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.
This is something, I guess brought in under Thatcher but continued under New Labour, the idea that competitive tendering is the best approach.
I’m a professor. People think I spend a lot of time doing research. I actually spend a large chunk of “research time” writing proposals to get funding. Most of these fail, even if you’re a top professor. Some of the time, I sit on panels reviewing other people’s proposals. The whole thing feels very inefficient. But the process’s proponents say it ensures we fund the best research, get the best value for money. Except research on research funding shows that these mechanisms aren’t actually very good at picking the best projects to fund. We’re running around in circles to do something that doesn’t produce better outcomes.
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.
Political people on left and right have far more in common with each other than with people with no interest in politics.
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.
2 is a great point to make. Too many in Labour and Labour types see these voters as repenting sinners voting against their own self interests rather than people making a rational choice.
If these areas return to Labour, a Labour Party that pretty much took them for granted and did little for them, then Labour has to respond and actually do something to improve these areas and these people's lives rather than just gloss over it.
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.
The admission that you dutifully watch a quintessential petit bourgeois provincial BBC sitcom jars, somewhat, with your curated persona as PB’s very own Trotskyite fighter ace
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.
I suppose if you're going to rebel against your upbringing you go all the way, you don't become a centrist dad.
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.
The admission that you dutifully watch a quintessential petit bourgeois provincial BBC sitcom jars, somewhat, with your curated persona as PB’s very own Trotskyite fighter ace
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.
List systems are a strawman. STV, which is far and away the best proportional system and the one proposed by the Lib Dems, has no list system and gives more rather than less accountability of the MP to their local constituency.
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.
This is something, I guess brought in under Thatcher but continued under New Labour, the idea that competitive tendering is the best approach.
I’m a professor. People think I spend a lot of time doing research. I actually spend a large chunk of “research time” writing proposals to get funding. Most of these fail, even if you’re a top professor. Some of the time, I sit on panels reviewing other people’s proposals. The whole thing feels very inefficient. But the process’s proponents say it ensures we fund the best research, get the best value for money. Except research on research funding shows that these mechanisms aren’t actually very good at picking the best projects to fund. We’re running around in circles to do something that doesn’t produce better outcomes.
Exactly. It's a combination of that and not trusting people to do their job.
If the Government funded local authorities properly through the core grant, then councils would have enough money to build stuff (including, perhaps, repairing schools) without the rigmarole of endless tenders. Yes, sometimes the "stuff" would be things that central government doesn't like. That's why we have local elections, so the councils can respond to local priorities.
Instead, local authorities have been emasculated to become delivery bodies for the whims of central government. Whitehall doesn't trust councils to make their own decisions.
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.
I suppose if you're going to rebel against your upbringing you go all the way, you don't become a centrist dad.
He was a Tory plant who can now come back in from the cold.
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.
The admission that you dutifully watch a quintessential petit bourgeois provincial BBC sitcom jars, somewhat, with your curated persona as PB’s very own Trotskyite fighter ace
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.
The admission that you dutifully watch a quintessential petit bourgeois provincial BBC sitcom jars, somewhat, with your curated persona as PB’s very own Trotskyite fighter ace
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.
2 is a great point to make. Too many in Labour and Labour types see these voters as repenting sinners voting against their own self interests rather than people making a rational choice.
If these areas return to Labour, a Labour Party that pretty much took them for granted and did little for them, then Labour has to respond and actually do something to improve these areas and these people's lives rather than just gloss over it.
Rejoining the EU, so that they could benefit from the Regional Development Fund would at least be a start.
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 a list system with a list of 1. That is, crudely, you can get selected on the votes of your chums. And then win in a safe seat.
You want an ordinal system that gives ordinary voters a choice from within a party’s candidates, so something like STV or there are list systems where the voter picks a list and then also gets to pick from within the list.
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.
Don't disagree with the principle of what you're saying - but I suspect that many more people know who's Education Secretary than they did this time last week...
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.
The admission that you dutifully watch a quintessential petit bourgeois provincial BBC sitcom jars, somewhat, with your curated persona as PB’s very own Trotskyite fighter ace
What is a haut bourgeois sitcom?
Set in Camden, playing chess on a chessboard in a park drinking pink gin.
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)
Looking at the process outlined, it looks bike the classic “professionalisation” of projects.
Which is simply about adding steps and paperwork, because more process is better.
We had one poster here saying that more process would have prevented the RAAC issue, somehow - there is a deep seated belief that more process can prevent all errors.
In fact, its been proven a number of times that excessive, useless paperwork hides problems.
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.
2 is a great point to make. Too many in Labour and Labour types see these voters as repenting sinners voting against their own self interests rather than people making a rational choice.
If these areas return to Labour, a Labour Party that pretty much took them for granted and did little for them, then Labour has to respond and actually do something to improve these areas and these people's lives rather than just gloss over it.
Rejoining the EU, so that they could benefit from the Regional Development Fund would at least be a start.
There won't be an internal 'regional development fund' under a Labour government then?
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 a list system with a list of 1. That is, crudely, you can get selected on the votes of your chums. And then win in a safe seat.
That would be the case if you could only vote for the party, but as you vote directly for the candidate, FPTP allows this to be circumvented.
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.
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.
The admission that you dutifully watch a quintessential petit bourgeois provincial BBC sitcom jars, somewhat, with your curated persona as PB’s very own Trotskyite fighter ace
What is a haut bourgeois sitcom?
Good question. The phrase may be oxymoronic
One Foot In The Grave is definitely “Radio Times and a digestive biscuit” territory, however
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 a list system with a list of 1. That is, crudely, you can get selected on the votes of your chums. And then win in a safe seat.
You want an ordinal system that gives ordinary voters a choice from within a party’s candidates, so something like STV or there are list systems where the voter picks a list and then also gets to pick from within the list.
Great, tell me what I want. Perhaps there's a might, or maybe there.
And no, I don't want any of these things. No change is often the best thing, and that's what I want.
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.
It sounds like an error path was hit that hadn’t been accounted for, so when the code threw an exception it halted altogether. As it should do in that case of course.
The actual fault was that the code as written could not find an exit point for a flightpath that was supposed to transit UK airspace. The software issue is that this error path wasn’t handled in the code & hence the entire system was brought down instead of that specific flight path being kicked out for manual processing.
There’s then a secondary issue in that it seems clear from the report that 1st & 2nd line support were too busy rigidly following their system failure procedures to actually do any root cause analysis & by the time those had failed to work & the top line support had been brought in from the company that wrote the code in the first place it was too late to get everything sorted out before the 4 hour time horizon was broken.
That in turn seems to be because the actual error was buried inside system logs that 1st & 2nd line support didn’t know how to access. Presumably there was an error log with the dump of the exception & stack at point of failure, which would have pointed to the root cause fairly quickly, but unless you know to look you’re going to be thrashing around in the dark.
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.
2 is a great point to make. Too many in Labour and Labour types see these voters as repenting sinners voting against their own self interests rather than people making a rational choice.
If these areas return to Labour, a Labour Party that pretty much took them for granted and did little for them, then Labour has to respond and actually do something to improve these areas and these people's lives rather than just gloss over it.
Rejoining the EU, so that they could benefit from the Regional Development Fund would at least be a start.
There won't be an internal 'regional development fund' under a Labour government then?
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.
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.
The admission that you dutifully watch a quintessential petit bourgeois provincial BBC sitcom jars, somewhat, with your curated persona as PB’s very own Trotskyite fighter ace
What is a haut bourgeois sitcom?
Good question. The phrase may be oxymoronic
One Foot In The Grave is definitely “Radio Times and a digestive biscuit” territory, however
OFITG is dark. Mildred hangs herself after a game of Happy Families.
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.
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.
The admission that you dutifully watch a quintessential petit bourgeois provincial BBC sitcom jars, somewhat, with your curated persona as PB’s very own Trotskyite fighter ace
What is a haut bourgeois sitcom?
Good question. The phrase may be oxymoronic
One Foot In The Grave is definitely “Radio Times and a digestive biscuit” territory, however
Is there something between petit and haut bourgeois, ie people who laugh at both ends because 'it's not them'?
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 a list system with a list of 1. That is, crudely, you can get selected on the votes of your chums. And then win in a safe seat.
That would be the case if you could only vote for the party, but as you vote directly for the candidate, FPTP allows this to be circumvented.
But what if you support, say, Conservative principles broadly, but you think the local candidate, put there by a chumocracy, is poor? How do you vote?
Under an ordinal system (STV, a list system with intra-list voting), you can vote Conservative and indicate which of the Conservative candidates you want.
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.
2 is a great point to make. Too many in Labour and Labour types see these voters as repenting sinners voting against their own self interests rather than people making a rational choice.
If these areas return to Labour, a Labour Party that pretty much took them for granted and did little for them, then Labour has to respond and actually do something to improve these areas and these people's lives rather than just gloss over it.
Rejoining the EU, so that they could benefit from the Regional Development Fund would at least be a start.
Which is not going to happen anytime soon. So they need to do something else. The odd benefit from the EU these regions had hardly helped them become economic powerhouses prior to Brexit. They were in deep decline then with Labour doing sod aside from taking their votes for granted.
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.
The admission that you dutifully watch a quintessential petit bourgeois provincial BBC sitcom jars, somewhat, with your curated persona as PB’s very own Trotskyite fighter ace
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 a list system with a list of 1. That is, crudely, you can get selected on the votes of your chums. And then win in a safe seat.
You want an ordinal system that gives ordinary voters a choice from within a party’s candidates, so something like STV or there are list systems where the voter picks a list and then also gets to pick from within the list.
Great, tell me what I want. Perhaps there's a might, or maybe there.
And no, I don't want any of these things. No change is often the best thing, and that's what I want.
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.
Yes, the 'silent generation', I need to tell my parents about that. But I'll struggle. It's hard to get a word in edgeways with either of them.
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.
It'd have worked for somewhere between as long Truss and Boris did.
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 a list system with a list of 1. That is, crudely, you can get selected on the votes of your chums. And then win in a safe seat.
That would be the case if you could only vote for the party, but as you vote directly for the candidate, FPTP allows this to be circumvented.
But what if you support, say, Conservative principles broadly, but you think the local candidate, put there by a chumocracy, is poor? How do you vote?
Under an ordinal system (STV, a list system with intra-list voting), you can vote Conservative and indicate which of the Conservative candidates you want.
Your proposed change could still leave someone having to choose between the lesser of two, or three, or four evils just so that their vote gets registered against the 'correct' party.
The combination of tactical voting, personal voting, and independent candidates deals with the same issue in a better way.
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.
There really was a buzz. That delicious feeling of scaring all the right people. But the voters weren't having it. Ah well.
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.
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.
The admission that you dutifully watch a quintessential petit bourgeois provincial BBC sitcom jars, somewhat, with your curated persona as PB’s very own Trotskyite fighter ace
What is a haut bourgeois sitcom?
Good question. The phrase may be oxymoronic
One Foot In The Grave is definitely “Radio Times and a digestive biscuit” territory, however
OFITG is dark. Mildred hangs herself after a game of Happy Families.
Darkness is at the heart of everything David Renwick ever did - see also Jonathon Creek (the later episodes in particular). In OFITG there is an obvious lack of children and grandchildren, and there are hint throughout the show of a trauma from a long time ago.
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
Okay that’s a good brag, kudos!
I once had a go in a 737 sim, and managed to do a circuit at Heathrow first time out, having flown nothing bigger than a glider in the real world at the time.
(One other PBer, who’s now an MP, was also on that show BTW).
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.
I know what you mean. It was more the feeltone of it - two fingers to the Mail and all of that - than the actual man and the actual policies. Both of those had a 70s retro feel tbh. And frankly Jez wasn't the brightest bulb in the ballroom, I didn't think.
However losing that way (least in 2017 when it was close) felt better than being timid and still losing like in 2015. I found that very disheartening. So I embraced the spirit of the Corbyn project and in fact joined 'his' party not the old one. I'm a newbie compared to the likes of you (although I've always voted Lab).
Ideally I'd that 'spirit' back with a contemporary makeover, policies and leadership style, but I'm more than ok with Starmer. He's going to win big, I think, and I'm actually optimistic that he will be bold (in a good way) once in office.
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."
Oh sh!t.
Please can we have the people who lied to Parliament imprisoned for contempt? Seriously. The PO are not treating this with the required gravity at all.
Having been a optimist on the war in Ukraine I am increasingly feeling pessimistic now. We don't know how the counter offensive will finally play out, a major breakthrough remains possible but the west appears to be losing interest and the Russian population seems in no mind to do anything about it.
Let me start with the attack on the grain in Reni. It is unclear whether any missiles or drones landed on Nato territory, the Ukrainians claim they did and there seems to be little attempt to geolocate etc to get to the bottom of it. No surprise as we saw something similar with Poland last year. Why does Putin feel emboldened to take such a risk anyway right on a Nato border? We are talking about grain being sent to feed some of the world's poorest people. What is to stop Romanian air defence from shooting down missiles near their border with Ukraine. I'm sure the Ukrainians would not object. But even this is too much of an escalation for Nato. All they would be doing is neutralising Russian missiles but no, this would bring Nato into direct conflict with Russia and that cannot be allowed. It beats me as to why there isn't more anger towards Russia from the global south about this but there you go. The Saudis cut oil production which should help Russia pay the bills for that much longer.
Meanwhile the Ukrainian economy suffers because of the difficulty exporting through the Black Sea as they're being held hostage by the Russian Navy. Never mind that the Russian navy is nothing special and has fewer ships in the region than Turkey alone. That once you get to the Romanian border you are in entirely Nato waters. The narrative is all about whether Putin will extend the grain deal. He is the agent in all this. It's a matter of his beneficence. Why? Because Nato has no backbone. As the old saying goes it's not the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog. Putin might have misjudged many things but he saw the cowardice of Nato all too clearly.
Anthony Blinken is back in Kyiv meeting a dog. Still no sign of ATACMS. Still no attempt to get control of Black Sea shipping. F16s will arrive sometime before Godot. Taurus missiles? More tanks? Perhaps it is time for major western leaders to fess up. What is it they are afraid of?
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)
Looking at the process outlined, it looks bike the classic “professionalisation” of projects.
Which is simply about adding steps and paperwork, because more process is better.
We had one poster here saying that more process would have prevented the RAAC issue, somehow - there is a deep seated belief that more process can prevent all errors.
In fact, its been proven a number of times that excessive, useless paperwork hides problems.
Because some idiot with an agenda - and a legal budget - will say that putting chessboards in parks is racist, and let the authority tie themselves in knots to try and prove otherwise.
What’s required, is to get rid of all the statutory paperwork, and just put some chess boards in the park. It makes the park nicer, and encourages all sorts of people to turn up. In New York’’s Central Park, everyone from the local vagrants, to competition players, to IMs, GMs, and even Magnus blooming Carlsen turn up to play chess. Many of the vagrants have been doing this every day for decades, and can play chess at Master level even though they don’t ever enter real competitions.
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.
UK had two baby booms: one after WW2, another after vaccination and school healthcare was introduced in the 1950s. We use American terms because the media is dominated by nepo-babies who think googling is research.
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.
It sounds like an error path was hit that hadn’t been accounted for, so when the code threw an exception it halted altogether. As it should do in that case of course.
The actual fault was that the code as written could not find an exit point for a flightpath that was supposed to transit UK airspace. The software issue is that this error path wasn’t handled in the code & hence the entire system was brought down instead of that specific flight path being kicked out for manual processing.
There’s then a secondary issue in that it seems clear from the report that 1st & 2nd line support were too busy rigidly following their system failure procedures to actually do any root cause analysis & by the time those had failed to work & the top line support had been brought in from the company that wrote the code in the first place it was too late to get everything sorted out before the 4 hour time horizon was broken.
That in turn seems to be because the actual error was buried inside system logs that 1st & 2nd line support didn’t know how to access. Presumably there was an error log with the dump of the exception & stack at point of failure, which would have pointed to the root cause fairly quickly, but unless you know to look you’re going to be thrashing around in the dark.
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.
My head canon says that John McDonnell would have won.
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)
Looking at the process outlined, it looks bike the classic “professionalisation” of projects.
Which is simply about adding steps and paperwork, because more process is better.
We had one poster here saying that more process would have prevented the RAAC issue, somehow - there is a deep seated belief that more process can prevent all errors.
In fact, its been proven a number of times that excessive, useless paperwork hides problems.
Because some idiot with an agenda - and a legal budget - will say that putting chessboards in parks is racist, and let the authority tie themselves in knots to try and prove otherwise.
What’s required, is to get rid of all the statutory paperwork, and just put some chess boards in the park. It makes the park nicer, and encourages all sorts of people to turn up. In New York’’s Central Park, everyone from the local vagrants, to competition players, to IMs, GMs, and even Magnus blooming Carlsen turn up to play chess. Many of the vagrants have been doing this every day for decades, and can play chess at Master level even though they don’t ever enter real competitions.
Yes.
There are times where you wish for Eric Kohl and his home brew Welrod.
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.
It sounds like an error path was hit that hadn’t been accounted for, so when the code threw an exception it halted altogether. As it should do in that case of course.
The actual fault was that the code as written could not find an exit point for a flightpath that was supposed to transit UK airspace. The software issue is that this error path wasn’t handled in the code & hence the entire system was brought down instead of that specific flight path being kicked out for manual processing.
There’s then a secondary issue in that it seems clear from the report that 1st & 2nd line support were too busy rigidly following their system failure procedures to actually do any root cause analysis & by the time those had failed to work & the top line support had been brought in from the company that wrote the code in the first place it was too late to get everything sorted out before the 4 hour time horizon was broken.
That in turn seems to be because the actual error was buried inside system logs that 1st & 2nd line support didn’t know how to access. Presumably there was an error log with the dump of the exception & stack at point of failure, which would have pointed to the root cause fairly quickly, but unless you know to look you’re going to be thrashing around in the dark.
I don't know if it assists anyone, but the above is jolly interesting and everything, but though every single word in it is a word I recognise none of it - I mean none of it - is comprehensible. Is it translatable, or is it just too difficult for morons to comprehend.
Also, I have just two simplistic issues: If the stuff that involved a total fail of the system involved a flight that had not started, then would you not just cancel that flight and carry on with the rest.
Secondly, if that flight had started why was it safer to alter the system for every other flight that was in mid air (which sounds ominous) rather than find a work around for the one flight (like sending it home - which does after all happen from time to time.
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.
My head canon says that John McDonnell would have won.
I agree. McDonnell's persona would have attracted neither the ludicrous hero worship nor the loathing Jezza managed. Following T May trashing the brand a few million voters would have had a glance at McDonnell and concluded that the Labour option was no worse than the Tory meltdown. In particular McDonnell lacks the fantastically annoying passive aggressive trait of Jezza and comes across as more or less human and even quite personable.
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.
It sounds like an error path was hit that hadn’t been accounted for, so when the code threw an exception it halted altogether. As it should do in that case of course.
The actual fault was that the code as written could not find an exit point for a flightpath that was supposed to transit UK airspace. The software issue is that this error path wasn’t handled in the code & hence the entire system was brought down instead of that specific flight path being kicked out for manual processing.
There’s then a secondary issue in that it seems clear from the report that 1st & 2nd line support were too busy rigidly following their system failure procedures to actually do any root cause analysis & by the time those had failed to work & the top line support had been brought in from the company that wrote the code in the first place it was too late to get everything sorted out before the 4 hour time horizon was broken.
That in turn seems to be because the actual error was buried inside system logs that 1st & 2nd line support didn’t know how to access. Presumably there was an error log with the dump of the exception & stack at point of failure, which would have pointed to the root cause fairly quickly, but unless you know to look you’re going to be thrashing around in the dark.
I don't know if it assists anyone, but the above is jolly interesting and everything, but though every single word in it is a word I recognise none of it - I mean none of it - is comprehensible. Is it translatable, or is it just too difficult for morons to comprehend.
Also, I have just two simplistic issues: If the stuff that involved a total fail of the system involved a flight that had not started, then would you not just cancel that flight and carry on with the rest.
Secondly, if that flight had started why was it safer to alter the system for every other flight that was in mid air (which sounds ominous) rather than find a work around for the one flight (like sending it home - which does after all happen from time to time.
Answers on a postcard.
If they had known at the start the root cause of the problem then sure: they could have excised that flightpath from the data, let the system handle the rest & entered that one manually.
But they didn’t know that at the start, they just knew that the system had failed hard. All these flights are already in the air because they’ve already given them permission to take off when their flight plans were accepted four hours earlier - there’s only a single digit number of hours before every flight in this list is in UK airspace & all ATC support knew is that the system designed to ingest flight data into the rest of ATC has completely failed to do so. The information that would let them find out that a single flight was the cause of the error was buried in logs that 1st & 2nd line support either didn’t know about, or possibly didn’t even have access to (it’s not entirely clear from the report which was the case). Ideally the system logs available to support should have told them this stuff. but this was an unanticipated failure mode, so the relevant information wasn’t obvious to 1st or 2nd line support.
Just going in and fiddling randomly with the data until things work is potentially asking for trouble - what if the underlying problem is a parsing error that has dropped some flight paths altogether from the input, or changed flightpath data? You’re dealing with thousands of actual people currently in the air. Getting this wrong could kill some of them, so understanding why the system has failed is crucial.
It does seem that it took UK ATC much longer to get to the root cause & to implement a fix than it really should have done because their default incident response scripts took up time that they didn’t have, but it’s always easy with perfect hindsight after an incident to say “well obviously they should have simply done /X/!”. It’s much harder to look at a system, or a very large pile of code, and trawl through every possible failure & make sure that it is handled correctly & speedily, when getting it wrong can have potentially dire consequences.
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.
It sounds like an error path was hit that hadn’t been accounted for, so when the code threw an exception it halted altogether. As it should do in that case of course.
The actual fault was that the code as written could not find an exit point for a flightpath that was supposed to transit UK airspace. The software issue is that this error path wasn’t handled in the code & hence the entire system was brought down instead of that specific flight path being kicked out for manual processing.
There’s then a secondary issue in that it seems clear from the report that 1st & 2nd line support were too busy rigidly following their system failure procedures to actually do any root cause analysis & by the time those had failed to work & the top line support had been brought in from the company that wrote the code in the first place it was too late to get everything sorted out before the 4 hour time horizon was broken.
That in turn seems to be because the actual error was buried inside system logs that 1st & 2nd line support didn’t know how to access. Presumably there was an error log with the dump of the exception & stack at point of failure, which would have pointed to the root cause fairly quickly, but unless you know to look you’re going to be thrashing around in the dark.
I don't know if it assists anyone, but the above is jolly interesting and everything, but though every single word in it is a word I recognise none of it - I mean none of it - is comprehensible. Is it translatable, or is it just too difficult for morons to comprehend.
Also, I have just two simplistic issues: If the stuff that involved a total fail of the system involved a flight that had not started, then would you not just cancel that flight and carry on with the rest.
Secondly, if that flight had started why was it safer to alter the system for every other flight that was in mid air (which sounds ominous) rather than find a work around for the one flight (like sending it home - which does after all happen from time to time.
Answers on a postcard.
1) someone did a stupid input to the system 2) system errored 3) normally you catch the error and report it. Think of it as stopping a fire spreading from a room. Instead the whole building caught fire 4) everyone was too busy trying to deal with the whole building burning down to find and fix the actual error.
What is to stop Romanian air defence from shooting down missiles near their border with Ukraine. I'm sure the Ukrainians would not object. But even this is too much of an escalation for Nato. All they would be doing is neutralising Russian missiles but no, this would bring Nato into direct conflict with Russia and that cannot be allowed.
I think any missile that's landing in Romanian territory is by definition off course, so it's probably just landing in a field. This is still dangerous because there may be someone standing in the field. But if they started shooting air defence missiles at it, it would still end up crashing in a field, and so would the (much larger and quite expensive) air defence missiles, so now you've got two problems.
And this assumes that Romania does actually have some kind of air defence system in a relevant place that could shoot these things down. If they had loads of spare air defence systems sitting around capable of shooting down whatever Russia shoots at their potatoes then you'd hope they'd give them to Ukraine ?
Comments
I’m a professor. People think I spend a lot of time doing research. I actually spend a large chunk of “research time” writing proposals to get funding. Most of these fail, even if you’re a top professor. Some of the time, I sit on panels reviewing other people’s proposals. The whole thing feels very inefficient. But the process’s proponents say it ensures we fund the best research, get the best value for money. Except research on research funding shows that these mechanisms aren’t actually very good at picking the best projects to fund. We’re running around in circles to do something that doesn’t produce better outcomes.
If these areas return to Labour, a Labour Party that pretty much took them for granted and did little for them, then Labour has to respond and actually do something to improve these areas and these people's lives rather than just gloss over it.
The admission that you dutifully watch a quintessential petit bourgeois provincial BBC sitcom jars, somewhat, with your curated persona as PB’s very own Trotskyite fighter ace
If the Government funded local authorities properly through the core grant, then councils would have enough money to build stuff (including, perhaps, repairing schools) without the rigmarole of endless tenders. Yes, sometimes the "stuff" would be things that central government doesn't like. That's why we have local elections, so the councils can respond to local priorities.
Instead, local authorities have been emasculated to become delivery bodies for the whims of central government. Whitehall doesn't trust councils to make their own decisions.
You want an ordinal system that gives ordinary voters a choice from within a party’s candidates, so something like STV or there are list systems where the voter picks a list and then also gets to pick from within the list.
Which is simply about adding steps and paperwork, because more process is better.
We had one poster here saying that more process would have prevented the RAAC issue, somehow - there is a deep seated belief that more process can prevent all errors.
In fact, its been proven a number of times that excessive, useless paperwork hides problems.
One Foot In The Grave is definitely “Radio Times and a digestive biscuit” territory, however
And no, I don't want any of these things. No change is often the best thing, and that's what I want.
The full report is here: https://publicapps.caa.co.uk/docs/33/NERL Major Incident Investigation Preliminary Report.pdf
The actual fault was that the code as written could not find an exit point for a flightpath that was supposed to transit UK airspace. The software issue is that this error path wasn’t handled in the code & hence the entire system was brought down instead of that specific flight path being kicked out for manual processing.
There’s then a secondary issue in that it seems clear from the report that 1st & 2nd line support were too busy rigidly following their system failure procedures to actually do any root cause analysis & by the time those had failed to work & the top line support had been brought in from the company that wrote the code in the first place it was too late to get everything sorted out before the 4 hour time horizon was broken.
That in turn seems to be because the actual error was buried inside system logs that 1st & 2nd line support didn’t know how to access. Presumably there was an error log with the dump of the exception & stack at point of failure, which would have pointed to the root cause fairly quickly, but unless you know to look you’re going to be thrashing around in the dark.
Under an ordinal system (STV, a list system with intra-list voting), you can vote Conservative and indicate which of the Conservative candidates you want.
Which is not going to happen anytime soon. So they need to do something else. The odd benefit from the EU these regions had hardly helped them become economic powerhouses prior to Brexit. They were in deep decline then with Labour doing sod aside from taking their votes for granted.
OGH is helping Sunak out by changing the topic. New Thread
The combination of tactical voting, personal voting, and independent candidates deals with the same issue in a better way.
I once had a go in a 737 sim, and managed to do a circuit at Heathrow first time out, having flown nothing bigger than a glider in the real world at the time.
(One other PBer, who’s now an MP, was also on that show BTW).
However losing that way (least in 2017 when it was close) felt better than being timid and still losing like in 2015. I found that very disheartening. So I embraced the spirit of the Corbyn project and in fact joined 'his' party not the old one. I'm a newbie compared to the likes of you (although I've always voted Lab).
Ideally I'd that 'spirit' back with a contemporary makeover, policies and leadership style, but I'm more than ok with Starmer. He's going to win big, I think, and I'm actually optimistic that he will be bold (in a good way) once in office.
Please can we have the people who lied to Parliament imprisoned for contempt? Seriously. The PO are not treating this with the required gravity at all.
Let me start with the attack on the grain in Reni. It is unclear whether any missiles or drones landed on Nato territory, the Ukrainians claim they did and there seems to be little attempt to geolocate etc to get to the bottom of it. No surprise as we saw something similar with Poland last year. Why does Putin feel emboldened to take such a risk anyway right on a Nato border? We are talking about grain being sent to feed some of the world's poorest people. What is to stop Romanian air defence from shooting down missiles near their border with Ukraine. I'm sure the Ukrainians would not object. But even this is too much of an escalation for Nato. All they would be doing is neutralising Russian missiles but no, this would bring Nato into direct conflict with Russia and that cannot be allowed. It beats me as to why there isn't more anger towards Russia from the global south about this but there you go. The Saudis cut oil production which should help Russia pay the bills for that much longer.
Meanwhile the Ukrainian economy suffers because of the difficulty exporting through the Black Sea as they're being held hostage by the Russian Navy. Never mind that the Russian navy is nothing special and has fewer ships in the region than Turkey alone. That once you get to the Romanian border you are in entirely Nato waters. The narrative is all about whether Putin will extend the grain deal. He is the agent in all this. It's a matter of his beneficence. Why? Because Nato has no backbone. As the old saying goes it's not the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog. Putin might have misjudged many things but he saw the cowardice of Nato all too clearly.
Anthony Blinken is back in Kyiv meeting a dog. Still no sign of ATACMS. Still no attempt to get control of Black Sea shipping. F16s will arrive sometime before Godot. Taurus missiles? More tanks? Perhaps it is time for major western leaders to fess up. What is it they are afraid of?
What’s required, is to get rid of all the statutory paperwork, and just put some chess boards in the park. It makes the park nicer, and encourages all sorts of people to turn up. In New York’’s Central Park, everyone from the local vagrants, to competition players, to IMs, GMs, and even Magnus blooming Carlsen turn up to play chess. Many of the vagrants have been doing this every day for decades, and can play chess at Master level even though they don’t ever enter real competitions.
There are times where you wish for Eric Kohl and his home brew Welrod.
Also, I have just two simplistic issues: If the stuff that involved a total fail of the system involved a flight that had not started, then would you not just cancel that flight and carry on with the rest.
Secondly, if that flight had started why was it safer to alter the system for every other flight that was in mid air (which sounds ominous) rather than find a work around for the one flight (like sending it home - which does after all happen from time to time.
Answers on a postcard.
But they didn’t know that at the start, they just knew that the system had failed hard. All these flights are already in the air because they’ve already given them permission to take off when their flight plans were accepted four hours earlier - there’s only a single digit number of hours before every flight in this list is in UK airspace & all ATC support knew is that the system designed to ingest flight data into the rest of ATC has completely failed to do so. The information that would let them find out that a single flight was the cause of the error was buried in logs that 1st & 2nd line support either didn’t know about, or possibly didn’t even have access to (it’s not entirely clear from the report which was the case). Ideally the system logs available to support should have told them this stuff. but this was an unanticipated failure mode, so the relevant information wasn’t obvious to 1st or 2nd line support.
Just going in and fiddling randomly with the data until things work is potentially asking for trouble - what if the underlying problem is a parsing error that has dropped some flight paths altogether from the input, or changed flightpath data? You’re dealing with thousands of actual people currently in the air. Getting this wrong could kill some of them, so understanding why the system has failed is crucial.
It does seem that it took UK ATC much longer to get to the root cause & to implement a fix than it really should have done because their default incident response scripts took up time that they didn’t have, but it’s always easy with perfect hindsight after an incident to say “well obviously they should have simply done /X/!”. It’s much harder to look at a system, or a very large pile of code, and trawl through every possible failure & make sure that it is handled correctly & speedily, when getting it wrong can have potentially dire consequences.
2) system errored
3) normally you catch the error and report it. Think of it as stopping a fire spreading from a room. Instead the whole building caught fire
4) everyone was too busy trying to deal with the whole building burning down to find and fix the actual error.
And this assumes that Romania does actually have some kind of air defence system in a relevant place that could shoot these things down. If they had loads of spare air defence systems sitting around capable of shooting down whatever Russia shoots at their potatoes then you'd hope they'd give them to Ukraine ?