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Was Sunak’s no show in the vote a mistake? – politicalbetting.com
Was Sunak’s no show in the vote a mistake? – politicalbetting.com
"Is Rishi Sunak in hiding?"Bob Seely was the poor sap pushed out last night to defend the PM's Commons no-show – and duly got his arse handed to him by Victoria Derbyshire.https://t.co/aFZJxt33LC
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(And first)
What would have been the downside of him voting for the report?
Of course it was a mistake. Weak, weak, weak.
Sunak’s cowardice is long established.
You just know he’s going to skip next year’s debates because he doesn’t want his arse handed to him by Starmer.
(I am not sure he does either.)
He has a tough gig. But when it is tough you have to lead. Put Up or Shut Up. Not free vote and don't even bother doing that.
And probably Boris.
My list would be
Blair
Major
Thatcher
Brown
May
Cameron
Sunak
.
.
.
.
.
Johnson
Truss
I mark Thatcher down because she squandered North Sea oil revenues, kept unemployment high for longer than necessary, failed to progress NI peace, tried to block the progress of social liberalism.
Glad to see my Tory MP had the decency to support the committee recommendation.
I was extremely disappointed in Sunak avoiding the vote and on the face of it it was an own goal which his opponents will celebrate
Whether it has traction in the months ahead only time will tell, but the party have to come together and move on as it faces the most intractable of problems, not least the rising mortgage rates
It is clear that there is very little the government can do to ameliorate these increases without scaring the markets and seeing even higher rates
The one stark lesson Truss demonstrated to politicians is propose unfunded tax cuts or increased spending and the markets will act adversely
It is one of the reasons that I expect Starmer to continue to water down his more ambitious spending programmes but notwithstanding, it is time for the country to accept, covid, the war in Ukraine, and indeed in some part Brexit will see years of turmoil and poorer living standards for many, though some as always will prosper
It is not a happy climate for any government, especially one looking to take office, and hard unpopular decisions will be the order of the day
Lots of people will be bothered by continuing high inflation, increasing interest rates and the consequent erosion of their real wealth and incomes.
Five scallywags missing after a night out in a town on a significant river wouldn't elicit such coverage.
https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/cost-of-cooking-a-family-meal-soars-by-up-to-27-as-price-of-some-ingredients-doubles-aA3K74w0eh7b
If food and housing are going up far more than the 5% or whatever Mr Sunak et al loudly proclaim, his statements will be worse tham useless.
Interviewer: PM, what did you have for lunch today?
Sunak: What the British people want us to do is to deliver our 5 key priorities: halving inflation...... stopping the boats.
Interviewer: Do you think Boris Johnson will ever return to parliament?
Sunak: What the British people want us to do is to deliver our key priorities.......... (and on an on).
It's painful. I remain of the view that Sunak is over-rated, and may well collapse into a gibbering heap under the spotlight of a GE campaign
Blair
Thatcher 79-87
Major
Cameron
Gap
Brown
May
Sunak
Thatcher 87-90
Big Gap
Johnson
Gap
Truss
Even 5% CPI is extremely high and corrosive of income and wealth. Not everyone can get pay rises in line with inflation and lots of private pension schemes only increase in response to inflation by a limited extent. Also annuity holders see their income eroded.
Terrible tragedy and a very serious problem for the EU as Italy, Greece and others decline help
Sunak = Marcus Licinius Crassus
GE24 = The battle of Carrhae.
Are the media moving on ?
Foreign social media 'influencers' will be used to push visitors away from Mont-Saint-Michel or the cliffs of Étretat
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/06/20/france-british-tourist-campaign-mont-saint-michel-crowd/ (£££)
France has too many tourists, apparently, so expect the Gazette's top travel writers (Monsieur @Leon in particular) to steer visitors to the less exposed parts of the country. Thank Dieu that no bloody fool has arranged to hold the Olympics in Paris. Oh, they have. Damn.
This French bluster is all fart and no follow through.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_in_the_Hole_(1951_film)
Carbon fibre is an interesting choice for a pressure vessel.
"He described being initially hesitant about going aboard the sub at all because some of the components appeared "off the shelf, sort of improvised".
"You steer this sub with an Xbox game controller, some of the ballast is abandoned construction pipes."
Pogue said he had been reassured by Titan's inventor and OceanGate's CEO, Stockton Rush, that the carbon-fibre main capsule had been co-designed with Nasa and the University of Washington and was "rock solid".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65957709
Starmer needs to show some backbone and leadership. If he does that he will get a easy second term.
It was a twin track effort - reaching out to the Irish government, killing off the hardline terrorists on both sides. The later was accomplished by using double agents - who rose to positions of power in the various organisations. And worked to kill off the hardliners who didn't want peace.
*H&W and White Star line were very closely aligned organisations.
The UK’s finest double agent, up there with Nicola Sturgeon.
I would very much doubt that the hatch is compatible with any rescue sub - and the depth is way beyond rescue sub depth, as you say.
Truss ahead of Brown as she was removed before she did too much damage. She was bad, I called for her to resign before she did, but she was quickly ousted before much worse happened.
Her Premiership was like stepping on a piece of Lego. Short and painful but quickly over.
The legacy of Gordon Brown was far more toxic and far more long-lasting. It needed a decade of austerity to clean up his mess.
I also give Major rather more credit than Blair. My problem with Mo Mowlam's approach was that she ended up rewarding the hardliners on both sides and marginalising the moderates.
My favourite NI secretary was Roy Mason. Treat criminals as criminals.
But a good politician is able to make it seem more natural. Blair, Boris, Cameron etc did it all the time but they did it in a way that carried their version of the public with them - even if it infuriated others. Sunak doesn't seem able to do that in the same way, and its a real weakness.
But he's facing Keir Starmer who doesn't seem able to either. So it might cancel out.
Which meant that from the moment it cooled the steel was in the brittle phase. That still was more brittle than wrought iron was a known thing (if not the reason) and was allowed for in the construction of ships.
The other one was that the rivets in some areas of the ship were not easy to machine hammer - the riveting machine was something line a pneumatic drill. So sometime they were less well "knocked up". This was , again accounted for in design and construction, and replacing loose rivets a standard piece of work when you docked the ship.
The famous Liberty ship problem was caused by 2 things. The newer steel had a much lower transition temperature - below zero. So when built, tested and often sailed, the steel was not in its brittle zone. So the design didn't take into account the effects, when exposed to sub zero temperatures. The other factor was welding - on a riveted ship, the cracks usually stop at a rivet line. On a welded ship, they keep on going....
Some people have been acting crazy here acting like anyone who abstained was like Trumpists storming the Capitol on 6 January. In our adversarial Parliamentary system if people from one party abstain while the opposition is voting then that's effectively siding with the opposition by stepping out of their way and letting them win by default.
The number that matters is how many voted against and that was a pathetic, meagre 7.
7 oddballs within a Government is nothing and is perfectly manageable in any party except one as small as the Lib Dems.
He's done very little to get away from that with these actions.
The rips of the bandage more than covering up real support with a fake whipped vote.
May made a good speech in yesterday's debate. It is the speech which Sunak should have made.
The vote may not be uppermost in voters' minds. But it was an opportunity for Sunak to draw a clear line under the Johnson past and to retrieve some sense of integrity and honour for the Tory party for the future. A sort of clause 4 moment. And he fluffed it - because he is weak and because (and this comes as no surprise to me knowing what I know of the places where he worked before he became an MP) he has no instinctive understanding of what integrity and good judgment are and why they matter.
So it will up to another Tory leader to rebuild the moral character of the Tory party. God knows who that will be.
And Austerity wasn't really that necessary so my list would be
Thatcher
Blair
Major
May
Brown
Sunak
Cameron
Johnson
Truss
But once you get beyond that top 3 all the others have pros and cons that could put them anywhere in the list...
That's my view. However, one of the most furiously anti-Labour people I know (I don't know very many - my home is the middle class urban public sector north) reckons Gordon Brown the best chancellor of his lifetime (principally because as an owner of a SME GB allowed him more of his own money).
Interesting development. Could the Privileges Committee be made subject to court challenge - a Judicial Review - on its procedural irregularities? Parliament is above the law thanks to the 1689 Bill of Rights; but surely common law rights still apply?
Nonsense. The Bill of Rights is statute law you silly boy
https://twitter.com/RhonddaBryant/status/1671068405657481216
How would you have dealt with that?
Few if any around at the moment, but a plethora of those you listen to with horror. Trump, Boris as he has become, JRM, a number of Lab and Tory MPs.
Best around of a bad lot: Kate Forbes, Streeting, Gove, Liz Kendall, Penny M.
The unfilled hole is that no-one at all can speak coherently and well about the development and meaning of the post Brexit UK.
Just the other day, I was talking to a chap who works for the civil service, at a fairly senior level. His view is that Rishi is excessively interested in "wasting" money on investment in productivity. Which only increases unemployment.
It is judging of them as PM not overall.
Not turning up was pitiful.
And no one has argued for a whipped vote; that a straw man.
Most cabinet members made their own - similarly poor - decisions.
What did you expect?
She tells me that ALL of the girls apart from one who suffers from psychosis are identifying either as "they" for non-binary, or as "he".
Try answering a basic and simple question like: What is the Tory policy and practice since 2010 on industrial strategy.
But Brown made matters even worse as PM. He completely botched the financial crisis by bailing out the failed banks, rather than allowing them to go bust and protecting guaranteed creditors instead like Iceland did.
That added much more debt than was necessary to an already bad problem and completely warped the market by suggesting that firms were too big to fail and making moral hazard a major problem.
Hopefully we get enough play to get the seven wickets. I believe the forecast is for it to dry up by lunchtime, hopefully that's not too little, too late.
Secondly, the leadership genius we need in parliament and government makes the weather of political correctness, and doesn't just follow it.
I suppose some people are just designed to say things in such a way, and with such an attitude, that instantly makes people adopt the opposite position.
Emma Thompson is one such better known example of this.
As for Cameron, in his farewell speech to the Commons he focused on the introduction of gay marriage as a major achievement of his seven years in office. He only looks good compared with the four incompetents who succeeded him. And insofar as he was on the right side of the argument about EU membership.
Reminds me of the nutjob who was recently claiming to have been sacked as a teacher for "misgendering" a pupil, then went to speak to Piers Morgan to say that all sinners should get the death penalty ...
https://www.sussexexpress.co.uk/news/people/east-sussex-teacher-calls-pupils-opinion-despicable-after-classmates-claim-she-identifies-as-a-cat-4187907