.
The only downside is that it's in the inferior county of Yorkshire...
The problem bro is that you claim to be Labour yet hate the man who is likely to deliver the first Labour Government since 2010. Why?
1 I dont claim to be Labour I stopped being Labour in 2020
2 I have explained many times why I will never vote Labour under SKS
3. He has gambled on winning over Tories and can afford to lose Socialists
I think it will backfire (we only have 18 months max to see if you with your massive Lab Majority or me with a hung Parliament is right
Do you not think that Labour being socialist will NEVER win as per 2017 and 2019?
No Labour being Socialist and offering something for the Many not the few produced the biggest swing to Lab since WW2 in 2017. 2019 was about an oven ready deal vs a 2nd Referendum nothing to do with Socialism
2017 was actually about stopping a hard Brexit, as soon as it looked like Corbyn's socialism might win you got 2019.
The Tory vote actually only rose 1.2% from 2017 to 2019, the main swing from 2017 to 2019 was Labour to LD. The LD voteshare in 2019 was up 4.2% on 2017 and the Labour voteshare down 7.9%
What a load of rubbish. You are saying with a straight face 2017 was more of a Brexit election than 2019. Can only assume you didnt knock many doors in 2017 or 2019
And 2019 was a one issue election and it wasnt Socialism it was about the will of the people and the oven ready deal lie
2019 was more of a Brexit election for those who voted Tory to deliver Brexit and those who voted LD to stop a hard Brexit (many of the latter having lent their votes to Labour in 2017 to do the same).
For the 32% who voted for Corbyn in 2019 as well as 2017 it was about opposing austerity and delivering socialism and redistribution from the rich and cancelling tuition fees etc yes. However 2019 showed their true numbers, not 2017
The problem bro is that you claim to be Labour yet hate the man who is likely to deliver the first Labour Government since 2010. Why?
1 I dont claim to be Labour I stopped being Labour in 2020
2 I have explained many times why I will never vote Labour under SKS
3. He has gambled on winning over Tories and can afford to lose Socialists
I think it will backfire (we only have 18 months max to see if you with your massive Lab Majority or me with a hung Parliament is right
Do you not think that Labour being socialist will NEVER win as per 2017 and 2019?
No Labour being Socialist and offering something for the Many not the few produced the biggest swing to Lab since WW2 in 2017. 2019 was about an oven ready deal vs a 2nd Referendum nothing to do with Socialism
The problem bro is that you claim to be Labour yet hate the man who is likely to deliver the first Labour Government since 2010. Why?
1 I dont claim to be Labour I stopped being Labour in 2020
2 I have explained many times why I will never vote Labour under SKS
3. He has gambled on winning over Tories and can afford to lose Socialists
I think it will backfire (we only have 18 months max to see if you with your massive Lab Majority or me with a hung Parliament is right
Do you not think that Labour being socialist will NEVER win as per 2017 and 2019?
No Labour being Socialist and offering something for the Many not the few produced the biggest swing to Lab since WW2 in 2017. 2019 was about an oven ready deal vs a 2nd Referendum nothing to do with Socialism
2017 was actually about stopping a hard Brexit, as soon as it looked like Corbyn's socialism might win you got 2019.
The Tory vote actually only rose 1.2% from 2017 to 2019, the main swing from 2017 to 2019 was Labour to LD. The LD voteshare in 2019 was up 4.2% on 2017 and the Labour voteshare down 7.9%
What a load of rubbish. You are saying with a straight face 2017 was more of a Brexit election than 2019. Can only assume you didnt knock many doors in 2017 or 2019
And 2019 was a one issue election and it wasnt Socialism it was about the will of the people and the oven ready deal lie
2019 was more of a Brexit election for those who voted Tory to deliver Brexit and those who voted LD to stop a hard Brexit (many of the latter having lent their votes to Labour in 2017 to do the same). Plenty also voted Tory to stop Corbyn of course and plenty who lent their votes to Corbyn in 2017 thinking he had zero chance of becoming PM but wanted to get a Remainer hung parliament went LD in 2019 to try and still do the latter without risking a Corbyn premiership.
For the 32% who voted for Corbyn in 2019 as well as 2017 it was about opposing austerity and delivering socialism and redistribution from the rich and cancelling tuition fees etc yes. However 2019 showed their true numbers, not 2017
It was about 29% of the country who voted Labour in both elections.
Off-topic but many here are interested in the implications of AI, so here goes...
Stack Exchange, by far and away the most influential "expert" question and answer site on the internet - and an instructive window on internet society including in its dynamic aspects - is in the process of getting AI-whacked.
Sadly it seems that most of those who until now have been working for the company for free, in some cases for many years, seem to fail to understand what's going on, believing it to come from stupidity.
AI - the LLM models at least - are parasitic on Stack Overflow. ChatGPT is trained on Stack Overflow and Reddit text. It has no knowledge of Linux filesystems, except that which it has extracted from those very experts.
If you take away the text for it to parse, then ChatGPT can't function. As from whence would it get its knowledge?
My experience of Stack is mainly on the non-coding side. Perhaps the quality of discourse among the world's programmers, who practically all use Stack's services, is about to drop a notch, or even fall off a cliff? It's happened in other areas of life and other sectors. I doubt a competitor will get much traction but we shall see.
Off-topic but many here are interested in the implications of AI, so here goes...
Stack Exchange, by far and away the most influential "expert" question and answer site on the internet - and an instructive window on internet society including in its dynamic aspects - is in the process of getting AI-whacked.
Sadly it seems that most of those who until now have been working for the company for free, in some cases for many years, seem to fail to understand what's going on, believing it to come from stupidity.
AI - the LLM models at least - are parasitic on Stack Overflow. ChatGPT is trained on Stack Overflow and Reddit text. It has no knowledge of Linux filesystems, except that which it has extracted from those very experts.
If you take away the text for it to parse, then ChatGPT can't function. As from whence would it get its knowledge?
My experience of Stack is mainly on the non-coding side. Perhaps the quality of discourse among the world's programmers, who practically all use Stack's services, is about to drop a notch, or even fall off a cliff? It's happened in other areas of life and other sectors. I doubt a competitor will get much traction but we shall see.
I don't know whether you intended that ironically, but SO is famous for snippy*, rude**, and pedantic*** responses to coding questions.
* stop thinking about PB ** I said stop it *** oh ok then
The problem bro is that you claim to be Labour yet hate the man who is likely to deliver the first Labour Government since 2010. Why?
1 I dont claim to be Labour I stopped being Labour in 2020
2 I have explained many times why I will never vote Labour under SKS
3. He has gambled on winning over Tories and can afford to lose Socialists
I think it will backfire (we only have 18 months max to see if you with your massive Lab Majority or me with a hung Parliament is right
Do you not think that Labour being socialist will NEVER win as per 2017 and 2019?
He doesn't care - he's one of those socialists who will always be condemning everyone else as a traitor to the cause.
Which is why the left wing always end up with the Judean People's Front, the People's Front of Judea and the Front Judean people all calling everyone else traitors.
I think you will find its Centrists within Labour who would rather have Tories win than a Socialist as per the report SKS has decided to pretend he never commissioned and ;hasn't implemented
Yep I want a left wing centrist party winning - that is Labour when the left wing idealistics are under control..
Does Pence have a secondary reason for launching a bid? Because he almost certainly won't get very far in terms of actually winning the nomination.
He won't if Trump wins it, if Trump collapses due to legal problems however he would likely endorse Pence, his former VP, to ensure DeSantis doesn't get the nomination given he now despises the latter even more than Pence
Are you sure Trump thinks like that? Is there a precedent for him going "I don't like HIM, and I don't like HIM, but I dislike the first guy more, so I'll endorse the second guy"?
Otherwise Trump runs as an Independent of course, handing re election to Biden on a plate
You're applying logic. He may say a pox on the lot of you, there's no difference between any of you, you all say I lost in 2020, this is the biggest crime in the country's history, you criminals are even intercepting my flight out of the country ...and our beautiful Second Amendment shows us ... argh!
Left and right seem to have one thing in common at the moment. They both believe the end of the world may be nigh.
"Humanity’s annihilation is far more likely than anyone dares contemplate The obsession with net zero has left elites bizarrely blind to the risks posed by AI, biowarfare and nukes Allister Heath" (£)
Not just 'net zero'... add other time consuming hobby horses like Brexit to the list.
It has been clear for many years that surveillance capitalism was advancing out of control and also that AI is an existential risk, poorly understood by policymakers and not taken seriously. Even now it seems to be naively underestimated, people try and find answers and settle on something like 'you can't stop human learning', or come up with false reassurances that 'the risk of existential collapse is low', or 'it is not very advanced'.
Ai is not a direct risk, as it stands at the moment or in the foreseeable future (unless there is another technological stepchange).
The direct risk comes from idiots believing AI's are actually intelligent, and trusting them more than their own common sense, because the computer must be correct.
"Yes, I should put this screwdriver into the mains electrical socket. The AI told me too..."
From what I can see I would say the problem is with the rate it is advancing and the lack of control and oversight, which will lead to rapid 'paradigm shifts' - as we saw with the rapid advance of chatbots and image generation technology.
I'll say something controversial here: it's not advancing fast. elizabots would fool some people thirty years ago. There is no massively new innovative breakthrough; just more computer power and massively larger data sets.
(runs for cover)
This is possible... but others who work in the field say very different things. What is concerning to me is the growth is not being overseen.
The problem is that if I didn't know you were the one and only CorrectHorse person then it'd take me and age to work it out. The good news is that an idea is valid no matter it's source! (An old idea obviously, but I've struggled wit h the accreditation)
The problem bro is that you claim to be Labour yet hate the man who is likely to deliver the first Labour Government since 2010. Why?
1 I dont claim to be Labour I stopped being Labour in 2020
2 I have explained many times why I will never vote Labour under SKS
3. He has gambled on winning over Tories and can afford to lose Socialists
I think it will backfire (we only have 18 months max to see if you with your massive Lab Majority or me with a hung Parliament is right
Do you not think that Labour being socialist will NEVER win as per 2017 and 2019?
No Labour being Socialist and offering something for the Many not the few produced the biggest swing to Lab since WW2 in 2017. 2019 was about an oven ready deal vs a 2nd Referendum nothing to do with Socialism
2017 was actually about stopping a hard Brexit, as soon as it looked like Corbyn's socialism might win you got 2019.
The Tory vote actually only rose 1.2% from 2017 to 2019, the main swing from 2017 to 2019 was Labour to LD. The LD voteshare in 2019 was up 4.2% on 2017 and the Labour voteshare down 7.9%
What a load of rubbish. You are saying with a straight face 2017 was more of a Brexit election than 2019. Can only assume you didnt knock many doors in 2017 or 2019
And 2019 was a one issue election and it wasnt Socialism it was about the will of the people and the oven ready deal lie
2019 was more of a Brexit election for those who voted Tory to deliver Brexit and those who voted LD to stop a hard Brexit (many of the latter having lent their votes to Labour in 2017 to do the same).
For the 32% who voted for Corbyn in 2019 as well as 2017 it was about opposing austerity and delivering socialism and redistribution from the rich and cancelling tuition fees etc yes. However 2019 showed their true numbers, not 2017
Whatever, at the end of the day the voters got 2 chances to elect a socialist PM, 2017 and 2019 and even in 2017 they turned down the opportunity with the Tories winning most seats in 2017 and a majority in 2019
There's so much to be said about this, from many angles. But I'll just say this: would the mocking soldiers have been so contemptuous if they'd required her services on the field? Or whether they'd have said the same to a male medic?
If someone's been shot they wouldn't have given a fuck about the medic's rack one way or the other.
Excessive pride in this sort of thing in the British forces often leads to savage mockery. The US forces have much more reverence which is weird because they get medals for just about anything.
Okay, this is a bit of a PR puff piece, but it's still interesting. Who'd have thought a 23-mile long tunnel with its own railway was the *least* innovative part of a project? Because it also includes Europe's deepest mine, and buried winding gear. Oh, and it's named after two geologists - will we see a @Richard_Tyndall mine?
Oh, and it's in Britain.
The only downside is that it's in the inferior county of Yorkshire...
Left and right seem to have one thing in common at the moment. They both believe the end of the world may be nigh.
"Humanity’s annihilation is far more likely than anyone dares contemplate The obsession with net zero has left elites bizarrely blind to the risks posed by AI, biowarfare and nukes Allister Heath" (£)
Not just 'net zero'... add other time consuming hobby horses like Brexit to the list.
It has been clear for many years that surveillance capitalism was advancing out of control and also that AI is an existential risk, poorly understood by policymakers and not taken seriously. Even now it seems to be naively underestimated, people try and find answers and settle on something like 'you can't stop human learning', or come up with false reassurances that 'the risk of existential collapse is low', or 'it is not very advanced'.
Ai is not a direct risk, as it stands at the moment or in the foreseeable future (unless there is another technological stepchange).
The direct risk comes from idiots believing AI's are actually intelligent, and trusting them more than their own common sense, because the computer must be correct.
"Yes, I should put this screwdriver into the mains electrical socket. The AI told me too..."
From what I can see I would say the problem is with the rate it is advancing and the lack of control and oversight, which will lead to rapid 'paradigm shifts' - as we saw with the rapid advance of chatbots and image generation technology.
I'll say something controversial here: it's not advancing fast. elizabots would fool some people thirty years ago. There is no massively new innovative breakthrough; just more computer power and massively larger data sets.
(runs for cover)
You're absolutely right. The recent wave of enthusiasm is a classic hype bubble. We have not crossed an inflection point and nor are we close to one.
I think it's about one year since @thealkyfromthespectator assured us that AI would replace all software development jobs two years hence.
Left and right seem to have one thing in common at the moment. They both believe the end of the world may be nigh.
"Humanity’s annihilation is far more likely than anyone dares contemplate The obsession with net zero has left elites bizarrely blind to the risks posed by AI, biowarfare and nukes Allister Heath" (£)
Another equally gloomy article from Dan Hannan on whether we are seeing the end of the Liberalism which grew from the late 18th and early 19th century to peak at the end of the 20th and early 21st century. Instead we are facing a battle between leftist Woke cancel culture and rightwing illiberal nationalist conservatism https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/06/blasphemy-codes-still-with-us-if-js-mill-were-alive-today/
Yes but Hannan is a twat and best ignored.
And we're back at the Robert Shrimsley piece in the FT (google "How the Thatcherites lost their Brexit dream and their party"). People like Hannan had a lovely theory of how Brexit should play out- and had Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden et al only done the right thing and joined us, maybe it would have worked.
But having aligned themselves with rightwing illiberal nationalists to get the fact of Brexit they wanted, they were then trapped with a form of Brexit they really didn't. Heart of stone etc etc.
Except that their strategic screwup has taken the rest of us down as well.
That Shrimsley piece is very good. Depressing, dispiriting, but good.
This bit:
‘The upshot is that the party’s centre of gravity and electoral calculations have shifted to meet a new target voter who is socially conservative and economically left-leaning.’
The late, great Bill Hicks did a riff on pornography: ‘Supreme Court says pornography is anything without artistic merit that causes sexual thoughts, that's their definition, essentially. No artistic merit, causes sexual thoughts. Hmm... Sounds like... every commercial on television, doesn't it? You know, when I see those two twins on that Doublemint commercial? I'm not thinking of gum. I am thinking of chewing, so maybe that's the connection they're trying to make.’
The point I’m ponderously edging towards is that it’s hard to define pornography, but you know it when you see it. Same with fascism.
GBNews. NatCons. Some of the Conservative Party’s more fiery participants. The increasingly authoritarian impulses of this government. Shrimsley’s point above. Looks uncomfortably like a breeding ground for lots of unsavoury things to me.
This stuff’s in my mind, I watched The Sorrow and the Pity yesterday - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrow_and_the_Pity - I’d never heard of it until the other day. Fascinating. The guy who turned down the offer of joining the French Resistance and instead volunteered for the SS’s Charlemagne Division and was packed off to the Eastern Front was particularly interesting to me. Eye-opening, the whole thing.
There's so much to be said about this, from many angles. But I'll just say this: would the mocking soldiers have been so contemptuous if they'd required her services on the field? Or whether they'd have said the same to a male medic?
I think soldiers generally mock others who have medals - its a banter thing ? I certainly used to do with colleagues who had won employee of the month!
Ah yes, that old excuse. "For the bants!"
If you pin your battle rattle to your civvies for a fucking garden party you 100% deserve the subsequent and inevitable piss taking.
Thatcher won partly because in broad socio-economic terms, self-employed and unemployed people were rising, and unionised workers were declining. The groups becoming more numerous today: pensioners, nursing and teaching staff, and young people with useless arts degrees. So it makes sense that there is no majority formable around low-tax politics.
Left and right seem to have one thing in common at the moment. They both believe the end of the world may be nigh.
"Humanity’s annihilation is far more likely than anyone dares contemplate The obsession with net zero has left elites bizarrely blind to the risks posed by AI, biowarfare and nukes Allister Heath" (£)
Another equally gloomy article from Dan Hannan on whether we are seeing the end of the Liberalism which grew from the late 18th and early 19th century to peak at the end of the 20th and early 21st century. Instead we are facing a battle between leftist Woke cancel culture and rightwing illiberal nationalist conservatism https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/06/blasphemy-codes-still-with-us-if-js-mill-were-alive-today/
Yes but Hannan is a twat and best ignored.
And we're back at the Robert Shrimsley piece in the FT (google "How the Thatcherites lost their Brexit dream and their party"). People like Hannan had a lovely theory of how Brexit should play out- and had Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden et al only done the right thing and joined us, maybe it would have worked.
But having aligned themselves with rightwing illiberal nationalists to get the fact of Brexit they wanted, they were then trapped with a form of Brexit they really didn't. Heart of stone etc etc.
Except that their strategic screwup has taken the rest of us down as well.
That Shrimsley piece is very good. Depressing, dispiriting, but good.
This bit:
‘The upshot is that the party’s centre of gravity and electoral calculations have shifted to meet a new target voter who is socially conservative and economically left-leaning.’
The late, great Bill Hicks did a riff on pornography: ‘Supreme Court says pornography is anything without artistic merit that causes sexual thoughts, that's their definition, essentially. No artistic merit, causes sexual thoughts. Hmm... Sounds like... every commercial on television, doesn't it? You know, when I see those two twins on that Doublemint commercial? I'm not thinking of gum. I am thinking of chewing, so maybe that's the connection they're trying to make.’
The point I’m ponderously edging towards is that it’s hard to define pornography, but you know it when you see it. Same with fascism.
GBNews. NatCons. Some of the Conservative Party’s more fiery participants. The increasingly authoritarian impulses of this government. Shrimsley’s point above. Looks uncomfortably like a breeding ground for lots of unsavoury things to me.
This stuff’s in my mind, I watched The Sorrow and the Pity yesterday - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrow_and_the_Pity - I’d never heard of it until the other day. Fascinating. The guy who turned down the offer of joining the French Resistance and instead volunteered for the SS’s Charlemagne Division and was packed off to the Eastern Front was particularly interesting to me. Eye-opening, the whole thing.
Most of the right in the western world are now economically more centrist than they were in the 80s but socially more nationalist and anti immigration. See Le Pen in France, Meloni in Italy, the PP in Spain allied with Vox, Dutton in Australia, Netanyahu in Israel and of course Trump in the US. In Eastern Europe, Brazil and India that is even more the case.
The post Brexit British right is no exception, less Thatcherite free market and laissez faire but backed withdrawing from the single market she signed up for as well as the EU. Trump was economically more centrist than Reagan but much more anti immigration. Le Pen too is economically left of Chirac and Balladur but also much more protectionist and anti immigration.
Partly a failure of capitalism which is increasingly leaving the middle not just the poor behind, the only true still committed pro free market social liberals tend to be the rich and high earners. The left and right overall are now largely economically centrist, the capitalist v socialist battle of the 80s is over. The real battle is cultural, woke v socially conservative, pro immigration and globalist v anti immigration and nationalist, pro EU v pro Brexit. Even Russia is now led by an anti woke nationalist not a communist v the liberal internationalist Zelensky in Ukraine. Xi too is more nationalist authoritarian than economic Maoist
Left and right seem to have one thing in common at the moment. They both believe the end of the world may be nigh.
"Humanity’s annihilation is far more likely than anyone dares contemplate The obsession with net zero has left elites bizarrely blind to the risks posed by AI, biowarfare and nukes Allister Heath" (£)
Another equally gloomy article from Dan Hannan on whether we are seeing the end of the Liberalism which grew from the late 18th and early 19th century to peak at the end of the 20th and early 21st century. Instead we are facing a battle between leftist Woke identity based cancel culture and rightwing illiberal nationalist conservatism https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/06/blasphemy-codes-still-with-us-if-js-mill-were-alive-today/
We'll be alright then, given you can set your watch by Dan being wrong. Always weird too that these "Woe is me we're drowning in wokery, why do young people hate us" pieces never have an element of self-reflection. People like Hannan are largely responsible for such divides, such as they exist, by allying with the populist nativist right and endlessly trashing the more liberal wing of the left and giving up on trying to win those people over to their arguments. In my experience, most people, even the young/in early middle age find 'woke identity cancel culture' stuff deeply tedious, but if forced to choose between it and the deranged guff that spews forth from the Telegraph opinion section, will be more sympathetic to the former.
Why, Trump, why? I've yet to understand why he not only held onto stuff (lots appear to) but sought to give the government the run around on it. Does he just not like giving stuff back?
Whatever, at the end of the day the voters got 2 chances to elect a socialist PM, 2017 and 2019 and even in 2017 they turned down the opportunity with the Tories winning most seats in 2017 and a majority in 2019
You're right, though I think that even non-socialists should feel a twinge of regret that we had an election where most people who supported a party did it because they *liked* its policies, ratther than just to keep the other lot out - and it wasn't quite enough. That's what leads to our negative politics - the probably accurate perception that the way to win is to promise as little as possible and rubbish the other side. People won't like you much, but there's a fair chance that they'll vote for you, because it plays to their cynical perception that everyone is rubbish and nothing works.
The problem bro is that you claim to be Labour yet hate the man who is likely to deliver the first Labour Government since 2010. Why?
1 I dont claim to be Labour I stopped being Labour in 2020
2 I have explained many times why I will never vote Labour under SKS
3. He has gambled on winning over Tories and can afford to lose Socialists
I think it will backfire (we only have 18 months max to see if you with your massive Lab Majority or me with a hung Parliament is right
Do you not think that Labour being socialist will NEVER win as per 2017 and 2019?
No Labour being Socialist and offering something for the Many not the few produced the biggest swing to Lab since WW2 in 2017. 2019 was about an oven ready deal vs a 2nd Referendum nothing to do with Socialism
You do realise that Corbyn lost the 2017 GE, being 63 seats short of a majority?
He doesn't and never will, nor will Corbyn himself.
What will be interesting about the next election is there's a good chance of an even bigger swing to Labour, yet I bet there will be a conversion away from the view that matters among Corbynites, if Keir falls short of a majority.
There might be a similar conversion away from arguing a big swing does not matter, if the Tories do end up clinging on to power, but since Labour have a really good chance of at least being largest party there's less change of that.
Maybe but it has 38 times the land area of the UK so has rather more room for them all
It seems slightly cheating to have places like Victoria Island which is slightly larger than GB but has a population of 2k.
Maybe Vancouver Island and Victoria as the capital !!!
32,100 km2
Yeah. All comparisons with Canada are moot. You could build forever in Saskatchewan (apart from the lakes). There's nowhere left to build in BC. But everyone wants to live in BC.
Left and right seem to have one thing in common at the moment. They both believe the end of the world may be nigh.
"Humanity’s annihilation is far more likely than anyone dares contemplate The obsession with net zero has left elites bizarrely blind to the risks posed by AI, biowarfare and nukes Allister Heath" (£)
Another equally gloomy article from Dan Hannan on whether we are seeing the end of the Liberalism which grew from the late 18th and early 19th century to peak at the end of the 20th and early 21st century. Instead we are facing a battle between leftist Woke cancel culture and rightwing illiberal nationalist conservatism https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/06/blasphemy-codes-still-with-us-if-js-mill-were-alive-today/
Yes but Hannan is a twat and best ignored.
And we're back at the Robert Shrimsley piece in the FT (google "How the Thatcherites lost their Brexit dream and their party"). People like Hannan had a lovely theory of how Brexit should play out- and had Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden et al only done the right thing and joined us, maybe it would have worked.
But having aligned themselves with rightwing illiberal nationalists to get the fact of Brexit they wanted, they were then trapped with a form of Brexit they really didn't. Heart of stone etc etc.
Except that their strategic screwup has taken the rest of us down as well.
That Shrimsley piece is very good. Depressing, dispiriting, but good.
This bit:
‘The upshot is that the party’s centre of gravity and electoral calculations have shifted to meet a new target voter who is socially conservative and economically left-leaning.’
The late, great Bill Hicks did a riff on pornography: ‘Supreme Court says pornography is anything without artistic merit that causes sexual thoughts, that's their definition, essentially. No artistic merit, causes sexual thoughts. Hmm... Sounds like... every commercial on television, doesn't it? You know, when I see those two twins on that Doublemint commercial? I'm not thinking of gum. I am thinking of chewing, so maybe that's the connection they're trying to make.’
The point I’m ponderously edging towards is that it’s hard to define pornography, but you know it when you see it. Same with fascism.
GBNews. NatCons. Some of the Conservative Party’s more fiery participants. The increasingly authoritarian impulses of this government. Shrimsley’s point above. Looks uncomfortably like a breeding ground for lots of unsavoury things to me.
This stuff’s in my mind, I watched The Sorrow and the Pity yesterday - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrow_and_the_Pity - I’d never heard of it until the other day. Fascinating. The guy who turned down the offer of joining the French Resistance and instead volunteered for the SS’s Charlemagne Division and was packed off to the Eastern Front was particularly interesting to me. Eye-opening, the whole thing.
Most of the right in the western world are now economically more centrist than they were in the 80s but socially more nationalist and anti immigration. See Le Pen in France, Meloni in Italy, the PP in Spain allied with Vox, Dutton in Australia, Netanyahu in Israel and of course Trump in the US. In Eastern Europe, Brazil and India that is even more the case.
The post Brexit British right is no exception, less Thatcherite free market and laissez faire but backed withdrawing from the single market she signed up for as well as the EU. Trump was economically more centrist than Reagan but much more anti immigration. Le Pen too is economically left of Chirac and Balladur but also much more protectionist and anti immigration.
Partly a failure of capitalism which is increasingly leaving the middle not just the poor behind, the only true still committed pro free market social liberals tend to be the rich and high earners. The left and right overall are now largely economically centrist, the capitalist v socialist battle of the 80s is over. The real battle is cultural, woke v socially conservative, pro immigration and globalist v anti immigration and nationalist, pro EU v pro Brexit. Even Russia is now led by an anti woke nationalist not a communist v the liberal internationalist Zelensky in Ukraine. Xi too is more nationalist authoritarian than economic Maoist
Worrying, isn’t it? That Wiki page discussing the definition of fascism mentions some guy who lumps fascism and Communism together as simply different kinds of populism. That seems to make some sense. The -isms are coalescing into populist reaction, the old guard terrified by the mores of a globalised ‘woke’, fey, unmasculine, cuck youth.
If I worked for Trump I'd walk around with a recording device at all times, knowing he will probably screw me over at some point, or profess not to even know who I am really when he is ready to ditch me.
Of course, doing so probably violates many laws in many states, but nevermind.
Left and right seem to have one thing in common at the moment. They both believe the end of the world may be nigh.
"Humanity’s annihilation is far more likely than anyone dares contemplate The obsession with net zero has left elites bizarrely blind to the risks posed by AI, biowarfare and nukes Allister Heath" (£)
Not just 'net zero'... add other time consuming hobby horses like Brexit to the list.
It has been clear for many years that surveillance capitalism was advancing out of control and also that AI is an existential risk, poorly understood by policymakers and not taken seriously. Even now it seems to be naively underestimated, people try and find answers and settle on something like 'you can't stop human learning', or come up with false reassurances that 'the risk of existential collapse is low', or 'it is not very advanced'.
Ai is not a direct risk, as it stands at the moment or in the foreseeable future (unless there is another technological stepchange).
The direct risk comes from idiots believing AI's are actually intelligent, and trusting them more than their own common sense, because the computer must be correct.
"Yes, I should put this screwdriver into the mains electrical socket. The AI told me too..."
From what I can see I would say the problem is with the rate it is advancing and the lack of control and oversight, which will lead to rapid 'paradigm shifts' - as we saw with the rapid advance of chatbots and image generation technology.
I'll say something controversial here: it's not advancing fast. elizabots would fool some people thirty years ago. There is no massively new innovative breakthrough; just more computer power and massively larger data sets.
(runs for cover)
You're absolutely right. The recent wave of enthusiasm is a classic hype bubble. We have not crossed an inflection point and nor are we close to one.
I think it's about one year since @thealkyfromthespectator assured us that AI would replace all software development jobs two years hence.
Thatcher won partly because in broad socio-economic terms, self-employed and unemployed people were rising, and unionised workers were declining. The groups becoming more numerous today: pensioners, nursing and teaching staff, and young people with useless arts degrees. So it makes sense that there is no majority formable around low-tax politics.
Where does teaching staff come from among that lot? I wish it were true, and it's very needed, but it isn't my experience.
For once I agree with HYUFD. The realignment on the political right is occurring all over the world and has little do do with Brexit, which if anything was a consequence not a cause.
Too many people are engaging in a dangerous fantasy that if it wasn't for Brexit we could have the 'old right' of Cameron, Osborne and Rory Stewart back again.
For once I agree with HYUFD. The realignment on the political right is occurring all over the world and has little do do with Brexit, which if anything was a consequence not a cause.
Too many people are engaging in a dangerous fantasy that if it wasn't for Brexit we could have the 'old right' of Cameron, Osborne and Rory Stewart back again.
Sadly they, and their ilk, are very much the sensible Centre these days. There are a number of posters on here who I have gone from regarding as right wing to middle of the road in a few years. I don't think they've changed their views at all.
"National says it is another example of a Government cost-of-living policy funds heading offshore, citing the example of French backpackers getting last year’s cost of living payment."
For once I agree with HYUFD. The realignment on the political right is occurring all over the world and has little do do with Brexit, which if anything was a consequence not a cause.
Too many people are engaging in a dangerous fantasy that if it wasn't for Brexit we could have the 'old right' of Cameron, Osborne and Rory Stewart back again.
Sadly they, and their ilk, are very much the sensible Centre these days. There are a number of posters on here who I have gone from regarding as right wing to middle of the road in a few years. I don't think they've changed their views at all.
Yes but in parallel there are some intelligent posters here from the right who are no longer Tory-supporting, reflecting the equivalent shift in political support away from the Tories amongst a good slice of the educated middle classes.
Maybe but it has 38 times the land area of the UK so has rather more room for them all
It seems slightly cheating to have places like Victoria Island which is slightly larger than GB but has a population of 2k.
Maybe Vancouver Island and Victoria as the capital !!!
32,100 km2
Yeah. All comparisons with Canada are moot. You could build forever in Saskatchewan (apart from the lakes). There's nowhere left to build in BC. But everyone wants to live in BC.
If I worked for Trump I'd walk around with a recording device at all times, knowing he will probably screw me over at some point, or profess not to even know who I am really when he is ready to ditch me.
Of course, doing so probably violates many laws in many states, but nevermind.
The tape I'd like to hear is Trump and Putin at Helsinki in 2018 in closed session without advisors:
Off topic - I've just been watching a programme about the Isle of Man TT on ITV4. I don't know much about motorsport - but this was fantastic. And then, approaching the break, a mention was made of the people who had died. Six people this year, including a father-and-son in the motorbike and sidecar racing. And apparently over 200 riders have died since this started 100 years ago, along with an unspecified number of spectators and marshalls; and since 1937, there has only been one year in which races were held and no-one died. And this was alluded to by some of the riders (and indeed spectators), who were clear that they knew the risks, and were chasing a dream. This all seemed quite surprising in the 21st century. And then I remembered this was the Isle of Man. The New Hampshire of the British Isles. Live Free or Die. My own instinctive reaction was that happiness that something so dangerous is still allowed to happen. Make Britain Manx! Not least because the Isle of Man looks like an idealised version of the North, in miniature - moorland and mountain and seaside villages. Just lovely. I had an opportunity to go and work in the IoM a couple of decades back, and I often wonder how life would have turned out - but while it looks agreeable enough to me now, there's possibly less to offer the me who was in my late 20s.
Off topic - I've just been watching a programme about the Isle of Man TT on ITV4. I don't know much about motorsport - but this was fantastic. And then, approaching the break, a mention was made of the people who had died. Six people this year, including a father-and-son in the motorbike and sidecar racing. And apparently over 200 riders have died since this started 100 years ago, along with an unspecified number of spectators and marshalls; and since 1937, there has only been one year in which races were held and no-one died. And this was alluded to by some of the riders (and indeed spectators), who were clear that they knew the risks, and were chasing a dream. This all seemed quite surprising in the 21st century. And then I remembered this was the Isle of Man. The New Hampshire of the British Isles. Live Free or Die. My own instinctive reaction was that happiness that something so dangerous is still allowed to happen. Make Britain Manx! Not least because the Isle of Man looks like an idealised version of the North, in miniature - moorland and mountain and seaside villages. Just lovely. I had an opportunity to go and work in the IoM a couple of decades back, and I often wonder how life would have turned out - but while it looks agreeable enough to me now, there's possibly less to offer the me who was in my late 20s.
Pretty sure that's a repeat of a 2022 programme. This year hasn't started, and the f/s sidecar deaths were the Stocktons last June.
Off topic - I've just been watching a programme about the Isle of Man TT on ITV4. I don't know much about motorsport - but this was fantastic. And then, approaching the break, a mention was made of the people who had died. Six people this year, including a father-and-son in the motorbike and sidecar racing. And apparently over 200 riders have died since this started 100 years ago, along with an unspecified number of spectators and marshalls; and since 1937, there has only been one year in which races were held and no-one died. And this was alluded to by some of the riders (and indeed spectators), who were clear that they knew the risks, and were chasing a dream. This all seemed quite surprising in the 21st century. And then I remembered this was the Isle of Man. The New Hampshire of the British Isles. Live Free or Die. My own instinctive reaction was that happiness that something so dangerous is still allowed to happen. Make Britain Manx! Not least because the Isle of Man looks like an idealised version of the North, in miniature - moorland and mountain and seaside villages. Just lovely. I had an opportunity to go and work in the IoM a couple of decades back, and I often wonder how life would have turned out - but while it looks agreeable enough to me now, there's possibly less to offer the me who was in my late 20s.
Nah, the petrolheads can fuck off. Not because it's dangerous; they can mangle themselves if they want. But because it's noise torture. People with loud cars or bikes can drink glue.
Left and right seem to have one thing in common at the moment. They both believe the end of the world may be nigh.
"Humanity’s annihilation is far more likely than anyone dares contemplate The obsession with net zero has left elites bizarrely blind to the risks posed by AI, biowarfare and nukes Allister Heath" (£)
Another equally gloomy article from Dan Hannan on whether we are seeing the end of the Liberalism which grew from the late 18th and early 19th century to peak at the end of the 20th and early 21st century. Instead we are facing a battle between leftist Woke cancel culture and rightwing illiberal nationalist conservatism https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/06/blasphemy-codes-still-with-us-if-js-mill-were-alive-today/
Yes but Hannan is a twat and best ignored.
And we're back at the Robert Shrimsley piece in the FT (google "How the Thatcherites lost their Brexit dream and their party"). People like Hannan had a lovely theory of how Brexit should play out- and had Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden et al only done the right thing and joined us, maybe it would have worked.
But having aligned themselves with rightwing illiberal nationalists to get the fact of Brexit they wanted, they were then trapped with a form of Brexit they really didn't. Heart of stone etc etc.
Except that their strategic screwup has taken the rest of us down as well.
That Shrimsley piece is very good. Depressing, dispiriting, but good.
This bit:
‘The upshot is that the party’s centre of gravity and electoral calculations have shifted to meet a new target voter who is socially conservative and economically left-leaning.’
The late, great Bill Hicks did a riff on pornography: ‘Supreme Court says pornography is anything without artistic merit that causes sexual thoughts, that's their definition, essentially. No artistic merit, causes sexual thoughts. Hmm... Sounds like... every commercial on television, doesn't it? You know, when I see those two twins on that Doublemint commercial? I'm not thinking of gum. I am thinking of chewing, so maybe that's the connection they're trying to make.’
The point I’m ponderously edging towards is that it’s hard to define pornography, but you know it when you see it. Same with fascism.
GBNews. NatCons. Some of the Conservative Party’s more fiery participants. The increasingly authoritarian impulses of this government. Shrimsley’s point above. Looks uncomfortably like a breeding ground for lots of unsavoury things to me.
This stuff’s in my mind, I watched The Sorrow and the Pity yesterday - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrow_and_the_Pity - I’d never heard of it until the other day. Fascinating. The guy who turned down the offer of joining the French Resistance and instead volunteered for the SS’s Charlemagne Division and was packed off to the Eastern Front was particularly interesting to me. Eye-opening, the whole thing.
Most of the right in the western world are now economically more centrist than they were in the 80s but socially more nationalist and anti immigration. See Le Pen in France, Meloni in Italy, the PP in Spain allied with Vox, Dutton in Australia, Netanyahu in Israel and of course Trump in the US. In Eastern Europe, Brazil and India that is even more the case.
The post Brexit British right is no exception, less Thatcherite free market and laissez faire but backed withdrawing from the single market she signed up for as well as the EU. Trump was economically more centrist than Reagan but much more anti immigration. Le Pen too is economically left of Chirac and Balladur but also much more protectionist and anti immigration.
Partly a failure of capitalism which is increasingly leaving the middle not just the poor behind, the only true still committed pro free market social liberals tend to be the rich and high earners. The left and right overall are now largely economically centrist, the capitalist v socialist battle of the 80s is over. The real battle is cultural, woke v socially conservative, pro immigration and globalist v anti immigration and nationalist, pro EU v pro Brexit. Even Russia is now led by an anti woke nationalist not a communist v the liberal internationalist Zelensky in Ukraine. Xi too is more nationalist authoritarian than economic Maoist
Truss being the exception to economic centrism in government here lately and we saw how long that lasted.
Left and right seem to have one thing in common at the moment. They both believe the end of the world may be nigh.
"Humanity’s annihilation is far more likely than anyone dares contemplate The obsession with net zero has left elites bizarrely blind to the risks posed by AI, biowarfare and nukes Allister Heath" (£)
Another equally gloomy article from Dan Hannan on whether we are seeing the end of the Liberalism which grew from the late 18th and early 19th century to peak at the end of the 20th and early 21st century. Instead we are facing a battle between leftist Woke cancel culture and rightwing illiberal nationalist conservatism https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/06/blasphemy-codes-still-with-us-if-js-mill-were-alive-today/
Yes but Hannan is a twat and best ignored.
And we're back at the Robert Shrimsley piece in the FT (google "How the Thatcherites lost their Brexit dream and their party"). People like Hannan had a lovely theory of how Brexit should play out- and had Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden et al only done the right thing and joined us, maybe it would have worked.
But having aligned themselves with rightwing illiberal nationalists to get the fact of Brexit they wanted, they were then trapped with a form of Brexit they really didn't. Heart of stone etc etc.
Except that their strategic screwup has taken the rest of us down as well.
That Shrimsley piece is very good. Depressing, dispiriting, but good.
This bit:
‘The upshot is that the party’s centre of gravity and electoral calculations have shifted to meet a new target voter who is socially conservative and economically left-leaning.’
The late, great Bill Hicks did a riff on pornography: ‘Supreme Court says pornography is anything without artistic merit that causes sexual thoughts, that's their definition, essentially. No artistic merit, causes sexual thoughts. Hmm... Sounds like... every commercial on television, doesn't it? You know, when I see those two twins on that Doublemint commercial? I'm not thinking of gum. I am thinking of chewing, so maybe that's the connection they're trying to make.’
The point I’m ponderously edging towards is that it’s hard to define pornography, but you know it when you see it. Same with fascism.
GBNews. NatCons. Some of the Conservative Party’s more fiery participants. The increasingly authoritarian impulses of this government. Shrimsley’s point above. Looks uncomfortably like a breeding ground for lots of unsavoury things to me.
This stuff’s in my mind, I watched The Sorrow and the Pity yesterday - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrow_and_the_Pity - I’d never heard of it until the other day. Fascinating. The guy who turned down the offer of joining the French Resistance and instead volunteered for the SS’s Charlemagne Division and was packed off to the Eastern Front was particularly interesting to me. Eye-opening, the whole thing.
Most of the right in the western world are now economically more centrist than they were in the 80s but socially more nationalist and anti immigration. See Le Pen in France, Meloni in Italy, the PP in Spain allied with Vox, Dutton in Australia, Netanyahu in Israel and of course Trump in the US. In Eastern Europe, Brazil and India that is even more the case.
The post Brexit British right is no exception, less Thatcherite free market and laissez faire but backed withdrawing from the single market she signed up for as well as the EU. Trump was economically more centrist than Reagan but much more anti immigration. Le Pen too is economically left of Chirac and Balladur but also much more protectionist and anti immigration.
Partly a failure of capitalism which is increasingly leaving the middle not just the poor behind, the only true still committed pro free market social liberals tend to be the rich and high earners. The left and right overall are now largely economically centrist, the capitalist v socialist battle of the 80s is over. The real battle is cultural, woke v socially conservative, pro immigration and globalist v anti immigration and nationalist, pro EU v pro Brexit. Even Russia is now led by an anti woke nationalist not a communist v the liberal internationalist Zelensky in Ukraine. Xi too is more nationalist authoritarian than economic Maoist
Truss being the exception to economic centrism in government here lately and we saw how long that lasted.
Yes, Truss was economically very Thatcherite and free market, that proved a disaster in terms of what most British voters now want.
She was also more socially libertarian than most voters are
Off topic - I've just been watching a programme about the Isle of Man TT on ITV4. I don't know much about motorsport - but this was fantastic. And then, approaching the break, a mention was made of the people who had died. Six people this year, including a father-and-son in the motorbike and sidecar racing. And apparently over 200 riders have died since this started 100 years ago, along with an unspecified number of spectators and marshalls; and since 1937, there has only been one year in which races were held and no-one died. And this was alluded to by some of the riders (and indeed spectators), who were clear that they knew the risks, and were chasing a dream. This all seemed quite surprising in the 21st century. And then I remembered this was the Isle of Man. The New Hampshire of the British Isles. Live Free or Die. My own instinctive reaction was that happiness that something so dangerous is still allowed to happen. Make Britain Manx! Not least because the Isle of Man looks like an idealised version of the North, in miniature - moorland and mountain and seaside villages. Just lovely. I had an opportunity to go and work in the IoM a couple of decades back, and I often wonder how life would have turned out - but while it looks agreeable enough to me now, there's possibly less to offer the me who was in my late 20s.
The unexamined aspect of the TT is that the riders are largely has-beens and never-gonna-bes who are risking their lives to make a mortgage payment because they aren't fast enough to make in regular series like BSB, BSS, etc.
Left and right seem to have one thing in common at the moment. They both believe the end of the world may be nigh.
"Humanity’s annihilation is far more likely than anyone dares contemplate The obsession with net zero has left elites bizarrely blind to the risks posed by AI, biowarfare and nukes Allister Heath" (£)
Another equally gloomy article from Dan Hannan on whether we are seeing the end of the Liberalism which grew from the late 18th and early 19th century to peak at the end of the 20th and early 21st century. Instead we are facing a battle between leftist Woke cancel culture and rightwing illiberal nationalist conservatism https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/06/blasphemy-codes-still-with-us-if-js-mill-were-alive-today/
Yes but Hannan is a twat and best ignored.
And we're back at the Robert Shrimsley piece in the FT (google "How the Thatcherites lost their Brexit dream and their party"). People like Hannan had a lovely theory of how Brexit should play out- and had Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden et al only done the right thing and joined us, maybe it would have worked.
But having aligned themselves with rightwing illiberal nationalists to get the fact of Brexit they wanted, they were then trapped with a form of Brexit they really didn't. Heart of stone etc etc.
Except that their strategic screwup has taken the rest of us down as well.
That Shrimsley piece is very good. Depressing, dispiriting, but good.
This bit:
‘The upshot is that the party’s centre of gravity and electoral calculations have shifted to meet a new target voter who is socially conservative and economically left-leaning.’
The late, great Bill Hicks did a riff on pornography: ‘Supreme Court says pornography is anything without artistic merit that causes sexual thoughts, that's their definition, essentially. No artistic merit, causes sexual thoughts. Hmm... Sounds like... every commercial on television, doesn't it? You know, when I see those two twins on that Doublemint commercial? I'm not thinking of gum. I am thinking of chewing, so maybe that's the connection they're trying to make.’
The point I’m ponderously edging towards is that it’s hard to define pornography, but you know it when you see it. Same with fascism.
GBNews. NatCons. Some of the Conservative Party’s more fiery participants. The increasingly authoritarian impulses of this government. Shrimsley’s point above. Looks uncomfortably like a breeding ground for lots of unsavoury things to me.
This stuff’s in my mind, I watched The Sorrow and the Pity yesterday - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrow_and_the_Pity - I’d never heard of it until the other day. Fascinating. The guy who turned down the offer of joining the French Resistance and instead volunteered for the SS’s Charlemagne Division and was packed off to the Eastern Front was particularly interesting to me. Eye-opening, the whole thing.
Most of the right in the western world are now economically more centrist than they were in the 80s but socially more nationalist and anti immigration. See Le Pen in France, Meloni in Italy, the PP in Spain allied with Vox, Dutton in Australia, Netanyahu in Israel and of course Trump in the US. In Eastern Europe, Brazil and India that is even more the case.
The post Brexit British right is no exception, less Thatcherite free market and laissez faire but backed withdrawing from the single market she signed up for as well as the EU. Trump was economically more centrist than Reagan but much more anti immigration. Le Pen too is economically left of Chirac and Balladur but also much more protectionist and anti immigration.
Partly a failure of capitalism which is increasingly leaving the middle not just the poor behind, the only true still committed pro free market social liberals tend to be the rich and high earners. The left and right overall are now largely economically centrist, the capitalist v socialist battle of the 80s is over. The real battle is cultural, woke v socially conservative, pro immigration and globalist v anti immigration and nationalist, pro EU v pro Brexit. Even Russia is now led by an anti woke nationalist not a communist v the liberal internationalist Zelensky in Ukraine. Xi too is more nationalist authoritarian than economic Maoist
Truss being the exception to economic centrism in government here lately and we saw how long that lasted.
Yes, Truss was economically very Thatcherite and free market, that proved a disaster in terms of what most British voters now want.
She was also more socially libertarian than most voters are
Plus she looks and sounds like Burns in The Springfield Files
Kudos to JohnLoony on the Vote UK forum (who also used to regularly post on PB) who seems to have noticed a counting error at the Northern Ireland local elections. He emailed the returning officer in question and they replied to acknowledge that he was right and they'd made a mistake with the counting process.
Left and right seem to have one thing in common at the moment. They both believe the end of the world may be nigh.
"Humanity’s annihilation is far more likely than anyone dares contemplate The obsession with net zero has left elites bizarrely blind to the risks posed by AI, biowarfare and nukes Allister Heath" (£)
Another equally gloomy article from Dan Hannan on whether we are seeing the end of the Liberalism which grew from the late 18th and early 19th century to peak at the end of the 20th and early 21st century. Instead we are facing a battle between leftist Woke cancel culture and rightwing illiberal nationalist conservatism https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/06/blasphemy-codes-still-with-us-if-js-mill-were-alive-today/
Yes but Hannan is a twat and best ignored.
And we're back at the Robert Shrimsley piece in the FT (google "How the Thatcherites lost their Brexit dream and their party"). People like Hannan had a lovely theory of how Brexit should play out- and had Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden et al only done the right thing and joined us, maybe it would have worked.
But having aligned themselves with rightwing illiberal nationalists to get the fact of Brexit they wanted, they were then trapped with a form of Brexit they really didn't. Heart of stone etc etc.
Except that their strategic screwup has taken the rest of us down as well.
That Shrimsley piece is very good. Depressing, dispiriting, but good.
This bit:
‘The upshot is that the party’s centre of gravity and electoral calculations have shifted to meet a new target voter who is socially conservative and economically left-leaning.’
The late, great Bill Hicks did a riff on pornography: ‘Supreme Court says pornography is anything without artistic merit that causes sexual thoughts, that's their definition, essentially. No artistic merit, causes sexual thoughts. Hmm... Sounds like... every commercial on television, doesn't it? You know, when I see those two twins on that Doublemint commercial? I'm not thinking of gum. I am thinking of chewing, so maybe that's the connection they're trying to make.’
The point I’m ponderously edging towards is that it’s hard to define pornography, but you know it when you see it. Same with fascism.
GBNews. NatCons. Some of the Conservative Party’s more fiery participants. The increasingly authoritarian impulses of this government. Shrimsley’s point above. Looks uncomfortably like a breeding ground for lots of unsavoury things to me.
This stuff’s in my mind, I watched The Sorrow and the Pity yesterday - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrow_and_the_Pity - I’d never heard of it until the other day. Fascinating. The guy who turned down the offer of joining the French Resistance and instead volunteered for the SS’s Charlemagne Division and was packed off to the Eastern Front was particularly interesting to me. Eye-opening, the whole thing.
Most of the right in the western world are now economically more centrist than they were in the 80s but socially more nationalist and anti immigration. See Le Pen in France, Meloni in Italy, the PP in Spain allied with Vox, Dutton in Australia, Netanyahu in Israel and of course Trump in the US. In Eastern Europe, Brazil and India that is even more the case.
The post Brexit British right is no exception, less Thatcherite free market and laissez faire but backed withdrawing from the single market she signed up for as well as the EU. Trump was economically more centrist than Reagan but much more anti immigration. Le Pen too is economically left of Chirac and Balladur but also much more protectionist and anti immigration.
Partly a failure of capitalism which is increasingly leaving the middle not just the poor behind, the only true still committed pro free market social liberals tend to be the rich and high earners. The left and right overall are now largely economically centrist, the capitalist v socialist battle of the 80s is over. The real battle is cultural, woke v socially conservative, pro immigration and globalist v anti immigration and nationalist, pro EU v pro Brexit. Even Russia is now led by an anti woke nationalist not a communist v the liberal internationalist Zelensky in Ukraine. Xi too is more nationalist authoritarian than economic Maoist
Truss being the exception to economic centrism in government here lately and we saw how long that lasted.
Yes, Truss was economically very Thatcherite and free market, that proved a disaster in terms of what most British voters now want.
She was also more socially libertarian than most voters are
Plus she looks and sounds like Burns in The Springfield Files
That’s exactly how I always imagined you looked like - reacting to one of my posts.
Britain's top civil servant helped end Liz Truss's premiership, it is claimed.
In an example of the power wielded by the Whitehall 'Blob', Cabinet Secretary Simon Case is said to have written a memo that helped seal her fate as the shortest-serving prime minister in history.
Britain's top civil servant helped end Liz Truss's premiership, it is claimed.
In an example of the power wielded by the Whitehall 'Blob', Cabinet Secretary Simon Case is said to have written a memo that helped seal her fate as the shortest-serving prime minister in history.
Off topic - I've just been watching a programme about the Isle of Man TT on ITV4. I don't know much about motorsport - but this was fantastic. And then, approaching the break, a mention was made of the people who had died. Six people this year, including a father-and-son in the motorbike and sidecar racing. And apparently over 200 riders have died since this started 100 years ago, along with an unspecified number of spectators and marshalls; and since 1937, there has only been one year in which races were held and no-one died. And this was alluded to by some of the riders (and indeed spectators), who were clear that they knew the risks, and were chasing a dream. This all seemed quite surprising in the 21st century. And then I remembered this was the Isle of Man. The New Hampshire of the British Isles. Live Free or Die. My own instinctive reaction was that happiness that something so dangerous is still allowed to happen. Make Britain Manx! Not least because the Isle of Man looks like an idealised version of the North, in miniature - moorland and mountain and seaside villages. Just lovely. I had an opportunity to go and work in the IoM a couple of decades back, and I often wonder how life would have turned out - but while it looks agreeable enough to me now, there's possibly less to offer the me who was in my late 20s.
The unexamined aspect of the TT is that the riders are largely has-beens and never-gonna-bes who are risking their lives to make a mortgage payment because they aren't fast enough to make in regular series like BSB, BSS, etc.
Doesn't that give it a bit of gritty nobility though? A Raymond Carver short story on two wheels.
Sarah Montague gave a very robust defence of Houchen on WATO. She demanded Andy Mc Donald repeat the accusations he made against Houchen under parliamentary privilege. He refused, and Sarah took the win on behalf of Ben.
I have to say selling millions of pounds worth of (even brownfield) real estate for less than a tenner raised my eyebrow.
I don't know anything about this situation. However in my experience it is common for these brownfield sites to have a zero value, for instance where the clean up costs exceed the land value even with planning permission in place.
I believe the same site had been bought with public funds for a significant (£millions) fee a year or two earlier.
I don’t know the details of this specific situation so not commenting on that.
More generally if you have land that the owner won’t pay to clean up but the government desires to bring back into productive use then the government needs to subsidise the clean up. That is effectively what has been done here.
The government has unlocked land from the previous owner, cleaned it up and transferred to a new owner. They may not have maximised value but that may not have been the purpose of the transaction.
Left and right seem to have one thing in common at the moment. They both believe the end of the world may be nigh.
"Humanity’s annihilation is far more likely than anyone dares contemplate The obsession with net zero has left elites bizarrely blind to the risks posed by AI, biowarfare and nukes Allister Heath" (£)
Not just 'net zero'... add other time consuming hobby horses like Brexit to the list.
It has been clear for many years that surveillance capitalism was advancing out of control and also that AI is an existential risk, poorly understood by policymakers and not taken seriously. Even now it seems to be naively underestimated, people try and find answers and settle on something like 'you can't stop human learning', or come up with false reassurances that 'the risk of existential collapse is low', or 'it is not very advanced'.
Ai is not a direct risk, as it stands at the moment or in the foreseeable future (unless there is another technological stepchange).
The direct risk comes from idiots believing AI's are actually intelligent, and trusting them more than their own common sense, because the computer must be correct.
"Yes, I should put this screwdriver into the mains electrical socket. The AI told me too..."
From what I can see I would say the problem is with the rate it is advancing and the lack of control and oversight, which will lead to rapid 'paradigm shifts' - as we saw with the rapid advance of chatbots and image generation technology.
I'll say something controversial here: it's not advancing fast. elizabots would fool some people thirty years ago. There is no massively new innovative breakthrough; just more computer power and massively larger data sets.
(runs for cover)
This is possible... but others who work in the field say very different things. What is concerning to me is the growth is not being overseen.
'Others who work in the field' are very often keen to hype their products and potential profits.
The biggest dangers of the current hype is people believing the systems are actually in any way intelligent, and putting faith in the systems' output.
Sarah Montague gave a very robust defence of Houchen on WATO. She demanded Andy Mc Donald repeat the accusations he made against Houchen under parliamentary privilege. He refused, and Sarah took the win on behalf of Ben.
I have to say selling millions of pounds worth of (even brownfield) real estate for less than a tenner raised my eyebrow.
I don't know anything about this situation. However in my experience it is common for these brownfield sites to have a zero value, for instance where the clean up costs exceed the land value even with planning permission in place.
I believe the same site had been bought with public funds for a significant (£millions) fee a year or two earlier.
I don’t know the details of this specific situation so not commenting on that.
More generally if you have land that the owner won’t pay to clean up but the government desires to bring back into productive use then the government needs to subsidise the clean up. That is effectively what has been done here.
The government has unlocked land from the previous owner, cleaned it up and transferred to a new owner. They may not have maximised value but that may not have been the purpose of the transaction.
It certainly shouldn't have been the only purpose.
Otherwise the land might have been best used as a nuclear waste storage site.
Off topic - I've just been watching a programme about the Isle of Man TT on ITV4. I don't know much about motorsport - but this was fantastic. And then, approaching the break, a mention was made of the people who had died. Six people this year, including a father-and-son in the motorbike and sidecar racing. And apparently over 200 riders have died since this started 100 years ago, along with an unspecified number of spectators and marshalls; and since 1937, there has only been one year in which races were held and no-one died. And this was alluded to by some of the riders (and indeed spectators), who were clear that they knew the risks, and were chasing a dream. This all seemed quite surprising in the 21st century. And then I remembered this was the Isle of Man. The New Hampshire of the British Isles. Live Free or Die. My own instinctive reaction was that happiness that something so dangerous is still allowed to happen. Make Britain Manx! Not least because the Isle of Man looks like an idealised version of the North, in miniature - moorland and mountain and seaside villages. Just lovely. I had an opportunity to go and work in the IoM a couple of decades back, and I often wonder how life would have turned out - but while it looks agreeable enough to me now, there's possibly less to offer the me who was in my late 20s.
The unexamined aspect of the TT is that the riders are largely has-beens and never-gonna-bes who are risking their lives to make a mortgage payment because they aren't fast enough to make in regular series like BSB, BSS, etc.
That, I would have thought, went without saying.
It's a race that anybody is allowed to enter, and therefore will attract people long on dreams and short (relatively) on experience and ability.
Off topic - I've just been watching a programme about the Isle of Man TT on ITV4. I don't know much about motorsport - but this was fantastic. And then, approaching the break, a mention was made of the people who had died. Six people this year, including a father-and-son in the motorbike and sidecar racing. And apparently over 200 riders have died since this started 100 years ago, along with an unspecified number of spectators and marshalls; and since 1937, there has only been one year in which races were held and no-one died. And this was alluded to by some of the riders (and indeed spectators), who were clear that they knew the risks, and were chasing a dream. This all seemed quite surprising in the 21st century. And then I remembered this was the Isle of Man. The New Hampshire of the British Isles. Live Free or Die. My own instinctive reaction was that happiness that something so dangerous is still allowed to happen. Make Britain Manx! Not least because the Isle of Man looks like an idealised version of the North, in miniature - moorland and mountain and seaside villages. Just lovely. I had an opportunity to go and work in the IoM a couple of decades back, and I often wonder how life would have turned out - but while it looks agreeable enough to me now, there's possibly less to offer the me who was in my late 20s.
The unexamined aspect of the TT is that the riders are largely has-beens and never-gonna-bes who are risking their lives to make a mortgage payment because they aren't fast enough to make in regular series like BSB, BSS, etc.
That, I would have thought, went without saying.
It's a race that anybody is allowed to enter, and therefore will attract people long on dreams and short (relatively) on experience and ability.
You need a National Competition or FIM licence to enter the TT so not just anybody can rock up and wipe themselves out.
Whatever, at the end of the day the voters got 2 chances to elect a socialist PM, 2017 and 2019 and even in 2017 they turned down the opportunity with the Tories winning most seats in 2017 and a majority in 2019
You're right, though I think that even non-socialists should feel a twinge of regret that we had an election where most people who supported a party did it because they *liked* its policies, ratther than just to keep the other lot out - and it wasn't quite enough. That's what leads to our negative politics - the probably accurate perception that the way to win is to promise as little as possible and rubbish the other side. People won't like you much, but there's a fair chance that they'll vote for you, because it plays to their cynical perception that everyone is rubbish and nothing works.
If you choose a leader who is incompetent and has toxic views on some things that are dealbreaking issues for some voters then, rightly, a tranche of voters will refuse to vote for you even if when polled they like your policies in isolation. And that's fine and rational - most manifestos contain lots of nice sounding policies people then make a judgment on whether you can deliver on them and whether you will do other things they don't like. And that judgment has proved entirely understandable with time. I think the past 13 years of Tory governments have been shameful and destructive - but also dread to think about the appalling policy a Corbyn government would have had on Ukraine or how it would enable the antisemitism on display from its staunchest supporters, who now openly peddle conspiracy theories. Labour now has a leader who doesn't have that toxic baggage - and guess what, when the government screws up they are ahead in the polls and will probably win an election as people prefer their policy offers.
Leor Sapir, who studies policies regarding transition care for children at the Manhattan Institute, draws a parallel between: a) the ways that medical societies supported broad access to opioid prescriptions; and b) medical societies' support for transition care for kids......
...This week four years ago, the American Pain Society, a professional medical association, closed down due to concerns that it had collaborated with Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, and helped fuel the devastating opioid epidemic. 🧵
Off topic - I've just been watching a programme about the Isle of Man TT on ITV4. I don't know much about motorsport - but this was fantastic. And then, approaching the break, a mention was made of the people who had died. Six people this year, including a father-and-son in the motorbike and sidecar racing. And apparently over 200 riders have died since this started 100 years ago, along with an unspecified number of spectators and marshalls; and since 1937, there has only been one year in which races were held and no-one died. And this was alluded to by some of the riders (and indeed spectators), who were clear that they knew the risks, and were chasing a dream. This all seemed quite surprising in the 21st century. And then I remembered this was the Isle of Man. The New Hampshire of the British Isles. Live Free or Die. My own instinctive reaction was that happiness that something so dangerous is still allowed to happen. Make Britain Manx! Not least because the Isle of Man looks like an idealised version of the North, in miniature - moorland and mountain and seaside villages. Just lovely. I had an opportunity to go and work in the IoM a couple of decades back, and I often wonder how life would have turned out - but while it looks agreeable enough to me now, there's possibly less to offer the me who was in my late 20s.
The unexamined aspect of the TT is that the riders are largely has-beens and never-gonna-bes who are risking their lives to make a mortgage payment because they aren't fast enough to make in regular series like BSB, BSS, etc.
That, I would have thought, went without saying.
It's a race that anybody is allowed to enter, and therefore will attract people long on dreams and short (relatively) on experience and ability.
You need a National Competition or FIM licence to enter the TT so not just anybody can rock up and wipe themselves out.
Is "Mad Sunday" still part of it, with the course opened to spectators?
I wonder how many other pb'ers regularly use buses? I was on a couple today, and they're great for litmus tests of public mood.
The die is cast. People have made up their minds and the polls will change very little right up until next year's General Election.
Have a nice evening.
xx
Is the mood anger.
Are the people mutinous ?
Is it a (drumroll) shellacking.
I am not on buses often but I have never heard anyone on one even mentioning politics.
I use the tube every day, buses quite often - it’s the quick way to get about in central London.
Striking up a conversation with a stranger would be considered evidence of being a sociopath or drunk. Or both.
I take a bus from time to time and can confirm that no-one speaks. They sit staring wistfully, hunched over their shopping bags, caressing the sausages they bought from Lidl, calculating how many days they might stretch to. If conversation did break out I'd have to confess I was en route to the station to go to London for lunch, so silence is probably the better option.
I did, on a few occasions on public transport (bus and train) overhear conversations about what a mess the government was (or variations on a theme), but they were all in the midst of the Trussterfuck.
Most people don’t think much about politics, but Truss being a one-woman wrecking ball definitely cut through.
Britain's top civil servant helped end Liz Truss's premiership, it is claimed.
In an example of the power wielded by the Whitehall 'Blob', Cabinet Secretary Simon Case is said to have written a memo that helped seal her fate as the shortest-serving prime minister in history.
Though ‘man states facts’ is hardly the turn-up the DM thinks it is (though given their propensity for falsehood, you have to forgive them for thinking so).
Maybe but it has 38 times the land area of the UK so has rather more room for them all
It seems slightly cheating to have places like Victoria Island which is slightly larger than GB but has a population of 2k.
Maybe Vancouver Island and Victoria as the capital !!!
32,100 km2
Yeah. All comparisons with Canada are moot. You could build forever in Saskatchewan (apart from the lakes). There's nowhere left to build in BC. But everyone wants to live in BC.
I dunno, most of Saskatchewan is sub-arctic, with brutal winters. It’s a great place to visit (Canada, I mean) but i think more appealing in principle than in practice as a place to move to.
I can see why you’d pick Vancouver over Saskatoon if you did though.
Britain's top civil servant helped end Liz Truss's premiership, it is claimed.
In an example of the power wielded by the Whitehall 'Blob', Cabinet Secretary Simon Case is said to have written a memo that helped seal her fate as the shortest-serving prime minister in history.
Though ‘man states facts’ is hardly the turn-up the DM thinks it is (though given their propensity for falsehood, you have to forgive them for thinking so).
Tbf ‘Simon Case gets something right’ is quite a turn up.
Britain's top civil servant helped end Liz Truss's premiership, it is claimed.
In an example of the power wielded by the Whitehall 'Blob', Cabinet Secretary Simon Case is said to have written a memo that helped seal her fate as the shortest-serving prime minister in history.
Though ‘man states facts’ is hardly the turn-up the DM thinks it is (though given their propensity for falsehood, you have to forgive them for thinking so).
Tbf ‘Simon Case gets something right’ is quite a turn up.
FFS, have these roasters not seen state of the public finances?
More than 50 Conservative MPs are demanding that Rishi Sunak scrap the “morally wrong” inheritance tax.
The proportion of homes under threat from the levy has more than doubled since the Conservatives came to power, despite George Osborne, the former Chancellor, pledging to abandon the death tax for all but the most wealthy in the run up to the 2010 election.
Instead, the threshold has been frozen since 2010 and almost 40 percent of homes sold in England and Wales last year were worth more than the basic allowance.
The levy is regarded as profoundly unfair as it penalises people who have saved money throughout their lives after paying tax on their income – and is punishing middle class families who want to help children or grandchildren to own homes.
The Telegraph is launching a campaign to scrap inheritance tax – a move which should be put at the heart of the Conservatives’ next election manifesto amid growing fears that Labour is plotting to target savings and assets to fund even higher levels of state spending.
This newspaper is receiving a growing number of letters from readers facing intrusive probate investigations into their estates at one of the most difficult moments in their lives.
Writing in this newspaper, former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi describes the death duty as “morally wrong” and warns that it is adding inflationary pressure to house prices.
Mr Zahawi writes: “Inheritance tax is that other spectre that haunts us alongside death. As well as being morally wrong to take someone’s assets on their death, it also creates all sorts of inefficient and damaging distortions in our personal finances, and the wider economy.”
Monzo has reported a sharp jump in its provisions for potential loan losses after a rapid increase in lending that has involved a push into the “buy now, pay later” industry.
The fast-growing digital bank has set aside £101.2 million to cover possible bad loans in the year to the end of February, up from only £14 million in 2022, annual results for the bank show.
Monzo also has revealed that the City regulator has widened the scope of its investigation into possible anti-money laundering breaches at the group.
FFS, have these roasters not seen state of the public finances?
More than 50 Conservative MPs are demanding that Rishi Sunak scrap the “morally wrong” inheritance tax.
The proportion of homes under threat from the levy has more than doubled since the Conservatives came to power, despite George Osborne, the former Chancellor, pledging to abandon the death tax for all but the most wealthy in the run up to the 2010 election.
Instead, the threshold has been frozen since 2010 and almost 40 percent of homes sold in England and Wales last year were worth more than the basic allowance.
The levy is regarded as profoundly unfair as it penalises people who have saved money throughout their lives after paying tax on their income – and is punishing middle class families who want to help children or grandchildren to own homes.
The Telegraph is launching a campaign to scrap inheritance tax – a move which should be put at the heart of the Conservatives’ next election manifesto amid growing fears that Labour is plotting to target savings and assets to fund even higher levels of state spending.
This newspaper is receiving a growing number of letters from readers facing intrusive probate investigations into their estates at one of the most difficult moments in their lives.
Writing in this newspaper, former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi describes the death duty as “morally wrong” and warns that it is adding inflationary pressure to house prices.
Mr Zahawi writes: “Inheritance tax is that other spectre that haunts us alongside death. As well as being morally wrong to take someone’s assets on their death, it also creates all sorts of inefficient and damaging distortions in our personal finances, and the wider economy.”
I blame the Angles. IIRC they first introduced Death Taxes because it's one life event where there can be no quibbling over whether it actually occurred......
FFS, have these roasters not seen state of the public finances?
More than 50 Conservative MPs are demanding that Rishi Sunak scrap the “morally wrong” inheritance tax.
The proportion of homes under threat from the levy has more than doubled since the Conservatives came to power, despite George Osborne, the former Chancellor, pledging to abandon the death tax for all but the most wealthy in the run up to the 2010 election.
Instead, the threshold has been frozen since 2010 and almost 40 percent of homes sold in England and Wales last year were worth more than the basic allowance.
The levy is regarded as profoundly unfair as it penalises people who have saved money throughout their lives after paying tax on their income – and is punishing middle class families who want to help children or grandchildren to own homes.
The Telegraph is launching a campaign to scrap inheritance tax – a move which should be put at the heart of the Conservatives’ next election manifesto amid growing fears that Labour is plotting to target savings and assets to fund even higher levels of state spending.
This newspaper is receiving a growing number of letters from readers facing intrusive probate investigations into their estates at one of the most difficult moments in their lives.
Writing in this newspaper, former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi describes the death duty as “morally wrong” and warns that it is adding inflationary pressure to house prices.
Mr Zahawi writes: “Inheritance tax is that other spectre that haunts us alongside death. As well as being morally wrong to take someone’s assets on their death, it also creates all sorts of inefficient and damaging distortions in our personal finances, and the wider economy.”
I blame the Angles. IIRC they first introduced Death Taxes because it's one life event where there can be no quibbling over whether it actually occurred......
Morning all! Day 3 of my tour of England and I wake up to read top quality "bantz" where BJO instructs us all on actually how much of a winner actually Jezbollah was actually.
There is growing disquiet on social media from people reacting to Keith Donkey's piece in the Express about Brexit. How he should be telling them they are wrong and always were rather than trying to placate them and win their votes.
This is absolutism at its finest. Unless you do 100% of what I say you should do, you are a traitor and I don't want to vote for you. The Good News is that as ABC is now the option, you can vote LibDem or Green in suitable constituencies to see Sir Donkey into office.
Puritanically untainted by voting Labour, but still benefitting from binning off the corruption party.
Morning all! Day 3 of my tour of England and I wake up to read top quality "bantz" where BJO instructs us all on actually how much of a winner actually Jezbollah was actually.
There is growing disquiet on social media from people reacting to Keith Donkey's piece in the Express about Brexit. How he should be telling them they are wrong and always were rather than trying to placate them and win their votes.
This is absolutism at its finest. Unless you do 100% of what I say you should do, you are a traitor and I don't want to vote for you. The Good News is that as ABC is now the option, you can vote LibDem or Green in suitable constituencies to see Sir Donkey into office.
Puritanically untainted by voting Labour, but still benefitting from binning off the corruption party.
It's pure Trumpism.
Jez won the 2017 election just like Trump won in 2020.
Morning all! Day 3 of my tour of England and I wake up to read top quality "bantz" where BJO instructs us all on actually how much of a winner actually Jezbollah was actually.
There is growing disquiet on social media from people reacting to Keith Donkey's piece in the Express about Brexit. How he should be telling them they are wrong and always were rather than trying to placate them and win their votes.
This is absolutism at its finest. Unless you do 100% of what I say you should do, you are a traitor and I don't want to vote for you. The Good News is that as ABC is now the option, you can vote LibDem or Green in suitable constituencies to see Sir Donkey into office.
Puritanically untainted by voting Labour, but still benefitting from binning off the corruption party.
It's pure Trumpism.
Jez won the 2017 election just like Trump won in 2020.
Id sooner vote Jez than Sir Bland, at least he had policies,
Morning all! Day 3 of my tour of England and I wake up to read top quality "bantz" where BJO instructs us all on actually how much of a winner actually Jezbollah was actually.
There is growing disquiet on social media from people reacting to Keith Donkey's piece in the Express about Brexit. How he should be telling them they are wrong and always were rather than trying to placate them and win their votes.
This is absolutism at its finest. Unless you do 100% of what I say you should do, you are a traitor and I don't want to vote for you. The Good News is that as ABC is now the option, you can vote LibDem or Green in suitable constituencies to see Sir Donkey into office.
Puritanically untainted by voting Labour, but still benefitting from binning off the corruption party.
It's pure Trumpism.
Jez won the 2017 election just like Trump won in 2020.
Id sooner vote Jez than Sir Bland, at least he had policies,
Donkey has policies - and when the Tories keep saying "they have no policies" whilst proffering their box of crayons, it just makes them look like shysters. Labour don't yet have *exciting* policies, but at this stage not being openly corrupt and grossly incompetent would be a start.
A Labour MP has been accused of multiple incidents of inappropriate behavior toward junior female colleagues over a long career in British politics.
Five women said that Geraint Davies, a former House of Commons select committee chair who was first elected in 1997, subjected them to unwanted sexual attention, both physical and verbal, after coming into contact with them through his work as an MP.
Many of the alleged incidents took place on the parliamentary estate, sometimes in bars or after late-night votes. One of the women he allegedly targeted was just 19 years old at the time.
Davies, 63, said that he did not “recognize” the allegations, adding: “If I have inadvertently caused offence to anyone, then I am naturally sorry.”
POLITICO spoke to more than 20 people who worked with Davies in parliament, including serving MPs and current and former members of Labour Party staff. They described a pattern of excessive drinking, sexual comments and unwanted touching by Davies stretching back at least five years, directed exclusively at younger women in the workplace.
Davies’ alleged behavior appears to have been an open secret in certain parts of the Labour Party, but no action was taken in the absence of a formal complaint. Such situations underline the difficulty of rooting out harassment claims in parliament.
In one instance, a former Labour Party staffer alleged that Davies, then 58, approached her while she was extremely intoxicated in a parliamentary bar. He proceeded to buy her another alcoholic drink and suggested they could go back to his nearby flat, she claimed. She was 22 years old at the time.
Davies took her number, saying he wanted to discuss parliamentary business, and subsequently sent her a string of sexually suggestive messages, alluding to masturbation on the parliamentary premises.
The former researcher initially responded to his messages in amusement, but later became uncomfortable and asked him to stop.
Morning all! Day 3 of my tour of England and I wake up to read top quality "bantz" where BJO instructs us all on actually how much of a winner actually Jezbollah was actually.
There is growing disquiet on social media from people reacting to Keith Donkey's piece in the Express about Brexit. How he should be telling them they are wrong and always were rather than trying to placate them and win their votes.
This is absolutism at its finest. Unless you do 100% of what I say you should do, you are a traitor and I don't want to vote for you. The Good News is that as ABC is now the option, you can vote LibDem or Green in suitable constituencies to see Sir Donkey into office.
Puritanically untainted by voting Labour, but still benefitting from binning off the corruption party.
It's pure Trumpism.
Jez won the 2017 election just like Trump won in 2020.
Id sooner vote Jez than Sir Bland, at least he had policies,
One reason why I remain suspicious of ‘Sir Bland’ is that his policies are essentially Corbyn’s policies stripped of the racism and the gross incompetence.
The catch is, so are rather too many of the Conservatives’ policies and they’ve actually gone all in on the racism and gross incompetence.
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
From a political betting view point, Primeminister Wallace or Mourdant might be close now.
Sunak might be toast. He is already in a very weak position. With Tories on 28% and slaughtered in the locals - Sunak’s WhatsAppGate could be about to finish him. The second Tory PM this parliament brought down by covid.
A worry for Labour as they clearly have Sunak beaten, sub 200 Tory seats even. But PM Penny might trump Labour appeals for a fresh change.
Penny will come across as more centre ground to voters than the increasingly right wing Starmer front bench.
Sunak actually polls better than his party, especially with under 50s and urban professionals.
Mordaunt is too woke for the party membership as leader.
I doubt the whatsapp messages will make the slightest difference to Sunak's position, indeed Tory and RefUK voters think we locked down too early and too long if anything
With the benefit of hindsight, which I fully accept was not available at the time and the risks were very difficult to calculate, I think it is far from clear that we should ever have locked down at all. Protected vulnerable groups, certainly. Ensured proper protection for medical and care staff beyond doubt. But closing schools, factories, pubs, restaurants, etc. I think it was a mistake now.
The problem is, of course, that we didn't have the benefit of hindsight. We had terrible scenes coming out of Northern Italy and New York. We had stories of ambulances running through the night.
And we knew very little of successful treatment methods, and had little idea when - or even if - a vaccine would be forthcoming.
I don't blame the government for the initial lockdown.
I do blame them for the severity of the restrictions, and the length of time they went on for, despite all the evidence that we were getting on top of the disease. It is an absolute disgrace that, even though we had a fantastic headstart with the vaccine roll out, that we lagged so many of our European peers for the removal of restrictions.
Yes, I accept that this is with hindsight. We never got near a collapse of the hospital system, we never used the nightingale hospitals, the projections the government were being given were alarming but entirely wrong. I accept given what was not known, the first lockdown was probably inevitable but I would still want the inquiry to look at whether it was in fact a good idea and whether we should ever do the like again faced with anything similar. The subsequent lockdowns were increasingly bizarre.
the mask mandate was ridiculous and cowardly - masks did F all to stop the virus as proved by Scotland having higher rates of infection whilst having a mask mandate when England eventually relaxed it. The mask thig was especially evil when applied in schools
Morning all! Day 3 of my tour of England and I wake up to read top quality "bantz" where BJO instructs us all on actually how much of a winner actually Jezbollah was actually.
There is growing disquiet on social media from people reacting to Keith Donkey's piece in the Express about Brexit. How he should be telling them they are wrong and always were rather than trying to placate them and win their votes.
This is absolutism at its finest. Unless you do 100% of what I say you should do, you are a traitor and I don't want to vote for you. The Good News is that as ABC is now the option, you can vote LibDem or Green in suitable constituencies to see Sir Donkey into office.
Puritanically untainted by voting Labour, but still benefitting from binning off the corruption party.
It's pure Trumpism.
Jez won the 2017 election just like Trump won in 2020.
Id sooner vote Jez than Sir Bland, at least he had policies,
Brexiteer willing to vote for another extremist.
I am shocked.
Though it is a tribute to the peace process that a Norn Iron chap would be willing to vote for Corbyn.
Morning all! Day 3 of my tour of England and I wake up to read top quality "bantz" where BJO instructs us all on actually how much of a winner actually Jezbollah was actually.
There is growing disquiet on social media from people reacting to Keith Donkey's piece in the Express about Brexit. How he should be telling them they are wrong and always were rather than trying to placate them and win their votes.
This is absolutism at its finest. Unless you do 100% of what I say you should do, you are a traitor and I don't want to vote for you. The Good News is that as ABC is now the option, you can vote LibDem or Green in suitable constituencies to see Sir Donkey into office.
Puritanically untainted by voting Labour, but still benefitting from binning off the corruption party.
It's pure Trumpism.
Jez won the 2017 election just like Trump won in 2020.
Id sooner vote Jez than Sir Bland, at least he had policies,
Brexiteer willing to vote for another extremist.
I am shocked.
Though it is a tribute to the peace process that a Norn Iron chap would be willing to vote for Corbyn.
Corbyn was of course a Brexiteer for much of his career…
Comments
This is why people voted the way they did in 2017
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2017/07/11/why-people-voted-labour-or-conservative-2017-gener
And 2019 was a one issue election and it wasnt Socialism it was about the will of the people and the oven ready deal lie
https://twitter.com/interacciones/status/1663898138518642689
Which is why the left wing always end up with the Judean People's Front, the People's Front of Judea and the Front Judean people all calling everyone else traitors.
The facts about 2017 are clear, the fact you cant admit it is your issue not mine Even Fraser Nelson, hardly a raving Corbynite, can do that mate
According to 🇳🇴 Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Norway will provide military, humanitarian, and civilian support to Ukraine worth over $6,3 bn in the next five years
https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1664008247030710273
You keep banging the same "but the swing!!!ONE!" drum like it's the only thing that matters.
Federal prosecutors obtained an audio recording of a summer '21 mtg w/ Trump acknowledging he held onto a classified Pentagon doc abt a potential attk on Iran,
@PaulaReidCNN @kpolantz @kaitlancollins
report. The recording captures sound of paper rustling.
https://twitter.com/kylieatwood/status/1664001525130067968
For the 32% who voted for Corbyn in 2019 as well as 2017 it was about opposing austerity and delivering socialism and redistribution from the rich and cancelling tuition fees etc yes. However 2019 showed their true numbers, not 2017
2017 was about what it was about ie this
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2017/07/11/why-people-voted-labour-or-conservative-2017-gener
2019 Brexit Brexit Breit
...The recording that’s now in the hands of prosecutors shows they are not only looking at Trump’s actions regarding classified documents recovered from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, but also at what happened at Bedminster a year earlier...
* stop thinking about PB
** I said stop it
*** oh ok then
What is concerning to me is the growth is not being overseen.
BBC: Ukraine
ITV: Boris
Sky: RAF alleged discrimination
"Once you've had a lover robot, you'll never want a real man... again."
Excessive pride in this sort of thing in the British forces often leads to savage mockery. The US forces have much more reverence which is weird because they get medals for just about anything.
This bit:
‘The upshot is that the party’s centre of gravity and electoral calculations have shifted to meet a new target voter who is socially conservative and economically left-leaning.’
A kind of nationalist socialist, if you will.
I’m only half joking.
I mean, it’s hard to define fascism - see the Wikipedia page outlining how difficult and contested it is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism), but I think we need to be very watchful.
The late, great Bill Hicks did a riff on pornography: ‘Supreme Court says pornography is anything without artistic merit that causes sexual thoughts, that's their definition, essentially. No artistic merit, causes sexual thoughts. Hmm... Sounds like... every commercial on television, doesn't it? You know, when I see those two twins on that Doublemint commercial? I'm not thinking of gum. I am thinking of chewing, so maybe that's the connection they're trying to make.’
The point I’m ponderously edging towards is that it’s hard to define pornography, but you know it when you see it. Same with fascism.
GBNews. NatCons. Some of the Conservative Party’s more fiery participants. The increasingly authoritarian impulses of this government. Shrimsley’s point above. Looks uncomfortably like a breeding ground for lots of unsavoury things to me.
This stuff’s in my mind, I watched The Sorrow and the Pity yesterday - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrow_and_the_Pity - I’d never heard of it until the other day. Fascinating. The guy who turned down the offer of joining the French Resistance and instead volunteered for the SS’s Charlemagne Division and was packed off to the Eastern Front was particularly interesting to me. Eye-opening, the whole thing.
The post Brexit British right is no exception, less Thatcherite free market and laissez faire but backed withdrawing from the single market she signed up for as well as the EU. Trump was economically more centrist than Reagan but much more anti immigration. Le Pen too is economically left of Chirac and Balladur but also much more protectionist and anti immigration.
Partly a failure of capitalism which is increasingly leaving the middle not just the poor behind, the only true still committed pro free market social liberals tend to be the rich and high earners. The left and right overall are now largely economically centrist, the capitalist v socialist battle of the 80s is over. The real battle is cultural, woke v socially conservative, pro immigration and globalist v anti immigration and nationalist, pro EU v pro Brexit. Even Russia is now led by an anti woke nationalist not a communist v the liberal internationalist Zelensky in Ukraine. Xi too is more nationalist authoritarian than economic Maoist
What will be interesting about the next election is there's a good chance of an even bigger swing to Labour, yet I bet there will be a conversion away from the view that matters among Corbynites, if Keir falls short of a majority.
There might be a similar conversion away from arguing a big swing does not matter, if the Tories do end up clinging on to power, but since Labour have a really good chance of at least being largest party there's less change of that.
But everyone wants to live in BC.
What a time to be alive.
Of course, doing so probably violates many laws in many states, but nevermind.
I wish it were true, and it's very needed, but it isn't my experience.
Too many people are engaging in a dangerous fantasy that if it wasn't for Brexit we could have the 'old right' of Cameron, Osborne and Rory Stewart back again.
days.
There are a number of posters on here who I have gone from regarding as right wing to middle of the road in a few years.
I don't think they've changed their views at all.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/budget-2023-australians-british-to-get-free-prescriptions-in-new-zealand/ISPQH3BYLNG2ZPNKXE4ZCG6E4I/
The amusing paragraph is this:
"National says it is another example of a Government cost-of-living policy funds heading offshore, citing the example of French backpackers getting last year’s cost of living payment."
Kevin McCarthy announces a “commission” to “look at” cutting Social Security and Medicare: “I’m going to make some people uncomfortable.”
He attacked Biden for “walling off” cuts to Social Security and Medicare during debt ceiling negotiations.
https://twitter.com/NoLieWithBTC/status/1663967414617292801
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-44852812
Were they both wired for sound? Or just Putin?
I don't know much about motorsport - but this was fantastic.
And then, approaching the break, a mention was made of the people who had died. Six people this year, including a father-and-son in the motorbike and sidecar racing. And apparently over 200 riders have died since this started 100 years ago, along with an unspecified number of spectators and marshalls; and since 1937, there has only been one year in which races were held and no-one died. And this was alluded to by some of the riders (and indeed spectators), who were clear that they knew the risks, and were chasing a dream.
This all seemed quite surprising in the 21st century. And then I remembered this was the Isle of Man. The New Hampshire of the British Isles. Live Free or Die.
My own instinctive reaction was that happiness that something so dangerous is still allowed to happen.
Make Britain Manx! Not least because the Isle of Man looks like an idealised version of the North, in miniature - moorland and mountain and seaside villages. Just lovely. I had an opportunity to go and work in the IoM a couple of decades back, and I often wonder how life would have turned out - but while it looks agreeable enough to me now, there's possibly less to offer the me who was in my late 20s.
She was also more socially libertarian than most voters are
https://vote-2012.proboards.com/post/1375677/thread
In an example of the power wielded by the Whitehall 'Blob', Cabinet Secretary Simon Case is said to have written a memo that helped seal her fate as the shortest-serving prime minister in history.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12145833/Liz-Truss-forced-Downing-Street-UKs-civil-servant.html
More generally if you have land that the owner won’t pay to clean up but the government desires to bring back into productive use then the government needs to subsidise the clean up. That is effectively what has been done here.
The government has unlocked land from the previous owner, cleaned it up and transferred to a new owner. They may not have maximised value but that may not have been the purpose of the transaction.
The biggest dangers of the current hype is people believing the systems are actually in any way intelligent, and putting faith in the systems' output.
Otherwise the land might have been best used as a nuclear waste storage site.
It's a race that anybody is allowed to enter, and therefore will attract people long on dreams and short (relatively) on experience and ability.
But I usually try to avoid random people who start conversations about politics and usually smile, nod and edge away if they start....
...This week four years ago, the American Pain Society, a professional medical association, closed down due to concerns that it had collaborated with Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, and helped fuel the devastating opioid epidemic. 🧵
https://twitter.com/benryanwriter/status/1664000492651913220?s=20
Most people don’t think much about politics, but Truss being a one-woman wrecking ball definitely cut through.
Though ‘man states facts’ is hardly the turn-up the DM thinks it is (though given their propensity for falsehood, you have to forgive them for thinking so).
I can see why you’d pick Vancouver over Saskatoon if you did though.
https://twitter.com/Melbchief/status/1664131594393882624
I imagine the press will try to follow up with a campaign for a trial, but the burden of proof is of course very different.
More than 50 Conservative MPs are demanding that Rishi Sunak scrap the “morally wrong” inheritance tax.
The proportion of homes under threat from the levy has more than doubled since the Conservatives came to power, despite George Osborne, the former Chancellor, pledging to abandon the death tax for all but the most wealthy in the run up to the 2010 election.
Instead, the threshold has been frozen since 2010 and almost 40 percent of homes sold in England and Wales last year were worth more than the basic allowance.
The levy is regarded as profoundly unfair as it penalises people who have saved money throughout their lives after paying tax on their income – and is punishing middle class families who want to help children or grandchildren to own homes.
The Telegraph is launching a campaign to scrap inheritance tax – a move which should be put at the heart of the Conservatives’ next election manifesto amid growing fears that Labour is plotting to target savings and assets to fund even higher levels of state spending.
This newspaper is receiving a growing number of letters from readers facing intrusive probate investigations into their estates at one of the most difficult moments in their lives.
Writing in this newspaper, former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi describes the death duty as “morally wrong” and warns that it is adding inflationary pressure to house prices.
Mr Zahawi writes: “Inheritance tax is that other spectre that haunts us alongside death. As well as being morally wrong to take someone’s assets on their death, it also creates all sorts of inefficient and damaging distortions in our personal finances, and the wider economy.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tax/news/tories-demand-rishi-sunak-scraps-morally-wrong-inheritance/
The fast-growing digital bank has set aside £101.2 million to cover possible bad loans in the year to the end of February, up from only £14 million in 2022, annual results for the bank show.
Monzo also has revealed that the City regulator has widened the scope of its investigation into possible anti-money laundering breaches at the group.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/digital-bank-monzo-faces-100m-loss-on-bad-loans-0sm2rlxj8
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2023/jun/01/ben-roberts-smith-verdict-live-news-defamation-case-trial-judgment-today-decorated-australian-soldier-latest-updates
There is growing disquiet on social media from people reacting to Keith Donkey's piece in the Express about Brexit. How he should be telling them they are wrong and always were rather than trying to placate them and win their votes.
This is absolutism at its finest. Unless you do 100% of what I say you should do, you are a traitor and I don't want to vote for you. The Good News is that as ABC is now the option, you can vote LibDem or Green in suitable constituencies to see Sir Donkey into office.
Puritanically untainted by voting Labour, but still benefitting from binning off the corruption party.
Jez won the 2017 election just like Trump won in 2020.
Five women said that Geraint Davies, a former House of Commons select committee chair who was first elected in 1997, subjected them to unwanted sexual attention, both physical and verbal, after coming into contact with them through his work as an MP.
Many of the alleged incidents took place on the parliamentary estate, sometimes in bars or after late-night votes. One of the women he allegedly targeted was just 19 years old at the time.
Davies, 63, said that he did not “recognize” the allegations, adding: “If I have inadvertently caused offence to anyone, then I am naturally sorry.”
POLITICO spoke to more than 20 people who worked with Davies in parliament, including serving MPs and current and former members of Labour Party staff. They described a pattern of excessive drinking, sexual comments and unwanted touching by Davies stretching back at least five years, directed exclusively at younger women in the workplace.
Davies’ alleged behavior appears to have been an open secret in certain parts of the Labour Party, but no action was taken in the absence of a formal complaint. Such situations underline the difficulty of rooting out harassment claims in parliament.
In one instance, a former Labour Party staffer alleged that Davies, then 58, approached her while she was extremely intoxicated in a parliamentary bar. He proceeded to buy her another alcoholic drink and suggested they could go back to his nearby flat, she claimed. She was 22 years old at the time.
Davies took her number, saying he wanted to discuss parliamentary business, and subsequently sent her a string of sexually suggestive messages, alluding to masturbation on the parliamentary premises.
The former researcher initially responded to his messages in amusement, but later became uncomfortable and asked him to stop.
https://www.politico.eu/article/labour-mp-geraint-davies-accused-sexually-harassing-junior-colleagues/
The catch is, so are rather too many of the Conservatives’ policies and they’ve actually gone all in on the racism and gross incompetence.
I am shocked.
Though it is a tribute to the peace process that a Norn Iron chap would be willing to vote for Corbyn.