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And now help for Sunak from the hard left – politicalbetting.com
And now help for Sunak from the hard left – politicalbetting.com
In a rare moment of honesty, Putin's stooges inside the left explain exactly what they are trying to achieve…a Tory victory. ?? pic.twitter.com/LNFADAbxP7
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To wit, Mike's great fallacy about the 2019 missing tories is that the 2019 election was anomalous. It was a 'Get Brexit Done' vote to unblock the remainer parliament's stalling of the Brexit vote, which left even people like me exasperated. Boris galvanised a demographic that simply cannot be lazily transposed to normal General Election psephology. That he was up against an unelectable hard left anti-semitic neo Trotskyite reinforces this point.
Go back to the last proper General Election in Britain: June, which was a hung parliament. That's your benchmark for what happens next.
@MikeSmithson
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/prominent-left-wing-activists-will-launch-stop-starmer-campaign
Starmer is surely doomed. Pile all your money on a Tory majority now!
All the successful Labour leaders have had vocal critics on the far left.
Neil Kinnock started it with that famous, and brave, speech that prompted the Eric Heffer walk out and Derek 'Trot' Hatton's heckling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9d7ahKWcsM
Kinnock was never the greatest leader tbh but that was one of the greatest political speeches in British politics from the last 50 years. It's fun to watch again. It also really fired the starting gun on New Labour.
And then there was 'call me Tony.' Many on the Hard Left preferred a tory victory to Blair. We can but marvel at how warped their perspective is.
For the moment this plays perfectly into Keir Starmer's hands. It shows Britain that he is ready to govern.
Further down the line, when things begin to go wrong for Starmer's Labour, the wolf pack will start biting at his ankles but for now they are left to howling beyond the camp fire's safe circle of light.
https://twitter.com/labenz/status/1699260122755662069
According to Dmytro Kuleba, Vladimir Putin cannot be trusted because even when he gives his word, there is no guarantee that he will not break it.
https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1699243519733637538
And it's not like doing a deal with a western nation, where the importance of reliable institutions means it's likely deals will be adhered to, irrespective of the whims of whoever is the current president of PM.
Putin's whims are all we have to go on.
He's more treacherous than Tsar Nicholas II.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2023/09/06/why-ukraines-defense-minister-reznikov-resigned-and-who-is-tapped-to-replace-him/
The most amusing thing about most self described Trots I’ve encountered is their admiration for Stalin, the Soviet Union and modern Semi-Demi-Fascist Russia. Haven’t they heard of this Trotsky chap?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/05/bharat-g20-invitation-fuels-rumours-india-may-change-name
However I do think GE19 reinforced some electoral shifts that were already happening. That’s what makes GE24 such a difficult election to call. I think there will be some tremendous value in some individual seat markets for those who have been paying attention to these shifts.
Remember that Jezbollah voted with the Tories against the Labour government literally hundreds and hundreds of times.
I have no doubt that the Corbynites are anymore relevant than the ERG and will not have any impact on Starmer election prospects
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12484005/amp/Delta-flight-Atlanta-Barcelona-forced-turn-passenger-suffered-horrific-bout-diarrhea-underwent-five-hour-cleanup-operation-entire-carpet-needed-replaced.html
He certainly didn’t yeet people out of windows for offending him.
We've seen this played out on this very forum where the crank left endlessly agitate against the true enemy - the Labour Party. As was always the case with the exception of the brief rising of The Jeremy.
For all that the loony left decry Blair and Brown and screech that they were the same as the Tories, that isn't true. Not enough New Labour stuff made big and long-lasting improvements to society, but their list of achievements was lengthy. That the loonies just screech no demonstrates that their agenda basically is self-aggrandisement rather than actual care for other people.
Which is the exact same trait that Tories have. Me me me, and fuck you.
Won't be enough this time.
https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/prominent-left-wing-activists-will-launch-stop-starmer-campaign
[Edit - sorry, I see point and link already made upthread]
Extraordinary (to me, anyway) work on microanalysis and imaging, including microCT, of the tail rotor bearing and its seizure that was the primary cause of the accident. Also interesting that the AAIB contracted out some of this work. But I imagine some of it is specialist and needs seriously specialist kit.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/64f73d429ee0f2000fb7bf1f/AAR_1-2023_G-VSKP_Final_Vol_1.pdf
2017 were very Red Wall indeed - in Middlesbrough, Stoke, Mansfield, Walsall and the small towns of Derbyshire NE. For all that campaign went wrong, May was still seen as sound on Brexit at that point.
So you can't really distance this government from ERG loons when it was infested with them less than a year ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/06/helicopter-crash-leicester-stadium-tragic-accident-inspectors?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
Some of the international involvement was related to manufacturers of the parts in question.
You can make the case that 2019 was special, but in many ways 2017;was too. Many voted Corbyn without wanting a Corbyn PM.
I still think Labour are nailed on, but the swing will rightly be shown against the last election, 2019.
People are allowed to be married to other people who have jobs.
It was already the case that we fell out of the usual schedule. The 2017 election was 3 years earlier than required. The 2019 election was either 6 months early or 6 months late vs 2015, and years and years early vs the mandate delivered in 2017.
That chaos has of course continued into government with a rolling succession of senior ministers and Prime Ministers to ensure that almost nothing is actually being brought through as actual legislation.
Politically then the baseline is October 1974 or 1992 - a chaotic, necrotic government stuck in office unable to government.
In the last few elections the polls have probably been the best guide, even when they were materially wrong (in 2015). People ignored them too often because they didn't believe what they showed. That was particularly true of the rapid swings during 2017 and the SNP landslide and Lib Dem wipeout of 2015, but also led to some disbelief when Johnson won emphatically in 2019.
The fascinating thing in the next year will be the degree to which the Tories creep back in the polls. We all expect them to, don't we. All of us. Nobody believes they'll get 26% at the GE. (Nobody expects Reform of the Greens to get 8% either). But by how much. Personally I expect Ref votes will mostly return home to Con or to no vote, but Green will be squeezed by Labour. But nothing is returning to a mythical baseline. Too much has changed.
Only if Sunak loses the next general election will the ERG have the chance to regain significant influence on the party frontbench again
The Corbyn experiment was interesting for those of us on the left because it got quite close to winning (though he was lucky with May/dementia tax in 2017 and unlucky with Boris/Brexit in 2019). He got a hearing because many of the policies were actually very popular and he put them across generally calmly rather than in inflammatory Scargill style. At some point I expect someone else with a reasonable manner will come along and have another try. People generally don't join Labour merely to move the chairs around, though at the moment the willingness to give Starmer 5 years to prove he's better is very strong even on the left in the party, because another 5 years of the Tories would just be ridiculous.
This is the cost of the Tories.
https://twitter.com/UKLabour/status/1699333134112727258/photo/1
1 In the round, the policy platform in 2017 was pretty good. That so many of the ideas have been suborned by the Tories and adopted under a different label shows that a different approach on policy can work. Which is why I endlessly advocate StateCo solutions to so many of our terrible service / infrastructure holes
2 The issue with the policy platform was who was proposing it. Jeremy came with major baggage - the most unlucky anti-racism campaigner ever in that he kept sharing platforms and causes with screaming racists. And he was mild compared to the absolute morons and lunatics who came with him. A Corbyn government never looked viable because of who would be in it
3 Of course the left of the party support getting into power. The crankies aren't in the party and with the exception on the Corbyn era, ,almost always sit off on the extreme left
The best man at my wedding used to do TV reviews and listings for the Morning Star. We had a bit of a falling out in the Corbyn years.
It is not difficult to find such examples for centre left or centre right policies.
EDIT: actually Starmer is borderline Boomer depending on when you set the changeover date. Cameron is comfortably X.
Tony Blair represented hope and a new direction. Blair saved the NHS and made massive investments in crumbling schools/ hospitals, introduced the minimum wage and had a broad church with a few Socialists in senior posts
SKS offers more of he same Tory ideology and austerity and has surrounded himself with the most right wing Ghouls that the PLP possesses. Even Nandy is too left wing for insecure Sir Kid Starver
Speaking to the Institute for Government as part of its ongoing series of in-depth interviews with former ministers about their time in office, James Bethell also said officials did not want him to discuss the potential economic impacts of Covid policies and would delete this from his speeches.
Asked about the health department’s interaction with other arms of government, Lord Bethell, who was a whip before becoming a junior health minister, said it could be “pretty turbulent”.
He said: “No 10 didn’t want to prioritise the pandemic in early 2020, even though the evidence was mounting – there was a post-election, ostrich, head-in-the-sand mentality, which I saw again around the invasion of Ukraine.
“Its priority, and what we were told many times, was Brexit and levelling up. ‘We have to deliver Brexit, so could your pandemic quietly go and mind your own business, please,’ we were told. So we had several weeks of this brushing off, and then they switched into it eventually. After that we got a lot of erratic dipping in. In Yiddish, it’s called ‘kibitzing’: erratic and ill-informed interference.”
While noting that as a junior minister his personal interactions with Downing Street were limited, Bethell said that from his point of view “coordination within government got a lot better” after Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, left No 10 in November 2020.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/06/no-10-had-head-in-sand-mentality-at-start-of-covid-crisis-says-ex-minister
If the Labour manifesto doesn't specifically commit to this policy we'll know they're not serious.
Saharan dust, but unusual Saharan dust for the UK. Usually when we get it, the winds come from Morocco and Western Algeria borne on SSW winds, over Spain and the Pyrenees and then into Britain. The sand and dust deposits in that source region are reddish in colour so our dust outbreaks tend to give us a bit of an orangy Martian sky and orange drops on cars when it rains.
This time the configuration of the high and low pressure is different with the Omega Block you may have read about bringing dust from the SSE/SE, i.e. from Libya and the central Sahara. That dust is more beige-yellow. Hence the different quality of light this time.
Yes, they managed to find some pretty serious imaging equipment from somewhere, very impressive microscopy scanning of the failed parts. Metallurgy is one of the AAIB’s specialist subjects, but they don’t hesitate to ask manufacturers, universities and other specialist companies to help them out, especially for a fatal accident of such a common type that was so clearly caused by a component failure.
Helicopters shouldn’t really exist, they’re instrinsically unstable by design! That there are so few accidents, is testament to the ability of the industry, investigators, and regulators all working together. Again, something that could be learned in a lot of other businesses and organisations.
Saved the NHS: The real crisis was a lack of investment meaning crumbling facilities and endless waits for treatment. Facilities were built using PFI, waiting lists were cleared by buying capacity from the private sector.
Made massive investments in crubling schools/hospitals. Yes and no - a lot of money spent and a transformation of facilities. But the investment was PFI, not Capex.
If we look at the reality of what that first Blair government did which BJO is rightly praising, there is nothing in what Starmer has said which suggests he won't at the very least copy those actions.
You say that Starmer offers more of the same Tory ideology and austerity. But you just praised Blair. Who stuck to Tory austerity and exploded the Tory PFI ideology...
Sunak is clearly completely out of his depth, I notice polling now shows Labour being more trusted on Ukraine, Reeves more popular than Hunt and business lining up to go to Labour Conference, which will apparently have the biggest turnout from business since 1996.
Far-left groups campaining to "Stop Starmer" will work in Starmer's favour. There may be a few not to bright "fairly-left" voters, who will be persuaded to vote Green or some kind of Socialist party, but they will be small in number. There will be a much larger group of voters who are roughly centrist, who didn't vote last time or voted Tory last time, that will read this as "Starmer is not a Loony Lefty" and be more likely to vote Labour in 2024.
That was a major reason why Blair was so keen to scrap Clause 4. Not because he felt contractually bound to renationalise everything the Tories had privatised if he didn't get rid of it, but because he was prepared to lose the far left in order to gain more of the centre.
Had the hard left still been in positions of influence, with senior figures calling for more strikes or for blanket soak the rich policies, the polls would likely be showing a toss-up.
Whether this policy or that policy is the right one or not is irrelevant unless you can get people to vote for it. And the Labour Party exists explicitly to take power and reform things (Clause 1). So having self-righteous policies that won't be elected is the diametric opposite of why the party exists. Whatever the lunatics say about it.
You can move close to them, as both major parties have done in recent times, but you risk losing the public and, the moment you try to extricate yourself, you find they haven't gone away and will try to devour you (and it'd be interesting to get Paul Mason's take on that...)
So the correct tactic in the long term is always to treat them as the enemies they are.
Labour's Rachel Reeves has opened up a clear lead over the Conservatives' Jeremy Hunt when voters are asked who should be the next chancellor of the exchequer, according to an exclusive poll for Sky News.
The Labour shadow chancellor is the choice of 21% of voters, according to YouGov, while Jeremy Hunt is judged to make the better chancellor by 14%.
Ms Reeves and Mr Hunt have been broadly neck-and-neck in the polls since Mr Hunt was appointed chancellor last October, so this poll represents the first moment where the opposition have taken a meaningful lead.
There are still 65% of the public who say they don't know, offering a significant opportunity for the Conservatives.
We also had to crew change by boat for several hitches after the Shetland crash back in 2012. Doing that West of Shetlands is an experience. For that we used a Frog.
https://www.reflexmarine.com/products/frog-range