The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
Seems the SNP have stabilised a little and much will depend on the outcome of the police investigations
As far as Starmer is concerned he remains an English man...
I get the feeling that for far too many of the protagonists, Brexit was a journey not a destination. No one really thought it'd happen. Cameron certainly didnt. He thought he was being clever. It was all about looking like they were doing something that was a bit populist. The likes of Farage and Johnson liked the glory of being heroic failures, never once imagining they'd have to implement it. It's turned into a shitshow, and they've been lucky with covid and war. Rejoin might be on the table at some point, but if a decent set of politicians finally show up and actually work with the EU to up both our games, rejoin might not be necessary.
I think that has to be the hope. A closer, more cooperative relationship with the EU that recognises its much stronger economic and geopolitical power, but which accommodates some level of UK difference is preferable to a protracted rejoin, uncertain process. But that is going to take some movement on both sides, a lot more on ours. The big unknown is Ukraine. It cannot be accommodated within the EU as it is currently set-up. So the EU needs to do a lot of thinking about how it wants to develop. The results of that may make re-entry for the UK more realistic.
Another pretty big drop in CPI, I think the end of year rate is probably going to be ~4.5%, if oil prices fall then maybe 4%.
Core CPI looks tougher to shift with wage data endlessly rising and 2.5m people long term sick. If the government wants to fix the labour market then it needs to get serious about sickness benefits reform. Matthew Paris had it bang on a couple of weeks ago, too many people are realising that it's easy to get signed off sick for stress and opt out of working. For people aged 50-64 who have paid off mortgages it's a realistic option to live on sickness benefits plus all the other assistance you get for it like council tax reductions etc...
Once again the safety net has become a way of life for some people. This time it's the comfortably off middle classes opting out of work by saying they're too stressed. It's something the Labour will need to address on day one because it now seems that young people are not only being asked to support pensions for the old, childcare for their kids, endless student loan repayments, old age care in the NHS but now also for the lazy middle classes who are deciding not to work because they're "stressed".
Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month.
He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse.
We're a professional services firm not a holiday club.
So why haven't you dismissed him / managed him out for poor performance?
I've said he should be but we're pussyfooting around (not just my decision)
He's shitting himself over a claim that by definition cannot be brought once you've fired someone.
I will eat my hat if rejoin the EU ever becomes a serious movement.
I'm afraid you live in a fantasy or your own echo chamber here.
Brexit is VERY much an issue. I hear people talking about it a LOT. Business people I know are fuming still. I know one guy whose entire business is now all but ruined. And, as Mike says, there's immense annoyance at what it has done to travel.
So I'm afraid if you think this is a non-issue this is wishful thinking on your part, which was of course the whole point of Brexit. It was never driven by people who understand economics but by those who, like Boris, wanted to "fuck business."
We will rejoin. It's 100% inevitable. It's simply a question of when. As you say, you may not live to see it, but be assured it will happen.
I live in an echo chamber?
I speak to people with different opinions to myself regularly. The difference is I make my own opinions.
You are the one constantly making anecdotes about how everyone you speak to shares your exact opinion on everything. As you've done in this post, yet again.
Wanting to rejoin the sclerotic EU isn't being driven by economics either. The UK may be suffering managed decline under Sunak, which is why I want Sunak out and the Tories to go into Opposition, but then you die-hard fanatical zealots who want Europe to be an issue are jealous we aren't declining as fast as Germany is.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.'Scarce
The uniform bloc of angry racist red wall voters in football strips and union jack tattoos is a lazy myth. See the header: support for staying out of the EU is now scarcely higher than GB support for the Tories. That means most people planning to vote Labour are not going to be put off by a gradual shift to a more pro-EU stance.
Nor, I suspect, are all Labour-curious voters in Scotland going to be begging for immediate rejoin, anymore than they are in Labour stronghold London where the remain vote in my constituency was nearly 80% and Labour have a 30k majority.
'Scarcely higher' 37% still for Leave is about 10% higher than the current Tory poll rating
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
Seems the SNP have stabilised a little and much will depend on the outcome of the police investigations
As far as Starmer is concerned he remains an English man from London trying to ride two horses at once, with differences over trans gender policies and the 2 children rule between himself and Sawar, and indeed Khan and himself over ULEZ
I note a lot of wishcasting about Keir Starmer by Tory and SNP supporters: a sense that any time soon he's going to be "found out", and people will return to their rightful home.
But this is the sort of thinking that landed Labour in trouble in the mid 2000s, kicked them out of most of Scotland in 2015 and buried the Lib Dems in the South West in the same election. And ejected Labour from swathes of the North and Midlands in 2019. The idea a bloc of voters belongs rightfully to your party. It's the same tendency that could nobble the Tories in the home counties and South Coast next year (fingers crossed) and reverse some of those 2015 SNP gains in Scotland. It leads to supporters ignoring the warning signs and convincing themselves that their voters will come home once they find out the opposition for who they really are.
I'm convinced most of the opposition just assumed that voters would see through Boris' bluster. They probably did, but they voted for him anyway. Same with Keir. It's not that voters are unaware of his or Labour's limitations. They just seem to have concluded it's time for a change.
Another pretty big drop in CPI, I think the end of year rate is probably going to be ~4.5%, if oil prices fall then maybe 4%.
Core CPI looks tougher to shift with wage data endlessly rising and 2.5m people long term sick. If the government wants to fix the labour market then it needs to get serious about sickness benefits reform. Matthew Paris had it bang on a couple of weeks ago, too many people are realising that it's easy to get signed off sick for stress and opt out of working. For people aged 50-64 who have paid off mortgages it's a realistic option to live on sickness benefits plus all the other assistance you get for it like council tax reductions etc...
Once again the safety net has become a way of life for some people. This time it's the comfortably off middle classes opting out of work by saying they're too stressed. It's something the Labour will need to address on day one because it now seems that young people are not only being asked to support pensions for the old, childcare for their kids, endless student loan repayments, old age care in the NHS but now also for the lazy middle classes who are deciding not to work because they're "stressed".
Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month.
He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse.
We're a professional services firm not a holiday club.
So why haven't you dismissed him / managed him out for poor performance?
"Constructive dismissal" you can't get rid of people if they've been signed off sick with stress or some other bogus mental health issue they've made up and convinced some bleeding heart therapist is a real problem. The government needs to seriously reform being signed off for mental health concerns, at the moment it's become a free for all and the indolent have realised they can turn it into a lifestyle choice.
"Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month."
"He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse."
I cannot imagine what might have induced any level of employee stress here.
Instead of creating the opportunity/necessity to be signed off sick, perhaps a better management approach in the first place may have prevented it getting to that stage.
I cannot believe the unwisdom of posting this sort of thing. Unless the law on discovery of documents has radically changed since I were a solicitor, it's disclosable in unfair dismissal proceedings.
Might I inquire - without wanting to comment on this specific case - if it is a general principle to disclose anything you write on matter x? I can understand memos and emails and corporate files. But what about something like this that t is purportedly anonymised as to both the manager and the employee (and indeed employer)?
The law and practice of discovery and disclosure (civil and criminal) is a tricky maze into which it is easy to wander and harder to get out of. Strict enforcement is not easy. Shredders and delete buttons exist; as does the capacity to create back dated paper documents to cover the gaps.
Thank you. And there are the GDPR and FoI regulations, too, to add to the potential fun.
None of the political culture (politicians, media, activists etc.) want to relitigate the EU (partly because solving other things is just as if not more important, partly because it is still a highly emotive topic for many). Labour has no desire to give the Tories a stick to beat them with, the LDs are not important enough and, most importantly, we don't know the terms we would be offered to rejoin. If I were an EU member state I would not allow the UK to rejoin with the exceptions we already had carved out back during the Cameron era. Not out of spite, but because it seems clear to me now that our exceptional status within the EU was part of what led us out - that we could not be appeased because at the end of the day the UK did not enter the project wanting it to succeed, and rather was accepted so it was on the inside pissing out rather than the other way around. For the UK to rejoin the EU would require both the UK and EU to say up front and clearly what kind of political entity they want the EU to be, and for the UK to clearly and affirmatively say we want to be part of that entity - not just a desire for us to get an economic boost for trade reasons (which we could do without rejoining).
If the EU project is that of differing states eventually evolving into a more federalist super state model, similar to the US or even the Russian Federation, the UKs "reentry" would be the perfect moment to make that clear. I know not all individual member states like that idea, nor do all voters within the individual states, but with a single currency and talks of increased security collaboration alongside increased collaboration likely necessary to deal with climate change and immigration, as well as threats from Russia and an increasingly unstable US, it would be beneficial to put all the cards on the table. And if the UK doesn't want to be part of that - fine. But if we do, we need to know at that point what rejoin means.
I don't think the EU really wants to have that conversation, and I don't think the UK would sign up for that - so I doubt anyone will push rejoin for a long time yet. I think the outcome of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the next decade of US political leadership will likely force the EU to react and therefore become more like a federalised state, rather than an open debate about whether that is what the individual countries want. So I don't see rejoin becoming a significant movement for at least a decade, if not longer, and by then it will be greatly overshadowed by the politics of climate catastrophe.
I think that a Federal EU can only emerge based on the Eurozone, and so it would deepen the split between the Eurozone countries and the non-Eurozone countries, likely making it permanent (and anyway, neither France or Germany want a Federal Europe for different reasons anyway). I think at the moment the EU would prefer to preserve the fiction that this divide between the Eurozone and the rest is temporary, rather than entrench it.
We see with the way the EU has handled Hungary over Ukraine that it is currently favouring the preservation of unanimity, rather than proceeding with a more determined core (even when they core is all the states bar one).
I don't disagree that there is not a huge push atm for an actual federalised EU, I just think events will make it so. Russia's aggression presents a question - what should Europe's relationship with Russia look like? Will Russia even continue to be an entity if it loses? What happens if Russia wins? These questions will require greater links between EU states - no longer can Germany seek out it's own oil and gas deal with Russia in such a world. And if Russia falls apart, which is unlikely but not impossible, what happens to the leftovers?
I think the same will be true of the US. If Trump wins next year, the EU can expect another mini trade war and an erratic ally at best and an outright hostile US at worst. If Trump doesn't win, a DeSantis or Cruz will still have a shot in 28 or 32 - again people who will not likely put US/EU cooperation highly on their list of priorities. The US also looks like it might fragment over the next decade - abortion, LGBT+ rights, wealth inequality, labour strikes, not to mention the impacts of climate change on farming and food distribution between states. And there are no real politicians capable of unifying the country, nor doing so in a way that benefits its allies. Already the IRA, which is doing a lot to boost the USAs infrastructure and growth, is having a negative impact on other smaller countries (like the UK) by raising the prices of materials needed for infrastructure and green transition. The EU would be better doing this as a whole rather than as individual states - saving money by bulk purchasing, sharing expertise and labour and subsidising infrastructure for the poorer states. That will also require a lot more collaboration that would start looking more like a real federal state.
Roy, Malan and Livingstone preferred to Harry Brook? I can only think that Brook must have misbehaved or something - he's the best of the lot, barring Root.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
The uniform bloc of angry racist red wall voters in football strips and union jack tattoos is a lazy myth. See the header: support for staying out of the EU is now scarcely higher than GB support for the Tories. That means most people planning to vote Labour are not going to be put off by a gradual shift to a more pro-EU stance.
Nor, I suspect, are all Labour-curious voters in Scotland going to be begging for immediate rejoin, anymore than they are in Labour stronghold London where the remain vote in my constituency was nearly 80% and Labour have a 30k majority.
Only stupid people think of voters as a uniform bloc, there are only approximate predispositions. However on your first point, why then are Starmer and co treating any gradual shift to a more pro EU stance as if it were a leper with syphilis?
On your second point, the all things to all men SLab candidate in Rutherglen left the the Labour party and didn't vote for them in 2019 because of Corbyn's negative attitude to the EU, so obviously the issue has some resonance.
On topic. -- It's interesting to compare the status of Rejoin as a political movement now with Brexit in say ~2011.
The opinion poll support for Rejoin certainly seems to be a lot stronger for Rejoin now than Brexit then, but there's no equivalent to UKIP to threaten the electoral prospects of one of the major parties, and no tireless monomaniacal campaigner in the mould of Farage to advocate for Rejoin.
OGH mentions the Lib Dems advocating Rejoin, but they will only do so insofar as they think it helps them win votes or seats. Where they think it will be a hindrance they will soft-pedal it, or caveat the message.
This will see the Lib Dems win a lot more seats than UKIP ever did, but in terms of advancing the cause of Rejoin it will be much less effective.
Consequently I'm not currently seeing any prospect of Rejoin becoming a serious political movement. A single issue campaign needs a single issue leader. Rejoin doesn't have one.
The analogy would be a niche party demanding a referendum on rejoining and picking up enough support from Lab voters to force the Lab leader to put this in a GE manifesto. That's hard to see with the political dynamic we have, so it'll probably have to find another way to happen (if it does).
Doesn't the SNP qualify? I can see it demanding both that and indyref if thje situation develops.
The scenario I'm hypothesizing is Labour adopt the policy to stop a big chunk of their support voting for a party who already have it. This can't be the SNP because only about 7% of the electorate can vote for them. Of current parties it'd have to be the LDs, I suppose, and this would kind of mirror the 2019 scenario where they went Cancel Brexit No Ref and forced Labour to go (effectively) Cancel Brexit Via Ref. That backfired because Brexit was still popular but if done when it's been implemented and lost its appeal perhaps it'd be a different story.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.'Scarce
The uniform bloc of angry racist red wall voters in football strips and union jack tattoos is a lazy myth. See the header: support for staying out of the EU is now scarcely higher than GB support for the Tories. That means most people planning to vote Labour are not going to be put off by a gradual shift to a more pro-EU stance.
Nor, I suspect, are all Labour-curious voters in Scotland going to be begging for immediate rejoin, anymore than they are in Labour stronghold London where the remain vote in my constituency was nearly 80% and Labour have a 30k majority.
'Scarcely higher' 37% still for Leave is about 10% higher than the current Tory poll rating
Add on Reform and it's within MoE of the stay out vote. And that will include people who preferred remain but now think the ship has sailed. And demographics means the number is shrinking daily.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
Seems the SNP have stabilised a little and much will depend on the outcome of the police investigations
As far as Starmer is concerned he remains an English man from London trying to ride two horses at once, with differences over trans gender policies and the 2 children rule between himself and Sawar, and indeed Khan and himself over ULEZ
I note a lot of wishcasting about Keir Starmer by Tory and SNP supporters: a sense that any time soon he's going to be "found out", and people will return to their rightful home.
But this is the sort of thinking that landed Labour in trouble in the mid 2000s, kicked them out of most of Scotland in 2015 and buried the Lib Dems in the South West in the same election. And ejected Labour from swathes of the North and Midlands in 2019. The idea a bloc of voters belongs rightfully to your party. It's the same tendency that could nobble the Tories in the home counties and South Coast next year (fingers crossed) and reverse some of those 2015 SNP gains in Scotland. It leads to supporters ignoring the warning signs and convincing themselves that their voters will come home once they find out the opposition for who they really are.
I'm convinced most of the opposition just assumed that voters would see through Boris' bluster. They probably did, but they voted for him anyway. Same with Keir. It's not that voters are unaware of his or Labour's limitations. They just seem to have concluded it's time for a change.
The start point for this wishful thinking is denial of reality. No the economy isn't structurally broken, no Brexit definitely isn't why we're performing worse than we would have been otherwise, no the NHS and other services aren't buggered, nobody will care that we miss every target we set or simply abolish the target etc etc etc.
Witness the idiocy over "NHS Week". They have solved the terrible state of cancer targets by abolishing them. Whilst hoping that people who wait for 18 months in pain or can't get a GP appointment say "but at least I'm not in Wales". Its deluded.
“Inflation proved stubborn in July as economists warned that underlying pressures meant the UK was not yet at a turning point on price rises.
“The consumer prices index (CPI) rose by 6.8pc in the year to July, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), as the lower energy price cap pulled down household bills.
“While the drop was in line with the Bank of England’s prediction of 6.8pc, economists had expected a sharper fall to 6.7pc.”
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
The MI5 controlled SNP will make Sarwar FM on those figures.
No no no.
It's SIS working with the CIA.
And they work for the Lizard men, who work for the Zeta Reticulans, who work for the Illuminati, who work for ZOG, who work for the Grand Council.
Get it right, or you'll come across as a crackpot loon.
Rejoiners dont know why theyd rejoin, except for a Trump like sulk that they lost an election, they think they should have won.
Yes and no.
We regret having left on account of the immense damage it did to the UK for no particular gain, save "sovereignty"*. Hence push us into a corner and we believe that 93% of the people who voted for Brexit were doing so either because they were given a red button to push, were told they couldn't push it, so pushed it; didn't like johnny foreigner, or believed that Brexit would deliver them some kind of benefit which they haven't been able to articulate then or now. Or that, simply, they were not very bright.
7% of those who voted for Brexit knew we had always been sovereign, knew that it would deliver harm to the nation with no tangible benefit, but believed that it was a price worth paying to not be in the club with all its funny rules any more, even though the rules were designed to benefit all. Fair enough.
So we know why we shouldn't have left but we are not 100% sure we would want to rejoin because of all the palaver plus divisiveness.
We would settle for sane people running post-Brexit UK. Not those who believe that it is not sufficient to have left the EU but for whom the EU has become the enemy whereby even discussing possible common widget standards is tantamount to treason.
*we were always sovereign.
Poeple voted our for sovereignty and because they couldnt see any advantage from being in. Remain had a case they could have made stressing the positives but they decided to go negative and it failed.
Remainers still dont understand why people at the bottom of the pile were more likely to vote out - these are your core Red wallers. If you have seen your job outsourced and people turning up on your doorstep to run say hand car washes and anyone earning wages around you has seen their real pay decline why wouldnt you say something has to change ? Its in vour economic interest to vote for change since there is precious little downside.
We still have that problem none of the political parties want to address it. Labour may or may not reclaim big chunks of the Red Wall, but the mould has been broken and those constituencies will never be nailed on again. For me thats a good thing as politicians might now have to listen to their constituents,
Likewise the Conservatives need to listen to the young people of southern England and remember they're supposed to be the party of aspiration.
Of course and at present the Cons have zero ideas on putting this right.
Start with affordable housing.
The problem is that many Conservatives do not think anything needs to be put right.
The rentier state is now viewed as desirable by too many of them.
Likewise to many Conservatives 'trade' isn't about producing useful goods and services but being a well-connected middleman giving and receiving vast sums of government money for nobody's knows what.
Their core vote no longer works, as they are past retirement age.
But it needs to be replenished by the young becoming homeowners.
Now the Conservatives should encourage this by aspiration, better training opportunities, lower employment taxes and affordable housing.
But I fear there will be a faction - HYUFD seems to have inclinations this way - who instead prefer aspiration through inheritance in some modern Jane Austen style society.
How the Conservatives deal with the 'higher wages versus higher house prices' debate in opposition will be interesting.
Most likely if Starmer wins a majority and pushes through his build all over the Greenbelt plans, the Tories will join the LDs on a NIMBY ticket in opposition
It actually surprises me that Brexit has become so unpopular so quickly. If I'd voted Leave on any of the grounds so often heard on here (sovereignty, the EU going long term in a direction I was uncomfortable with, this sort of 'Times editorial' type shit) I'd still be happy with it. Why wouldn't I be?
So what I conclude is that many people must have voted Leave because they thought it would (i) stop immigration or (ii) deliver some sort of financial bonanza. It's done neither (in fact the opposite on both) therefore they are now pissed off. They feel conned.
Given the nature of the Leave campaign, it's hard to imagine why they might have been under such a misapprehension.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
Seems the SNP have stabilised a little and much will depend on the outcome of the police investigations
As far as Starmer is concerned he remains an English man from London trying to ride two horses at once, with differences over trans gender policies and the 2 children rule between himself and Sawar, and indeed Khan and himself over ULEZ
I note a lot of wishcasting about Keir Starmer by Tory and SNP supporters: a sense that any time soon he's going to be "found out", and people will return to their rightful home.
But this is the sort of thinking that landed Labour in trouble in the mid 2000s, kicked them out of most of Scotland in 2015 and buried the Lib Dems in the South West in the same election. And ejected Labour from swathes of the North and Midlands in 2019. The idea a bloc of voters belongs rightfully to your party. It's the same tendency that could nobble the Tories in the home counties and South Coast next year (fingers crossed) and reverse some of those 2015 SNP gains in Scotland. It leads to supporters ignoring the warning signs and convincing themselves that their voters will come home once they find out the opposition for who they really are.
I'm convinced most of the opposition just assumed that voters would see through Boris' bluster. They probably did, but they voted for him anyway. Same with Keir. It's not that voters are unaware of his or Labour's limitations. They just seem to have concluded it's time for a change.
The difficulty about projecting how well Labour are going to do is that Starmer isn't particularly popular, he is just less unpopular than the alternatives. This means it looks like Labour is on course to win a parliamentary majority, and a big one, but it doesn't say much about how long that majority can be held together and what Starmer will do with it. So far he seems to be flouting policies to the right of Blair - which is not really the platform he was elected to the Labour leadership on. If he runs in a GE as that figure, I could see lots of voters going "back" to the SNP (although less so the Tories). On the other hand, if he tries to paint himself as someone who wants to change things significantly - who wants to fix a "broken Britain" - he might alienate Tory voters who really just want things to go "back to normal" with low interest rates and the like.
I think we could see a very large Labour majority that becomes very unpopular very quickly because it doesn't seem like many voters actively like Starmer's political vision for the UK.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.'Scarce
The uniform bloc of angry racist red wall voters in football strips and union jack tattoos is a lazy myth. See the header: support for staying out of the EU is now scarcely higher than GB support for the Tories. That means most people planning to vote Labour are not going to be put off by a gradual shift to a more pro-EU stance.
Nor, I suspect, are all Labour-curious voters in Scotland going to be begging for immediate rejoin, anymore than they are in Labour stronghold London where the remain vote in my constituency was nearly 80% and Labour have a 30k majority.
'Scarcely higher' 37% still for Leave is about 10% higher than the current Tory poll rating
It isn't 37% for Leave, nor for that matter 63% for Rejoin. It is 30% for Leave, 50% Rejoin and 20% DK or Won't Vote. The header poll excludes that 20%.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
The uniform bloc of angry racist red wall voters in football strips and union jack tattoos is a lazy myth. See the header: support for staying out of the EU is now scarcely higher than GB support for the Tories. That means most people planning to vote Labour are not going to be put off by a gradual shift to a more pro-EU stance.
Nor, I suspect, are all Labour-curious voters in Scotland going to be begging for immediate rejoin, anymore than they are in Labour stronghold London where the remain vote in my constituency was nearly 80% and Labour have a 30k majority.
Only stupid people think of voters as a uniform bloc, there are only approximate predispositions. However on your first point, why then are Starmer and co treating any gradual shift to a more pro EU stance as if it were a leper with syphilis?
Because he is very risk-averse. I understand the position to an extent because banging on about Europe has rarely benefited a party when there are richer pickings elsewhere. Their current position is paying dividends at the polls - why change. I would rather Starmer went further, and I'll be voting Lib Dem as usual, but the priority is to rid ourselves of this Tory government.
None of the political culture (politicians, media, activists etc.) want to relitigate the EU (partly because solving other things is just as if not more important, partly because it is still a highly emotive topic for many). Labour has no desire to give the Tories a stick to beat them with, the LDs are not important enough and, most importantly, we don't know the terms we would be offered to rejoin. If I were an EU member state I would not allow the UK to rejoin with the exceptions we already had carved out back during the Cameron era. Not out of spite, but because it seems clear to me now that our exceptional status within the EU was part of what led us out - that we could not be appeased because at the end of the day the UK did not enter the project wanting it to succeed, and rather was accepted so it was on the inside pissing out rather than the other way around. For the UK to rejoin the EU would require both the UK and EU to say up front and clearly what kind of political entity they want the EU to be, and for the UK to clearly and affirmatively say we want to be part of that entity - not just a desire for us to get an economic boost for trade reasons (which we could do without rejoining).
If the EU project is that of differing states eventually evolving into a more federalist super state model, similar to the US or even the Russian Federation, the UKs "reentry" would be the perfect moment to make that clear. I know not all individual member states like that idea, nor do all voters within the individual states, but with a single currency and talks of increased security collaboration alongside increased collaboration likely necessary to deal with climate change and immigration, as well as threats from Russia and an increasingly unstable US, it would be beneficial to put all the cards on the table. And if the UK doesn't want to be part of that - fine. But if we do, we need to know at that point what rejoin means.
I don't think the EU really wants to have that conversation, and I don't think the UK would sign up for that - so I doubt anyone will push rejoin for a long time yet. I think the outcome of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the next decade of US political leadership will likely force the EU to react and therefore become more like a federalised state, rather than an open debate about whether that is what the individual countries want. So I don't see rejoin becoming a significant movement for at least a decade, if not longer, and by then it will be greatly overshadowed by the politics of climate catastrophe.
I think that a Federal EU can only emerge based on the Eurozone, and so it would deepen the split between the Eurozone countries and the non-Eurozone countries, likely making it permanent (and anyway, neither France or Germany want a Federal Europe for different reasons anyway). I think at the moment the EU would prefer to preserve the fiction that this divide between the Eurozone and the rest is temporary, rather than entrench it.
We see with the way the EU has handled Hungary over Ukraine that it is currently favouring the preservation of unanimity, rather than proceeding with a more determined core (even when they core is all the states bar one).
I don't disagree that there is not a huge push atm for an actual federalised EU, I just think events will make it so. Russia's aggression presents a question - what should Europe's relationship with Russia look like? Will Russia even continue to be an entity if it loses? What happens if Russia wins? These questions will require greater links between EU states - no longer can Germany seek out it's own oil and gas deal with Russia in such a world. And if Russia falls apart, which is unlikely but not impossible, what happens to the leftovers?
I think the same will be true of the US. If Trump wins next year, the EU can expect another mini trade war and an erratic ally at best and an outright hostile US at worst. If Trump doesn't win, a DeSantis or Cruz will still have a shot in 28 or 32 - again people who will not likely put US/EU cooperation highly on their list of priorities. The US also looks like it might fragment over the next decade - abortion, LGBT+ rights, wealth inequality, labour strikes, not to mention the impacts of climate change on farming and food distribution between states. And there are no real politicians capable of unifying the country, nor doing so in a way that benefits its allies. Already the IRA, which is doing a lot to boost the USAs infrastructure and growth, is having a negative impact on other smaller countries (like the UK) by raising the prices of materials needed for infrastructure and green transition. The EU would be better doing this as a whole rather than as individual states - saving money by bulk purchasing, sharing expertise and labour and subsidising infrastructure for the poorer states. That will also require a lot more collaboration that would start looking more like a real federal state.
Personal view - with all its caveats etc - is that there will be a move to a federal Europe but the driver will be the increasing number of governments in Europe that will have a populist right agenda, or at least strongly influenced by it. If you look at Europe over the next five years - it is likely we will see France (under Le Pen), Italy, much of Central and Eastern Europe, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria etc that will have such movements as part of their governments. The AfD could also boost their share in Germany. Polling in Ireland shows strong support for a Dutch-style farmers party. If Ukraine gets in (which I don't think it will but...), then that will only increase that tilt.
If it heads in that way, then there are likely to be a number of areas where the Bloc would make substantial unifying progress simply because each country will recognise it cannot do things on its own and there is strength through numbers. However, it will be areas such as border protection, armed forces, protectionism, policies to encourage childbirth etc that will see the biggest integration. I suspect though that these will not be the measures that many pro-EU advocates have in mind when they talk about the greater integration of the EU.
In fact, I think the only way to control immigration is to deport the fake asylum seekers to somewhere they don't want to go. That would only be possible if we left the ECHR.
We deported more failed asylum seekers when we were in the EU, through the Dublin protocol.
We have, under longstanding legislation and within the ECHR, the ability to deport fake asylum seekers. If someone's asylum case fails, the law is pretty straightforward. The number of deportations has fallen hugely over the period the Conservatives have been in power. That's primarily because fewer cases are being processed and it's taking longer to do them. That's mainly a resourcing problem.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
The uniform bloc of angry racist red wall voters in football strips and union jack tattoos is a lazy myth. See the header: support for staying out of the EU is now scarcely higher than GB support for the Tories. That means most people planning to vote Labour are not going to be put off by a gradual shift to a more pro-EU stance.
Nor, I suspect, are all Labour-curious voters in Scotland going to be begging for immediate rejoin, anymore than they are in Labour stronghold London where the remain vote in my constituency was nearly 80% and Labour have a 30k majority.
Only stupid people think of voters as a uniform bloc, there are only approximate predispositions. However on your first point, why then are Starmer and co treating any gradual shift to a more pro EU stance as if it were a leper with syphilis?
On your second point, the all things to all men SLab candidate in Rutherglen left the the Labour party and didn't vote for them in 2019 because of Corbyn's negative attitude to the EU, so obviously the issue has some resonance.
Och, it's resonant in Ru'glen. The unfortunate chap with the red rosette is finding himself in the position of sort of holding the aforesaid party position at arms' length but still not quite giving the impression of lavish brotherly love.
Roy, Malan and Livingstone preferred to Harry Brook? I can only think that Brook must have misbehaved or something - he's the best of the lot, barring Root.
I wonder if Stokes is going to retire earlier than people think. He really should get that knee seen to.
Rejoiners dont know why theyd rejoin, except for a Trump like sulk that they lost an election, they think they should have won.
Yes and no.
We regret having left on account of the immense damage it did to the UK for no particular gain, save "sovereignty"*. Hence push us into a corner and we believe that 93% of the people who voted for Brexit were doing so either because they were given a red button to push, were told they couldn't push it, so pushed it; didn't like johnny foreigner, or believed that Brexit would deliver them some kind of benefit which they haven't been able to articulate then or now. Or that, simply, they were not very bright.
7% of those who voted for Brexit knew we had always been sovereign, knew that it would deliver harm to the nation with no tangible benefit, but believed that it was a price worth paying to not be in the club with all its funny rules any more, even though the rules were designed to benefit all. Fair enough.
So we know why we shouldn't have left but we are not 100% sure we would want to rejoin because of all the palaver plus divisiveness.
We would settle for sane people running post-Brexit UK. Not those who believe that it is not sufficient to have left the EU but for whom the EU has become the enemy whereby even discussing possible common widget standards is tantamount to treason.
*we were always sovereign.
Remainers still dont understand why people at the bottom of the pile were more likely to vote out - these are your core Red wallers. If you have seen your job outsourced and people turning up on your doorstep to run say hand car washes and anyone earning wages around you has seen their real pay decline why wouldnt you say something has to change ? Its in vour economic interest to vote for change since there is precious little downside.
Leavers still don't understand that they had to deliver that "moon on a stick" and have completely failed to do so. The resilient parts of the country are Remania, those in decline are Leaverstan. Nothing has changed.
They know that they were sold a pup, and will be out for electoral revenge. When Starmer fails to deliver too, fingers will point even more to Brexit being the problem.
Parties cannot ignore the polling forever. The laws of political gravity apply.
Thats also true.
The Leavers as yet have still to deliver upside on the vote. The conservatives who are the main drivers of this have been a shitshow, They spent ages fighting among themselves on the In\out divisions in their party and then had the bad luck to have two black swans land in their pond - Covid and Putin. You could argue that the crises should have made them put their arse in gear but instead we have rabbits in headlights.
As for electoral revenge when we have PM Tice youll know it has arrived.
The Conservatives have been so stupid/useless that they haven't even tried to take credit for full employment.
Partially because some think that because there was high unemployment under Thatcher then high unemployment must be a good thing.
Partially because some are fully committed to rentierism and think that the only thing that should be allowed to increase are house prices.
Partially because some are so thick/unaware that they don't realise there's full employment.
They do talk about the employment rate quite a lot, don't they?
But the problem with claiming full employment specifically is that it invites questions about low productivity, poor growth and how to fill the huge numbers of job vacancies in essential services that there are.
The problems with low end jobs are present in a number of countries. When you do the math on such jobs, they turn out to be so badly paid (with shit conditions) that nearly anything is a better alternative.
In such jobs, either they are a temporary step to getting a better job, or you are very unadevnturous.
COVID pushed people to move - with zero hours etc, there were simply more hours. Driving a local Amazon van is a far nicer and better paid job than most of the ones we are talking about. So the racist, gammon bastards chose the better paid jobs.
In addition, outside certain menial jobs in central London, the mythology of "No UK people will do the jobs" is just that - the majority of the employees were and are UK citizens. Which is not surprising when you look at the demographics.
Many companies are hanging on, hoping that a supply of people prepared to work for minimum wage (or effectively less) will magically appear. Others are investing in productivity.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
Seems the SNP have stabilised a little and much will depend on the outcome of the police investigations
As far as Starmer is concerned he remains an English man from London trying to ride two horses at once, with differences over trans gender policies and the 2 children rule between himself and Sawar, and indeed Khan and himself over ULEZ
I note a lot of wishcasting about Keir Starmer by Tory and SNP supporters: a sense that any time soon he's going to be "found out", and people will return to their rightful home.
But this is the sort of thinking that landed Labour in trouble in the mid 2000s, kicked them out of most of Scotland in 2015 and buried the Lib Dems in the South West in the same election. And ejected Labour from swathes of the North and Midlands in 2019. The idea a bloc of voters belongs rightfully to your party. It's the same tendency that could nobble the Tories in the home counties and South Coast next year (fingers crossed) and reverse some of those 2015 SNP gains in Scotland. It leads to supporters ignoring the warning signs and convincing themselves that their voters will come home once they find out the opposition for who they really are.
I'm convinced most of the opposition just assumed that voters would see through Boris' bluster. They probably did, but they voted for him anyway. Same with Keir. It's not that voters are unaware of his or Labour's limitations. They just seem to have concluded it's time for a change.
The difficulty about projecting how well Labour are going to do is that Starmer isn't particularly popular, he is just less unpopular than the alternatives. This means it looks like Labour is on course to win a parliamentary majority, and a big one, but it doesn't say much about how long that majority can be held together and what Starmer will do with it. So far he seems to be flouting policies to the right of Blair - which is not really the platform he was elected to the Labour leadership on. If he runs in a GE as that figure, I could see lots of voters going "back" to the SNP (although less so the Tories). On the other hand, if he tries to paint himself as someone who wants to change things significantly - who wants to fix a "broken Britain" - he might alienate Tory voters who really just want things to go "back to normal" with low interest rates and the like.
I think we could see a very large Labour majority that becomes very unpopular very quickly because it doesn't seem like many voters actively like Starmer's political vision for the UK.
I'm not sure I agree with this either. The voter ratings for Starmer are OK. Not stellar, but not bad at all. That's probably ideal ahead of an election. If expectations were sky high then the risk of rapid disillusionment would be greater. His political vision isn't transformational certainly, it's a bit prosaic. But it's not scary.
Labour's biggest risk after an election is the Conservatives getting their act together. How likely is that? I strongly suspect they have at least one more round of craziness in them before they wake up from their fever dream.
Rejoiners dont know why theyd rejoin, except for a Trump like sulk that they lost an election, they think they should have won.
Yes and no.
We regret having left on account of the immense damage it did to the UK for no particular gain, save "sovereignty"*. Hence push us into a corner and we believe that 93% of the people who voted for Brexit were doing so either because they were given a red button to push, were told they couldn't push it, so pushed it; didn't like johnny foreigner, or believed that Brexit would deliver them some kind of benefit which they haven't been able to articulate then or now. Or that, simply, they were not very bright.
7% of those who voted for Brexit knew we had always been sovereign, knew that it would deliver harm to the nation with no tangible benefit, but believed that it was a price worth paying to not be in the club with all its funny rules any more, even though the rules were designed to benefit all. Fair enough.
So we know why we shouldn't have left but we are not 100% sure we would want to rejoin because of all the palaver plus divisiveness.
We would settle for sane people running post-Brexit UK. Not those who believe that it is not sufficient to have left the EU but for whom the EU has become the enemy whereby even discussing possible common widget standards is tantamount to treason.
*we were always sovereign.
Poeple voted our for sovereignty and because they couldnt see any advantage from being in. Remain had a case they could have made stressing the positives but they decided to go negative and it failed.
Remainers still dont understand why people at the bottom of the pile were more likely to vote out - these are your core Red wallers. If you have seen your job outsourced and people turning up on your doorstep to run say hand car washes and anyone earning wages around you has seen their real pay decline why wouldnt you say something has to change ? Its in vour economic interest to vote for change since there is precious little downside.
We still have that problem none of the political parties want to address it. Labour may or may not reclaim big chunks of the Red Wall, but the mould has been broken and those constituencies will never be nailed on again. For me thats a good thing as politicians might now have to listen to their constituents,
Extending your argument, with the economy outside the South East flatlining, at best, the vote against the status quo now is Rejoin. But it’s not going to happen. You can relax!
There may well come a point when EU regional funding looks quite attractive to voters in some of those areas, as they realise no one is delivering 'levelling up' in any discernible manner.
It actually surprises me that Brexit has become so unpopular so quickly. If I'd voted Leave on any of the grounds so often heard on here (sovereignty, the EU going long term in a direction I was uncomfortable with, this sort of 'Times editorial' type shit) I'd still be happy with it. Why wouldn't I be?
So what I conclude is that many people must have voted Leave because they thought it would (i) stop immigration or (ii) deliver some sort of financial bonanza. It's done neither (in fact the opposite on both) therefore they are now pissed off. They feel conned.
Given the nature of the Leave campaign, it's hard to imagine why they might have been under such a misapprehension.
In order to win any national vote you need the votes of people whose experience and opinions don't go beyond the immediate, and who think there are simple answers to complex things. True of Brexit vote, true of every general election. That's life.
As to Brexit, compare it to Scotland. It is easy to imagine people saying in X years time "I voted for and support our independence, but I don't support the current Scottish government or what they are doing with our sovereignty". That would not mean they want London back.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
The uniform bloc of angry racist red wall voters in football strips and union jack tattoos is a lazy myth. See the header: support for staying out of the EU is now scarcely higher than GB support for the Tories. That means most people planning to vote Labour are not going to be put off by a gradual shift to a more pro-EU stance.
Nor, I suspect, are all Labour-curious voters in Scotland going to be begging for immediate rejoin, anymore than they are in Labour stronghold London where the remain vote in my constituency was nearly 80% and Labour have a 30k majority.
Only stupid people think of voters as a uniform bloc, there are only approximate predispositions. However on your first point, why then are Starmer and co treating any gradual shift to a more pro EU stance as if it were a leper with syphilis?
On your second point, the all things to all men SLab candidate in Rutherglen left the the Labour party and didn't vote for them in 2019 because of Corbyn's negative attitude to the EU, so obviously the issue has some resonance.
Och, it's resonant in Ru'glen. The unfortunate chap with the red rosette is finding himself in the position of sort of holding the aforesaid party position at arms' length but still not quite giving the impression of lavish brotherly love.
None of the political culture (politicians, media, activists etc.) want to relitigate the EU (partly because solving other things is just as if not more important, partly because it is still a highly emotive topic for many). Labour has no desire to give the Tories a stick to beat them with, the LDs are not important enough and, most importantly, we don't know the terms we would be offered to rejoin. If I were an EU member state I would not allow the UK to rejoin with the exceptions we already had carved out back during the Cameron era. Not out of spite, but because it seems clear to me now that our exceptional status within the EU was part of what led us out - that we could not be appeased because at the end of the day the UK did not enter the project wanting it to succeed, and rather was accepted so it was on the inside pissing out rather than the other way around. For the UK to rejoin the EU would require both the UK and EU to say up front and clearly what kind of political entity they want the EU to be, and for the UK to clearly and affirmatively say we want to be part of that entity - not just a desire for us to get an economic boost for trade reasons (which we could do without rejoining).
If the EU project is that of differing states eventually evolving into a more federalist super state model, similar to the US or even the Russian Federation, the UKs "reentry" would be the perfect moment to make that clear. I know not all individual member states like that idea, nor do all voters within the individual states, but with a single currency and talks of increased security collaboration alongside increased collaboration likely necessary to deal with climate change and immigration, as well as threats from Russia and an increasingly unstable US, it would be beneficial to put all the cards on the table. And if the UK doesn't want to be part of that - fine. But if we do, we need to know at that point what rejoin means.
I don't think the EU really wants to have that conversation, and I don't think the UK would sign up for that - so I doubt anyone will push rejoin for a long time yet. I think the outcome of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the next decade of US political leadership will likely force the EU to react and therefore become more like a federalised state, rather than an open debate about whether that is what the individual countries want. So I don't see rejoin becoming a significant movement for at least a decade, if not longer, and by then it will be greatly overshadowed by the politics of climate catastrophe.
I think that a Federal EU can only emerge based on the Eurozone, and so it would deepen the split between the Eurozone countries and the non-Eurozone countries, likely making it permanent (and anyway, neither France or Germany want a Federal Europe for different reasons anyway). I think at the moment the EU would prefer to preserve the fiction that this divide between the Eurozone and the rest is temporary, rather than entrench it.
We see with the way the EU has handled Hungary over Ukraine that it is currently favouring the preservation of unanimity, rather than proceeding with a more determined core (even when they core is all the states bar one).
I don't disagree that there is not a huge push atm for an actual federalised EU, I just think events will make it so. Russia's aggression presents a question - what should Europe's relationship with Russia look like? Will Russia even continue to be an entity if it loses? What happens if Russia wins? These questions will require greater links between EU states - no longer can Germany seek out it's own oil and gas deal with Russia in such a world. And if Russia falls apart, which is unlikely but not impossible, what happens to the leftovers?
I think the same will be true of the US. If Trump wins next year, the EU can expect another mini trade war and an erratic ally at best and an outright hostile US at worst. If Trump doesn't win, a DeSantis or Cruz will still have a shot in 28 or 32 - again people who will not likely put US/EU cooperation highly on their list of priorities. The US also looks like it might fragment over the next decade - abortion, LGBT+ rights, wealth inequality, labour strikes, not to mention the impacts of climate change on farming and food distribution between states. And there are no real politicians capable of unifying the country, nor doing so in a way that benefits its allies. Already the IRA, which is doing a lot to boost the USAs infrastructure and growth, is having a negative impact on other smaller countries (like the UK) by raising the prices of materials needed for infrastructure and green transition. The EU would be better doing this as a whole rather than as individual states - saving money by bulk purchasing, sharing expertise and labour and subsidising infrastructure for the poorer states. That will also require a lot more collaboration that would start looking more like a real federal state.
Personal view - with all its caveats etc - is that there will be a move to a federal Europe but the driver will be the increasing number of governments in Europe that will have a populist right agenda, or at least strongly influenced by it. If you look at Europe over the next five years - it is likely we will see France (under Le Pen), Italy, much of Central and Eastern Europe, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria etc that will have such movements as part of their governments. The AfD could also boost their share in Germany. Polling in Ireland shows strong support for a Dutch-style farmers party. If Ukraine gets in (which I don't think it will but...), then that will only increase that tilt.
If it heads in that way, then there are likely to be a number of areas where the Bloc would make substantial unifying progress simply because each country will recognise it cannot do things on its own and there is strength through numbers. However, it will be areas such as border protection, armed forces, protectionism, policies to encourage childbirth etc that will see the biggest integration. I suspect though that these will not be the measures that many pro-EU advocates have in mind when they talk about the greater integration of the EU.
This is also quite possible - I think one thing Brexit has done is taken the desire out of right wing parties to leave the EU and instead made it more likely they will do as you say; look at the structures of the EU as a means to the outcomes they want. It won't take to many more member states to be Orbanised for that to be a real possibility (although I still don't think Le Pen will ever actually manage to win in France). It would be a strange quirk of history if the UK once again managed to keep the growing European far right out of power not through active embrace of left wing ideas but because of some weird internal conservative infighting.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
The uniform bloc of angry racist red wall voters in football strips and union jack tattoos is a lazy myth. See the header: support for staying out of the EU is now scarcely higher than GB support for the Tories. That means most people planning to vote Labour are not going to be put off by a gradual shift to a more pro-EU stance.
Nor, I suspect, are all Labour-curious voters in Scotland going to be begging for immediate rejoin, anymore than they are in Labour stronghold London where the remain vote in my constituency was nearly 80% and Labour have a 30k majority.
Only stupid people think of voters as a uniform bloc, there are only approximate predispositions. However on your first point, why then are Starmer and co treating any gradual shift to a more pro EU stance as if it were a leper with syphilis?
On your second point, the all things to all men SLab candidate in Rutherglen left the the Labour party and didn't vote for them in 2019 because of Corbyn's negative attitude to the EU, so obviously the issue has some resonance.
Och, it's resonant in Ru'glen. The unfortunate chap with the red rosette is finding himself in the position of sort of holding the aforesaid party position at arms' length but still not quite giving the impression of lavish brotherly love.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
The uniform bloc of angry racist red wall voters in football strips and union jack tattoos is a lazy myth. See the header: support for staying out of the EU is now scarcely higher than GB support for the Tories. That means most people planning to vote Labour are not going to be put off by a gradual shift to a more pro-EU stance.
Nor, I suspect, are all Labour-curious voters in Scotland going to be begging for immediate rejoin, anymore than they are in Labour stronghold London where the remain vote in my constituency was nearly 80% and Labour have a 30k majority.
Only stupid people think of voters as a uniform bloc, there are only approximate predispositions. However on your first point, why then are Starmer and co treating any gradual shift to a more pro EU stance as if it were a leper with syphilis?
On your second point, the all things to all men SLab candidate in Rutherglen left the the Labour party and didn't vote for them in 2019 because of Corbyn's negative attitude to the EU, so obviously the issue has some resonance.
Och, it's resonant in Ru'glen. The unfortunate chap with the red rosette is finding himself in the position of sort of holding the aforesaid party position at arms' length but still not quite giving the impression of lavish brotherly love.
I am many hundreds of km away from Rutherglen so I'm sure you are closer to the sentiment on the ground, but I'm not sure something in an article in The National is the clincher, anymore than a piece in the Daily Mail about Starmer's donkey sanctuary or beer and curry habits would be. Or a Guardian piece about Tories eating babies.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
The uniform bloc of angry racist red wall voters in football strips and union jack tattoos is a lazy myth. See the header: support for staying out of the EU is now scarcely higher than GB support for the Tories. That means most people planning to vote Labour are not going to be put off by a gradual shift to a more pro-EU stance.
Nor, I suspect, are all Labour-curious voters in Scotland going to be begging for immediate rejoin, anymore than they are in Labour stronghold London where the remain vote in my constituency was nearly 80% and Labour have a 30k majority.
Only stupid people think of voters as a uniform bloc, there are only approximate predispositions. However on your first point, why then are Starmer and co treating any gradual shift to a more pro EU stance as if it were a leper with syphilis?
On your second point, the all things to all men SLab candidate in Rutherglen left the the Labour party and didn't vote for them in 2019 because of Corbyn's negative attitude to the EU, so obviously the issue has some resonance.
Och, it's resonant in Ru'glen. The unfortunate chap with the red rosette is finding himself in the position of sort of holding the aforesaid party position at arms' length but still not quite giving the impression of lavish brotherly love.
I am many hundreds of km away from Rutherglen so I'm sure you are closer to the sentiment on the ground, but I'm not sure something in an article in The National is the clincher, anymore than a piece in the Daily Mail about Starmer's donkey sanctuary or beer and curry habits would be. Or a Guardian piece about Tories eating babies.
I refer you to my previous reply to the other Hon PBer.
Another pretty big drop in CPI, I think the end of year rate is probably going to be ~4.5%, if oil prices fall then maybe 4%.
Core CPI looks tougher to shift with wage data endlessly rising and 2.5m people long term sick. If the government wants to fix the labour market then it needs to get serious about sickness benefits reform. Matthew Paris had it bang on a couple of weeks ago, too many people are realising that it's easy to get signed off sick for stress and opt out of working. For people aged 50-64 who have paid off mortgages it's a realistic option to live on sickness benefits plus all the other assistance you get for it like council tax reductions etc...
Once again the safety net has become a way of life for some people. This time it's the comfortably off middle classes opting out of work by saying they're too stressed. It's something the Labour will need to address on day one because it now seems that young people are not only being asked to support pensions for the old, childcare for their kids, endless student loan repayments, old age care in the NHS but now also for the lazy middle classes who are deciding not to work because they're "stressed".
Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month.
He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse.
We're a professional services firm not a holiday club.
So why haven't you dismissed him / managed him out for poor performance?
"Constructive dismissal" you can't get rid of people if they've been signed off sick with stress or some other bogus mental health issue they've made up and convinced some bleeding heart therapist is a real problem. The government needs to seriously reform being signed off for mental health concerns, at the moment it's become a free for all and the indolent have realised they can turn it into a lifestyle choice.
"Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month."
"He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse."
I cannot imagine what might have induced any level of employee stress here.
Instead of creating the opportunity/necessity to be signed off sick, perhaps a better management approach in the first place may have prevented it getting to that stage.
A better management approach would be to sack people who are regularly off "sick", thus adding more to the real stress of people who are turning up to work who have to do not just their own job, but carry the weight of the skivers.
Everyone in the world suffers from stress. You need ways to manage your own stress. It should not be a reason not to turn in to work, that just hurts your colleagues more. If your job is too stressful for you, go get a different one, don't make your colleagues carry your burdens for you.
It’s an easy, short route, but I curse the people who named the streets here
I have to deliver to North Street, North End, North Way, North Cote and Northfields
What dickheads came up with all those in the same postcode?
The same dick heads who named the streets in my village. We're on Main Street. With the same postcode we have 6 Streets that have "Main Street" or "Off Main Street" in their address all with numbers that are identical. Amazon drivers just chuck parcels over whatever fence that has "Main" Street in their address. It causes havoc when a call centre operator just ticks the first "Main Street" that comes up in a drop down box.
My village has about 8 named streets, and two of them (referring to two different stations) are Station Road.
We went the other way and had numerous different official names for the same road.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
The uniform bloc of angry racist red wall voters in football strips and union jack tattoos is a lazy myth. See the header: support for staying out of the EU is now scarcely higher than GB support for the Tories. That means most people planning to vote Labour are not going to be put off by a gradual shift to a more pro-EU stance.
Nor, I suspect, are all Labour-curious voters in Scotland going to be begging for immediate rejoin, anymore than they are in Labour stronghold London where the remain vote in my constituency was nearly 80% and Labour have a 30k majority.
Only stupid people think of voters as a uniform bloc, there are only approximate predispositions. However on your first point, why then are Starmer and co treating any gradual shift to a more pro EU stance as if it were a leper with syphilis?
On your second point, the all things to all men SLab candidate in Rutherglen left the the Labour party and didn't vote for them in 2019 because of Corbyn's negative attitude to the EU, so obviously the issue has some resonance.
Och, it's resonant in Ru'glen. The unfortunate chap with the red rosette is finding himself in the position of sort of holding the aforesaid party position at arms' length but still not quite giving the impression of lavish brotherly love.
I am many hundreds of km away from Rutherglen so I'm sure you are closer to the sentiment on the ground, but I'm not sure something in an article in The National is the clincher, anymore than a piece in the Daily Mail about Starmer's donkey sanctuary or beer and curry habits would be. Or a Guardian piece about Tories eating babies.
I refer you to my previous reply to the other Hon PBer.
*Direct Quotations*.
Direct quotations are something Daily Mail articles are also very in favour of. The direct quotations that suit their agenda.
It's not as if candidates triangulating between national party policy and local priorities in a by-election is anything new. It's what's helped win the Lib Dems lots of recent ones.
None of the political culture (politicians, media, activists etc.) want to relitigate the EU (partly because solving other things is just as if not more important, partly because it is still a highly emotive topic for many). Labour has no desire to give the Tories a stick to beat them with, the LDs are not important enough and, most importantly, we don't know the terms we would be offered to rejoin. If I were an EU member state I would not allow the UK to rejoin with the exceptions we already had carved out back during the Cameron era. Not out of spite, but because it seems clear to me now that our exceptional status within the EU was part of what led us out - that we could not be appeased because at the end of the day the UK did not enter the project wanting it to succeed, and rather was accepted so it was on the inside pissing out rather than the other way around. For the UK to rejoin the EU would require both the UK and EU to say up front and clearly what kind of political entity they want the EU to be, and for the UK to clearly and affirmatively say we want to be part of that entity - not just a desire for us to get an economic boost for trade reasons (which we could do without rejoining).
If the EU project is that of differing states eventually evolving into a more federalist super state model, similar to the US or even the Russian Federation, the UKs "reentry" would be the perfect moment to make that clear. I know not all individual member states like that idea, nor do all voters within the individual states, but with a single currency and talks of increased security collaboration alongside increased collaboration likely necessary to deal with climate change and immigration, as well as threats from Russia and an increasingly unstable US, it would be beneficial to put all the cards on the table. And if the UK doesn't want to be part of that - fine. But if we do, we need to know at that point what rejoin means.
I don't think the EU really wants to have that conversation, and I don't think the UK would sign up for that - so I doubt anyone will push rejoin for a long time yet. I think the outcome of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the next decade of US political leadership will likely force the EU to react and therefore become more like a federalised state, rather than an open debate about whether that is what the individual countries want. So I don't see rejoin becoming a significant movement for at least a decade, if not longer, and by then it will be greatly overshadowed by the politics of climate catastrophe.
I think that a Federal EU can only emerge based on the Eurozone, and so it would deepen the split between the Eurozone countries and the non-Eurozone countries, likely making it permanent (and anyway, neither France or Germany want a Federal Europe for different reasons anyway). I think at the moment the EU would prefer to preserve the fiction that this divide between the Eurozone and the rest is temporary, rather than entrench it.
We see with the way the EU has handled Hungary over Ukraine that it is currently favouring the preservation of unanimity, rather than proceeding with a more determined core (even when they core is all the states bar one).
I don't disagree that there is not a huge push atm for an actual federalised EU, I just think events will make it so. Russia's aggression presents a question - what should Europe's relationship with Russia look like? Will Russia even continue to be an entity if it loses? What happens if Russia wins? These questions will require greater links between EU states - no longer can Germany seek out it's own oil and gas deal with Russia in such a world. And if Russia falls apart, which is unlikely but not impossible, what happens to the leftovers?
I think the same will be true of the US. If Trump wins next year, the EU can expect another mini trade war and an erratic ally at best and an outright hostile US at worst. If Trump doesn't win, a DeSantis or Cruz will still have a shot in 28 or 32 - again people who will not likely put US/EU cooperation highly on their list of priorities. The US also looks like it might fragment over the next decade - abortion, LGBT+ rights, wealth inequality, labour strikes, not to mention the impacts of climate change on farming and food distribution between states. And there are no real politicians capable of unifying the country, nor doing so in a way that benefits its allies. Already the IRA, which is doing a lot to boost the USAs infrastructure and growth, is having a negative impact on other smaller countries (like the UK) by raising the prices of materials needed for infrastructure and green transition. The EU would be better doing this as a whole rather than as individual states - saving money by bulk purchasing, sharing expertise and labour and subsidising infrastructure for the poorer states. That will also require a lot more collaboration that would start looking more like a real federal state.
Personal view - with all its caveats etc - is that there will be a move to a federal Europe but the driver will be the increasing number of governments in Europe that will have a populist right agenda, or at least strongly influenced by it. If you look at Europe over the next five years - it is likely we will see France (under Le Pen), Italy, much of Central and Eastern Europe, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria etc that will have such movements as part of their governments. The AfD could also boost their share in Germany. Polling in Ireland shows strong support for a Dutch-style farmers party. If Ukraine gets in (which I don't think it will but...), then that will only increase that tilt.
If it heads in that way, then there are likely to be a number of areas where the Bloc would make substantial unifying progress simply because each country will recognise it cannot do things on its own and there is strength through numbers. However, it will be areas such as border protection, armed forces, protectionism, policies to encourage childbirth etc that will see the biggest integration. I suspect though that these will not be the measures that many pro-EU advocates have in mind when they talk about the greater integration of the EU.
I think it’s more likely to be the opposite. As a few ‘hard-right’ governments are elected in Europe, the move towards further federalisation will happen quickly and via QMV, to cement the centre-left thinking of the bureaucracy and constrain right-ring governments, against the wishes of the electorates of the member states. What could possibly go wrong there?
Another pretty big drop in CPI, I think the end of year rate is probably going to be ~4.5%, if oil prices fall then maybe 4%.
Core CPI looks tougher to shift with wage data endlessly rising and 2.5m people long term sick. If the government wants to fix the labour market then it needs to get serious about sickness benefits reform. Matthew Paris had it bang on a couple of weeks ago, too many people are realising that it's easy to get signed off sick for stress and opt out of working. For people aged 50-64 who have paid off mortgages it's a realistic option to live on sickness benefits plus all the other assistance you get for it like council tax reductions etc...
Once again the safety net has become a way of life for some people. This time it's the comfortably off middle classes opting out of work by saying they're too stressed. It's something the Labour will need to address on day one because it now seems that young people are not only being asked to support pensions for the old, childcare for their kids, endless student loan repayments, old age care in the NHS but now also for the lazy middle classes who are deciding not to work because they're "stressed".
Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month.
He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse.
We're a professional services firm not a holiday club.
So why haven't you dismissed him / managed him out for poor performance?
"Constructive dismissal" you can't get rid of people if they've been signed off sick with stress or some other bogus mental health issue they've made up and convinced some bleeding heart therapist is a real problem. The government needs to seriously reform being signed off for mental health concerns, at the moment it's become a free for all and the indolent have realised they can turn it into a lifestyle choice.
"Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month."
"He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse."
I cannot imagine what might have induced any level of employee stress here.
Instead of creating the opportunity/necessity to be signed off sick, perhaps a better management approach in the first place may have prevented it getting to that stage.
A better management approach would be to sack people who are regularly off "sick", thus adding more to the real stress of people who are turning up to work who have to do not just their own job, but carry the weight of the skivers.
Everyone in the world suffers from stress. You need ways to manage your own stress. It should not be a reason not to turn in to work, that just hurts your colleagues more. If your job is too stressful for you, go get a different one, don't make your colleagues carry your burdens for you.
Stress is not normally considered a disability within the meaning of the Equality Act. It’s an HR issue to be sure but normal absence management issue.
Another pretty big drop in CPI, I think the end of year rate is probably going to be ~4.5%, if oil prices fall then maybe 4%.
Core CPI looks tougher to shift with wage data endlessly rising and 2.5m people long term sick. If the government wants to fix the labour market then it needs to get serious about sickness benefits reform. Matthew Paris had it bang on a couple of weeks ago, too many people are realising that it's easy to get signed off sick for stress and opt out of working. For people aged 50-64 who have paid off mortgages it's a realistic option to live on sickness benefits plus all the other assistance you get for it like council tax reductions etc...
Once again the safety net has become a way of life for some people. This time it's the comfortably off middle classes opting out of work by saying they're too stressed. It's something the Labour will need to address on day one because it now seems that young people are not only being asked to support pensions for the old, childcare for their kids, endless student loan repayments, old age care in the NHS but now also for the lazy middle classes who are deciding not to work because they're "stressed".
Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month.
He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse.
We're a professional services firm not a holiday club.
So why haven't you dismissed him / managed him out for poor performance?
"Constructive dismissal" you can't get rid of people if they've been signed off sick with stress or some other bogus mental health issue they've made up and convinced some bleeding heart therapist is a real problem. The government needs to seriously reform being signed off for mental health concerns, at the moment it's become a free for all and the indolent have realised they can turn it into a lifestyle choice.
"Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month."
"He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse."
I cannot imagine what might have induced any level of employee stress here.
Instead of creating the opportunity/necessity to be signed off sick, perhaps a better management approach in the first place may have prevented it getting to that stage.
A better management approach would be to sack people who are regularly off "sick", thus adding more to the real stress of people who are turning up to work who have to do not just their own job, but carry the weight of the skivers.
Everyone in the world suffers from stress. You need ways to manage your own stress. It should not be a reason not to turn in to work, that just hurts your colleagues more. If your job is too stressful for you, go get a different one, don't make your colleagues carry your burdens for you.
Also - certainly in my public sector job, and especially after a revision more than 20 years ago - simply calling in sick, *even with perfectly good medical reasons/notes*, started an automatic and essentially no faulkt process which would [edit] ultimately end in dismissal on sickness grounds. In fact, it'd be easier to do it that way than try and mess around with their minds or bullying them out, which is liable, as any competent manager knows, to end up in ways not necessarily to the employer's advantage.
Just in case anyone was thinking it is worth negotiating with Russia, Medvedev reminds us why we shouldn't.
A new idea for Ukraine has emerged from the North Atlantic Alliance office: Ukraine will be able to join NATO if it gives up the disputed territories.
It does look like an interesting idea. The only problem is that all of – supposedly – their territories are highly disputable. And to enter the bloc, the Kiev authorities will have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
The uniform bloc of angry racist red wall voters in football strips and union jack tattoos is a lazy myth. See the header: support for staying out of the EU is now scarcely higher than GB support for the Tories. That means most people planning to vote Labour are not going to be put off by a gradual shift to a more pro-EU stance.
Nor, I suspect, are all Labour-curious voters in Scotland going to be begging for immediate rejoin, anymore than they are in Labour stronghold London where the remain vote in my constituency was nearly 80% and Labour have a 30k majority.
Only stupid people think of voters as a uniform bloc, there are only approximate predispositions. However on your first point, why then are Starmer and co treating any gradual shift to a more pro EU stance as if it were a leper with syphilis?
On your second point, the all things to all men SLab candidate in Rutherglen left the the Labour party and didn't vote for them in 2019 because of Corbyn's negative attitude to the EU, so obviously the issue has some resonance.
Och, it's resonant in Ru'glen. The unfortunate chap with the red rosette is finding himself in the position of sort of holding the aforesaid party position at arms' length but still not quite giving the impression of lavish brotherly love.
I am many hundreds of km away from Rutherglen so I'm sure you are closer to the sentiment on the ground, but I'm not sure something in an article in The National is the clincher, anymore than a piece in the Daily Mail about Starmer's donkey sanctuary or beer and curry habits would be. Or a Guardian piece about Tories eating babies.
I refer you to my previous reply to the other Hon PBer.
*Direct Quotations*.
Direct quotations are something Daily Mail articles are also very in favour of. The direct quotations that suit their agenda.
It's not as if candidates triangulating between national party policy and local priorities in a by-election is anything new. It's what's helped win the Lib Dems lots of recent ones.
On a highly sensitive issue? It's not a local but a national issue in Scotland.
Plus you must have missed my edit, which points out that the interview was in a Labour-supporting newspaper (well, website). So they think it is important.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
Seems the SNP have stabilised a little and much will depend on the outcome of the police investigations
As far as Starmer is concerned he remains an English man from London trying to ride two horses at once, with differences over trans gender policies and the 2 children rule between himself and Sawar, and indeed Khan and himself over ULEZ
I note a lot of wishcasting about Keir Starmer by Tory and SNP supporters: a sense that any time soon he's going to be "found out", and people will return to their rightful home.
But this is the sort of thinking that landed Labour in trouble in the mid 2000s, kicked them out of most of Scotland in 2015 and buried the Lib Dems in the South West in the same election. And ejected Labour from swathes of the North and Midlands in 2019. The idea a bloc of voters belongs rightfully to your party. It's the same tendency that could nobble the Tories in the home counties and South Coast next year (fingers crossed) and reverse some of those 2015 SNP gains in Scotland. It leads to supporters ignoring the warning signs and convincing themselves that their voters will come home once they find out the opposition for who they really are.
I'm convinced most of the opposition just assumed that voters would see through Boris' bluster. They probably did, but they voted for him anyway. Same with Keir. It's not that voters are unaware of his or Labour's limitations. They just seem to have concluded it's time for a change.
The difficulty about projecting how well Labour are going to do is that Starmer isn't particularly popular, he is just less unpopular than the alternatives. This means it looks like Labour is on course to win a parliamentary majority, and a big one, but it doesn't say much about how long that majority can be held together and what Starmer will do with it. So far he seems to be flouting policies to the right of Blair - which is not really the platform he was elected to the Labour leadership on. If he runs in a GE as that figure, I could see lots of voters going "back" to the SNP (although less so the Tories). On the other hand, if he tries to paint himself as someone who wants to change things significantly - who wants to fix a "broken Britain" - he might alienate Tory voters who really just want things to go "back to normal" with low interest rates and the like.
I think we could see a very large Labour majority that becomes very unpopular very quickly because it doesn't seem like many voters actively like Starmer's political vision for the UK.
I'm not sure I agree with this either. The voter ratings for Starmer are OK. Not stellar, but not bad at all. That's probably ideal ahead of an election. If expectations were sky high then the risk of rapid disillusionment would be greater. His political vision isn't transformational certainly, it's a bit prosaic. But it's not scary.
Labour's biggest risk after an election is the Conservatives getting their act together. How likely is that? I strongly suspect they have at least one more round of craziness in them before they wake up from their fever dream.
Starmer's net ratings are not great and seem to be getting lower recently:
A lot of that seems to be coming from the more Liberal / Left leaning voters (LDs and Lab). To me that suggests his rightward shift will not help where the SNP could actively argue they are a progressive party. I agree that the likelihood of Starmer moving left and giving the Tories opportunities to scare their voters into the polling booth are low (although they still try by linking him to Corbyn all the time).
The problems facing the country require big systemic changes - and Starmer isn't promising any of those. So when a Labour party come in with a big majority and things don't get better, after more than a decade of Tory rule where things have got worse and worse, I could see people fleeing both parties and just a huge political mess.
None of the political culture (politicians, media, activists etc.) want to relitigate the EU (partly because solving other things is just as if not more important, partly because it is still a highly emotive topic for many). Labour has no desire to give the Tories a stick to beat them with, the LDs are not important enough and, most importantly, we don't know the terms we would be offered to rejoin. If I were an EU member state I would not allow the UK to rejoin with the exceptions we already had carved out back during the Cameron era. Not out of spite, but because it seems clear to me now that our exceptional status within the EU was part of what led us out - that we could not be appeased because at the end of the day the UK did not enter the project wanting it to succeed, and rather was accepted so it was on the inside pissing out rather than the other way around. For the UK to rejoin the EU would require both the UK and EU to say up front and clearly what kind of political entity they want the EU to be, and for the UK to clearly and affirmatively say we want to be part of that entity - not just a desire for us to get an economic boost for trade reasons (which we could do without rejoining).
If the EU project is that of differing states eventually evolving into a more federalist super state model, similar to the US or even the Russian Federation, the UKs "reentry" would be the perfect moment to make that clear. I know not all individual member states like that idea, nor do all voters within the individual states, but with a single currency and talks of increased security collaboration alongside increased collaboration likely necessary to deal with climate change and immigration, as well as threats from Russia and an increasingly unstable US, it would be beneficial to put all the cards on the table. And if the UK doesn't want to be part of that - fine. But if we do, we need to know at that point what rejoin means.
I don't think the EU really wants to have that conversation, and I don't think the UK would sign up for that - so I doubt anyone will push rejoin for a long time yet. I think the outcome of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the next decade of US political leadership will likely force the EU to react and therefore become more like a federalised state, rather than an open debate about whether that is what the individual countries want. So I don't see rejoin becoming a significant movement for at least a decade, if not longer, and by then it will be greatly overshadowed by the politics of climate catastrophe.
I think that a Federal EU can only emerge based on the Eurozone, and so it would deepen the split between the Eurozone countries and the non-Eurozone countries, likely making it permanent (and anyway, neither France or Germany want a Federal Europe for different reasons anyway). I think at the moment the EU would prefer to preserve the fiction that this divide between the Eurozone and the rest is temporary, rather than entrench it.
We see with the way the EU has handled Hungary over Ukraine that it is currently favouring the preservation of unanimity, rather than proceeding with a more determined core (even when they core is all the states bar one).
I don't disagree that there is not a huge push atm for an actual federalised EU, I just think events will make it so. Russia's aggression presents a question - what should Europe's relationship with Russia look like? Will Russia even continue to be an entity if it loses? What happens if Russia wins? These questions will require greater links between EU states - no longer can Germany seek out it's own oil and gas deal with Russia in such a world. And if Russia falls apart, which is unlikely but not impossible, what happens to the leftovers?
I think the same will be true of the US. If Trump wins next year, the EU can expect another mini trade war and an erratic ally at best and an outright hostile US at worst. If Trump doesn't win, a DeSantis or Cruz will still have a shot in 28 or 32 - again people who will not likely put US/EU cooperation highly on their list of priorities. The US also looks like it might fragment over the next decade - abortion, LGBT+ rights, wealth inequality, labour strikes, not to mention the impacts of climate change on farming and food distribution between states. And there are no real politicians capable of unifying the country, nor doing so in a way that benefits its allies. Already the IRA, which is doing a lot to boost the USAs infrastructure and growth, is having a negative impact on other smaller countries (like the UK) by raising the prices of materials needed for infrastructure and green transition. The EU would be better doing this as a whole rather than as individual states - saving money by bulk purchasing, sharing expertise and labour and subsidising infrastructure for the poorer states. That will also require a lot more collaboration that would start looking more like a real federal state.
Personal view - with all its caveats etc - is that there will be a move to a federal Europe but the driver will be the increasing number of governments in Europe that will have a populist right agenda, or at least strongly influenced by it. If you look at Europe over the next five years - it is likely we will see France (under Le Pen), Italy, much of Central and Eastern Europe, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria etc that will have such movements as part of their governments. The AfD could also boost their share in Germany. Polling in Ireland shows strong support for a Dutch-style farmers party. If Ukraine gets in (which I don't think it will but...), then that will only increase that tilt.
If it heads in that way, then there are likely to be a number of areas where the Bloc would make substantial unifying progress simply because each country will recognise it cannot do things on its own and there is strength through numbers. However, it will be areas such as border protection, armed forces, protectionism, policies to encourage childbirth etc that will see the biggest integration. I suspect though that these will not be the measures that many pro-EU advocates have in mind when they talk about the greater integration of the EU.
All of these hard fought, meaningful elections across Europe are quite surprising if EU membership is incompatible with national sovereignty.
Another pretty big drop in CPI, I think the end of year rate is probably going to be ~4.5%, if oil prices fall then maybe 4%.
Core CPI looks tougher to shift with wage data endlessly rising and 2.5m people long term sick. If the government wants to fix the labour market then it needs to get serious about sickness benefits reform. Matthew Paris had it bang on a couple of weeks ago, too many people are realising that it's easy to get signed off sick for stress and opt out of working. For people aged 50-64 who have paid off mortgages it's a realistic option to live on sickness benefits plus all the other assistance you get for it like council tax reductions etc...
Once again the safety net has become a way of life for some people. This time it's the comfortably off middle classes opting out of work by saying they're too stressed. It's something the Labour will need to address on day one because it now seems that young people are not only being asked to support pensions for the old, childcare for their kids, endless student loan repayments, old age care in the NHS but now also for the lazy middle classes who are deciding not to work because they're "stressed".
Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month.
He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse.
We're a professional services firm not a holiday club.
So why haven't you dismissed him / managed him out for poor performance?
"Constructive dismissal" you can't get rid of people if they've been signed off sick with stress or some other bogus mental health issue they've made up and convinced some bleeding heart therapist is a real problem. The government needs to seriously reform being signed off for mental health concerns, at the moment it's become a free for all and the indolent have realised they can turn it into a lifestyle choice.
"Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month."
"He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse."
I cannot imagine what might have induced any level of employee stress here.
Instead of creating the opportunity/necessity to be signed off sick, perhaps a better management approach in the first place may have prevented it getting to that stage.
A better management approach would be to sack people who are regularly off "sick", thus adding more to the real stress of people who are turning up to work who have to do not just their own job, but carry the weight of the skivers.
Everyone in the world suffers from stress. You need ways to manage your own stress. It should not be a reason not to turn in to work, that just hurts your colleagues more. If your job is too stressful for you, go get a different one, don't make your colleagues carry your burdens for you.
Stress is not normally considered a disability within the meaning of the Equality Act. It’s an HR issue to be sure but normal absence management issue.
It angers me greatly that some people use "stress" as a fake excuse.
Much as with the fake ADHD industry, this causes great harm to the real cases.
There is also something that I have observed, personally. The phenomenon of people who are told they are "sick with stress" - then abandoned. They can develop a mindset that they can't do anything.
One person I knew was in full retreat from the world, until a relative paid for private therapy. She wasn't able to walk to the shops at that point - because she'd convinced herself that it was "too stressful". This wasn't someone enjoying the life of Riley on benefits. She was heading to a dark, bad place and was miserable the whole time. She now works in stress counselling, herself.
Shall we start the what if I want to move a horse to/from the EU one instead.
I think you may have cut down the advice you get considerably there @Topping, although @Alanbrooke seems to have come up with a good suggestion and I suspect he actually knows what he is talking about.
Moving horses (not dizzy ones, @Alanbrooke) to the EU costs hundreds and hundreds of pounds more than it used to pre-Brexit.
Not a constituency I appreciate that any party (Lozza?) is going to die in a ditch for but I'm sure it can't be the only category example beyond "waiting a bit longer at customs".
Taking cars and motorbikes to the EU and back if you're not actually driving/riding them is a cauchemar. When I trailered my R8 to the Nurburgring and back I got one of the Ukrainians to drive it off the trailer at Coquelles, through Eurotunnel and then back on to the trailer at the other side. There is no way of knowing what random selection of paperwork, fees and sexual favours are going to be demanded at customs for a car on a trailer. If the vehicle has no VIN then the level of embuggerance is so high as to be indistinguishable from impossible.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
The uniform bloc of angry racist red wall voters in football strips and union jack tattoos is a lazy myth. See the header: support for staying out of the EU is now scarcely higher than GB support for the Tories. That means most people planning to vote Labour are not going to be put off by a gradual shift to a more pro-EU stance.
Nor, I suspect, are all Labour-curious voters in Scotland going to be begging for immediate rejoin, anymore than they are in Labour stronghold London where the remain vote in my constituency was nearly 80% and Labour have a 30k majority.
Only stupid people think of voters as a uniform bloc, there are only approximate predispositions. However on your first point, why then are Starmer and co treating any gradual shift to a more pro EU stance as if it were a leper with syphilis?
On your second point, the all things to all men SLab candidate in Rutherglen left the the Labour party and didn't vote for them in 2019 because of Corbyn's negative attitude to the EU, so obviously the issue has some resonance.
Och, it's resonant in Ru'glen. The unfortunate chap with the red rosette is finding himself in the position of sort of holding the aforesaid party position at arms' length but still not quite giving the impression of lavish brotherly love.
I am many hundreds of km away from Rutherglen so I'm sure you are closer to the sentiment on the ground, but I'm not sure something in an article in The National is the clincher, anymore than a piece in the Daily Mail about Starmer's donkey sanctuary or beer and curry habits would be. Or a Guardian piece about Tories eating babies.
I refer you to my previous reply to the other Hon PBer.
*Direct Quotations*.
Direct quotations are something Daily Mail articles are also very in favour of. The direct quotations that suit their agenda.
It's not as if candidates triangulating between national party policy and local priorities in a by-election is anything new. It's what's helped win the Lib Dems lots of recent ones.
What else do we have to judge politicians if it's not direct quotations, whether written or spoken? Would you rather we just went with messy haircuts and photocalls with badly poured pints and winning here placards?
Another pretty big drop in CPI, I think the end of year rate is probably going to be ~4.5%, if oil prices fall then maybe 4%.
Core CPI looks tougher to shift with wage data endlessly rising and 2.5m people long term sick. If the government wants to fix the labour market then it needs to get serious about sickness benefits reform. Matthew Paris had it bang on a couple of weeks ago, too many people are realising that it's easy to get signed off sick for stress and opt out of working. For people aged 50-64 who have paid off mortgages it's a realistic option to live on sickness benefits plus all the other assistance you get for it like council tax reductions etc...
Once again the safety net has become a way of life for some people. This time it's the comfortably off middle classes opting out of work by saying they're too stressed. It's something the Labour will need to address on day one because it now seems that young people are not only being asked to support pensions for the old, childcare for their kids, endless student loan repayments, old age care in the NHS but now also for the lazy middle classes who are deciding not to work because they're "stressed".
Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month.
He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse.
We're a professional services firm not a holiday club.
So why haven't you dismissed him / managed him out for poor performance?
"Constructive dismissal" you can't get rid of people if they've been signed off sick with stress or some other bogus mental health issue they've made up and convinced some bleeding heart therapist is a real problem. The government needs to seriously reform being signed off for mental health concerns, at the moment it's become a free for all and the indolent have realised they can turn it into a lifestyle choice.
"Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month."
"He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse."
I cannot imagine what might have induced any level of employee stress here.
Instead of creating the opportunity/necessity to be signed off sick, perhaps a better management approach in the first place may have prevented it getting to that stage.
A better management approach would be to sack people who are regularly off "sick", thus adding more to the real stress of people who are turning up to work who have to do not just their own job, but carry the weight of the skivers.
Everyone in the world suffers from stress. You need ways to manage your own stress. It should not be a reason not to turn in to work, that just hurts your colleagues more. If your job is too stressful for you, go get a different one, don't make your colleagues carry your burdens for you.
Stress is not normally considered a disability within the meaning of the Equality Act. It’s an HR issue to be sure but normal absence management issue.
Indeed. Too many people, on both sides, think sick notes are a "get out of jail free" card.
A lot of employers are very adverse to sacking people who are "sick".
Going off sick, when you're not, is an incredibly selfish thing to do that hurts your colleagues typically more than your employer as your colleagues are the one who will have to carry you in your absence.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
The uniform bloc of angry racist red wall voters in football strips and union jack tattoos is a lazy myth. See the header: support for staying out of the EU is now scarcely higher than GB support for the Tories. That means most people planning to vote Labour are not going to be put off by a gradual shift to a more pro-EU stance.
Nor, I suspect, are all Labour-curious voters in Scotland going to be begging for immediate rejoin, anymore than they are in Labour stronghold London where the remain vote in my constituency was nearly 80% and Labour have a 30k majority.
Only stupid people think of voters as a uniform bloc, there are only approximate predispositions. However on your first point, why then are Starmer and co treating any gradual shift to a more pro EU stance as if it were a leper with syphilis?
On your second point, the all things to all men SLab candidate in Rutherglen left the the Labour party and didn't vote for them in 2019 because of Corbyn's negative attitude to the EU, so obviously the issue has some resonance.
Och, it's resonant in Ru'glen. The unfortunate chap with the red rosette is finding himself in the position of sort of holding the aforesaid party position at arms' length but still not quite giving the impression of lavish brotherly love.
I am many hundreds of km away from Rutherglen so I'm sure you are closer to the sentiment on the ground, but I'm not sure something in an article in The National is the clincher, anymore than a piece in the Daily Mail about Starmer's donkey sanctuary or beer and curry habits would be. Or a Guardian piece about Tories eating babies.
I refer you to my previous reply to the other Hon PBer.
*Direct Quotations*.
Direct quotations are something Daily Mail articles are also very in favour of. The direct quotations that suit their agenda.
It's not as if candidates triangulating between national party policy and local priorities in a by-election is anything new. It's what's helped win the Lib Dems lots of recent ones.
What else do we have to judge politicians if it's not direct quotations, whether written or spoken? Would you rather we just went with messy haircuts and photocalls with foaming pints and winning here placards?
Preferabl;y with copulating farm animals if it is a Scottish LD leader.
Shall we start the what if I want to move a horse to/from the EU one instead.
I think you may have cut down the advice you get considerably there @Topping, although @Alanbrooke seems to have come up with a good suggestion and I suspect he actually knows what he is talking about.
Moving horses (not dizzy ones, @Alanbrooke) to the EU costs hundreds and hundreds of pounds more than it used to pre-Brexit.
Not a constituency I appreciate that any party (Lozza?) is going to die in a ditch for but I'm sure it can't be the only category example beyond "waiting a bit longer at customs".
Taking cars and motorbikes to the EU and back if you're not actually driving/riding them is a cauchemar. When I trailered my R8 to the Nurburgring and back I got one of the Ukrainians to drive it off the trailer at Coquelles, through Eurotunnel and then back on to the trailer at the other side. There is no way of knowing what random selection of paperwork, fees and sexual favours are going to be demanded at customs for a car on a trailer. If the vehicle has no VIN then the level of embuggerance is so high as to be indistinguishable from impossible.
Surely as an anti-government rebel, the way to go is to buy an old landing craft and sneak it across the Channel yourself?
You could even fill up the empty space, at £5k a head on Calais beach, on the return trip and make a profit on the first trip.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
Seems the SNP have stabilised a little and much will depend on the outcome of the police investigations
As far as Starmer is concerned he remains an English man from London trying to ride two horses at once, with differences over trans gender policies and the 2 children rule between himself and Sawar, and indeed Khan and himself over ULEZ
I note a lot of wishcasting about Keir Starmer by Tory and SNP supporters: a sense that any time soon he's going to be "found out", and people will return to their rightful home.
But this is the sort of thinking that landed Labour in trouble in the mid 2000s, kicked them out of most of Scotland in 2015 and buried the Lib Dems in the South West in the same election. And ejected Labour from swathes of the North and Midlands in 2019. The idea a bloc of voters belongs rightfully to your party. It's the same tendency that could nobble the Tories in the home counties and South Coast next year (fingers crossed) and reverse some of those 2015 SNP gains in Scotland. It leads to supporters ignoring the warning signs and convincing themselves that their voters will come home once they find out the opposition for who they really are.
I'm convinced most of the opposition just assumed that voters would see through Boris' bluster. They probably did, but they voted for him anyway. Same with Keir. It's not that voters are unaware of his or Labour's limitations. They just seem to have concluded it's time for a change.
The difficulty about projecting how well Labour are going to do is that Starmer isn't particularly popular, he is just less unpopular than the alternatives. This means it looks like Labour is on course to win a parliamentary majority, and a big one, but it doesn't say much about how long that majority can be held together and what Starmer will do with it. So far he seems to be flouting policies to the right of Blair - which is not really the platform he was elected to the Labour leadership on. If he runs in a GE as that figure, I could see lots of voters going "back" to the SNP (although less so the Tories). On the other hand, if he tries to paint himself as someone who wants to change things significantly - who wants to fix a "broken Britain" - he might alienate Tory voters who really just want things to go "back to normal" with low interest rates and the like.
I think we could see a very large Labour majority that becomes very unpopular very quickly because it doesn't seem like many voters actively like Starmer's political vision for the UK.
I'm not sure I agree with this either. The voter ratings for Starmer are OK. Not stellar, but not bad at all. That's probably ideal ahead of an election. If expectations were sky high then the risk of rapid disillusionment would be greater. His political vision isn't transformational certainly, it's a bit prosaic. But it's not scary.
Labour's biggest risk after an election is the Conservatives getting their act together. How likely is that? I strongly suspect they have at least one more round of craziness in them before they wake up from their fever dream.
Which was the situation with Margaret Thatcher going into the 1979 election. There are parallels between today and 1979, more I think than with 1997. Also parallels between Starmer and early Thatcher, for better or for worse.
Another pretty big drop in CPI, I think the end of year rate is probably going to be ~4.5%, if oil prices fall then maybe 4%.
Core CPI looks tougher to shift with wage data endlessly rising and 2.5m people long term sick. If the government wants to fix the labour market then it needs to get serious about sickness benefits reform. Matthew Paris had it bang on a couple of weeks ago, too many people are realising that it's easy to get signed off sick for stress and opt out of working. For people aged 50-64 who have paid off mortgages it's a realistic option to live on sickness benefits plus all the other assistance you get for it like council tax reductions etc...
Once again the safety net has become a way of life for some people. This time it's the comfortably off middle classes opting out of work by saying they're too stressed. It's something the Labour will need to address on day one because it now seems that young people are not only being asked to support pensions for the old, childcare for their kids, endless student loan repayments, old age care in the NHS but now also for the lazy middle classes who are deciding not to work because they're "stressed".
Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month.
He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse.
We're a professional services firm not a holiday club.
So why haven't you dismissed him / managed him out for poor performance?
"Constructive dismissal" you can't get rid of people if they've been signed off sick with stress or some other bogus mental health issue they've made up and convinced some bleeding heart therapist is a real problem. The government needs to seriously reform being signed off for mental health concerns, at the moment it's become a free for all and the indolent have realised they can turn it into a lifestyle choice.
"Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month."
"He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse."
I cannot imagine what might have induced any level of employee stress here.
Instead of creating the opportunity/necessity to be signed off sick, perhaps a better management approach in the first place may have prevented it getting to that stage.
A better management approach would be to sack people who are regularly off "sick", thus adding more to the real stress of people who are turning up to work who have to do not just their own job, but carry the weight of the skivers.
Everyone in the world suffers from stress. You need ways to manage your own stress. It should not be a reason not to turn in to work, that just hurts your colleagues more. If your job is too stressful for you, go get a different one, don't make your colleagues carry your burdens for you.
Stress is not normally considered a disability within the meaning of the Equality Act. It’s an HR issue to be sure but normal absence management issue.
It angers me greatly that some people use "stress" as a fake excuse.
Much as with the fake ADHD industry, this causes great harm to the real cases.
There is also something that I have observed, personally. The phenomenon of people who are told they are "sick with stress" - then abandoned. They can develop a mindset that they can't do anything.
One person I knew was in full retreat from the world, until a relative paid for private therapy. She wasn't able to walk to the shops at that point - because she'd convinced herself that it was "too stressful". This wasn't someone enjoying the life of Riley on benefits. She was heading to a dark, bad place and was miserable the whole time. She now works in stress counselling, herself.
You've hit on the nub of the problem. What about those without a relative willing or able to shell out a hefty sum? Is the government doing anything or thinking about what to do about them? No.
Just in case anyone was thinking it is worth negotiating with Russia, Medvedev reminds us why we shouldn't.
A new idea for Ukraine has emerged from the North Atlantic Alliance office: Ukraine will be able to join NATO if it gives up the disputed territories.
It does look like an interesting idea. The only problem is that all of – supposedly – their territories are highly disputable. And to enter the bloc, the Kiev authorities will have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus.
Only defeat has a chance of ridding Russia of its imperialist delusions and consequently creating a lasting peace.
There is not currently a route to a durable peace with Russia via negotiations. They chose to settle this via war and we have to ensure that they lose this war of their choosing.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
Seems the SNP have stabilised a little and much will depend on the outcome of the police investigations
As far as Starmer is concerned he remains an English man from London trying to ride two horses at once, with differences over trans gender policies and the 2 children rule between himself and Sawar, and indeed Khan and himself over ULEZ
I note a lot of wishcasting about Keir Starmer by Tory and SNP supporters: a sense that any time soon he's going to be "found out", and people will return to their rightful home.
But this is the sort of thinking that landed Labour in trouble in the mid 2000s, kicked them out of most of Scotland in 2015 and buried the Lib Dems in the South West in the same election. And ejected Labour from swathes of the North and Midlands in 2019. The idea a bloc of voters belongs rightfully to your party. It's the same tendency that could nobble the Tories in the home counties and South Coast next year (fingers crossed) and reverse some of those 2015 SNP gains in Scotland. It leads to supporters ignoring the warning signs and convincing themselves that their voters will come home once they find out the opposition for who they really are.
I'm convinced most of the opposition just assumed that voters would see through Boris' bluster. They probably did, but they voted for him anyway. Same with Keir. It's not that voters are unaware of his or Labour's limitations. They just seem to have concluded it's time for a change.
The difficulty about projecting how well Labour are going to do is that Starmer isn't particularly popular, he is just less unpopular than the alternatives. This means it looks like Labour is on course to win a parliamentary majority, and a big one, but it doesn't say much about how long that majority can be held together and what Starmer will do with it. So far he seems to be flouting policies to the right of Blair - which is not really the platform he was elected to the Labour leadership on. If he runs in a GE as that figure, I could see lots of voters going "back" to the SNP (although less so the Tories). On the other hand, if he tries to paint himself as someone who wants to change things significantly - who wants to fix a "broken Britain" - he might alienate Tory voters who really just want things to go "back to normal" with low interest rates and the like.
I think we could see a very large Labour majority that becomes very unpopular very quickly because it doesn't seem like many voters actively like Starmer's political vision for the UK.
I'm not sure I agree with this either. The voter ratings for Starmer are OK. Not stellar, but not bad at all. That's probably ideal ahead of an election. If expectations were sky high then the risk of rapid disillusionment would be greater. His political vision isn't transformational certainly, it's a bit prosaic. But it's not scary.
Labour's biggest risk after an election is the Conservatives getting their act together. How likely is that? I strongly suspect they have at least one more round of craziness in them before they wake up from their fever dream.
That's my view too. Winning a majority yet with nobody 'inspired' and expecting the earth to move is a political sweet spot for an incoming government and by a mixture of luck and planning it appears that Starmer will land right on it.
I don't know about other workplaces but in my former job, days off triggered a response from HR to your immediate manager to have a chat. Repeated days off triggered more chats, targets were set, any patterns ( lots of weekends off etc) created a paper trail that HR followed up. Pay could be reduced for longer term absence and there was always the option of dismissal if all boxes were ticked. Even the FBU were on board as long as procedures were followed and other options looked at. I never saw it get that far.
Just in case anyone was thinking it is worth negotiating with Russia, Medvedev reminds us why we shouldn't.
A new idea for Ukraine has emerged from the North Atlantic Alliance office: Ukraine will be able to join NATO if it gives up the disputed territories.
It does look like an interesting idea. The only problem is that all of – supposedly – their territories are highly disputable. And to enter the bloc, the Kiev authorities will have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus.
Only defeat has a chance of ridding Russia of its imperialist delusions and consequently creating a lasting peace.
There is not currently a route to a suitable place with Russia via negotiations. They choose to settle this via war and we have to ensure that they lose this war of their choosing.
How do you defeat a nuclear power who has suggested they might use nukes? And what happens to Russia after defeat?
Like, I agree that Russia needs to lose this war, but I don't see how that can happen with the situation as it is. It's not even like getting rid of Putin sorts anything out, because most of the people likely to take over in that scenario are more hard line than Putin.
Rejoin won't become a reality until the Conservative Party advocates it wholeheartedly. So not in my lifetime. The EU won't even consider us rejoining without that - there would be no point in going through a rejoin/Brexit cycle every time the UK government changed.
What that means for the LDs and pro-Europeans in general, I don't know. Perhaps campaign in a GE on 'Brexit is rubbish' but without making any commitment beyond 'working more closely' with the EU, and actively campaign to rejoin at some future date between GEs.
It needs someone as annoying as Farage to bang on about it for 20 years outside the main party system
Just in case anyone was thinking it is worth negotiating with Russia, Medvedev reminds us why we shouldn't.
A new idea for Ukraine has emerged from the North Atlantic Alliance office: Ukraine will be able to join NATO if it gives up the disputed territories.
It does look like an interesting idea. The only problem is that all of – supposedly – their territories are highly disputable. And to enter the bloc, the Kiev authorities will have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus.
Only defeat has a chance of ridding Russia of its imperialist delusions and consequently creating a lasting peace.
There is not currently a route to a suitable place with Russia via negotiations. They choose to settle this via war and we have to ensure that they lose this war of their choosing.
The problem is that centre of the Overton window in Russian politics is the League of Empire Loyalists.
Another pretty big drop in CPI, I think the end of year rate is probably going to be ~4.5%, if oil prices fall then maybe 4%.
Core CPI looks tougher to shift with wage data endlessly rising and 2.5m people long term sick. If the government wants to fix the labour market then it needs to get serious about sickness benefits reform. Matthew Paris had it bang on a couple of weeks ago, too many people are realising that it's easy to get signed off sick for stress and opt out of working. For people aged 50-64 who have paid off mortgages it's a realistic option to live on sickness benefits plus all the other assistance you get for it like council tax reductions etc...
Once again the safety net has become a way of life for some people. This time it's the comfortably off middle classes opting out of work by saying they're too stressed. It's something the Labour will need to address on day one because it now seems that young people are not only being asked to support pensions for the old, childcare for their kids, endless student loan repayments, old age care in the NHS but now also for the lazy middle classes who are deciding not to work because they're "stressed".
Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month.
He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse.
We're a professional services firm not a holiday club.
So why haven't you dismissed him / managed him out for poor performance?
"Constructive dismissal" you can't get rid of people if they've been signed off sick with stress or some other bogus mental health issue they've made up and convinced some bleeding heart therapist is a real problem. The government needs to seriously reform being signed off for mental health concerns, at the moment it's become a free for all and the indolent have realised they can turn it into a lifestyle choice.
"Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month."
"He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse."
I cannot imagine what might have induced any level of employee stress here.
Instead of creating the opportunity/necessity to be signed off sick, perhaps a better management approach in the first place may have prevented it getting to that stage.
A better management approach would be to sack people who are regularly off "sick", thus adding more to the real stress of people who are turning up to work who have to do not just their own job, but carry the weight of the skivers.
Everyone in the world suffers from stress. You need ways to manage your own stress. It should not be a reason not to turn in to work, that just hurts your colleagues more. If your job is too stressful for you, go get a different one, don't make your colleagues carry your burdens for you.
It is a very common thing in professional jobs now to get rid of people you don't like by subjecting them to stress, for example by giving them an unreasonable workload or failing to provide the proper support to get the job done. It's effectively a way to force someone to resign rather than dismiss them directly.
And I can tell you that every employment lawyer you talk to will tell you they see this on a daily basis, and they will always recommend that you go to your doctor and get signed off sick before starting the process, as having a doctor's note is a legal way of proving you were subjected to said stress in order to push you out. So even if you think you can cope with the stress you have to get signed off in order to prove the stress, so it's a bit of a catch 22 there.
I have some HR training and I think the original post was very unwise, if the person mentioned in the post sees it, his lawyer will be very happy as it's a slam dunk and a compromise agreement is a dead cert, if that is how your manager is talking about you behind your back.
I will add that some people do play the system in order to get an additional payout rather than what they would normally be entitled to, I have seen this happen once or twice in my career. But as a person's line manager you absolutely cannot be saying that - leave it to HR to sort out.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
Seems the SNP have stabilised a little and much will depend on the outcome of the police investigations
As far as Starmer is concerned he remains an English man from London trying to ride two horses at once, with differences over trans gender policies and the 2 children rule between himself and Sawar, and indeed Khan and himself over ULEZ
I note a lot of wishcasting about Keir Starmer by Tory and SNP supporters: a sense that any time soon he's going to be "found out", and people will return to their rightful home.
But this is the sort of thinking that landed Labour in trouble in the mid 2000s, kicked them out of most of Scotland in 2015 and buried the Lib Dems in the South West in the same election. And ejected Labour from swathes of the North and Midlands in 2019. The idea a bloc of voters belongs rightfully to your party. It's the same tendency that could nobble the Tories in the home counties and South Coast next year (fingers crossed) and reverse some of those 2015 SNP gains in Scotland. It leads to supporters ignoring the warning signs and convincing themselves that their voters will come home once they find out the opposition for who they really are.
I'm convinced most of the opposition just assumed that voters would see through Boris' bluster. They probably did, but they voted for him anyway. Same with Keir. It's not that voters are unaware of his or Labour's limitations. They just seem to have concluded it's time for a change.
The difficulty about projecting how well Labour are going to do is that Starmer isn't particularly popular, he is just less unpopular than the alternatives. This means it looks like Labour is on course to win a parliamentary majority, and a big one, but it doesn't say much about how long that majority can be held together and what Starmer will do with it. So far he seems to be flouting policies to the right of Blair - which is not really the platform he was elected to the Labour leadership on. If he runs in a GE as that figure, I could see lots of voters going "back" to the SNP (although less so the Tories). On the other hand, if he tries to paint himself as someone who wants to change things significantly - who wants to fix a "broken Britain" - he might alienate Tory voters who really just want things to go "back to normal" with low interest rates and the like.
I think we could see a very large Labour majority that becomes very unpopular very quickly because it doesn't seem like many voters actively like Starmer's political vision for the UK.
I'm not sure I agree with this either. The voter ratings for Starmer are OK. Not stellar, but not bad at all. That's probably ideal ahead of an election. If expectations were sky high then the risk of rapid disillusionment would be greater. His political vision isn't transformational certainly, it's a bit prosaic. But it's not scary.
Labour's biggest risk after an election is the Conservatives getting their act together. How likely is that? I strongly suspect they have at least one more round of craziness in them before they wake up from their fever dream.
Which was the situation with Margaret Thatcher going into the 1979 election. There are parallels between today and 1979, more I think than with 1997. Also parallels between Starmer and early Thatcher, for better or for worse.
One difference with 1979 is that voters mostly quite liked Callaghan (it was the unions they were sick of). Not so much love for Sunak.
I don't know about other workplaces but in my former job, days off triggered a response from HR to your immediate manager to have a chat. Repeated days off triggered more chats, targets were set, any patterns ( lots of weekends off etc) created a paper trail that HR followed up. Pay could be reduced for longer term absence and there was always the option of dismissal if all boxes were ticked. Even the FBU were on board as long as procedures were followed and other options looked at. I never saw it get that far.
That's the situation in education too. At least at my place. There seems to be a strange belief that the public sector can simply produce a sick note and no questions asked.
Just in case anyone was thinking it is worth negotiating with Russia, Medvedev reminds us why we shouldn't.
A new idea for Ukraine has emerged from the North Atlantic Alliance office: Ukraine will be able to join NATO if it gives up the disputed territories.
It does look like an interesting idea. The only problem is that all of – supposedly – their territories are highly disputable. And to enter the bloc, the Kiev authorities will have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus.
Only defeat has a chance of ridding Russia of its imperialist delusions and consequently creating a lasting peace.
There is not currently a route to a suitable place with Russia via negotiations. They choose to settle this via war and we have to ensure that they lose this war of their choosing.
How do you defeat a nuclear power who has suggested they might use nukes? And what happens to Russia after defeat?
Like, I agree that Russia needs to lose this war, but I don't see how that can happen with the situation as it is. It's not even like getting rid of Putin sorts anything out, because most of the people likely to take over in that scenario are more hard line than Putin.
"How do you defeat them" - by defeating them. By equipping Ukraine with all the support they need, whether it be logistical, intelligence or anything else, in order to defeat them. Nukes aren't relevant, they don't prevent defeat, they aren't a tactical weapon.
"And what happens to Russia" - who knows? Who cares? That's their problem, and its know knowable now, but that's their responsibility to deal with. But it should be their problem, not theirs and occupied Ukraine's.
Rejoin won't become a reality until the Conservative Party advocates it wholeheartedly. So not in my lifetime. The EU won't even consider us rejoining without that - there would be no point in going through a rejoin/Brexit cycle every time the UK government changed.
What that means for the LDs and pro-Europeans in general, I don't know. Perhaps campaign in a GE on 'Brexit is rubbish' but without making any commitment beyond 'working more closely' with the EU, and actively campaign to rejoin at some future date between GEs.
It needs someone as annoying as Farage to bang on about it for 20 years outside the main party system
The Tory Party will get behind rejoin if there is an electrical advantage, i.e. they can somehow pretend it is Labour's fault.
They will do it as cynically and opportunistically as they always do.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
The uniform bloc of angry racist red wall voters in football strips and union jack tattoos is a lazy myth. See the header: support for staying out of the EU is now scarcely higher than GB support for the Tories. That means most people planning to vote Labour are not going to be put off by a gradual shift to a more pro-EU stance.
Nor, I suspect, are all Labour-curious voters in Scotland going to be begging for immediate rejoin, anymore than they are in Labour stronghold London where the remain vote in my constituency was nearly 80% and Labour have a 30k majority.
Only stupid people think of voters as a uniform bloc, there are only approximate predispositions. However on your first point, why then are Starmer and co treating any gradual shift to a more pro EU stance as if it were a leper with syphilis?
On your second point, the all things to all men SLab candidate in Rutherglen left the the Labour party and didn't vote for them in 2019 because of Corbyn's negative attitude to the EU, so obviously the issue has some resonance.
Och, it's resonant in Ru'glen. The unfortunate chap with the red rosette is finding himself in the position of sort of holding the aforesaid party position at arms' length but still not quite giving the impression of lavish brotherly love.
I am many hundreds of km away from Rutherglen so I'm sure you are closer to the sentiment on the ground, but I'm not sure something in an article in The National is the clincher, anymore than a piece in the Daily Mail about Starmer's donkey sanctuary or beer and curry habits would be. Or a Guardian piece about Tories eating babies.
I refer you to my previous reply to the other Hon PBer.
*Direct Quotations*.
Direct quotations are something Daily Mail articles are also very in favour of. The direct quotations that suit their agenda.
It's not as if candidates triangulating between national party policy and local priorities in a by-election is anything new. It's what's helped win the Lib Dems lots of recent ones.
What else do we have to judge politicians if it's not direct quotations, whether written or spoken? Would you rather we just went with messy haircuts and photocalls with foaming pints and winning here placards?
Preferabl;y with copulating farm animals if it is a Scottish LD leader.
Just in case anyone was thinking it is worth negotiating with Russia, Medvedev reminds us why we shouldn't.
A new idea for Ukraine has emerged from the North Atlantic Alliance office: Ukraine will be able to join NATO if it gives up the disputed territories.
It does look like an interesting idea. The only problem is that all of – supposedly – their territories are highly disputable. And to enter the bloc, the Kiev authorities will have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus.
Only defeat has a chance of ridding Russia of its imperialist delusions and consequently creating a lasting peace.
There is not currently a route to a suitable place with Russia via negotiations. They choose to settle this via war and we have to ensure that they lose this war of their choosing.
How do you defeat a nuclear power who has suggested they might use nukes? And what happens to Russia after defeat?
Like, I agree that Russia needs to lose this war, but I don't see how that can happen with the situation as it is. It's not even like getting rid of Putin sorts anything out, because most of the people likely to take over in that scenario are more hard line than Putin.
"How do you defeat them" - by defeating them. By equipping Ukraine with all the support they need, whether it be logistical, intelligence or anything else, in order to defeat them. Nukes aren't relevant, they don't prevent defeat, they aren't a tactical weapon.
"And what happens to Russia" - who knows? Who cares? That's their problem, and its know knowable now, but that's their responsibility to deal with. But it should be their problem, not theirs and occupied Ukraine's.
And the whole "But who follows Putin" thing is pointless
In 1938 odd, the UK government turned down overtures from the German Army about getting rid of Hitler. On the grounds that Getting rid of Hitler would mean that the Germany Army would be in charge. And the British Government judged that the German Army was more competent at war planning.
Apart from the small bit about the German Army not wanting a war, this was sensible.
I can absolutely see the case where the Tories blame Labour for Brexit, just as they did for the Global Financial Crisis.
They don't have anyone talented enough at the moment to do that but a politician will come along that can do it, another Boris Johnson type character or a Cameron.
Labour needs to be prepared for that because it will happen. There is no reason Labour should be out of power for the next 10-15 years but there is every chance they end up fucking it up and ceding ground to the Liar Party.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
Seems the SNP have stabilised a little and much will depend on the outcome of the police investigations
As far as Starmer is concerned he remains an English man from London trying to ride two horses at once, with differences over trans gender policies and the 2 children rule between himself and Sawar, and indeed Khan and himself over ULEZ
I note a lot of wishcasting about Keir Starmer by Tory and SNP supporters: a sense that any time soon he's going to be "found out", and people will return to their rightful home.
But this is the sort of thinking that landed Labour in trouble in the mid 2000s, kicked them out of most of Scotland in 2015 and buried the Lib Dems in the South West in the same election. And ejected Labour from swathes of the North and Midlands in 2019. The idea a bloc of voters belongs rightfully to your party. It's the same tendency that could nobble the Tories in the home counties and South Coast next year (fingers crossed) and reverse some of those 2015 SNP gains in Scotland. It leads to supporters ignoring the warning signs and convincing themselves that their voters will come home once they find out the opposition for who they really are.
I'm convinced most of the opposition just assumed that voters would see through Boris' bluster. They probably did, but they voted for him anyway. Same with Keir. It's not that voters are unaware of his or Labour's limitations. They just seem to have concluded it's time for a change.
The difficulty about projecting how well Labour are going to do is that Starmer isn't particularly popular, he is just less unpopular than the alternatives. This means it looks like Labour is on course to win a parliamentary majority, and a big one, but it doesn't say much about how long that majority can be held together and what Starmer will do with it. So far he seems to be flouting policies to the right of Blair - which is not really the platform he was elected to the Labour leadership on. If he runs in a GE as that figure, I could see lots of voters going "back" to the SNP (although less so the Tories). On the other hand, if he tries to paint himself as someone who wants to change things significantly - who wants to fix a "broken Britain" - he might alienate Tory voters who really just want things to go "back to normal" with low interest rates and the like.
I think we could see a very large Labour majority that becomes very unpopular very quickly because it doesn't seem like many voters actively like Starmer's political vision for the UK.
I'm not sure I agree with this either. The voter ratings for Starmer are OK. Not stellar, but not bad at all. That's probably ideal ahead of an election. If expectations were sky high then the risk of rapid disillusionment would be greater. His political vision isn't transformational certainly, it's a bit prosaic. But it's not scary.
Labour's biggest risk after an election is the Conservatives getting their act together. How likely is that? I strongly suspect they have at least one more round of craziness in them before they wake up from their fever dream.
That's my view too. Winning a majority yet with nobody 'inspired' and expecting the earth to move is a political sweet spot for an incoming government and by a mixture of luck and planning it appears that Starmer will land right on it.
I disagree - sure it means fewer people to "let down" but it also means no hopeful populace already behind your mission, no political capital to point at and go "look, the voters put me here to do x, so let's do it". Is anyone truly going to feel they owe Starmer their seat in the same way MPs felt they did to Blair, or even Johnson? I also look at Starmer's team and see nothing but a desire to destroy the left - no coalition building within the party, no actual relationship building with unions or other stakeholder groups. Hell, Sunak gave a bigger pay rise to nurses than Starmer was willing to! We could have more strikes, more inflation and a Labour government to the right of this one on that issue...
I just don't see Starmer being a good PM or his government being popular for long.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
Seems the SNP have stabilised a little and much will depend on the outcome of the police investigations
As far as Starmer is concerned he remains an English man from London trying to ride two horses at once, with differences over trans gender policies and the 2 children rule between himself and Sawar, and indeed Khan and himself over ULEZ
I note a lot of wishcasting about Keir Starmer by Tory and SNP supporters: a sense that any time soon he's going to be "found out", and people will return to their rightful home.
But this is the sort of thinking that landed Labour in trouble in the mid 2000s, kicked them out of most of Scotland in 2015 and buried the Lib Dems in the South West in the same election. And ejected Labour from swathes of the North and Midlands in 2019. The idea a bloc of voters belongs rightfully to your party. It's the same tendency that could nobble the Tories in the home counties and South Coast next year (fingers crossed) and reverse some of those 2015 SNP gains in Scotland. It leads to supporters ignoring the warning signs and convincing themselves that their voters will come home once they find out the opposition for who they really are.
I'm convinced most of the opposition just assumed that voters would see through Boris' bluster. They probably did, but they voted for him anyway. Same with Keir. It's not that voters are unaware of his or Labour's limitations. They just seem to have concluded it's time for a change.
The start point for this wishful thinking is denial of reality. No the economy isn't structurally broken, no Brexit definitely isn't why we're performing worse than we would have been otherwise, no the NHS and other services aren't buggered, nobody will care that we miss every target we set or simply abolish the target etc etc etc.
Witness the idiocy over "NHS Week". They have solved the terrible state of cancer targets by abolishing them. Whilst hoping that people who wait for 18 months in pain or can't get a GP appointment say "but at least I'm not in Wales". Its deluded.
And the thing is the NHS are in the public sector so it's very easy to make a freedom of information request and ask the NHS to provide updated versions of previously reported figures.
So while the figures may no longer be immediately available its very likely new figures will be sought and if they are really bad published by a newspaper..
I don't know about other workplaces but in my former job, days off triggered a response from HR to your immediate manager to have a chat. Repeated days off triggered more chats, targets were set, any patterns ( lots of weekends off etc) created a paper trail that HR followed up. Pay could be reduced for longer term absence and there was always the option of dismissal if all boxes were ticked. Even the FBU were on board as long as procedures were followed and other options looked at. I never saw it get that far.
Mine (Civil Service) was similar - any days off sick were carefully recorded and triggered managerial chat, and forms had to be filled in and sent to HR. Going over a fairly small number of days off in the previous (rolling) year triggered further attention from management and HR, and it escalated in much the same manner. Our unions were on board, in the same way as yours.
I presume the reduction of pay was more likely to be moving onto half rate sick pay rather than anything punitive?
Once you'd been on sick pay for period x that was it where I worked - you were out. I did see it happen on occasion. But those cases were fair anyway - onset of MS and so on.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
Seems the SNP have stabilised a little and much will depend on the outcome of the police investigations
As far as Starmer is concerned he remains an English man from London trying to ride two horses at once, with differences over trans gender policies and the 2 children rule between himself and Sawar, and indeed Khan and himself over ULEZ
I note a lot of wishcasting about Keir Starmer by Tory and SNP supporters: a sense that any time soon he's going to be "found out", and people will return to their rightful home.
But this is the sort of thinking that landed Labour in trouble in the mid 2000s, kicked them out of most of Scotland in 2015 and buried the Lib Dems in the South West in the same election. And ejected Labour from swathes of the North and Midlands in 2019. The idea a bloc of voters belongs rightfully to your party. It's the same tendency that could nobble the Tories in the home counties and South Coast next year (fingers crossed) and reverse some of those 2015 SNP gains in Scotland. It leads to supporters ignoring the warning signs and convincing themselves that their voters will come home once they find out the opposition for who they really are.
I'm convinced most of the opposition just assumed that voters would see through Boris' bluster. They probably did, but they voted for him anyway. Same with Keir. It's not that voters are unaware of his or Labour's limitations. They just seem to have concluded it's time for a change.
The difficulty about projecting how well Labour are going to do is that Starmer isn't particularly popular, he is just less unpopular than the alternatives. This means it looks like Labour is on course to win a parliamentary majority, and a big one, but it doesn't say much about how long that majority can be held together and what Starmer will do with it. So far he seems to be flouting policies to the right of Blair - which is not really the platform he was elected to the Labour leadership on. If he runs in a GE as that figure, I could see lots of voters going "back" to the SNP (although less so the Tories). On the other hand, if he tries to paint himself as someone who wants to change things significantly - who wants to fix a "broken Britain" - he might alienate Tory voters who really just want things to go "back to normal" with low interest rates and the like.
I think we could see a very large Labour majority that becomes very unpopular very quickly because it doesn't seem like many voters actively like Starmer's political vision for the UK.
I'm not sure I agree with this either. The voter ratings for Starmer are OK. Not stellar, but not bad at all. That's probably ideal ahead of an election. If expectations were sky high then the risk of rapid disillusionment would be greater. His political vision isn't transformational certainly, it's a bit prosaic. But it's not scary.
Labour's biggest risk after an election is the Conservatives getting their act together. How likely is that? I strongly suspect they have at least one more round of craziness in them before they wake up from their fever dream.
Which was the situation with Margaret Thatcher going into the 1979 election. There are parallels between today and 1979, more I think than with 1997. Also parallels between Starmer and early Thatcher, for better or for worse.
One difference with 1979 is that voters mostly quite liked Callaghan (it was the unions they were sick of). Not so much love for Sunak.
Agreed.
Nevertheless if people are sick of a situation - the unions in 1979 or feckless government in 2024 - they will want to see change. Starmer will need to deliver that perceived change.
There seems to be a new form of cope from the Tory faithful which is that soon SKS will be found out and somehow ending up throwing away a 22 point lead.
But let's look at the reality, SKS has managed since 2019 to out-gun and destroy literally all of his political opponents both inside and out of the party, mostly by playing a very long and tactical game.
These people under-estimate him continuously and I would argue at their peril. They don't seem to want to understand why or how he has done so well, similar to Labour in 2019.
I don't know about other workplaces but in my former job, days off triggered a response from HR to your immediate manager to have a chat. Repeated days off triggered more chats, targets were set, any patterns ( lots of weekends off etc) created a paper trail that HR followed up. Pay could be reduced for longer term absence and there was always the option of dismissal if all boxes were ticked. Even the FBU were on board as long as procedures were followed and other options looked at. I never saw it get that far.
That's the situation in education too. At least at my place. There seems to be a strange belief that the public sector can simply produce a sick note and no questions asked.
Exactly. Things were tightened up very considerably around 2000-ish, IIRC.
I don't know about other workplaces but in my former job, days off triggered a response from HR to your immediate manager to have a chat. Repeated days off triggered more chats, targets were set, any patterns ( lots of weekends off etc) created a paper trail that HR followed up. Pay could be reduced for longer term absence and there was always the option of dismissal if all boxes were ticked. Even the FBU were on board as long as procedures were followed and other options looked at. I never saw it get that far.
Mine (Civil Service) was similar - any days off sick were carefully recorded and triggered managerial chat, and forms had to be filled in and sent to HR. Going over a fairly small number of days off in the previous (rolling) year triggered further attention from management and HR, and it escalated in much the same manner. Our unions were on board, in the same way as yours.
I presume the reduction of pay was more likely to be moving onto half rate sick pay rather than anything punitive?
Once you'd been on sick pay for period x that was it where I worked - you were out. I did see it happen on occasion. But those cases were fair anyway - onset of MS and so on.
Yup, reduced pay after 6 months. Even that didn't happen very often as we did all we could do to get work mates back on station in some capacity.
Just in case anyone was thinking it is worth negotiating with Russia, Medvedev reminds us why we shouldn't.
A new idea for Ukraine has emerged from the North Atlantic Alliance office: Ukraine will be able to join NATO if it gives up the disputed territories.
It does look like an interesting idea. The only problem is that all of – supposedly – their territories are highly disputable. And to enter the bloc, the Kiev authorities will have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus.
Only defeat has a chance of ridding Russia of its imperialist delusions and consequently creating a lasting peace.
There is not currently a route to a suitable place with Russia via negotiations. They choose to settle this via war and we have to ensure that they lose this war of their choosing.
How do you defeat a nuclear power who has suggested they might use nukes? And what happens to Russia after defeat?
Like, I agree that Russia needs to lose this war, but I don't see how that can happen with the situation as it is. It's not even like getting rid of Putin sorts anything out, because most of the people likely to take over in that scenario are more hard line than Putin.
"How do you defeat them" - by defeating them.
What does this defeat look like? Because pushing them back to the 2022 borders, which looks like a fucking long shot at this point, won't stop the fighting.
I wrote this at the start of the SMO and it's as true now as it was then. Except, I now think that would no longer be enough for VVP and Odessa would have to be on the table also.
Another pretty big drop in CPI, I think the end of year rate is probably going to be ~4.5%, if oil prices fall then maybe 4%.
Core CPI looks tougher to shift with wage data endlessly rising and 2.5m people long term sick. If the government wants to fix the labour market then it needs to get serious about sickness benefits reform. Matthew Paris had it bang on a couple of weeks ago, too many people are realising that it's easy to get signed off sick for stress and opt out of working. For people aged 50-64 who have paid off mortgages it's a realistic option to live on sickness benefits plus all the other assistance you get for it like council tax reductions etc...
Once again the safety net has become a way of life for some people. This time it's the comfortably off middle classes opting out of work by saying they're too stressed. It's something the Labour will need to address on day one because it now seems that young people are not only being asked to support pensions for the old, childcare for their kids, endless student loan repayments, old age care in the NHS but now also for the lazy middle classes who are deciding not to work because they're "stressed".
Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month.
He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse.
We're a professional services firm not a holiday club.
So why haven't you dismissed him / managed him out for poor performance?
"Constructive dismissal" you can't get rid of people if they've been signed off sick with stress or some other bogus mental health issue they've made up and convinced some bleeding heart therapist is a real problem. The government needs to seriously reform being signed off for mental health concerns, at the moment it's become a free for all and the indolent have realised they can turn it into a lifestyle choice.
"Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month."
"He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse."
I cannot imagine what might have induced any level of employee stress here.
Instead of creating the opportunity/necessity to be signed off sick, perhaps a better management approach in the first place may have prevented it getting to that stage.
A better management approach would be to sack people who are regularly off "sick", thus adding more to the real stress of people who are turning up to work who have to do not just their own job, but carry the weight of the skivers.
Everyone in the world suffers from stress. You need ways to manage your own stress. It should not be a reason not to turn in to work, that just hurts your colleagues more. If your job is too stressful for you, go get a different one, don't make your colleagues carry your burdens for you.
It is a very common thing in professional jobs now to get rid of people you don't like by subjecting them to stress, for example by giving them an unreasonable workload or failing to provide the proper support to get the job done. It's effectively a way to force someone to resign rather than dismiss them directly.
And I can tell you that every employment lawyer you talk to will tell you they see this on a daily basis, and they will always recommend that you go to your doctor and get signed off sick before starting the process, as having a doctor's note is a legal way of proving you were subjected to said stress in order to push you out. So even if you think you can cope with the stress you have to get signed off in order to prove the stress, so it's a bit of a catch 22 there.
I have some HR training and I think the original post was very unwise, if the person mentioned in the post sees it, his lawyer will be very happy as it's a slam dunk and a compromise agreement is a dead cert, if that is how your manager is talking about you behind your back.
I will add that some people do play the system in order to get an additional payout rather than what they would normally be entitled to, I have seen this happen once or twice in my career. But as a person's line manager you absolutely cannot be saying that - leave it to HR to sort out.
What a load of crap. Having a doctors note does not prove anything. Doctors don't see your workload, they don't see what you are subjected to, or your colleagues are subjected to. All that does is say you went to speak to a doctor, it says nothing about your work environment.
And if an "unreasonable workload" is the cause of stress, then what do you think you going to get signed off is going to do to your colleagues workload? Your work isn't going to vanish because you do, its going to get dumped onto your colleagues, thus burdening them with more stress. Which is because you chose not to go into work, not because of "management".
Its not just workload though ...
I had an employee years ago whom I caught red handed stealing on CCTV. Followed all HR processes, suspended him pending a disciplinary, invited him in to a disciplinary along with a copy of the evidence of his theft, a timeline and CCTV footage. He responded by sending a relative in with a sick note, saying he was signed off for "stress" the day after I sent him that invitation. I responded by firing him - the invitation was for him to present his side of any evidence, the fact he hadn't turned up to the meeting didn't change the fact that I had the evidence and was able to come to a conclusion he'd committed gross misconduct.
Many employers though press pause on disciplinary proceedings if someone is "sick". Which gives people a get out of jail free card to pretend to be sick to evade sanctions. We see this reported regularly with Police misconduct etc
What does this defeat look like? Because pushing them back to the 2022 borders, which looks like a fucking long shot at this point, won't stop the fighting.
I wrote this at the start of the SMO and it's as true now as it was then. Except, I now think that would no longer be enough for VVP and Odessa would have to be on the table also.
I try and stay out of these debates because I don't have a huge amount to add but I do fear this war will just go on and on. The arrogance from some that Russia would surely be swiftly defeated seems to have quietly been forgotten. At the end of the day they do have nukes.
Just in case anyone was thinking it is worth negotiating with Russia, Medvedev reminds us why we shouldn't.
A new idea for Ukraine has emerged from the North Atlantic Alliance office: Ukraine will be able to join NATO if it gives up the disputed territories.
It does look like an interesting idea. The only problem is that all of – supposedly – their territories are highly disputable. And to enter the bloc, the Kiev authorities will have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus.
Only defeat has a chance of ridding Russia of its imperialist delusions and consequently creating a lasting peace.
There is not currently a route to a suitable place with Russia via negotiations. They choose to settle this via war and we have to ensure that they lose this war of their choosing.
How do you defeat a nuclear power who has suggested they might use nukes? And what happens to Russia after defeat?
Like, I agree that Russia needs to lose this war, but I don't see how that can happen with the situation as it is. It's not even like getting rid of Putin sorts anything out, because most of the people likely to take over in that scenario are more hard line than Putin.
"How do you defeat them" - by defeating them.
What does this defeat look like? Because pushing them back to the 2022 borders, which looks like a fucking long shot at this point, won't stop the fighting.
I wrote this at the start of the SMO and it's as true now as it was then. Except, I now think that would no longer be enough for VVP and Odessa would have to be on the table also.
It was bullshit then, and its bullshit now.
Defeat looks like pushing them back to their own borders. I couldn't care less what is "enough" for Putin, he needs to lose.
Just in case anyone was thinking it is worth negotiating with Russia, Medvedev reminds us why we shouldn't.
A new idea for Ukraine has emerged from the North Atlantic Alliance office: Ukraine will be able to join NATO if it gives up the disputed territories.
It does look like an interesting idea. The only problem is that all of – supposedly – their territories are highly disputable. And to enter the bloc, the Kiev authorities will have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus.
Only defeat has a chance of ridding Russia of its imperialist delusions and consequently creating a lasting peace.
There is not currently a route to a suitable place with Russia via negotiations. They choose to settle this via war and we have to ensure that they lose this war of their choosing.
How do you defeat a nuclear power who has suggested they might use nukes? And what happens to Russia after defeat?
Like, I agree that Russia needs to lose this war, but I don't see how that can happen with the situation as it is. It's not even like getting rid of Putin sorts anything out, because most of the people likely to take over in that scenario are more hard line than Putin.
"How do you defeat them" - by defeating them.
What does this defeat look like? Because pushing them back to the 2022 borders, which looks like a fucking long shot at this point, won't stop the fighting.
I wrote this at the start of the SMO and it's as true now as it was then. Except, I now think that would no longer be enough for VVP and Odessa would have to be on the table also.
If Russia loses now, licks its wounds, and tries this all again in a few decades - that's not a solution to the issue. If Russia loses and its people react poorly, either causing Balkanisation or general upheaval, we don't know what could happen. These things need to be considered - not to the point where anyone should consider conceding to their demands and the invasion - but to prevent continued loss of life.
Apparently this image that has been going the rounds, is being flagged as upsetting on Twatter and elsewhere by Russian nationalists. So please don't repost it all over the place.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
Seems the SNP have stabilised a little and much will depend on the outcome of the police investigations
As far as Starmer is concerned he remains an English man from London trying to ride two horses at once, with differences over trans gender policies and the 2 children rule between himself and Sawar, and indeed Khan and himself over ULEZ
I note a lot of wishcasting about Keir Starmer by Tory and SNP supporters: a sense that any time soon he's going to be "found out", and people will return to their rightful home.
But this is the sort of thinking that landed Labour in trouble in the mid 2000s, kicked them out of most of Scotland in 2015 and buried the Lib Dems in the South West in the same election. And ejected Labour from swathes of the North and Midlands in 2019. The idea a bloc of voters belongs rightfully to your party. It's the same tendency that could nobble the Tories in the home counties and South Coast next year (fingers crossed) and reverse some of those 2015 SNP gains in Scotland. It leads to supporters ignoring the warning signs and convincing themselves that their voters will come home once they find out the opposition for who they really are.
I'm convinced most of the opposition just assumed that voters would see through Boris' bluster. They probably did, but they voted for him anyway. Same with Keir. It's not that voters are unaware of his or Labour's limitations. They just seem to have concluded it's time for a change.
The difficulty about projecting how well Labour are going to do is that Starmer isn't particularly popular, he is just less unpopular than the alternatives. This means it looks like Labour is on course to win a parliamentary majority, and a big one, but it doesn't say much about how long that majority can be held together and what Starmer will do with it. So far he seems to be flouting policies to the right of Blair - which is not really the platform he was elected to the Labour leadership on. If he runs in a GE as that figure, I could see lots of voters going "back" to the SNP (although less so the Tories). On the other hand, if he tries to paint himself as someone who wants to change things significantly - who wants to fix a "broken Britain" - he might alienate Tory voters who really just want things to go "back to normal" with low interest rates and the like.
I think we could see a very large Labour majority that becomes very unpopular very quickly because it doesn't seem like many voters actively like Starmer's political vision for the UK.
I'm not sure I agree with this either. The voter ratings for Starmer are OK. Not stellar, but not bad at all. That's probably ideal ahead of an election. If expectations were sky high then the risk of rapid disillusionment would be greater. His political vision isn't transformational certainly, it's a bit prosaic. But it's not scary.
Labour's biggest risk after an election is the Conservatives getting their act together. How likely is that? I strongly suspect they have at least one more round of craziness in them before they wake up from their fever dream.
Which was the situation with Margaret Thatcher going into the 1979 election. There are parallels between today and 1979, more I think than with 1997. Also parallels between Starmer and early Thatcher, for better or for worse.
One difference with 1979 is that voters mostly quite liked Callaghan (it was the unions they were sick of). Not so much love for Sunak.
Agreed.
Nevertheless if people are sick of a situation - the unions in 1979 or feckless government in 2024 - they will want to see change. Starmer will need to deliver that perceived change.
The twin benefits of martial victory and free money from the North Sea look unlikely to be repeated.
What does this defeat look like? Because pushing them back to the 2022 borders, which looks like a fucking long shot at this point, won't stop the fighting.
I wrote this at the start of the SMO and it's as true now as it was then. Except, I now think that would no longer be enough for VVP and Odessa would have to be on the table also.
I try and stay out of these debates because I don't have a huge amount to add but I do fear this war will just go on and on. The arrogance from some that Russia would surely be swiftly defeated seems to have quietly been forgotten. At the end of the day they do have nukes.
War going on and on is a better alternative than Russian occupation going on and on.
If it takes 8 years to liberate the whole of Ukraine, it takes 8 years. We should support Ukraine every single step of the way, until Russia is repelled back to their own borders.
Why does defeat need to be "swift"?
Its better for Ukraine to take their time, do it properly, do it well, and lose fewer people in the process than to send people into a meat grinder to try and do it on some arbitrarily rapid timeline.
Just in case anyone was thinking it is worth negotiating with Russia, Medvedev reminds us why we shouldn't.
A new idea for Ukraine has emerged from the North Atlantic Alliance office: Ukraine will be able to join NATO if it gives up the disputed territories.
It does look like an interesting idea. The only problem is that all of – supposedly – their territories are highly disputable. And to enter the bloc, the Kiev authorities will have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus.
Only defeat has a chance of ridding Russia of its imperialist delusions and consequently creating a lasting peace.
There is not currently a route to a suitable place with Russia via negotiations. They choose to settle this via war and we have to ensure that they lose this war of their choosing.
How do you defeat a nuclear power who has suggested they might use nukes? And what happens to Russia after defeat?
Like, I agree that Russia needs to lose this war, but I don't see how that can happen with the situation as it is. It's not even like getting rid of Putin sorts anything out, because most of the people likely to take over in that scenario are more hard line than Putin.
A defeat in a war of aggression is a failure to hold on to the territory that is the target of the aggression. I don't think that leads to a nuclear response, as it didn't when Russia lost Kherson city.
Obviously you can't march on Moscow. So you might have to defend yourself against repeated wars of aggression until they get the message. But that's preferable to negotiating away more and more of Eastern Europe and providing Russia with the evidence that we don't have the resolve to stop them.
Another pretty big drop in CPI, I think the end of year rate is probably going to be ~4.5%, if oil prices fall then maybe 4%.
Core CPI looks tougher to shift with wage data endlessly rising and 2.5m people long term sick. If the government wants to fix the labour market then it needs to get serious about sickness benefits reform. Matthew Paris had it bang on a couple of weeks ago, too many people are realising that it's easy to get signed off sick for stress and opt out of working. For people aged 50-64 who have paid off mortgages it's a realistic option to live on sickness benefits plus all the other assistance you get for it like council tax reductions etc...
Once again the safety net has become a way of life for some people. This time it's the comfortably off middle classes opting out of work by saying they're too stressed. It's something the Labour will need to address on day one because it now seems that young people are not only being asked to support pensions for the old, childcare for their kids, endless student loan repayments, old age care in the NHS but now also for the lazy middle classes who are deciding not to work because they're "stressed".
Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month.
He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse.
We're a professional services firm not a holiday club.
So why haven't you dismissed him / managed him out for poor performance?
"Constructive dismissal" you can't get rid of people if they've been signed off sick with stress or some other bogus mental health issue they've made up and convinced some bleeding heart therapist is a real problem. The government needs to seriously reform being signed off for mental health concerns, at the moment it's become a free for all and the indolent have realised they can turn it into a lifestyle choice.
"Got a guy who's got signed off sick from work who worked for me up to last month."
"He was basically a lazy fucker who was shy of a hard day's work unless it was easy and got sunshine blown up his arse."
I cannot imagine what might have induced any level of employee stress here.
Instead of creating the opportunity/necessity to be signed off sick, perhaps a better management approach in the first place may have prevented it getting to that stage.
A better management approach would be to sack people who are regularly off "sick", thus adding more to the real stress of people who are turning up to work who have to do not just their own job, but carry the weight of the skivers.
Everyone in the world suffers from stress. You need ways to manage your own stress. It should not be a reason not to turn in to work, that just hurts your colleagues more. If your job is too stressful for you, go get a different one, don't make your colleagues carry your burdens for you.
It is a very common thing in professional jobs now to get rid of people you don't like by subjecting them to stress, for example by giving them an unreasonable workload or failing to provide the proper support to get the job done. It's effectively a way to force someone to resign rather than dismiss them directly.
And I can tell you that every employment lawyer you talk to will tell you they see this on a daily basis, and they will always recommend that you go to your doctor and get signed off sick before starting the process, as having a doctor's note is a legal way of proving you were subjected to said stress in order to push you out. So even if you think you can cope with the stress you have to get signed off in order to prove the stress, so it's a bit of a catch 22 there.
I have some HR training and I think the original post was very unwise, if the person mentioned in the post sees it, his lawyer will be very happy as it's a slam dunk and a compromise agreement is a dead cert, if that is how your manager is talking about you behind your back.
I will add that some people do play the system in order to get an additional payout rather than what they would normally be entitled to, I have seen this happen once or twice in my career. But as a person's line manager you absolutely cannot be saying that - leave it to HR to sort out.
What a load of crap. Having a doctors note does not prove anything. Doctors don't see your workload, they don't see what you are subjected to, or your colleagues are subjected to. All that does is say you went to speak to a doctor, it says nothing about your work environment.
And if an "unreasonable workload" is the cause of stress, then what do you think you going to get signed off is going to do to your colleagues workload? Your work isn't going to vanish because you do, its going to get dumped onto your colleagues, thus burdening them with more stress. Which is because you chose not to go into work, not because of "management".
Its not just workload though ...
I had an employee years ago whom I caught red handed stealing on CCTV. Followed all HR processes, suspended him pending a disciplinary, invited him in to a disciplinary along with a copy of the evidence of his theft, a timeline and CCTV footage. He responded by sending a relative in with a sick note, saying he was signed off for "stress" the day after I sent him that invitation. I responded by firing him - the invitation was for him to present his side of any evidence, the fact he hadn't turned up to the meeting didn't change the fact that I had the evidence and was able to come to a conclusion he'd committed gross misconduct.
Many employers though press pause on disciplinary proceedings if someone is "sick". Which gives people a get out of jail free card to pretend to be sick to evade sanctions. We see this reported regularly with Police misconduct etc
Obviously you have never been in a circumstance where your employer wants you out, and will subject you to all manner of different ways of doing so, including setting unreasonable targets and deadlines, in order to 'encourage' you to find a different job. As I say, it happens in professional services jobs all the time, and literally every employment lawyer will tell you they see it on a daily basis, and that to strengthen your case you need a doctor's sick note. So I'm afraid it's not a load of crap, it's a very common thing in professional services.
Do people play the system / game this? Yes. It doesn't change the fact that employers will subject you to stress in order to push you out. The stuff about the impact on the rest of your team or stealing stuff is irrelevant to my point.
The poll also suggested that there would be another pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election, with the SNP winning 57 seats and the Greens ten. Labour would return 38 MSPs to comfortably overtake the Conservatives whose representation at Holyrood would almost halve, to 16 MSPs. The Liberal Democrats would win eight seats under this scenario.
YouGov interviewed 1,086 people aged 16 and older in Scotland between August 3 and 8.
Combined Unionist parties on 62 MSPs however ahead of the SNP on 57 MSPs on that projection and just 5 behind the combined SNP and Greens total. Sarwar now has a net positive rating with Scots unlike Yousaf so at least a chance he will be next FM
Ah, HYUFD arithmetic where a minority of Unionist msps beats a majority of pro Indy msps. Who do you think votes in an FM? Rumours of the death of the SNP greatly exaggerated in any case.
Agree with that. Starmer/Sarwar still struggling to achieve definitive tipping point. The main danger to SNP is civil war breaking out over the alliance with the Greens. That would follow if Nats get hammered at GE but the result still appears open at the moment.
Starmer/Sarwar have had some success in convincing anti EU anti immigration Red wall voters in England and vaguely progressive pro EU voters in Scotland that Labour is the party for them, but the essential contradiction in those positions has to come to a head sooner or later. Pretending to these groups that the other doesn't exist only works for so long.
Seems the SNP have stabilised a little and much will depend on the outcome of the police investigations
As far as Starmer is concerned he remains an English man from London trying to ride two horses at once, with differences over trans gender policies and the 2 children rule between himself and Sawar, and indeed Khan and himself over ULEZ
I note a lot of wishcasting about Keir Starmer by Tory and SNP supporters: a sense that any time soon he's going to be "found out", and people will return to their rightful home.
But this is the sort of thinking that landed Labour in trouble in the mid 2000s, kicked them out of most of Scotland in 2015 and buried the Lib Dems in the South West in the same election. And ejected Labour from swathes of the North and Midlands in 2019. The idea a bloc of voters belongs rightfully to your party. It's the same tendency that could nobble the Tories in the home counties and South Coast next year (fingers crossed) and reverse some of those 2015 SNP gains in Scotland. It leads to supporters ignoring the warning signs and convincing themselves that their voters will come home once they find out the opposition for who they really are.
I'm convinced most of the opposition just assumed that voters would see through Boris' bluster. They probably did, but they voted for him anyway. Same with Keir. It's not that voters are unaware of his or Labour's limitations. They just seem to have concluded it's time for a change.
The difficulty about projecting how well Labour are going to do is that Starmer isn't particularly popular, he is just less unpopular than the alternatives. This means it looks like Labour is on course to win a parliamentary majority, and a big one, but it doesn't say much about how long that majority can be held together and what Starmer will do with it. So far he seems to be flouting policies to the right of Blair - which is not really the platform he was elected to the Labour leadership on. If he runs in a GE as that figure, I could see lots of voters going "back" to the SNP (although less so the Tories). On the other hand, if he tries to paint himself as someone who wants to change things significantly - who wants to fix a "broken Britain" - he might alienate Tory voters who really just want things to go "back to normal" with low interest rates and the like.
I think we could see a very large Labour majority that becomes very unpopular very quickly because it doesn't seem like many voters actively like Starmer's political vision for the UK.
I'm not sure I agree with this either. The voter ratings for Starmer are OK. Not stellar, but not bad at all. That's probably ideal ahead of an election. If expectations were sky high then the risk of rapid disillusionment would be greater. His political vision isn't transformational certainly, it's a bit prosaic. But it's not scary.
Labour's biggest risk after an election is the Conservatives getting their act together. How likely is that? I strongly suspect they have at least one more round of craziness in them before they wake up from their fever dream.
Which was the situation with Margaret Thatcher going into the 1979 election. There are parallels between today and 1979, more I think than with 1997. Also parallels between Starmer and early Thatcher, for better or for worse.
One difference with 1979 is that voters mostly quite liked Callaghan (it was the unions they were sick of). Not so much love for Sunak.
Agreed.
Nevertheless if people are sick of a situation - the unions in 1979 or feckless government in 2024 - they will want to see change. Starmer will need to deliver that perceived change.
Yes. I think he will, but the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. IMHO the problem the current government has is that it keeps making decisions on the basis of the prejudices of its supporters rather than objective reality. Hence it keeps making bad decisions. This is very well summarised by the Marina Hyde article I circulated yesterday. I think Starmer will go down a much more rational and evidence based path. Nothing too exciting or daring, but sensible policymaking which, over time, should deliver better outcomes. Whether that will deliver enough change is less clear to me - but it is always worth remembering that change can be for the worse (something Red Wall Brexit voters forgot).
What does this defeat look like? Because pushing them back to the 2022 borders, which looks like a fucking long shot at this point, won't stop the fighting.
I wrote this at the start of the SMO and it's as true now as it was then. Except, I now think that would no longer be enough for VVP and Odessa would have to be on the table also.
I try and stay out of these debates because I don't have a huge amount to add but I do fear this war will just go on and on. The arrogance from some that Russia would surely be swiftly defeated seems to have quietly been forgotten. At the end of the day they do have nukes.
War going on and on is a better alternative than Russian occupation going on and on.
If it takes 8 years to liberate the whole of Ukraine, it takes 8 years. We should support Ukraine every single step of the way, until Russia is repelled back to their own borders.
Why does defeat need to be "swift"?
Its better for Ukraine to take their time, do it properly, do it well, and lose fewer people in the process than to send people into a meat grinder to try and do it on some arbitrarily rapid timeline.
The other question I have is this.
When the the Afghanistan withdrawal turned into a debacle, why couldn't the UK wave it's nuclear weapons about and demand half of Afghanistan?
Just in case anyone was thinking it is worth negotiating with Russia, Medvedev reminds us why we shouldn't.
A new idea for Ukraine has emerged from the North Atlantic Alliance office: Ukraine will be able to join NATO if it gives up the disputed territories.
It does look like an interesting idea. The only problem is that all of – supposedly – their territories are highly disputable. And to enter the bloc, the Kiev authorities will have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus.
Only defeat has a chance of ridding Russia of its imperialist delusions and consequently creating a lasting peace.
There is not currently a route to a suitable place with Russia via negotiations. They choose to settle this via war and we have to ensure that they lose this war of their choosing.
How do you defeat a nuclear power who has suggested they might use nukes? And what happens to Russia after defeat?
Like, I agree that Russia needs to lose this war, but I don't see how that can happen with the situation as it is. It's not even like getting rid of Putin sorts anything out, because most of the people likely to take over in that scenario are more hard line than Putin.
A defeat in a war of aggression is a failure to hold on to the territory that is the target of the aggression. I don't think that leads to a nuclear response, as it didn't when Russia lost Kherson city.
Obviously you can't march on Moscow. So you might have to defend yourself against repeated wars of aggression until they get the message. But that's preferable to negotiating away more and more of Eastern Europe and providing Russia with the evidence that we don't have the resolve to stop them.
Indeed. Ukranians aren’t interested in marching on Moscow, they just want to be left alone in their own country, and are very grateful to everyone helping them out at the moment.
Just in case anyone was thinking it is worth negotiating with Russia, Medvedev reminds us why we shouldn't.
A new idea for Ukraine has emerged from the North Atlantic Alliance office: Ukraine will be able to join NATO if it gives up the disputed territories.
It does look like an interesting idea. The only problem is that all of – supposedly – their territories are highly disputable. And to enter the bloc, the Kiev authorities will have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus.
Only defeat has a chance of ridding Russia of its imperialist delusions and consequently creating a lasting peace.
There is not currently a route to a suitable place with Russia via negotiations. They choose to settle this via war and we have to ensure that they lose this war of their choosing.
How do you defeat a nuclear power who has suggested they might use nukes? And what happens to Russia after defeat?
Like, I agree that Russia needs to lose this war, but I don't see how that can happen with the situation as it is. It's not even like getting rid of Putin sorts anything out, because most of the people likely to take over in that scenario are more hard line than Putin.
"How do you defeat them" - by defeating them.
What does this defeat look like? Because pushing them back to the 2022 borders, which looks like a fucking long shot at this point, won't stop the fighting.
I wrote this at the start of the SMO and it's as true now as it was then. Except, I now think that would no longer be enough for VVP and Odessa would have to be on the table also.
It was bullshit then, and its bullshit now.
Defeat looks like pushing them back to their own borders. I couldn't care less what is "enough" for Putin, he needs to lose.
Pushing them back to their own borders won't stop the fighting. It would probably result in a GPW style total mobilisation in the RF. So that's not enough of a defeat. Try again.
There seems to be a new form of cope from the Tory faithful which is that soon SKS will be found out and somehow ending up throwing away a 22 point lead.
But let's look at the reality, SKS has managed since 2019 to out-gun and destroy literally all of his political opponents both inside and out of the party, mostly by playing a very long and tactical game.
These people under-estimate him continuously and I would argue at their peril. They don't seem to want to understand why or how he has done so well, similar to Labour in 2019.
The Tories are in denial.
BIB - there is an alternative to this, which is that a combination of a disastrous PM, a pandemic, a war in Europe and all the associated economic headwinds have handed Starmer the openest of open goals, which so far he has not missed.
Opposition is easy. Its shit in the long run as you don't have power and you don't get to change the nation, but its easy. There is very little scrutiny from day to day. Its only when the election looms a lot closer that the labour policies will actually come under proper scrutiny and the public will answer polls not based on 'I am fed up with the government' but with who that actually might vote for.
I believe Labour are heading for a decent majority (between 30 and 100 seats). I think the Tories have shat the bed, are out of ideas and the country faces enormous challenges (some down to Brexit, more down to decades of poor policy choices). Starmer has done a good job up till now. But he will know that the real task has not started. Elections are not won by poll leads. Teresa May knows that now.
Just in case anyone was thinking it is worth negotiating with Russia, Medvedev reminds us why we shouldn't.
A new idea for Ukraine has emerged from the North Atlantic Alliance office: Ukraine will be able to join NATO if it gives up the disputed territories.
It does look like an interesting idea. The only problem is that all of – supposedly – their territories are highly disputable. And to enter the bloc, the Kiev authorities will have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus.
Quoting Medvedev as a representative of Russian policy is like quoting Liz Truss as a guide to British policy - yes, she's still got a following but she's not in power. Medvedev (who used to be seen as a moderate technocrat) is I suspect cynically on maneouvres in case Putin falls.
Bartholomew's view that we shouldn't care who runs Russia is seriously mistaken IMO - it's the equivalent of not caring who ran Germany after WW1. It's hard to tell whether a total Ukrainian victory would lead to revenge-seeking nutcases taking over in Russia, but it's ostrich-like not to factor in the possibility.
The case for a negotiated settlement, however, is more that neither side actually looks like winning however much we want them to, so encouraging years of slaughter as our sole policy option is a bad idea. At present, both sides think they can win so they're not up for serious talks, but we should try to encourage that rather than put all our eggs into the escalation basket.
Just in case anyone was thinking it is worth negotiating with Russia, Medvedev reminds us why we shouldn't.
A new idea for Ukraine has emerged from the North Atlantic Alliance office: Ukraine will be able to join NATO if it gives up the disputed territories.
It does look like an interesting idea. The only problem is that all of – supposedly – their territories are highly disputable. And to enter the bloc, the Kiev authorities will have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus.
Only defeat has a chance of ridding Russia of its imperialist delusions and consequently creating a lasting peace.
There is not currently a route to a durable peace with Russia via negotiations. They chose to settle this via war and we have to ensure that they lose this war of their choosing.
A way of ridding these delusions is perhaps by making it hard for them to defend their enormous borders with their rapidly declining population and dwindling military resources. So diverting their attention away from Ukraine by creating other problems that they then have to deal with. Why is it that they just seem to do what they want and everyone runs away scared? Isn't that just reinforcing their delusions?
There seems to be a new form of cope from the Tory faithful which is that soon SKS will be found out and somehow ending up throwing away a 22 point lead.
But let's look at the reality, SKS has managed since 2019 to out-gun and destroy literally all of his political opponents both inside and out of the party, mostly by playing a very long and tactical game.
These people under-estimate him continuously and I would argue at their peril. They don't seem to want to understand why or how he has done so well, similar to Labour in 2019.
The Tories are in denial.
I think that Starmer has done what he wanted internally, but that hasn't made him very popular amongst the base of Labour activists. And the majority he seems to be looking at seems to be more about the Tories fucking everything up so badly rather than him presenting anything the public actually want.
My concern is that we get a Labour party with a big majority that is essentially Tory-lite, and that the Tories go further to the right and the electorate continue to see a lowering standard of living. That is the ideal scenario for the right wing freaks to really pounce - denounce the old Tory establishment as the captured opposition of progressives, denounce the Labour party as ineffectual lefty elites, and embrace real hard line authoritarian nationalism. That's the choice of socialism or barbarism: an acceptance that the state does have a responsibility and the ability to safeguard peoples lives or the continuation of the cycle of capitalism boom and busts and the eventual rising of demagogues who capitalise on that.
Just in case anyone was thinking it is worth negotiating with Russia, Medvedev reminds us why we shouldn't.
A new idea for Ukraine has emerged from the North Atlantic Alliance office: Ukraine will be able to join NATO if it gives up the disputed territories.
It does look like an interesting idea. The only problem is that all of – supposedly – their territories are highly disputable. And to enter the bloc, the Kiev authorities will have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus.
Only defeat has a chance of ridding Russia of its imperialist delusions and consequently creating a lasting peace.
There is not currently a route to a suitable place with Russia via negotiations. They choose to settle this via war and we have to ensure that they lose this war of their choosing.
How do you defeat a nuclear power who has suggested they might use nukes? And what happens to Russia after defeat?
Like, I agree that Russia needs to lose this war, but I don't see how that can happen with the situation as it is. It's not even like getting rid of Putin sorts anything out, because most of the people likely to take over in that scenario are more hard line than Putin.
"How do you defeat them" - by defeating them.
What does this defeat look like? Because pushing them back to the 2022 borders, which looks like a fucking long shot at this point, won't stop the fighting.
I wrote this at the start of the SMO and it's as true now as it was then. Except, I now think that would no longer be enough for VVP and Odessa would have to be on the table also.
It was bullshit then, and its bullshit now.
Defeat looks like pushing them back to their own borders. I couldn't care less what is "enough" for Putin, he needs to lose.
Pushing them back to their own borders won't stop the fighting. It would probably result in a GPW style total mobilisation in the RF. So that's not enough of a defeat. Try again.
Putin has, almost desperately, tried to avoid a mobilisation of ethnic Russians.
Just in case anyone was thinking it is worth negotiating with Russia, Medvedev reminds us why we shouldn't.
A new idea for Ukraine has emerged from the North Atlantic Alliance office: Ukraine will be able to join NATO if it gives up the disputed territories.
It does look like an interesting idea. The only problem is that all of – supposedly – their territories are highly disputable. And to enter the bloc, the Kiev authorities will have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus.
Only defeat has a chance of ridding Russia of its imperialist delusions and consequently creating a lasting peace.
There is not currently a route to a suitable place with Russia via negotiations. They choose to settle this via war and we have to ensure that they lose this war of their choosing.
How do you defeat a nuclear power who has suggested they might use nukes? And what happens to Russia after defeat?
Like, I agree that Russia needs to lose this war, but I don't see how that can happen with the situation as it is. It's not even like getting rid of Putin sorts anything out, because most of the people likely to take over in that scenario are more hard line than Putin.
"How do you defeat them" - by defeating them.
What does this defeat look like? Because pushing them back to the 2022 borders, which looks like a fucking long shot at this point, won't stop the fighting.
I wrote this at the start of the SMO and it's as true now as it was then. Except, I now think that would no longer be enough for VVP and Odessa would have to be on the table also.
Giving Putin a win doesn't end the war. It teaches him and the other Russian imperialists that the West is weak and will cede territory when pushed. So they will come again. And again.
We have to work out what we need to do to help Ukraine defeat the Russian military and then do it, rather than wringing our hands over how difficult it is. That's the best achievable option.
I don't buy the idea that the Russian Army is invincible and can't be defeated.
Comments
a French, or Turk, or Proosian,
or perhaps Itali-an!
[or perhaps Itali-an!]
but in spite of all temptations
to belong to other nations,
he remains an English man,
he remains an English man..."
- For He Is an Englishman, Gilbert And Sullivan
I speak to people with different opinions to myself regularly. The difference is I make my own opinions.
You are the one constantly making anecdotes about how everyone you speak to shares your exact opinion on everything. As you've done in this post, yet again.
Wanting to rejoin the sclerotic EU isn't being driven by economics either. The UK may be suffering managed decline under Sunak, which is why I want Sunak out and the Tories to go into Opposition, but then you die-hard fanatical zealots who want Europe to be an issue are jealous we aren't declining as fast as Germany is.
But this is the sort of thinking that landed Labour in trouble in the mid 2000s, kicked them out of most of Scotland in 2015 and buried the Lib Dems in the South West in the same election. And ejected Labour from swathes of the North and Midlands in 2019. The idea a bloc of voters belongs rightfully to your party. It's the same tendency that could nobble the Tories in the home counties and South Coast next year (fingers crossed) and reverse some of those 2015 SNP gains in Scotland. It leads to supporters ignoring the warning signs and convincing themselves that their voters will come home once they find out the opposition for who they really are.
I'm convinced most of the opposition just assumed that voters would see through Boris' bluster. They probably did, but they voted for him anyway. Same with Keir. It's not that voters are unaware of his or Labour's limitations. They just seem to have concluded it's time for a change.
I think the same will be true of the US. If Trump wins next year, the EU can expect another mini trade war and an erratic ally at best and an outright hostile US at worst. If Trump doesn't win, a DeSantis or Cruz will still have a shot in 28 or 32 - again people who will not likely put US/EU cooperation highly on their list of priorities. The US also looks like it might fragment over the next decade - abortion, LGBT+ rights, wealth inequality, labour strikes, not to mention the impacts of climate change on farming and food distribution between states. And there are no real politicians capable of unifying the country, nor doing so in a way that benefits its allies. Already the IRA, which is doing a lot to boost the USAs infrastructure and growth, is having a negative impact on other smaller countries (like the UK) by raising the prices of materials needed for infrastructure and green transition. The EU would be better doing this as a whole rather than as individual states - saving money by bulk purchasing, sharing expertise and labour and subsidising infrastructure for the poorer states. That will also require a lot more collaboration that would start looking more like a real federal state.
I can only think that Brook must have misbehaved or something - he's the best of the lot, barring Root.
On your second point, the all things to all men SLab candidate in Rutherglen left the the Labour party and didn't vote for them in 2019 because of Corbyn's negative attitude to the EU, so obviously the issue has some resonance.
Witness the idiocy over "NHS Week". They have solved the terrible state of cancer targets by abolishing them. Whilst hoping that people who wait for 18 months in pain or can't get a GP appointment say "but at least I'm not in Wales". Its deluded.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/16/britain-inflation-cpi-food-core-interest-rates-bank-england/
“Inflation proved stubborn in July as economists warned that underlying pressures meant the UK was not yet at a turning point on price rises.
“The consumer prices index (CPI) rose by 6.8pc in the year to July, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), as the lower energy price cap pulled down household bills.
“While the drop was in line with the Bank of England’s prediction of 6.8pc, economists had expected a sharper fall to 6.7pc.”
It's SIS working with the CIA.
And they work for the Lizard men, who work for the Zeta Reticulans, who work for the Illuminati, who work for ZOG, who work for the Grand Council.
Get it right, or you'll come across as a crackpot loon.
I think we could see a very large Labour majority that becomes very unpopular very quickly because it doesn't seem like many voters actively like Starmer's political vision for the UK.
So about the same as Con plus REFUK at 30%.
If it heads in that way, then there are likely to be a number of areas where the Bloc would make substantial unifying progress simply because each country will recognise it cannot do things on its own and there is strength through numbers. However, it will be areas such as border protection, armed forces, protectionism, policies to encourage childbirth etc that will see the biggest integration. I suspect though that these will not be the measures that many pro-EU advocates have in mind when they talk about the greater integration of the EU.
We have, under longstanding legislation and within the ECHR, the ability to deport fake asylum seekers. If someone's asylum case fails, the law is pretty straightforward. The number of deportations has fallen hugely over the period the Conservatives have been in power. That's primarily because fewer cases are being processed and it's taking longer to do them. That's mainly a resourcing problem.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/23719096.brexits-impact-rutherglen-hamilton-west-revealed/
In such jobs, either they are a temporary step to getting a better job, or you are very unadevnturous.
COVID pushed people to move - with zero hours etc, there were simply more hours. Driving a local Amazon van is a far nicer and better paid job than most of the ones we are talking about. So the racist, gammon bastards chose the better paid jobs.
In addition, outside certain menial jobs in central London, the mythology of "No UK people will do the jobs" is just that - the majority of the employees were and are UK citizens. Which is not surprising when you look at the demographics.
Many companies are hanging on, hoping that a supply of people prepared to work for minimum wage (or effectively less) will magically appear. Others are investing in productivity.
Labour's biggest risk after an election is the Conservatives getting their act together. How likely is that? I strongly suspect they have at least one more round of craziness in them before they wake up from their fever dream.
As to Brexit, compare it to Scotland. It is easy to imagine people saying in X years time "I voted for and support our independence, but I don't support the current Scottish government or what they are doing with our sovereignty". That would not mean they want London back.
As for the National - blame the idiots who wrec ked the Herald and Scotsman.
*Direct Quotations*.
Edit: also https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/scottish-labour-election-candidate-not-30662998
NB that this tabloid is relatively widely read in Scotland by the Labour-voting demographic.
Everyone in the world suffers from stress. You need ways to manage your own stress. It should not be a reason not to turn in to work, that just hurts your colleagues more. If your job is too stressful for you, go get a different one, don't make your colleagues carry your burdens for you.
It's not as if candidates triangulating between national party policy and local priorities in a by-election is anything new. It's what's helped win the Lib Dems lots of recent ones.
A new idea for Ukraine has emerged from the North Atlantic Alliance office: Ukraine will be able to join NATO if it gives up the disputed territories.
It does look like an interesting idea. The only problem is that all of – supposedly – their territories are highly disputable. And to enter the bloc, the Kiev authorities will have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus.
And their capital thus should be moved to Lvov. That is, if Polacks agree to leave Lemberg to the fans of lard with cocaine.
https://twitter.com/MedvedevRussiaE/status/1691545649299304448?s=20
On a highly sensitive issue? It's not a local but a national issue in Scotland.
Plus you must have missed my edit, which points out that the interview was in a Labour-supporting newspaper (well, website). So they think it is important.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/keir-starmer-approval-rating
https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/magnified-email/issue-68/
A lot of that seems to be coming from the more Liberal / Left leaning voters (LDs and Lab). To me that suggests his rightward shift will not help where the SNP could actively argue they are a progressive party. I agree that the likelihood of Starmer moving left and giving the Tories opportunities to scare their voters into the polling booth are low (although they still try by linking him to Corbyn all the time).
The problems facing the country require big systemic changes - and Starmer isn't promising any of those. So when a Labour party come in with a big majority and things don't get better, after more than a decade of Tory rule where things have got worse and worse, I could see people fleeing both parties and just a huge political mess.
Much as with the fake ADHD industry, this causes great harm to the real cases.
There is also something that I have observed, personally. The phenomenon of people who are told they are "sick with stress" - then abandoned. They can develop a mindset that they can't do anything.
One person I knew was in full retreat from the world, until a relative paid for private therapy. She wasn't able to walk to the shops at that point - because she'd convinced herself that it was "too stressful". This wasn't someone enjoying the life of Riley on benefits. She was heading to a dark, bad place and was miserable the whole time. She now works in stress counselling, herself.
A lot of employers are very adverse to sacking people who are "sick".
Going off sick, when you're not, is an incredibly selfish thing to do that hurts your colleagues typically more than your employer as your colleagues are the one who will have to carry you in your absence.
You could even fill up the empty space, at £5k a head on Calais beach, on the return trip and make a profit on the first trip.
What about those without a relative willing or able to shell out a hefty sum?
Is the government doing anything or thinking about what to do about them?
No.
There is not currently a route to a durable peace with Russia via negotiations. They chose to settle this via war and we have to ensure that they lose this war of their choosing.
These 20 point leads are stubbornly high.
Like, I agree that Russia needs to lose this war, but I don't see how that can happen with the situation as it is. It's not even like getting rid of Putin sorts anything out, because most of the people likely to take over in that scenario are more hard line than Putin.
What that means for the LDs and pro-Europeans in general, I don't know. Perhaps campaign in a GE on 'Brexit is rubbish' but without making any commitment beyond 'working more closely' with the EU, and actively campaign to rejoin at some future date between GEs.
It needs someone as annoying as Farage to bang on about it for 20 years outside the main party system
Not sure how that changes.
And I can tell you that every employment lawyer you talk to will tell you they see this on a daily basis, and they will always recommend that you go to your doctor and get signed off sick before starting the process, as having a doctor's note is a legal way of proving you were subjected to said stress in order to push you out. So even if you think you can cope with the stress you have to get signed off in order to prove the stress, so it's a bit of a catch 22 there.
I have some HR training and I think the original post was very unwise, if the person mentioned in the post sees it, his lawyer will be very happy as it's a slam dunk and a compromise agreement is a dead cert, if that is how your manager is talking about you behind your back.
I will add that some people do play the system in order to get an additional payout rather than what they would normally be entitled to, I have seen this happen once or twice in my career. But as a person's line manager you absolutely cannot be saying that - leave it to HR to sort out.
There seems to be a strange belief that the public sector can simply produce a sick note and no questions asked.
"And what happens to Russia" - who knows? Who cares? That's their problem, and its know knowable now, but that's their responsibility to deal with. But it should be their problem, not theirs and occupied Ukraine's.
They will do it as cynically and opportunistically as they always do.
In 1938 odd, the UK government turned down overtures from the German Army about getting rid of Hitler. On the grounds that Getting rid of Hitler would mean that the Germany Army would be in charge. And the British Government judged that the German Army was more competent at war planning.
Apart from the small bit about the German Army not wanting a war, this was sensible.
They don't have anyone talented enough at the moment to do that but a politician will come along that can do it, another Boris Johnson type character or a Cameron.
Labour needs to be prepared for that because it will happen. There is no reason Labour should be out of power for the next 10-15 years but there is every chance they end up fucking it up and ceding ground to the Liar Party.
I just don't see Starmer being a good PM or his government being popular for long.
So while the figures may no longer be immediately available its very likely new figures will be sought and if they are really bad published by a newspaper..
I presume the reduction of pay was more likely to be moving onto half rate sick pay rather than anything punitive?
Once you'd been on sick pay for period x that was it where I worked - you were out. I did see it happen on occasion. But those cases were fair anyway - onset of MS and so on.
Nevertheless if people are sick of a situation - the unions in 1979 or feckless government in 2024 - they will want to see change. Starmer will need to deliver that perceived change.
But let's look at the reality, SKS has managed since 2019 to out-gun and destroy literally all of his political opponents both inside and out of the party, mostly by playing a very long and tactical game.
These people under-estimate him continuously and I would argue at their peril. They don't seem to want to understand why or how he has done so well, similar to Labour in 2019.
The Tories are in denial.
I wrote this at the start of the SMO and it's as true now as it was then. Except, I now think that would no longer be enough for VVP and Odessa would have to be on the table also.
And if an "unreasonable workload" is the cause of stress, then what do you think you going to get signed off is going to do to your colleagues workload? Your work isn't going to vanish because you do, its going to get dumped onto your colleagues, thus burdening them with more stress. Which is because you chose not to go into work, not because of "management".
Its not just workload though ...
I had an employee years ago whom I caught red handed stealing on CCTV. Followed all HR processes, suspended him pending a disciplinary, invited him in to a disciplinary along with a copy of the evidence of his theft, a timeline and CCTV footage. He responded by sending a relative in with a sick note, saying he was signed off for "stress" the day after I sent him that invitation. I responded by firing him - the invitation was for him to present his side of any evidence, the fact he hadn't turned up to the meeting didn't change the fact that I had the evidence and was able to come to a conclusion he'd committed gross misconduct.
Many employers though press pause on disciplinary proceedings if someone is "sick". Which gives people a get out of jail free card to pretend to be sick to evade sanctions. We see this reported regularly with Police misconduct etc
England v Australia live on BBC1
Defeat looks like pushing them back to their own borders. I couldn't care less what is "enough" for Putin, he needs to lose.
I think the Lib Dems will do very well though.
If it takes 8 years to liberate the whole of Ukraine, it takes 8 years. We should support Ukraine every single step of the way, until Russia is repelled back to their own borders.
Why does defeat need to be "swift"?
Its better for Ukraine to take their time, do it properly, do it well, and lose fewer people in the process than to send people into a meat grinder to try and do it on some arbitrarily rapid timeline.
Obviously you can't march on Moscow. So you might have to defend yourself against repeated wars of aggression until they get the message. But that's preferable to negotiating away more and more of Eastern Europe and providing Russia with the evidence that we don't have the resolve to stop them.
Do people play the system / game this? Yes. It doesn't change the fact that employers will subject you to stress in order to push you out. The stuff about the impact on the rest of your team or stealing stuff is irrelevant to my point.
IMHO the problem the current government has is that it keeps making decisions on the basis of the prejudices of its supporters rather than objective reality. Hence it keeps making bad decisions. This is very well summarised by the Marina Hyde article I circulated yesterday. I think Starmer will go down a much more rational and evidence based path. Nothing too exciting or daring, but sensible policymaking which, over time, should deliver better outcomes. Whether that will deliver enough change is less clear to me - but it is always worth remembering that change can be for the worse (something Red Wall Brexit voters forgot).
When the the Afghanistan withdrawal turned into a debacle, why couldn't the UK wave it's nuclear weapons about and demand half of Afghanistan?
Opposition is easy. Its shit in the long run as you don't have power and you don't get to change the nation, but its easy. There is very little scrutiny from day to day. Its only when the election looms a lot closer that the labour policies will actually come under proper scrutiny and the public will answer polls not based on 'I am fed up with the government' but with who that actually might vote for.
I believe Labour are heading for a decent majority (between 30 and 100 seats). I think the Tories have shat the bed, are out of ideas and the country faces enormous challenges (some down to Brexit, more down to decades of poor policy choices). Starmer has done a good job up till now. But he will know that the real task has not started. Elections are not won by poll leads. Teresa May knows that now.
Bartholomew's view that we shouldn't care who runs Russia is seriously mistaken IMO - it's the equivalent of not caring who ran Germany after WW1. It's hard to tell whether a total Ukrainian victory would lead to revenge-seeking nutcases taking over in Russia, but it's ostrich-like not to factor in the possibility.
The case for a negotiated settlement, however, is more that neither side actually looks like winning however much we want them to, so encouraging years of slaughter as our sole policy option is a bad idea. At present, both sides think they can win so they're not up for serious talks, but we should try to encourage that rather than put all our eggs into the escalation basket.
My concern is that we get a Labour party with a big majority that is essentially Tory-lite, and that the Tories go further to the right and the electorate continue to see a lowering standard of living. That is the ideal scenario for the right wing freaks to really pounce - denounce the old Tory establishment as the captured opposition of progressives, denounce the Labour party as ineffectual lefty elites, and embrace real hard line authoritarian nationalism. That's the choice of socialism or barbarism: an acceptance that the state does have a responsibility and the ability to safeguard peoples lives or the continuation of the cycle of capitalism boom and busts and the eventual rising of demagogues who capitalise on that.
Why do you think that is?
We have to work out what we need to do to help Ukraine defeat the Russian military and then do it, rather than wringing our hands over how difficult it is. That's the best achievable option.
I don't buy the idea that the Russian Army is invincible and can't be defeated.