This certainly feels like the end of Gordon Brown now (an era I do actually remember quite well), with the narrative now turning into "what else will go wrong for Rishi Sunak".
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.
I think this is the poll you refer to with 65% DNK : -
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.
Given the cumulative impact cost of living will have, and the ongoing gaffes from the government, I suspect it is a more significant opportunity for the opposition. To take it all they have to do is very little!
The solution to the problem is simple: grow more lettuces.
If the Labour manifesto doesn't specifically commit to this policy we'll know they're not serious.
I recall at the last election there was a brief bidding war on tree planting, which essentially turned into parties adding a zero to the end of any number mentioned by any other party (I think Johnson ultimately promised a hundred squillion trees or something like that).
Hopefully we'll have the same on lettuces next time. Nobody will be happy until we're drowning in lettuces, dining on lettuce soup, and unable to open the front door due to vast piles of rotting lettuces on the path.
It seems the hard left hate Starmer even more than they hated Blair. After all Blair kept Corbyn and Tony Benn in the Labour Party while Starmer has kicked Corbyn out
SKS is no Tony Blair
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
Can we pick this line apart slightly?
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...
What I'm really hoping for from a putative Starmer government is a proper understanding of the interconnectedness of things. Why crap roads can mean more people in hospital, why crap hospitals can mean more people in prison, why crap prisons can lead to more crime, and (especially) why crap schools can lead to increasing inequality (amond other things).
I believe this is something the Blair government grasped - but Cameron/Osborne deliberately harrowed out wider public services and infrastructure while falsely claiming to maintain spend on hospitals and schools which became de-facto front-line services, and setting in place their mendacious bung to their vote in the triple-lock.
I've said it before on here, but aside from a few bright spots on social reform, the coalition government was the worst and most damaging in my lifetime.
This certainly feels like the end of Gordon Brown now (an era I do actually remember quite well), with the narrative now turning into "what else will go wrong for Rishi Sunak".
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.
I think this is the poll you refer to with 65% DNK : -
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.
Given the cumulative impact cost of living will have, and the ongoing gaffes from the government, I suspect it is a more significant opportunity for the opposition. To take it all they have to do is very little!
Two principle questions: 1 Who are the DK voters? 2 Why do they respond DK?
I have read a few times that a lot of 2019 first time Tories sit in the DK camp. Many of these were either non or infrequent voters, so if that is true then I can't see them moving out of DK into a vote for anyone.
For the chunk of the DK's who were more regular Tory voters you have to ask what could motivate them to change their mind. Its unlikely to be fear of Starmer. Its unlikely to be renewed enthusiasm for Tory policies.
So Of that "significant opportunity" for the Conservatives, I can't see how they attract them in remotely sufficient numbers.
This certainly feels like the end of Gordon Brown now (an era I do actually remember quite well), with the narrative now turning into "what else will go wrong for Rishi Sunak".
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.
I think this is the poll you refer to with 65% DNK : -
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.
Given the cumulative impact cost of living will have, and the ongoing gaffes from the government, I suspect it is a more significant opportunity for the opposition. To take it all they have to do is very little!
Its a glorious idea. Stop Starmer becoming Prime Minister so that we can keep Sunak. The crank left are hardened Tories - unless they can have True Socialism they want the Tories.
Remember that Jezbollah voted with the Tories against the Labour government literally hundreds and hundreds of times.
Genuinely does anyone think they are relevant?
Well not any more. But a few years ago...?
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.
I've known quite a variety of the far left for obvious reasons, and that's not always quite true (maybe not quite true for the super-Brexiteers either). There's a school of thought, not entirely wrong, that democracy moves within a narrow range of "acceptable" economic policies which leaves maybe 20% of the population in desperate straits, and if you espouse anything beyond that you get slaughtered by the tycoon-owned media and the markets. They dislike centrists like Starmer because they think centrists give a false hope of change when actually they're seen by them as just moving the chairs around on the Titanic. Those of an inflammatory temperament conclude that the moderate left are hateful and only revolution or something like it will really change things for people on the margins of society, and then they get angry that it's not happening. It's not sensible (because you can't altogether ignore the markets and you can't build a left-wing government or indeed a revolution on tiny minority support) but it's not especially self-centred.
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 how I feel. I miss the radicalism of the Corbyn era but SKS is playing a blinder on the 'winning the election' front and I'm happy to get behind him because, oh god, we really do have to win this time. This takes priority for me. I want to see the end of Tory (mis)rule more than I want the buzz of being in a party fully aligned with my opinions. My opinions might be bollox, for one thing, but one of them definitely isn't - the one that says a Labour government under Starmer will be far better on every level than anything on offer from these Tories. We have to win. So let's drop the self-indulgence and make it happen.
On topic, the Hard Left has always been the strategic enemy of the Soft Left, just as the Hard Right has always been the strategic enemy of the Soft Right.
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.
If we had PR of course the hard right would have its own party and about 10-20% of MPs as would the hard left.
Only FPTP keeps the hard right in the Conservatives and the hard left in Labour
Its a glorious idea. Stop Starmer becoming Prime Minister so that we can keep Sunak. The crank left are hardened Tories - unless they can have True Socialism they want the Tories.
Remember that Jezbollah voted with the Tories against the Labour government literally hundreds and hundreds of times.
Genuinely does anyone think they are relevant?
Well not any more. But a few years ago...?
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.
I've known quite a variety of the far left for obvious reasons, and that's not always quite true (maybe not quite true for the super-Brexiteers either). There's a school of thought, not entirely wrong, that democracy moves within a narrow range of "acceptable" economic policies which leaves maybe 20% of the population in desperate straits, and if you espouse anything beyond that you get slaughtered by the tycoon-owned media and the markets. They dislike centrists like Starmer because they think centrists give a false hope of change when actually they're seen by them as just moving the chairs around on the Titanic. Those of an inflammatory temperament conclude that the moderate left are hateful and only revolution or something like it will really change things for people on the margins of society, and then they get angry that it's not happening. It's not sensible (because you can't altogether ignore the markets and you can't build a left-wing government or indeed a revolution on tiny minority support) but it's not especially self-centred.
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 how I feel. I miss the radicalism of the Corbyn era but SKS is playing a blinder on the 'winning the election' front and I'm happy to get behind him because, oh god, we really do have to win this time. This takes priority for me. I want to see the end of Tory (mis)rule more than I want the buzz of being in a party fully aligned with my opinions. My opinions might be bollox, for one thing, but one of them definitely isn't - the one that says a Labour government under Starmer will be far better on every level than anything on offer from these Tories. We have to win. So let's drop the self-indulgence and make it happen.
"Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we'll keep the red flag flying here".
I have a degree of sympathy with Heathener’s view that 2019 is a false baseline for GE24.
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.
Yes, I think Heathener overstates the case for 2017 being the ‘true’ baseline. Every election starts with an incumbent (party, if not the same candidate). That has some effect. In addition there were people who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 (for a variety of reasons, not just Brexit). The decline of Labour in the red wall had been running for a while as demographics changed and mirrored the decline in Scotland. Scotland always voted Labour (for a decade or two at least) right up until they didn’t.
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.
Every election is different. It's like weather - trying to predict how the summer will evolve based on how similar the patterns in May are to 1976 or 2012 is a mug's game.
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.
I would not be at all surprised to see the Tories get only 26% at the GE.
They are, frankly, an absolute shower. And in denial. I met my local MP - or the one who will be under the new boundaries - recently. Nice chap. Has worked hard on local issues, some of them on a cross-party basis, and been pretty effective. Obviously keen to get to know the new area and the issues. And frustrated by national issues - though he hid it well.
But my overall impression was that they simply don't realise the level of fed-upness many voters have. In an area which is meant to be receiving Levelling Up money, which has been allocated, there are no visible results and there won't be by the time of the GE. On housing, for instance, he mentioned the various provisions in the Levelling Up Bill allowing councils to charge more to second home owners / licence AirBnBs etc but could say nothing about actually building more houses for local people. Like my daughter who is actively looking. Because the government has no plan on this.
Good local MPs like him are being undermined by the government and the national party. So where is the talent going to come from in opposition when they need to rebuild the party?
On topic, the Hard Left has always been the strategic enemy of the Soft Left, just as the Hard Right has always been the strategic enemy of the Soft Right.
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.
If we had PR of course the hard right would have its own party and about 10-20% of MPs as would the hard left.
Only FPTP keeps the hard right in the Conservatives and the hard left in Labour
Depends on the type of PR, of course, but I agree they'd have MPs... much as they do now except without the misleading packaging.
I have a degree of sympathy with Heathener’s view that 2019 is a false baseline for GE24.
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.
Yes, I think Heathener overstates the case for 2017 being the ‘true’ baseline. Every election starts with an incumbent (party, if not the same candidate). That has some effect. In addition there were people who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 (for a variety of reasons, not just Brexit). The decline of Labour in the red wall had been running for a while as demographics changed and mirrored the decline in Scotland. Scotland always voted Labour (for a decade or two at least) right up until they didn’t.
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.
Every election is different. It's like weather - trying to predict how the summer will evolve based on how similar the patterns in May are to 1976 or 2012 is a mug's game.
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.
I would not be at all surprised to see the Tories get only 26% at the GE.
They are, frankly, an absolute shower. And in denial. I met my local MP - or the one who will be under the new boundaries - recently. Nice chap. Has worked hard on local issues, some of them on a cross-party basis, and been pretty effective. Obviously keen to get to know the new area and the issues. And frustrated by national issues - though he hid it well.
But my overall impression was that they simply don't realise the level of fed-upness many voters have. In an area which is meant to be receiving Levelling Up money, which has been allocated, there are no visible results and there won't be by the time of the GE. On housing, for instance, he mentioned the various provisions in the Levelling Up Bill allowing councils to charge more to second home owners / licence AirBnBs etc but could say nothing about actually building more houses for local people. Like my daughter who is actively looking. Because the government has no plan on this.
Good local MPs like him are being undermined by the government and the national party. So where is the talent going to come from in opposition when they need to rebuild the party?
And I bet your good local MP has no chance of a senior position in the Government because he is not part of the chumocracy.
Its a glorious idea. Stop Starmer becoming Prime Minister so that we can keep Sunak. The crank left are hardened Tories - unless they can have True Socialism they want the Tories.
Remember that Jezbollah voted with the Tories against the Labour government literally hundreds and hundreds of times.
Genuinely does anyone think they are relevant?
Well not any more. But a few years ago...?
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.
I've known quite a variety of the far left for obvious reasons, and that's not always quite true (maybe not quite true for the super-Brexiteers either). There's a school of thought, not entirely wrong, that democracy moves within a narrow range of "acceptable" economic policies which leaves maybe 20% of the population in desperate straits, and if you espouse anything beyond that you get slaughtered by the tycoon-owned media and the markets. They dislike centrists like Starmer because they think centrists give a false hope of change when actually they're seen by them as just moving the chairs around on the Titanic. Those of an inflammatory temperament conclude that the moderate left are hateful and only revolution or something like it will really change things for people on the margins of society, and then they get angry that it's not happening. It's not sensible (because you can't altogether ignore the markets and you can't build a left-wing government or indeed a revolution on tiny minority support) but it's not especially self-centred.
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 how I feel. I miss the radicalism of the Corbyn era but SKS is playing a blinder on the 'winning the election' front and I'm happy to get behind him because, oh god, we really do have to win this time. This takes priority for me. I want to see the end of Tory (mis)rule more than I want the buzz of being in a party fully aligned with my opinions. My opinions might be bollox, for one thing, but one of them definitely isn't - the one that says a Labour government under Starmer will be far better on every level than anything on offer from these Tories. We have to win. So let's drop the self-indulgence and make it happen.
"Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we'll keep the red flag flying here".
I have a degree of sympathy with Heathener’s view that 2019 is a false baseline for GE24.
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.
Yes, I think Heathener overstates the case for 2017 being the ‘true’ baseline. Every election starts with an incumbent (party, if not the same candidate). That has some effect. In addition there were people who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 (for a variety of reasons, not just Brexit). The decline of Labour in the red wall had been running for a while as demographics changed and mirrored the decline in Scotland. Scotland always voted Labour (for a decade or two at least) right up until they didn’t.
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.
Every election is different. It's like weather - trying to predict how the summer will evolve based on how similar the patterns in May are to 1976 or 2012 is a mug's game.
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.
I would not be at all surprised to see the Tories get only 26% at the GE.
They are, frankly, an absolute shower. And in denial. I met my local MP - or the one who will be under the new boundaries - recently. Nice chap. Has worked hard on local issues, some of them on a cross-party basis, and been pretty effective. Obviously keen to get to know the new area and the issues. And frustrated by national issues - though he hid it well.
But my overall impression was that they simply don't realise the level of fed-upness many voters have. In an area which is meant to be receiving Levelling Up money, which has been allocated, there are no visible results and there won't be by the time of the GE. On housing, for instance, he mentioned the various provisions in the Levelling Up Bill allowing councils to charge more to second home owners / licence AirBnBs etc but could say nothing about actually building more houses for local people. Like my daughter who is actively looking. Because the government has no plan on this.
Good local MPs like him are being undermined by the government and the national party. So where is the talent going to come from in opposition when they need to rebuild the party?
While I'm not a Labour voter, I was similarly concerned under Corybn that the requirement for doctrinal purity above such piddling things as competence and propriety would mean a hollowing out of actual administrative talent from the party.
I do wonder if Jared O'Mara was such an egregious example of this that he inadvertently helped the cause of the centrists, i.e. look at the absolute shite these Momentum types foist on you.
Losing good conservative MPs bothers me too. People who are thoughtful and bright, but yer Charles Walkers are losing out to yer 30p Lees at the moment,
Happy Trussmas! Likely to be the only ever Gen X Prime Minister. We really managed to change the world didn’t we?
Cameron was Gen X too, as is Starmer.
EDIT: actually Starmer is borderline Boomer depending on when you set the changeover date. Cameron is comfortably X.
It is hard for me to keep up with the named generations, especially as many use the American definitions even though our baby boom was later than theirs.
I have a degree of sympathy with Heathener’s view that 2019 is a false baseline for GE24.
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.
Yes, I think Heathener overstates the case for 2017 being the ‘true’ baseline. Every election starts with an incumbent (party, if not the same candidate). That has some effect. In addition there were people who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 (for a variety of reasons, not just Brexit). The decline of Labour in the red wall had been running for a while as demographics changed and mirrored the decline in Scotland. Scotland always voted Labour (for a decade or two at least) right up until they didn’t.
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.
Every election is different. It's like weather - trying to predict how the summer will evolve based on how similar the patterns in May are to 1976 or 2012 is a mug's game.
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.
I would not be at all surprised to see the Tories get only 26% at the GE.
They are, frankly, an absolute shower. And in denial. I met my local MP - or the one who will be under the new boundaries - recently. Nice chap. Has worked hard on local issues, some of them on a cross-party basis, and been pretty effective. Obviously keen to get to know the new area and the issues. And frustrated by national issues - though he hid it well.
But my overall impression was that they simply don't realise the level of fed-upness many voters have. In an area which is meant to be receiving Levelling Up money, which has been allocated, there are no visible results and there won't be by the time of the GE. On housing, for instance, he mentioned the various provisions in the Levelling Up Bill allowing councils to charge more to second home owners / licence AirBnBs etc but could say nothing about actually building more houses for local people. Like my daughter who is actively looking. Because the government has no plan on this.
Good local MPs like him are being undermined by the government and the national party. So where is the talent going to come from in opposition when they need to rebuild the party?
While I'm not a Labour voter, I was similarly concerned under Corybn that the requirement for doctrinal purity above such piddling things as competence and propriety would mean a hollowing out of actual administrative talent from the party.
I do wonder if Jared O'Mara was such an egregious example of this that he inadvertently helped the cause of the centrists, i.e. look at the absolute shite these Momentum types foist on you.
Losing good conservative MPs bothers me too. People who are thoughtful and bright, but yer Charles Walkers are losing out to yer 30p Lees at the moment,
I don't want a huge Labour majority because:-
1. It makes for bad arrogant government 2. It leads to complacency. The Red Wall turned to the Tories because, despite being Labour for years, Labour had done damn all for them for too long and took them for granted. I see some of that attitude returning - the idea that these voters are turning back to their natural home and so no-one need bother about their needs. There were good reasons why they turned away from Labour and toward what the Tories appeared to be selling and those reasons have not gone away. 3. We need a good effective opposition. We won't get it with a demoralised weak party in the grip of loons fighting political purity battles.
Happy Trussmas! Likely to be the only ever Gen X Prime Minister. We really managed to change the world didn’t we?
Cameron was Gen X too, as is Starmer.
EDIT: actually Starmer is borderline Boomer depending on when you set the changeover date. Cameron is comfortably X.
It is hard for me to keep up with the named generations, especially as many use the American definitions even though our baby boom was later than theirs.
Working as I do in advertising, I hear no end of generalised horseshit about generations. It's a trigger word for me when I hear some bollocks about Gen Z 'not conforming to stereotypes' or 'wanting to make a difference to the world' - i.e. young people since forever - and I get quite cross about it, especially from people who should know better. Even more points off for 'Gen-zee' rather than 'Gen-zed'.
Confusingly, I fall between two 'generations' (X and Millennial; it depends what year you start Millennial from) neither of which I can really identify with according to their popular stereotypes.
On helicopters: all those helicopters RP and I see going to and from Aberdeen are quite safe because of the twin pillars of good science and information practices to learn from failures, and because of the diligence and training required to pilot them.
Imagine a world where car drivers had that same level professionalism. Instead that hand licences out to utter twunts like Dura.
tbf, Dura drove fighter jets off big boats for a living so he must have had some training.
I mentioned the other day the Post Office paying bonuses to lawyers working on the Horizon Inquiry despite telling Parliament that it would no longer do so.
Nick Wallis and counsel for the inquiry have done some more digging and it now looks as if the Post Office's lie is even more brazen than we thought. Any Post Office executive is eligible for a bonus for their work on the inquiry.
"We won't pay bonuses for work on the Horizon Inquiry"
they actually meant -
"We will pay bonuses for work on the Horizon Inquiry. But if we say the opposite the press will leave us alone and we don't care what Parliament thinks because the Ministers we report to don't give a damn about this issue. So why should we."
Happy Trussmas! Likely to be the only ever Gen X Prime Minister. We really managed to change the world didn’t we?
Cameron was Gen X too, as is Starmer.
EDIT: actually Starmer is borderline Boomer depending on when you set the changeover date. Cameron is comfortably X.
It is hard for me to keep up with the named generations, especially as many use the American definitions even though our baby boom was later than theirs.
Working as I do in advertising, I hear no end of generalised horseshit about generations. It's a trigger word for me when I hear some bollocks about Gen Z 'not conforming to stereotypes' or 'wanting to make a difference to the world' - i.e. young people since forever - and I get quite cross about it, especially from people who should know better. Even more points off for 'Gen-zee' rather than 'Gen-zed'.
Confusingly, I fall between two 'generations' (X and Millennial; it depends what year you start Millennial from) neither of which I can really identify with according to their popular stereotypes.
Hopefully it ends now we've run out of letters.
Born in 1938, where does that leave the likes of me, and of course Big G? Come to that my wife was born in 1941, as was my sister. My wife and I have three children born in the sixties. I get very confused with these labels!
Incidentally, I’m also a Don’t Know; LD, Lab or Green. Definitely not Con, though.
Specially for @JosiasJessop and @Malmesbury - the AAIB report is now out on the fatal helicopter accident at King Power Stadium, Leicester, in 2018.
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.
I’ve been skimming through that report this morning. Typically detailled report that we’ve come to expect from the AAIB - and proof that there can be excellence within public sector departments. Perhaps others can learn from them?
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.
Please don't say that! I will be back on one again at the end of next week. I have lost track exactly but it will be somewhere over my 750th flight.
That’s an impressive number. I’ve only half a dozen in my log book, of which I was P2 on a couple! (It’s way harder than it looks, even if you can fly regular planes). Have fun next week, I was trying to be positive about the industry!
When I did Krypton Factor (33 years ago!), for the the flight simulator section in the final we went down to Culdrose, for a scenario of taking off from an oil rig, and landing on a moving helicopter carrier. We had about half an hour practice with an FAA instructor. When we did our filmed flight, the instructor told me and one of the other finalists that in 30 minutes we'd learned what takes him 3 months to teach pilots normally - he was pushing us both to think about signing up! End of brag
Happy Trussmas! Likely to be the only ever Gen X Prime Minister. We really managed to change the world didn’t we?
Cameron was Gen X too, as is Starmer.
EDIT: actually Starmer is borderline Boomer depending on when you set the changeover date. Cameron is comfortably X.
It is hard for me to keep up with the named generations, especially as many use the American definitions even though our baby boom was later than theirs.
Working as I do in advertising, I hear no end of generalised horseshit about generations. It's a trigger word for me when I hear some bollocks about Gen Z 'not conforming to stereotypes' or 'wanting to make a difference to the world' - i.e. young people since forever - and I get quite cross about it, especially from people who should know better. Even more points off for 'Gen-zee' rather than 'Gen-zed'.
Confusingly, I fall between two 'generations' (X and Millennial; it depends what year you start Millennial from) neither of which I can really identify with according to their popular stereotypes.
Specially for @JosiasJessop and @Malmesbury - the AAIB report is now out on the fatal helicopter accident at King Power Stadium, Leicester, in 2018.
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.
I’ve been skimming through that report this morning. Typically detailled report that we’ve come to expect from the AAIB - and proof that there can be excellence within public sector departments. Perhaps others can learn from them?
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.
Please don't say that! I will be back on one again at the end of next week. I have lost track exactly but it will be somewhere over my 750th flight.
That’s an impressive number. I’ve only half a dozen in my log book, of which I was P2 on a couple! (It’s way harder than it looks, even if you can fly regular planes). Have fun next week, I was trying to be positive about the industry!
When I did Krypton Factor (33 years ago!), for the the flight simulator section in the final we went down to Culdrose, for a scenario of taking off from an oil rig, and landing on a moving helicopter carrier. We had about half an hour practice with an FAA instructor. When we did our filmed flight, the instructor told me and one of the other finalists that in 30 minutes we'd learned what takes him 3 months to teach pilots normally - he was pushing us both to think about signing up! End of brag
I have a degree of sympathy with Heathener’s view that 2019 is a false baseline for GE24.
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.
Yes, I think Heathener overstates the case for 2017 being the ‘true’ baseline. Every election starts with an incumbent (party, if not the same candidate). That has some effect. In addition there were people who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 (for a variety of reasons, not just Brexit). The decline of Labour in the red wall had been running for a while as demographics changed and mirrored the decline in Scotland. Scotland always voted Labour (for a decade or two at least) right up until they didn’t.
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.
Every election is different. It's like weather - trying to predict how the summer will evolve based on how similar the patterns in May are to 1976 or 2012 is a mug's game.
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.
I would not be at all surprised to see the Tories get only 26% at the GE.
They are, frankly, an absolute shower. And in denial. I met my local MP - or the one who will be under the new boundaries - recently. Nice chap. Has worked hard on local issues, some of them on a cross-party basis, and been pretty effective. Obviously keen to get to know the new area and the issues. And frustrated by national issues - though he hid it well.
But my overall impression was that they simply don't realise the level of fed-upness many voters have. In an area which is meant to be receiving Levelling Up money, which has been allocated, there are no visible results and there won't be by the time of the GE. On housing, for instance, he mentioned the various provisions in the Levelling Up Bill allowing councils to charge more to second home owners / licence AirBnBs etc but could say nothing about actually building more houses for local people. Like my daughter who is actively looking. Because the government has no plan on this.
Good local MPs like him are being undermined by the government and the national party. So where is the talent going to come from in opposition when they need to rebuild the party?
While I'm not a Labour voter, I was similarly concerned under Corybn that the requirement for doctrinal purity above such piddling things as competence and propriety would mean a hollowing out of actual administrative talent from the party.
I do wonder if Jared O'Mara was such an egregious example of this that he inadvertently helped the cause of the centrists, i.e. look at the absolute shite these Momentum types foist on you.
Losing good conservative MPs bothers me too. People who are thoughtful and bright, but yer Charles Walkers are losing out to yer 30p Lees at the moment,
That was the odd thing about Corbyn. He did not insist on doctrinal purity. He might have ended up with some because so many centrists refused to serve but I'm not even sure Corbyn had much doctrine himself. John McDonnell did but he was also pragmatic so it is moot. Nor did Corbyn instigate the purge so many on the right feared and predicted. As for young Jared, he was a classic paper candidate in a hopeless seat held by Nick Clegg, Deputy PM and star of the Cleggasm.
On helicopters: all those helicopters RP and I see going to and from Aberdeen are quite safe because of the twin pillars of good science and information practices to learn from failures, and because of the diligence and training required to pilot them.
Imagine a world where car drivers had that same level professionalism. Instead that hand licences out to utter twunts like Dura.
tbf, Dura drove fighter jets off big boats for a living so he must have had some training.
And helicopters into hot LZs. Neither of which compares to doing 170+ on a motorbike on that section of the M40 that is the unofficial UK equivalent of Bonneville Salt Flats.
I have a degree of sympathy with Heathener’s view that 2019 is a false baseline for GE24.
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.
Yes, I think Heathener overstates the case for 2017 being the ‘true’ baseline. Every election starts with an incumbent (party, if not the same candidate). That has some effect. In addition there were people who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 (for a variety of reasons, not just Brexit). The decline of Labour in the red wall had been running for a while as demographics changed and mirrored the decline in Scotland. Scotland always voted Labour (for a decade or two at least) right up until they didn’t.
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.
Every election is different. It's like weather - trying to predict how the summer will evolve based on how similar the patterns in May are to 1976 or 2012 is a mug's game.
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.
I would not be at all surprised to see the Tories get only 26% at the GE.
They are, frankly, an absolute shower. And in denial. I met my local MP - or the one who will be under the new boundaries - recently. Nice chap. Has worked hard on local issues, some of them on a cross-party basis, and been pretty effective. Obviously keen to get to know the new area and the issues. And frustrated by national issues - though he hid it well.
But my overall impression was that they simply don't realise the level of fed-upness many voters have. In an area which is meant to be receiving Levelling Up money, which has been allocated, there are no visible results and there won't be by the time of the GE. On housing, for instance, he mentioned the various provisions in the Levelling Up Bill allowing councils to charge more to second home owners / licence AirBnBs etc but could say nothing about actually building more houses for local people. Like my daughter who is actively looking. Because the government has no plan on this.
Good local MPs like him are being undermined by the government and the national party. So where is the talent going to come from in opposition when they need to rebuild the party?
While I'm not a Labour voter, I was similarly concerned under Corybn that the requirement for doctrinal purity above such piddling things as competence and propriety would mean a hollowing out of actual administrative talent from the party.
I do wonder if Jared O'Mara was such an egregious example of this that he inadvertently helped the cause of the centrists, i.e. look at the absolute shite these Momentum types foist on you.
Losing good conservative MPs bothers me too. People who are thoughtful and bright, but yer Charles Walkers are losing out to yer 30p Lees at the moment,
I don't want a huge Labour majority because:-
1. It makes for bad arrogant government 2. It leads to complacency. The Red Wall turned to the Tories because, despite being Labour for years, Labour had done damn all for them for too long and took them for granted. I see some of that attitude returning - the idea that these voters are turning back to their natural home and so no-one need bother about their needs. There were good reasons why they turned away from Labour and toward what the Tories appeared to be selling and those reasons have not gone away. 3. We need a good effective opposition. We won't get it with a demoralised weak party in the grip of loons fighting political purity battles.
Agreed on all counts. I've been staying at my dad's for the last few days (where I grew up), and he's just a few doors down from Nick Fletcher's constituency office, pretty much the archetypal 'red wall' seat*. Labour's outlook had been allowed to drift too far from that of their core voters but had been propped up by tribal loyalty (it was a mining seat) which is in terminal decline. UKIP-lite was an easy sell, especially in places like Don Valley which had returned strong UKIP and even BNP votes.
My ideal would be a 40-50 seat Lab majority, with a decent showing by the LDs (30-40 seats) and a more thoughtful, ideologically coherent and capable* Conservative opposition. Plus a couple of Greens and a reduced SNP bloc.
*I've wittered ad nauseam about why Red Wall is a pretty useless term but I'll leave it at that.
Specially for @JosiasJessop and @Malmesbury - the AAIB report is now out on the fatal helicopter accident at King Power Stadium, Leicester, in 2018.
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.
I’ve been skimming through that report this morning. Typically detailled report that we’ve come to expect from the AAIB - and proof that there can be excellence within public sector departments. Perhaps others can learn from them?
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.
Please don't say that! I will be back on one again at the end of next week. I have lost track exactly but it will be somewhere over my 750th flight.
That’s an impressive number. I’ve only half a dozen in my log book, of which I was P2 on a couple! (It’s way harder than it looks, even if you can fly regular planes). Have fun next week, I was trying to be positive about the industry!
When I did Krypton Factor (33 years ago!), for the the flight simulator section in the final we went down to Culdrose, for a scenario of taking off from an oil rig, and landing on a moving helicopter carrier. We had about half an hour practice with an FAA instructor. When we did our filmed flight, the instructor told me and one of the other finalists that in 30 minutes we'd learned what takes him 3 months to teach pilots normally - he was pushing us both to think about signing up! End of brag
A friend knew someone who designed some of the puzzles on Krytpon factor. Obviously the contestants solving was edited, but he recounted tales of some contestants taking 30 minutes plus to solve, and the audience shouting out advice... Not the impression given on the show!
I have a degree of sympathy with Heathener’s view that 2019 is a false baseline for GE24.
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.
Yes, I think Heathener overstates the case for 2017 being the ‘true’ baseline. Every election starts with an incumbent (party, if not the same candidate). That has some effect. In addition there were people who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 (for a variety of reasons, not just Brexit). The decline of Labour in the red wall had been running for a while as demographics changed and mirrored the decline in Scotland. Scotland always voted Labour (for a decade or two at least) right up until they didn’t.
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.
Every election is different. It's like weather - trying to predict how the summer will evolve based on how similar the patterns in May are to 1976 or 2012 is a mug's game.
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.
I would not be at all surprised to see the Tories get only 26% at the GE.
They are, frankly, an absolute shower. And in denial. I met my local MP - or the one who will be under the new boundaries - recently. Nice chap. Has worked hard on local issues, some of them on a cross-party basis, and been pretty effective. Obviously keen to get to know the new area and the issues. And frustrated by national issues - though he hid it well.
But my overall impression was that they simply don't realise the level of fed-upness many voters have. In an area which is meant to be receiving Levelling Up money, which has been allocated, there are no visible results and there won't be by the time of the GE. On housing, for instance, he mentioned the various provisions in the Levelling Up Bill allowing councils to charge more to second home owners / licence AirBnBs etc but could say nothing about actually building more houses for local people. Like my daughter who is actively looking. Because the government has no plan on this.
Good local MPs like him are being undermined by the government and the national party. So where is the talent going to come from in opposition when they need to rebuild the party?
While I'm not a Labour voter, I was similarly concerned under Corybn that the requirement for doctrinal purity above such piddling things as competence and propriety would mean a hollowing out of actual administrative talent from the party.
I do wonder if Jared O'Mara was such an egregious example of this that he inadvertently helped the cause of the centrists, i.e. look at the absolute shite these Momentum types foist on you.
Losing good conservative MPs bothers me too. People who are thoughtful and bright, but yer Charles Walkers are losing out to yer 30p Lees at the moment,
That was the odd thing about Corbyn. He did not insist on doctrinal purity. He might have ended up with some because so many centrists refused to serve but I'm not even sure Corbyn had much doctrine himself. John McDonnell did but he was also pragmatic so it is moot. Nor did Corbyn instigate the purge so many on the right feared and predicted. As for young Jared, he was a classic paper candidate in a hopeless seat held by Nick Clegg, Deputy PM and star of the Cleggasm.
True - he didn't, but Momentum did and he just basically let them do whatever they wanted.
The alternate timeline where John McDonnell was the leftist candidate instead of Corbyn is intriguing.
I have a degree of sympathy with Heathener’s view that 2019 is a false baseline for GE24.
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.
Yes, I think Heathener overstates the case for 2017 being the ‘true’ baseline. Every election starts with an incumbent (party, if not the same candidate). That has some effect. In addition there were people who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 (for a variety of reasons, not just Brexit). The decline of Labour in the red wall had been running for a while as demographics changed and mirrored the decline in Scotland. Scotland always voted Labour (for a decade or two at least) right up until they didn’t.
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.
Every election is different. It's like weather - trying to predict how the summer will evolve based on how similar the patterns in May are to 1976 or 2012 is a mug's game.
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.
I would not be at all surprised to see the Tories get only 26% at the GE.
They are, frankly, an absolute shower. And in denial. I met my local MP - or the one who will be under the new boundaries - recently. Nice chap. Has worked hard on local issues, some of them on a cross-party basis, and been pretty effective. Obviously keen to get to know the new area and the issues. And frustrated by national issues - though he hid it well.
But my overall impression was that they simply don't realise the level of fed-upness many voters have. In an area which is meant to be receiving Levelling Up money, which has been allocated, there are no visible results and there won't be by the time of the GE. On housing, for instance, he mentioned the various provisions in the Levelling Up Bill allowing councils to charge more to second home owners / licence AirBnBs etc but could say nothing about actually building more houses for local people. Like my daughter who is actively looking. Because the government has no plan on this.
Good local MPs like him are being undermined by the government and the national party. So where is the talent going to come from in opposition when they need to rebuild the party?
While I'm not a Labour voter, I was similarly concerned under Corybn that the requirement for doctrinal purity above such piddling things as competence and propriety would mean a hollowing out of actual administrative talent from the party.
I do wonder if Jared O'Mara was such an egregious example of this that he inadvertently helped the cause of the centrists, i.e. look at the absolute shite these Momentum types foist on you.
Losing good conservative MPs bothers me too. People who are thoughtful and bright, but yer Charles Walkers are losing out to yer 30p Lees at the moment,
I don't want a huge Labour majority because:-
1. It makes for bad arrogant government 2. It leads to complacency. The Red Wall turned to the Tories because, despite being Labour for years, Labour had done damn all for them for too long and took them for granted. I see some of that attitude returning - the idea that these voters are turning back to their natural home and so no-one need bother about their needs. There were good reasons why they turned away from Labour and toward what the Tories appeared to be selling and those reasons have not gone away. 3. We need a good effective opposition. We won't get it with a demoralised weak party in the grip of loons fighting political purity battles.
Agreed on all counts. I've been staying at my dad's for the last few days (where I grew up), and he's just a few doors down from Nick Fletcher's constituency office, pretty much the archetypal 'red wall' seat*. Labour's outlook had been allowed to drift too far from that of their core voters but had been propped up by tribal loyalty (it was a mining seat) which is in terminal decline. UKIP-lite was an easy sell, especially in places like Don Valley which had returned strong UKIP and even BNP votes.
My ideal would be a 40-50 seat Lab majority, with a decent showing by the LDs (30-40 seats) and a more thoughtful, ideologically coherent and capable* Conservative opposition. Plus a couple of Greens and a reduced SNP bloc.
*I've wittered ad nauseam about why Red Wall is a pretty useless term but I'll leave it at that.
**yeah, I know.
Interesting stuff, and it was patently obvious for a long time that too many Labour MPs / councillors were of the view that whilst things continued to decline it was the Tories fault so keep voting Labour for more decline or you get more decline with the Tories.
The challenge for all of the Red Wall Tory MPs was to deliver some actual change. Hard to do in a few years but they at least need to be able to show progress towards actual change.
Is there any sign of positive progress in the Don Valley? Or is he doomed? And more importantly are pit villages like Tickhill ever going to reinvent themselves in a post-pit world?
I have a degree of sympathy with Heathener’s view that 2019 is a false baseline for GE24.
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.
Yes, I think Heathener overstates the case for 2017 being the ‘true’ baseline. Every election starts with an incumbent (party, if not the same candidate). That has some effect. In addition there were people who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 (for a variety of reasons, not just Brexit). The decline of Labour in the red wall had been running for a while as demographics changed and mirrored the decline in Scotland. Scotland always voted Labour (for a decade or two at least) right up until they didn’t.
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.
Every election is different. It's like weather - trying to predict how the summer will evolve based on how similar the patterns in May are to 1976 or 2012 is a mug's game.
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.
I would not be at all surprised to see the Tories get only 26% at the GE.
They are, frankly, an absolute shower. And in denial. I met my local MP - or the one who will be under the new boundaries - recently. Nice chap. Has worked hard on local issues, some of them on a cross-party basis, and been pretty effective. Obviously keen to get to know the new area and the issues. And frustrated by national issues - though he hid it well.
But my overall impression was that they simply don't realise the level of fed-upness many voters have. In an area which is meant to be receiving Levelling Up money, which has been allocated, there are no visible results and there won't be by the time of the GE. On housing, for instance, he mentioned the various provisions in the Levelling Up Bill allowing councils to charge more to second home owners / licence AirBnBs etc but could say nothing about actually building more houses for local people. Like my daughter who is actively looking. Because the government has no plan on this.
Good local MPs like him are being undermined by the government and the national party. So where is the talent going to come from in opposition when they need to rebuild the party?
While I'm not a Labour voter, I was similarly concerned under Corybn that the requirement for doctrinal purity above such piddling things as competence and propriety would mean a hollowing out of actual administrative talent from the party.
I do wonder if Jared O'Mara was such an egregious example of this that he inadvertently helped the cause of the centrists, i.e. look at the absolute shite these Momentum types foist on you.
Losing good conservative MPs bothers me too. People who are thoughtful and bright, but yer Charles Walkers are losing out to yer 30p Lees at the moment,
I don't want a huge Labour majority because:-
1. It makes for bad arrogant government 2. It leads to complacency. The Red Wall turned to the Tories because, despite being Labour for years, Labour had done damn all for them for too long and took them for granted. I see some of that attitude returning - the idea that these voters are turning back to their natural home and so no-one need bother about their needs. There were good reasons why they turned away from Labour and toward what the Tories appeared to be selling and those reasons have not gone away. 3. We need a good effective opposition. We won't get it with a demoralised weak party in the grip of loons fighting political purity battles.
I would normally agree but on rare occassions it is necessary to give the governing party a shellacking rather than a slap on the wrist.
On T... The extra-parliamentary left are, sadly, utterly without influence in this country so this probably is of very little moment for the next GE. If anything, it's a slight positive for SKS.
On helicopters: all those helicopters RP and I see going to and from Aberdeen are quite safe because of the twin pillars of good science and information practices to learn from failures, and because of the diligence and training required to pilot them.
Imagine a world where car drivers had that same level professionalism. Instead that hand licences out to utter twunts like Dura.
I think my main problem with them is there are a couple of things that can go wrong that are 'almost' impossible to detect in advance and which, if they fail, can only lead to catastrophe.
Bearings and gear boxes are the main ones. They have all manner of clever detection systems now - including heat and vibration sensors, oil filter checks for micro-particles which might indicate abnormal wear and regular NDT scans. And yet if any chopper goes down the most likely cause other than human error (which in itself is rare) is gear box failures of one form or another. As is shown by the Leicester crash (and the two most recent Norway crashes, the Newfoundland S92 crash, the last Shetlands crash and all the way back to the Shetlands Chinook crash in the 80s) there are some technical failures you are not going to walk away from.
The "don't knows" coming home to the Tories is the same thing the Corbynites (including me) said before GE19. If that is what you must rely on to win you are in for a battering
I have a degree of sympathy with Heathener’s view that 2019 is a false baseline for GE24.
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.
Yes, I think Heathener overstates the case for 2017 being the ‘true’ baseline. Every election starts with an incumbent (party, if not the same candidate). That has some effect. In addition there were people who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 (for a variety of reasons, not just Brexit). The decline of Labour in the red wall had been running for a while as demographics changed and mirrored the decline in Scotland. Scotland always voted Labour (for a decade or two at least) right up until they didn’t.
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.
Every election is different. It's like weather - trying to predict how the summer will evolve based on how similar the patterns in May are to 1976 or 2012 is a mug's game.
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.
I would not be at all surprised to see the Tories get only 26% at the GE.
They are, frankly, an absolute shower. And in denial. I met my local MP - or the one who will be under the new boundaries - recently. Nice chap. Has worked hard on local issues, some of them on a cross-party basis, and been pretty effective. Obviously keen to get to know the new area and the issues. And frustrated by national issues - though he hid it well.
But my overall impression was that they simply don't realise the level of fed-upness many voters have. In an area which is meant to be receiving Levelling Up money, which has been allocated, there are no visible results and there won't be by the time of the GE. On housing, for instance, he mentioned the various provisions in the Levelling Up Bill allowing councils to charge more to second home owners / licence AirBnBs etc but could say nothing about actually building more houses for local people. Like my daughter who is actively looking. Because the government has no plan on this.
Good local MPs like him are being undermined by the government and the national party. So where is the talent going to come from in opposition when they need to rebuild the party?
While I'm not a Labour voter, I was similarly concerned under Corybn that the requirement for doctrinal purity above such piddling things as competence and propriety would mean a hollowing out of actual administrative talent from the party.
I do wonder if Jared O'Mara was such an egregious example of this that he inadvertently helped the cause of the centrists, i.e. look at the absolute shite these Momentum types foist on you.
Losing good conservative MPs bothers me too. People who are thoughtful and bright, but yer Charles Walkers are losing out to yer 30p Lees at the moment,
I don't want a huge Labour majority because:-
1. It makes for bad arrogant government 2. It leads to complacency. The Red Wall turned to the Tories because, despite being Labour for years, Labour had done damn all for them for too long and took them for granted. I see some of that attitude returning - the idea that these voters are turning back to their natural home and so no-one need bother about their needs. There were good reasons why they turned away from Labour and toward what the Tories appeared to be selling and those reasons have not gone away. 3. We need a good effective opposition. We won't get it with a demoralised weak party in the grip of loons fighting political purity battles.
I would normally agree but on rare occassions it is necessary to give the governing party a shellacking rather than a slap on the wrist.
The problem is that under FPTP the difference between a shellacking and a little slap on the wrists is just a few percentage points. It's hard to vote for one or the other.
Happy Trussmas! Likely to be the only ever Gen X Prime Minister. We really managed to change the world didn’t we?
Cameron was Gen X too, as is Starmer.
EDIT: actually Starmer is borderline Boomer depending on when you set the changeover date. Cameron is comfortably X.
It is hard for me to keep up with the named generations, especially as many use the American definitions even though our baby boom was later than theirs.
Working as I do in advertising, I hear no end of generalised horseshit about generations. It's a trigger word for me when I hear some bollocks about Gen Z 'not conforming to stereotypes' or 'wanting to make a difference to the world' - i.e. young people since forever - and I get quite cross about it, especially from people who should know better. Even more points off for 'Gen-zee' rather than 'Gen-zed'.
Confusingly, I fall between two 'generations' (X and Millennial; it depends what year you start Millennial from) neither of which I can really identify with according to their popular stereotypes.
Hopefully it ends now we've run out of letters.
Born in 1938, where does that leave the likes of me, and of course Big G? Come to that my wife was born in 1941, as was my sister. My wife and I have three children born in the sixties. I get very confused with these labels!
Incidentally, I’m also a Don’t Know; LD, Lab or Green. Definitely not Con, though.
The rather unflattering 'silent generation', I think, but honestly it's a load of guff that is best ignored.
I have a degree of sympathy with Heathener’s view that 2019 is a false baseline for GE24.
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.
Yes, I think Heathener overstates the case for 2017 being the ‘true’ baseline. Every election starts with an incumbent (party, if not the same candidate). That has some effect. In addition there were people who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 (for a variety of reasons, not just Brexit). The decline of Labour in the red wall had been running for a while as demographics changed and mirrored the decline in Scotland. Scotland always voted Labour (for a decade or two at least) right up until they didn’t.
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.
Every election is different. It's like weather - trying to predict how the summer will evolve based on how similar the patterns in May are to 1976 or 2012 is a mug's game.
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.
I would not be at all surprised to see the Tories get only 26% at the GE.
They are, frankly, an absolute shower. And in denial. I met my local MP - or the one who will be under the new boundaries - recently. Nice chap. Has worked hard on local issues, some of them on a cross-party basis, and been pretty effective. Obviously keen to get to know the new area and the issues. And frustrated by national issues - though he hid it well.
But my overall impression was that they simply don't realise the level of fed-upness many voters have. In an area which is meant to be receiving Levelling Up money, which has been allocated, there are no visible results and there won't be by the time of the GE. On housing, for instance, he mentioned the various provisions in the Levelling Up Bill allowing councils to charge more to second home owners / licence AirBnBs etc but could say nothing about actually building more houses for local people. Like my daughter who is actively looking. Because the government has no plan on this.
Good local MPs like him are being undermined by the government and the national party. So where is the talent going to come from in opposition when they need to rebuild the party?
While I'm not a Labour voter, I was similarly concerned under Corybn that the requirement for doctrinal purity above such piddling things as competence and propriety would mean a hollowing out of actual administrative talent from the party.
I do wonder if Jared O'Mara was such an egregious example of this that he inadvertently helped the cause of the centrists, i.e. look at the absolute shite these Momentum types foist on you.
Losing good conservative MPs bothers me too. People who are thoughtful and bright, but yer Charles Walkers are losing out to yer 30p Lees at the moment,
That was the odd thing about Corbyn. He did not insist on doctrinal purity. He might have ended up with some because so many centrists refused to serve but I'm not even sure Corbyn had much doctrine himself. John McDonnell did but he was also pragmatic so it is moot. Nor did Corbyn instigate the purge so many on the right feared and predicted. As for young Jared, he was a classic paper candidate in a hopeless seat held by Nick Clegg, Deputy PM and star of the Cleggasm.
True - he didn't, but Momentum did and he just basically let them do whatever they wanted.
The alternate timeline where John McDonnell was the leftist candidate instead of Corbyn is intriguing.
It is. Would McDonnell have won the leadership, even? He would have had some appeal (I personally rate him, although I don't share his politics) but I'm not sure he'd have managed the not-a-typical-politician act/reality that Corbyn managed that helped win him the election. I'm not sure he'd have looked sufficiently different to tired Cooper, smarmy Burnham, too-right Kendall and the other one for whom I can't even really think of an adjective.
(I don't dislike Cooper and Burnham, particularly - that's how they came over in the campaign to me though, not that I had a vote)
I have a degree of sympathy with Heathener’s view that 2019 is a false baseline for GE24.
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.
Yes, I think Heathener overstates the case for 2017 being the ‘true’ baseline. Every election starts with an incumbent (party, if not the same candidate). That has some effect. In addition there were people who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 (for a variety of reasons, not just Brexit). The decline of Labour in the red wall had been running for a while as demographics changed and mirrored the decline in Scotland. Scotland always voted Labour (for a decade or two at least) right up until they didn’t.
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.
Every election is different. It's like weather - trying to predict how the summer will evolve based on how similar the patterns in May are to 1976 or 2012 is a mug's game.
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.
I would not be at all surprised to see the Tories get only 26% at the GE.
They are, frankly, an absolute shower. And in denial. I met my local MP - or the one who will be under the new boundaries - recently. Nice chap. Has worked hard on local issues, some of them on a cross-party basis, and been pretty effective. Obviously keen to get to know the new area and the issues. And frustrated by national issues - though he hid it well.
But my overall impression was that they simply don't realise the level of fed-upness many voters have. In an area which is meant to be receiving Levelling Up money, which has been allocated, there are no visible results and there won't be by the time of the GE. On housing, for instance, he mentioned the various provisions in the Levelling Up Bill allowing councils to charge more to second home owners / licence AirBnBs etc but could say nothing about actually building more houses for local people. Like my daughter who is actively looking. Because the government has no plan on this.
So much this. It amazes me that a Government which has been in power for 13 years, much of which it has spent railing about the "blob", literally has no understanding of How Long Things Take. Its understanding is roughly on a par with me trying to explain to my seven-year old that the train to school leaves in 25 minutes, therefore he has to start putting his clothes on right now.
If the Government was really serious about levelling up, and about using it as a tool to retain the votes of Red Wall voters at the next election, it would have had shovels in the ground years ago. Right now there would be teams building new bare-bones stations at Swadlincote, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and Coalville ready to get passenger trains on the freight railway (the fricking track is still there and used for goodness' sake). You don't get a better and more obvious Red Wall story than "we are bringing trains back to COALVILLE. Look, it even says 'COAL' in the placename."
Instead it went through its usual time-wasting trick of requiring local authorities to make speculative bids, some of which would be funded, some of which would have to reapply to another round next year, oh, but we won't tell you when that round is going to start.
For anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating... take a look at the Levelling Up guidance for funding chessboards in parks. You literally can't make this stuff up:
Key dates to note:
22 August 2022 – formal public launch of proposals to increase access to and provision of chess facilities 4 September 2023 – EOI submission window for chess tables in parks and public spaces opens 25 September 2023 – EOI submission for chess tables in parks and public spaces deadline 2 October 2023 to 5 February 2024 – distribution of funds to LAs, and LAs to begin work to install chess tables in parks and public spaces
All this time-wasting and endless paperwork for a £2,500 grant to put a chessboard in a park. The staff cost for one successful application easily reaches £2,500 alone. It is insane.
Why is the Labour Party still using X/Twitter? Surely it's no longer acceptable for a party of the left to use such a platform.
I’d imagine Elon twitter should be no longer acceptable to any party that has screeched about antisemitism at every turn, which includes more parties than Labour.
The "don't knows" coming home to the Tories is the same thing the Corbynites (including me) said before GE19. If that is what you must rely on to win you are in for a battering
Some will return but not enough to deny Starmer a majority
The "don't knows" coming home to the Tories is the same thing the Corbynites (including me) said before GE19. If that is what you must rely on to win you are in for a battering
Some will return but not enough to deny Starmer a majority
And a lot more may go to Labour, the truth is you don't know.
Opinium's polls account for this behaviour and still have Labour winning in a landslide. So I think you are wrong at the moment.
On helicopters: all those helicopters RP and I see going to and from Aberdeen are quite safe because of the twin pillars of good science and information practices to learn from failures, and because of the diligence and training required to pilot them.
Imagine a world where car drivers had that same level professionalism. Instead that hand licences out to utter twunts like Dura.
I think my main problem with them is there are a couple of things that can go wrong that are 'almost' impossible to detect in advance and which, if they fail, can only lead to catastrophe.
Bearings and gear boxes are the main ones. They have all manner of clever detection systems now - including heat and vibration sensors, oil filter checks for micro-particles which might indicate abnormal wear and regular NDT scans. And yet if any chopper goes down the most likely cause other than human error (which in itself is rare) is gear box failures of one form or another. As is shown by the Leicester crash (and the two most recent Norway crashes, the Newfoundland S92 crash, the last Shetlands crash and all the way back to the Shetlands Chinook crash in the 80s) there are some technical failures you are not going to walk away from.
On Day 1 of the Lynx conversion they used to tell us (with a knowing smirk) that the aircraft had 10 components/subsystems that were single points of failure. I can only remember the initialisms for them so I don't want to type them all out in case viewcode has a lot on today.
Specially for @JosiasJessop and @Malmesbury - the AAIB report is now out on the fatal helicopter accident at King Power Stadium, Leicester, in 2018.
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.
In a former job, we'd receive things to run tests on as part of forensics - very high resolution x-ray and XRF imaging - from various places. Often didn't know exactly where the items were from and were not given the context, very much lab for hire kind of approach, sometimes operatives would come to run the samples. We also did some analysis in a pollution lawsuit. During my PhD I made a bit of money being the on-site rep to babysit while the samples were run (there was also a reasonably large radioactive source and a staff member had to be in place at all times when the lab was unlocked).
The "don't knows" coming home to the Tories is the same thing the Corbynites (including me) said before GE19. If that is what you must rely on to win you are in for a battering
Some will return but not enough to deny Starmer a majority
And a lot more may go to Labour, the truth is you don't know.
Opinium's polls account for this behaviour and still have Labour winning in a landslide. So I think you are wrong at the moment.
I am not sure about being wrong when I said I expect a Labour majority, just not able to be definitive on the majority though it should be a working one without any coalitions
I have a degree of sympathy with Heathener’s view that 2019 is a false baseline for GE24.
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.
Yes, I think Heathener overstates the case for 2017 being the ‘true’ baseline. Every election starts with an incumbent (party, if not the same candidate). That has some effect. In addition there were people who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 (for a variety of reasons, not just Brexit). The decline of Labour in the red wall had been running for a while as demographics changed and mirrored the decline in Scotland. Scotland always voted Labour (for a decade or two at least) right up until they didn’t.
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.
Every election is different. It's like weather - trying to predict how the summer will evolve based on how similar the patterns in May are to 1976 or 2012 is a mug's game.
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.
I would not be at all surprised to see the Tories get only 26% at the GE.
They are, frankly, an absolute shower. And in denial. I met my local MP - or the one who will be under the new boundaries - recently. Nice chap. Has worked hard on local issues, some of them on a cross-party basis, and been pretty effective. Obviously keen to get to know the new area and the issues. And frustrated by national issues - though he hid it well.
But my overall impression was that they simply don't realise the level of fed-upness many voters have. In an area which is meant to be receiving Levelling Up money, which has been allocated, there are no visible results and there won't be by the time of the GE. On housing, for instance, he mentioned the various provisions in the Levelling Up Bill allowing councils to charge more to second home owners / licence AirBnBs etc but could say nothing about actually building more houses for local people. Like my daughter who is actively looking. Because the government has no plan on this.
Good local MPs like him are being undermined by the government and the national party. So where is the talent going to come from in opposition when they need to rebuild the party?
While I'm not a Labour voter, I was similarly concerned under Corybn that the requirement for doctrinal purity above such piddling things as competence and propriety would mean a hollowing out of actual administrative talent from the party.
I do wonder if Jared O'Mara was such an egregious example of this that he inadvertently helped the cause of the centrists, i.e. look at the absolute shite these Momentum types foist on you.
Losing good conservative MPs bothers me too. People who are thoughtful and bright, but yer Charles Walkers are losing out to yer 30p Lees at the moment,
I don't want a huge Labour majority because:-
1. It makes for bad arrogant government 2. It leads to complacency. The Red Wall turned to the Tories because, despite being Labour for years, Labour had done damn all for them for too long and took them for granted. I see some of that attitude returning - the idea that these voters are turning back to their natural home and so no-one need bother about their needs. There were good reasons why they turned away from Labour and toward what the Tories appeared to be selling and those reasons have not gone away. 3. We need a good effective opposition. We won't get it with a demoralised weak party in the grip of loons fighting political purity battles.
Agreed on all counts. I've been staying at my dad's for the last few days (where I grew up), and he's just a few doors down from Nick Fletcher's constituency office, pretty much the archetypal 'red wall' seat*. Labour's outlook had been allowed to drift too far from that of their core voters but had been propped up by tribal loyalty (it was a mining seat) which is in terminal decline. UKIP-lite was an easy sell, especially in places like Don Valley which had returned strong UKIP and even BNP votes.
My ideal would be a 40-50 seat Lab majority, with a decent showing by the LDs (30-40 seats) and a more thoughtful, ideologically coherent and capable* Conservative opposition. Plus a couple of Greens and a reduced SNP bloc.
*I've wittered ad nauseam about why Red Wall is a pretty useless term but I'll leave it at that.
**yeah, I know.
Interesting stuff, and it was patently obvious for a long time that too many Labour MPs / councillors were of the view that whilst things continued to decline it was the Tories fault so keep voting Labour for more decline or you get more decline with the Tories.
The challenge for all of the Red Wall Tory MPs was to deliver some actual change. Hard to do in a few years but they at least need to be able to show progress towards actual change.
Is there any sign of positive progress in the Don Valley? Or is he doomed? And more importantly are pit villages like Tickhill ever going to reinvent themselves in a post-pit world?
TBF Tickhill is a farming village, not a pit village - though it is surrounded by them (Maltby, Yorkshire Main, in Edlington, where I went to school - Rossington, Denaby and others), and no, they aren't really reinventing themselves. Mostly just a mix of slightly desperate exurbs with high unemployment, drug problems and crap schools, and some of the nicer fringes with commuters into Donny, Rotherham and Sheffield.
To be honest, I don't really think it is possible to attain anything like the sense of shared community that a pit village had, where a single workplace defined the settlement - and the work was tough and dangerous so everyone had to stick together.
The "don't knows" coming home to the Tories is the same thing the Corbynites (including me) said before GE19. If that is what you must rely on to win you are in for a battering
Some will return but not enough to deny Starmer a majority
And a lot more may go to Labour, the truth is you don't know.
Opinium's polls account for this behaviour and still have Labour winning in a landslide. So I think you are wrong at the moment.
I am not sure about being wrong when I said I expect a Labour majority, just not able to be definitive on the majority though it should be a working one without any coalitions
Why is the Labour Party still using X/Twitter? Surely it's no longer acceptable for a party of the left to use such a platform.
I’d imagine Elon twitter should be no longer acceptable to any party that has screeched about antisemitism at every turn, which includes more parties than Labour.
Sure that's fair. It just seem incougrous to me that parties are campaigning on a platform that is increasingly filling up with content that they oppose. If Musk now picking a fight with the ADL — for keeping track of the far-right rubbish on Twitter — isn't a big enough sign that Twitter is a lost cause I don't know what is.
The "don't knows" coming home to the Tories is the same thing the Corbynites (including me) said before GE19. If that is what you must rely on to win you are in for a battering
Some will return but not enough to deny Starmer a majority
And a lot more may go to Labour, the truth is you don't know.
Opinium's polls account for this behaviour and still have Labour winning in a landslide. So I think you are wrong at the moment.
Thing is opinion polls are just that. I have long contended that most people pay little or no attention to politics. We on PB are different to other people. We would be able to identify members of the shadow cabinet - most would struggle to get more than Starmer.
How people vote in the booth on the day is not the same as how a set of people respond in a poll. In every election the opinion polls are wrong. That one or two will match up to the result is simply scatter.
We all have a gut feel about what is going to happen. Mine is a comfortable Labour majority, but I would not be stunned by a 100+ Labour majority, or a need for a coalition (probably with a slightly recovered Lib Dems). but I don't KNOW this will happen.
Most people start to pay attention to politics when the election looms.
I have a degree of sympathy with Heathener’s view that 2019 is a false baseline for GE24.
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.
Yes, I think Heathener overstates the case for 2017 being the ‘true’ baseline. Every election starts with an incumbent (party, if not the same candidate). That has some effect. In addition there were people who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 (for a variety of reasons, not just Brexit). The decline of Labour in the red wall had been running for a while as demographics changed and mirrored the decline in Scotland. Scotland always voted Labour (for a decade or two at least) right up until they didn’t.
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.
Every election is different. It's like weather - trying to predict how the summer will evolve based on how similar the patterns in May are to 1976 or 2012 is a mug's game.
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.
I would not be at all surprised to see the Tories get only 26% at the GE.
They are, frankly, an absolute shower. And in denial. I met my local MP - or the one who will be under the new boundaries - recently. Nice chap. Has worked hard on local issues, some of them on a cross-party basis, and been pretty effective. Obviously keen to get to know the new area and the issues. And frustrated by national issues - though he hid it well.
But my overall impression was that they simply don't realise the level of fed-upness many voters have. In an area which is meant to be receiving Levelling Up money, which has been allocated, there are no visible results and there won't be by the time of the GE. On housing, for instance, he mentioned the various provisions in the Levelling Up Bill allowing councils to charge more to second home owners / licence AirBnBs etc but could say nothing about actually building more houses for local people. Like my daughter who is actively looking. Because the government has no plan on this.
So much this. It amazes me that a Government which has been in power for 13 years, much of which it has spent railing about the "blob", literally has no understanding of How Long Things Take. Its understanding is roughly on a par with me trying to explain to my seven-year old that the train to school leaves in 25 minutes, therefore he has to start putting his clothes on right now.
If the Government was really serious about levelling up, and about using it as a tool to retain the votes of Red Wall voters at the next election, it would have had shovels in the ground years ago. Right now there would be teams building new bare-bones stations at Swadlincote, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and Coalville ready to get passenger trains on the freight railway (the fricking track is still there and used for goodness' sake). You don't get a better and more obvious Red Wall story than "we are bringing trains back to COALVILLE. Look, it even says 'COAL' in the placename."
Instead it went through its usual time-wasting trick of requiring local authorities to make speculative bids, some of which would be funded, some of which would have to reapply to another round next year, oh, but we won't tell you when that round is going to start.
For anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating... take a look at the Levelling Up guidance for funding chessboards in parks. You literally can't make this stuff up:
Key dates to note:
22 August 2022 – formal public launch of proposals to increase access to and provision of chess facilities 4 September 2023 – EOI submission window for chess tables in parks and public spaces opens 25 September 2023 – EOI submission for chess tables in parks and public spaces deadline 2 October 2023 to 5 February 2024 – distribution of funds to LAs, and LAs to begin work to install chess tables in parks and public spaces
All this time-wasting and endless paperwork for a £2,500 grant to put a chessboard in a park. The staff cost for one successful application easily reaches £2,500 alone. It is insane.
Coalville may have 'coal' in the name, but it also has 'ville', which sounds suspiciously foreign, French even
On-topic, it does sound inefficient. Sounds like research funding, in fact (but there the model makes more sense, as there will be good proposals that the funder doesn't have on their radar).
For the chess faclities, you surely: - have a one minute application for chess boards - order as many of these as you can fund and have interest for, all the same - distribute, with some fixed amount of money to set them up, too (you'd think sending a few table-top chess sets to every school along with some online resources for setting up clubs, learning chess etc would make more sense - if indeed chess should be any kind of priority anyway)
Doesn’t suggest the software was the best ever written..,
Yes, I wondered about that.
Is the plane with the problematic flight plan in the air at this point? Surely not. But if not, don't you just refuse permission for that plane to take off and that resolves the error? Or maybe there's more to it - I should read the report/someone on here will explain it in words of one syllable.
Obviously failing (and clearly failing/shutting down) when the data makes no sense is the right thing if you get to that point, but there should be a way to resolve that for flights not yet in the air, otherwise the system looks very vulnerable - e.g. you have a separate system that pre-screens the flight plans for nonsense before entering the main system?
Most agreeable. Hasn’t got quite the exquisite prettiness of Ludlow, but it is a fine and handsome English county town. Near completely unspoiled in the middle. Again one sobs for all the towns we DID despoil
Centre feels prosperous and even chic in places. The magnificent loop of the River Severn is, however, somewhat marred by the obvious pollution. Yuk
I have a degree of sympathy with Heathener’s view that 2019 is a false baseline for GE24.
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.
Yes, I think Heathener overstates the case for 2017 being the ‘true’ baseline. Every election starts with an incumbent (party, if not the same candidate). That has some effect. In addition there were people who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 (for a variety of reasons, not just Brexit). The decline of Labour in the red wall had been running for a while as demographics changed and mirrored the decline in Scotland. Scotland always voted Labour (for a decade or two at least) right up until they didn’t.
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.
Every election is different. It's like weather - trying to predict how the summer will evolve based on how similar the patterns in May are to 1976 or 2012 is a mug's game.
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.
I would not be at all surprised to see the Tories get only 26% at the GE.
They are, frankly, an absolute shower. And in denial. I met my local MP - or the one who will be under the new boundaries - recently. Nice chap. Has worked hard on local issues, some of them on a cross-party basis, and been pretty effective. Obviously keen to get to know the new area and the issues. And frustrated by national issues - though he hid it well.
But my overall impression was that they simply don't realise the level of fed-upness many voters have. In an area which is meant to be receiving Levelling Up money, which has been allocated, there are no visible results and there won't be by the time of the GE. On housing, for instance, he mentioned the various provisions in the Levelling Up Bill allowing councils to charge more to second home owners / licence AirBnBs etc but could say nothing about actually building more houses for local people. Like my daughter who is actively looking. Because the government has no plan on this.
So much this. It amazes me that a Government which has been in power for 13 years, much of which it has spent railing about the "blob", literally has no understanding of How Long Things Take. Its understanding is roughly on a par with me trying to explain to my seven-year old that the train to school leaves in 25 minutes, therefore he has to start putting his clothes on right now.
If the Government was really serious about levelling up, and about using it as a tool to retain the votes of Red Wall voters at the next election, it would have had shovels in the ground years ago. Right now there would be teams building new bare-bones stations at Swadlincote, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and Coalville ready to get passenger trains on the freight railway (the fricking track is still there and used for goodness' sake). You don't get a better and more obvious Red Wall story than "we are bringing trains back to COALVILLE. Look, it even says 'COAL' in the placename."
Instead it went through its usual time-wasting trick of requiring local authorities to make speculative bids, some of which would be funded, some of which would have to reapply to another round next year, oh, but we won't tell you when that round is going to start.
For anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating... take a look at the Levelling Up guidance for funding chessboards in parks. You literally can't make this stuff up:
Key dates to note:
22 August 2022 – formal public launch of proposals to increase access to and provision of chess facilities 4 September 2023 – EOI submission window for chess tables in parks and public spaces opens 25 September 2023 – EOI submission for chess tables in parks and public spaces deadline 2 October 2023 to 5 February 2024 – distribution of funds to LAs, and LAs to begin work to install chess tables in parks and public spaces
All this time-wasting and endless paperwork for a £2,500 grant to put a chessboard in a park. The staff cost for one successful application easily reaches £2,500 alone. It is insane.
Coalville may have 'coal' in the name, but it also has 'ville', which sounds suspiciously foreign, French even
On-topic, it does sound inefficient. Sounds like research funding, in fact (but there the model makes more sense, as there will be good proposals that the funder doesn't have on their radar).
For the chess faclities, you surely: - have a one minute application for chess boards - order as many of these as you can fund and have interest for, all the same - distribute, with some fixed amount of money to set them up, too (you'd think sending a few table-top chess sets to every school along with some online resources for setting up clubs, learning chess etc would make more sense - if indeed chess should be any kind of priority anyway)
It's been known as Coalhole as long as I can remember. I did a short stint at the fire station there many years ago. It lived up (or down) to its nickname.
The "don't knows" coming home to the Tories is the same thing the Corbynites (including me) said before GE19. If that is what you must rely on to win you are in for a battering
Some will return but not enough to deny Starmer a majority
And a lot more may go to Labour, the truth is you don't know.
Opinium's polls account for this behaviour and still have Labour winning in a landslide. So I think you are wrong at the moment.
Thing is opinion polls are just that. I have long contended that most people pay little or no attention to politics. We on PB are different to other people. We would be able to identify members of the shadow cabinet - most would struggle to get more than Starmer.
How people vote in the booth on the day is not the same as how a set of people respond in a poll. In every election the opinion polls are wrong. That one or two will match up to the result is simply scatter.
We all have a gut feel about what is going to happen. Mine is a comfortable Labour majority, but I would not be stunned by a 100+ Labour majority, or a need for a coalition (probably with a slightly recovered Lib Dems). but I don't KNOW this will happen.
Most people start to pay attention to politics when the election looms.
Interestingly yesterday I was looking at the reshuffled Labour Shadow cabinet and then the actual Cabinet on the parliament website, and I reckon I knew more of the Labour positions than I did government ones. The constant reshuffling by Sunak means whilst we may know who people like Shapps or Barclay are, we don't necessarily know what their current job is.
I think most educated voters would struggle correctly to name anyone in the correct cabinet post beyond Sunak, Hunt and Braverman. Possibly Gove and Badenoch. Shadow cabinet wise probably Starmer, Streeting and Reeves. possibly Cooper.
I know some people here would like to forget that they thought Liz Truss would be good and I distinctly remember the "Starmer is being given a run for his money" from a couple of people.
It was plainly obvious she'd be terrible and she was. Good riddance.
Most agreeable. Hasn’t got quite the exquisite prettiness of Ludlow, but it is a fine and handsome English county town. Near completely unspoiled in the middle. Again one sobs for all the towns we DID despoil
Centre feels prosperous and even chic in places. The magnificent loop of the River Severn is, however, somewhat marred by the obvious pollution. Yuk
I noted your comments (yesterday?) contrasting the glorious trip you are having and the sad state of Britain. I think that the narrative of decline has seized the commentariat (both the media and on PB) and while there is much that is wrong, there is also another Britain out there. Sunak's problem is that he cannot change the narrative.
I have a degree of sympathy with Heathener’s view that 2019 is a false baseline for GE24.
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.
Yes, I think Heathener overstates the case for 2017 being the ‘true’ baseline. Every election starts with an incumbent (party, if not the same candidate). That has some effect. In addition there were people who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 (for a variety of reasons, not just Brexit). The decline of Labour in the red wall had been running for a while as demographics changed and mirrored the decline in Scotland. Scotland always voted Labour (for a decade or two at least) right up until they didn’t.
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.
It all depends on what you mean by a baseline. My GE baseline is what happened last time there was a GE, which has the merit of simplicity.
What else do you want out of a 'baseline'?
If you want some sort of normality, don't bother, there is no such thing. If you want the last time there was a GE that wasn't weird, don't bother, the are all unique and strange.
As Heraclitus points out:
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
The "don't knows" coming home to the Tories is the same thing the Corbynites (including me) said before GE19. If that is what you must rely on to win you are in for a battering
Some will return but not enough to deny Starmer a majority
And a lot more may go to Labour, the truth is you don't know.
Opinium's polls account for this behaviour and still have Labour winning in a landslide. So I think you are wrong at the moment.
Thing is opinion polls are just that. I have long contended that most people pay little or no attention to politics. We on PB are different to other people. We would be able to identify members of the shadow cabinet - most would struggle to get more than Starmer.
How people vote in the booth on the day is not the same as how a set of people respond in a poll. In every election the opinion polls are wrong. That one or two will match up to the result is simply scatter.
We all have a gut feel about what is going to happen. Mine is a comfortable Labour majority, but I would not be stunned by a 100+ Labour majority, or a need for a coalition (probably with a slightly recovered Lib Dems). but I don't KNOW this will happen.
Most people start to pay attention to politics when the election looms.
Interestingly yesterday I was looking at the reshuffled Labour Shadow cabinet and then the actual Cabinet on the parliament website, and I reckon I knew more of the Labour positions than I did government ones. The constant reshuffling by Sunak means whilst we may know who people like Shapps or Barclay are, we don't necessarily know what their current job is.
I think most educated voters would struggle correctly to name anyone in the correct cabinet post beyond Sunak, Hunt and Braverman. Possibly Gove and Badenoch. Shadow cabinet wise probably Starmer, Streeting and Reeves. possibly Cooper.
And thats the educated ones, think of the masses...
PB is a fascinating place, and I spend too much time here for sure, but the insights from a variety of expects in diverse fields is astonishing. But for me, one the harder challenges, is for PBers to understand the mindset of those with no interest in politics. And yet it is these people who decide elections.
Most agreeable. Hasn’t got quite the exquisite prettiness of Ludlow, but it is a fine and handsome English county town. Near completely unspoiled in the middle. Again one sobs for all the towns we DID despoil
Centre feels prosperous and even chic in places. The magnificent loop of the River Severn is, however, somewhat marred by the obvious pollution. Yuk
Haven’t been there but it made a very pretty stand-in for Victorian London in the film of A Christmas Carol with George C Scott.
Most agreeable. Hasn’t got quite the exquisite prettiness of Ludlow, but it is a fine and handsome English county town. Near completely unspoiled in the middle. Again one sobs for all the towns we DID despoil
Centre feels prosperous and even chic in places. The magnificent loop of the River Severn is, however, somewhat marred by the obvious pollution. Yuk
An ex girlfriend of mine (who was from Durham) described Shrewsbury as 'like a less bad version of Durham'. Which is pretty high praise, albeit expressed slightly idiosyncratically.
It might be the hottest day of the year today at a mere 32C. Last year a 40C+ was recorded in July. Can we dig out the 'New Ice Age Looming' headlines from the 1970s?
Most agreeable. Hasn’t got quite the exquisite prettiness of Ludlow, but it is a fine and handsome English county town. Near completely unspoiled in the middle. Again one sobs for all the towns we DID despoil
Centre feels prosperous and even chic in places. The magnificent loop of the River Severn is, however, somewhat marred by the obvious pollution. Yuk
I noted your comments (yesterday?) contrasting the glorious trip you are having and the sad state of Britain. I think that the narrative of decline has seized the commentariat (both the media and on PB) and while there is much that is wrong, there is also another Britain out there. Sunak's problem is that he cannot change the narrative.
He could head off on a two week tour doing a big loop around Birmingham and forcing all the Westminster journalists to get a different perspective.
Its a glorious idea. Stop Starmer becoming Prime Minister so that we can keep Sunak. The crank left are hardened Tories - unless they can have True Socialism they want the Tories.
Remember that Jezbollah voted with the Tories against the Labour government literally hundreds and hundreds of times.
Genuinely does anyone think they are relevant?
Well not any more. But a few years ago...?
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.
I've known quite a variety of the far left for obvious reasons, and that's not always quite true (maybe not quite true for the super-Brexiteers either). There's a school of thought, not entirely wrong, that democracy moves within a narrow range of "acceptable" economic policies which leaves maybe 20% of the population in desperate straits, and if you espouse anything beyond that you get slaughtered by the tycoon-owned media and the markets. They dislike centrists like Starmer because they think centrists give a false hope of change when actually they're seen by them as just moving the chairs around on the Titanic. Those of an inflammatory temperament conclude that the moderate left are hateful and only revolution or something like it will really change things for people on the margins of society, and then they get angry that it's not happening. It's not sensible (because you can't altogether ignore the markets and you can't build a left-wing government or indeed a revolution on tiny minority support) but it's not especially self-centred.
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 how I feel. I miss the radicalism of the Corbyn era but SKS is playing a blinder on the 'winning the election' front and I'm happy to get behind him because, oh god, we really do have to win this time. This takes priority for me. I want to see the end of Tory (mis)rule more than I want the buzz of being in a party fully aligned with my opinions. My opinions might be bollox, for one thing, but one of them definitely isn't - the one that says a Labour government under Starmer will be far better on every level than anything on offer from these Tories. We have to win. So let's drop the self-indulgence and make it happen.
Perhaps I'm more of a liberal/meritocrat/social democrat than socialist, but I didn't get that excited about Corbyn's version of Labour. Not just because I thought people wouldn't vote for it (wrongly in 2017, all too rightly in 2019), but because I thought he was mostly offering statist kinds of solutions that I didn't think would actually work. People respond to incentives and self interest as well as (and more than) to altruistic and collective impulses. You can't just keep taxing people more and handing out money and telling people what to do. So if we're ditching that I'm not too upset. What does worry me is that Starmer will be too timid to do anything at all. IMHO there are some big wins to be had from making bold changes in things like housing/planning, infrastructure, education, drugs policy and our economic relationship with the EU, which I don't see as particularly left/right but more just common sense reforms to deliver a more prosperous, more equal and happier country. If Starmer can't make any bold changes then that will be a lost opportunity. On the other hand, the key thing must be getting the current lot out.
Doesn’t suggest the software was the best ever written..,
Yes, I wondered about that.
Is the plane with the problematic flight plan in the air at this point? Surely not. But if not, don't you just refuse permission for that plane to take off and that resolves the error? Or maybe there's more to it - I should read the report/someone on here will explain it in words of one syllable.
Obviously failing (and clearly failing/shutting down) when the data makes no sense is the right thing if you get to that point, but there should be a way to resolve that for flights not yet in the air, otherwise the system looks very vulnerable - e.g. you have a separate system that pre-screens the flight plans for nonsense before entering the main system?
The only reason to fail as it has is surely if the plane is already in the air, and the flight plan is being passed to UK control from elsewhere, which I would have thought is itself stupid as surely you have to clear the complete flight plan with all applicable ATC, not just in stages.
It seems very odd that an individual flight plan can result in the system halting rather than simply rejecting the flight plan as malformed for having a duplicated name. I would have thought that parsing then tokenizing and counting names/IDs would be a basic part of processing such a plan.
Doesn’t suggest the software was the best ever written..,
Yes, I wondered about that.
Is the plane with the problematic flight plan in the air at this point? Surely not. But if not, don't you just refuse permission for that plane to take off and that resolves the error? Or maybe there's more to it - I should read the report/someone on here will explain it in words of one syllable.
Obviously failing (and clearly failing/shutting down) when the data makes no sense is the right thing if you get to that point, but there should be a way to resolve that for flights not yet in the air, otherwise the system looks very vulnerable - e.g. you have a separate system that pre-screens the flight plans for nonsense before entering the main system?
I think this document gives you chapter and verse on Flight Plans…
A quick read suggests that the system should identify data errors in flight plan submissions and ensure they are corrected before the plan is forwarded… presumably the error in question was not one that anyone had ever envisaged… even so, unforeseen errors for one flight which is most likely to have still been on the ground, probably shouldn’t cause a total system shutdown for safety reasons
That was the odd thing about Corbyn. He did not insist on doctrinal purity. He might have ended up with some because so many centrists refused to serve but I'm not even sure Corbyn had much doctrine himself. John McDonnell did but he was also pragmatic so it is moot. Nor did Corbyn instigate the purge so many on the right feared and predicted. As for young Jared, he was a classic paper candidate in a hopeless seat held by Nick Clegg, Deputy PM and star of the Cleggasm.
Yes, some here have a generic view of Corbyn, McDonnell and the far left which doesn't correspond with reality. Arguably it doesn't matter since both of them are now clearly marginal and approaching retirement, though Corbyn may have one more go at something, probably Islington North. But an important thing about the Corbyn period is that he was personally opposed to ruthless party management, and thought he could manage by persuasion and inclusion. Many in Momentum were convinced he was indulging centrists who would knife him when the opportunity arose, and think that's just what happened.
That, too, is not the whole story. There were plenty of centrists who were willing to give him a shot, but who revolted when the project seemed to be foundering. Whether that doomed him between 2017 and 2019 or whether it was the equivocal initial response to Salisbury or the dodgy people who he's shared a platform with is debatable - clearly he made mistakes, but all leaders get stuff thrown at them which isn't particularly fair, and alternative scenarios where Burnham or McDonnell or anyone else had led the party in 2019 implicitly assume mistakenly that they'd have had an easier ride. I think Boris had a winning hand in 2019, regardless - the "Get Brexit done" mantra simply had majority support, from people who liked Brexit to people who were just bored with it.
One of Starmer's strengths, incidentally, is that he is good at simply shrugging off the sillier attacks (the attempt to portray him as being soft on Savile, for example). That Teflon quality is quite rare.
All this time-wasting and endless paperwork for a £2,500 grant to put a chessboard in a park. The staff cost for one successful application easily reaches £2,500 alone. It is insane.
There are only 85 eligible local authorities for this as part of the Levelling Up Parks Fund - basically it's a list of the 85 worst urban sh1tholes in England.*
It's all perfectly laudable that a government might want to give them a bit of a helping hand to bring them up to the standard of most localities. But why drip feed it in a weird and bureaucratic way? Why not just say "we'll give £X a year over the next five years of ring-fenced additional funding for capital projects to improve parks in these 85 places - we'll expect an audit trail and an annual statement of where it's been spent so we know it's not been misused but you're the people on the ground who are best placed to know the community's needs".
That way, Councils can plan properly, aren't waiting for a man in Whitehall to sign off on every tiny thing, and can do chessboards in parks if they want, or trees, or paddling pools or whatever it is people want to see within the broad remit of parks. The micromanagement is crazy.
* I say urban sh1tholes but, as ever when you create a metric, there are some weird ones on the list - Kensington & Chelsea is there, and places like Norwich which I don't think of as a particularly grim concrete jungle.
In hindsight I think it was good that Johnson won GE19 and got Brexit out of the way as an issue despite negotiating a truly awful deal but everything after that has been a disaster.
Most agreeable. Hasn’t got quite the exquisite prettiness of Ludlow, but it is a fine and handsome English county town. Near completely unspoiled in the middle. Again one sobs for all the towns we DID despoil
Centre feels prosperous and even chic in places. The magnificent loop of the River Severn is, however, somewhat marred by the obvious pollution. Yuk
I'd initially thought that the pollution thing was a bit overblown and probably a small localised issue.
Then we went boating on the River Thames this summer. At one point I had to lean down to clear some weed off the propeller, which meant my face was pretty near the water.
The river absolutely stank of sewage. And this was deepest rural Oxfordshire. Honestly, the urban Birmingham canals with two centuries of pollution in them smell better.
Most agreeable. Hasn’t got quite the exquisite prettiness of Ludlow, but it is a fine and handsome English county town. Near completely unspoiled in the middle. Again one sobs for all the towns we DID despoil
Centre feels prosperous and even chic in places. The magnificent loop of the River Severn is, however, somewhat marred by the obvious pollution. Yuk
An ex girlfriend of mine (who was from Durham) described Shrewsbury as 'like a less bad version of Durham'. Which is pretty high praise, albeit expressed slightly idiosyncratically.
Durham is one of the places with magical geographical and townscape qualities, along with few others. No straight lines and alternative routes to and from all places for pedestrians on account of the elliptical river.
As a pedestrian paradise it is up with London's square mile, York, Stamford and Oxford.
Oh, here's Rimmer with his slide show. For fuck's sake.
The endless fucking tedious photos of nothing in particular remind me of that episode of One Foot In The Grave where Ronnie and Mildred come round with a slide show of their caravan holiday.
On helicopters: all those helicopters RP and I see going to and from Aberdeen are quite safe because of the twin pillars of good science and information practices to learn from failures, and because of the diligence and training required to pilot them.
Imagine a world where car drivers had that same level professionalism. Instead that hand licences out to utter twunts like Dura.
tbf, Dura drove fighter jets off big boats for a living so he must have had some training.
Too much training perhaps, since he apparently drives like he's in a fighter jet.
Damon Hill, when asked about the performance of some supercar or other, replied that everything is sluggish compared to Formula One. This is probably the same, only more so.
That was the odd thing about Corbyn. He did not insist on doctrinal purity. He might have ended up with some because so many centrists refused to serve but I'm not even sure Corbyn had much doctrine himself. John McDonnell did but he was also pragmatic so it is moot. Nor did Corbyn instigate the purge so many on the right feared and predicted. As for young Jared, he was a classic paper candidate in a hopeless seat held by Nick Clegg, Deputy PM and star of the Cleggasm.
Yes, some here have a generic view of Corbyn, McDonnell and the far left which doesn't correspond with reality. Arguably it doesn't matter since both of them are now clearly marginal and approaching retirement, though Corbyn may have one more go at something, probably Islington North. But an important thing about the Corbyn period is that he was personally opposed to ruthless party management, and thought he could manage by persuasion and inclusion. Many in Momentum were convinced he was indulging centrists who would knife him when the opportunity arose, and think that's just what happened.
That, too, is not the whole story. There were plenty of centrists who were willing to give him a shot, but who revolted when the project seemed to be foundering. Whether that doomed him between 2017 and 2019 or whether it was the equivocal initial response to Salisbury or the dodgy people who he's shared a platform with is debatable - clearly he made mistakes, but all leaders get stuff thrown at them which isn't particularly fair, and alternative scenarios where Burnham or McDonnell or anyone else had led the party in 2019 implicitly assume mistakenly that they'd have had an easier ride. I think Boris had a winning hand in 2019, regardless - the "Get Brexit done" mantra simply had majority support, from people who liked Brexit to people who were just bored with it.
One of Starmer's strengths, incidentally, is that he is good at simply shrugging off the sillier attacks (the attempt to portray him as being soft on Savile, for example). That Teflon quality is quite rare.
Interesting thoughts on Corbyn, and you'd have a better idea of the man's "big tent" personal instincts of course.
Although wouldn't another take be that he was just being realistic on this point? If he'd been exclusive in the way Momentum headbangers might have wanted, he'd literally not be able to fill the front bench, and would even have risked a proper split (100+ MPs rather than the 28 of the SDP or half dozen of Change UK).
I wonder what you think of McDonnell in all this? Whilst I can kind of buy into the story that Corbyn's personal instinct was NOT to be ruthless and let a thousand flowers bloom in the Labour Party, I find that harder to believe with McDonnell. Was he not a pretty ruthless guy, who was also realistic about how far he could push it? Similarly, but more so, Seamus Milne?
Maybe I'm being unfair and they are lovely guys who regret to this day the terrible misunderstandings with Luciana Berger etc.
On topic, the Hard Left has always been the strategic enemy of the Soft Left, just as the Hard Right has always been the strategic enemy of the Soft Right.
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.
If we had PR of course the hard right would have its own party and about 10-20% of MPs as would the hard left.
Only FPTP keeps the hard right in the Conservatives and the hard left in Labour
Aaron Lijphart’s seminal work on this suggested that, yes, there is a link between voting system used and the number of (serious) political parties, but it’s weak. A move from FPTP to a more proportional (and/or ordinal) system would make it somewhat more likely that the hard right/left split, but it wouldn’t be an inevitability by any means.
We see big, ‘broad church’ parties under PR and we see hard right/left splitters under FPTP. The ANC in South Africa is this very broad party, but it’s remained together despite the country using PR. The Japanese Liberal Democrats are a broad party despite a semi-PR system. Ireland was a long dominated by two very broad church parties, FF and FG, despite using STV, a form of PR.
Meanwhile, the UK, with FPTP, has lots of small parties in Parliament. 10 parties won seats at the last general election (and an 11th was close). In 1950, it was just 4 parties (and one independent). Our voting system is basically the same, yet over twice as many parties are winning seats. Other factors impact on how many parties there are. Meanwhile, Finland in 2011 only elected 9 different parties, so they have a PR system but fewer parties winning seats.
Rishi's sixth question rant is ill-judged and sounds like it was written for Boris with its call-response cadence. If the Tories are to have a chance, someone should tell CCHQ there has been a change of leader.
On topic, the Hard Left has always been the strategic enemy of the Soft Left, just as the Hard Right has always been the strategic enemy of the Soft Right.
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.
If we had PR of course the hard right would have its own party and about 10-20% of MPs as would the hard left.
Only FPTP keeps the hard right in the Conservatives and the hard left in Labour
I don't like PR, but it does encourage a rallying around against that which you like least. I think hard left, hard right, or hard LD nonsense become less likely.
However there is a huge concern about any system where anyone can be elected on the votes of their chums - so definitely list systems should be excluded.
All this time-wasting and endless paperwork for a £2,500 grant to put a chessboard in a park. The staff cost for one successful application easily reaches £2,500 alone. It is insane.
There are only 85 eligible local authorities for this as part of the Levelling Up Parks Fund - basically it's a list of the 85 worst urban sh1tholes in England.*
It's all perfectly laudable that a government might want to give them a bit of a helping hand to bring them up to the standard of most localities. But why drip feed it in a weird and bureaucratic way? Why not just say "we'll give £X a year over the next five years of ring-fenced additional funding for capital projects to improve parks in these 85 places - we'll expect an audit trail and an annual statement of where it's been spent so we know it's not been misused but you're the people on the ground who are best placed to know the community's needs".
That way, Councils can plan properly, aren't waiting for a man in Whitehall to sign off on every tiny thing, and can do chessboards in parks if they want, or trees, or paddling pools or whatever it is people want to see within the broad remit of parks. The micromanagement is crazy.
* I say urban sh1tholes but, as ever when you create a metric, there are some weird ones on the list - Kensington & Chelsea is there, and places like Norwich which I don't think of as a particularly grim concrete jungle.
Kensington & Chelsea must have been judged on the sh*thole management of the streets :smile. People only go there to get out of the other side as quickly as possible.
Am I correct these are coffee table chess sets and a picnic table, rather than (as I was expecting) human sized ones on a chess board you walk around?
On topic, the Hard Left has always been the strategic enemy of the Soft Left, just as the Hard Right has always been the strategic enemy of the Soft Right.
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.
If we had PR of course the hard right would have its own party and about 10-20% of MPs as would the hard left.
Only FPTP keeps the hard right in the Conservatives and the hard left in Labour
I don't like PR, but it does encourage a rallying around against that which you like least. I think hard left, hard right, or hard LD nonsense become less likely.
However there is a huge concern about any system where anyone can be elected on the votes of their chums - so definitely list systems should be excluded.
FPTP seems like the least worst option.
FPTP is one of the reasons we are in such a mess. Scrap it.
I have a degree of sympathy with Heathener’s view that 2019 is a false baseline for GE24.
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.
Yes, I think Heathener overstates the case for 2017 being the ‘true’ baseline. Every election starts with an incumbent (party, if not the same candidate). That has some effect. In addition there were people who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 (for a variety of reasons, not just Brexit). The decline of Labour in the red wall had been running for a while as demographics changed and mirrored the decline in Scotland. Scotland always voted Labour (for a decade or two at least) right up until they didn’t.
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.
Every election is different. It's like weather - trying to predict how the summer will evolve based on how similar the patterns in May are to 1976 or 2012 is a mug's game.
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.
I would not be at all surprised to see the Tories get only 26% at the GE.
They are, frankly, an absolute shower. And in denial. I met my local MP - or the one who will be under the new boundaries - recently. Nice chap. Has worked hard on local issues, some of them on a cross-party basis, and been pretty effective. Obviously keen to get to know the new area and the issues. And frustrated by national issues - though he hid it well.
But my overall impression was that they simply don't realise the level of fed-upness many voters have. In an area which is meant to be receiving Levelling Up money, which has been allocated, there are no visible results and there won't be by the time of the GE. On housing, for instance, he mentioned the various provisions in the Levelling Up Bill allowing councils to charge more to second home owners / licence AirBnBs etc but could say nothing about actually building more houses for local people. Like my daughter who is actively looking. Because the government has no plan on this.
So much this. It amazes me that a Government which has been in power for 13 years, much of which it has spent railing about the "blob", literally has no understanding of How Long Things Take. Its understanding is roughly on a par with me trying to explain to my seven-year old that the train to school leaves in 25 minutes, therefore he has to start putting his clothes on right now.
If the Government was really serious about levelling up, and about using it as a tool to retain the votes of Red Wall voters at the next election, it would have had shovels in the ground years ago. Right now there would be teams building new bare-bones stations at Swadlincote, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and Coalville ready to get passenger trains on the freight railway (the fricking track is still there and used for goodness' sake). You don't get a better and more obvious Red Wall story than "we are bringing trains back to COALVILLE. Look, it even says 'COAL' in the placename."
Instead it went through its usual time-wasting trick of requiring local authorities to make speculative bids, some of which would be funded, some of which would have to reapply to another round next year, oh, but we won't tell you when that round is going to start.
For anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating... take a look at the Levelling Up guidance for funding chessboards in parks. You literally can't make this stuff up:
Key dates to note:
22 August 2022 – formal public launch of proposals to increase access to and provision of chess facilities 4 September 2023 – EOI submission window for chess tables in parks and public spaces opens 25 September 2023 – EOI submission for chess tables in parks and public spaces deadline 2 October 2023 to 5 February 2024 – distribution of funds to LAs, and LAs to begin work to install chess tables in parks and public spaces
All this time-wasting and endless paperwork for a £2,500 grant to put a chessboard in a park. The staff cost for one successful application easily reaches £2,500 alone. It is insane.
On topic, the Hard Left has always been the strategic enemy of the Soft Left, just as the Hard Right has always been the strategic enemy of the Soft Right.
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.
If we had PR of course the hard right would have its own party and about 10-20% of MPs as would the hard left.
Only FPTP keeps the hard right in the Conservatives and the hard left in Labour
I don't like PR, but it does encourage a rallying around against that which you like least. I think hard left, hard right, or hard LD nonsense become less likely.
However there is a huge concern about any system where anyone can be elected on the votes of their chums - so definitely list systems should be excluded.
FPTP seems like the least worst option.
Hard LD? What's that, Paddy Ashdown ex-SBS?
Or maybe cancelling Brexit without a referendum is hard LD nonsense? If so, I'm with you there.
That was the odd thing about Corbyn. He did not insist on doctrinal purity. He might have ended up with some because so many centrists refused to serve but I'm not even sure Corbyn had much doctrine himself. John McDonnell did but he was also pragmatic so it is moot. Nor did Corbyn instigate the purge so many on the right feared and predicted. As for young Jared, he was a classic paper candidate in a hopeless seat held by Nick Clegg, Deputy PM and star of the Cleggasm.
Yes, some here have a generic view of Corbyn, McDonnell and the far left which doesn't correspond with reality. Arguably it doesn't matter since both of them are now clearly marginal and approaching retirement, though Corbyn may have one more go at something, probably Islington North. But an important thing about the Corbyn period is that he was personally opposed to ruthless party management, and thought he could manage by persuasion and inclusion. Many in Momentum were convinced he was indulging centrists who would knife him when the opportunity arose, and think that's just what happened.
That, too, is not the whole story. There were plenty of centrists who were willing to give him a shot, but who revolted when the project seemed to be foundering. Whether that doomed him between 2017 and 2019 or whether it was the equivocal initial response to Salisbury or the dodgy people who he's shared a platform with is debatable - clearly he made mistakes, but all leaders get stuff thrown at them which isn't particularly fair, and alternative scenarios where Burnham or McDonnell or anyone else had led the party in 2019 implicitly assume mistakenly that they'd have had an easier ride. I think Boris had a winning hand in 2019, regardless - the "Get Brexit done" mantra simply had majority support, from people who liked Brexit to people who were just bored with it.
One of Starmer's strengths, incidentally, is that he is good at simply shrugging off the sillier attacks (the attempt to portray him as being soft on Savile, for example). That Teflon quality is quite rare.
The most baffling thing that ever happened on PB was you, NP, coming out as a Corbynite.
That was the odd thing about Corbyn. He did not insist on doctrinal purity. He might have ended up with some because so many centrists refused to serve but I'm not even sure Corbyn had much doctrine himself. John McDonnell did but he was also pragmatic so it is moot. Nor did Corbyn instigate the purge so many on the right feared and predicted. As for young Jared, he was a classic paper candidate in a hopeless seat held by Nick Clegg, Deputy PM and star of the Cleggasm.
Yes, some here have a generic view of Corbyn, McDonnell and the far left which doesn't correspond with reality. Arguably it doesn't matter since both of them are now clearly marginal and approaching retirement, though Corbyn may have one more go at something, probably Islington North. But an important thing about the Corbyn period is that he was personally opposed to ruthless party management, and thought he could manage by persuasion and inclusion. Many in Momentum were convinced he was indulging centrists who would knife him when the opportunity arose, and think that's just what happened.
That, too, is not the whole story. There were plenty of centrists who were willing to give him a shot, but who revolted when the project seemed to be foundering. Whether that doomed him between 2017 and 2019 or whether it was the equivocal initial response to Salisbury or the dodgy people who he's shared a platform with is debatable - clearly he made mistakes, but all leaders get stuff thrown at them which isn't particularly fair, and alternative scenarios where Burnham or McDonnell or anyone else had led the party in 2019 implicitly assume mistakenly that they'd have had an easier ride. I think Boris had a winning hand in 2019, regardless - the "Get Brexit done" mantra simply had majority support, from people who liked Brexit to people who were just bored with it.
One of Starmer's strengths, incidentally, is that he is good at simply shrugging off the sillier attacks (the attempt to portray him as being soft on Savile, for example). That Teflon quality is quite rare.
Interesting thoughts on Corbyn, and you'd have a better idea of the man's "big tent" personal instincts of course.
Although wouldn't another take be that he was just being realistic on this point? If he'd been exclusive in the way Momentum headbangers might have wanted, he'd literally not be able to fill the front bench, and would even have risked a proper split (100+ MPs rather than the 28 of the SDP or half dozen of Change UK).
I wonder what you think of McDonnell in all this? Whilst I can kind of buy into the story that Corbyn's personal instinct was NOT to be ruthless and let a thousand flowers bloom in the Labour Party, I find that harder to believe with McDonnell. Was he not a pretty ruthless guy, who was also realistic about how far he could push it? Similarly, but more so, Seamus Milne?
Maybe I'm being unfair and they are lovely guys who regret to this day the terrible misunderstandings with Luciana Berger etc.
I'm still not sure public school tankie Seumus Milne was not a CCHQ plant. He might as well have been. Winchester then Oxford PPE. Has that ever happened before? Or since?
Oh, here's Rimmer with his slide show. For fuck's sake.
The endless fucking tedious photos of nothing in particular remind me of that episode of One Foot In The Grave where Ronnie and Mildred come round with a slide show of their caravan holiday.
That was the odd thing about Corbyn. He did not insist on doctrinal purity. He might have ended up with some because so many centrists refused to serve but I'm not even sure Corbyn had much doctrine himself. John McDonnell did but he was also pragmatic so it is moot. Nor did Corbyn instigate the purge so many on the right feared and predicted. As for young Jared, he was a classic paper candidate in a hopeless seat held by Nick Clegg, Deputy PM and star of the Cleggasm.
Yes, some here have a generic view of Corbyn, McDonnell and the far left which doesn't correspond with reality. Arguably it doesn't matter since both of them are now clearly marginal and approaching retirement, though Corbyn may have one more go at something, probably Islington North. But an important thing about the Corbyn period is that he was personally opposed to ruthless party management, and thought he could manage by persuasion and inclusion. Many in Momentum were convinced he was indulging centrists who would knife him when the opportunity arose, and think that's just what happened.
That, too, is not the whole story. There were plenty of centrists who were willing to give him a shot, but who revolted when the project seemed to be foundering. Whether that doomed him between 2017 and 2019 or whether it was the equivocal initial response to Salisbury or the dodgy people who he's shared a platform with is debatable - clearly he made mistakes, but all leaders get stuff thrown at them which isn't particularly fair, and alternative scenarios where Burnham or McDonnell or anyone else had led the party in 2019 implicitly assume mistakenly that they'd have had an easier ride. I think Boris had a winning hand in 2019, regardless - the "Get Brexit done" mantra simply had majority support, from people who liked Brexit to people who were just bored with it.
One of Starmer's strengths, incidentally, is that he is good at simply shrugging off the sillier attacks (the attempt to portray him as being soft on Savile, for example). That Teflon quality is quite rare.
The most baffling thing that ever happened on PB was you, NP, coming out as a Corbynite.
If I were on the left of the Labour Party I could certainly see the appeal of the Corbyn project. It was probably a once in a century opportunity and it very nearly worked.
Most agreeable. Hasn’t got quite the exquisite prettiness of Ludlow, but it is a fine and handsome English county town. Near completely unspoiled in the middle. Again one sobs for all the towns we DID despoil
Centre feels prosperous and even chic in places. The magnificent loop of the River Severn is, however, somewhat marred by the obvious pollution. Yuk
I had one of the finest meals I have ever eaten at restaurant in Shrewsbury.
That was the odd thing about Corbyn. He did not insist on doctrinal purity. He might have ended up with some because so many centrists refused to serve but I'm not even sure Corbyn had much doctrine himself. John McDonnell did but he was also pragmatic so it is moot. Nor did Corbyn instigate the purge so many on the right feared and predicted. As for young Jared, he was a classic paper candidate in a hopeless seat held by Nick Clegg, Deputy PM and star of the Cleggasm.
Yes, some here have a generic view of Corbyn, McDonnell and the far left which doesn't correspond with reality. Arguably it doesn't matter since both of them are now clearly marginal and approaching retirement, though Corbyn may have one more go at something, probably Islington North. But an important thing about the Corbyn period is that he was personally opposed to ruthless party management, and thought he could manage by persuasion and inclusion. Many in Momentum were convinced he was indulging centrists who would knife him when the opportunity arose, and think that's just what happened.
That, too, is not the whole story. There were plenty of centrists who were willing to give him a shot, but who revolted when the project seemed to be foundering. Whether that doomed him between 2017 and 2019 or whether it was the equivocal initial response to Salisbury or the dodgy people who he's shared a platform with is debatable - clearly he made mistakes, but all leaders get stuff thrown at them which isn't particularly fair, and alternative scenarios where Burnham or McDonnell or anyone else had led the party in 2019 implicitly assume mistakenly that they'd have had an easier ride. I think Boris had a winning hand in 2019, regardless - the "Get Brexit done" mantra simply had majority support, from people who liked Brexit to people who were just bored with it.
One of Starmer's strengths, incidentally, is that he is good at simply shrugging off the sillier attacks (the attempt to portray him as being soft on Savile, for example). That Teflon quality is quite rare.
Interesting thoughts on Corbyn, and you'd have a better idea of the man's "big tent" personal instincts of course.
Although wouldn't another take be that he was just being realistic on this point? If he'd been exclusive in the way Momentum headbangers might have wanted, he'd literally not be able to fill the front bench, and would even have risked a proper split (100+ MPs rather than the 28 of the SDP or half dozen of Change UK).
I wonder what you think of McDonnell in all this? Whilst I can kind of buy into the story that Corbyn's personal instinct was NOT to be ruthless and let a thousand flowers bloom in the Labour Party, I find that harder to believe with McDonnell. Was he not a pretty ruthless guy, who was also realistic about how far he could push it? Similarly, but more so, Seamus Milne?
Maybe I'm being unfair and they are lovely guys who regret to this day the terrible misunderstandings with Luciana Berger etc.
I'm still not sure public school tankie Seumus Milne was not a CCHQ plant. He might as well have been. Winchester then Oxford PPE. Has that ever happened before? Or since?
In fairness, Cambridge is where you go if you want to learn to be a treacherous scumbag, whereas Oxford churns out deluded bullsh1tters. For that reason alone, I can't see Milne being a plant any more than Truss was - they were good, honest, Oxford twats rather than Cambridge spies.
That was the odd thing about Corbyn. He did not insist on doctrinal purity. He might have ended up with some because so many centrists refused to serve but I'm not even sure Corbyn had much doctrine himself. John McDonnell did but he was also pragmatic so it is moot. Nor did Corbyn instigate the purge so many on the right feared and predicted. As for young Jared, he was a classic paper candidate in a hopeless seat held by Nick Clegg, Deputy PM and star of the Cleggasm.
Yes, some here have a generic view of Corbyn, McDonnell and the far left which doesn't correspond with reality. Arguably it doesn't matter since both of them are now clearly marginal and approaching retirement, though Corbyn may have one more go at something, probably Islington North. But an important thing about the Corbyn period is that he was personally opposed to ruthless party management, and thought he could manage by persuasion and inclusion. Many in Momentum were convinced he was indulging centrists who would knife him when the opportunity arose, and think that's just what happened.
That, too, is not the whole story. There were plenty of centrists who were willing to give him a shot, but who revolted when the project seemed to be foundering. Whether that doomed him between 2017 and 2019 or whether it was the equivocal initial response to Salisbury or the dodgy people who he's shared a platform with is debatable - clearly he made mistakes, but all leaders get stuff thrown at them which isn't particularly fair, and alternative scenarios where Burnham or McDonnell or anyone else had led the party in 2019 implicitly assume mistakenly that they'd have had an easier ride. I think Boris had a winning hand in 2019, regardless - the "Get Brexit done" mantra simply had majority support, from people who liked Brexit to people who were just bored with it.
One of Starmer's strengths, incidentally, is that he is good at simply shrugging off the sillier attacks (the attempt to portray him as being soft on Savile, for example). That Teflon quality is quite rare.
Interesting thoughts on Corbyn, and you'd have a better idea of the man's "big tent" personal instincts of course.
Although wouldn't another take be that he was just being realistic on this point? If he'd been exclusive in the way Momentum headbangers might have wanted, he'd literally not be able to fill the front bench, and would even have risked a proper split (100+ MPs rather than the 28 of the SDP or half dozen of Change UK).
I wonder what you think of McDonnell in all this? Whilst I can kind of buy into the story that Corbyn's personal instinct was NOT to be ruthless and let a thousand flowers bloom in the Labour Party, I find that harder to believe with McDonnell. Was he not a pretty ruthless guy, who was also realistic about how far he could push it? Similarly, but more so, Seamus Milne?
Maybe I'm being unfair and they are lovely guys who regret to this day the terrible misunderstandings with Luciana Berger etc.
I'm still not sure public school tankie Seumus Milne was not a CCHQ plant. He might as well have been. Winchester then Oxford PPE. Has that ever happened before? Or since?
James Schneider, founder of Momentum, Winchester and Oxford.
On topic, the Hard Left has always been the strategic enemy of the Soft Left, just as the Hard Right has always been the strategic enemy of the Soft Right.
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.
If we had PR of course the hard right would have its own party and about 10-20% of MPs as would the hard left.
Only FPTP keeps the hard right in the Conservatives and the hard left in Labour
I don't like PR, but it does encourage a rallying around against that which you like least. I think hard left, hard right, or hard LD nonsense become less likely.
However there is a huge concern about any system where anyone can be elected on the votes of their chums - so definitely list systems should be excluded.
FPTP seems like the least worst option.
Hard LD? What's that, Paddy Ashdown ex-SBS?
Or maybe cancelling Brexit without a referendum is hard LD nonsense? If so, I'm with you there.
Yes of course, there is no hard-line LD position. That's because they have no stance. Rory Stewart was quoted (I think here) as being a likely future LD voter - insane! The LDs are just the stuff in the drains that we clean out every now and again. They definitely don't have to be, and in principal are better than that though. Just needs a leader.
Comments
Hopefully we'll have the same on lettuces next time. Nobody will be happy until we're drowning in lettuces, dining on lettuce soup, and unable to open the front door due to vast piles of rotting lettuces on the path.
I believe this is something the Blair government grasped - but Cameron/Osborne deliberately harrowed out wider public services and infrastructure while falsely claiming to maintain spend on hospitals and schools which became de-facto front-line services, and setting in place their mendacious bung to their vote in the triple-lock.
I've said it before on here, but aside from a few bright spots on social reform, the coalition government was the worst and most damaging in my lifetime.
1 Who are the DK voters?
2 Why do they respond DK?
I have read a few times that a lot of 2019 first time Tories sit in the DK camp. Many of these were either non or infrequent voters, so if that is true then I can't see them moving out of DK into a vote for anyone.
For the chunk of the DK's who were more regular Tory voters you have to ask what could motivate them to change their mind. Its unlikely to be fear of Starmer. Its unlikely to be renewed enthusiasm for Tory policies.
So Of that "significant opportunity" for the Conservatives, I can't see how they attract them in remotely sufficient numbers.
Only FPTP keeps the hard right in the Conservatives and the hard left in Labour
So the question remains, which one are YOU?
They are, frankly, an absolute shower. And in denial. I met my local MP - or the one who will be under the new boundaries - recently. Nice chap. Has worked hard on local issues, some of them on a cross-party basis, and been pretty effective. Obviously keen to get to know the new area and the issues. And frustrated by national issues - though he hid it well.
But my overall impression was that they simply don't realise the level of fed-upness many voters have. In an area which is meant to be receiving Levelling Up money, which has been allocated, there are no visible results and there won't be by the time of the GE. On housing, for instance, he mentioned the various provisions in the Levelling Up Bill allowing councils to charge more to second home owners / licence AirBnBs etc but could say nothing about actually building more houses for local people. Like my daughter who is actively looking. Because the government has no plan on this.
Good local MPs like him are being undermined by the government and the national party. So where is the talent going to come from in opposition when they need to rebuild the party?
I do wonder if Jared O'Mara was such an egregious example of this that he inadvertently helped the cause of the centrists, i.e. look at the absolute shite these Momentum types foist on you.
Losing good conservative MPs bothers me too. People who are thoughtful and bright, but yer Charles Walkers are losing out to yer 30p Lees at the moment,
1. It makes for bad arrogant government
2. It leads to complacency. The Red Wall turned to the Tories because, despite being Labour for years, Labour had done damn all for them for too long and took them for granted. I see some of that attitude returning - the idea that these voters are turning back to their natural home and so no-one need bother about their needs. There were good reasons why they turned away from Labour and toward what the Tories appeared to be selling and those reasons have not gone away.
3. We need a good effective opposition. We won't get it with a demoralised weak party in the grip of loons fighting political purity battles.
https://www.confused.com/petrol-prices/fuel-price-index
Confusingly, I fall between two 'generations' (X and Millennial; it depends what year you start Millennial from) neither of which I can really identify with according to their popular stereotypes.
Hopefully it ends now we've run out of letters.
Nick Wallis and counsel for the inquiry have done some more digging and it now looks as if the Post Office's lie is even more brazen than we thought. Any Post Office executive is eligible for a bonus for their work on the inquiry.
See here - https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/will-post-office-execs-continue-to-be-given-bonuses-for-their-inquiry-work/
In other words, when they said to Parliament -
"We won't pay bonuses for work on the Horizon Inquiry"
they actually meant -
"We will pay bonuses for work on the Horizon Inquiry. But if we say the opposite the press will leave us alone and we don't care what Parliament thinks because the Ministers we report to don't give a damn about this issue. So why should we."
My wife and I have three children born in the sixties.
I get very confused with these labels!
Incidentally, I’m also a Don’t Know; LD, Lab or Green. Definitely not Con, though.
When we did our filmed flight, the instructor told me and one of the other finalists that in 30 minutes we'd learned what takes him 3 months to teach pilots normally - he was pushing us both to think about signing up! End of brag
My ideal would be a 40-50 seat Lab majority, with a decent showing by the LDs (30-40 seats) and a more thoughtful, ideologically coherent and capable* Conservative opposition. Plus a couple of Greens and a reduced SNP bloc.
*I've wittered ad nauseam about why Red Wall is a pretty useless term but I'll leave it at that.
**yeah, I know.
The alternate timeline where John McDonnell was the leftist candidate instead of Corbyn is intriguing.
The challenge for all of the Red Wall Tory MPs was to deliver some actual change. Hard to do in a few years but they at least need to be able to show progress towards actual change.
Is there any sign of positive progress in the Don Valley? Or is he doomed? And more importantly are pit villages like Tickhill ever going to reinvent themselves in a post-pit world?
Bearings and gear boxes are the main ones. They have all manner of clever detection systems now - including heat and vibration sensors, oil filter checks for micro-particles which might indicate abnormal wear and regular NDT scans. And yet if any chopper goes down the most likely cause other than human error (which in itself is rare) is gear box failures of one form or another. As is shown by the Leicester crash (and the two most recent Norway crashes, the Newfoundland S92 crash, the last Shetlands crash and all the way back to the Shetlands Chinook crash in the 80s) there are some technical failures you are not going to walk away from.
(I don't dislike Cooper and Burnham, particularly - that's how they came over in the campaign to me though, not that I had a vote)
If the Government was really serious about levelling up, and about using it as a tool to retain the votes of Red Wall voters at the next election, it would have had shovels in the ground years ago. Right now there would be teams building new bare-bones stations at Swadlincote, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and Coalville ready to get passenger trains on the freight railway (the fricking track is still there and used for goodness' sake). You don't get a better and more obvious Red Wall story than "we are bringing trains back to COALVILLE. Look, it even says 'COAL' in the placename."
Instead it went through its usual time-wasting trick of requiring local authorities to make speculative bids, some of which would be funded, some of which would have to reapply to another round next year, oh, but we won't tell you when that round is going to start.
For anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating... take a look at the Levelling Up guidance for funding chessboards in parks. You literally can't make this stuff up:
22 August 2022 – formal public launch of proposals to increase access to and provision of chess facilities
4 September 2023 – EOI submission window for chess tables in parks and public spaces opens
25 September 2023 – EOI submission for chess tables in parks and public spaces deadline
2 October 2023 to 5 February 2024 – distribution of funds to LAs, and LAs to begin work to install chess tables in parks and public spaces
All this time-wasting and endless paperwork for a £2,500 grant to put a chessboard in a park. The staff cost for one successful application easily reaches £2,500 alone. It is insane.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/installing-chess-tables-in-parks-and-public-spaces-prospectus/installing-chess-tables-in-parks-and-public-spaces-prospectus
Opinium's polls account for this behaviour and still have Labour winning in a landslide. So I think you are wrong at the moment.
To be honest, I don't really think it is possible to attain anything like the sense of shared community that a pit village had, where a single workplace defined the settlement - and the work was tough and dangerous so everyone had to stick together.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66723586
Doesn’t suggest the software was the best ever written..,
How people vote in the booth on the day is not the same as how a set of people respond in a poll. In every election the opinion polls are wrong. That one or two will match up to the result is simply scatter.
We all have a gut feel about what is going to happen. Mine is a comfortable Labour majority, but I would not be stunned by a 100+ Labour majority, or a need for a coalition (probably with a slightly recovered Lib Dems). but I don't KNOW this will happen.
Most people start to pay attention to politics when the election looms.
On-topic, it does sound inefficient. Sounds like research funding, in fact (but there the model makes more sense, as there will be good proposals that the funder doesn't have on their radar).
For the chess faclities, you surely:
- have a one minute application for chess boards
- order as many of these as you can fund and have interest for, all the same
- distribute, with some fixed amount of money to set them up, too
(you'd think sending a few table-top chess sets to every school along with some online resources for setting up clubs, learning chess etc would make more sense - if indeed chess should be any kind of priority anyway)
For what it is worth I am still not overly confident in a Labour majority
Is the plane with the problematic flight plan in the air at this point? Surely not. But if not, don't you just refuse permission for that plane to take off and that resolves the error? Or maybe there's more to it - I should read the report/someone on here will explain it in words of one syllable.
Obviously failing (and clearly failing/shutting down) when the data makes no sense is the right thing if you get to that point, but there should be a way to resolve that for flights not yet in the air, otherwise the system looks very vulnerable - e.g. you have a separate system that pre-screens the flight plans for nonsense before entering the main system?
Most agreeable. Hasn’t got quite the exquisite prettiness of Ludlow, but it is a fine and handsome English county town. Near completely unspoiled in the middle. Again one sobs for all the towns we DID despoil
Centre feels prosperous and even chic in places. The magnificent loop of the River Severn is, however, somewhat marred by the obvious pollution. Yuk
I think most educated voters would struggle correctly to name anyone in the correct cabinet post beyond Sunak, Hunt and Braverman. Possibly Gove and Badenoch. Shadow cabinet wise probably Starmer, Streeting and Reeves. possibly Cooper.
It was plainly obvious she'd be terrible and she was. Good riddance.
What else do you want out of a 'baseline'?
If you want some sort of normality, don't bother, there is no such thing. If you want the last time there was a GE that wasn't weird, don't bother, the are all unique and strange.
As Heraclitus points out:
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
PB is a fascinating place, and I spend too much time here for sure, but the insights from a variety of expects in diverse fields is astonishing. But for me, one the harder challenges, is for PBers to understand the mindset of those with no interest in politics. And yet it is these people who decide elections.
Today marks one year since Liz Truss became Prime Minister and the Tories wrecked the economy.
Here’s what Rishi Sunak thinks.
So if we're ditching that I'm not too upset. What does worry me is that Starmer will be too timid to do anything at all. IMHO there are some big wins to be had from making bold changes in things like housing/planning, infrastructure, education, drugs policy and our economic relationship with the EU, which I don't see as particularly left/right but more just common sense reforms to deliver a more prosperous, more equal and happier country. If Starmer can't make any bold changes then that will be a lost opportunity. On the other hand, the key thing must be getting the current lot out.
It seems very odd that an individual flight plan can result in the system halting rather than simply rejecting the flight plan as malformed for having a duplicated name. I would have thought that parsing then tokenizing and counting names/IDs would be a basic part of processing such a plan.
https://publicapps.caa.co.uk/docs/33/CAP 694.pdf
A quick read suggests that the system should identify data errors in flight plan submissions and ensure they are corrected before the plan is forwarded… presumably the error in question was not one that anyone had ever envisaged… even so, unforeseen errors for one flight which is most likely to have still been on the ground, probably shouldn’t cause a total system shutdown for safety reasons
That, too, is not the whole story. There were plenty of centrists who were willing to give him a shot, but who revolted when the project seemed to be foundering. Whether that doomed him between 2017 and 2019 or whether it was the equivocal initial response to Salisbury or the dodgy people who he's shared a platform with is debatable - clearly he made mistakes, but all leaders get stuff thrown at them which isn't particularly fair, and alternative scenarios where Burnham or McDonnell or anyone else had led the party in 2019 implicitly assume mistakenly that they'd have had an easier ride. I think Boris had a winning hand in 2019, regardless - the "Get Brexit done" mantra simply had majority support, from people who liked Brexit to people who were just bored with it.
One of Starmer's strengths, incidentally, is that he is good at simply shrugging off the sillier attacks (the attempt to portray him as being soft on Savile, for example). That Teflon quality is quite rare.
There are only 85 eligible local authorities for this as part of the Levelling Up Parks Fund - basically it's a list of the 85 worst urban sh1tholes in England.*
It's all perfectly laudable that a government might want to give them a bit of a helping hand to bring them up to the standard of most localities. But why drip feed it in a weird and bureaucratic way? Why not just say "we'll give £X a year over the next five years of ring-fenced additional funding for capital projects to improve parks in these 85 places - we'll expect an audit trail and an annual statement of where it's been spent so we know it's not been misused but you're the people on the ground who are best placed to know the community's needs".
That way, Councils can plan properly, aren't waiting for a man in Whitehall to sign off on every tiny thing, and can do chessboards in parks if they want, or trees, or paddling pools or whatever it is people want to see within the broad remit of parks. The micromanagement is crazy.
* I say urban sh1tholes but, as ever when you create a metric, there are some weird ones on the list - Kensington & Chelsea is there, and places like Norwich which I don't think of as a particularly grim concrete jungle.
Here’s a good thread about “the economy”:
https://x.com/redhistorian/status/1692988843132145944
Then we went boating on the River Thames this summer. At one point I had to lean down to clear some weed off the propeller, which meant my face was pretty near the water.
The river absolutely stank of sewage. And this was deepest rural Oxfordshire. Honestly, the urban Birmingham canals with two centuries of pollution in them smell better.
As a pedestrian paradise it is up with London's square mile, York, Stamford and Oxford.
I think thats a miss-step - does he expect to have no refurb of government estates for his time in office?
Although wouldn't another take be that he was just being realistic on this point? If he'd been exclusive in the way Momentum headbangers might have wanted, he'd literally not be able to fill the front bench, and would even have risked a proper split (100+ MPs rather than the 28 of the SDP or half dozen of Change UK).
I wonder what you think of McDonnell in all this? Whilst I can kind of buy into the story that Corbyn's personal instinct was NOT to be ruthless and let a thousand flowers bloom in the Labour Party, I find that harder to believe with McDonnell. Was he not a pretty ruthless guy, who was also realistic about how far he could push it? Similarly, but more so, Seamus Milne?
Maybe I'm being unfair and they are lovely guys who regret to this day the terrible misunderstandings with Luciana Berger etc.
We see big, ‘broad church’ parties under PR and we see hard right/left splitters under FPTP. The ANC in South Africa is this very broad party, but it’s remained together despite the country using PR. The Japanese Liberal Democrats are a broad party despite a semi-PR system. Ireland was a long dominated by two very broad church parties, FF and FG, despite using STV, a form of PR.
Meanwhile, the UK, with FPTP, has lots of small parties in Parliament. 10 parties won seats at the last general election (and an 11th was close). In 1950, it was just 4 parties (and one independent). Our voting system is basically the same, yet over twice as many parties are winning seats. Other factors impact on how many parties there are. Meanwhile, Finland in 2011 only elected 9 different parties, so they have a PR system but fewer parties winning seats.
However there is a huge concern about any system where anyone can be elected on the votes of their chums - so definitely list systems should be excluded.
FPTP seems like the least worst option.
Am I correct these are coffee table chess sets and a picnic table, rather than (as I was expecting) human sized ones on a chess board you walk around?
"Coalville" is actually Cabbage-town, a village full of Franco-German agitators secretly working to bring Brexit to it's knees.
Or maybe cancelling Brexit without a referendum is hard LD nonsense? If so, I'm with you there.
@DPJHodges
·
7m
Surprisingly lacklustre performance from Keir Starmer. Strange, given the material he had to work with.
I don't believe it!
*trudges outside and awaits Exekutionskommando *
When you let off a big fart
What a fucking turnip.