Yes I remember how many here were calling for Kinnock’s head, he was called to resign by all the people who later supported poor Johnson.
Let us be honest, if Keir had done half of what Johnson had done he’d have resigned.
TBF I can't even remember the Kinnock incident. Then again, I've never rated him as a politician. His father was not a brilliant politician, but Stephen isn't even at his level.
How’s the running going? I am now back up to running around 20KM a week consistently which I’m pleased about.
Anyway, my hunt for some gardening help goes on. No joy so far. Yesterday I managed a nasty fall and now have a large part of my left leg black, blue, bruised and painful. A nuisance.
I am doing a talk to bankers next week in London so I shall spend the weekend sitting in the sun thinking about what to say and hope to make it down in one piece. I really resent having to go - even for a few days - because the weather here has been and continues to be idyllic. June in the Lakes is just glorious. Still, the bills don't pay themselves .....
More interpretatively, I am concerned that punters on here may be affected by recency bias and, more seriously, using the mistaken benchmark of the December 2019 election.
There are plenty of good, non-offal, reasons for proposing that Dec 19 was a one-off. It came on the back of a stalemate parliament and Boris galvanised the 'Get Brexit Done' vote which was the raison d'etre of the election. He was up against an unelectable Trotskyite anti-semite. It had one purpose: to deliver a majority so that Brexit could be enabled.
Since then, a series of catastrophic occurrences (many self-induced) have Ratnered the Conservative brand. And bubbling away in the background is the clusterfuck of Brexit - the very thing which motivated the Dec 19 vote.
No, the truer benchmark is the last proper General Election which was 08 June 2017 - which resulted in a hung parliament.
I know this part, unlike the previous, is more polemical and less factual but I think there's a good case for it. And I warn punters on here to pay attention, lest you lose your money.
It's a sobering thought that the Tories have won a majority only twice in the last 30 years - once when offering a referendum on Brexit, and once when offering Brexit itself.
Talking of sobering thoughts:
Labour MP Charlotte Nichols says that when she was elected in 2019, the Labour whips gave her a list of thirty male MPs that she should avoid being alone with, at risk of her personal safety.
In 2019, Labour saw 202 MPs elected.
Remove the female MPs, and you are left with 98.
Remove the men who have declared themselves as gay, and you are left with 83.
Remove those who were newly elected in 2019 and therefore unlikely to be on the whips' black list, and you are left with just 77 (by my reckoning).
Which suggests that a woman who finds herself alone with a heterosexual Labour MP stands an almost 40% chance of being in the company of a potentially dangerous sexual predator.....
Labour MPs or all MPs?
Edit - also, those six elected in 2019 still be included in your final figure as you said 'being left alone' without qualifying it.
Ive just taken a look at the gorgeous pouting Charlotte Nichols and it's very probably something she dreamt
It always surprises me how male posters are prepared to let their critical faculties disappear to appear PC. The idea that 40% of the Heterosexual Labour Party MPs or anyone else for that matter wouldn't be safe to be left alone with Charlotte Nichols is plainly ridiculous not to mention extremely insulting to those dozens of male MPs.
So all we are left with is some mischievous whips having a joke or Charlotte's fevered imagination. You choose.
I hate to join in the PB bloodsport of Roger Bashing, but on this point you are plain wrong.
Nichols specifically stated it was 30 MPs from a range of parties. The BBC in particular has tried to make the case that it was 30 Labour MPs.
Creasey and Duffield have corroborated Nichols' charge.
It's the Lynx effect. Here's one I did earlier of felix trying to get some peace on the Costa Del Sol....
FWIW I am expecting an election more like 2010 in reverse, possibly a little better for Labour because of developments in Scotland. This government is tired and worn down but I don’t accept that the current incumbent is disgraced, unlike his 2 immediate predecessors. It is time for a change though and Labour are actually offering a credible alternative this time. That’s going to be enough.
I think that's right: I'd expect a Labour majority of 5 to 25, with the SNP down 15 and the LDs up a similar amount.
Polling-wise, the Labour lead now is pretty much where the Conservative lead was in 2009 (although Lib Dem support was greater at that stage). The Conservatives are more corrupt than Labour was at that point (although Labour was quite corrupt by that point). OTOH, the economic outlook is better than it was in 2009, so it's probably a wash. A 15% lead now, probably converts into a 7-8% lead on polling day.
That's roughly where I'm at, and tactical voting on top will probably deliver a clear Labour majority.
It will converge a bit by polling day. Why? Because the economic situation will improve, I expect boat crossings to diminish and some of the silly stuff Labour keep rolling out (we will reduce tuition fees without spending a single penny of public money) will be exposed for the nonsense they are.
As they look more and more like the prospective government, the more focus will be put on their programme.
I can understand why there is this constant focus on 1997, but the 1964 and and 2010 results show how tough it can be to dislodge a government that has been in power for a long time. I think more attention should be paid to both.
1992 is burned into my memory. Lightening can of course strike twice.
Had Thatcher still been leading the Tories or Blair been leading Labour in 1992 then Labour probably would have won.
It was a victory the Tories won by replacing Thatcher with Major after the poll tax and Labour lost by keeping Kinnock after his 1987 defeat (albeit probably still an election too early for Blair)
Kinnock served a purpose after 1987. Can you imagine the enthusiasm for LOTO Eric Heffer? Didn't he have leadership aspirations around that time? Almost as delusional as Corbyn believing he could become Labour leader.
It didn't need to be Heffer. Kinnock's Shadow Cabinet in 1987 included the likes of John Smith, Jack Cunningham, Giles Radice, Donald Dewar and Denis Healey all of whom would have been more appealing to the average voter than he was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Cabinet_of_Neil_Kinnock
The Tories almost always remove their leaders after they lose a general election or lose their majority if they haven't already resigned, the last one they didn't was Heath after 1966 and that was only as it was a snap election by Wilson after only 2 years in power to increase his majority and Heath had only had a year in the job. Whereas Labour are much less ruthless allowing the likes of Kinnock and Corbyn to fight a second general election and lose it despite already having suffered a first general election defeat.
If Labour had been as ruthless as the Tories they would also have replaced Brown with David Miliband before the 2010 general election as the Tories replaced Boris/Truss with Sunak.
It is Labour's lack of ruthlessness compared to the Tories which largely explains why the Tories have been in power longer than Labour have over the last 50 to 100 years
“The Tories almost always remove their leaders after they lose a general election or lose their majority if they haven't already resigned, the last one they didn't was Heath after 1966…”
No. The last one they didn’t was TMay after 2017. And don’t try and tell me that her resignation 2 years later counts.
Yes I remember how many here were calling for Kinnock’s head, he was called to resign by all the people who later supported poor Johnson.
Let us be honest, if Keir had done half of what Johnson had done he’d have resigned.
TBF I can't even remember the Kinnock incident. Then again, I've never rated him as a politician. His father was not a brilliant politician, but Stephen isn't even at his level.
How’s the running going? I am now back up to running around 20KM a week consistently which I’m pleased about.
The week before last, I ran 48km in four runs. On Monday I did a marathon (5hr 30), despite doing everything wrong. I might go for a 10 to 15km run later.
Glad to hear you're recovering; I find running (or preferably hiking) improves my mental health immeasurably.
edit: I'm still coughing my lungs up an hour or two after finishing a run, though. That's been happening since I got Covid before Easter...
More interpretatively, I am concerned that punters on here may be affected by recency bias and, more seriously, using the mistaken benchmark of the December 2019 election.
There are plenty of good, non-offal, reasons for proposing that Dec 19 was a one-off. It came on the back of a stalemate parliament and Boris galvanised the 'Get Brexit Done' vote which was the raison d'etre of the election. He was up against an unelectable Trotskyite anti-semite. It had one purpose: to deliver a majority so that Brexit could be enabled.
Since then, a series of catastrophic occurrences (many self-induced) have Ratnered the Conservative brand. And bubbling away in the background is the clusterfuck of Brexit - the very thing which motivated the Dec 19 vote.
No, the truer benchmark is the last proper General Election which was 08 June 2017 - which resulted in a hung parliament.
I know this part, unlike the previous, is more polemical and less factual but I think there's a good case for it. And I warn punters on here to pay attention, lest you lose your money.
It's a sobering thought that the Tories have won a majority only twice in the last 30 years - once when offering a referendum on Brexit, and once when offering Brexit itself.
Talking of sobering thoughts:
Labour MP Charlotte Nichols says that when she was elected in 2019, the Labour whips gave her a list of thirty male MPs that she should avoid being alone with, at risk of her personal safety.
In 2019, Labour saw 202 MPs elected.
Remove the female MPs, and you are left with 98.
Remove the men who have declared themselves as gay, and you are left with 83.
Remove those who were newly elected in 2019 and therefore unlikely to be on the whips' black list, and you are left with just 77 (by my reckoning).
Which suggests that a woman who finds herself alone with a heterosexual Labour MP stands an almost 40% chance of being in the company of a potentially dangerous sexual predator.....
Labour MPs or all MPs?
Edit - also, those six elected in 2019 still be included in your final figure as you said 'being left alone' without qualifying it.
Ive just taken a look at the gorgeous pouting Charlotte Nichols and it's very probably something she dreamt
It always surprises me how male posters are prepared to let their critical faculties disappear to appear PC. The idea that 40% of the Heterosexual Labour Party MPs or anyone else for that matter wouldn't be safe to be left alone with Charlotte Nichols is plainly ridiculous not to mention extremely insulting to those dozens of male MPs.
So all we are left with is some mischievous whips having a joke or Charlotte's fevered imagination. You choose.
I hate to join in the PB bloodsport of Roger Bashing, but on this point you are plain wrong.
Nichols specifically stated it was 30 MPs from a range of parties. The BBC in particular has tried to make the case that it was 30 Labour MPs.
Creasey and Duffield have corroborated Nichols' charge.
It's the Lynx effect. Here's one I did earlier of felix trying to get some peace on the Costa Del Sol....
The Lynx effect misogyny abounds. I have you down as a Bentley driving cross between Lesley Phillips and Terry-Thomas. Both of whom drove Bentleys. Ding-dong!
FWIW I am expecting an election more like 2010 in reverse, possibly a little better for Labour because of developments in Scotland. This government is tired and worn down but I don’t accept that the current incumbent is disgraced, unlike his 2 immediate predecessors. It is time for a change though and Labour are actually offering a credible alternative this time. That’s going to be enough.
I think that's right: I'd expect a Labour majority of 5 to 25, with the SNP down 15 and the LDs up a similar amount.
Polling-wise, the Labour lead now is pretty much where the Conservative lead was in 2009 (although Lib Dem support was greater at that stage). The Conservatives are more corrupt than Labour was at that point (although Labour was quite corrupt by that point). OTOH, the economic outlook is better than it was in 2009, so it's probably a wash. A 15% lead now, probably converts into a 7-8% lead on polling day.
That's roughly where I'm at, and tactical voting on top will probably deliver a clear Labour majority.
It will converge a bit by polling day. Why? Because the economic situation will improve, I expect boat crossings to diminish and some of the silly stuff Labour keep rolling out (we will reduce tuition fees without spending a single penny of public money) will be exposed for the nonsense they are.
As they look more and more like the prospective government, the more focus will be put on their programme.
I can understand why there is this constant focus on 1997, but the 1964 and and 2010 results show how tough it can be to dislodge a government that has been in power for a long time. I think more attention should be paid to both.
1992 is burned into my memory. Lightening can of course strike twice.
Had Thatcher still been leading the Tories or Blair been leading Labour in 1992 then Labour probably would have won.
It was a victory the Tories won by replacing Thatcher with Major after the poll tax and Labour lost by keeping Kinnock after his 1987 defeat (albeit probably still an election too early for Blair)
Kinnock served a purpose after 1987. Can you imagine the enthusiasm for LOTO Eric Heffer? Didn't he have leadership aspirations around that time? Almost as delusional as Corbyn believing he could become Labour leader.
It didn't need to be Heffer. Kinnock's Shadow Cabinet in 1987 included the likes of John Smith, Jack Cunningham, Giles Radice, Donald Dewar and Denis Healey all of whom would have been more appealing to the average voter than he was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Cabinet_of_Neil_Kinnock
The Tories almost always remove their leaders after they lose a general election or lose their majority if they haven't already resigned, the last one they didn't was Heath after 1966 and that was only as it was a snap election by Wilson after only 2 years in power to increase his majority and Heath had only had a year in the job. Whereas Labour are much less ruthless allowing the likes of Kinnock and Corbyn to fight a second general election and lose it despite already having suffered a first general election defeat.
If Labour had been as ruthless as the Tories they would also have replaced Brown with David Miliband before the 2010 general election as the Tories replaced Boris/Truss with Sunak.
It is Labour's lack of ruthlessness compared to the Tories which largely explains why the Tories have been in power longer than Labour have over the last 50 to 100 years
“The Tories almost always remove their leaders after they lose a general election or lose their majority if they haven't already resigned, the last one they didn't was Heath after 1966…”
No. The last one they didn’t was TMay after 2017. And don’t try and tell me that her resignation 2 years later counts.
They did remove TMay in 2019 and replaced her with Boris. Despite the fact she won most seats she was removed as Tory leader in Spring 2019 and not allowed to fight another general election after failing to retain her majority. She only resigned as she knew she was about to lose a VONC amongst Tory MPs
Anyway, my hunt for some gardening help goes on. No joy so far. Yesterday I managed a nasty fall and now have a large part of my left leg black, blue, bruised and painful. A nuisance.
I am doing a talk to bankers next week in London so I shall spend the weekend sitting in the sun thinking about what to say and hope to make it down in one piece. I really resent having to go - even for a few days - because the weather here has been and continues to be idyllic. June in the Lakes is just glorious. Still, the bills don't pay themselves .....
FWIW I am expecting an election more like 2010 in reverse, possibly a little better for Labour because of developments in Scotland. This government is tired and worn down but I don’t accept that the current incumbent is disgraced, unlike his 2 immediate predecessors. It is time for a change though and Labour are actually offering a credible alternative this time. That’s going to be enough.
I think that's right: I'd expect a Labour majority of 5 to 25, with the SNP down 15 and the LDs up a similar amount.
Polling-wise, the Labour lead now is pretty much where the Conservative lead was in 2009 (although Lib Dem support was greater at that stage). The Conservatives are more corrupt than Labour was at that point (although Labour was quite corrupt by that point). OTOH, the economic outlook is better than it was in 2009, so it's probably a wash. A 15% lead now, probably converts into a 7-8% lead on polling day.
That's roughly where I'm at, and tactical voting on top will probably deliver a clear Labour majority.
It will converge a bit by polling day. Why? Because the economic situation will improve, I expect boat crossings to diminish and some of the silly stuff Labour keep rolling out (we will reduce tuition fees without spending a single penny of public money) will be exposed for the nonsense they are.
As they look more and more like the prospective government, the more focus will be put on their programme.
I can understand why there is this constant focus on 1997, but the 1964 and and 2010 results show how tough it can be to dislodge a government that has been in power for a long time. I think more attention should be paid to both.
1992 is burned into my memory. Lightening can of course strike twice.
Had Thatcher still been leading the Tories or Blair been leading Labour in 1992 then Labour probably would have won.
It was a victory the Tories won by replacing Thatcher with Major after the poll tax and Labour lost by keeping Kinnock after his 1987 defeat (albeit probably still an election too early for Blair)
Kinnock served a purpose after 1987. Can you imagine the enthusiasm for LOTO Eric Heffer? Didn't he have leadership aspirations around that time? Almost as delusional as Corbyn believing he could become Labour leader.
It didn't need to be Heffer. Kinnock's Shadow Cabinet in 1987 included the likes of John Smith, Jack Cunningham, Giles Radice, Donald Dewar and Denis Healey all of whom would have been more appealing to the average voter than he was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Cabinet_of_Neil_Kinnock
The Tories almost always remove their leaders after they lose a general election or lose their majority if they haven't already resigned, the last one they didn't was Heath after 1966 and that was only as it was a snap election by Wilson after only 2 years in power to increase his majority and Heath had only had a year in the job. Whereas Labour are much less ruthless allowing the likes of Kinnock and Corbyn to fight a second general election and lose it despite already having suffered a first general election defeat.
If Labour had been as ruthless as the Tories they would also have replaced Brown with David Miliband before the 2010 general election as the Tories replaced Boris/Truss with Sunak.
It is Labour's lack of ruthlessness compared to the Tories which largely explains why the Tories have been in power longer than Labour have over the last 50 to 100 years
“The Tories almost always remove their leaders after they lose a general election or lose their majority if they haven't already resigned, the last one they didn't was Heath after 1966…”
No. The last one they didn’t was TMay after 2017. And don’t try and tell me that her resignation 2 years later counts.
They did remove TMay in 2019 and replaced her with Boris. Despite the fact she won most seats she was removed as Tory leader in Spring 2019 and not allowed to fight another general election after failing to retain her majority. She only resigned as she knew she was about to lose a VONC amongst Tory MPs
She was allowed to stay after losing a majority in 2017, for two years, before resigning. That is the opposite to what you said. Have a read of Proverbs 11:2
Anyway, my hunt for some gardening help goes on. No joy so far. Yesterday I managed a nasty fall and now have a large part of my left leg black, blue, bruised and painful. A nuisance.
I am doing a talk to bankers next week in London so I shall spend the weekend sitting in the sun thinking about what to say and hope to make it down in one piece. I really resent having to go - even for a few days - because the weather here has been and continues to be idyllic. June in the Lakes is just glorious. Still, the bills don't pay themselves .....
Hope you get well soon.
I've fallen out with my parsnips, almost half of which haven't come up from seed and those that have are tiny and barely strong enough to survive outside. I've only got about 5 strong plants growing.
More interpretatively, I am concerned that punters on here may be affected by recency bias and, more seriously, using the mistaken benchmark of the December 2019 election.
There are plenty of good, non-offal, reasons for proposing that Dec 19 was a one-off. It came on the back of a stalemate parliament and Boris galvanised the 'Get Brexit Done' vote which was the raison d'etre of the election. He was up against an unelectable Trotskyite anti-semite. It had one purpose: to deliver a majority so that Brexit could be enabled.
Since then, a series of catastrophic occurrences (many self-induced) have Ratnered the Conservative brand. And bubbling away in the background is the clusterfuck of Brexit - the very thing which motivated the Dec 19 vote.
No, the truer benchmark is the last proper General Election which was 08 June 2017 - which resulted in a hung parliament.
I know this part, unlike the previous, is more polemical and less factual but I think there's a good case for it. And I warn punters on here to pay attention, lest you lose your money.
It's a sobering thought that the Tories have won a majority only twice in the last 30 years - once when offering a referendum on Brexit, and once when offering Brexit itself.
Talking of sobering thoughts:
Labour MP Charlotte Nichols says that when she was elected in 2019, the Labour whips gave her a list of thirty male MPs that she should avoid being alone with, at risk of her personal safety.
In 2019, Labour saw 202 MPs elected.
Remove the female MPs, and you are left with 98.
Remove the men who have declared themselves as gay, and you are left with 83.
Remove those who were newly elected in 2019 and therefore unlikely to be on the whips' black list, and you are left with just 77 (by my reckoning).
Which suggests that a woman who finds herself alone with a heterosexual Labour MP stands an almost 40% chance of being in the company of a potentially dangerous sexual predator.....
Labour MPs or all MPs?
Edit - also, those six elected in 2019 still be included in your final figure as you said 'being left alone' without qualifying it.
Ive just taken a look at the gorgeous pouting Charlotte Nichols and it's very probably something she dreamt
It always surprises me how male posters are prepared to let their critical faculties disappear to appear PC. The idea that 40% of the Heterosexual Labour Party MPs or anyone else for that matter wouldn't be safe to be left alone with Charlotte Nichols is plainly ridiculous not to mention extremely insulting to those dozens of male MPs.
So all we are left with is some mischievous whips having a joke or Charlotte's fevered imagination. You choose.
I hate to join in the PB bloodsport of Roger Bashing, but on this point you are plain wrong.
Nichols specifically stated it was 30 MPs from a range of parties. The BBC in particular has tried to make the case that it was 30 Labour MPs.
Creasey and Duffield have corroborated Nichols' charge.
It's the Lynx effect. Here's one I did earlier of felix trying to get some peace on the Costa Del Sol....
The Lynx effect misogyny abounds. I have you down as a Bentley driving cross between Lesley Phillips and Terry-Thomas. Both of whom drove Bentleys. Ding-dong!
No I didn't and I'm nothing like Mr Ding Dong or Terry Thomas. I'm also quite PC but having worked forever with male and female models and actors I'd struggle to say the male ones are the more predatory.
(You surely found felix's post as funny as I did for the priggishness if nothing else?)
More interpretatively, I am concerned that punters on here may be affected by recency bias and, more seriously, using the mistaken benchmark of the December 2019 election.
There are plenty of good, non-offal, reasons for proposing that Dec 19 was a one-off. It came on the back of a stalemate parliament and Boris galvanised the 'Get Brexit Done' vote which was the raison d'etre of the election. He was up against an unelectable Trotskyite anti-semite. It had one purpose: to deliver a majority so that Brexit could be enabled.
Since then, a series of catastrophic occurrences (many self-induced) have Ratnered the Conservative brand. And bubbling away in the background is the clusterfuck of Brexit - the very thing which motivated the Dec 19 vote.
No, the truer benchmark is the last proper General Election which was 08 June 2017 - which resulted in a hung parliament.
I know this part, unlike the previous, is more polemical and less factual but I think there's a good case for it. And I warn punters on here to pay attention, lest you lose your money.
It's a sobering thought that the Tories have won a majority only twice in the last 30 years - once when offering a referendum on Brexit, and once when offering Brexit itself.
Talking of sobering thoughts:
Labour MP Charlotte Nichols says that when she was elected in 2019, the Labour whips gave her a list of thirty male MPs that she should avoid being alone with, at risk of her personal safety.
In 2019, Labour saw 202 MPs elected.
Remove the female MPs, and you are left with 98.
Remove the men who have declared themselves as gay, and you are left with 83.
Remove those who were newly elected in 2019 and therefore unlikely to be on the whips' black list, and you are left with just 77 (by my reckoning).
Which suggests that a woman who finds herself alone with a heterosexual Labour MP stands an almost 40% chance of being in the company of a potentially dangerous sexual predator.....
Labour MPs or all MPs?
Edit - also, those six elected in 2019 still be included in your final figure as you said 'being left alone' without qualifying it.
Ive just taken a look at the gorgeous pouting Charlotte Nichols and it's very probably something she dreamt
It always surprises me how male posters are prepared to let their critical faculties disappear to appear PC. The idea that 40% of the Heterosexual Labour Party MPs or anyone else for that matter wouldn't be safe to be left alone with Charlotte Nichols is plainly ridiculous not to mention extremely insulting to those dozens of male MPs.
So all we are left with is some mischievous whips having a joke or Charlotte's fevered imagination. You choose.
I hate to join in the PB bloodsport of Roger Bashing, but on this point you are plain wrong.
Nichols specifically stated it was 30 MPs from a range of parties. The BBC in particular has tried to make the case that it was 30 Labour MPs.
Creasey and Duffield have corroborated Nichols' charge.
It's the Lynx effect. Here's one I did earlier of felix trying to get some peace on the Costa Del Sol....
It is probably more that some MPs are three sheets to the wind every night, possibly through drinking Lynx in subsidised bars, so their inhibitions are compromised.
FWIW I am expecting an election more like 2010 in reverse, possibly a little better for Labour because of developments in Scotland. This government is tired and worn down but I don’t accept that the current incumbent is disgraced, unlike his 2 immediate predecessors. It is time for a change though and Labour are actually offering a credible alternative this time. That’s going to be enough.
I think that's right: I'd expect a Labour majority of 5 to 25, with the SNP down 15 and the LDs up a similar amount.
Polling-wise, the Labour lead now is pretty much where the Conservative lead was in 2009 (although Lib Dem support was greater at that stage). The Conservatives are more corrupt than Labour was at that point (although Labour was quite corrupt by that point). OTOH, the economic outlook is better than it was in 2009, so it's probably a wash. A 15% lead now, probably converts into a 7-8% lead on polling day.
That's roughly where I'm at, and tactical voting on top will probably deliver a clear Labour majority.
It will converge a bit by polling day. Why? Because the economic situation will improve, I expect boat crossings to diminish and some of the silly stuff Labour keep rolling out (we will reduce tuition fees without spending a single penny of public money) will be exposed for the nonsense they are.
As they look more and more like the prospective government, the more focus will be put on their programme.
I can understand why there is this constant focus on 1997, but the 1964 and and 2010 results show how tough it can be to dislodge a government that has been in power for a long time. I think more attention should be paid to both.
1992 is burned into my memory. Lightening can of course strike twice.
Had Thatcher still been leading the Tories or Blair been leading Labour in 1992 then Labour probably would have won.
It was a victory the Tories won by replacing Thatcher with Major after the poll tax and Labour lost by keeping Kinnock after his 1987 defeat (albeit probably still an election too early for Blair)
Kinnock served a purpose after 1987. Can you imagine the enthusiasm for LOTO Eric Heffer? Didn't he have leadership aspirations around that time? Almost as delusional as Corbyn believing he could become Labour leader.
It didn't need to be Heffer. Kinnock's Shadow Cabinet in 1987 included the likes of John Smith, Jack Cunningham, Giles Radice, Donald Dewar and Denis Healey all of whom would have been more appealing to the average voter than he was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Cabinet_of_Neil_Kinnock
The Tories almost always remove their leaders after they lose a general election or lose their majority if they haven't already resigned, the last one they didn't was Heath after 1966 and that was only as it was a snap election by Wilson after only 2 years in power to increase his majority and Heath had only had a year in the job. Whereas Labour are much less ruthless allowing the likes of Kinnock and Corbyn to fight a second general election and lose it despite already having suffered a first general election defeat.
If Labour had been as ruthless as the Tories they would also have replaced Brown with David Miliband before the 2010 general election as the Tories replaced Boris/Truss with Sunak.
It is Labour's lack of ruthlessness compared to the Tories which largely explains why the Tories have been in power longer than Labour have over the last 50 to 100 years
“The Tories almost always remove their leaders after they lose a general election or lose their majority if they haven't already resigned, the last one they didn't was Heath after 1966…”
No. The last one they didn’t was TMay after 2017. And don’t try and tell me that her resignation 2 years later counts.
They did remove TMay in 2019 and replaced her with Boris. Despite the fact she won most seats she was removed as Tory leader in Spring 2019 and not allowed to fight another general election after failing to retain her majority. She only resigned as she knew she was about to lose a VONC amongst Tory MPs
She was allowed to stay after losing a majority in 2017, for two years, before resigning. That is the opposite to what you said. Have a read of Proverbs 11:2
She won most seats in 2017, she didn't even lose an election but she still wasn't allowed to fight the next general election in 2019
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
If Yes, Minister is any guide, official phone calls would have a civil servant listening in and taking notes. But yes, something has changed in the 21st Century. Some on pb have been calling for professionalisation of government communications (not in the PR spin sense) for some time. Remember when the government released the photo of the first Zoom Cabinet meeting, revealing a miscellany of unofficial email addresses?
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
If Yes, Minister is any guide, official phone calls would have a civil servant listening in and taking notes. But yes, something has changed in the 21st Century. Some on pb have been calling for professionalisation of government communications (not in the PR spin sense) for some time. Remember when the government released the photo of the Zoom Cabinet meeting, revealing a miscellany of unofficial email addresses?
1) Yes Minister was fiction. 2) Yes Minister was before mobile phones; all phones were far less common. 3) Yes Minister was before Internet communications.
I'm all for more professionalism in politics. But I'm also for efficient governance...
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
I wonder when it became acceptable or normal to mix official and non-official communications on the same platform. It goes without saying that it was a big mistake to start doing so.
More interpretatively, I am concerned that punters on here may be affected by recency bias and, more seriously, using the mistaken benchmark of the December 2019 election.
There are plenty of good, non-offal, reasons for proposing that Dec 19 was a one-off. It came on the back of a stalemate parliament and Boris galvanised the 'Get Brexit Done' vote which was the raison d'etre of the election. He was up against an unelectable Trotskyite anti-semite. It had one purpose: to deliver a majority so that Brexit could be enabled.
Since then, a series of catastrophic occurrences (many self-induced) have Ratnered the Conservative brand. And bubbling away in the background is the clusterfuck of Brexit - the very thing which motivated the Dec 19 vote.
No, the truer benchmark is the last proper General Election which was 08 June 2017 - which resulted in a hung parliament.
I know this part, unlike the previous, is more polemical and less factual but I think there's a good case for it. And I warn punters on here to pay attention, lest you lose your money.
It's a sobering thought that the Tories have won a majority only twice in the last 30 years - once when offering a referendum on Brexit, and once when offering Brexit itself.
Talking of sobering thoughts:
Labour MP Charlotte Nichols says that when she was elected in 2019, the Labour whips gave her a list of thirty male MPs that she should avoid being alone with, at risk of her personal safety.
In 2019, Labour saw 202 MPs elected.
Remove the female MPs, and you are left with 98.
Remove the men who have declared themselves as gay, and you are left with 83.
Remove those who were newly elected in 2019 and therefore unlikely to be on the whips' black list, and you are left with just 77 (by my reckoning).
Which suggests that a woman who finds herself alone with a heterosexual Labour MP stands an almost 40% chance of being in the company of a potentially dangerous sexual predator.....
Labour MPs or all MPs?
Edit - also, those six elected in 2019 still be included in your final figure as you said 'being left alone' without qualifying it.
Ive just taken a look at the gorgeous pouting Charlotte Nichols and it's very probably something she dreamt
It always surprises me how male posters are prepared to let their critical faculties disappear to appear PC. The idea that 40% of the Heterosexual Labour Party MPs or anyone else for that matter wouldn't be safe to be left alone with Charlotte Nichols is plainly ridiculous not to mention extremely insulting to those dozens of male MPs.
So all we are left with is some mischievous whips having a joke or Charlotte's fevered imagination. You choose.
I hate to join in the PB bloodsport of Roger Bashing, but on this point you are plain wrong.
Nichols specifically stated it was 30 MPs from a range of parties. The BBC in particular has tried to make the case that it was 30 Labour MPs.
Creasey and Duffield have corroborated Nichols' charge.
It's the Lynx effect. Here's one I did earlier of felix trying to get some peace on the Costa Del Sol....
The Lynx effect misogyny abounds. I have you down as a Bentley driving cross between Lesley Phillips and Terry-Thomas. Both of whom drove Bentleys. Ding-dong!
Not generally a fan of Simon Heffer but I am a big fan of French cinema and this review definitely serves its purpose and makes me want to see this film
"‘Much easier to say no’: Irish town unites in smartphone ban for young children Parents and schools across Greystones adopt voluntary ‘no-smartphone code’ in bid to curb peer pressure"
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
If Yes, Minister is any guide, official phone calls would have a civil servant listening in and taking notes. But yes, something has changed in the 21st Century. Some on pb have been calling for professionalisation of government communications (not in the PR spin sense) for some time. Remember when the government released the photo of the Zoom Cabinet meeting, revealing a miscellany of unofficial email addresses?
1) Yes Minister was fiction. 2) Yes Minister was before mobile phones; all phones were far less common. 3) Yes Minister was before Internet communications.
I'm all for more professionalism in politics. But I'm also for efficient governance...
"Yes Minister" is the Haynes manual for government.
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
I wonder when it became acceptable or normal to mix official and non-official communications on the same platform. It goes without saying that it was a big mistake to start doing so.
I think it's always been the case. 150 years ago, there were no phones, and meetings had to be held face-to-face. I'd be staggered if Queen Victoria and Lord Melbourne (or any of her PMs) only ever discussed official business at their meetings.
I mean, saying things like: "How're your kids?" is common, and seen as polite; but not business.
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
If Yes, Minister is any guide, official phone calls would have a civil servant listening in and taking notes. But yes, something has changed in the 21st Century. Some on pb have been calling for professionalisation of government communications (not in the PR spin sense) for some time. Remember when the government released the photo of the Zoom Cabinet meeting, revealing a miscellany of unofficial email addresses?
1) Yes Minister was fiction. 2) Yes Minister was before mobile phones; all phones were far less common. 3) Yes Minister was before Internet communications.
I'm all for more professionalism in politics. But I'm also for efficient governance...
"Yes Minister" is the Haynes manual for government.
To be serious, I do believe one toxic effect of Yes, Minister is that the Blair and Cameron governments really did believe the Civil Service comprised numerous Sir Humphreys conspiring to frustrate the will of the people, hence their attempts to bypass it with SpAds, sofa government, management consultants and so on, including off-grid communications.
"Yes Minister" is the Haynes manual for government.
Good analogy. Like a Haynes Manual, it was a useful guide a few decades ago, but while modern cars are superficially similar, open the bonnet and things are very different and you scratch your head as your 40 year old Haynes manual doesn’t even mention the ECU…
Right. Sorted my dissertation title. If you see me spending too much time on here between now and 8 September tell me to piss of and write some of it.
Away and get the flippers moving to your working ice floe!
Seriously, though, great news if the diss title is sorted - that means a big step in formulating the project.
Yes, once the dissertation title is settled, the ChatGPT prompts write themselves.
Or get meta, and get ChatGPT to do a dissertation on how dissertations written by ChatGPT are better than dissertations written by the previous version of ChatGPT.
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
If Yes, Minister is any guide, official phone calls would have a civil servant listening in and taking notes. But yes, something has changed in the 21st Century. Some on pb have been calling for professionalisation of government communications (not in the PR spin sense) for some time. Remember when the government released the photo of the Zoom Cabinet meeting, revealing a miscellany of unofficial email addresses?
1) Yes Minister was fiction. 2) Yes Minister was before mobile phones; all phones were far less common. 3) Yes Minister was before Internet communications.
I'm all for more professionalism in politics. But I'm also for efficient governance...
And, yet, it's still bloody funny and fresh today because it's still largely accurate.
"The Startup Party: reflections on the last 20 years, what could replace the Tories, and why And building a Q&A on Brexit, what really happened in No10, covid etc DOMINIC CUMMINGS"
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
If Yes, Minister is any guide, official phone calls would have a civil servant listening in and taking notes. But yes, something has changed in the 21st Century. Some on pb have been calling for professionalisation of government communications (not in the PR spin sense) for some time. Remember when the government released the photo of the first Zoom Cabinet meeting, revealing a miscellany of unofficial email addresses?
There is a tiny thing in "the blob" but it emerges by osmosis rather than organisation.
I have rather an old-fashioned attitude to professional services, which is you take your brief and execute your clients instructions (provided they are legal and ethical) to the best of your ability, but there are many Millennials and GenZers in the firm who simply refuse to work for clients and on client assignments on which they disagree.
If that's the case in a Big4 consultancy I can only imagine it's also widespread in the civil service, with some others just going through the motions.
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
If Yes, Minister is any guide, official phone calls would have a civil servant listening in and taking notes. But yes, something has changed in the 21st Century. Some on pb have been calling for professionalisation of government communications (not in the PR spin sense) for some time. Remember when the government released the photo of the Zoom Cabinet meeting, revealing a miscellany of unofficial email addresses?
1) Yes Minister was fiction. 2) Yes Minister was before mobile phones; all phones were far less common. 3) Yes Minister was before Internet communications.
I'm all for more professionalism in politics. But I'm also for efficient governance...
And, yet, it's still bloody funny and fresh today because it's still largely accurate.
I agree, it is funny, not least because of the 3 main actors and excellent scrips. It isn't a documentary.
But it is a sitcom, as much as Fawlty Towers was, and I wouldn't expect to learn much about how the hotel industry works from that. While I loved Green Wing as the best hospital comedy, I wouldn't claim that as a documentary either.
My old flatmate from uni recently retired from the Whitehall CS, and from his description the biggest obstacle to getting anything done was the Machiavellian plotting by junior ministers and their SPADs against each other.
More interpretatively, I am concerned that punters on here may be affected by recency bias and, more seriously, using the mistaken benchmark of the December 2019 election.
There are plenty of good, non-offal, reasons for proposing that Dec 19 was a one-off. It came on the back of a stalemate parliament and Boris galvanised the 'Get Brexit Done' vote which was the raison d'etre of the election. He was up against an unelectable Trotskyite anti-semite. It had one purpose: to deliver a majority so that Brexit could be enabled.
Since then, a series of catastrophic occurrences (many self-induced) have Ratnered the Conservative brand. And bubbling away in the background is the clusterfuck of Brexit - the very thing which motivated the Dec 19 vote.
No, the truer benchmark is the last proper General Election which was 08 June 2017 - which resulted in a hung parliament.
I know this part, unlike the previous, is more polemical and less factual but I think there's a good case for it. And I warn punters on here to pay attention, lest you lose your money.
It's a sobering thought that the Tories have won a majority only twice in the last 30 years - once when offering a referendum on Brexit, and once when offering Brexit itself.
Talking of sobering thoughts:
Labour MP Charlotte Nichols says that when she was elected in 2019, the Labour whips gave her a list of thirty male MPs that she should avoid being alone with, at risk of her personal safety.
In 2019, Labour saw 202 MPs elected.
Remove the female MPs, and you are left with 98.
Remove the men who have declared themselves as gay, and you are left with 83.
Remove those who were newly elected in 2019 and therefore unlikely to be on the whips' black list, and you are left with just 77 (by my reckoning).
Which suggests that a woman who finds herself alone with a heterosexual Labour MP stands an almost 40% chance of being in the company of a potentially dangerous sexual predator.....
Labour MPs or all MPs?
Edit - also, those six elected in 2019 still be included in your final figure as you said 'being left alone' without qualifying it.
Ive just taken a look at the gorgeous pouting Charlotte Nichols and it's very probably something she dreamt
It always surprises me how male posters are prepared to let their critical faculties disappear to appear PC. The idea that 40% of the Heterosexual Labour Party MPs or anyone else for that matter wouldn't be safe to be left alone with Charlotte Nichols is plainly ridiculous not to mention extremely insulting to those dozens of male MPs.
So all we are left with is some mischievous whips having a joke or Charlotte's fevered imagination. You choose.
I hate to join in the PB bloodsport of Roger Bashing, but on this point you are plain wrong.
Nichols specifically stated it was 30 MPs from a range of parties. The BBC in particular has tried to make the case that it was 30 Labour MPs.
Creasey and Duffield have corroborated Nichols' charge.
It's the Lynx effect. Here's one I did earlier of felix trying to get some peace on the Costa Del Sol....
The Lynx effect misogyny abounds. I have you down as a Bentley driving cross between Lesley Phillips and Terry-Thomas. Both of whom drove Bentleys. Ding-dong!
"Leslie" Phillips, in case he's minded to sue.
I'd be very impressed if he was able to. Maybe via a seance.
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
There's some really good stuff on this trend in the Matt Levine newsletter. You need to subscribe to read it but it's free and everybody should be subscribed to Matt Levine's newsletter because it's totally great. Basically the Securities Exchange Commission has an old rule saying you have to preserve inter-office memoranda, and they're now using it to say that you had to preserve all your Whats App texts, and if you didn't they're going to fine you. And they're extracting pretty sizable fines from basically every single bank.
In 1948, if you were a broker, you probably communicated with your coworkers in roughly three ways:
Inter-office memoranda, for quite formal occasions. For new office policies, formal write-ups of investment ideas, etc., you’d spring for the typewriter ribbons and carbon paper. Telephone. If your coworkers worked in a different branch office, you might spring for a long-distance call to talk about urgent matters. Walking over to their desk and talking to them, would probably be the main form of communication.
So when the SEC said that brokers needed to keep copies of their business correspondence, that implicitly assumed a certain level of formality. The SEC might plausibly come to a broker in 1948 and say “show me all of your internal communications for the last two years,” and he (he) might hand the SEC, like, 30 memos, and the SEC might say “ah right that’s a reasonable number of memos” and then go read them.
One thing that has happened in the intervening 74 years is that written communication has become much much much much much much much easier and more casual. I used to work on a desk at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., where the default method of communication with someone who sat two seats away from you was instant messaging. [8] There were some mornings when I sent more than 100 inter-office memoranda, though like 20 of them would be “lol” or “fml.” [9]
And so then if the SEC thought that a broker was up to no good, it could say “give me all of the internal communications of one particular desk for the month of September,” and the broker would hand over like 500,000 emails and instant messages, and the SEC would run some search terms on this vast corpus, and the search terms would be like “fraud” and “spoof” and “manipulate” and “sucker” and “fml,” and they’d get a hit like “fml i just did a fraud oops” and go from there to build a case. In 1948, it would be very weird for a broker to send around an inter-office memo with the subject line “Re: We need to do more fraud.” He might say it, but only out loud, in person, in a form not required to be preserved for SEC examination. By 2011, it was just expected that if a broker was doing fraud there would be dozens of eternally preserved electronic messages about it.
I seem to be alone here, though not I suspect in the minority in the general population, in being totally uncaring about the inquiry and incensed by one thing or another.
In my view and I suspect the views of many an inquiry is pretty much a huge waste of time and money. Not just on covid but on anything. Rarely do they change any minds and any useful information that comes out or actionable points get ignored anyway. So what is the point. May as well just email a blank conclusion form to everyone and say fill in your own view.
Funny how "centrists" accuse the left of operating a "purity test".
Yesterday, SKS blocked Jamie Driscoll, the incumbent Mayor of the North of Tyne, from standing to be Mayor of the North East.
His alleged "crime"? Talking to Ken Loach.
His real "crime"? Being a socialist.
Ken Loach, a great social commentator through his movies like Kes, nonetheless has some unconventional views regarding Labour's anti -Semitism scandal.
Loach and Corbyn and their acolytes have views which should be unacceptable to any modern fair-minded political party.
The most shameful thing about the government's behaviour during the pandemic wasn't whatever rules they broke personally, but that they agreed to stupid, tyrannical and counter-productive lockdowns at all, and then deliberately tried to terrify the public to keep them in place.
No it really wasn't.
It was that they imposed those rules and then didn't keep them themselves. They deprived people of the right to go to birthday parties or visit dying relatives, whilst all the while mocking us.
The British public will never forgive them for this and on election day vengeance will be brutal.
I agree with Fishing. The lockdowns should never have happened, apart from the first one when we weren't sure what was happening with the virus.
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
There's some really good stuff on this trend in the Matt Levine newsletter. You need to subscribe to read it but it's free and everybody should be subscribed to Matt Levine's newsletter because it's totally great. Basically the Securities Exchange Commission has an old rule saying you have to preserve inter-office memoranda, and they're now using it to say that you had to preserve all your Whats App texts, and if you didn't they're going to fine you. And they're extracting pretty sizable fines from basically every single bank.
In 1948, if you were a broker, you probably communicated with your coworkers in roughly three ways:
Inter-office memoranda, for quite formal occasions. For new office policies, formal write-ups of investment ideas, etc., you’d spring for the typewriter ribbons and carbon paper. Telephone. If your coworkers worked in a different branch office, you might spring for a long-distance call to talk about urgent matters. Walking over to their desk and talking to them, would probably be the main form of communication.
So when the SEC said that brokers needed to keep copies of their business correspondence, that implicitly assumed a certain level of formality. The SEC might plausibly come to a broker in 1948 and say “show me all of your internal communications for the last two years,” and he (he) might hand the SEC, like, 30 memos, and the SEC might say “ah right that’s a reasonable number of memos” and then go read them.
One thing that has happened in the intervening 74 years is that written communication has become much much much much much much much easier and more casual. I used to work on a desk at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., where the default method of communication with someone who sat two seats away from you was instant messaging. [8] There were some mornings when I sent more than 100 inter-office memoranda, though like 20 of them would be “lol” or “fml.” [9]
And so then if the SEC thought that a broker was up to no good, it could say “give me all of the internal communications of one particular desk for the month of September,” and the broker would hand over like 500,000 emails and instant messages, and the SEC would run some search terms on this vast corpus, and the search terms would be like “fraud” and “spoof” and “manipulate” and “sucker” and “fml,” and they’d get a hit like “fml i just did a fraud oops” and go from there to build a case. In 1948, it would be very weird for a broker to send around an inter-office memo with the subject line “Re: We need to do more fraud.” He might say it, but only out loud, in person, in a form not required to be preserved for SEC examination. By 2011, it was just expected that if a broker was doing fraud there would be dozens of eternally preserved electronic messages about it.
Do we know why people starting using instant messaging to communicate with someone sitting two seats away? I've never understood that.
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
If Yes, Minister is any guide, official phone calls would have a civil servant listening in and taking notes. But yes, something has changed in the 21st Century. Some on pb have been calling for professionalisation of government communications (not in the PR spin sense) for some time. Remember when the government released the photo of the first Zoom Cabinet meeting, revealing a miscellany of unofficial email addresses?
There is a tiny thing in "the blob" but it emerges by osmosis rather than organisation.
I have rather an old-fashioned attitude to professional services, which is you take your brief and execute your clients instructions (provided they are legal and ethical) to the best of your ability, but there are many Millennials and GenZers in the firm who simply refuse to work for clients and on client assignments on which they disagree.
If that's the case in a Big4 consultancy I can only imagine it's also widespread in the civil service, with some others just going through the motions.
In some ways I quite admire a principled stance towards towards dealing with those you fundamentally disagree with. However I can't really see how they could continue working for said employer. Presumably they realise that if they aren't helping hide potentates ill gotten gains in tax havens (or whatever it is they're being asked to do) someone else at their firm is.
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
There's some really good stuff on this trend in the Matt Levine newsletter. You need to subscribe to read it but it's free and everybody should be subscribed to Matt Levine's newsletter because it's totally great. Basically the Securities Exchange Commission has an old rule saying you have to preserve inter-office memoranda, and they're now using it to say that you had to preserve all your Whats App texts, and if you didn't they're going to fine you. And they're extracting pretty sizable fines from basically every single bank.
In 1948, if you were a broker, you probably communicated with your coworkers in roughly three ways:
Inter-office memoranda, for quite formal occasions. For new office policies, formal write-ups of investment ideas, etc., you’d spring for the typewriter ribbons and carbon paper. Telephone. If your coworkers worked in a different branch office, you might spring for a long-distance call to talk about urgent matters. Walking over to their desk and talking to them, would probably be the main form of communication.
So when the SEC said that brokers needed to keep copies of their business correspondence, that implicitly assumed a certain level of formality. The SEC might plausibly come to a broker in 1948 and say “show me all of your internal communications for the last two years,” and he (he) might hand the SEC, like, 30 memos, and the SEC might say “ah right that’s a reasonable number of memos” and then go read them.
One thing that has happened in the intervening 74 years is that written communication has become much much much much much much much easier and more casual. I used to work on a desk at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., where the default method of communication with someone who sat two seats away from you was instant messaging. [8] There were some mornings when I sent more than 100 inter-office memoranda, though like 20 of them would be “lol” or “fml.” [9]
And so then if the SEC thought that a broker was up to no good, it could say “give me all of the internal communications of one particular desk for the month of September,” and the broker would hand over like 500,000 emails and instant messages, and the SEC would run some search terms on this vast corpus, and the search terms would be like “fraud” and “spoof” and “manipulate” and “sucker” and “fml,” and they’d get a hit like “fml i just did a fraud oops” and go from there to build a case. In 1948, it would be very weird for a broker to send around an inter-office memo with the subject line “Re: We need to do more fraud.” He might say it, but only out loud, in person, in a form not required to be preserved for SEC examination. By 2011, it was just expected that if a broker was doing fraud there would be dozens of eternally preserved electronic messages about it.
Do we know why people starting using instant messaging to communicate with someone sitting two seats away? I've never understood that.
Saves interrupting them, or waiting till they are free. I've been known to email Mrs C downstairs but often it's to report something while I remember, and I don't want to wait till she is off the phone in case I forget.
Funny how "centrists" accuse the left of operating a "purity test".
Yesterday, SKS blocked Jamie Driscoll, the incumbent Mayor of the North of Tyne, from standing to be Mayor of the North East.
His alleged "crime"? Talking to Ken Loach.
His real "crime"? Being a socialist.
Ken Loach, a great social commentator through his movies like Kes, nonetheless has some unconventional views regarding Labour's anti -Semitism scandal.
Loach and Corbyn and their acolytes have views which should be unacceptable to any modern fair-minded political party.
Though I wouldn't regard appearing at the same event as Loach as evidence of anti-semitism in an individual.
The most shameful thing about the government's behaviour during the pandemic wasn't whatever rules they broke personally, but that they agreed to stupid, tyrannical and counter-productive lockdowns at all, and then deliberately tried to terrify the public to keep them in place.
No it really wasn't.
It was that they imposed those rules and then didn't keep them themselves. They deprived people of the right to go to birthday parties or visit dying relatives, whilst all the while mocking us.
The British public will never forgive them for this and on election day vengeance will be brutal.
I agree with Fishing. The lockdowns should never have happened, apart from the first one when we weren't sure what was happening with the virus.
Oh behave. The September and December late lockdown debacles were brutal in terms of fatalities.
For all his governmental chaos, Johnson got lockdowns almost right.
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
There's some really good stuff on this trend in the Matt Levine newsletter. You need to subscribe to read it but it's free and everybody should be subscribed to Matt Levine's newsletter because it's totally great. Basically the Securities Exchange Commission has an old rule saying you have to preserve inter-office memoranda, and they're now using it to say that you had to preserve all your Whats App texts, and if you didn't they're going to fine you. And they're extracting pretty sizable fines from basically every single bank.
In 1948, if you were a broker, you probably communicated with your coworkers in roughly three ways:
Inter-office memoranda, for quite formal occasions. For new office policies, formal write-ups of investment ideas, etc., you’d spring for the typewriter ribbons and carbon paper. Telephone. If your coworkers worked in a different branch office, you might spring for a long-distance call to talk about urgent matters. Walking over to their desk and talking to them, would probably be the main form of communication.
So when the SEC said that brokers needed to keep copies of their business correspondence, that implicitly assumed a certain level of formality. The SEC might plausibly come to a broker in 1948 and say “show me all of your internal communications for the last two years,” and he (he) might hand the SEC, like, 30 memos, and the SEC might say “ah right that’s a reasonable number of memos” and then go read them.
One thing that has happened in the intervening 74 years is that written communication has become much much much much much much much easier and more casual. I used to work on a desk at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., where the default method of communication with someone who sat two seats away from you was instant messaging. [8] There were some mornings when I sent more than 100 inter-office memoranda, though like 20 of them would be “lol” or “fml.” [9]
And so then if the SEC thought that a broker was up to no good, it could say “give me all of the internal communications of one particular desk for the month of September,” and the broker would hand over like 500,000 emails and instant messages, and the SEC would run some search terms on this vast corpus, and the search terms would be like “fraud” and “spoof” and “manipulate” and “sucker” and “fml,” and they’d get a hit like “fml i just did a fraud oops” and go from there to build a case. In 1948, it would be very weird for a broker to send around an inter-office memo with the subject line “Re: We need to do more fraud.” He might say it, but only out loud, in person, in a form not required to be preserved for SEC examination. By 2011, it was just expected that if a broker was doing fraud there would be dozens of eternally preserved electronic messages about it.
Do we know why people starting using instant messaging to communicate with someone sitting two seats away? I've never understood that.
I can offer one reason, I used to im our support guys even though they sat at the desk behind me because actually talking face to face would involve them telling me about how great the match last night/ the latest conspiracy theory they thought there must be some truth too and wasting half an hour of my time. Talking direct is often taken as permission to spout about all sorts of other issues and if you have no interest in those other issues using ims or emails is a way to avoid them
Do we know why people starting using instant messaging to communicate with someone sitting two seats away? I've never understood that.
Personally I sometimes use text for people who aren't far away because - You're texting other people who aren't as close and sometimes also involving them in the conversation - Most of what you're talking about is happening on the internet so if you want to share links then text is better - If there's someone between you and them then you'd have to either get up and leave whatever else you're working on or talk across them which is maybe annoying to them - Text is less disruptive to the other person than walking over and talking to them because they don't have to look at it until they've finished whatever they're concentrating on
What this inquiry should be focusing on, rather than government tittle tattle, is how decisions were made, and how, in some cases the expert advice was so wrong (I am not suggesting for a moment that it was anything other than genuine). In other words, did the expert structure have built into it an excessive degree of caution, a tendency to ignore the non medical consequences of their decisions and a degree of group think that was unhealthy? How could we do it better the next time?
You misunderstand the nature of the expert advice given. SAGE was set up such that Govt would pose it questions and SAGE would give an answer. Policymaking remained with Govt and it was explicitly Govt’s job to balance the different issues at play, like medical and non-medical consequences.
What was striking was how the modelling seemed to underplay how the public would take their own measures, rather than need laws/rules to help reduce spread. Almost every time the models overestimated how bad things would get, and arguably they didn’t as the people of the country took their own choices to not socialise, or to work from home (if they could). That hints at a possibility that a more grown up approach may have work, rather than the blunt scare tactics. But perhaps it was the scare that induced the behaviour change. I also think that while I understand the SAGE remit, there was a lot of leak of experts onto the media, and this did not help either. It’s hard to know how other nations experienced this clash between science, advisory boards and government, with the media muddying the water at every point. But I’d hope most were better than ours.
To be fair, it was only when the modelling pointed to potential very bad outcomes that the media aimed to amplify it (for drama). And they inevitably seized upon the worst projection (because there were always multiple projections ranging from best case to worst case) and focused entirely upon that one.
When actually looking at the regular models presented, it looked like the central case undershot reality about one time in three and overshot it maybe two times in three. That wouldn't make for good copy, though, so the less dramatic ones were simply ignored by the media.
The mocking they got from some media commentators (and others) in September for projecting a possible increase to as many as two hundred deaths per day as an illustration of exponential growth if nothing happened was lengthy and protracted, and now that mocking looks really ignorant in retrospect.
What this inquiry should be focusing on, rather than government tittle tattle, is how decisions were made, and how, in some cases the expert advice was so wrong (I am not suggesting for a moment that it was anything other than genuine). In other words, did the expert structure have built into it an excessive degree of caution, a tendency to ignore the non medical consequences of their decisions and a degree of group think that was unhealthy? How could we do it better the next time?
You misunderstand the nature of the expert advice given. SAGE was set up such that Govt would pose it questions and SAGE would give an answer. Policymaking remained with Govt and it was explicitly Govt’s job to balance the different issues at play, like medical and non-medical consequences.
What was striking was how the modelling seemed to underplay how the public would take their own measures, rather than need laws/rules to help reduce spread. Almost every time the models overestimated how bad things would get, and arguably they didn’t as the people of the country took their own choices to not socialise, or to work from home (if they could). That hints at a possibility that a more grown up approach may have work, rather than the blunt scare tactics. But perhaps it was the scare that induced the behaviour change. I also think that while I understand the SAGE remit, there was a lot of leak of experts onto the media, and this did not help either. It’s hard to know how other nations experienced this clash between science, advisory boards and government, with the media muddying the water at every point. But I’d hope most were better than ours.
To be fair, it was only when the modelling pointed to potential very bad outcomes that the media aimed to amplify it (for drama). And they inevitably seized upon the worst projection (because there were always multiple projections ranging from best case to worst case) and focused entirely upon that one.
When actually looking at the regular models presented, it looked like the central case undershot reality about one time in three and overshot it maybe two times in three. That wouldn't make for good copy, though, so the less dramatic ones were simply ignored by the media.
The mocking they got from some media commentators (and others) in September for projecting a possible increase to as many as two hundred deaths per day as an illustration of exponential growth if nothing happened was lengthy and protracted, and now that mocking looks really ignorant in retrospect.
The large amount of both ignorant and deliberately contrarian journalism, needs to form a large chapter of the inquiry.
Do we know why people starting using instant messaging to communicate with someone sitting two seats away? I've never understood that.
Personally I sometimes use text for people who aren't far away because - You're texting other people who aren't as close and sometimes also involving them in the conversation - Most of what you're talking about is happening on the internet so if you want to share links then text is better - If there's someone between you and them then you'd have to either get up and leave whatever else you're working on or talk across them which is maybe annoying to them - Text is less disruptive to the other person than walking over and talking to them because they don't have to look at it until they've finished whatever they're concentrating on
The message is only meant for the person you send it to and don't want anyone else to hear it.
*) Epidemiolocally, getting people from all over the country together into a crowded room, eating and drinking, after and before meeting members of the public, was stupid. And unnecessary. IMV far worse than the No.10 debacle.
He may not have been charged, but it was stupid, unnecessary and dangerous.
Others may differ.
Insert variation on Mandy Rice Davies quote here……
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
If Yes, Minister is any guide, official phone calls would have a civil servant listening in and taking notes. But yes, something has changed in the 21st Century. Some on pb have been calling for professionalisation of government communications (not in the PR spin sense) for some time. Remember when the government released the photo of the Zoom Cabinet meeting, revealing a miscellany of unofficial email addresses?
1) Yes Minister was fiction. 2) Yes Minister was before mobile phones; all phones were far less common. 3) Yes Minister was before Internet communications.
I'm all for more professionalism in politics. But I'm also for efficient governance...
And, yet, it's still bloody funny and fresh today because it's still largely accurate.
I agree, it is funny, not least because of the 3 main actors and excellent scrips. It isn't a documentary.
But it is a sitcom, as much as Fawlty Towers was, and I wouldn't expect to learn much about how the hotel industry works from that. While I loved Green Wing as the best hospital comedy, I wouldn't claim that as a documentary either.
My old flatmate from uni recently retired from the Whitehall CS, and from his description the biggest obstacle to getting anything done was the Machiavellian plotting by junior ministers and their SPADs against each other.
I agree with this. Also part of the reason Fawlty Towers was funny was that there were some recognisable tropes that were relevant to the seaside hotels that existed at the time. While accurate at the time, the hospitality industry has moved on a lot in the last 40 years.
It’s similar with Whitehall and Westminster. In The Thick of It was painfully accurate for a while, but not so much these days.
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
If Yes, Minister is any guide, official phone calls would have a civil servant listening in and taking notes. But yes, something has changed in the 21st Century. Some on pb have been calling for professionalisation of government communications (not in the PR spin sense) for some time. Remember when the government released the photo of the first Zoom Cabinet meeting, revealing a miscellany of unofficial email addresses?
There is a tiny thing in "the blob" but it emerges by osmosis rather than organisation.
I have rather an old-fashioned attitude to professional services, which is you take your brief and execute your clients instructions (provided they are legal and ethical) to the best of your ability, but there are many Millennials and GenZers in the firm who simply refuse to work for clients and on client assignments on which they disagree.
If that's the case in a Big4 consultancy I can only imagine it's also widespread in the civil service, with some others just going through the motions.
In some ways I quite admire a principled stance towards towards dealing with those you fundamentally disagree with. However I can't really see how they could continue working for said employer. Presumably they realise that if they aren't helping hide potentates ill gotten gains in tax havens (or whatever it is they're being asked to do) someone else at their firm is.
Essentially my view is professional and, i think more broadly, it helps to avoid polarisation, chaos and disfunctionality in wider society.
Privately, I would express my views, and vote for them accordingly, but I wouldn't look to obstruct my business on account of my personal views.
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
If Yes, Minister is any guide, official phone calls would have a civil servant listening in and taking notes. But yes, something has changed in the 21st Century. Some on pb have been calling for professionalisation of government communications (not in the PR spin sense) for some time. Remember when the government released the photo of the Zoom Cabinet meeting, revealing a miscellany of unofficial email addresses?
1) Yes Minister was fiction. 2) Yes Minister was before mobile phones; all phones were far less common. 3) Yes Minister was before Internet communications.
I'm all for more professionalism in politics. But I'm also for efficient governance...
And, yet, it's still bloody funny and fresh today because it's still largely accurate.
I agree, it is funny, not least because of the 3 main actors and excellent scrips. It isn't a documentary.
But it is a sitcom, as much as Fawlty Towers was, and I wouldn't expect to learn much about how the hotel industry works from that. While I loved Green Wing as the best hospital comedy, I wouldn't claim that as a documentary either.
My old flatmate from uni recently retired from the Whitehall CS, and from his description the biggest obstacle to getting anything done was the Machiavellian plotting by junior ministers and their SPADs against each other.
I agree with this. Also part of the reason Fawlty Towers was funny was that there were some recognisable tropes that were relevant to the seaside hotels that existed at the time. While accurate at the time, the hospitality industry has moved on a lot in the last 40 years.
It’s similar with Whitehall and Westminster. In The Thick of It was painfully accurate for a while, but not so much these days.
“The IT Crowd” was obviously written by someone who’d spent a lot of time observing a corporate IT department. The key to a good sitcom, is to emphasise the absurdites of the real situation.
We’ve all had the phone answered by someone who only slightly paraphrases “Hello, this is IT, have you switched it off and on again?”
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
If Yes, Minister is any guide, official phone calls would have a civil servant listening in and taking notes. But yes, something has changed in the 21st Century. Some on pb have been calling for professionalisation of government communications (not in the PR spin sense) for some time. Remember when the government released the photo of the Zoom Cabinet meeting, revealing a miscellany of unofficial email addresses?
1) Yes Minister was fiction. 2) Yes Minister was before mobile phones; all phones were far less common. 3) Yes Minister was before Internet communications.
I'm all for more professionalism in politics. But I'm also for efficient governance...
And, yet, it's still bloody funny and fresh today because it's still largely accurate.
I agree, it is funny, not least because of the 3 main actors and excellent scrips. It isn't a documentary.
But it is a sitcom, as much as Fawlty Towers was, and I wouldn't expect to learn much about how the hotel industry works from that. While I loved Green Wing as the best hospital comedy, I wouldn't claim that as a documentary either.
My old flatmate from uni recently retired from the Whitehall CS, and from his description the biggest obstacle to getting anything done was the Machiavellian plotting by junior ministers and their SPADs against each other.
I agree with this. Also part of the reason Fawlty Towers was funny was that there were some recognisable tropes that were relevant to the seaside hotels that existed at the time. While accurate at the time, the hospitality industry has moved on a lot in the last 40 years.
It’s similar with Whitehall and Westminster. In The Thick of It was painfully accurate for a while, but not so much these days.
“The IT Crowd” was obviously written by someone who’d spent a lot of time observing a corporate IT department. The key to a good sitcom, is to emphasise the absurdites of the real situation.
We’ve all had the phone answered by someone who only slightly paraphrases “Hello, this is IT, have you switched it off and on again?”
Years ago, I was looking through a pre WWI (1913 I think) manual for a fire control table for a battleship. An early electro-mechanical computer.
In case of it all going wrong, the instructions were (essentially)
1) turn everything off 2) set all the dials zero 3) count to 10 - make sure all the gears had stopped turning. 4) turn it back on
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
If Yes, Minister is any guide, official phone calls would have a civil servant listening in and taking notes. But yes, something has changed in the 21st Century. Some on pb have been calling for professionalisation of government communications (not in the PR spin sense) for some time. Remember when the government released the photo of the Zoom Cabinet meeting, revealing a miscellany of unofficial email addresses?
1) Yes Minister was fiction. 2) Yes Minister was before mobile phones; all phones were far less common. 3) Yes Minister was before Internet communications.
I'm all for more professionalism in politics. But I'm also for efficient governance...
And, yet, it's still bloody funny and fresh today because it's still largely accurate.
I agree, it is funny, not least because of the 3 main actors and excellent scrips. It isn't a documentary.
But it is a sitcom, as much as Fawlty Towers was, and I wouldn't expect to learn much about how the hotel industry works from that. While I loved Green Wing as the best hospital comedy, I wouldn't claim that as a documentary either.
My old flatmate from uni recently retired from the Whitehall CS, and from his description the biggest obstacle to getting anything done was the Machiavellian plotting by junior ministers and their SPADs against each other.
I agree with this. Also part of the reason Fawlty Towers was funny was that there were some recognisable tropes that were relevant to the seaside hotels that existed at the time. While accurate at the time, the hospitality industry has moved on a lot in the last 40 years.
It’s similar with Whitehall and Westminster. In The Thick of It was painfully accurate for a while, but not so much these days.
“The IT Crowd” was obviously written by someone who’d spent a lot of time observing a corporate IT department. The key to a good sitcom, is to emphasise the absurdites of the real situation.
We’ve all had the phone answered by someone who only slightly paraphrases “Hello, this is IT, have you switched it off and on again?”
Years ago, I was looking through a pre WWI (1913 I think) manual for a fire control table for a battleship. An early electro-mechanical computer.
In case of it all going wrong, the instructions were (essentially)
1) turn everything off 2) set all the dials zero 3) count to 10 - make sure all the gears had stopped turning. 4) turn it back on
More interpretatively, I am concerned that punters on here may be affected by recency bias and, more seriously, using the mistaken benchmark of the December 2019 election.
There are plenty of good, non-offal, reasons for proposing that Dec 19 was a one-off. It came on the back of a stalemate parliament and Boris galvanised the 'Get Brexit Done' vote which was the raison d'etre of the election. He was up against an unelectable Trotskyite anti-semite. It had one purpose: to deliver a majority so that Brexit could be enabled.
Since then, a series of catastrophic occurrences (many self-induced) have Ratnered the Conservative brand. And bubbling away in the background is the clusterfuck of Brexit - the very thing which motivated the Dec 19 vote.
No, the truer benchmark is the last proper General Election which was 08 June 2017 - which resulted in a hung parliament.
I know this part, unlike the previous, is more polemical and less factual but I think there's a good case for it. And I warn punters on here to pay attention, lest you lose your money.
It's a sobering thought that the Tories have won a majority only twice in the last 30 years - once when offering a referendum on Brexit, and once when offering Brexit itself.
Talking of sobering thoughts:
Labour MP Charlotte Nichols says that when she was elected in 2019, the Labour whips gave her a list of thirty male MPs that she should avoid being alone with, at risk of her personal safety.
In 2019, Labour saw 202 MPs elected.
Remove the female MPs, and you are left with 98.
Remove the men who have declared themselves as gay, and you are left with 83.
Remove those who were newly elected in 2019 and therefore unlikely to be on the whips' black list, and you are left with just 77 (by my reckoning).
Which suggests that a woman who finds herself alone with a heterosexual Labour MP stands an almost 40% chance of being in the company of a potentially dangerous sexual predator.....
(edit/ I am making the assumption here that the MPs on the Labour whips' blacklist were all their own, which does seem to be the inference of the story, but I haven't seen explicitly stated)
Why are you removing those known to be gay? Roberts, Pincher and the Tory MP who has been barred from Westminster for over 12 months now were all allegedly involved in same-sex incidents. It’s quite likely that any list is agnostic on proclivity.
Because Ms Nichols is a woman being warned about being alone with male MPs.
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
If Yes, Minister is any guide, official phone calls would have a civil servant listening in and taking notes. But yes, something has changed in the 21st Century. Some on pb have been calling for professionalisation of government communications (not in the PR spin sense) for some time. Remember when the government released the photo of the first Zoom Cabinet meeting, revealing a miscellany of unofficial email addresses?
There is a tiny thing in "the blob" but it emerges by osmosis rather than organisation.
I have rather an old-fashioned attitude to professional services, which is you take your brief and execute your clients instructions (provided they are legal and ethical) to the best of your ability, but there are many Millennials and GenZers in the firm who simply refuse to work for clients and on client assignments on which they disagree.
If that's the case in a Big4 consultancy I can only imagine it's also widespread in the civil service, with some others just going through the motions.
In some ways I quite admire a principled stance towards towards dealing with those you fundamentally disagree with. However I can't really see how they could continue working for said employer. Presumably they realise that if they aren't helping hide potentates ill gotten gains in tax havens (or whatever it is they're being asked to do) someone else at their firm is.
Essentially my view is professional and, i think more broadly, it helps to avoid polarisation, chaos and disfunctionality in wider society.
Privately, I would express my views, and vote for them accordingly, but I wouldn't look to obstruct my business on account of my personal views.
I don't disapprove of people taking a principled stance, so long as they, in turn, recognise that their principles come with a price attached to them.
So, if you are unwilling to work for a particular client, on political grounds, you accept that your employer is entitled to dismiss you.
In the case of barristers, and solicitors who are advocates, there is a different principle at stake. Namely, that the justice system exists for the benefit of unpopular people, as well as for the benefit of popular people, and it's your job as an advocate to represent them, regardless of your own beliefs.
The most shameful thing about the government's behaviour during the pandemic wasn't whatever rules they broke personally, but that they agreed to stupid, tyrannical and counter-productive lockdowns at all, and then deliberately tried to terrify the public to keep them in place.
No it really wasn't.
It was that they imposed those rules and then didn't keep them themselves. They deprived people of the right to go to birthday parties or visit dying relatives, whilst all the while mocking us.
The British public will never forgive them for this and on election day vengeance will be brutal.
I agree with Fishing. The lockdowns should never have happened, apart from the first one when we weren't sure what was happening with the virus.
Oh behave. The September and December late lockdown debacles were brutal in terms of fatalities.
For all his governmental chaos, Johnson got lockdowns almost right.
Locking down until we had a vaccine saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But we probably should have kept kids in school.
Over the past month 3 local by elections, Swansea, Scarborough and Camden, all showing a very significant fall in the Labour percentage vote, each seat has of course individual issues but the pattern has been the same, drops of 18%, and two each of 20% plus. These accompany the May 4th results when Labour did not do as well as many would have thought. Maybe there is a straw in the wind.
Labour never seems to do as well in local elections, as the Conservatives do, in opposition. The Conservatives almost always outperformed their poll rating, in local elections, between 1997-2010. Labour have always underperformed theirs after 2010.
Do we know why people starting using instant messaging to communicate with someone sitting two seats away? I've never understood that.
Personally I sometimes use text for people who aren't far away because - You're texting other people who aren't as close and sometimes also involving them in the conversation - Most of what you're talking about is happening on the internet so if you want to share links then text is better - If there's someone between you and them then you'd have to either get up and leave whatever else you're working on or talk across them which is maybe annoying to them - Text is less disruptive to the other person than walking over and talking to them because they don't have to look at it until they've finished whatever they're concentrating on
It is also handy when you have had a row with your spouse and you are both too angry and upset to speak to each other.
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
If Yes, Minister is any guide, official phone calls would have a civil servant listening in and taking notes. But yes, something has changed in the 21st Century. Some on pb have been calling for professionalisation of government communications (not in the PR spin sense) for some time. Remember when the government released the photo of the Zoom Cabinet meeting, revealing a miscellany of unofficial email addresses?
1) Yes Minister was fiction. 2) Yes Minister was before mobile phones; all phones were far less common. 3) Yes Minister was before Internet communications.
I'm all for more professionalism in politics. But I'm also for efficient governance...
And, yet, it's still bloody funny and fresh today because it's still largely accurate.
I agree, it is funny, not least because of the 3 main actors and excellent scrips. It isn't a documentary.
But it is a sitcom, as much as Fawlty Towers was, and I wouldn't expect to learn much about how the hotel industry works from that. While I loved Green Wing as the best hospital comedy, I wouldn't claim that as a documentary either.
My old flatmate from uni recently retired from the Whitehall CS, and from his description the biggest obstacle to getting anything done was the Machiavellian plotting by junior ministers and their SPADs against each other.
I agree with this. Also part of the reason Fawlty Towers was funny was that there were some recognisable tropes that were relevant to the seaside hotels that existed at the time. While accurate at the time, the hospitality industry has moved on a lot in the last 40 years.
It’s similar with Whitehall and Westminster. In The Thick of It was painfully accurate for a while, but not so much these days.
“The IT Crowd” was obviously written by someone who’d spent a lot of time observing a corporate IT department. The key to a good sitcom, is to emphasise the absurdites of the real situation.
We’ve all had the phone answered by someone who only slightly paraphrases “Hello, this is IT, have you switched it off and on again?”
Years ago, I was looking through a pre WWI (1913 I think) manual for a fire control table for a battleship. An early electro-mechanical computer.
In case of it all going wrong, the instructions were (essentially)
1) turn everything off 2) set all the dials zero 3) count to 10 - make sure all the gears had stopped turning. 4) turn it back on
Over the past month 3 local by elections, Swansea, Scarborough and Camden, all showing a very significant fall in the Labour percentage vote, each seat has of course individual issues but the pattern has been the same, drops of 18%, and two each of 20% plus. These accompany the May 4th results when Labour did not do as well as many would have thought. Maybe there is a straw in the wind.
Labour never seems to do as well in local elections, as the Conservatives do, in opposition. The Conservatives almost always outperformed their poll rating, in local elections, between 1997-2010. Labour have always underperformed theirs after 2010.
Two polls were conducted in late April for the English local elections in May 2023, by Survation and Omnisis. When the same sample was asked on their voting intentions in a general election, the Labour lead over the Conservatives increased by around 9% compared to the net Labour lead in responses for the local elections. What is instructive about that polling is that it was the same sample being asked, so you are comparing like-for-like.
It's something that was totally ignored in the subsequent analysis of national vote shares by Curtice et al.
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
If Yes, Minister is any guide, official phone calls would have a civil servant listening in and taking notes. But yes, something has changed in the 21st Century. Some on pb have been calling for professionalisation of government communications (not in the PR spin sense) for some time. Remember when the government released the photo of the Zoom Cabinet meeting, revealing a miscellany of unofficial email addresses?
1) Yes Minister was fiction. 2) Yes Minister was before mobile phones; all phones were far less common. 3) Yes Minister was before Internet communications.
I'm all for more professionalism in politics. But I'm also for efficient governance...
And, yet, it's still bloody funny and fresh today because it's still largely accurate.
I agree, it is funny, not least because of the 3 main actors and excellent scrips. It isn't a documentary.
But it is a sitcom, as much as Fawlty Towers was, and I wouldn't expect to learn much about how the hotel industry works from that. While I loved Green Wing as the best hospital comedy, I wouldn't claim that as a documentary either.
My old flatmate from uni recently retired from the Whitehall CS, and from his description the biggest obstacle to getting anything done was the Machiavellian plotting by junior ministers and their SPADs against each other.
I agree with this. Also part of the reason Fawlty Towers was funny was that there were some recognisable tropes that were relevant to the seaside hotels that existed at the time. While accurate at the time, the hospitality industry has moved on a lot in the last 40 years.
It’s similar with Whitehall and Westminster. In The Thick of It was painfully accurate for a while, but not so much these days.
“The IT Crowd” was obviously written by someone who’d spent a lot of time observing a corporate IT department. The key to a good sitcom, is to emphasise the absurdites of the real situation.
We’ve all had the phone answered by someone who only slightly paraphrases “Hello, this is IT, have you switched it off and on again?”
Years ago, I was looking through a pre WWI (1913 I think) manual for a fire control table for a battleship. An early electro-mechanical computer.
In case of it all going wrong, the instructions were (essentially)
1) turn everything off 2) set all the dials zero 3) count to 10 - make sure all the gears had stopped turning. 4) turn it back on
Same thing for AIs today. Maybe.
Except leave out step 4. Maybe.
Person of Interest - Harold gets his benevolent AI, by killing the ones that try and kill him…
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
If Yes, Minister is any guide, official phone calls would have a civil servant listening in and taking notes. But yes, something has changed in the 21st Century. Some on pb have been calling for professionalisation of government communications (not in the PR spin sense) for some time. Remember when the government released the photo of the Zoom Cabinet meeting, revealing a miscellany of unofficial email addresses?
1) Yes Minister was fiction. 2) Yes Minister was before mobile phones; all phones were far less common. 3) Yes Minister was before Internet communications.
I'm all for more professionalism in politics. But I'm also for efficient governance...
And, yet, it's still bloody funny and fresh today because it's still largely accurate.
I agree, it is funny, not least because of the 3 main actors and excellent scrips. It isn't a documentary.
But it is a sitcom, as much as Fawlty Towers was, and I wouldn't expect to learn much about how the hotel industry works from that. While I loved Green Wing as the best hospital comedy, I wouldn't claim that as a documentary either.
My old flatmate from uni recently retired from the Whitehall CS, and from his description the biggest obstacle to getting anything done was the Machiavellian plotting by junior ministers and their SPADs against each other.
I agree with this. Also part of the reason Fawlty Towers was funny was that there were some recognisable tropes that were relevant to the seaside hotels that existed at the time. While accurate at the time, the hospitality industry has moved on a lot in the last 40 years.
It’s similar with Whitehall and Westminster. In The Thick of It was painfully accurate for a while, but not so much these days.
“The IT Crowd” was obviously written by someone who’d spent a lot of time observing a corporate IT department. The key to a good sitcom, is to emphasise the absurdites of the real situation.
We’ve all had the phone answered by someone who only slightly paraphrases “Hello, this is IT, have you switched it off and on again?”
Yes, and there does need to be a grain of truth for the absurdity to work. No one thinks that the IT department is really like that.
I love Green Wing because it really captured the absurdity and banter of hospital life in a way that few hospital set comedies do. It isn't a documentary though!
Over the past month 3 local by elections, Swansea, Scarborough and Camden, all showing a very significant fall in the Labour percentage vote, each seat has of course individual issues but the pattern has been the same, drops of 18%, and two each of 20% plus. These accompany the May 4th results when Labour did not do as well as many would have thought. Maybe there is a straw in the wind.
Labour never seems to do as well in local elections, as the Conservatives do, in opposition. The Conservatives almost always outperformed their poll rating, in local elections, between 1997-2010. Labour have always underperformed theirs after 2010.
Two polls were conducted in late April for the English local elections in May 2023, by Survation and Omnisis. When the same sample was asked on their voting intentions in a general election, the Labour lead over the Conservatives increased by around 9% compared to the net Labour lead in responses for the local elections. What is instructive about that polling is that it was the same sample being asked, so you are comparing like-for-like.
Even in 1995, which was Labour's best ever year in local elections, they "only" got 47%, compared to most polls giving them over 50%.
Part of it is down to Lib Dems and Greens outperforming their poll ratings, in local elections, but it's not the whole story. Survation also found Lib Dem local voters splitting 23%/9% in favour of Labour over the Conservatives, at the GE, and Greens splitting 14/11%, so one can't just add them to the Labour total.
I do think there is an element among Labour voters who just are not interested in local elections.
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
If Yes, Minister is any guide, official phone calls would have a civil servant listening in and taking notes. But yes, something has changed in the 21st Century. Some on pb have been calling for professionalisation of government communications (not in the PR spin sense) for some time. Remember when the government released the photo of the Zoom Cabinet meeting, revealing a miscellany of unofficial email addresses?
1) Yes Minister was fiction. 2) Yes Minister was before mobile phones; all phones were far less common. 3) Yes Minister was before Internet communications.
I'm all for more professionalism in politics. But I'm also for efficient governance...
And, yet, it's still bloody funny and fresh today because it's still largely accurate.
I agree, it is funny, not least because of the 3 main actors and excellent scrips. It isn't a documentary.
But it is a sitcom, as much as Fawlty Towers was, and I wouldn't expect to learn much about how the hotel industry works from that. While I loved Green Wing as the best hospital comedy, I wouldn't claim that as a documentary either.
My old flatmate from uni recently retired from the Whitehall CS, and from his description the biggest obstacle to getting anything done was the Machiavellian plotting by junior ministers and their SPADs against each other.
I agree with this. Also part of the reason Fawlty Towers was funny was that there were some recognisable tropes that were relevant to the seaside hotels that existed at the time. While accurate at the time, the hospitality industry has moved on a lot in the last 40 years.
It’s similar with Whitehall and Westminster. In The Thick of It was painfully accurate for a while, but not so much these days.
“The IT Crowd” was obviously written by someone who’d spent a lot of time observing a corporate IT department. The key to a good sitcom, is to emphasise the absurdites of the real situation.
We’ve all had the phone answered by someone who only slightly paraphrases “Hello, this is IT, have you switched it off and on again?”
Yes, and there does need to be a grain of truth for the absurdity to work. No one thinks that the IT department is really like that.
I love Green Wing because it really captured the absurdity and banter of hospital life in a way that few hospital set comedies do.
I think everyone experiences stupid or funny things at work.
When I joined company X, the personnel department had a wall on which they stuck the passes of ex-employees, underneath each they wrote funny and/or nasty things about the person.
Which was all good and well, until you saw that they'd written something nasty about a friend underneath their pass.
They wouldn't get away with that nowadays. As it happens, when the head of that department left, he sent a company-wide email saying there would be a lunchtime get-together at a certain pub. We all turned up, whilst he and a few of his friends went to a different pub!
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
There's some really good stuff on this trend in the Matt Levine newsletter. You need to subscribe to read it but it's free and everybody should be subscribed to Matt Levine's newsletter because it's totally great. Basically the Securities Exchange Commission has an old rule saying you have to preserve inter-office memoranda, and they're now using it to say that you had to preserve all your Whats App texts, and if you didn't they're going to fine you. And they're extracting pretty sizable fines from basically every single bank.
In 1948, if you were a broker, you probably communicated with your coworkers in roughly three ways:
Inter-office memoranda, for quite formal occasions. For new office policies, formal write-ups of investment ideas, etc., you’d spring for the typewriter ribbons and carbon paper. Telephone. If your coworkers worked in a different branch office, you might spring for a long-distance call to talk about urgent matters. Walking over to their desk and talking to them, would probably be the main form of communication.
So when the SEC said that brokers needed to keep copies of their business correspondence, that implicitly assumed a certain level of formality. The SEC might plausibly come to a broker in 1948 and say “show me all of your internal communications for the last two years,” and he (he) might hand the SEC, like, 30 memos, and the SEC might say “ah right that’s a reasonable number of memos” and then go read them.
One thing that has happened in the intervening 74 years is that written communication has become much much much much much much much easier and more casual. I used to work on a desk at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., where the default method of communication with someone who sat two seats away from you was instant messaging. [8] There were some mornings when I sent more than 100 inter-office memoranda, though like 20 of them would be “lol” or “fml.” [9]
And so then if the SEC thought that a broker was up to no good, it could say “give me all of the internal communications of one particular desk for the month of September,” and the broker would hand over like 500,000 emails and instant messages, and the SEC would run some search terms on this vast corpus, and the search terms would be like “fraud” and “spoof” and “manipulate” and “sucker” and “fml,” and they’d get a hit like “fml i just did a fraud oops” and go from there to build a case. In 1948, it would be very weird for a broker to send around an inter-office memo with the subject line “Re: We need to do more fraud.” He might say it, but only out loud, in person, in a form not required to be preserved for SEC examination. By 2011, it was just expected that if a broker was doing fraud there would be dozens of eternally preserved electronic messages about it.
Do we know why people starting using instant messaging to communicate with someone sitting two seats away? I've never understood that.
Messaging is asynchronous. If you go and talk to them you have to interrupt them, and you don't always want to do that.
Yet Nick only got elected because of his deal with the LibDems. Had there been an open three-party contest, his ward would likely now have a team of LibDem councillors.
The assumption that it is the politicians (only) trying to hide stuff is a mistake, I think.
Plenty of people in permanent government positions will be very upset by the idea that their casual communications would become fodder for the enquiry.
I don’t think it is “Trump like” to assume the enquiry will leak, either. I think it is inevitable that redacted and personal information will be leaked.
It hasn't happened on inquiries far more sensitive than this.
Ministers may feel that a hint as to who they might or might not have been banging, or an off-colour joke is the most sensitive thing in the world. But things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry have involved disclosure of material that, unredacted, would endanger lives.
Because of the remit and modern technology, the amount of information this inquiry will be getting will be much larger.
Two decades ago, politicians would have a phone call and discuss business. The conversation may stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. That's what happens in phone calls. The calls were rarely recorded.
Things like WhatsApp came along, and often took over from the phone. Conversations still stray between various topics of business, and also personal matters and jokes. But they are now recorded.
Hence the inquiry gets access to much more potential information.
And IME (the tech sector), it is rare for long conversations between colleagues *not* to stray onto matters other than the direct reason for the conversation. They shouldn't, but people are people.
There's some really good stuff on this trend in the Matt Levine newsletter. You need to subscribe to read it but it's free and everybody should be subscribed to Matt Levine's newsletter because it's totally great. Basically the Securities Exchange Commission has an old rule saying you have to preserve inter-office memoranda, and they're now using it to say that you had to preserve all your Whats App texts, and if you didn't they're going to fine you. And they're extracting pretty sizable fines from basically every single bank.
In 1948, if you were a broker, you probably communicated with your coworkers in roughly three ways:
Inter-office memoranda, for quite formal occasions. For new office policies, formal write-ups of investment ideas, etc., you’d spring for the typewriter ribbons and carbon paper. Telephone. If your coworkers worked in a different branch office, you might spring for a long-distance call to talk about urgent matters. Walking over to their desk and talking to them, would probably be the main form of communication.
So when the SEC said that brokers needed to keep copies of their business correspondence, that implicitly assumed a certain level of formality. The SEC might plausibly come to a broker in 1948 and say “show me all of your internal communications for the last two years,” and he (he) might hand the SEC, like, 30 memos, and the SEC might say “ah right that’s a reasonable number of memos” and then go read them.
One thing that has happened in the intervening 74 years is that written communication has become much much much much much much much easier and more casual. I used to work on a desk at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., where the default method of communication with someone who sat two seats away from you was instant messaging. [8] There were some mornings when I sent more than 100 inter-office memoranda, though like 20 of them would be “lol” or “fml.” [9]
And so then if the SEC thought that a broker was up to no good, it could say “give me all of the internal communications of one particular desk for the month of September,” and the broker would hand over like 500,000 emails and instant messages, and the SEC would run some search terms on this vast corpus, and the search terms would be like “fraud” and “spoof” and “manipulate” and “sucker” and “fml,” and they’d get a hit like “fml i just did a fraud oops” and go from there to build a case. In 1948, it would be very weird for a broker to send around an inter-office memo with the subject line “Re: We need to do more fraud.” He might say it, but only out loud, in person, in a form not required to be preserved for SEC examination. By 2011, it was just expected that if a broker was doing fraud there would be dozens of eternally preserved electronic messages about it.
Do we know why people starting using instant messaging to communicate with someone sitting two seats away? I've never understood that.
Messaging is asynchronous. If you go and talk to them you have to interrupt them, and you don't always want to do that.
I love being in Qazaqstan. I read, write, & teach about it regularly. Yet, physical presence affords a visceral sense of societal changes taking place that is hard to fully grasp otherwise. And there are big changes underway. A short 🧵… https://twitter.com/azamatistan/status/1664819401948815360
More interpretatively, I am concerned that punters on here may be affected by recency bias and, more seriously, using the mistaken benchmark of the December 2019 election.
There are plenty of good, non-offal, reasons for proposing that Dec 19 was a one-off. It came on the back of a stalemate parliament and Boris galvanised the 'Get Brexit Done' vote which was the raison d'etre of the election. He was up against an unelectable Trotskyite anti-semite. It had one purpose: to deliver a majority so that Brexit could be enabled.
Since then, a series of catastrophic occurrences (many self-induced) have Ratnered the Conservative brand. And bubbling away in the background is the clusterfuck of Brexit - the very thing which motivated the Dec 19 vote.
No, the truer benchmark is the last proper General Election which was 08 June 2017 - which resulted in a hung parliament.
I know this part, unlike the previous, is more polemical and less factual but I think there's a good case for it. And I warn punters on here to pay attention, lest you lose your money.
It's a sobering thought that the Tories have won a majority only twice in the last 30 years - once when offering a referendum on Brexit, and once when offering Brexit itself.
Talking of sobering thoughts:
Labour MP Charlotte Nichols says that when she was elected in 2019, the Labour whips gave her a list of thirty male MPs that she should avoid being alone with, at risk of her personal safety.
In 2019, Labour saw 202 MPs elected.
Remove the female MPs, and you are left with 98.
Remove the men who have declared themselves as gay, and you are left with 83.
Remove those who were newly elected in 2019 and therefore unlikely to be on the whips' black list, and you are left with just 77 (by my reckoning).
Which suggests that a woman who finds herself alone with a heterosexual Labour MP stands an almost 40% chance of being in the company of a potentially dangerous sexual predator.....
(edit/ I am making the assumption here that the MPs on the Labour whips' blacklist were all their own, which does seem to be the inference of the story, but I haven't seen explicitly stated)
Why are you removing those known to be gay? Roberts, Pincher and the Tory MP who has been barred from Westminster for over 12 months now were all allegedly involved in same-sex incidents. It’s quite likely that any list is agnostic on proclivity.
Because Ms Nichols is a woman being warned about being alone with male MPs.
Sexual harassment and bullying happens in many if not all organisations but does seem particularly problematic in workplaces based upon small teams working out of hours or away from home. Even more so where career progression for youngsters is dependent on patronage by senior figures. Hence its prevalence in politics and media.
Politicians and media folk do need romantic and sexual opportunities as much as the rest of us, so there is a possibility of workplace relationships. They are certainly a feature of my workplace. Alarm bells would ring in me though of there was an asymmetry of status or age.
I love being in Qazaqstan. I read, write, & teach about it regularly. Yet, physical presence affords a visceral sense of societal changes taking place that is hard to fully grasp otherwise. And there are big changes underway. A short 🧵… https://twitter.com/azamatistan/status/1664819401948815360
We seem to be in a new phase of place renaming. Starting with Kiev/Kyiv and onwards from there (via the Brecon Beacons).
I love being in Qazaqstan. I read, write, & teach about it regularly. Yet, physical presence affords a visceral sense of societal changes taking place that is hard to fully grasp otherwise. And there are big changes underway. A short 🧵… https://twitter.com/azamatistan/status/1664819401948815360
We seem to be in a new phase of place renaming. Starting with Kiev/Kyiv and onwards from there (via the Brecon Beacons).
Mum's favourite vlogger from Kerala insists on pronouncing Kazakhstan "Kazak-ee-stan"
19 people arrested this morning, in conjunction with conspiracy to disrupt the Derby race. The Jockey Club took out an injunction against a group of individuals yesterday.
I love being in Qazaqstan. I read, write, & teach about it regularly. Yet, physical presence affords a visceral sense of societal changes taking place that is hard to fully grasp otherwise. And there are big changes underway. A short 🧵… https://twitter.com/azamatistan/status/1664819401948815360
We seem to be in a new phase of place renaming. Starting with Kiev/Kyiv and onwards from there (via the Brecon Beacons).
Fair point. A few of the top violent scenes from the book:
- Family murder with Cane and Abel - Killing of the firstborn at Passover - Bakhmut style obliteration at Sodom and Gomorra - Sarajevo style antics in Jericho - Just-Stop-Oil protest against the moneychangers in the temple - Execution of an innocent man on a cross - Terminator-2 / Stranger things vibes in the book of revelation
Edit: forgot about Herod’s pol-pot style infanticide
Fair point. A few of the top violent scenes from the book:
- Family murder with Cane and Abel - Killing of the firstborn at Passover - Bakhmut style obliteration at Sodom and Gomorra - Sarajevo style antics in Jericho - Just-Stop-Oil protest against the moneychangers in the temple - Execution of an innocent man on a cross - Terminator-2 / Stranger things vibes in the book of revelation
Fair point. A few of the top violent scenes from the book:
- Family murder with Cane and Abel - Killing of the firstborn at Passover - Bakhmut style obliteration at Sodom and Gomorra - Sarajevo style antics in Jericho - Just-Stop-Oil protest against the moneychangers in the temple - Execution of an innocent man on a cross - Terminator-2 / Stranger things vibes in the book of revelation
Edit: forgot about Herod’s pol-pot style infanticide
It’s certainly not a comfortable read if you’re an Amalekite
"“The proposed ban on incitement to ‘religious hatred’ makes no sense unless it involves a ban on the Koran itself; and that would be pretty absurd, when you consider that the Bill’s intention is to fight Islamophobia.”"
19 people arrested this morning, in conjunction with conspiracy to disrupt the Derby race. The Jockey Club took out an injunction against a group of individuals yesterday.
Over the past month 3 local by elections, Swansea, Scarborough and Camden, all showing a very significant fall in the Labour percentage vote, each seat has of course individual issues but the pattern has been the same, drops of 18%, and two each of 20% plus. These accompany the May 4th results when Labour did not do as well as many would have thought. Maybe there is a straw in the wind.
Labour never seems to do as well in local elections, as the Conservatives do, in opposition. The Conservatives almost always outperformed their poll rating, in local elections, between 1997-2010. Labour have always underperformed theirs after 2010.
Two polls were conducted in late April for the English local elections in May 2023, by Survation and Omnisis. When the same sample was asked on their voting intentions in a general election, the Labour lead over the Conservatives increased by around 9% compared to the net Labour lead in responses for the local elections. What is instructive about that polling is that it was the same sample being asked, so you are comparing like-for-like.
Even in 1995, which was Labour's best ever year in local elections, they "only" got 47%, compared to most polls giving them over 50%.
Part of it is down to Lib Dems and Greens outperforming their poll ratings, in local elections, but it's not the whole story. Survation also found Lib Dem local voters splitting 23%/9% in favour of Labour over the Conservatives, at the GE, and Greens splitting 14/11%, so one can't just add them to the Labour total.
I do think there is an element among Labour voters who just are not interested in local elections.
Turnout is around half of that at General Elections. Except in NI, where turnout is always over 50%.
Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txDjn5HrC3w
No. The last one they didn’t was TMay after 2017. And don’t try and tell me that her resignation 2 years later counts.
Glad to hear you're recovering; I find running (or preferably hiking) improves my mental health immeasurably.
edit: I'm still coughing my lungs up an hour or two after finishing a run, though. That's been happening since I got Covid before Easter...
The Lynx effect misogyny abounds. I have you down as a Bentley driving cross between Lesley Phillips and Terry-Thomas. Both of whom drove Bentleys. Ding-dong!
Are they here? Can we have a laugh?
Should we nominate someone else to have a go instead?
Maybe I'll start:
"Don't get the Covid vaccine! Not only is the 5G reception really poor, it turns you into a Ukrainian Jewish Homosexual Nazi."
I've fallen out with my parsnips, almost half of which haven't come up from seed and those that have are tiny and barely strong enough to survive outside. I've only got about 5 strong plants growing.
And it's bloody June already.
(You surely found felix's post as funny as I did for the priggishness if nothing else?)
2) Yes Minister was before mobile phones; all phones were far less common.
3) Yes Minister was before Internet communications.
I'm all for more professionalism in politics. But I'm also for efficient governance...
Not generally a fan of Simon Heffer but I am a big fan of French cinema and this review definitely serves its purpose and makes me want to see this film
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/novembre-bataclan-paris-terrorist-attack-jean-dujardin/
Parents and schools across Greystones adopt voluntary ‘no-smartphone code’ in bid to curb peer pressure"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/03/much-easier-to-say-no-irish-town-unites-in-smartphone-ban-for-young-children
Seriously, though, great news if the diss title is sorted - that means a big step in formulating the project.
I mean, saying things like: "How're your kids?" is common, and seen as polite; but not business.
Funny how "centrists" accuse the left of operating a "purity test".
Yesterday, SKS blocked Jamie Driscoll, the incumbent Mayor of the North of Tyne, from standing to be Mayor of the North East.
His alleged "crime"?
Talking to Ken Loach.
His real "crime"?
Being a socialist.
"The Startup Party: reflections on the last 20 years, what could replace the Tories, and why
And building a Q&A on Brexit, what really happened in No10, covid etc
DOMINIC CUMMINGS"
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/the-startup-party-reflections-on
I have rather an old-fashioned attitude to professional services, which is you take your brief and execute your clients instructions (provided they are legal and ethical) to the best of your ability, but there are many Millennials and GenZers in the firm who simply refuse to work for clients and on client assignments on which they disagree.
If that's the case in a Big4 consultancy I can only imagine it's also widespread in the civil service, with some others just going through the motions.
But it is a sitcom, as much as Fawlty Towers was, and I wouldn't expect to learn much about how the hotel industry works from that. While I loved Green Wing as the best hospital comedy, I wouldn't claim that as a documentary either.
My old flatmate from uni recently retired from the Whitehall CS, and from his description the biggest obstacle to getting anything done was the Machiavellian plotting by junior ministers and their SPADs against each other.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-09-28/the-deli-was-allegedly-a-fraud
Just quoting a little bit:
In my view and I suspect the views of many an inquiry is pretty much a huge waste of time and money. Not just on covid but on anything. Rarely do they change any minds and any useful information that comes out or actionable points get ignored anyway. So what is the point. May as well just email a blank conclusion form to everyone and say fill in your own view.
@Cyclefree thank you for the message have replied
Loach and Corbyn and their acolytes have views which should be unacceptable to any modern fair-minded political party.
Do we know why people starting using instant messaging to communicate with someone sitting two seats away? I've never understood that.
Saves interrupting them, or waiting till they are free. I've been known to email Mrs C downstairs but often it's to report something while I remember, and I don't want to wait till she is off the phone in case I forget.
For all his governmental chaos, Johnson got lockdowns almost right.
- You're texting other people who aren't as close and sometimes also involving them in the conversation
- Most of what you're talking about is happening on the internet so if you want to share links then text is better
- If there's someone between you and them then you'd have to either get up and leave whatever else you're working on or talk across them which is maybe annoying to them
- Text is less disruptive to the other person than walking over and talking to them because they don't have to look at it until they've finished whatever they're concentrating on
When actually looking at the regular models presented, it looked like the central case undershot reality about one time in three and overshot it maybe two times in three. That wouldn't make for good copy, though, so the less dramatic ones were simply ignored by the media.
The mocking they got from some media commentators (and others) in September for projecting a possible increase to as many as two hundred deaths per day as an illustration of exponential growth if nothing happened was lengthy and protracted, and now that mocking looks really ignorant in retrospect.
It’s similar with Whitehall and Westminster. In The Thick of It was painfully accurate for a while, but not so much these days.
Privately, I would express my views, and vote for them accordingly, but I wouldn't look to obstruct my business on account of my personal views.
We’ve all had the phone answered by someone who only slightly paraphrases “Hello, this is IT, have you switched it off and on again?”
In case of it all going wrong, the instructions were (essentially)
1) turn everything off
2) set all the dials zero
3) count to 10 - make sure all the gears had stopped turning.
4) turn it back on
So, if you are unwilling to work for a particular client, on political grounds, you accept that your employer is entitled to dismiss you.
In the case of barristers, and solicitors who are advocates, there is a different principle at stake. Namely, that the justice system exists for the benefit of unpopular people, as well as for the benefit of popular people, and it's your job as an advocate to represent them, regardless of your own beliefs.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jun/03/the-blue-wall-home-counties-are-falling-out-of-love-with-the-tory-party
Maybe.
It's something that was totally ignored in the subsequent analysis of national vote shares by Curtice et al.
I love Green Wing because it really captured the absurdity and banter of hospital life in a way that few hospital set comedies do. It isn't a documentary though!
Part of it is down to Lib Dems and Greens outperforming their poll ratings, in local elections, but it's not the whole story. Survation also found Lib Dem local voters splitting 23%/9% in favour of Labour over the Conservatives, at the GE, and Greens splitting 14/11%, so one can't just add them to the Labour total.
I do think there is an element among Labour voters who just are not interested in local elections.
When I joined company X, the personnel department had a wall on which they stuck the passes of ex-employees, underneath each they wrote funny and/or nasty things about the person.
Which was all good and well, until you saw that they'd written something nasty about a friend underneath their pass.
They wouldn't get away with that nowadays. As it happens, when the head of that department left, he sent a company-wide email saying there would be a lunchtime get-together at a certain pub. We all turned up, whilst he and a few of his friends went to a different pub!
Messaging is asynchronous. If you go and talk to them you have to interrupt them, and you don't always want to do that.
Quoting is garbled. No idea why.
I love being in Qazaqstan. I read, write, & teach about it regularly. Yet, physical presence affords a visceral sense of societal changes taking place that is hard to fully grasp otherwise. And there are big changes underway. A short 🧵…
https://twitter.com/azamatistan/status/1664819401948815360
These sorts of matches are useful for England players’ individual averages though.
Politicians and media folk do need romantic and sexual opportunities as much as the rest of us, so there is a possibility of workplace relationships. They are certainly a feature of my workplace. Alarm bells would ring in me though of there was an asymmetry of status or age.
Unfortunately the pictures are of someone called Ed Cavey!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/racing/2023/06/03/epsom-derby-protesters-animal-rising-activists-arrests/
Utah bans The Bible as too violent for children...
https://apnews.com/article/book-ban-school-library-bible-fc025c8ccf30e955aaf0b0ee1899608a?taid=647b3cebab5b67000120094d&utm_campaign=TrueAnthem&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter
- Family murder with Cane and Abel
- Killing of the firstborn at Passover
- Bakhmut style obliteration at Sodom and Gomorra
- Sarajevo style antics in Jericho
- Just-Stop-Oil protest against the moneychangers in the temple
- Execution of an innocent man on a cross
- Terminator-2 / Stranger things vibes in the book of revelation
Edit: forgot about Herod’s pol-pot style infanticide
"“The proposed ban on incitement to ‘religious hatred’ makes no sense unless it involves a ban on the Koran itself; and that would be pretty absurd, when you consider that the Bill’s intention is to fight Islamophobia.”"
We assume the shy Tory exists - but could there be a new "shy Labour" voter with Keir Starmer?