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Memo to Sunak: Tweeting pics from a private jet isn’t smart – politicalbetting.com
Memo to Sunak: Tweeting pics from a private jet isn’t smart – politicalbetting.com
‘Boost our transport’ says man pictured on private jet. Who thought the optics of this were good? Extraordinary https://t.co/wfBnOk0zI9
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Nice one, Mike. Terrible 'optics' from Sunak, our lame duck PM.
I think Sunak is saying to his valet:
"Gosh, this is a tough one. 'Man's best friend'. Three letters. D something G."
https://www.threads.net/@mrmichaelspicer/post/CyD1qavMVQk
Police have reportedly wrongly labelled hundreds of alleged rapists as women in referrals to the Crown Prosecution Service - despite Home Secretary Suella Braverman's orders not to.
The scale of police adopting the self-declared gender of suspected rapists has been shown for the first time in figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
In the last four years, police forces have referred 260 'females' to the CPS to consider a rape charge, The Telegraph reports.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12603973/Police-wrongly-label-hundreds-rapists-women-referrals-CPS-despite-Home-Secretary-Suella-Bravermans-orders-not-to.html
Reports of armed Palestinian ganga roaming Israeli towns near Gaza, gunning down everyone they see.
A woman is a woman
A muppet is a muppet.
I am just wondering if this latest attack might lead Israel to take a more direct approach a la Azerbaijan and Artsekh. In which case, if I were the Egyptian government I would be really worried right now.
Can we discuss which is the current thread please!
All my bags are packed
I'm ready to go
I'm standin' here outside your door
I hate to wake you up to say goodbye
But the dawn is breakin'
It's early morn
The taxi's waitin'
He's blowin' his horn
Already I'm so lonesome
I could die
So kiss me and smile for me
Tell me that you'll wait for me
Hold me like you'll never let me go
'Cause I'm leavin' on a jet plane
Don't know when I'll be back again
Oh babe, I hate to go
Akshata (off) " Well you could start by taking the cap off"
However, he can use computers, apparently, so that might rule him out.
F1: no bet, just wibbling:
https://enormo-haddock.blogspot.com/2023/10/qatar-pre-sprint-race-2023.html
“Don’t try to hide your wealth. That’s fake. See it as an attribute. Embrace it. People respect wealth and power. Look at Trump.” Etc.
It’s like an extreme example of the be yourself advice. Except it just doesn’t work in this context because it suggests he hasn’t got a clue about real transport.
I am glad he gets on with the job. I just wish he made a lot better decisions.
It's the sheer inanity of it that gets me. What message did he think pretending* to work on a private jet would send?
Honestly, Charles' handling of his divorce was a model of common sense by comparison.
*if he can't even remember to take the cap off his fucking pen...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/10/07/bond-markets-doom-joe-biden-us-presidential-elections/
No. I wish he was not doing the job, because he is bad at it.
Next we will get photos of him doing yoga in places that look like he’s on the edge of a cliff.
Watch the youth flock to the Tories. You just don’t see how clever the plan is, so clever nobody can see.
Not saying a lot, though, is it!
Then yes suggesting that our infrastructure is gawd awful might be somewhat problematic.
It’s the private jet version of a VW Golf
@LouHaigh
A perfect image to accompany the announcement you're scrapping High Speed rail, flying home on your private jet.
A breathtaking lack of self-awareness.
And utter contempt for the millions who never voted for you or this.
Doesn't seem to have dented Ms Swift's tour sales
By which I mean they’ve come around yet again.
Why's an investigation needed? It's because they're fucking stupid.
The broader point is correct though, you get delayed for hours due to cancelled trains, the ones that run are packed out, you can't drive anywhere due to vast amounts of irresolvable congestion and the difficulties in finding parking. And then you hear his new plan, the reinvention of the government after 13 years, is based around the flagship policy of cancelling a new high speed rail line that his government have been planning for 13 years at vast cost to you, as a taxpayer, apparently largely in favour of doing some routine maintainence to the roads (filling in potholes). And then you see him on a private jet. It is bad decisions and incompetence and many voters will reach the conclusion that we need a different government.
It is remarkable that an increase in employment across the US is a negative but it seems it is similar to Truss economics when borrowing unfunded billions leads to continuing inflation and increased long term interest rates and huge increase in government's borrowing rates
This is not just likely to cause a problem for Biden but all governments as we continue to live beyond our means
I had to say that I didn’t know; both as bad as each other, perhaps. At the beginning, back in the 40’s and 50’s, one could, reasonably, have sympathy for the Israelis, but now???
One thing I told her was if she was looking for heroes, don't look in the Middle East. There are bad guys, who happen to oppose each other.
The one saving grace for the Israelis is not all of them are in favour of the government's policies on Gaza and the West Bank, while all members of Hamas (again, not necessarily representative of all Palestinians although it's undoubtedly a high proportion) is signed up to the idea of genocide against the Israelis. But there's at best little gap in disgustingness between Haniyeh and Netanyahu.
British and European societies are reticent about flamboyant wealth in a way that the American and Indian elite are not. There is definitely a feeling that if you are wealthy and successful you should show it, indeed if you are not showing it then you are not to be believed.
(1) Someone has told Sunak the only way forward is to be authentically himself
(2) He's totally missed the point, as this photo shows
(3) He's either: (a) surrounded by people who won't say truth to power, or, (b) ignoring those who do and deciding instead to all do it his way - see (1) and (2) again
Proper DfE would have been to wait until about this time next year and claw the excess back after it had been spent.
The fear is that this Israeli government, the most far right ever, will now enact a Permanent Solution to the Gaza Problem: ejecting them all into Sinai. Perhaps, in a macabre way, that would be better than the endless agony of the last decades
Starmer is saying HS2 will be forever unaffordable if Rishi scorches the earth and resells the already procured land to developers etc. Rayner I think is saying "Rishi, don't salt the earth, just build HS2"
This is throwing the offset industry into disarray. Many businesses, wealthy individuals and institutions buy land for forestry on the basis it allows them to carry on as normal whilst being irredeemably smug and patronising. It appears that in doing so they are actually increasing their carbon footprint, not reducing it.
Apart from the voices in his head, Mr Spreadsheet (which was going to be the name for Microsoft Excel) and family chum James Forsyth, who is Rishi actually listening to these days?
Trump, eating KFC, on his private 757, on fine china and gold cutlery....
It's the process. The root cause being a lack of political courage - to make brave decisions and lead - and then consistency in the follow-through:
"Failing to build things we need is a sure-fire way to get poorer. It gradually strangles an economy, making it harder and harder to live, work and innovate. Yet we seem to have become world leaders in how to not build things. The costs for our infrastructure projects are markedly above those of other countries. The planning and legal processes take longer. The outcomes are less certain.
There are plenty of technical reasons why this is happening, not least a lack of training to produce skilled planners or workers, and fiscal rules that push governments to plan in five-year cycles instead of the 10 to 20 years required. But there is a political and moral reason too. Governments have become incapable of accepting that serving the national interest sometimes involves doing things that are unfair — often deeply unfair — to certain, highly visible, organised groups
The failure to accept this means they instead preside over a much greater, more terrible unfairness: the inexorable decline of British competitiveness. Building more runways or huge pylons or wider roads damages the quality of life of those who live near them. These are unpalatable facts. But somehow we have allowed these facts to overwhelm the greater, pressing national need to modernise the country.
The government avoids grappling directly with these issues by effectively outsourcing policy to the courts, which are then charged with sorting out, over years, which of the various contradictory sets of environmental, human rights or economic policies ought to have priority in each particular case."
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fail-to-build-and-britain-will-hit-the-buffers-2j7hlj8g9
So he’s “leaning into” a bout of boasting, saying “look I married really well”, like he’s a kind of miniaturised, quasi-male Meghan Markle
I really do believe Starmer is quietly pleased as he can attack Sunak's decision while saying he is the one who will see that all the savings will be spent in the north as proposed
If they have to be this tiny blinding size, just forbid them altogether
You can see his devious hand and thick head in every mistake Sunak is making.
Some suggestions this is Iranian backed in response to the Israel-Saudi detente. Makes some sense. Iran does seem to have a penchant for stirring up foreign trouble simply for the sake of permanent instability.
Deeply concerned by reports from Gaza and Israel. Civilians must be protected, I am especially horrified to hear about hostage taking, and all violence condemned. This is a significant escalation. I can't see how it ends well for anyone.
https://x.com/LaylaMoran/status/1710554463830782201?s=20
There's a grim irony that CC claimed they could have 'more seats with fewer trains' when retiring the Intercities!
I don’t want this to happen. I don’t want Israelis or Palestinians to die - any of them. The whole thing is a Satanic mess and both sides are at fault - increasingly Israel but the Islamists of Hamas are hardly saints
I am speculating as to possible outcomes and what a very hardline Israeli government might do that no previous Israeli government has dared to do - actually drive the Palestinians out of Gaza. Far right Israeli politicians have talked of this in the past, plenty of times, well now they are in the government - so maybe they will do it
If it happens it would be a crime for the ages - of course - but in the end if the Gazans were given a proper amount of land to settle in Sinai - and their freedom - it might be better than the living prison they inhabit now, which is constantly at war (as we see)
There is no good easy clearly moral solution; quit your pearl clutching
I’d like to think the Starmer government will get to grips with this. He will surely have the majority to do it; it should be top of his to-do list. Fix the planning system so we can build things
For all the attacks on Sunak it is his technocratic and accountancy attitudes that he applies and ignores conventional politics which also explains his use of a private jet
It would also change the demographic ratio of the whole area firmly in favour of the Israelis by removing over half the Palestinians.
At that stage the West Bank would almost certainly have to accept its de facto annexation into Israel. The 'facts on the ground' strategy would have borne fruit.
Would Netanyahu do it? Certainly he would, given a pretext.
He has just been given a pretext.
And having emasculated the Israeli courts and split the Knesset, it's hard to see who would stop him.
As the LibDem MP says, it's hard to see how this ends well.
It’s also notable that Israel has been quietly making peace with all the major Arab players in recent years. First Egypt of course, but now the UAE and recently Saudi
“Riyadh said willing to boost oil output to help clinch normalization deal with Israel”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/riyadh-said-willing-to-boost-oil-output-to-help-clinch-normalization-deal-with-israel/
Listening to the reports on Sky it is very serious and a lot of bloodshed is likely sadly
https://www.cntraveler.com/story/all-the-ways-to-fly-private-starting-at-dollar100-per-flight