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Tory incompetence – politicalbetting.com
Tory incompetence – politicalbetting.com
Look at the words that are coming up most:Useless, Incompetent, rubbish.The Government's biggest electoral issue is not their positions or ideology, which is why shifting them doesn't shift the polls.It's delivery. It's getting things done.HS2 cancellation is a disaster. https://t.co/R6WgK9eTKC
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And first apparently!
Lab 43 (-1)
Con 28 (+2)
LD 12 (=)
Numerous other Qs but this one is a bit different and interesting:
Q: Over the last 30 years we have had 8 PMs. Who is most to blame for the UK's current economic situation?
Johnson 20
Blair 16
Cameron 15
Truss 13
May 6
Brown 5
Sunak 4
Major 1
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12606369/Rishi-Sunak-rights-women-Sir-Keir-Starmer-flip-flopper-policy.html
This attack might have been conducted by Hamas but was directed by Iran. Iran want to create conflict to derail the upcoming Saudi/UAE-Israel peace talks. Before the year ends I expect to see Iran and Saudi in a state of war - with troubles in Bahrain and Qatar.
Sorry for the doom...
We've been here many times before, and somehow so far they have always managed to contain it. Because it's in the sane world's interest to do so and included in that majority are serious interests.
So, on balance, no I don't think it will escalate very much, nor to the hyperbolic level you (and Leondamus) imagine.
Time to peruse the F1 markets.
Tonga v Romania – Play off for 4th-5th place. Romania’s best chance to win their first RWC game but Tonga to win comfortably by 20.
Japan v Argentina – This is maybe the hardest match to call this weekend. Argentina have improved slowly through the tournament but Japan will be targeting this game to reach the QF. I expect Argentina to win but only by 5 or 6 – and Japan could potentially steal it.
Fiji v Portugal – This could be the most exciting game of the weekend – Both sides will be running from everywhere but I expect Fiji’s strength to prevail – Fiji by 15.
Unfortunately they have been progressively sidelined in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and we are left with Netanyahu and his loons on one side and Haniyeh and his genocidal loons on the other.
It might be contained - the Saudis (for a given value of 'sane') are already trying to broker some sort of climb down. But the risks it won't be are extremely high.
I think the Iran-Saudi war will most likely continue as a proxy in Yemen though, rather than more directly. Worrying times.
Betting PostF1: impressed with McLaren in the sprint and the circuit may make passing too easy, so backed them both (one stake split evenly) to win each way at 23 for Piastri and 19 for Norris, boosted.
https://enormo-haddock.blogspot.com/2023/10/qatar-pre-race-2023.html
It may be they have calculated they need a war to reverse their wave of unpopularity. That would be entirely in keeping with their outlook and that of many dictators through time. What would puzzle me is how they think poking Netanyahu with a very large stick like this, by using a pariah organisation like Hamas to rape and murder inside Israel and give him an opportunity to move decisively against Gaza, would achieve that.
It might, of course, lead to problems between the Israelis and the Saudis. But truthfully, neither the Saudis nor the Egyptians have any love for Hamas and would probably be very happy indeed to see the Israelis smash them even if their citizens might not be. It might give Iran's enemies in the west a further headache and take pressure off Russia in Ukraine, but that's not altogether likely as Ukraine is far more strategically important to the West than Israel and there is no doubt whom they would fling under the bus first if necessary.
Or it may be that they have calculated Gaza is unsustainable without doing something drastic, and this is the something drastic.
Whatever it is, I can't see good outcomes from it for anyone. There are bad ones and much worse ones.
* Starmer more trusted to protect the rights of women and girls.
* Starmer the stronger leader
* Starmer more trusted overall
* Sunak the bigger flip-flopper
* Sunak more out of touch
* Sunak more seen as representing more of the same
He would win a 10km race, but Starmer best for a pub quiz!!
Good morning everybody.
It rather makes you question how meaningful the poll might be.
The Israel conflict is terrible with unknown consequences and outcome
This article highlights just how perilous the world's economy's are and why there is absolutely no money to spend by governments
Also sorry to see @Farooq and @FrankBooth leave this forum but at times it does seem like an echo chamber, but it is important that as many different views are expressed as possible otherwise it will become an echo chamber
I hope they both return
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/10/08/britain-heading-another-black-monday-stock-market-crash/
Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, told cabinet colleagues he recently asked the artificial intelligence app ChatGPT: “Is Jeremy Hunt doing a good job as chancellor?” To his distress and amusement came the reply: “Jeremy Hunt is not the chancellor, Rishi Sunak is.”
And a wit at the Treasury, where civil servants are still unclear what the government will put in the autumn statement on November 22, quipped: “We are waiting for the prime minister to tell us.”
The parallels with Gordon Brown’s micromanagement send a chill up Tory spines. “Like Gordon, he’s convinced he’s morally and intellectually superior to his predecessors, despite never having won an election,” a former No 10 adviser thundered. “And he never will.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rishi-sunak-tories-next-general-election-lrx8dkp0c
(1) Massive attack on Israel, with utterly disgusting brutal atrocities - to be widely broadcast on social media
(2) Provoke the fury and wrath of Israel, to wipe out Gaza - again, capture the worst bits; broadcast it all
(3) Trigger a wider Middle East conflagration in disgust, and ally with everyone to wipe out Israel
(4) Be rewarded in this life or the next, as holy martyrs, for wiping the Jews and their state
So, it's not dissimilar to the thinking of White Supremacists who want to provoke a race war that, ultimately, will work out in their favour.
[Btw, I don't think (3) would happen regardless, but Netanyahu needs to be careful not to fall into a trap on (2)]
1. He is in coalition with far-right ethno-nationalists who believe they know better than the IDF
2. He is in that coalition solely because he needed to power to prevent criminal investigation of himself
3. The combination of 1 and 2 means that he totally took his eye off the national security ball
Put all of that together and there is a very good chance that he now reacts in exactly the way that Hamas/Iran want.
Of course, they know all this too (Hamas/Iran aren't stupid) which is why they struck as hard as they did when they did.
However, clenching my teeth, he did at least make vaguely half-intelligent posts at time, and hadn't yet crossed the boundary for being so deeply unpleasant and toxic that he needed evicting from the site, so I wouldn't support his expulsion.
I trust he will return after a few days.
A rather bleak scenario being painted by the Telegraph. After the recent bond sell offs are we facing another black Monday, although it could be any trading day, as the markets get used to higher for longer rates.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/10/08/britain-heading-another-black-monday-stock-market-crash/
The Tory leader’s attempt to rebrand himself as an agent of “change” was the audacity of the desperate. The essential smallness of Mr Sunak’s speech came at the end of a Tory conference in Manchester that had the smell of a party preparing for opposition.
Voters loathe it when they think they are being taken for granted and pollsters report that the phrase “he’s already measuring the curtains” has started to crop up in their focus groups when members of the public talk about Sir Keir. Cheerful and confident is a good look; cocky and triumphalist isn’t.
Virtually all of [Keir’s] colleagues, including many who used to be consumed with doubt that he had the capacity to take them into power, now speak with admiration about the transformation of the party’s prospects under his leadership.
The absence of a record that they can boast about means the Conservatives will rely even more heavily than they usually do on trying to trash Labour’s credibility and especially the character of its leader. The Tories grasp that they are unlikely to succeed in convincing voters that Sir Keir is too scary to be allowed anywhere near Number 10. “People can see he is not Corbyn,” says one senior Conservative. They are seeking to frame the Labour leader as a shifty opportunist who will say anything to get elected.
What the Tories say about them is not the first order question facing Labour this week. The most crucial one is whether Labour can communicate persuasively with the country. It should worry the shadow cabinet that only a shade more than a third of people currently saying they intend to vote Labour at the election think that the party has clear plans for the country. “If not them, why us?” is the exam question this conference has been set and it must be answered with compelling clarity and coherence.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/labour-poll-keir-starmer-unpopular-tories-b2425801.html
I don’t mind Faarooq, but it’s all getting a bit like CHB when he was crying for some departed posters to return and then promptly flounced himself. It’s bizarre when people are nostalgic For posters on a message board.
People get far too invested in these debates and discussions. Especially on fucking Israel. Which is why I avoid the topic in any depth. No good ever comes out of it and on Twitter it’s far worse.
The only consultation in that thought is that Leon might not be real person!
Hence leaving the playing field to the extremists. And it's not just issues like Israel / Palestine / Hamas, either.
https://twitter.com/UKLabour/status/1710767403028603275
Alcohol and vigorous debate are not good bedfellows.
The Tories are simply Blairism lite and not very good at it. At some point - probably when weve run out of money - the country is going to have to ditch the metropolitan cowboys and get back to reality.
That said, there is a case that many of the economic issues facing the country have their roots in Blair’s government
These are currently in the news for all the wrong reasons. Only one of many measures that eroded our civil liberties.
https://prisonreformtrust.org.uk/project/imprisonment-for-public-protection-ipp/
Anyway, add things up and what it’s saying is:
Tory PMs: 59%
Labour PMs: 21%
Not massively far away from the LLG vs Tory scores, though marginally worse for Tories.
Doctors say growing use of assistants is ‘indulgence of an unregulated professional' and detrimental to patients
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/07/non-medical-staff-learn-neurosurgery-on-the-job/ (£££)
Doctors, who needs 'em?
@Farooq objected to a few other posters calling for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and expulsion from their remaining lands.
I don't think our site or country can usefully contribute to resolving the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, so try to stay out of it, but is difficult to tolerate reading a site calling for further war crimes as answer to war crimes.
PB benefits from a diversity of voices and opinions, and is generally civil compared to other sites, but when any poster dominates thread after thread then it loses that charm.
Ask malc for lessons
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Thing is you can try to dismantle the organs of a liberal democratic state and you will get objections from all sorts but what you do may well be tolerated by many if you provide safety and security in return. But if you cannot do that - as the Netanyahu government has plainly failed to do - why tolerate everything else?
For now those reservists will fight to defend their country, to defend people from being slaughtered in their homes, at bus stops, from girls being kidnapped, raped, killed, their bodies desecrated. But after?
Recent Israeli governments have become more and more horrible and so, while I want Israel to exist and be safe it has become, increasingly hard to support the policies of its government which provide no security and are becoming increasingly undemocratic and illiberal. Israel under Netanyahu has become more and more like the Arab states it claims to be better than. Those Israelis wanting a liberal Democratic Western-style Israel have sometimes looked like the remnants of an older better - but dying - Israel.
But what we have seen of Islamic terrorism in Israel and everywhere it has happened in recent decades and the resurgence of Western anti-semitism under the guise of anti-colonialism has reduced my sympathy for the causes they claim to be fighting for to somewhere near zero. The Palestinians - and Arabs generally - have picked and supported the most appalling causes and leaders. I can feel sorrow and sympathy for innocent individuals in Israel and Gaza being terrorised and tortured and suffering. I feel nothing but contempt for those whose reaction to seeing films of old people gunned down at bus stops and girls being raped is to go out onto the streets of London and celebrate.
In the end, they did more damage than good to civil liberties and other liberal causes and principles. And they pretty much killed off independent local government, with all their legislation and targets and nannying initiatives and council funding becoming more and more tied to doing precisely whatever central government wanted.
Starmer and Streeting and the rest show less liberal tendency now than Blair and Co did in opposition, which doesn’t augur well. And in an era where new money will be hard to come by, I strongly expect they will try and get more and more control over all of the existing money.
Rory Stewart’s thinking is more encouraging as a more intelligent take on where we should go, but of course he’s already a fringe figure, and conservative liberalism doesn’t long survive contact with power.
So I comment not on the issue, which is way beyond my understanding, but the quality of posting.
The main rule that I try to follow - with occasional exceptions which I do regret (sorry, Josiah)- is not to comment critically about other posters. After all, 90% of people here are anonymous, so who cares what they're really like? Disagreeing with what they say is fine, and sometimes being critical of how they say it, but not labelling each other in neat categories - racist, Putinist, sexist, or simply stupid. We are probably all more nuanced than we seem, or even realise ourselves.
"A new station for Bradford
There will be investment of £2bn to include a "brand new" railway station in Bradford.
That was previously cancelled in 2021 by Boris Johnson's government, reinstated by Liz Truss in 2022 and axed again when Rishi Sunak took office." (BBC)
Even to call it an -ism rather oversells it I think because that implies a guiding ideology. When Randolph Churchill was asked what Tory Democracy was, he replied “To tell the truth I don’t know myself what Tory Democracy is, but I believe it to be principally opportunism.” And that's as good a definition of Blairism (or Cameronism or Sunakism or Starmerism) as I've ever heard.
Rape has always been used as a weapon by men against women in wartime. Saying this does not make one an advocate for it.
https://x.com/daithidoolan/status/1710687290912333832?s=61&t=s0ae0IFncdLS1Dc7J0P_TQ
There is a long tradition of non-medically trained assistants, from scrub nurses to other professions such as physiotherapists or radiographers, but these new roles of "Physician Associate" and "Anaesthetic Associate" are new to the UK. They are long established in the USA and I have also worked with them in Africa.
All other paramedical professions have their own regulatory bodies , but these new PA and AA roles do not at present. Some Trusts and General Practices are using them interchangeably with Doctors, and they are often incentivised financially to do so.
There is some protectiveness of medical perogative, but also genuine concern as to who is responsible for mistakes, and the diversion of skilled specialists to train these rather than the next generation of specialists.
There was the tragic death of a 30 year old woman with textbook Deep Vein Thrombosis recently, seen only by a PA in General Practice on a number of occasions, and never seen by a qualified doctor.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2023-07-06/debates/D98F2ABE-7B33-4748-B88E-ED7243469131/PhysicianAssociates
Tragic medical errors are not unique to PAs, but there is general concern as to who is responsible in such cases.
Gaza is an open sore on the region, allowed to be sustained by other states. Egypt likes to blame Israel but has its own border wall at the south to keep Gazans imprisoned. Iran is after a fight and seem to be responsible for all those missiles arriving into Gaza. Russia seem to have armed and trained Hamas with drones to drop bombs.
Removing Gaza and pushing the people there back onto the arab diaspora isn't that crazy an idea. The idiocy of "refugee camps" has to end. These are not displaced refugees, they are several generations down the track from that. Resettle them in the other parts of the former Ottoman empire. So that they can also find peace.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/07/sunaks-plan-to-run-part-of-hs2-on-existing-track-may-be-slower-than-existing-service
They might hope to trigger massive unrest in Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, at the refusal of the leadership to support a way against Israel. If they could flip one country from having a broadly pro-West government to a pro-Iranian one it would be a massive win for them. How stable is Jordan, for example?
It might provide a pretext to step up attacks on shipping in the Gulf, in an attempt to block oil and gas exports to punish the West for siding with Israel.
They are a chaotic coalition of reactionaries and loopy radicals.
Incompetent as she was, the idea that she did quite so much damage in so little time is risible. The UK's problems are far deeper seated than that.
Sunak should score way higher, too.
It is - putting it bluntly - a lie. Delivery promised in the 2040s providing that it passes the usual treasury funding tests which it won't. I don't know who I feel more sorry for - the people this was aimed at ('these idiots will believe any crap we feed them') or the few people who still now parrot the £36bn of investment as if it is real and that people near them welcome it.
It is of course necessary for the reason I suggested earlier or if one wants to differentiate the one- sided barbarism of one particular group against another. In this instance the poster's accusation is reality, but why the graphic picture?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Ironically it appears that many of the kidnap and rape victims were peace protestors.
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this