Average house price in Chelsea and Fulham is 1.4 million pounds so a Tory manifesto commitment to scrap IHT or raise the threshold to 1 million pounds would help Hands in this marginal seat
Yes we don't want the LDs getting busy in Chelsea & Fulham. That's a central London seat. It's Labour. What we want the LDs doing is winning seats off the Cons in the SW and blue wall towns and burbs.
Libdems are 2nd in that seat, up 15% over 2017, Labour down 10%.
One thing that may help the Liberal Democrats improve their poll ratings is that they have missed the limelight for a while: the last conference had to be cancelled after the death of Elizabeth II, so there has not been much spotlight on the party. Despite this, at both Westminster by elections and local council elections, they have been performing very strongly, and above their poll ratings.
Ed Davey is a remarkable man, and when journalists have gone one-to-one with him, they seem to come away pretty impressed. (vide recent Guardian interview). He has also solved a fair few of the internal process issues and is attracting something of a surge in support, including significant financial support.
Meanwhile the Tories seem to be doing everything in their power to cozy up to the Faragist right, but this is going down very badly in places like Surrey, and many other places across the South and south west of England. In Scotland the party is coming back in the North East and making strong progress in Edinburgh.
Its all beginning to look like we could see a real move in the coming months, and the anti Tory swing could bring some remarkable results in some surprising places.
Average house price in Chelsea and Fulham is 1.4 million pounds so a Tory manifesto commitment to scrap IHT or raise the threshold to 1 million pounds would help Hands in this marginal seat
Yes we don't want the LDs getting busy in Chelsea & Fulham. That's a central London seat. It's Labour. What we want the LDs doing is winning seats off the Cons in the SW and blue wall towns and burbs.
Libdems are 2nd in that seat, up 15% over 2017, Labour down 10%.
.. oh and will Nicola Horlick stand again for the LibDems?
One thing that may help the Liberal Democrats improve their poll ratings is that they have missed the limelight for a while: the last conference had to be cancelled after the death of Elizabeth II, so there has not been much spotlight on the party. Despite this, at both Westminster by elections and local council elections, they have been performing very strongly, and above their poll ratings.
Ed Davey is a remarkable man, and when journalists have gone one-to-one with him, they seem to come away pretty impressed. (vide recent Guardian interview). He has also solved a fair few of the internal process issues and is attracting something of a surge in support, including significant financial support.
Meanwhile the Tories seem to be doing everything in their power to cozy up to the Faragist right, but this is going down very badly in places like Surrey, and many other places across the South and south west of England. In Scotland the party is coming back in the North East and making strong progress in Edinburgh.
Its all beginning to look like we could see a real move in the coming months, and the anti Tory swing could bring some remarkable results in some surprising places.
Were you still up for Gove?
Davey's improved as a politician since his coalition days.
Average house price in Chelsea and Fulham is 1.4 million pounds so a Tory manifesto commitment to scrap IHT or raise the threshold to 1 million pounds would help Hands in this marginal seat
Yes we don't want the LDs getting busy in Chelsea & Fulham. That's a central London seat. It's Labour. What we want the LDs doing is winning seats off the Cons in the SW and blue wall towns and burbs.
That’s assuming that the Lib Dem’s are Spare Labour. There is a long history of that in the Labour Party - see the negotiations about the Coalition government.
The Tories should be worried about the rise and fall and rise again of Reginald Farage. As an almost millionaire he practically an Ordinary Man compared to our billionaire Prime Minister. And now that he has pledged himself to Stand Up for the ordinary people in a crusade against the woke establishment, he could be a serious threat to the Tories.
It is increasingly clear that the Tories are going to fight an insurgent campaign against Keir Starmer's government - the blob, the establishment, the lawyers, the regulators - all the people ruining the lives of the ordinary.
If Farage is there to point out that the Tories ARE the government, it won't work. Especially if he is leading another crusade to motivate all the let behind people to vote against the amassed forces stopping them from succeeding.
There has been an assumption that ReFUK will be an irrelevance. The fall out from the Coutts affair suggests that may not be true.
There is a wider issue on the conduct of banks. Farage has found something to elevate his profile with, or re-elevate it. There will be, I expect, more stories like this one which, on the face of it, is inexcusable.
I get very twitchy about the number of banks and lawyers with a photocopy of my passport, but at least I have one to prove my identity.
There's a related issue - access to Government services online. It has proved difficult to get through the Government Gateway and then the HMRC process in my experience esp if one doesn't have a photographic drivers' licence - demands to send mobile phone photos of passports (insane security wise), questions about one's credit record (not easy if one last took out a loan in 1992), and so on. And on top of that there seems to be a random element (as well as the sort of recursive loop in the website which drives one potty). @DavidL was unsurprisingly complainiong about it a few weeks back.
(And even when one does get to the HMRC site the tax information seems pretty pathetic. No clear statements of tax charged and why - just that "tax is sorted for year Y". If HMRC have done it for you it seems to be impossible to correct it once that has happened. But that is another matter.)
Another issue with "the number of banks and lawyers with a photocopy of my passport" is the number of banks and lawyers you hope have got their IT security ducks in a row so your passport is not for sale on the dark web.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha Ha ha ha ha ha ha
Anyway. I have a long, complicated surname. Cossacks stole all the vowels when we lived in the shtetl…
So I have my surname as an internet domain.
So my email is firstname@surname.com
Because I run it, anything before the @ that isn’t a proper, setup email address goes to me.
So i often give out, online, an email address specific to a purpose.
Say I fill in a form with - isuspectthisbsnkissellingdata@surname.com
Then find that email address on the web in hours…
I do exactly the same. I bought a domain for my consultancy business, and any company who asks me for my email address gets theircompany@mydomain.com.
Makes it really, really easy to find out where the spam is coming from.
It’s a useful starting point for conversations with customers, given that a fair bit of my business is IT security training!
I knew someone who did that but reported a lot of pushback from phone operators who thought tesco@mydomain meant that he had hacked Tesco. Of course, for your purposes that would be a good thing as a sales lead.
Met some young Ukrainians out drinking last night. Learned a lot
Like this
This is how young Ukrainians decide whether to go to the bomb shelter or not (last night most didn’t, despite the wailing sirens). They constantly check this Telegram channel, the same way we check the weather during a Test match. It tells you what’s incoming & where. If it says drones they say Meh; missiles get them underground. That is digital life in Lviv
The Tories should be worried about the rise and fall and rise again of Reginald Farage. As an almost millionaire he practically an Ordinary Man compared to our billionaire Prime Minister. And now that he has pledged himself to Stand Up for the ordinary people in a crusade against the woke establishment, he could be a serious threat to the Tories.
It is increasingly clear that the Tories are going to fight an insurgent campaign against Keir Starmer's government - the blob, the establishment, the lawyers, the regulators - all the people ruining the lives of the ordinary.
If Farage is there to point out that the Tories ARE the government, it won't work. Especially if he is leading another crusade to motivate all the let behind people to vote against the amassed forces stopping them from succeeding.
There has been an assumption that ReFUK will be an irrelevance. The fall out from the Coutts affair suggests that may not be true.
There is a wider issue on the conduct of banks. Farage has found something to elevate his profile with, or re-elevate it. There will be, I expect, more stories like this one which, on the face of it, is inexcusable.
I get very twitchy about the number of banks and lawyers with a photocopy of my passport, but at least I have one to prove my identity.
There's a related issue - access to Government services online. It has proved difficult to get through the Government Gateway and then the HMRC process in my experience esp if one doesn't have a photographic drivers' licence - demands to send mobile phone photos of passports (insane security wise), questions about one's credit record (not easy if one last took out a loan in 1992), and so on. And on top of that there seems to be a random element (as well as the sort of recursive loop in the website which drives one potty). @DavidL was unsurprisingly complainiong about it a few weeks back.
(And even when one does get to the HMRC site the tax information seems pretty pathetic. No clear statements of tax charged and why - just that "tax is sorted for year Y". If HMRC have done it for you it seems to be impossible to correct it once that has happened. But that is another matter.)
Another issue with "the number of banks and lawyers with a photocopy of my passport" is the number of banks and lawyers you hope have got their IT security ducks in a row so your passport is not for sale on the dark web.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha Ha ha ha ha ha ha
Anyway. I have a long, complicated surname. Cossacks stole all the vowels when we lived in the shtetl…
So I have my surname as an internet domain.
So my email is firstname@surname.com
Because I run it, anything before the @ that isn’t a proper, setup email address goes to me.
So i often give out, online, an email address specific to a purpose.
Say I fill in a form with - isuspectthisbsnkissellingdata@surname.com
Then find that email address on the web in hours…
I do exactly the same. I bought a domain for my consultancy business, and any company who asks me for my email address gets theircompany@mydomain.com.
Makes it really, really easy to find out where the spam is coming from.
It’s a useful starting point for conversations with customers, given that a fair bit of my business is IT security training!
I knew someone who did that but reported a lot of pushback from phone operators who thought tesco@mydomain meant that he had hacked Tesco. Of course, for your purposes that would be a good thing as a sales lead.
iirc there was (and might still be) a related thing involving product URLs on Amazon and elsewhere, which used to go Amazon/tracking-data/product/more-tracking and that people would cut down to Amazon/product or personalise like Amazon/Nigel Farage is GOAT/product/. (Tracking data would include affiliate links and other promotional stuff.) But it is a long time since I cared so DYOR.
The Tories should be worried about the rise and fall and rise again of Reginald Farage. As an almost millionaire he practically an Ordinary Man compared to our billionaire Prime Minister. And now that he has pledged himself to Stand Up for the ordinary people in a crusade against the woke establishment, he could be a serious threat to the Tories.
It is increasingly clear that the Tories are going to fight an insurgent campaign against Keir Starmer's government - the blob, the establishment, the lawyers, the regulators - all the people ruining the lives of the ordinary.
If Farage is there to point out that the Tories ARE the government, it won't work. Especially if he is leading another crusade to motivate all the let behind people to vote against the amassed forces stopping them from succeeding.
There has been an assumption that ReFUK will be an irrelevance. The fall out from the Coutts affair suggests that may not be true.
There is a wider issue on the conduct of banks. Farage has found something to elevate his profile with, or re-elevate it. There will be, I expect, more stories like this one which, on the face of it, is inexcusable.
I get very twitchy about the number of banks and lawyers with a photocopy of my passport, but at least I have one to prove my identity.
There's a related issue - access to Government services online. It has proved difficult to get through the Government Gateway and then the HMRC process in my experience esp if one doesn't have a photographic drivers' licence - demands to send mobile phone photos of passports (insane security wise), questions about one's credit record (not easy if one last took out a loan in 1992), and so on. And on top of that there seems to be a random element (as well as the sort of recursive loop in the website which drives one potty). @DavidL was unsurprisingly complainiong about it a few weeks back.
(And even when one does get to the HMRC site the tax information seems pretty pathetic. No clear statements of tax charged and why - just that "tax is sorted for year Y". If HMRC have done it for you it seems to be impossible to correct it once that has happened. But that is another matter.)
Another issue with "the number of banks and lawyers with a photocopy of my passport" is the number of banks and lawyers you hope have got their IT security ducks in a row so your passport is not for sale on the dark web.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha Ha ha ha ha ha ha
Anyway. I have a long, complicated surname. Cossacks stole all the vowels when we lived in the shtetl…
So I have my surname as an internet domain.
So my email is firstname@surname.com
Because I run it, anything before the @ that isn’t a proper, setup email address goes to me.
So i often give out, online, an email address specific to a purpose.
Say I fill in a form with - isuspectthisbsnkissellingdata@surname.com
Then find that email address on the web in hours…
I do exactly the same. I bought a domain for my consultancy business, and any company who asks me for my email address gets theircompany@mydomain.com.
Makes it really, really easy to find out where the spam is coming from.
It’s a useful starting point for conversations with customers, given that a fair bit of my business is IT security training!
I knew someone who did that but reported a lot of pushback from phone operators who thought tesco@mydomain meant that he had hacked Tesco. Of course, for your purposes that would be a good thing as a sales lead.
The Tories should be worried about the rise and fall and rise again of Reginald Farage. As an almost millionaire he practically an Ordinary Man compared to our billionaire Prime Minister. And now that he has pledged himself to Stand Up for the ordinary people in a crusade against the woke establishment, he could be a serious threat to the Tories.
It is increasingly clear that the Tories are going to fight an insurgent campaign against Keir Starmer's government - the blob, the establishment, the lawyers, the regulators - all the people ruining the lives of the ordinary.
If Farage is there to point out that the Tories ARE the government, it won't work. Especially if he is leading another crusade to motivate all the let behind people to vote against the amassed forces stopping them from succeeding.
There has been an assumption that ReFUK will be an irrelevance. The fall out from the Coutts affair suggests that may not be true.
There is a wider issue on the conduct of banks. Farage has found something to elevate his profile with, or re-elevate it. There will be, I expect, more stories like this one which, on the face of it, is inexcusable.
I get very twitchy about the number of banks and lawyers with a photocopy of my passport, but at least I have one to prove my identity.
There's a related issue - access to Government services online. It has proved difficult to get through the Government Gateway and then the HMRC process in my experience esp if one doesn't have a photographic drivers' licence - demands to send mobile phone photos of passports (insane security wise), questions about one's credit record (not easy if one last took out a loan in 1992), and so on. And on top of that there seems to be a random element (as well as the sort of recursive loop in the website which drives one potty). @DavidL was unsurprisingly complainiong about it a few weeks back.
(And even when one does get to the HMRC site the tax information seems pretty pathetic. No clear statements of tax charged and why - just that "tax is sorted for year Y". If HMRC have done it for you it seems to be impossible to correct it once that has happened. But that is another matter.)
Another issue with "the number of banks and lawyers with a photocopy of my passport" is the number of banks and lawyers you hope have got their IT security ducks in a row so your passport is not for sale on the dark web.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha Ha ha ha ha ha ha
Anyway. I have a long, complicated surname. Cossacks stole all the vowels when we lived in the shtetl…
So I have my surname as an internet domain.
So my email is firstname@surname.com
Because I run it, anything before the @ that isn’t a proper, setup email address goes to me.
So i often give out, online, an email address specific to a purpose.
Say I fill in a form with - isuspectthisbsnkissellingdata@surname.com
Then find that email address on the web in hours…
I do exactly the same. I bought a domain for my consultancy business, and any company who asks me for my email address gets theircompany@mydomain.com.
Makes it really, really easy to find out where the spam is coming from.
It’s a useful starting point for conversations with customers, given that a fair bit of my business is IT security training!
I knew someone who did that but reported a lot of pushback from phone operators who thought tesco@mydomain meant that he had hacked Tesco. Of course, for your purposes that would be a good thing as a sales lead.
Oh indeed, customer service peeps do sometimes get confused by it!
Actually rcs did once query it here, where my registered address is vanilla@mydomain.com (Never get any spam to that address btw, so well done Vanilla Forums).
Met some young Ukrainians out drinking last night. Learned a lot
Like this
This is how young Ukrainians decide whether to go to the bomb shelter or not (last night most didn’t, despite the wailing sirens). They constantly check this Telegram channel, the same way we check the weather during a Test match. It tells you what’s incoming & where. If it says drones they say Meh; missiles get them underground. That is digital life in Lviv
FYI, on email addresses you can do the same thing as above with domains, with Gmail for free.
Just add literally anything additionally to your email address, e.g. if your email is bob@gmail.com, you can do bob+1@gmail.com, b.ob@gmail.com, bob.@gmail.com, they all go to the same email and so you get unlimited free email addresses. I use it all the time.
Met some young Ukrainians out drinking last night. Learned a lot
Like this
This is how young Ukrainians decide whether to go to the bomb shelter or not (last night most didn’t, despite the wailing sirens). They constantly check this Telegram channel, the same way we check the weather during a Test match. It tells you what’s incoming & where. If it says drones they say Meh; missiles get them underground. That is digital life in Lviv
Did you decide about Odesa ?
No. I want to go but 1, it’s hard to get to from here and 2, eeeek bombs
Plural, they're using their victories across the past couple of years, not just the most recent victory.
Clever and an honest bar chart. Are we sure this is the Lib Dems?
It's clever, but it's as dishonest as usual. Picking only the ones you won when they've lost several days in the same timeframe is an example of cherry picking stats, which is just as misleading as their usual bar charts with the axis cut off.
Beaten by @TimS , but I am baffled as to how you see this as dishonest. They didn't attempt to win Selby or Uxbridge so they are not relevant. If they used such a chart in seats like that it would be dishonest, but they haven't. They are comparing like with like. If you see such a chart appear in Hartlepool you would be right, but that won't happen.
But what if they produce this chart in a seat they are targeting but actually came third last time?
That is absolutely fine. I double checked the chart before saying that. Such a statement is still completely honest. Also coming from 3rd happened in one of the by elections.
I think it is definitely dishonest (although within the normal bounds of cherry-picking you'd expect) in seats where Labour (or someone else) actually has a better objective claim to being the best-placed to defeat the sitting Conservative (or sitting someone else).
It might also be counterproductive if not carefully targeted. It already has the disadvantage of being seen as just another dodgy LibDem bar chart.
I get the point that you are making, but anywhere where it is not clear cut is fair game. The chart is completely accurate and in somewhere like Chelsea and Fulham fair game, even though both LDs and Lab have a claim to be the challenger. Do you expect the LDs to just go 'Oh you have it cos you are doing so well in the polls even though we are in 2nd place?'.
No. I also don't expect the Libdems to be honest in their election material. Doesn't make it honest just because it's what we expect.
If a firm advertised a new fund by showing some of their existing funds doing better than some of a rival's existing funds, while omitting the funds where they are doing worse than the rival's equivalent, I guess you'd agree that would be dishonest?
They are being completely honest. There is nothing in that leaflet that is anything like untrue or even misleading in any way. They were comparing like with like. A stocks and shares fund wouldn't compare itself to a bond. It compares itself to like funds.
Just because Labour are doing well in polls do you expect the LDs are just going give up and go away. They have every right to go for Chelsea and Fulham and are just as well placed as Lab and the chart is a 100% accurate reflection of that.
Average house price in Chelsea and Fulham is 1.4 million pounds so a Tory manifesto commitment to scrap IHT or raise the threshold to 1 million pounds would help Hands in this marginal seat
Yes we don't want the LDs getting busy in Chelsea & Fulham. That's a central London seat. It's Labour. What we want the LDs doing is winning seats off the Cons in the SW and blue wall towns and burbs.
Libdems are 2nd in that seat, up 15% over 2017, Labour down 10%.
But it's still Labour. Just like in the other direction you have blue wall type seats where the LDs are technically running 3rd but in actuality they are the ones best placed to make the gain.
I hope he gets the best surgeon. I'm guessing that it might be cartilage replacement, in which case it's quite a long rehab - but the results can be excellent.
Average house price in Chelsea and Fulham is 1.4 million pounds so a Tory manifesto commitment to scrap IHT or raise the threshold to 1 million pounds would help Hands in this marginal seat
Yes we don't want the LDs getting busy in Chelsea & Fulham. That's a central London seat. It's Labour. What we want the LDs doing is winning seats off the Cons in the SW and blue wall towns and burbs.
That’s assuming that the Lib Dem’s are Spare Labour. There is a long history of that in the Labour Party - see the negotiations about the Coalition government.
No it isn't. It's just looking at who's best placed to win the seat.
I get a feeling that @Leon's forthcoming Speccie article on "life in Ukraine" is going to be unbearably smug.
I don’t write for the Spectator. If only! The Knapper’s Gazette might, I suppose, ask me for a war diary. But why would it be smug?
I am completely capable of being intolerably smug, I don’t deny that. But anything I write about Ukraine will just be the truth about what I have encountered
I’m not gonna be boasting about the tasting menus and Ayurvedic massage
Met some young Ukrainians out drinking last night. Learned a lot
Like this
This is how young Ukrainians decide whether to go to the bomb shelter or not (last night most didn’t, despite the wailing sirens). They constantly check this Telegram channel, the same way we check the weather during a Test match. It tells you what’s incoming & where. If it says drones they say Meh; missiles get them underground. That is digital life in Lviv
I'm intrigued by Telegram. It seems to dominate much of the post-Soviet social media space, but I've never gone on it. How does it work - is it like Twitter/Threads, or more Facebook-like? Or basic messaging like Whatsapp? Who owns it, I thought it was Russian but the fact Ukrainians seem happy to use it suggests not.
Average house price in Chelsea and Fulham is 1.4 million pounds so a Tory manifesto commitment to scrap IHT or raise the threshold to 1 million pounds would help Hands in this marginal seat
Yes we don't want the LDs getting busy in Chelsea & Fulham. That's a central London seat. It's Labour. What we want the LDs doing is winning seats off the Cons in the SW and blue wall towns and burbs.
Libdems are 2nd in that seat, up 15% over 2017, Labour down 10%.
.. oh and will Nicola Horlick stand again for the LibDems?
Met some young Ukrainians out drinking last night. Learned a lot
Like this
This is how young Ukrainians decide whether to go to the bomb shelter or not (last night most didn’t, despite the wailing sirens). They constantly check this Telegram channel, the same way we check the weather during a Test match. It tells you what’s incoming & where. If it says drones they say Meh; missiles get them underground. That is digital life in Lviv
Did you decide about Odesa ?
No. I want to go but 1, it’s hard to get to from here and 2, eeeek bombs
Fair enough. Would have been interesting - it's on my list if I ever get the ability to spend more time travelling.
I get a feeling that @Leon's forthcoming Speccie article on "life in Ukraine" is going to be unbearably smug.
I don’t write for the Spectator. If only! The Knapper’s Gazette might, I suppose, ask me for a war diary. But why would it be smug?
I am completely capable of being intolerably smug, I don’t deny that. But anything I write about Ukraine will just be the truth about what I have encountered
I’m not gonna be boasting about the tasting menus and Ayurvedic massage
One thing that may help the Liberal Democrats improve their poll ratings is that they have missed the limelight for a while: the last conference had to be cancelled after the death of Elizabeth II, so there has not been much spotlight on the party. Despite this, at both Westminster by elections and local council elections, they have been performing very strongly, and above their poll ratings.
Ed Davey is a remarkable man, and when journalists have gone one-to-one with him, they seem to come away pretty impressed. (vide recent Guardian interview). He has also solved a fair few of the internal process issues and is attracting something of a surge in support, including significant financial support.
Meanwhile the Tories seem to be doing everything in their power to cozy up to the Faragist right, but this is going down very badly in places like Surrey, and many other places across the South and south west of England. In Scotland the party is coming back in the North East and making strong progress in Edinburgh.
Its all beginning to look like we could see a real move in the coming months, and the anti Tory swing could bring some remarkable results in some surprising places.
Were you still up for Gove?
Gove will likely hold on, Surrey Heath voted Leave unlike most of Surrey and his build in the brownbelt not greenbelt housing plans are exactly what his constituency wants. Hunt likely loses and Raab's seat probably goes LD too but Gove will survive. Like cockroaches, Gove and Jeffrey Archer and Lord Mandelson would even survive a nuclear holocaust!
Met some young Ukrainians out drinking last night. Learned a lot
Like this
This is how young Ukrainians decide whether to go to the bomb shelter or not (last night most didn’t, despite the wailing sirens). They constantly check this Telegram channel, the same way we check the weather during a Test match. It tells you what’s incoming & where. If it says drones they say Meh; missiles get them underground. That is digital life in Lviv
Did you decide about Odesa ?
No. I want to go but 1, it’s hard to get to from here and 2, eeeek bombs
Fair enough. Would have been interesting - it's on my list if I ever get the ability to spend more time travelling.
If I don’t reach it on this trip I intend to come back soon. Ukraine right now is an absolutely fascinating place to be. Can’t think of anything that compares
Also you can get excellent 4 star hotels for about £30 a night. In beautiful historic cities full of interest and life. If you’re willing to take the rather modest risk of being bombed
I get a feeling that @Leon's forthcoming Speccie article on "life in Ukraine" is going to be unbearably smug.
Ink dark night descends on the ancient citadel of Lviv. Under the ceaseless hail of Russian muntions we try to wash the equally dark stain of war from our souls with draughts of Nemiroff...
Met some young Ukrainians out drinking last night. Learned a lot
Like this
This is how young Ukrainians decide whether to go to the bomb shelter or not (last night most didn’t, despite the wailing sirens). They constantly check this Telegram channel, the same way we check the weather during a Test match. It tells you what’s incoming & where. If it says drones they say Meh; missiles get them underground. That is digital life in Lviv
I'm intrigued by Telegram. It seems to dominate much of the post-Soviet social media space, but I've never gone on it. How does it work - is it like Twitter/Threads, or more Facebook-like? Or basic messaging like Whatsapp? Who owns it, I thought it was Russian but the fact Ukrainians seem happy to use it suggests not.
I tried it out but (like Mastodon) I couldn't quite get my head round it and I guess it's not fulfilling any particular need I have when I've got my other socials, Reddit, Discord and the lovable grumps on here.
The founders are Russians but it is currently HQ-ed in the UAE and kind of trans/supra-national. One of the core USPs is encryption and security; I remember lots of alarmism around ISIS using it but it's quite popular all over the place.
Rudy Giuliani has now admitted that while acting as Trump’s lawyer, he made false statements by asserting that two Georgia election workers had mishandled ballots while counting votes in Atlanta during the 2020 election.
Giuliani’s concession came in court papers filed on Tuesday night as part of a defamation lawsuit that the two workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, had brought against him in Federal District Court in Washington in December 2021.
The suit accused Giuliani and others of promoting a video that purported to show the two women — who are mother and daughter — manipulating ballots while working for the Fulton County Board of Elections.
In a two-page declaration, Giuliani acknowledged that he had in fact made the statements about the women that led to the filing of the suit and that the remarks “carry meaning that is defamatory per se.” He also admitted that his statements were “actionable” and “false” and that he no longer disputed the “factual elements of liability” the election workers had raised in their suit. https://twitter.com/joncoopertweets/status/1684202856725839876
The mills of justice ground slowly, but they grind very fine... but will any of it cut through to the Fox News-watching Republican voters who still believe the 2020 election was stolen?
Rudy Giuliani has now admitted that while acting as Trump’s lawyer, he made false statements by asserting that two Georgia election workers had mishandled ballots while counting votes in Atlanta during the 2020 election.
Giuliani’s concession came in court papers filed on Tuesday night as part of a defamation lawsuit that the two workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, had brought against him in Federal District Court in Washington in December 2021.
The suit accused Giuliani and others of promoting a video that purported to show the two women — who are mother and daughter — manipulating ballots while working for the Fulton County Board of Elections.
In a two-page declaration, Giuliani acknowledged that he had in fact made the statements about the women that led to the filing of the suit and that the remarks “carry meaning that is defamatory per se.” He also admitted that his statements were “actionable” and “false” and that he no longer disputed the “factual elements of liability” the election workers had raised in their suit. https://twitter.com/joncoopertweets/status/1684202856725839876
The mills of justice ground slowly, but they grind very fine... but will any of it cut through to the Fox News-watching Republican voters who still believe the 2020 election was stolen?
No
Has he tried the “the lies were such obvious bullshit that they weren’t really lies” defence?
Met some young Ukrainians out drinking last night. Learned a lot
Like this
This is how young Ukrainians decide whether to go to the bomb shelter or not (last night most didn’t, despite the wailing sirens). They constantly check this Telegram channel, the same way we check the weather during a Test match. It tells you what’s incoming & where. If it says drones they say Meh; missiles get them underground. That is digital life in Lviv
I'm intrigued by Telegram. It seems to dominate much of the post-Soviet social media space, but I've never gone on it. How does it work - is it like Twitter/Threads, or more Facebook-like? Or basic messaging like Whatsapp? Who owns it, I thought it was Russian but the fact Ukrainians seem happy to use it suggests not.
Yes, good piece from Mike and it echoes my own view that this could be a very good election for the LDs.
Their biggest stumbling block is that they have to overcome some seriously large majorities to win a lot of seats from the Conservatives, but as the bar illustrates, they are capable of doing this.
I am going to provisionally estimate that yhey will emerge from the GE with at least 30 seats. They may even displace the SNP as the third largest Party.
As Generals go, Davey is almost as lucky as Starmer.
Good morning
Fair comment and as things stand entirely possible
On the Farage banking affair there are times, when no matter how you dislike someone's political views, when a stand has to be made against an injustice
Yesterday, Nick Thomas Symonds was terrible on Sky attempting to defend Alison Rose and even worse, Rachel Reeves penned a piece (before Rose resigned) accusing Farage and the media of 'bullying' Rose which was just crass in the extreme
Starmer eventually endorsed her resignation, but only after seeing the way the wind was blowing
This was not a political issue, but the difference between trust and confidentiality, and no doubt if it had been anyone other than Farage, these labour politicians would have had a different response
And I would say the same thing if it had been Corbyn who had been subject to this injustice
Agreed, Big G.
Awkward as it is to find oneself supporting Farage, it has to be said that he has as much right to privacy as the rest of us.
What possessed this woman to blurt out his private details to a journalist is beyond me.
Because she thought she was so brilliant she knew better.
You meet the same phenomenon with OFSTED inspectors.
The fact that they might actually have quite poor judgement doesn't cross their minds.
I can't comment on OFSTED inspectors but the 'they thought they were so brilliant they knew better' attitude is prevalent in many senior executives (and politicians) .
Maybe it's a function of their success in climbing the slippery pole - they come to believe in their own brilliance.
Thank **** such hubris never afflicted Nigel Farage.
Although to be fair he has been particularly deft in his takedown of these particular liberal elitists. These might even be a hatful of compo at the end of this particular rainbow.
Farage is now setting up a campaign group on the de-banking issue, after many people have shared their similar stories with him over the last few weeks.
“ Now it is time to fight back. A common feeling that has been expressed to me over these past few weeks is one of helplessness bordering on despair. It is clear that nobody has been speaking up for everyday people. Now, I intend to be their voice and to campaign for the cultural and legal changes that our banking system needs. Every law-abiding citizen in this country should have the right to a bank account. The resignation of Dame Alison Rose is the first step to ensuring this can happen. Banks must return to operating as they used to do. Then – and only then – can we return to business as usual.
“I am now seriously motivated by this issue. The desperation of those that have been wronged by the big banks means that I simply have to do something. I may not have picked this fight, but I now find myself right in the middle of it. I will be launching, over the course of the next few days, an exercise designed to gather together all of those that have been de-banked. I’m hoping to build a very large database of cases to find out which banks are the worst offenders and what the commonest reasons are, so that we can prepare and present a lobby to ministers, and to Parliament, in order to achieve fundamental change.”
Fair play to him, if he can use his story to bring wider attention to the issue.
I am very very cynical that he will do so. His case attracted attention because he was rich and politically powerful, and the fact that his cause turned out to be just was just coincident to the support: were it not he would still be supported. With the possible caveat that a court case would provide a precedent that could be used by poor people, I doubt that this will help the poor. Happy to be proved wrong, though.
Rightly, or wrongly, being poor remains a legitimate reason for a bank to reject you, surely?
Um, no. Where else is a poor person to put their pennies?
If functioning in society requires the ownership of a bank account, then people must be able to have bank accounts. To do otherwise is to ostracise that person. Consequently if banks do not want to provide one then the state must.
PB has a marked tendency to service the needs of the rich whilst neglecting the needs of the poor, or even imposing upon them against their will.
Do you do that with regulation of banks, or the creation of a state bank of last resort that will provide basic services to everyone?
Met some young Ukrainians out drinking last night. Learned a lot
Like this
This is how young Ukrainians decide whether to go to the bomb shelter or not (last night most didn’t, despite the wailing sirens). They constantly check this Telegram channel, the same way we check the weather during a Test match. It tells you what’s incoming & where. If it says drones they say Meh; missiles get them underground. That is digital life in Lviv
I'm intrigued by Telegram. It seems to dominate much of the post-Soviet social media space, but I've never gone on it. How does it work - is it like Twitter/Threads, or more Facebook-like? Or basic messaging like Whatsapp? Who owns it, I thought it was Russian but the fact Ukrainians seem happy to use it suggests not.
It’s more of a messaging app, a replacement for WhatsApp or Signal, and yes it’s dominant in the CIS countries. Set up by the people who launched Facebook-like VK social network, who quit that company saying it had been taken over by the Russian government.
They’re now Russian exiles based in the sandpit, with a lot of opaque corporate structure designed to stop them from being taken down by governments.
Yes, good piece from Mike and it echoes my own view that this could be a very good election for the LDs.
Their biggest stumbling block is that they have to overcome some seriously large majorities to win a lot of seats from the Conservatives, but as the bar illustrates, they are capable of doing this.
I am going to provisionally estimate that yhey will emerge from the GE with at least 30 seats. They may even displace the SNP as the third largest Party.
As Generals go, Davey is almost as lucky as Starmer.
Good morning
Fair comment and as things stand entirely possible
On the Farage banking affair there are times, when no matter how you dislike someone's political views, when a stand has to be made against an injustice
Yesterday, Nick Thomas Symonds was terrible on Sky attempting to defend Alison Rose and even worse, Rachel Reeves penned a piece (before Rose resigned) accusing Farage and the media of 'bullying' Rose which was just crass in the extreme
Starmer eventually endorsed her resignation, but only after seeing the way the wind was blowing
This was not a political issue, but the difference between trust and confidentiality, and no doubt if it had been anyone other than Farage, these labour politicians would have had a different response
And I would say the same thing if it had been Corbyn who had been subject to this injustice
Agreed, Big G.
Awkward as it is to find oneself supporting Farage, it has to be said that he has as much right to privacy as the rest of us.
What possessed this woman to blurt out his private details to a journalist is beyond me.
Because she thought she was so brilliant she knew better.
You meet the same phenomenon with OFSTED inspectors.
The fact that they might actually have quite poor judgement doesn't cross their minds.
I can't comment on OFSTED inspectors but the 'they thought they were so brilliant they knew better' attitude is prevalent in many senior executives (and politicians) .
Maybe it's a function of their success in climbing the slippery pole - they come to believe in their own brilliance.
Thank **** such hubris never afflicted Nigel Farage.
Although to be fair he has been particularly deft in his takedown of these particular liberal elitists. These might even be a hatful of compo at the end of this particular rainbow.
Farage is now setting up a campaign group on the de-banking issue, after many people have shared their similar stories with him over the last few weeks.
“ Now it is time to fight back. A common feeling that has been expressed to me over these past few weeks is one of helplessness bordering on despair. It is clear that nobody has been speaking up for everyday people. Now, I intend to be their voice and to campaign for the cultural and legal changes that our banking system needs. Every law-abiding citizen in this country should have the right to a bank account. The resignation of Dame Alison Rose is the first step to ensuring this can happen. Banks must return to operating as they used to do. Then – and only then – can we return to business as usual.
“I am now seriously motivated by this issue. The desperation of those that have been wronged by the big banks means that I simply have to do something. I may not have picked this fight, but I now find myself right in the middle of it. I will be launching, over the course of the next few days, an exercise designed to gather together all of those that have been de-banked. I’m hoping to build a very large database of cases to find out which banks are the worst offenders and what the commonest reasons are, so that we can prepare and present a lobby to ministers, and to Parliament, in order to achieve fundamental change.”
Fair play to him, if he can use his story to bring wider attention to the issue.
I get a feeling that @Leon's forthcoming Speccie article on "life in Ukraine" is going to be unbearably smug.
I don’t write for the Spectator. If only! The Knapper’s Gazette might, I suppose, ask me for a war diary. But why would it be smug?
I am completely capable of being intolerably smug, I don’t deny that. But anything I write about Ukraine will just be the truth about what I have encountered
I’m not gonna be boasting about the tasting menus and Ayurvedic massage
Will you be going to more warzones after this?
There's definitely a niche for travel in the safe parts of otherwise war torn countries, with the limitation usually being travel insurance if the FCDO have it as a red zone.
Iraqi Kurdistan (Erbil) is an example. It's amber - avoid all but necessary travel - whereas the rest of Iraq is red. So you can potentially get insurance, and there are flights to Erbil on Wizz and Pegasus airlines.
Afghanistan is another that is probably theoretically now safer than when the US and UK were occupying it. I expect that, red zones notwithstanding, there are parts of Northern Sudan still perfectly visitable, and large tracts of Yemen. The quasi-independent Somaliland at least until recently.
Then there are the disputed zones of otherwise peaceful countries, which are by and large possible to visit and by all accounts can be very interesting. Abkhazia in Georgia for example I hear is beautiful but dilapidated (Sukhumi), though South Ossetia seems more problematic. Transnistria in Moldova is an established offbeat tourist attraction. The Israeli settlements on the West Bank, etc. Others I would probably steer clear of, like the IS-prowled zones of Saharan Mali and Chad, or the cartel zones of Northern Mexico.
Met some young Ukrainians out drinking last night. Learned a lot
Like this
This is how young Ukrainians decide whether to go to the bomb shelter or not (last night most didn’t, despite the wailing sirens). They constantly check this Telegram channel, the same way we check the weather during a Test match. It tells you what’s incoming & where. If it says drones they say Meh; missiles get them underground. That is digital life in Lviv
I'm intrigued by Telegram. It seems to dominate much of the post-Soviet social media space, but I've never gone on it. How does it work - is it like Twitter/Threads, or more Facebook-like? Or basic messaging like Whatsapp? Who owns it, I thought it was Russian but the fact Ukrainians seem happy to use it suggests not.
It’s more of a messaging app, a replacement for WhatsApp or Signal, and yes it’s dominant in the CIS countries. Set up by the people who launched Facebook-like VK social network, who quit that company saying it had been taken over by the Russian government.
They’re now Russian exiles based in the sandpit, with a lot of opaque corporate structure designed to stop them from being taken down by governments.
Looking like a rainy few days in London coming up. @kinabalu 's tip for 2-1 Australia for the Ashes (which I followed - thanks) - is looking increasingly attractive.
On weather: it feels like a very rainy July. Yet reservoir levels in the North West are below average for the time of year (though in contrast to the start of July, we are now above the levels from last year). I wonder what the lag between rain and levels is? I think it must be quite a lot: first, the moors need to be saturated in order for streams to form and rain to run off. June was very dry, so July has probably been spent replenishing the sponge. https://www.unitedutilities.com/help-and-support/your-water-supply/your-reservoirs/reservoir-levels/
Thanks back for the thanks. I nailed Wimbo too so I'm feeling more smugcity than usual at the moment and therefore moved to mention again my top 2 politics calls: They are Donald Trump will not be president again and Labour will win a majority at the GE. These are terrific 3.4 lay and 1.6 back bets respectively imo.
Yes, good piece from Mike and it echoes my own view that this could be a very good election for the LDs.
Their biggest stumbling block is that they have to overcome some seriously large majorities to win a lot of seats from the Conservatives, but as the bar illustrates, they are capable of doing this.
I am going to provisionally estimate that yhey will emerge from the GE with at least 30 seats. They may even displace the SNP as the third largest Party.
As Generals go, Davey is almost as lucky as Starmer.
Good morning
Fair comment and as things stand entirely possible
On the Farage banking affair there are times, when no matter how you dislike someone's political views, when a stand has to be made against an injustice
Yesterday, Nick Thomas Symonds was terrible on Sky attempting to defend Alison Rose and even worse, Rachel Reeves penned a piece (before Rose resigned) accusing Farage and the media of 'bullying' Rose which was just crass in the extreme
Starmer eventually endorsed her resignation, but only after seeing the way the wind was blowing
This was not a political issue, but the difference between trust and confidentiality, and no doubt if it had been anyone other than Farage, these labour politicians would have had a different response
And I would say the same thing if it had been Corbyn who had been subject to this injustice
Agreed, Big G.
Awkward as it is to find oneself supporting Farage, it has to be said that he has as much right to privacy as the rest of us.
What possessed this woman to blurt out his private details to a journalist is beyond me.
I get a feeling that @Leon's forthcoming Speccie article on "life in Ukraine" is going to be unbearably smug.
I don’t write for the Spectator. If only! The Knapper’s Gazette might, I suppose, ask me for a war diary. But why would it be smug?
I am completely capable of being intolerably smug, I don’t deny that. But anything I write about Ukraine will just be the truth about what I have encountered
I’m not gonna be boasting about the tasting menus and Ayurvedic massage
Will you be going to more warzones after this?
There's definitely a niche for travel in the safe parts of otherwise war torn countries, with the limitation usually being travel insurance if the FCDO have it as a red zone.
Iraqi Kurdistan (Erbil) is an example. It's amber - avoid all but necessary travel - whereas the rest of Iraq is red. So you can potentially get insurance, and there are flights to Erbil on Wizz and Pegasus airlines.
Afghanistan is another that is probably theoretically now safer than when the US and UK were occupying it. I expect that, red zones notwithstanding, there are parts of Northern Sudan still perfectly visitable, and large tracts of Yemen. The quasi-independent Somaliland at least until recently.
Then there are the disputed zones of otherwise peaceful countries, which are by and large possible to visit and by all accounts can be very interesting. Abkhazia in Georgia for example I hear is beautiful but dilapidated (Sukhumi), though South Ossetia seems more problematic. Transnistria in Moldova is an established offbeat tourist attraction. The Israeli settlements on the West Bank, etc. Others I would probably steer clear of, like the IS-prowled zones of Saharan Mali and Chad, or the cartel zones of Northern Mexico.
Yes, that would be an interesting new direction for Leon's travel writing. But I was thinking of a more radical option. Many of the greatest war correspondents have started out as something else.
I get a feeling that @Leon's forthcoming Speccie article on "life in Ukraine" is going to be unbearably smug.
I don’t write for the Spectator. If only! The Knapper’s Gazette might, I suppose, ask me for a war diary. But why would it be smug?
I am completely capable of being intolerably smug, I don’t deny that. But anything I write about Ukraine will just be the truth about what I have encountered
I’m not gonna be boasting about the tasting menus and Ayurvedic massage
Will you be going to more warzones after this?
I can completely see how - notoriously - some journalists get addicted to it. War journalism
Everything seems elevated: more intense and colourful. Oh I’m having a nice coffee and strudel - what if the air raid sirens go off?! Here’s a guy having a beer - but he’s telling me about how last week he was nearly shot dead. That sounds like thunder - but it could be incoming missiles - run!
Etc
It’s a constant pump of adrenaline, excitement and interest. Until you get over excited, get too close to the front and Bang
Yes, good piece from Mike and it echoes my own view that this could be a very good election for the LDs.
Their biggest stumbling block is that they have to overcome some seriously large majorities to win a lot of seats from the Conservatives, but as the bar illustrates, they are capable of doing this.
I am going to provisionally estimate that yhey will emerge from the GE with at least 30 seats. They may even displace the SNP as the third largest Party.
As Generals go, Davey is almost as lucky as Starmer.
Good morning
Fair comment and as things stand entirely possible
On the Farage banking affair there are times, when no matter how you dislike someone's political views, when a stand has to be made against an injustice
Yesterday, Nick Thomas Symonds was terrible on Sky attempting to defend Alison Rose and even worse, Rachel Reeves penned a piece (before Rose resigned) accusing Farage and the media of 'bullying' Rose which was just crass in the extreme
Starmer eventually endorsed her resignation, but only after seeing the way the wind was blowing
This was not a political issue, but the difference between trust and confidentiality, and no doubt if it had been anyone other than Farage, these labour politicians would have had a different response
And I would say the same thing if it had been Corbyn who had been subject to this injustice
Agreed, Big G.
Awkward as it is to find oneself supporting Farage, it has to be said that he has as much right to privacy as the rest of us.
What possessed this woman to blurt out his private details to a journalist is beyond me.
Because she thought she was so brilliant she knew better.
You meet the same phenomenon with OFSTED inspectors.
The fact that they might actually have quite poor judgement doesn't cross their minds.
I can't comment on OFSTED inspectors but the 'they thought they were so brilliant they knew better' attitude is prevalent in many senior executives (and politicians) .
Maybe it's a function of their success in climbing the slippery pole - they come to believe in their own brilliance.
Thank **** such hubris never afflicted Nigel Farage.
Although to be fair he has been particularly deft in his takedown of these particular liberal elitists. These might even be a hatful of compo at the end of this particular rainbow.
Farage is now setting up a campaign group on the de-banking issue, after many people have shared their similar stories with him over the last few weeks.
“ Now it is time to fight back. A common feeling that has been expressed to me over these past few weeks is one of helplessness bordering on despair. It is clear that nobody has been speaking up for everyday people. Now, I intend to be their voice and to campaign for the cultural and legal changes that our banking system needs. Every law-abiding citizen in this country should have the right to a bank account. The resignation of Dame Alison Rose is the first step to ensuring this can happen. Banks must return to operating as they used to do. Then – and only then – can we return to business as usual.
“I am now seriously motivated by this issue. The desperation of those that have been wronged by the big banks means that I simply have to do something. I may not have picked this fight, but I now find myself right in the middle of it. I will be launching, over the course of the next few days, an exercise designed to gather together all of those that have been de-banked. I’m hoping to build a very large database of cases to find out which banks are the worst offenders and what the commonest reasons are, so that we can prepare and present a lobby to ministers, and to Parliament, in order to achieve fundamental change.”
Fair play to him, if he can use his story to bring wider attention to the issue.
Maybe, but with Farage there is always an angle.
A cute hoor grifting the obtuse?
Some people claim that any criticism of Farage is just a reflex action.
Obesity is no longer confined to the Anglosphere. Very prevalent here too.
If I had to guess it's the spread of burgers, pizza and chips- all of which are far more prevalent here than 15 years ago - and the general decline in physical activity.
That said, it's still not as bad as the UK - yet alone the USA.
Another day on from the Farage / Coutts fun. As he is ineligible for an account there (I assume they won't wave their rules just because they have made a tit of themselves) will the Nigel now be demanding that "ordinary" people like him should be allowed a Coutts account?
I am feeling the Farage love on here, he is doing this not for himself, but for the poor people. Handily, I have another invisible Garden Bridge available.
What strikes me is that Mr Farage has had hassle from being a PEP. So he makes himself an even more Politically Exposed Person with his mission against the banks. What bank is now going to take him on, if it means banner headlines in the DM every time some minion burps unintentionally while handling his non-Coutt's cheque book? Which will only "justify" him even more.
Nevertheless: the point remains: we need to understand this basic bank business and how well it works. Benpointer thought just about anyone ordinary could get one (which is not the same as having an existing one closed down), but RCS1000's stats suggest otherwise.
One way of reading the stats is that everyone who persists manages to sort out a Basic Account with someone eventually, but at least one bank isn't pulling their weight in making it easy and seems generally keener on Computer Says No reasons for rejecting people. Which isn't the point really.
And that's where the stories of the Aristocrat who (no longer) banks at Coutts and the Aristocrat who cleans our boots (and can't get a basic account) do join up.
We have got a business model of banking where "nah, too difficult/ expensive" is part of the thinking. Branches, customers, services and transactions that aren't easy and quickly profitable are to be trimmed.
Capitalism doesn't have to look like that, but capitalism coupled with short horizons probably does. Fix that, and a lot of the British Disease subsides.
(Talking of which, without being conspiratorial, what's the benefit to society in a hedge fund shorting a bank?
I think GBNews needs Farage more than the other way around probably.
Maybe I missed it, but has anyone commented on the uber-irony of Farage using the EU developed GDPR (that no doubt he would like scrapped) to issue a Subject Access Request to NatWest/Coutts?
Another day on from the Farage / Coutts fun. As he is ineligible for an account there (I assume they won't wave their rules just because they have made a tit of themselves) will the Nigel now be demanding that "ordinary" people like him should be allowed a Coutts account?
I am feeling the Farage love on here, he is doing this not for himself, but for the poor people. Handily, I have another invisible Garden Bridge available.
What strikes me is that Mr Farage has had hassle from being a PEP. So he makes himself an even more Politically Exposed Person with his mission against the banks. What bank is now going to take him on, if it means banner headlines in the DM every time some minion burps unintentionally while handling his non-Coutt's cheque book? Which will only "justify" him even more.
Nevertheless: the point remains: we need to understand this basic bank business and how well it works. Benpointer thought just about anyone ordinary could get one (which is not the same as having an existing one closed down), but RCS1000's stats suggest otherwise.
One way of reading the stats is that everyone who persists manages to sort out a Basic Account with someone eventually, but at least one bank isn't pulling their weight in making it easy and seems generally keener on Computer Says No reasons for rejecting people. Which isn't the point really.
And that's where the stories of the Aristocrat who (no longer) banks at Coutts and the Aristocrat who cleans our boots (and can't get a basic account) do join up.
We have got a business model of banking where "nah, too difficult/ expensive" is part of the thinking. Branches, customers, services and transactions that aren't easy and quickly profitable are to be trimmed.
Capitalism doesn't have to look like that, but capitalism coupled with short horizons probably does. Fix that, and a lot of the British Disease subsides.
(Talking of which, without being conspiratorial, what's the benefit to society in a hedge fund shorting a bank?
I think GBNews needs Farage more than the other way around probably.
Maybe I missed it, but has anyone commented on the uber-irony of Farage using the EU developed GDPR (that no doubt he would like scrapped) to issue a Subject Access Request to NatWest/Coutts?
Oh yes; but one of us took the slightly niche view that it was revenge on the remainers with their own weapons.
Obesity is no longer confined to the Anglosphere. Very prevalent here too.
If I had to guess it's the spread of burgers, pizza and chips- all of which are far more prevalent here than 15 years ago - and the general decline in physical activity.
That said, it's still not as bad as the UK - yet alone the USA.
That’s Bulgaria?
Yes, obesity is almost everywhere. The only country I’ve been recently that seems immune is Vietnam. Which - surely no coincidence - has some of the best food and food culture in the world
But I bet it will get there in the end. America was merely the pioneer. The other Anglophone countries followed (Oz is really fat as well). Now continental Europe, South Asia, all follow. Some Arab controls are grossly fat. Ditto Latin America
OTOH these new obesity drugs really work, and they work fast, they just need to come down in price (which they surely will). The NHS should start handing them out for free. The money saved versus money spent (on lifelong obesity) will make it a huge bonus overall
Another day on from the Farage / Coutts fun. As he is ineligible for an account there (I assume they won't wave their rules just because they have made a tit of themselves) will the Nigel now be demanding that "ordinary" people like him should be allowed a Coutts account?
I am feeling the Farage love on here, he is doing this not for himself, but for the poor people. Handily, I have another invisible Garden Bridge available.
What strikes me is that Mr Farage has had hassle from being a PEP. So he makes himself an even more Politically Exposed Person with his mission against the banks. What bank is now going to take him on, if it means banner headlines in the DM every time some minion burps unintentionally while handling his non-Coutt's cheque book? Which will only "justify" him even more.
Nevertheless: the point remains: we need to understand this basic bank business and how well it works. Benpointer thought just about anyone ordinary could get one (which is not the same as having an existing one closed down), but RCS1000's stats suggest otherwise.
One way of reading the stats is that everyone who persists manages to sort out a Basic Account with someone eventually, but at least one bank isn't pulling their weight in making it easy and seems generally keener on Computer Says No reasons for rejecting people. Which isn't the point really.
And that's where the stories of the Aristocrat who (no longer) banks at Coutts and the Aristocrat who cleans our boots (and can't get a basic account) do join up.
We have got a business model of banking where "nah, too difficult/ expensive" is part of the thinking. Branches, customers, services and transactions that aren't easy and quickly profitable are to be trimmed.
Capitalism doesn't have to look like that, but capitalism coupled with short horizons probably does. Fix that, and a lot of the British Disease subsides.
(Talking of which, without being conspiratorial, what's the benefit to society in a hedge fund shorting a bank?
I think GBNews needs Farage more than the other way around probably.
Maybe I missed it, but has anyone commented on the uber-irony of Farage using the EU developed GDPR (that no doubt he would like scrapped) to issue a Subject Access Request to NatWest/Coutts?
Oh yes; but one of us took the slightly niche view that it was revenge on the remainers with their own weapons.
I have zero sympathy for Farage (the fascist tosser), but it does question the managerial efficiency of Coutts. When GDPR came out, most sensible companies informed their staff that if they wrote anything about any individual it needed to factual and not subjective and written in a manner that was defensible if an SAR was issued.
Perhaps Coutts needs to also look at it's "membership" policy which could ( I am not sure whether legal under banking law) state that the bank reserved the right to not hold accounts of persons it considered that might bring the bank's equality values into disrepute.
I suspect Greg Hands will be delighted with that new LD barchart.
In 2019 he won with 49% of the vote ie less than half the votes but there was only 2% between the LDs and Labour for second. On current polls Starmer Labour would be a clear second so anything which helps divide his opposition also helps him cling on and keeps Chelsea and Fulham Tory blue
I agree, Labour is the main threat to the Tories in Chelsea and Fulham. The LDs only came second because of Corbyn.
Maybe.... But then the Con candidate only came first because of Corbyn.
Yes, good piece from Mike and it echoes my own view that this could be a very good election for the LDs.
Their biggest stumbling block is that they have to overcome some seriously large majorities to win a lot of seats from the Conservatives, but as the bar illustrates, they are capable of doing this.
I am going to provisionally estimate that yhey will emerge from the GE with at least 30 seats. They may even displace the SNP as the third largest Party.
As Generals go, Davey is almost as lucky as Starmer.
Good morning
Fair comment and as things stand entirely possible
On the Farage banking affair there are times, when no matter how you dislike someone's political views, when a stand has to be made against an injustice
Yesterday, Nick Thomas Symonds was terrible on Sky attempting to defend Alison Rose and even worse, Rachel Reeves penned a piece (before Rose resigned) accusing Farage and the media of 'bullying' Rose which was just crass in the extreme
Starmer eventually endorsed her resignation, but only after seeing the way the wind was blowing
This was not a political issue, but the difference between trust and confidentiality, and no doubt if it had been anyone other than Farage, these labour politicians would have had a different response
And I would say the same thing if it had been Corbyn who had been subject to this injustice
Agreed, Big G.
Awkward as it is to find oneself supporting Farage, it has to be said that he has as much right to privacy as the rest of us.
What possessed this woman to blurt out his private details to a journalist is beyond me.
Ego and stupidity
That, and the sense that Farage is an annoying so-and-so. The only way to deal with that scenario is to get in extra supplies of sang-froid, because he will try wear through them. And if he suceeds, he will pounce on the resulting weakness. As he has. (No, Alison Rose shouldn't have said anything. It's not forgivable, but it is possibly understandable.)
(Once read a samizdat copy of guide to how to wind up the opposition aimed at council candidates and writers of Focus newsletters, for those who remember them. Truly there is little new under the sun.)
I get a feeling that @Leon's forthcoming Speccie article on "life in Ukraine" is going to be unbearably smug.
I don’t write for the Spectator. If only! The Knapper’s Gazette might, I suppose, ask me for a war diary. But why would it be smug?
I am completely capable of being intolerably smug, I don’t deny that. But anything I write about Ukraine will just be the truth about what I have encountered
I’m not gonna be boasting about the tasting menus and Ayurvedic massage
Will you be going to more warzones after this?
I can completely see how - notoriously - some journalists get addicted to it. War journalism
Everything seems elevated: more intense and colourful. Oh I’m having a nice coffee and strudel - what if the air raid sirens go off?! Here’s a guy having a beer - but he’s telling me about how last week he was nearly shot dead. That sounds like thunder - but it could be incoming missiles - run!
Etc
It’s a constant pump of adrenaline, excitement and interest. Until you get over excited, get too close to the front and Bang
That's what they say. That for some people life in a combat zone is lived on a plane above and beyond, making it difficult to adjust afterwards because 'normality' now seems mundane and meaningless. Hopefully you won't be afflicted in this way. Hopefully you'll be able to come back and still enjoy feeding the ducks in Regents Park.
Yes, good piece from Mike and it echoes my own view that this could be a very good election for the LDs.
Their biggest stumbling block is that they have to overcome some seriously large majorities to win a lot of seats from the Conservatives, but as the bar illustrates, they are capable of doing this.
I am going to provisionally estimate that yhey will emerge from the GE with at least 30 seats. They may even displace the SNP as the third largest Party.
As Generals go, Davey is almost as lucky as Starmer.
Good morning
Fair comment and as things stand entirely possible
On the Farage banking affair there are times, when no matter how you dislike someone's political views, when a stand has to be made against an injustice
Yesterday, Nick Thomas Symonds was terrible on Sky attempting to defend Alison Rose and even worse, Rachel Reeves penned a piece (before Rose resigned) accusing Farage and the media of 'bullying' Rose which was just crass in the extreme
Starmer eventually endorsed her resignation, but only after seeing the way the wind was blowing
This was not a political issue, but the difference between trust and confidentiality, and no doubt if it had been anyone other than Farage, these labour politicians would have had a different response
And I would say the same thing if it had been Corbyn who had been subject to this injustice
Agreed, Big G.
Awkward as it is to find oneself supporting Farage, it has to be said that he has as much right to privacy as the rest of us.
What possessed this woman to blurt out his private details to a journalist is beyond me.
Why do you believe that ridiculously spun story?
The printing of that material by the BBC was almost certainly a result of a parallelogram of forces, a negotiated agreement between tough, serious, very intelligent people, not the product of somebody finding out she was sitting next to somebody else at a dinner one evening and blurting it out by accident after she'd had a few. The same can be said about the cracking down on Farage's account in the first place. Ditto with the unsanctioning of Oleg Tinkov. Into that, add a dose of the fact that in Britain wherever the royal family are concerned, especially the head of that family - currently a man who can't write his own name with a pen without effing and blinding at his servants - different rules apply.
Obesity is no longer confined to the Anglosphere. Very prevalent here too.
If I had to guess it's the spread of burgers, pizza and chips- all of which are far more prevalent here than 15 years ago - and the general decline in physical activity.
That said, it's still not as bad as the UK - yet alone the USA.
That’s Bulgaria?
Yes, obesity is almost everywhere. The only country I’ve been recently that seems immune is Vietnam. Which - surely no coincidence - has some of the best food and food culture in the world
But I bet it will get there in the end. America was merely the pioneer. The other Anglophone countries followed (Oz is really fat as well). Now continental Europe, South Asia, all follow. Some Arab controls are grossly fat. Ditto Latin America
OTOH these new obesity drugs really work, and they work fast, they just need to come down in price (which they surely will). The NHS should start handing them out for free. The money saved versus money spent (on lifelong obesity) will make it a huge bonus overall
The NHS should spend money on educating people about just how shit the food is that they get brainwashed into eating. The cure for lifelong obesity is to not get obese in the first place. Failing that, get the NHS to spend money on buying people proper food, instead of lining the pockets of Big Pharma share holders!
Obesity is no longer confined to the Anglosphere. Very prevalent here too.
If I had to guess it's the spread of burgers, pizza and chips- all of which are far more prevalent here than 15 years ago - and the general decline in physical activity.
That said, it's still not as bad as the UK - yet alone the USA.
Or maybe it's selection bias - are you in the touristy bit which is full of burger bars and chippies?
One thing that may help the Liberal Democrats improve their poll ratings is that they have missed the limelight for a while: the last conference had to be cancelled after the death of Elizabeth II, so there has not been much spotlight on the party. Despite this, at both Westminster by elections and local council elections, they have been performing very strongly, and above their poll ratings.
Ed Davey is a remarkable man, and when journalists have gone one-to-one with him, they seem to come away pretty impressed. (vide recent Guardian interview). He has also solved a fair few of the internal process issues and is attracting something of a surge in support, including significant financial support.
Meanwhile the Tories seem to be doing everything in their power to cozy up to the Faragist right, but this is going down very badly in places like Surrey, and many other places across the South and south west of England. In Scotland the party is coming back in the North East and making strong progress in Edinburgh.
Its all beginning to look like we could see a real move in the coming months, and the anti Tory swing could bring some remarkable results in some surprising places.
Were you still up for Gove?
The challenge for the LDs is that their popularity plummeted in the Coalition years and has been flatlining at 10% +/- 2% for a decade now. The assumption is that the LDs can sweep all before them using tactical voting but national vote share also matters.
1992 - 20 seats, 18% vote share. ratio 1.1 1997 - 46 seats, 17% vote share. ratio 2.7 2001 - 52 seats, 18% vote share. ratio 2.9 2005 - 62 seats, 22% vote share. ratio 2.8 2010 - 57 seats, 23% vote share. ratio 2.5 2015 - 8 seats, 8% vote share. ratio 1 2017 - 12 seats, 7% vote share. ratio 1.7 2019 - 11 seats, 12% vote share. ratio 0.9
So even at peak tactical voting the best they managed was 3 seats per 1% of national vote. This would give them 25-30 seats max on current polling.
The second challenge is what is the LDs positioning now? Traditionally, they tried to position themselves as being in the centre between Con and Lab. This enabled them to pick up anti-Con and anti-Lab votes in different places but this feel apart after the Coalition. They now seem to be positioning as a more explicitly left wing party but how does that differentiate them from the Greens and Lab?
I get a feeling that @Leon's forthcoming Speccie article on "life in Ukraine" is going to be unbearably smug.
I don’t write for the Spectator. If only! The Knapper’s Gazette might, I suppose, ask me for a war diary. But why would it be smug?
I am completely capable of being intolerably smug, I don’t deny that. But anything I write about Ukraine will just be the truth about what I have encountered
I’m not gonna be boasting about the tasting menus and Ayurvedic massage
Will you be going to more warzones after this?
I can completely see how - notoriously - some journalists get addicted to it. War journalism
Everything seems elevated: more intense and colourful. Oh I’m having a nice coffee and strudel - what if the air raid sirens go off?! Here’s a guy having a beer - but he’s telling me about how last week he was nearly shot dead. That sounds like thunder - but it could be incoming missiles - run!
Etc
It’s a constant pump of adrenaline, excitement and interest. Until you get over excited, get too close to the front and Bang
There's probably a good book/film in there (know any good writers?) whereby you have, say, a Marie Colvin-type super serious, renowned war reporter, together with some ne'er do well lackadaisical, effete, Hampstead type (albeit with a chequered past) in the middle of a war zone.
Cate Blanchett for the Marie Colvin role, and Toby Jones for the other one would be good.
I can't imagine many things more stupid than trafficking drugs in Singapore.
Surely proof the death penalty does not deter stupid drug traffickers.
There is a simple logical flaw in that argument.
What is it? The argument goes like this. "Everyone knows there's the death penalty for drug smuggling in Singapore and also that it's enforced. Some people are so stupid that they do it anyway. Here's an example."
Nobody's claiming it doesn't stop the specific drug smugglers who get executed from doing it again.
Another day on from the Farage / Coutts fun. As he is ineligible for an account there (I assume they won't wave their rules just because they have made a tit of themselves) will the Nigel now be demanding that "ordinary" people like him should be allowed a Coutts account?
I am feeling the Farage love on here, he is doing this not for himself, but for the poor people. Handily, I have another invisible Garden Bridge available.
What strikes me is that Mr Farage has had hassle from being a PEP. So he makes himself an even more Politically Exposed Person with his mission against the banks. What bank is now going to take him on, if it means banner headlines in the DM every time some minion burps unintentionally while handling his non-Coutt's cheque book? Which will only "justify" him even more.
Nevertheless: the point remains: we need to understand this basic bank business and how well it works. Benpointer thought just about anyone ordinary could get one (which is not the same as having an existing one closed down), but RCS1000's stats suggest otherwise.
One way of reading the stats is that everyone who persists manages to sort out a Basic Account with someone eventually, but at least one bank isn't pulling their weight in making it easy and seems generally keener on Computer Says No reasons for rejecting people. Which isn't the point really.
And that's where the stories of the Aristocrat who (no longer) banks at Coutts and the Aristocrat who cleans our boots (and can't get a basic account) do join up.
We have got a business model of banking where "nah, too difficult/ expensive" is part of the thinking. Branches, customers, services and transactions that aren't easy and quickly profitable are to be trimmed.
Capitalism doesn't have to look like that, but capitalism coupled with short horizons probably does. Fix that, and a lot of the British Disease subsides.
(Talking of which, without being conspiratorial, what's the benefit to society in a hedge fund shorting a bank?
I think GBNews needs Farage more than the other way around probably.
Maybe I missed it, but has anyone commented on the uber-irony of Farage using the EU developed GDPR (that no doubt he would like scrapped) to issue a Subject Access Request to NatWest/Coutts?
Oh yes; but one of us took the slightly niche view that it was revenge on the remainers with their own weapons.
I have zero sympathy for Farage (the fascist tosser), but it does question the managerial efficiency of Coutts. When GDPR came out, most sensible companies informed their staff that if they wrote anything about any individual it needed to factual and not subjective and written in a manner that was defensible if an SAR was issued.
Perhaps Coutts needs to also look at it's "membership" policy which could ( I am not sure whether legal under banking law) state that the bank reserved the right to not hold accounts of persons it considered that might bring the bank's equality values into disrepute.
On first point: quite so.
Not sure on second myself, but perhaps the gay birthday cake case precedent applies.
Another day on from the Farage / Coutts fun. As he is ineligible for an account there (I assume they won't wave their rules just because they have made a tit of themselves) will the Nigel now be demanding that "ordinary" people like him should be allowed a Coutts account?
I am feeling the Farage love on here, he is doing this not for himself, but for the poor people. Handily, I have another invisible Garden Bridge available.
What strikes me is that Mr Farage has had hassle from being a PEP. So he makes himself an even more Politically Exposed Person with his mission against the banks. What bank is now going to take him on, if it means banner headlines in the DM every time some minion burps unintentionally while handling his non-Coutt's cheque book? Which will only "justify" him even more.
Nevertheless: the point remains: we need to understand this basic bank business and how well it works. Benpointer thought just about anyone ordinary could get one (which is not the same as having an existing one closed down), but RCS1000's stats suggest otherwise.
One way of reading the stats is that everyone who persists manages to sort out a Basic Account with someone eventually, but at least one bank isn't pulling their weight in making it easy and seems generally keener on Computer Says No reasons for rejecting people. Which isn't the point really.
And that's where the stories of the Aristocrat who (no longer) banks at Coutts and the Aristocrat who cleans our boots (and can't get a basic account) do join up.
We have got a business model of banking where "nah, too difficult/ expensive" is part of the thinking. Branches, customers, services and transactions that aren't easy and quickly profitable are to be trimmed.
Capitalism doesn't have to look like that, but capitalism coupled with short horizons probably does. Fix that, and a lot of the British Disease subsides.
(Talking of which, without being conspiratorial, what's the benefit to society in a hedge fund shorting a bank?
I think GBNews needs Farage more than the other way around probably.
Maybe I missed it, but has anyone commented on the uber-irony of Farage using the EU developed GDPR (that no doubt he would like scrapped) to issue a Subject Access Request to NatWest/Coutts?
His right to see his data began in 1984, under UK-originated legislation:
Another day on from the Farage / Coutts fun. As he is ineligible for an account there (I assume they won't wave their rules just because they have made a tit of themselves) will the Nigel now be demanding that "ordinary" people like him should be allowed a Coutts account?
I am feeling the Farage love on here, he is doing this not for himself, but for the poor people. Handily, I have another invisible Garden Bridge available.
What strikes me is that Mr Farage has had hassle from being a PEP. So he makes himself an even more Politically Exposed Person with his mission against the banks. What bank is now going to take him on, if it means banner headlines in the DM every time some minion burps unintentionally while handling his non-Coutt's cheque book? Which will only "justify" him even more.
Nevertheless: the point remains: we need to understand this basic bank business and how well it works. Benpointer thought just about anyone ordinary could get one (which is not the same as having an existing one closed down), but RCS1000's stats suggest otherwise.
One way of reading the stats is that everyone who persists manages to sort out a Basic Account with someone eventually, but at least one bank isn't pulling their weight in making it easy and seems generally keener on Computer Says No reasons for rejecting people. Which isn't the point really.
And that's where the stories of the Aristocrat who (no longer) banks at Coutts and the Aristocrat who cleans our boots (and can't get a basic account) do join up.
We have got a business model of banking where "nah, too difficult/ expensive" is part of the thinking. Branches, customers, services and transactions that aren't easy and quickly profitable are to be trimmed.
Capitalism doesn't have to look like that, but capitalism coupled with short horizons probably does. Fix that, and a lot of the British Disease subsides.
(Talking of which, without being conspiratorial, what's the benefit to society in a hedge fund shorting a bank?
I think GBNews needs Farage more than the other way around probably.
Maybe I missed it, but has anyone commented on the uber-irony of Farage using the EU developed GDPR (that no doubt he would like scrapped) to issue a Subject Access Request to NatWest/Coutts?
Oh yes; but one of us took the slightly niche view that it was revenge on the remainers with their own weapons.
I have zero sympathy for Farage (the fascist tosser), but it does question the managerial efficiency of Coutts. When GDPR came out, most sensible companies informed their staff that if they wrote anything about any individual it needed to factual and not subjective and written in a manner that was defensible if an SAR was issued.
Perhaps Coutts needs to also look at it's "membership" policy which could ( I am not sure whether legal under banking law) state that the bank reserved the right to not hold accounts of persons it considered that might bring the bank's equality values into disrepute.
They have the right to terminate your account for any reason they chose. Now.
They frequently terminate accounts at Coutts - transferring the people to NatWest. They do this so often that there is an internal process for this. You invite the customer in and tell them, to their face, what is happening. A friend of mine does this on a regular basis there.
They chose not to tell the truth to Farage. They seem to have lied to other banks about why they were closing his account. They then lied to a BBC journalist, face to face, on the record. While disclosing personal information.
If someone pours petrol over their head, and lights a cigar…..
One thing that may help the Liberal Democrats improve their poll ratings is that they have missed the limelight for a while: the last conference had to be cancelled after the death of Elizabeth II, so there has not been much spotlight on the party. Despite this, at both Westminster by elections and local council elections, they have been performing very strongly, and above their poll ratings.
Ed Davey is a remarkable man, and when journalists have gone one-to-one with him, they seem to come away pretty impressed. (vide recent Guardian interview). He has also solved a fair few of the internal process issues and is attracting something of a surge in support, including significant financial support.
Meanwhile the Tories seem to be doing everything in their power to cozy up to the Faragist right, but this is going down very badly in places like Surrey, and many other places across the South and south west of England. In Scotland the party is coming back in the North East and making strong progress in Edinburgh.
Its all beginning to look like we could see a real move in the coming months, and the anti Tory swing could bring some remarkable results in some surprising places.
Were you still up for Gove?
Gove will likely hold on, Surrey Heath voted Leave unlike most of Surrey and his build in the brownbelt not greenbelt housing plans are exactly what his constituency wants. Hunt likely loses and Raab's seat probably goes LD too but Gove will survive. Like cockroaches, Gove and Jeffrey Archer and Lord Mandelson would even survive a nuclear holocaust!
A vivid image.
It always amused me that the Latin name for the cockroach is Blatta. At the height of the FIFA scandals one did feel that Sepp had the survival skills of his near namesake.
Interesting that you share the view that even large parts of Surrey are already a lost cause. I may add there are similar dynamics in the Cotswolds, so there really could really be some big surprises in the formerly true blue Shire Counties. Given the advances in the suburbs, the Lib Dems could have a very good result across the board.
One thing that may help the Liberal Democrats improve their poll ratings is that they have missed the limelight for a while: the last conference had to be cancelled after the death of Elizabeth II, so there has not been much spotlight on the party. Despite this, at both Westminster by elections and local council elections, they have been performing very strongly, and above their poll ratings.
Ed Davey is a remarkable man, and when journalists have gone one-to-one with him, they seem to come away pretty impressed. (vide recent Guardian interview). He has also solved a fair few of the internal process issues and is attracting something of a surge in support, including significant financial support.
Meanwhile the Tories seem to be doing everything in their power to cozy up to the Faragist right, but this is going down very badly in places like Surrey, and many other places across the South and south west of England. In Scotland the party is coming back in the North East and making strong progress in Edinburgh.
Its all beginning to look like we could see a real move in the coming months, and the anti Tory swing could bring some remarkable results in some surprising places.
Were you still up for Gove?
The challenge for the LDs is that their popularity plummeted in the Coalition years and has been flatlining at 10% +/- 2% for a decade now. The assumption is that the LDs can sweep all before them using tactical voting but national vote share also matters.
1992 - 20 seats, 18% vote share. ratio 1.1 1997 - 46 seats, 17% vote share. ratio 2.7 2001 - 52 seats, 18% vote share. ratio 2.9 2005 - 62 seats, 22% vote share. ratio 2.8 2010 - 57 seats, 23% vote share. ratio 2.5 2015 - 8 seats, 8% vote share. ratio 1 2017 - 12 seats, 7% vote share. ratio 1.7 2019 - 11 seats, 12% vote share. ratio 0.9
So even at peak tactical voting the best they managed was 3 seats per 1% of national vote. This would give them 25-30 seats max on current polling.
The second challenge is what is the LDs positioning now? Traditionally, they tried to position themselves as being in the centre between Con and Lab. This enabled them to pick up anti-Con and anti-Lab votes in different places but this feel apart after the Coalition. They now seem to be positioning as a more explicitly left wing party but how does that differentiate them from the Greens and Lab?
For a minutely right of centre/centrist like me the LDs are a party I can hold my nose and vote for despite misgivings about many of their members and activists, and I did so in the last two GEs and many local elections because of the Brexit insanity and Boris Johnson.
I am likely to shift back to Conservative at the next GE because I think Sunak is a decent man and that I fear a big majority from bossy anti-business Labour. Whether there are many others like me I have no idea!
Obesity is no longer confined to the Anglosphere. Very prevalent here too.
If I had to guess it's the spread of burgers, pizza and chips- all of which are far more prevalent here than 15 years ago - and the general decline in physical activity.
That said, it's still not as bad as the UK - yet alone the USA.
That’s Bulgaria?
Yes, obesity is almost everywhere. The only country I’ve been recently that seems immune is Vietnam. Which - surely no coincidence - has some of the best food and food culture in the world
But I bet it will get there in the end. America was merely the pioneer. The other Anglophone countries followed (Oz is really fat as well). Now continental Europe, South Asia, all follow. Some Arab controls are grossly fat. Ditto Latin America
OTOH these new obesity drugs really work, and they work fast, they just need to come down in price (which they surely will). The NHS should start handing them out for free. The money saved versus money spent (on lifelong obesity) will make it a huge bonus overall
One thing that may help the Liberal Democrats improve their poll ratings is that they have missed the limelight for a while: the last conference had to be cancelled after the death of Elizabeth II, so there has not been much spotlight on the party. Despite this, at both Westminster by elections and local council elections, they have been performing very strongly, and above their poll ratings.
Ed Davey is a remarkable man, and when journalists have gone one-to-one with him, they seem to come away pretty impressed. (vide recent Guardian interview). He has also solved a fair few of the internal process issues and is attracting something of a surge in support, including significant financial support.
Meanwhile the Tories seem to be doing everything in their power to cozy up to the Faragist right, but this is going down very badly in places like Surrey, and many other places across the South and south west of England. In Scotland the party is coming back in the North East and making strong progress in Edinburgh.
Its all beginning to look like we could see a real move in the coming months, and the anti Tory swing could bring some remarkable results in some surprising places.
Were you still up for Gove?
The challenge for the LDs is that their popularity plummeted in the Coalition years and has been flatlining at 10% +/- 2% for a decade now. The assumption is that the LDs can sweep all before them using tactical voting but national vote share also matters.
1992 - 20 seats, 18% vote share. ratio 1.1 1997 - 46 seats, 17% vote share. ratio 2.7 2001 - 52 seats, 18% vote share. ratio 2.9 2005 - 62 seats, 22% vote share. ratio 2.8 2010 - 57 seats, 23% vote share. ratio 2.5 2015 - 8 seats, 8% vote share. ratio 1 2017 - 12 seats, 7% vote share. ratio 1.7 2019 - 11 seats, 12% vote share. ratio 0.9
So even at peak tactical voting the best they managed was 3 seats per 1% of national vote. This would give them 25-30 seats max on current polling.
The second challenge is what is the LDs positioning now? Traditionally, they tried to position themselves as being in the centre between Con and Lab. This enabled them to pick up anti-Con and anti-Lab votes in different places but this feel apart after the Coalition. They now seem to be positioning as a more explicitly left wing party but how does that differentiate them from the Greens and Lab?
Labour and the Green Party are both very authoritarian. How about that for a start?
Yes, good piece from Mike and it echoes my own view that this could be a very good election for the LDs.
Their biggest stumbling block is that they have to overcome some seriously large majorities to win a lot of seats from the Conservatives, but as the bar illustrates, they are capable of doing this.
I am going to provisionally estimate that yhey will emerge from the GE with at least 30 seats. They may even displace the SNP as the third largest Party.
As Generals go, Davey is almost as lucky as Starmer.
Good morning
Fair comment and as things stand entirely possible
On the Farage banking affair there are times, when no matter how you dislike someone's political views, when a stand has to be made against an injustice
Yesterday, Nick Thomas Symonds was terrible on Sky attempting to defend Alison Rose and even worse, Rachel Reeves penned a piece (before Rose resigned) accusing Farage and the media of 'bullying' Rose which was just crass in the extreme
Starmer eventually endorsed her resignation, but only after seeing the way the wind was blowing
This was not a political issue, but the difference between trust and confidentiality, and no doubt if it had been anyone other than Farage, these labour politicians would have had a different response
And I would say the same thing if it had been Corbyn who had been subject to this injustice
Agreed, Big G.
Awkward as it is to find oneself supporting Farage, it has to be said that he has as much right to privacy as the rest of us.
What possessed this woman to blurt out his private details to a journalist is beyond me.
Why do you believe that ridiculously spun story?
The printing of that material by the BBC was almost certainly a result of a parallelogram of forces, a negotiated agreement between tough, serious, very intelligent people, not the product of somebody finding out she was sitting next to somebody else at a dinner one evening and blurting it out by accident after she'd had a few. The same can be said about the cracking down on Farage's account in the first place. Ditto with the unsanctioning of Oleg Tinkov. Into that, add a dose of the fact that in Britain wherever the royal family are concerned, especially the head of that family - currently a man who can't write his own name with a pen without effing and blinding at his servants - different rules apply.
Farage should lose the "K" bit in "Reform UK".
You keep pushing that line.
As I actually work in the industry, I say you are wrong.
The amount of stupid shit I see from senior management - but unlike them I can keep my mouth shut. Suffice it to say, that a few days ago, senior managers in another bank demonstrated in a large meeting that they had no understanding of the legal and required process for moving money on a large scale.
I suspect Greg Hands will be delighted with that new LD barchart.
In 2019 he won with 49% of the vote ie less than half the votes but there was only 2% between the LDs and Labour for second. On current polls Starmer Labour would be a clear second so anything which helps divide his opposition also helps him cling on and keeps Chelsea and Fulham Tory blue
I agree, Labour is the main threat to the Tories in Chelsea and Fulham. The LDs only came second because of Corbyn.
Maybe.... But then the Con candidate only came first because of Corbyn.
Hmmm. The combined Labour and Liberal Democrat vote was still less than the Tory vote. And while I can imagine some of the Tory vote was Corbyn effect, it seems unlikely it was sufficient to make a difference overall. If anything, the trend was against the Tories in 2019.
Edit - if you'd been talking about Kensington, now, that might be different.
Another day on from the Farage / Coutts fun. As he is ineligible for an account there (I assume they won't wave their rules just because they have made a tit of themselves) will the Nigel now be demanding that "ordinary" people like him should be allowed a Coutts account?
I am feeling the Farage love on here, he is doing this not for himself, but for the poor people. Handily, I have another invisible Garden Bridge available.
What strikes me is that Mr Farage has had hassle from being a PEP. So he makes himself an even more Politically Exposed Person with his mission against the banks. What bank is now going to take him on, if it means banner headlines in the DM every time some minion burps unintentionally while handling his non-Coutt's cheque book? Which will only "justify" him even more.
Nevertheless: the point remains: we need to understand this basic bank business and how well it works. Benpointer thought just about anyone ordinary could get one (which is not the same as having an existing one closed down), but RCS1000's stats suggest otherwise.
One way of reading the stats is that everyone who persists manages to sort out a Basic Account with someone eventually, but at least one bank isn't pulling their weight in making it easy and seems generally keener on Computer Says No reasons for rejecting people. Which isn't the point really.
And that's where the stories of the Aristocrat who (no longer) banks at Coutts and the Aristocrat who cleans our boots (and can't get a basic account) do join up.
We have got a business model of banking where "nah, too difficult/ expensive" is part of the thinking. Branches, customers, services and transactions that aren't easy and quickly profitable are to be trimmed.
Capitalism doesn't have to look like that, but capitalism coupled with short horizons probably does. Fix that, and a lot of the British Disease subsides.
(Talking of which, without being conspiratorial, what's the benefit to society in a hedge fund shorting a bank?
I think GBNews needs Farage more than the other way around probably.
Maybe I missed it, but has anyone commented on the uber-irony of Farage using the EU developed GDPR (that no doubt he would like scrapped) to issue a Subject Access Request to NatWest/Coutts?
His right to see his data began in 1984, under UK-originated legislation:
Only when the 1998 act came in was there an EU basis.
Thanks for this, though I don't have the time (or expertise perhaps) to read it's provisions, I am pretty sure there was no similar provision to a SAR under Data Protection Act or else it would not have been such a major concern to many companies such as mine when GDPR became enforced. The ability of an individual to demand all info that references an individual (with some limitations where it involves privacy of others) was certainly stated by lawyers I spoke to at the time as a new development
One thing that may help the Liberal Democrats improve their poll ratings is that they have missed the limelight for a while: the last conference had to be cancelled after the death of Elizabeth II, so there has not been much spotlight on the party. Despite this, at both Westminster by elections and local council elections, they have been performing very strongly, and above their poll ratings.
Ed Davey is a remarkable man, and when journalists have gone one-to-one with him, they seem to come away pretty impressed. (vide recent Guardian interview). He has also solved a fair few of the internal process issues and is attracting something of a surge in support, including significant financial support.
Meanwhile the Tories seem to be doing everything in their power to cozy up to the Faragist right, but this is going down very badly in places like Surrey, and many other places across the South and south west of England. In Scotland the party is coming back in the North East and making strong progress in Edinburgh.
Its all beginning to look like we could see a real move in the coming months, and the anti Tory swing could bring some remarkable results in some surprising places.
Were you still up for Gove?
The challenge for the LDs is that their popularity plummeted in the Coalition years and has been flatlining at 10% +/- 2% for a decade now. The assumption is that the LDs can sweep all before them using tactical voting but national vote share also matters.
1992 - 20 seats, 18% vote share. ratio 1.1 1997 - 46 seats, 17% vote share. ratio 2.7 2001 - 52 seats, 18% vote share. ratio 2.9 2005 - 62 seats, 22% vote share. ratio 2.8 2010 - 57 seats, 23% vote share. ratio 2.5 2015 - 8 seats, 8% vote share. ratio 1 2017 - 12 seats, 7% vote share. ratio 1.7 2019 - 11 seats, 12% vote share. ratio 0.9
So even at peak tactical voting the best they managed was 3 seats per 1% of national vote. This would give them 25-30 seats max on current polling.
The second challenge is what is the LDs positioning now? Traditionally, they tried to position themselves as being in the centre between Con and Lab. This enabled them to pick up anti-Con and anti-Lab votes in different places but this feel apart after the Coalition. They now seem to be positioning as a more explicitly left wing party but how does that differentiate them from the Greens and Lab?
Labour and the Green Party are both very authoritarian. How about that for a start?
The problem for the LDs is that a large part of their party membership and activists are not very liberal
Another day on from the Farage / Coutts fun. As he is ineligible for an account there (I assume they won't wave their rules just because they have made a tit of themselves) will the Nigel now be demanding that "ordinary" people like him should be allowed a Coutts account?
I am feeling the Farage love on here, he is doing this not for himself, but for the poor people. Handily, I have another invisible Garden Bridge available.
What strikes me is that Mr Farage has had hassle from being a PEP. So he makes himself an even more Politically Exposed Person with his mission against the banks. What bank is now going to take him on, if it means banner headlines in the DM every time some minion burps unintentionally while handling his non-Coutt's cheque book? Which will only "justify" him even more.
Nevertheless: the point remains: we need to understand this basic bank business and how well it works. Benpointer thought just about anyone ordinary could get one (which is not the same as having an existing one closed down), but RCS1000's stats suggest otherwise.
One way of reading the stats is that everyone who persists manages to sort out a Basic Account with someone eventually, but at least one bank isn't pulling their weight in making it easy and seems generally keener on Computer Says No reasons for rejecting people. Which isn't the point really.
And that's where the stories of the Aristocrat who (no longer) banks at Coutts and the Aristocrat who cleans our boots (and can't get a basic account) do join up.
We have got a business model of banking where "nah, too difficult/ expensive" is part of the thinking. Branches, customers, services and transactions that aren't easy and quickly profitable are to be trimmed.
Capitalism doesn't have to look like that, but capitalism coupled with short horizons probably does. Fix that, and a lot of the British Disease subsides.
(Talking of which, without being conspiratorial, what's the benefit to society in a hedge fund shorting a bank?
I think GBNews needs Farage more than the other way around probably.
Maybe I missed it, but has anyone commented on the uber-irony of Farage using the EU developed GDPR (that no doubt he would like scrapped) to issue a Subject Access Request to NatWest/Coutts?
Oh yes; but one of us took the slightly niche view that it was revenge on the remainers with their own weapons.
I have zero sympathy for Farage (the fascist tosser), but it does question the managerial efficiency of Coutts. When GDPR came out, most sensible companies informed their staff that if they wrote anything about any individual it needed to factual and not subjective and written in a manner that was defensible if an SAR was issued.
Perhaps Coutts needs to also look at it's "membership" policy which could ( I am not sure whether legal under banking law) state that the bank reserved the right to not hold accounts of persons it considered that might bring the bank's equality values into disrepute.
They have the right to terminate your account for any reason they chose. Now.
They frequently terminate accounts at Coutts - transferring the people to NatWest. They do this so often that there is an internal process for this. You invite the customer in and tell them, to their face, what is happening. A friend of mine does this on a regular basis there.
They chose not to tell the truth to Farage. They seem to have lied to other banks about why they were closing his account. They then lied to a BBC journalist, face to face, on the record. While disclosing personal information.
If someone pours petrol over their head, and lights a cigar…..
It does appear that, under NatWest, the Coutts brand is now little different to an HSBC Premier account, but with added lack of discretion.
I’m still astonished that this played out how it did from the bank’s side, did they not realise that this particular customer has a massive media profile, and an annoying knack of getting himself in the news?
If, as you say, they have a process and switch the brand of your account automatically, there would have been little said about it - but they decided to terminate the relationship completely, and tell him a load of baloney about why they were doing it, then briefing the media about their customer.
Yes, good piece from Mike and it echoes my own view that this could be a very good election for the LDs.
Their biggest stumbling block is that they have to overcome some seriously large majorities to win a lot of seats from the Conservatives, but as the bar illustrates, they are capable of doing this.
I am going to provisionally estimate that yhey will emerge from the GE with at least 30 seats. They may even displace the SNP as the third largest Party.
As Generals go, Davey is almost as lucky as Starmer.
Good morning
Fair comment and as things stand entirely possible
On the Farage banking affair there are times, when no matter how you dislike someone's political views, when a stand has to be made against an injustice
Yesterday, Nick Thomas Symonds was terrible on Sky attempting to defend Alison Rose and even worse, Rachel Reeves penned a piece (before Rose resigned) accusing Farage and the media of 'bullying' Rose which was just crass in the extreme
Starmer eventually endorsed her resignation, but only after seeing the way the wind was blowing
This was not a political issue, but the difference between trust and confidentiality, and no doubt if it had been anyone other than Farage, these labour politicians would have had a different response
And I would say the same thing if it had been Corbyn who had been subject to this injustice
Agreed, Big G.
Awkward as it is to find oneself supporting Farage, it has to be said that he has as much right to privacy as the rest of us.
What possessed this woman to blurt out his private details to a journalist is beyond me.
Why do you believe that ridiculously spun story?
The printing of that material by the BBC was almost certainly a result of a parallelogram of forces, a negotiated agreement between tough, serious, very intelligent people, not the product of somebody finding out she was sitting next to somebody else at a dinner one evening and blurting it out by accident after she'd had a few. The same can be said about the cracking down on Farage's account in the first place. Ditto with the unsanctioning of Oleg Tinkov. Into that, add a dose of the fact that in Britain wherever the royal family are concerned, especially the head of that family - currently a man who can't write his own name with a pen without effing and blinding at his servants - different rules apply.
Farage should lose the "K" bit in "Reform UK".
You keep pushing that line.
As I actually work in the industry, I say you are wrong.
The amount of stupid shit I see from senior management - but unlike them I can keep my mouth shut. Suffice it to say, that a few days ago, senior managers in another bank demonstrated in a large meeting that they had no understanding of the legal and required process for moving money on a large scale.
+1 - and I'm probably closer to the action than anyone else here.
The bit I don't get is that all banks have a block of text everywhere saying - "Remember the Customer may see what you write" and yet Coutts seem to have missed the fact and actually written things down...
I get a feeling that @Leon's forthcoming Speccie article on "life in Ukraine" is going to be unbearably smug.
I don’t write for the Spectator. If only! The Knapper’s Gazette might, I suppose, ask me for a war diary. But why would it be smug?
I am completely capable of being intolerably smug, I don’t deny that. But anything I write about Ukraine will just be the truth about what I have encountered
I’m not gonna be boasting about the tasting menus and Ayurvedic massage
Will you be going to more warzones after this?
There's definitely a niche for travel in the safe parts of otherwise war torn countries, with the limitation usually being travel insurance if the FCDO have it as a red zone.
Iraqi Kurdistan (Erbil) is an example. It's amber - avoid all but necessary travel - whereas the rest of Iraq is red. So you can potentially get insurance, and there are flights to Erbil on Wizz and Pegasus airlines.
Afghanistan is another that is probably theoretically now safer than when the US and UK were occupying it. I expect that, red zones notwithstanding, there are parts of Northern Sudan still perfectly visitable, and large tracts of Yemen. The quasi-independent Somaliland at least until recently.
Then there are the disputed zones of otherwise peaceful countries, which are by and large possible to visit and by all accounts can be very interesting. Abkhazia in Georgia for example I hear is beautiful but dilapidated (Sukhumi), though South Ossetia seems more problematic. Transnistria in Moldova is an established offbeat tourist attraction. The Israeli settlements on the West Bank, etc. Others I would probably steer clear of, like the IS-prowled zones of Saharan Mali and Chad, or the cartel zones of Northern Mexico.
Erbil is not bad. I certainly didn't feel unsafe walking the streets there which is more than I would say for quite a few western cities.
Another day on from the Farage / Coutts fun. As he is ineligible for an account there (I assume they won't wave their rules just because they have made a tit of themselves) will the Nigel now be demanding that "ordinary" people like him should be allowed a Coutts account?
I am feeling the Farage love on here, he is doing this not for himself, but for the poor people. Handily, I have another invisible Garden Bridge available.
What strikes me is that Mr Farage has had hassle from being a PEP. So he makes himself an even more Politically Exposed Person with his mission against the banks. What bank is now going to take him on, if it means banner headlines in the DM every time some minion burps unintentionally while handling his non-Coutt's cheque book? Which will only "justify" him even more.
Nevertheless: the point remains: we need to understand this basic bank business and how well it works. Benpointer thought just about anyone ordinary could get one (which is not the same as having an existing one closed down), but RCS1000's stats suggest otherwise.
One way of reading the stats is that everyone who persists manages to sort out a Basic Account with someone eventually, but at least one bank isn't pulling their weight in making it easy and seems generally keener on Computer Says No reasons for rejecting people. Which isn't the point really.
And that's where the stories of the Aristocrat who (no longer) banks at Coutts and the Aristocrat who cleans our boots (and can't get a basic account) do join up.
We have got a business model of banking where "nah, too difficult/ expensive" is part of the thinking. Branches, customers, services and transactions that aren't easy and quickly profitable are to be trimmed.
Capitalism doesn't have to look like that, but capitalism coupled with short horizons probably does. Fix that, and a lot of the British Disease subsides.
(Talking of which, without being conspiratorial, what's the benefit to society in a hedge fund shorting a bank?
I think GBNews needs Farage more than the other way around probably.
Maybe I missed it, but has anyone commented on the uber-irony of Farage using the EU developed GDPR (that no doubt he would like scrapped) to issue a Subject Access Request to NatWest/Coutts?
Oh yes; but one of us took the slightly niche view that it was revenge on the remainers with their own weapons.
I have zero sympathy for Farage (the fascist tosser), but it does question the managerial efficiency of Coutts. When GDPR came out, most sensible companies informed their staff that if they wrote anything about any individual it needed to factual and not subjective and written in a manner that was defensible if an SAR was issued.
Perhaps Coutts needs to also look at it's "membership" policy which could ( I am not sure whether legal under banking law) state that the bank reserved the right to not hold accounts of persons it considered that might bring the bank's equality values into disrepute.
They have the right to terminate your account for any reason they chose. Now.
They frequently terminate accounts at Coutts - transferring the people to NatWest. They do this so often that there is an internal process for this. You invite the customer in and tell them, to their face, what is happening. A friend of mine does this on a regular basis there.
They chose not to tell the truth to Farage. They seem to have lied to other banks about why they were closing his account. They then lied to a BBC journalist, face to face, on the record. While disclosing personal information.
If someone pours petrol over their head, and lights a cigar…..
It does appear that, under NatWest, the Coutts brand is now little different to an HSBC Premier account, but with added lack of discretion.
I’m still astonished that this played out how it did from the bank’s side, did they not realise that this particular customer has a massive media profile, and an annoying knack of getting himself in the news?
If, as you say, they have a process and switch the brand of your account automatically, there would have been little said about it - but they decided to terminate the relationship completely, and tell him a load of baloney about why they were doing it, then briefing the media about their customer.
It’s actually a separate bank. But yes, they do this on a regular basis. Mostly about getting rid of the £30k income wastes of space that poured in, in the 90s.
Ironically, they were trying to rebuild the Coutts brand.
Edit: a part of the problem is that so much senior management were from NatWest culture. They had no idea how private banking worked. Trying to force the private bankers to pressure sell financial products.
Met some young Ukrainians out drinking last night. Learned a lot
Like this
This is how young Ukrainians decide whether to go to the bomb shelter or not (last night most didn’t, despite the wailing sirens). They constantly check this Telegram channel, the same way we check the weather during a Test match. It tells you what’s incoming & where. If it says drones they say Meh; missiles get them underground. That is digital life in Lviv
I'm intrigued by Telegram. It seems to dominate much of the post-Soviet social media space, but I've never gone on it. How does it work - is it like Twitter/Threads, or more Facebook-like? Or basic messaging like Whatsapp? Who owns it, I thought it was Russian but the fact Ukrainians seem happy to use it suggests not.
I've used telegram a lot, initially for many years simply as a non-facebook version of whatsapp.
But you can also follow people's channels, which I've started doing as an alternative to twitter. This is essentially the same as following their twitter feed, so you can comment on their posts, use emojis in response to them, but it's not like a group conversation (where I have my family all in the same group conversation).
So it's a bit of a hybrid.
The people who created it were Russian, but they made a point of putting their servers outside of Russia, and independent checks rate them highly for security, so I think they're independent of the Russian state.
F1: the sprint bullshit is contaminating Spa this year, so qualifying's tomorrow at 4pm. Joy.
Hopefully it pours down all day on Saturday, so we don’t have to put up with the s****t.
More seriously, there is actually a lot of adverse weather forecast for the weekend, and they might well need to make late changes to the schedule to avoid a repeat of the 2021 farce, where two safety car laps and five hours of grid-squatting was the order of the day.
One thing that may help the Liberal Democrats improve their poll ratings is that they have missed the limelight for a while: the last conference had to be cancelled after the death of Elizabeth II, so there has not been much spotlight on the party. Despite this, at both Westminster by elections and local council elections, they have been performing very strongly, and above their poll ratings.
Ed Davey is a remarkable man, and when journalists have gone one-to-one with him, they seem to come away pretty impressed. (vide recent Guardian interview). He has also solved a fair few of the internal process issues and is attracting something of a surge in support, including significant financial support.
Meanwhile the Tories seem to be doing everything in their power to cozy up to the Faragist right, but this is going down very badly in places like Surrey, and many other places across the South and south west of England. In Scotland the party is coming back in the North East and making strong progress in Edinburgh.
Its all beginning to look like we could see a real move in the coming months, and the anti Tory swing could bring some remarkable results in some surprising places.
Were you still up for Gove?
The challenge for the LDs is that their popularity plummeted in the Coalition years and has been flatlining at 10% +/- 2% for a decade now. The assumption is that the LDs can sweep all before them using tactical voting but national vote share also matters.
1992 - 20 seats, 18% vote share. ratio 1.1 1997 - 46 seats, 17% vote share. ratio 2.7 2001 - 52 seats, 18% vote share. ratio 2.9 2005 - 62 seats, 22% vote share. ratio 2.8 2010 - 57 seats, 23% vote share. ratio 2.5 2015 - 8 seats, 8% vote share. ratio 1 2017 - 12 seats, 7% vote share. ratio 1.7 2019 - 11 seats, 12% vote share. ratio 0.9
So even at peak tactical voting the best they managed was 3 seats per 1% of national vote. This would give them 25-30 seats max on current polling.
The second challenge is what is the LDs positioning now? Traditionally, they tried to position themselves as being in the centre between Con and Lab. This enabled them to pick up anti-Con and anti-Lab votes in different places but this feel apart after the Coalition. They now seem to be positioning as a more explicitly left wing party but how does that differentiate them from the Greens and Lab?
Labour and the Green Party are both very authoritarian. How about that for a start?
That's precisely why I'm a Lib Dem and have been for my entire adult voting life (which started coincidentally in 1997). That and an attention to facts / what works rather than ideology make up the capital L Liberal philosophy of the party.
Sadly of course the LDs often stray from the non-ideological path, at local or national level, especially when there's a by-election to win, but they tend to stick to their anti-authoritarian guns most of the time.
Sorry if someone has already posted this, but have you seen the list of seats which the Labour Party regard as "non priority"? In other words, the places where it's OK to vote tactically for the Lib Dems as long as you don't make too much of a fuss about it?
One thing that may help the Liberal Democrats improve their poll ratings is that they have missed the limelight for a while: the last conference had to be cancelled after the death of Elizabeth II, so there has not been much spotlight on the party. Despite this, at both Westminster by elections and local council elections, they have been performing very strongly, and above their poll ratings.
Ed Davey is a remarkable man, and when journalists have gone one-to-one with him, they seem to come away pretty impressed. (vide recent Guardian interview). He has also solved a fair few of the internal process issues and is attracting something of a surge in support, including significant financial support.
Meanwhile the Tories seem to be doing everything in their power to cozy up to the Faragist right, but this is going down very badly in places like Surrey, and many other places across the South and south west of England. In Scotland the party is coming back in the North East and making strong progress in Edinburgh.
Its all beginning to look like we could see a real move in the coming months, and the anti Tory swing could bring some remarkable results in some surprising places.
Were you still up for Gove?
The challenge for the LDs is that their popularity plummeted in the Coalition years and has been flatlining at 10% +/- 2% for a decade now. The assumption is that the LDs can sweep all before them using tactical voting but national vote share also matters.
1992 - 20 seats, 18% vote share. ratio 1.1 1997 - 46 seats, 17% vote share. ratio 2.7 2001 - 52 seats, 18% vote share. ratio 2.9 2005 - 62 seats, 22% vote share. ratio 2.8 2010 - 57 seats, 23% vote share. ratio 2.5 2015 - 8 seats, 8% vote share. ratio 1 2017 - 12 seats, 7% vote share. ratio 1.7 2019 - 11 seats, 12% vote share. ratio 0.9
So even at peak tactical voting the best they managed was 3 seats per 1% of national vote. This would give them 25-30 seats max on current polling.
The second challenge is what is the LDs positioning now? Traditionally, they tried to position themselves as being in the centre between Con and Lab. This enabled them to pick up anti-Con and anti-Lab votes in different places but this feel apart after the Coalition. They now seem to be positioning as a more explicitly left wing party but how does that differentiate them from the Greens and Lab?
Labour and the Green Party are both very authoritarian. How about that for a start?
The problem for the LDs is that a large part of their party membership and activists are not very liberal
That's not been my experience as an activist. Most people I've debated with at events or leafletted with are very committed to civil liberties and other anti-authoritarian causes. We've even managed to discuss the dreaded trans rights issue in our local party without bad blood or hyperbole.
Met some young Ukrainians out drinking last night. Learned a lot
Like this
This is how young Ukrainians decide whether to go to the bomb shelter or not (last night most didn’t, despite the wailing sirens). They constantly check this Telegram channel, the same way we check the weather during a Test match. It tells you what’s incoming & where. If it says drones they say Meh; missiles get them underground. That is digital life in Lviv
I'm intrigued by Telegram. It seems to dominate much of the post-Soviet social media space, but I've never gone on it. How does it work - is it like Twitter/Threads, or more Facebook-like? Or basic messaging like Whatsapp? Who owns it, I thought it was Russian but the fact Ukrainians seem happy to use it suggests not.
I've used telegram a lot, initially for many years simply as a non-facebook version of whatsapp.
But you can also follow people's channels, which I've started doing as an alternative to twitter. This is essentially the same as following their twitter feed, so you can comment on their posts, use emojis in response to them, but it's not like a group conversation (where I have my family all in the same group conversation).
So it's a bit of a hybrid.
The people who created it were Russian, but they made a point of putting their servers outside of Russia, and independent checks rate them highly for security, so I think they're independent of the Russian state.
Does actually sound like it fits a useful niche in social media. It's a surprise few people have suggested moving on to Telegram from Twitter since the recent Elon Shenanigans.
Sorry if someone has already posted this, but have you seen the list of seats which the Labour Party regard as "non priority"? In other words, the places where it's OK to vote tactically for the Lib Dems as long as you don't make too much of a fuss about it?
On that logic - Chesham and Amersham is a target seat for Labour (and it really isn't). Round there the focus should be Wycombe, Watford, Aylesbury and Hemel...
Sorry if someone has already posted this, but have you seen the list of seats which the Labour Party regard as "non priority"? In other words, the places where it's OK to vote tactically for the Lib Dems as long as you don't make too much of a fuss about it?
Sorry if someone has already posted this, but have you seen the list of seats which the Labour Party regard as "non priority"? In other words, the places where it's OK to vote tactically for the Lib Dems as long as you don't make too much of a fuss about it?
Nor Wokingham ... clearly there's been a lot of subjective judgement used in preparing the list, but it makes interesting reading. Presumably Labour HQ won't object if the local party puts some effort in, but they won't be getting any help from the centre unless the locals can persuade them to change their minds.
Met some young Ukrainians out drinking last night. Learned a lot
Like this
This is how young Ukrainians decide whether to go to the bomb shelter or not (last night most didn’t, despite the wailing sirens). They constantly check this Telegram channel, the same way we check the weather during a Test match. It tells you what’s incoming & where. If it says drones they say Meh; missiles get them underground. That is digital life in Lviv
I'm intrigued by Telegram. It seems to dominate much of the post-Soviet social media space, but I've never gone on it. How does it work - is it like Twitter/Threads, or more Facebook-like? Or basic messaging like Whatsapp? Who owns it, I thought it was Russian but the fact Ukrainians seem happy to use it suggests not.
I've used telegram a lot, initially for many years simply as a non-facebook version of whatsapp.
But you can also follow people's channels, which I've started doing as an alternative to twitter. This is essentially the same as following their twitter feed, so you can comment on their posts, use emojis in response to them, but it's not like a group conversation (where I have my family all in the same group conversation).
So it's a bit of a hybrid.
The people who created it were Russian, but they made a point of putting their servers outside of Russia, and independent checks rate them highly for security, so I think they're independent of the Russian state.
Does actually sound like it fits a useful niche in social media. It's a surprise few people have suggested moving on to Telegram from Twitter since the recent Elon Shenanigans.
Telegram has less moderation than Twitter. The complaints were about lack of censorship
Maybe I missed it, but has anyone commented on the uber-irony of Farage using the EU developed GDPR (that no doubt he would like scrapped) to issue a Subject Access Request to NatWest/Coutts?
His right to see his data began in 1984, under UK-originated legislation:
Only when the 1998 act came in was there an EU basis.
Thanks for this, though I don't have the time (or expertise perhaps) to read it's provisions, I am pretty sure there was no similar provision to a SAR under Data Protection Act
Really?
21. Rights of Data Subjects (1) Subject to the provisions of this section, an individual shall be entitled (a) to be informed by any data user whether the data held by him include personal data of which that individual is the data subject ; and (b) to be supplied by any data user with a copy of the information constituting any such personal data held by him
Took me about thirty seconds. ED: 2018 Data Protection Act text for comparison.
45 Right of access by the data subject (1) A data subject is entitled to obtain from the controller— (a) confirmation as to whether or not personal data concerning him or her is being processed, and (b) where that is the case, access to the personal data and the information set out in subsection (2).
Met some young Ukrainians out drinking last night. Learned a lot
Like this
This is how young Ukrainians decide whether to go to the bomb shelter or not (last night most didn’t, despite the wailing sirens). They constantly check this Telegram channel, the same way we check the weather during a Test match. It tells you what’s incoming & where. If it says drones they say Meh; missiles get them underground. That is digital life in Lviv
I'm intrigued by Telegram. It seems to dominate much of the post-Soviet social media space, but I've never gone on it. How does it work - is it like Twitter/Threads, or more Facebook-like? Or basic messaging like Whatsapp? Who owns it, I thought it was Russian but the fact Ukrainians seem happy to use it suggests not.
I've used telegram a lot, initially for many years simply as a non-facebook version of whatsapp.
But you can also follow people's channels, which I've started doing as an alternative to twitter. This is essentially the same as following their twitter feed, so you can comment on their posts, use emojis in response to them, but it's not like a group conversation (where I have my family all in the same group conversation).
So it's a bit of a hybrid.
The people who created it were Russian, but they made a point of putting their servers outside of Russia, and independent checks rate them highly for security, so I think they're independent of the Russian state.
Does actually sound like it fits a useful niche in social media. It's a surprise few people have suggested moving on to Telegram from Twitter since the recent Elon Shenanigans.
It doesn't have a home page that will put an endless stream of random stuff in front of you in the way that twitter and instagram do. That's nice from the point of view of easily being able to see what I know I want to see, but it probably makes finding people on it more difficult.
I'm only following channels on telegram that I found out about on twitter. So I guess it is to twitter as discord is to the old web forums. A little bit more private.
Met some young Ukrainians out drinking last night. Learned a lot
Like this
This is how young Ukrainians decide whether to go to the bomb shelter or not (last night most didn’t, despite the wailing sirens). They constantly check this Telegram channel, the same way we check the weather during a Test match. It tells you what’s incoming & where. If it says drones they say Meh; missiles get them underground. That is digital life in Lviv
I'm intrigued by Telegram. It seems to dominate much of the post-Soviet social media space, but I've never gone on it. How does it work - is it like Twitter/Threads, or more Facebook-like? Or basic messaging like Whatsapp? Who owns it, I thought it was Russian but the fact Ukrainians seem happy to use it suggests not.
I've used telegram a lot, initially for many years simply as a non-facebook version of whatsapp.
But you can also follow people's channels, which I've started doing as an alternative to twitter. This is essentially the same as following their twitter feed, so you can comment on their posts, use emojis in response to them, but it's not like a group conversation (where I have my family all in the same group conversation).
So it's a bit of a hybrid.
The people who created it were Russian, but they made a point of putting their servers outside of Russia, and independent checks rate them highly for security, so I think they're independent of the Russian state.
Does actually sound like it fits a useful niche in social media. It's a surprise few people have suggested moving on to Telegram from Twitter since the recent Elon Shenanigans.
Telegram has less moderation than Twitter. The complaints were about lack of censorship
Mastodon had the same issue, the mods said you can mute people you don’t want to listen to, but we don’t ban people here (unless they post CP or other obviously illegal material). But those who had rage-quit Twitter wanted to see people banned for being right-wing.
Sorry if someone has already posted this, but have you seen the list of seats which the Labour Party regard as "non priority"? In other words, the places where it's OK to vote tactically for the Lib Dems as long as you don't make too much of a fuss about it?
On that logic - Chesham and Amersham is a target seat for Labour (and it really isn't). Round there the focus should be Wycombe, Watford, Aylesbury and Hemel...
Some chat on this last night- on one level, they're mostly obvious "don't give up the day job" places for Labour candidates, but there were a few there that didn't look totally hopeless.
One of my assumptions is that Labour and Lib Dems have fairly shrewd ideas which seats the other is taking seriously. Not a sordid deal, of course, but a fairly shrewd idea of how to avoid stepping on each other's toes. There will be exceptions (Chelsea and Fulham, for example), but not many, and how better to show that there's no deal?
I did assume that the understanding would be fuelled by lists "accidentally" left in the gent's in a pub at the shadier end of Westminster, rather than on the internet, though.
One thing that may help the Liberal Democrats improve their poll ratings is that they have missed the limelight for a while: the last conference had to be cancelled after the death of Elizabeth II, so there has not been much spotlight on the party. Despite this, at both Westminster by elections and local council elections, they have been performing very strongly, and above their poll ratings.
Ed Davey is a remarkable man, and when journalists have gone one-to-one with him, they seem to come away pretty impressed. (vide recent Guardian interview). He has also solved a fair few of the internal process issues and is attracting something of a surge in support, including significant financial support.
Meanwhile the Tories seem to be doing everything in their power to cozy up to the Faragist right, but this is going down very badly in places like Surrey, and many other places across the South and south west of England. In Scotland the party is coming back in the North East and making strong progress in Edinburgh.
Its all beginning to look like we could see a real move in the coming months, and the anti Tory swing could bring some remarkable results in some surprising places.
Were you still up for Gove?
The challenge for the LDs is that their popularity plummeted in the Coalition years and has been flatlining at 10% +/- 2% for a decade now. The assumption is that the LDs can sweep all before them using tactical voting but national vote share also matters.
1992 - 20 seats, 18% vote share. ratio 1.1 1997 - 46 seats, 17% vote share. ratio 2.7 2001 - 52 seats, 18% vote share. ratio 2.9 2005 - 62 seats, 22% vote share. ratio 2.8 2010 - 57 seats, 23% vote share. ratio 2.5 2015 - 8 seats, 8% vote share. ratio 1 2017 - 12 seats, 7% vote share. ratio 1.7 2019 - 11 seats, 12% vote share. ratio 0.9
So even at peak tactical voting the best they managed was 3 seats per 1% of national vote. This would give them 25-30 seats max on current polling.
The second challenge is what is the LDs positioning now? Traditionally, they tried to position themselves as being in the centre between Con and Lab. This enabled them to pick up anti-Con and anti-Lab votes in different places but this feel apart after the Coalition. They now seem to be positioning as a more explicitly left wing party but how does that differentiate them from the Greens and Lab?
Labour and the Green Party are both very authoritarian. How about that for a start?
The problem for the LDs is that a large part of their party membership and activists are not very liberal
And few Conservatives actually want to conserve very much, except their own unearned priviledges.
Met some young Ukrainians out drinking last night. Learned a lot
Like this
This is how young Ukrainians decide whether to go to the bomb shelter or not (last night most didn’t, despite the wailing sirens). They constantly check this Telegram channel, the same way we check the weather during a Test match. It tells you what’s incoming & where. If it says drones they say Meh; missiles get them underground. That is digital life in Lviv
I'm intrigued by Telegram. It seems to dominate much of the post-Soviet social media space, but I've never gone on it. How does it work - is it like Twitter/Threads, or more Facebook-like? Or basic messaging like Whatsapp? Who owns it, I thought it was Russian but the fact Ukrainians seem happy to use it suggests not.
I've used telegram a lot, initially for many years simply as a non-facebook version of whatsapp.
But you can also follow people's channels, which I've started doing as an alternative to twitter. This is essentially the same as following their twitter feed, so you can comment on their posts, use emojis in response to them, but it's not like a group conversation (where I have my family all in the same group conversation).
So it's a bit of a hybrid.
The people who created it were Russian, but they made a point of putting their servers outside of Russia, and independent checks rate them highly for security, so I think they're independent of the Russian state.
Does actually sound like it fits a useful niche in social media. It's a surprise few people have suggested moving on to Telegram from Twitter since the recent Elon Shenanigans.
It doesn't have a home page that will put an endless stream of random stuff in front of you in the way that twitter and instagram do. That's nice from the point of view of easily being able to see what I know I want to see, but it probably makes finding people on it more difficult.
I'm only following channels on telegram that I found out about on twitter. So I guess it is to twitter as discord is to the old web forums. A little bit more private.
I think if there's a critical mass of people you know or people you want to follow then it works. For me, I guess that was it - I didn't know anyone on it and couldn't find anyone or anything I wanted to follow and tbh I don't need another place to doomscroll.
Sorry if someone has already posted this, but have you seen the list of seats which the Labour Party regard as "non priority"? In other words, the places where it's OK to vote tactically for the Lib Dems as long as you don't make too much of a fuss about it?
On that logic - Chesham and Amersham is a target seat for Labour (and it really isn't). Round there the focus should be Wycombe, Watford, Aylesbury and Hemel...
Some chat on this last night- on one level, they're mostly obvious "don't give up the day job" places for Labour candidates, but there were a few there that didn't look totally hopeless.
One of my assumptions is that Labour and Lib Dems have fairly shrewd ideas which seats the other is taking seriously. Not a sordid deal, of course, but a fairly shrewd idea of how to avoid stepping on each other's toes. There will be exceptions (Chelsea and Fulham, for example), but not many, and how better to show that there's no deal?
I did assume that the understanding would be fuelled by lists "accidentally" left in the gent's in a pub at the shadier end of Westminster, rather than on the internet, though.
Maybe I missed it, but has anyone commented on the uber-irony of Farage using the EU developed GDPR (that no doubt he would like scrapped) to issue a Subject Access Request to NatWest/Coutts?
His right to see his data began in 1984, under UK-originated legislation:
Only when the 1998 act came in was there an EU basis.
Thanks for this, though I don't have the time (or expertise perhaps) to read it's provisions, I am pretty sure there was no similar provision to a SAR under Data Protection Act
Really?
21. Rights of Data Subjects - (1) Subject to the provisions of this section, an individual shall be entitled (a) to be informed by any data user whether the data held by him include personal data of which that individual is the data subject ; and (b) to be supplied by any data user with a copy of the information constituting any such personal data held by him
Took me about thirty seconds. ED: 2018 Data Protection Act text for comparison.
45 Right of access by the data subject
(1) A data subject is entitled to obtain from the controller— (a) confirmation as to whether or not personal data concerning him or her is being processed, and (b) where that is the case, access to the personal data and the information set out in subsection (2).
It's a minor point but a name like "the Data Protection Act" sounds much more substantial and meaningful than jargon acronyms like GDPR.
F1: the sprint bullshit is contaminating Spa this year, so qualifying's tomorrow at 4pm. Joy.
Hopefully it pours down all day on Saturday, so we don’t have to put up with the s****t.
More seriously, there is actually a lot of adverse weather forecast for the weekend, and they might well need to make late changes to the schedule to avoid a repeat of the 2021 farce, where two safety car laps and five hours of grid-squatting was the order of the day.
Comments
Ed Davey is a remarkable man, and when journalists have gone one-to-one with him, they seem to come away pretty impressed. (vide recent Guardian interview). He has also solved a fair few of the internal process issues and is attracting something of a surge in support, including significant financial support.
Meanwhile the Tories seem to be doing everything in their power to cozy up to the Faragist right, but this is going down very badly in places like Surrey, and many other places across the South and south west of England. In Scotland the party is coming back in the North East and making strong progress in Edinburgh.
Its all beginning to look like we could see a real move in the coming months, and the anti Tory swing could bring some remarkable results in some surprising places.
Were you still up for Gove?
Like this
This is how young Ukrainians decide whether to go to the bomb shelter or not (last night most didn’t, despite the wailing sirens). They constantly check this Telegram channel, the same way we check the weather during a Test match. It tells you what’s incoming & where. If it says drones they say Meh; missiles get them underground. That is digital life in Lviv
Actually rcs did once query it here, where my registered address is vanilla@mydomain.com
(Never get any spam to that address btw, so well done Vanilla Forums).
Just add literally anything additionally to your email address, e.g. if your email is bob@gmail.com, you can do bob+1@gmail.com, b.ob@gmail.com, bob.@gmail.com, they all go to the same email and so you get unlimited free email addresses. I use it all the time.
Just because Labour are doing well in polls do you expect the LDs are just going give up and go away. They have every right to go for Chelsea and Fulham and are just as well placed as Lab and the chart is a 100% accurate reflection of that.
I'm guessing that it might be cartilage replacement, in which case it's quite a long rehab - but the results can be excellent.
Ben Stokes plans to sort out knee problem during England’s Test break
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/jul/26/jimmy-anderson-makes-the-cut-in-unchanged-england-team-australia-final-ashes-test-cricket
I am completely capable of being intolerably smug, I don’t deny that. But anything I write about Ukraine will just be the truth about what I have encountered
I’m not gonna be boasting about the tasting menus and Ayurvedic massage
Would have been interesting - it's on my list if I ever get the ability to spend more time travelling.
First test team to have six bowlers with 100-plus wickets.
Also you can get excellent 4 star hotels for about £30 a night. In beautiful historic cities full of interest and life. If you’re willing to take the rather modest risk of being bombed
The founders are Russians but it is currently HQ-ed in the UAE and kind of trans/supra-national. One of the core USPs is encryption and security; I remember lots of alarmism around ISIS using it but it's quite popular all over the place.
Has he tried the “the lies were such obvious bullshit that they weren’t really lies” defence?
They’re now Russian exiles based in the sandpit, with a lot of opaque corporate structure designed to stop them from being taken down by governments.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(software)
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/how-to-use-telegram,news-29636.html
Iraqi Kurdistan (Erbil) is an example. It's amber - avoid all but necessary travel - whereas the rest of Iraq is red. So you can potentially get insurance, and there are flights to Erbil on Wizz and Pegasus airlines.
Afghanistan is another that is probably theoretically now safer than when the US and UK were occupying it. I expect that, red zones notwithstanding, there are parts of Northern Sudan still perfectly visitable, and large tracts of Yemen. The quasi-independent Somaliland at least until recently.
Then there are the disputed zones of otherwise peaceful countries, which are by and large possible to visit and by all accounts can be very interesting. Abkhazia in Georgia for example I hear is beautiful but dilapidated (Sukhumi), though South Ossetia seems more problematic. Transnistria in Moldova is an established offbeat tourist attraction. The Israeli settlements on the West Bank, etc. Others I would probably steer clear of, like the IS-prowled zones of Saharan Mali and Chad, or the cartel zones of Northern Mexico.
Everything seems elevated: more intense and colourful. Oh I’m having a nice coffee and strudel - what if the air raid sirens go off?! Here’s a guy having a beer - but he’s telling me about how last
week he was nearly shot dead. That sounds like thunder - but it could be incoming missiles - run!
Etc
It’s a constant pump of adrenaline, excitement and interest. Until you get over excited, get too close to the front and Bang
If I had to guess it's the spread of burgers, pizza and chips- all of which are far more prevalent here than 15 years ago - and the general decline in physical activity.
That said, it's still not as bad as the UK - yet alone the USA.
Yes, obesity is almost everywhere. The only country I’ve been recently that seems immune is Vietnam. Which - surely no coincidence - has some of the best food and food culture in the world
But I bet it will get there in the end. America was merely the pioneer. The other Anglophone countries followed (Oz is really fat as well). Now continental Europe, South Asia, all follow. Some Arab controls are grossly fat. Ditto Latin America
OTOH these new obesity drugs really work, and they work fast, they just need to come down in price (which they surely will). The NHS should start handing them out for free. The money saved versus money spent (on lifelong obesity) will make it a huge bonus overall
Perhaps Coutts needs to also look at it's "membership" policy which could ( I am not sure whether legal under banking law) state that the bank reserved the right to not hold accounts of persons it considered that might bring the bank's equality values into disrepute.
(Once read a samizdat copy of guide to how to wind up the opposition aimed at council candidates and writers of Focus newsletters, for those who remember them. Truly there is little new under the sun.)
The printing of that material by the BBC was almost certainly a result of a parallelogram of forces, a negotiated agreement between tough, serious, very intelligent people, not the product of somebody finding out she was sitting next to somebody else at a dinner one evening and blurting it out by accident after she'd had a few. The same can be said about the cracking down on Farage's account in the first place. Ditto with the unsanctioning of Oleg Tinkov. Into that, add a dose of the fact that in Britain wherever the royal family are concerned, especially the head of that family - currently a man who can't write his own name with a pen without effing and blinding at his servants - different rules apply.
Farage should lose the "K" bit in "Reform UK".
1992 - 20 seats, 18% vote share. ratio 1.1
1997 - 46 seats, 17% vote share. ratio 2.7
2001 - 52 seats, 18% vote share. ratio 2.9
2005 - 62 seats, 22% vote share. ratio 2.8
2010 - 57 seats, 23% vote share. ratio 2.5
2015 - 8 seats, 8% vote share. ratio 1
2017 - 12 seats, 7% vote share. ratio 1.7
2019 - 11 seats, 12% vote share. ratio 0.9
So even at peak tactical voting the best they managed was 3 seats per 1% of national vote. This would give them 25-30 seats max on current polling.
The second challenge is what is the LDs positioning now? Traditionally, they tried to position themselves as being in the centre between Con and Lab. This enabled them to pick up anti-Con and anti-Lab votes in different places but this feel apart after the Coalition. They now seem to be positioning as a more explicitly left wing party but how does that differentiate them from the Greens and Lab?
Cate Blanchett for the Marie Colvin role, and Toby Jones for the other one would be good.
Nobody's claiming it doesn't stop the specific drug smugglers who get executed from doing it again.
Not sure on second myself, but perhaps the gay birthday cake case precedent applies.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1984/35/pdfs/ukpga_19840035_en.pdf
Only when the 1998 act came in was there an EU basis.
They frequently terminate accounts at Coutts - transferring the people to NatWest. They do this so often that there is an internal process for this. You invite the customer in and tell them, to their face, what is happening. A friend of mine does this on a regular basis there.
They chose not to tell the truth to Farage. They seem to have lied to other banks about why they were closing his account. They then lied to a BBC journalist, face to face, on the record. While disclosing personal information.
If someone pours petrol over their head, and lights a cigar…..
It always amused me that the Latin name for the cockroach is Blatta. At the height of the FIFA scandals one did feel that Sepp had the survival skills of his near namesake.
Interesting that you share the view that even large parts of Surrey are already a lost cause. I may add there are similar dynamics in the Cotswolds, so there really could really be some big surprises in the formerly true blue Shire Counties. Given the advances in the suburbs, the Lib Dems could have a very good result across the board.
I am likely to shift back to Conservative at the next GE because I think Sunak is a decent man and that I fear a big majority from bossy anti-business Labour. Whether there are many others like me I have no idea!
Stats on obesity:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/obesity-rates-by-country
As I actually work in the industry, I say you are wrong.
The amount of stupid shit I see from senior management - but unlike them I can keep my mouth shut. Suffice it to say, that a few days ago, senior managers in another bank demonstrated in a large meeting that they had no understanding of the legal and required process for moving money on a large scale.
Edit - if you'd been talking about Kensington, now, that might be different.
I’m still astonished that this played out how it did from the bank’s side, did they not realise that this particular customer has a massive media profile, and an annoying knack of getting himself in the news?
If, as you say, they have a process and switch the brand of your account automatically, there would have been little said about it - but they decided to terminate the relationship completely, and tell him a load of baloney about why they were doing it, then briefing the media about their customer.
The bit I don't get is that all banks have a block of text everywhere saying - "Remember the Customer may see what you write" and yet Coutts seem to have missed the fact and actually written things down...
Ironically, they were trying to rebuild the Coutts brand.
Edit: a part of the problem is that so much senior management were from NatWest culture. They had no idea how private banking worked. Trying to force the private bankers to pressure sell financial products.
But you can also follow people's channels, which I've started doing as an alternative to twitter. This is essentially the same as following their twitter feed, so you can comment on their posts, use emojis in response to them, but it's not like a group conversation (where I have my family all in the same group conversation).
So it's a bit of a hybrid.
The people who created it were Russian, but they made a point of putting their servers outside of Russia, and independent checks rate them highly for security, so I think they're independent of the Russian state.
More seriously, there is actually a lot of adverse weather forecast for the weekend, and they might well need to make late changes to the schedule to avoid a repeat of the 2021 farce, where two safety car laps and five hours of grid-squatting was the order of the day.
Sadly of course the LDs often stray from the non-ideological path, at local or national level, especially when there's a by-election to win, but they tend to stick to their anti-authoritarian guns most of the time.
Introduces him as Nigel Farage and then says "did I just call you Nigel Farage easy mistake to make"
Excellent
This is a publicly available list!
https://www.markpack.org.uk/
21. Rights of Data Subjects
(1) Subject to the provisions of this section, an individual shall be entitled
(a) to be informed by any data user whether the data held by him include personal data of which that individual is the data subject ; and
(b) to be supplied by any data user with a copy of the information constituting any such personal data held by him
Took me about thirty seconds. ED: 2018 Data Protection Act text for comparison.
45 Right of access by the data subject
(1) A data subject is entitled to obtain from the controller—
(a) confirmation as to whether or not personal data concerning him or her is being processed, and
(b) where that is the case, access to the personal data and the information set out in subsection (2).
I'm only following channels on telegram that I found out about on twitter. So I guess it is to twitter as discord is to the old web forums. A little bit more private.
One of my assumptions is that Labour and Lib Dems have fairly shrewd ideas which seats the other is taking seriously. Not a sordid deal, of course, but a fairly shrewd idea of how to avoid stepping on each other's toes. There will be exceptions (Chelsea and Fulham, for example), but not many, and how better to show that there's no deal?
I did assume that the understanding would be fuelled by lists "accidentally" left in the gent's in a pub at the shadier end of Westminster, rather than on the internet, though.
Brazil 2021.