Can someone help? Here's a question I've been pondering of late. King Charles III got the III bit because, obviously, there were two kings called Charles before him. But who or what gets to decide who officially counts as a historical monarch or not? For example, it's surely debatable whether Edward V should count as a genuine king, but it's been decided that he was, and there must be other borderline cases throughout history. So what's the official criteria?
It's up to the next monarch of the same name. Edward VI (or more probably his protectors) decided that he was the sixth of that name so, proclaimed Edward VI he was.
That's really interesting. Especially with the Edward bit - because of course there was at least one King Edward of England prior to Edward I - i.e. Edward the Confessor.
By convention the numbering starts at 1066. There were two (three?) Anglo Saxon Edwards.
Should we be calling them Edward the Zeroth and Edward the Minus First?
Nah. We make 1066 Episode 4 and make pre-1066 times Episode 1,2 and 3. Perfectly sensible as I'm sure you'd agree.
What idiot thought selling of social housing for peanuts was a good idea?
The idea of selling council stock was a good one.
Central government nicking most of the proceeds, and legislating to prevent councils building more to replace it was utter idiocy - motivated purely by Thatcher's dislike of local government. But then left unchanged by her successors.
The problem is not so much the lack of social housing as the lack of housing overall. Had much more been built, to meet demand, prices would never have soared as they have in both rental and purchase sectors.
You do need lots of properly funded social housing. If the residential property space is nearly all private sector you're too much in the hands of developers, financiers and landlords whose priorities are not aligned to what should be our national objective: a decent affordable place to live for everybody, homes as homes not money making instruments.
If you have a shortage of housing, then you will have people living in tiny, shitty properties. Plenty of evidence historically.
If you don't want that, do what the Victorians and Edwardians did. Build whole towns and suburbs, with actual space for people to live.
The ownership is next to immaterial - look at how much council accommodation is flipped into the rental sector.
A massive landslide in line with these results will leave Labour in the same position as The SNP in 2015, with lots of MPs elected in seats they would normally not expect to win. In Scotland that meant a lot of numpties and the occasional rouge elected, dependent on slavishly following the leadership line to preserve their lucrative positions and career progression. It will be interesting to see the calibre and performance of Labour's equivalent.
In fairness if the same happened to Labour then rouge would be far from occasional
A massive landslide in line with these results will leave Labour in the same position as The SNP in 2015, with lots of MPs elected in seats they would normally not expect to win. In Scotland that meant a lot of numpties and the occasional rouge elected, dependent on slavishly following the leadership line to preserve their lucrative positions and career progression. It will be interesting to see the calibre and performance of Labour's equivalent.
That prospect is one reason Labour has been so ruthless with its selection processes I think. No doubt they'll get some wrong, but I doubt we'll see any Jared O'Maras or the bizarrely inappropriate people chosen in historically safe Red Wall seats in 2019 because Len and Unite were fans. No doubt we'll start hearing criticism that they are boring drones, but I'd take loads of dull, earnest councillor types over the eccentric firebrands who inevitably seem to end their careers in some form of disgrace.
I’m still amazed, as an IT consultant, how poor the main political parties are at vettting MP candidates for online behaviour. There’s only a couple of hundred new ones each election, it’s really not difficult if you have £1m budget, to weed out the Jared O’Maras before they become a massive problem.
You don't need a big budget. You hire external outfits to do this for x a head. The X depends on how thoroughly they dig.
Oh of course. I’d be happy to enable such research for an appropriate fee.
The official line is that Starmer's failing leadership condemned the Lanour candidates to winning fewer votes than were achieved by Corbyn in these seats in 2017, and fewer even than in 2019 in Mid Beds. There will be grim faces in Labour HQ as the enormity of this historic defeat sinks in, and Kid Starver must do the obvious thing and resign immediately.
Can someone help? Here's a question I've been pondering of late. King Charles III got the III bit because, obviously, there were two kings called Charles before him. But who or what gets to decide who officially counts as a historical monarch or not? For example, it's surely debatable whether Edward V should count as a genuine king, but it's been decided that he was, and there must be other borderline cases throughout history. So what's the official criteria?
We already had a Charles III north of the wall...
And south, certainly in Derby.
There's a surprisingly kind cairn near Swarkestone Bridge / Causeway (itself very special) in memory of Charles Edward Stuart's about turn.
Piccies:
Local Schoolchildren are less kind. No idea about why the actual decision was made:
"Bonnie Prince Charlie came this way And ran away on washing day."
A colleague used to work for a Derby operation - I used to see him at conferences and rib him over a beer on how so unspeakably awful Derby was that CES at the head of an all-conquering blitzkrieg could only take one look and turn back.
I'd call Derby a Curate's Egg - good parts and bad parts. Some truly awful roads, but also Rolls-Royce (1200 new jobs from Aukus, if dodgy Rishi doesn't burn that down as well) and the Peak District corridor.
But they have just put *this* in the middle one of their key strategic cycling and walking routes, so totally in hock to motor-normativity.
A numpty at the Derbyshire County Council Planning Department conditioned the mast with a pathway extension to make it a bit less dangerous, but then accepted a drawing with no dimensions on it so can do bugger all to enforce anything, and something was built that is massively below national standards. Attention to detail totally missing.
Situated on the key Pentagon Island active travel route, Derby’s newest sculptural installation “Middle Finger” provides deep & emotional insight into the true feelings of the council’s planning department towards all those walking, wheeling & cycling in the city. https://twitter.com/tandemkate/status/1710701505064354227
At least if anyone crashes into it there should be good signal to call an ambulance
(quite possibly not true, of course - I don't know much about the radiation characteristics of mobile masts, but there could well be a dead zone around the base)
ETA: There's a popular multi-use cycle path in N Yorks with an electricity pole slap bang in the middle. Unlit track too. It does have some pretty worn white paint on it to protect against collisions. Nettles either side, so space enough to have wiggled the path around it if not wanting to move the pole - I'm assuming the pole pre-dates the path!
I think the Tories might just get rid of Rishi after next years local elections. Yes it will be their fourth leader in this Parliament but given the seats they're losing what have they got to lose?
I think the Tories might just get rid of Rishi after next years local elections. Yes it will be their fourth leader in this Parliament but given the seats they're losing what have they got to lose?
If they think Sunak is the main problem then they haven't a clue.
Oh look, another person who'd never vote Tory along to dispense some helpful advice.
It's time for a leadership challenge, with Penny Mordaunt and Kemi Badenoch being the main candidates.
Why on Earth would they want it now? Do they want to tick a box or have a career? If the Tories switch, they need an elder statesman to fight a short, sharp campaign and win a few seats. A Michael Howard type. I'm not sure who they have left in the Commons who can do that.
Gove???
I think Gove is a bit too "unpredictable" to be an elder statesman.
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
ATACMS is a proper game-changer. There’s nowhere in occupied Ukraine that’s safe from them, so ammo dumps and command posts need to be moved back all the way to Russia if they don’t want to get blown up.
There’s good reason that Zelensky was asking for it 18 months ago.
Maybe. But on the other hand it seems as though they've only sent the cluster munition version of ATACMS. So that was great for hitting exposed targets at the airfield outside Berdyansk, but it won't be so good at hitting a hardened ammunition dump or command post that is out of Storm Shadow range.
Ukraine's domestic drone and missile industry developments may prove to be more consequential. They're not shy of using those to hit valuable military targets within Russia. Trump can't so easily put a stop to them if he wins in 2024.
I think the Tories might just get rid of Rishi after next years local elections. Yes it will be their fourth leader in this Parliament but given the seats they're losing what have they got to lose?
If they think Sunak is the main problem then they haven't a clue.
Oh look, another person who'd never vote Tory along to dispense some helpful advice.
You don't have to be a political sage or a Tory to know that Sunak is a major problem for the Tories. Perhaps the problem isn't so much what he does, it's what he is not doing. He is not a convincing leader, he blows with the wind (which undermines any claim to integrity so important these days) and lacks the gravitas/authority of a PM despite occupying the job. He is bed blocking an alternative, who might just be able to grab the situation. If the Tories have any sense (long shot) they will thank him for his efforts and say goodbye.
A massive landslide in line with these results will leave Labour in the same position as The SNP in 2015, with lots of MPs elected in seats they would normally not expect to win. In Scotland that meant a lot of numpties and the occasional rouge elected, dependent on slavishly following the leadership line to preserve their lucrative positions and career progression. It will be interesting to see the calibre and performance of Labour's equivalent.
That prospect is one reason Labour has been so ruthless with its selection processes I think. No doubt they'll get some wrong, but I doubt we'll see any Jared O'Maras or the bizarrely inappropriate people chosen in historically safe Red Wall seats in 2019 because Len and Unite were fans. No doubt we'll start hearing criticism that they are boring drones, but I'd take loads of dull, earnest councillor types over the eccentric firebrands who inevitably seem to end their careers in some form of disgrace.
I’m still amazed, as an IT consultant, how poor the main political parties are at vettting MP candidates for online behaviour. There’s only a couple of hundred new ones each election, it’s really not difficult if you have £1m budget, to weed out the Jared O’Maras before they become a massive problem.
You don't need a big budget. You hire external outfits to do this for x a head. The X depends on how thoroughly they dig.
Oh of course. I’d be happy to enable such research for an appropriate fee.
Jared was sui generis, a paper candidate in an unwinnable seat in an unexpected election called three years too early for the FTPA, and O'Mara was picked only after several other prospective candidates had declined. There was no time for proper vetting, and rule him out and you then have to persuade someone else to stand, and all the best candidates want to stand where they can actually win.
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
ATACMS is a proper game-changer. There’s nowhere in occupied Ukraine that’s safe from them, so ammo dumps and command posts need to be moved back all the way to Russia if they don’t want to get blown up.
There’s good reason that Zelensky was asking for it 18 months ago.
Maybe. But on the other hand it seems as though they've only sent the cluster munition version of ATACMS. So that was great for hitting exposed targets at the airfield outside Berdyansk, but it won't be so good at hitting a hardened ammunition dump or command post that is out of Storm Shadow range...
That is possibly as much to do with funding authorisation as anything else. The cluster munition version is due for disposal, so has little or no (perhaps even negative) book value.
Can someone help? Here's a question I've been pondering of late. King Charles III got the III bit because, obviously, there were two kings called Charles before him. But who or what gets to decide who officially counts as a historical monarch or not? For example, it's surely debatable whether Edward V should count as a genuine king, but it's been decided that he was, and there must be other borderline cases throughout history. So what's the official criteria?
Like Edward V, Matilda was never crowned, but unlike him she's not generally recognised as a monarch. Nor is the uncrowned Lady Jane Grey.
Edward V has a strong case. His father Edward IV had died and the succession was not initially disputed (Edward was clearly named as successor in the will, with Richard as Protector during the minority, a role Richard assumed initially.) Also Henry VII eventually married Edward's sister so legitimising Edward V also helped his own (weak) claim.
By contrast, Matilda was seeking to usurp Stephen, who by contrast was very much living, and despite making all the arrangements the coronation had to be cancelled as she fled London. Also, her son Henry II made an eventual settlement to the civil war with Stephen which recognised Stephen as (still) king and Henry II as his successor.
Lady Jane Grey's case is the more borderline, because Edward VI had died and she was named as successor thanks to a very late amendment to the will. The problem is that outside of the nobles was that there was no popular backing for the move and just two weeks later they were overthrown. The other problem is that the dispute lasted just 14 days. And then Mary was in charge and needed to be recognised as the rightful successor to Edward.
So I think in the case of uncrowned monarchs it's ultimately determined by the interests of who initially writes the history books.
Being crowned might not have been enough. Had Henry VI ultimately prevailed against his usurper Edward IV I suspect that Edward IV would have been written out of the period 1461-70 and treated much as Cromwell is today.
It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.
And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?
I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.
It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.
The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?
Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...
One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.
Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years
That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.
It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.
The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.
A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.
The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.
HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.
We must do something This is something We must do it.
The question you should be asking is not: why HS2? But rather: why is it apparently impossible to build these other projects?
I note in passing that a country which had built these other projects would probably be one that would happily build another north-south train line as the economic advantages would be obvious & unarguable & we would have an economy which could more easily afford the interest costs.
I think the answer to that one is obvius although sad. WHatever they might say, the London-centric politicians simply don't care about the North and don't want to waste money on it. That applied to Labour for years because they thought the North would vote for them anyway and to the Tories because they knew the North would never vote for them. (The Brexit effect being the exception).
The other thing is the absurd costs.
Once a project gets “unique mega project” status, it inevitably gets turned into a football.
HS2 should have been the “National rail investment plan, section 16, project 4”
Absolutely. Korea's rail plan had the concept of a 'half day country' - which means being able to get from any one place to another in half a day - and worked from there.
The construction of their national road network, which started back in the 70s, was similarly consistent.
Of course they make mistakes, encounter problems, and have corruption like everywhere else. But having a consistent, and persistent plan works.
I talked with a councillor a couple of days ago, at a Police-meets-the-locals event.
His reaction to my point about needing continual development to go with a continually growing population was interesting.
He seemed to be trying to call me racist. Because in his mind, there should be no development - some re-development of sites (this is London). But nothing new. So he (at first) assumed I was arguing for zero immigration. Because no-one wants development.
Tbf (and I don't mean with you) this point is frequently used in that way by wily operators of the hard right. The idea is you start with the assumption that people instinctively don't want lots more development in our Green and Pleasant - typically amping this prospect up with a bit of 'new Birmingham every fortnight' type rhetoric - and then you say, well we simply have to do it (build a new Birmingham every fortnight) because of all this immigration we have ('have' here is subliminally 'allow' not 'need'). The desired effect of the conversation (when embarked on in this spirit) is that your audience thinks (although maybe doesn't always say), ah well maybe we should stop letting all these foreigners in then, our country is full, and hey so *that's* why I can't see a GP or get a council house or a place at the nursery etc etc.
I think the Tories might just get rid of Rishi after next years local elections. Yes it will be their fourth leader in this Parliament but given the seats they're losing what have they got to lose?
If they think Sunak is the main problem then they haven't a clue.
Oh look, another person who'd never vote Tory along to dispense some helpful advice.
Rishi may not be the main problem, but he's definitely not an answer to the main problem
What idiot thought selling of social housing for peanuts was a good idea?
The idea of selling council stock was a good one.
Central government nicking most of the proceeds, and legislating to prevent councils building more to replace it was utter idiocy - motivated purely by Thatcher's dislike of local government. But then left unchanged by her successors.
The problem is not so much the lack of social housing as the lack of housing overall. Had much more been built, to meet demand, prices would never have soared as they have in both rental and purchase sectors.
You do need lots of properly funded social housing. If the residential property space is nearly all private sector you're too much in the hands of developers, financiers and landlords whose priorities are not aligned to what should be our national objective: a decent affordable place to live for everybody, homes as homes not money making instruments.
Not if there are enough properties so that tenants have the choice and ability to move, and not if it's backed up by an effective regulator enforcing fair rules.
Besides, I do have quite a bit of experience with the social rented sector and the notion that all their properties are "decent affordable place[s] to live" is optimistic. It doesn't happen just by the nature of them being social rented.
Can someone help? Here's a question I've been pondering of late. King Charles III got the III bit because, obviously, there were two kings called Charles before him. But who or what gets to decide who officially counts as a historical monarch or not? For example, it's surely debatable whether Edward V should count as a genuine king, but it's been decided that he was, and there must be other borderline cases throughout history. So what's the official criteria?
It's up to the next monarch of the same name. Edward VI (or more probably his protectors) decided that he was the sixth of that name so, proclaimed Edward VI he was.
I've always wondered why Edward the Elder and Edward the Confessor weren't Edwards 1 and II. Especially the latter as England was one single Kingdom by then.
It was simply not the Anglo-Saxon style for Kings to be numbered.
The old style persisted to a certain extent for a little while. William I was William the Conqueror, and William II was known as William Rufus (though perhaps that was before he became King?)
I suppose they, given the Normans would have wanted to emphasise their legitimacy and the continuity of their line with the earlier Anglo-Saxon Kings, it's a bit curious that Edward I didn't retrospectively add ordinal numbers to the earlier King Edwards. But then he wasn't short of self-confidence, so I guess he didn't feel like he needed to.
The big question is how many generations before the electorate forgive the Tories for taking us down the rabbit hole of Brexit? I suspect a long time. Though Brexit wasn't mentioned as an issue it's effects in many ways has destabilised the electorate and subliminally made us see our position in the world differently
52% of voters voted for Brexit despite the Tory leader at the time opposing it, indeed Brexit voters leaking to Reform and even Labour having voted for Boris is making the Tory situation worse.
How a Labour government handles the economy will be far more significant for the future Tory prospects than Brexit
Brexit is a stench that wont go away. Every time Rishi goes abroad he seems to get smaller. Do you think he's actually shrinking or that the country he represents is?
I waited in the longest airport queue I can remember being in at an airport a couple of weeks ago. Do you think everyone in the queue wasn't joining the dots and asking what caused this new phenomena?
That people voted for it is irrelevant. Do you think human nature allows them to blame themselves?
People who use airports probably voted Remain by a considerable margin.
I wouldn't be so sure. Some people are incredibly stupid. I mentioned before a friend of mine who was completely screwed by Brexit because he sold up to tour Europe in a campervan and ended up having to park it on his son's drive. He reported meeting a number of people on campsites who voted Brexit who just didn't think the 90 day rule would apply to them.
90 days at a time seems to leave a lot of leeway for extensive tours of Europe.
I think the Tories might just get rid of Rishi after next years local elections. Yes it will be their fourth leader in this Parliament but given the seats they're losing what have they got to lose?
Of course, if a General Election is called for the same day as the Locals, Rishi will be announcing his resignation when he leaves for the Palace anyway.
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
ATACMS is a proper game-changer. There’s nowhere in occupied Ukraine that’s safe from them, so ammo dumps and command posts need to be moved back all the way to Russia if they don’t want to get blown up.
There’s good reason that Zelensky was asking for it 18 months ago.
Maybe. But on the other hand it seems as though they've only sent the cluster munition version of ATACMS. So that was great for hitting exposed targets at the airfield outside Berdyansk, but it won't be so good at hitting a hardened ammunition dump or command post that is out of Storm Shadow range...
That is possibly as much to do with funding authorisation as anything else. The cluster munition version is due for disposal, so has little or no (perhaps even negative) book value.
I thought it was also because the US is much less likely to use the cluster munition version itself, and can't easily replace the other munitions (because the new GLSDB is on the way)?
Can someone help? Here's a question I've been pondering of late. King Charles III got the III bit because, obviously, there were two kings called Charles before him. But who or what gets to decide who officially counts as a historical monarch or not? For example, it's surely debatable whether Edward V should count as a genuine king, but it's been decided that he was, and there must be other borderline cases throughout history. So what's the official criteria?
We already had a Charles III north of the wall...
And south, certainly in Derby.
There's a surprisingly kind cairn near Swarkestone Bridge / Causeway (itself very special) in memory of Charles Edward Stuart's about turn.
Piccies:
Local Schoolchildren are less kind. No idea about why the actual decision was made:
"Bonnie Prince Charlie came this way And ran away on washing day."
A colleague used to work for a Derby operation - I used to see him at conferences and rib him over a beer on how so unspeakably awful Derby was that CES at the head of an all-conquering blitzkrieg could only take one look and turn back.
I'd call Derby a Curate's Egg - good parts and bad parts. Some truly awful roads, but also Rolls-Royce (1200 new jobs from Aukus, if dodgy Rishi doesn't burn that down as well) and the Peak District corridor.
But they have just put *this* in the middle one of their key strategic cycling and walking routes, so totally in hock to motor-normativity.
A numpty at the Derbyshire County Council Planning Department conditioned the mast with a pathway extension to make it a bit less dangerous, but then accepted a drawing with no dimensions on it so can do bugger all to enforce anything, and something was built that is massively below national standards. Attention to detail totally missing.
Situated on the key Pentagon Island active travel route, Derby’s newest sculptural installation “Middle Finger” provides deep & emotional insight into the true feelings of the council’s planning department towards all those walking, wheeling & cycling in the city. https://twitter.com/tandemkate/status/1710701505064354227
At least if anyone crashes into it there should be good signal to call an ambulance
(quite possibly not true, of course - I don't know much about the radiation characteristics of mobile masts, but there could well be a dead zone around the base)
ETA: There's a popular multi-use cycle path in N Yorks with an electricity pole slap bang in the middle. Unlit track too. It does have some pretty worn white paint on it to protect against collisions. Nettles either side, so space enough to have wiggled the path around it if not wanting to move the pole - I'm assuming the pole pre-dates the path!
Are you sure it's a phone mast? looks like the atmospheric pollution sampling stations we have locally.
Well done, Labour: two excellent wins in very different seats. The people have decided, ('the bastards'), and there'll be a Labour government after the next election. The only question will be how much of a majority they get. I expect more playing it safe from Starmer - don't scare the horses.
A qualified well done to the LibDems: no one expected anything in Tamworth, so it means nothing, despite the best efforts of some to label it a poor showing, and in Mid Beds they didn't win or come second, but they got a significant vote increase, almost as much in percentage terms as Labour, despite both of them fighting it hard. Reinforces my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances. Some constituencies will have any more of those, plus where Labour don't fight a big chunk of the vote that went Labour here will go LibDem. It's going to be a good election for the LibDems.
Disastrous for the Cons: Labour majorities in both seats were smaller than the RefUk vote, That doesn't mean they'd have got all those votes if RefUK didn't stand, but it doesn't bode well that they could do that well. as mentoned above, they're going to be fighting a GE on two fronts, requiring completely different campaign messaging. Even a locally prominent and apparently favoured candidate didn't save the, in Mid Beds. Do they have people with the skills to walk that fine line? Do they have people with skills? For any Con supporters look for straws to clutch at - don't bother, they've all gone.
So Greg Hands says he 'doesn't see any great enthusiasm for Labour' - in which case, Greg, how much do people hate the Tories?
Well done the LDs? ".... my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances....."?? Get a grip on reality.
The fall in the Conservative vote share was much the same in both constituencies, 28% in Mid Beds and 25% in Tamworth. Your idea that the LDs somehow aided Labour in mid Beds by causing a collapse in the Conservative vote that otherwise wouldn't have happened doesn't hold water.
What the LDs did do was to badly split the anti-Conservative vote by spending much of the campaign trying to talk down Labour's chances, with blatantly false claims about being set to win and the usual false bar charts even in the face of polling that pointed to the opposite, and highly personal attacks on the Labour candidate. They were desperate to come out ahead of Labour. Some people fell for it but overall the LDs still failed badly. The idea that the LDs somehow helped Labour to win is risible. Labour won in spite of their best efforts.
Breathe! We have stress-tested the theory that Lab & LD vying for votes delivers a Tory victory. Lets assume for a minute that some of the LD votes added may have been winnable for Labour - that is almost certainly true. At the same time some - and likely many more - of the LD votes added were not winnable by Labour.
Labour have 2 tasks - convert people to directly switch Con > Lab. Or if they won't do that to switch Con > not Con. The former is a 2 vote swing to Labour, the latter a 1 vote swing.
Lets say that 60% of the new LD voters weren't winnable by Labour. The safest path is have them vote for someone not Con. Riskier is hope that they don't vote at all - might they change their mind? Riskiest is just not bother with Con voters because Never Kissed A Tory.
Tamworth is nor Mid Beds. Your form of Labour absolutism is a risk to your majority. There are scores of seats where you Cannot Win - even in a landslide. Do you want the Con tally reduced by 1 or not?
While it's obviously true that SOME Tories won't switch to Labour and will switch to LibDem, my impression - IMO reniforced by the results - is that it's now quite rare. What is more common is that Tories don't switch to either of us, but accept a potential PM Starmer as an OK result (so a "stop Starmer!" campaign by the Tories won't pay off as the "stop Corbyn" campaign did).
I do think that the result discredits the kind of scorched-earth LibDem tactical campaigning that they tried in mid-Beds. It's demonstrably untrue that "Labour can't win here" in this sort of seat, but the LD negative tactics and dodgy bar charts came close to misleading the voters and handing the seat to the Tories. I remember that you suggested that your party should ease off in mid-Beds once the polls showed the position.
What seems to me perfeclty fair is Verulamus's comment on the lsst thread that the LibDems should concentrate resources on say 40 seats. There are certaibly 40 seats in Britain (discretion prevents me from naming them) where they can perfectly reasonably say that only they can beat the Tories, and gaining 40 seats would be a damn good result, without trying to go for the seats where Labour were second even in the poor 2019 election.
The 40 seat strategy is absolutely the plan. There won't be resources to go after even 100 seats. But again again, Labour are very unlikely to win scores of seats where we could. Do you want those seats to stay Tory or not?
It's difficult to answer that in general. My starting point would be that Labour and LibDems should respectively prioritise Tory seats where each came second, and shouldn't try hard in seats where we respectively came third. That should surely cope with 90% of cases?
There may be exceptions where there are boundary changes or the 2019 result was a wild one-off for some reason, but in general there will always be problems where the third-placed party makes a massive effort - the second-placed local party members are likely to fight back even if HQ is quietly advising them not to bother. There will be a few seats where the two parties objectively have a roughly equal chance and there a fight may be inevitable, but I hope they will be rare. A seat like mid-Beds shouldn't be an exception merely on the basis that "yes we were third by a long way but only we can appeal to Tories", since that's been disproved.
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
ATACMS is a proper game-changer. There’s nowhere in occupied Ukraine that’s safe from them, so ammo dumps and command posts need to be moved back all the way to Russia if they don’t want to get blown up.
There’s good reason that Zelensky was asking for it 18 months ago.
Maybe. But on the other hand it seems as though they've only sent the cluster munition version of ATACMS. So that was great for hitting exposed targets at the airfield outside Berdyansk, but it won't be so good at hitting a hardened ammunition dump or command post that is out of Storm Shadow range.
Ukraine's domestic drone and missile industry developments may prove to be more consequential. They're not shy of using those to hit valuable military targets within Russia. Trump can't so easily put a stop to them if he wins in 2024.
There is, of course, a 400-500km version of Storm Shadow.
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
ATACMS is a proper game-changer. There’s nowhere in occupied Ukraine that’s safe from them, so ammo dumps and command posts need to be moved back all the way to Russia if they don’t want to get blown up.
There’s good reason that Zelensky was asking for it 18 months ago.
Maybe. But on the other hand it seems as though they've only sent the cluster munition version of ATACMS. So that was great for hitting exposed targets at the airfield outside Berdyansk, but it won't be so good at hitting a hardened ammunition dump or command post that is out of Storm Shadow range...
That is possibly as much to do with funding authorisation as anything else. The cluster munition version is due for disposal, so has little or no (perhaps even negative) book value.
My constant criticism of the Americans has been the way they value things. Something that cost $1m three decades ago is now valued at $5m, even if it was about to get scrapped.
It’s allowed opposition to form around spending on overseas vs domestic problems, when the spending on the domestic problems are actual money spent today.
So Biden has announced $10m of aid for the train crash in East Palestine, and $100m in aid for the Hawaii fires, while announcing $100m of aid to Palestine, $100BN of aid to Ukraine, and an unknown amount of aid, suspected to be $20BN, to Israel. One can understand why domestic opponents are off at Biden’s priorities being overseas rather than domestic, and the Republicans are going to go hard on this issue.
I think the Tories might just get rid of Rishi after next years local elections. Yes it will be their fourth leader in this Parliament but given the seats they're losing what have they got to lose?
Of course, if a General Election is called for the same day as the Locals, Rishi will be announcing his resignation when he leaves for the Palace anyway.
After these results (and the coming wipeout in Wellingborough) any remote chance of a Spring or early summer 2024 election is done for.
The earliest I can see the election is autumn 2024 and I'd say December 2024 and even January 2025 is starting to become increasingly likely - as grim as another winter election will be - But why go earlier than you absolutely have to when you're near certain to be obliterated?
Can someone help? Here's a question I've been pondering of late. King Charles III got the III bit because, obviously, there were two kings called Charles before him. But who or what gets to decide who officially counts as a historical monarch or not? For example, it's surely debatable whether Edward V should count as a genuine king, but it's been decided that he was, and there must be other borderline cases throughout history. So what's the official criteria?
It's up to the next monarch of the same name. Edward VI (or more probably his protectors) decided that he was the sixth of that name so, proclaimed Edward VI he was.
I've always wondered why Edward the Elder and Edward the Confessor weren't Edwards 1 and II. Especially the latter as England was one single Kingdom by then.
It was simply not the Anglo-Saxon style for Kings to be numbered.
The old style persisted to a certain extent for a little while. William I was William the Conqueror, and William II was known as William Rufus (though perhaps that was before he became King?)
I suppose they, given the Normans would have wanted to emphasise their legitimacy and the continuity of their line with the earlier Anglo-Saxon Kings, it's a bit curious that Edward I didn't retrospectively add ordinal numbers to the earlier King Edwards. But then he wasn't short of self-confidence, so I guess he didn't feel like he needed to.
Wasn't Henry VII or Henry VIII the first to use a postnominal number during their reign? I heard it somewhere...
It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.
And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?
I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.
It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.
The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?
Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...
One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.
Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years
That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.
It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.
The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.
A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.
The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.
HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.
We must do something This is something We must do it.
The question you should be asking is not: why HS2? But rather: why is it apparently impossible to build these other projects?
I note in passing that a country which had built these other projects would probably be one that would happily build another north-south train line as the economic advantages would be obvious & unarguable & we would have an economy which could more easily afford the interest costs.
I think the answer to that one is obvius although sad. WHatever they might say, the London-centric politicians simply don't care about the North and don't want to waste money on it. That applied to Labour for years because they thought the North would vote for them anyway and to the Tories because they knew the North would never vote for them. (The Brexit effect being the exception).
The other thing is the absurd costs.
Once a project gets “unique mega project” status, it inevitably gets turned into a football.
HS2 should have been the “National rail investment plan, section 16, project 4”
Absolutely. Korea's rail plan had the concept of a 'half day country' - which means being able to get from any one place to another in half a day - and worked from there.
The construction of their national road network, which started back in the 70s, was similarly consistent.
Of course they make mistakes, encounter problems, and have corruption like everywhere else. But having a consistent, and persistent plan works.
I talked with a councillor a couple of days ago, at a Police-meets-the-locals event.
His reaction to my point about needing continual development to go with a continually growing population was interesting.
He seemed to be trying to call me racist. Because in his mind, there should be no development - some re-development of sites (this is London). But nothing new. So he (at first) assumed I was arguing for zero immigration. Because no-one wants development.
Tbf (and I don't mean with you) this point is frequently used in that way by wily operators of the hard right. The idea is you start with the assumption that people instinctively don't want lots more development in our Green and Pleasant - typically amping this prospect up with a bit of 'new Birmingham every fortnight' type rhetoric - and then you say, well we simply have to do it (build a new Birmingham every fortnight) because of all this immigration we have ('have' here is subliminally 'allow' not 'need'). The desired effect of the conversation (when embarked on in this spirit) is that your audience thinks (although maybe doesn't always say), ah well maybe we should stop letting all these foreigners in then, our country is full, and hey so *that's* why I can't see a GP or get a council house or a place at the nursery etc etc.
Well, if you put pint and half in a pint pot, shit will go sideways.
Buy a bigger fucking pot.
Not sure who I like less - the zero immigration crowd or the "We love immigration. Just not places for immigrants to live, work, sleep"
When I become unDictator, they will be providing shade for the roads. Maybe on opposite sides of the road? Hmmmmmm.....
I bet Boris is kicking himself for not contesting Uxbridge...
Well, Boris is several million quid richer but yes, if he were back in Parliament, he'd be prime candidate to replace Sunak.
Will he stand at the GE? That would certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons.
Only if it looks like the Conservatives might win. Boris wants to be World King, not Leader of the Opposition. If Boris had won Uxbridge, he could be back in Number 10 before the election, not in five years' time.
I bet Boris is kicking himself for not contesting Uxbridge...
I don't think he'd have won Uxbridge.
That seat was a shock Tory hold because they successfully turned it into a referendum on ULEZ expansion. Had the ex-PM stood down in order to seek a mandate from the People in his righteous crusade against the Privileges Committee "witch hunt", that's just a fundamentally different campaign.
The big question is how many generations before the electorate forgive the Tories for taking us down the rabbit hole of Brexit? I suspect a long time. Though Brexit wasn't mentioned as an issue it's effects in many ways has destabilised the electorate and subliminally made us see our position in the world differently
52% of voters voted for Brexit despite the Tory leader at the time opposing it, indeed Brexit voters leaking to Reform and even Labour having voted for Boris is making the Tory situation worse.
How a Labour government handles the economy will be far more significant for the future Tory prospects than Brexit
Brexit is a stench that wont go away. Every time Rishi goes abroad he seems to get smaller. Do you think he's actually shrinking or that the country he represents is?
I waited in the longest airport queue I can remember being in at an airport a couple of weeks ago. Do you think everyone in the queue wasn't joining the dots and asking what caused this new phenomena?
That people voted for it is irrelevant. Do you think human nature allows them to blame themselves?
People who use airports probably voted Remain by a considerable margin.
I wouldn't be so sure. Some people are incredibly stupid. I mentioned before a friend of mine who was completely screwed by Brexit because he sold up to tour Europe in a campervan and ended up having to park it on his son's drive. He reported meeting a number of people on campsites who voted Brexit who just didn't think the 90 day rule would apply to them.
90 days at a time seems to leave a lot of leeway for extensive tours of Europe.
Not when you sell your house to do it for several years on retirement it isn't. As I said he ended up parked up on his son's drive. Some people go on extended trips, some people have home abroad. They were stuffed by this. The fact that some of these people voted for it not realising it impacted them so dramatically shows how stupid some people were. He met several. I have seen numerous 2nd home owners on the TV saying the same. You have to be a particular type of dim not to realise you are voting for something that will stuff you.
What idiot thought selling of social housing for peanuts was a good idea?
The idea of selling council stock was a good one.
Central government nicking most of the proceeds, and legislating to prevent councils building more to replace it was utter idiocy - motivated purely by Thatcher's dislike of local government. But then left unchanged by her successors.
The problem is not so much the lack of social housing as the lack of housing overall. Had much more been built, to meet demand, prices would never have soared as they have in both rental and purchase sectors.
You do need lots of properly funded social housing. If the residential property space is nearly all private sector you're too much in the hands of developers, financiers and landlords whose priorities are not aligned to what should be our national objective: a decent affordable place to live for everybody, homes as homes not money making instruments.
If you have a shortage of housing, then you will have people living in tiny, shitty properties. Plenty of evidence historically.
If you don't want that, do what the Victorians and Edwardians did. Build whole towns and suburbs, with actual space for people to live.
The ownership is next to immaterial - look at how much council accommodation is flipped into the rental sector.
Fine if there are not millions on benefits and council have to pay over the odds for private rental for them. They should have decent low cost social housing. Where they do move to associations they usually feather nest large salaries for their political chums and families to run them.
What idiot thought selling of social housing for peanuts was a good idea?
The idea of selling council stock was a good one.
Central government nicking most of the proceeds, and legislating to prevent councils building more to replace it was utter idiocy - motivated purely by Thatcher's dislike of local government. But then left unchanged by her successors.
The problem is not so much the lack of social housing as the lack of housing overall. Had much more been built, to meet demand, prices would never have soared as they have in both rental and purchase sectors.
You do need lots of properly funded social housing. If the residential property space is nearly all private sector you're too much in the hands of developers, financiers and landlords whose priorities are not aligned to what should be our national objective: a decent affordable place to live for everybody, homes as homes not money making instruments.
If you have a shortage of housing, then you will have people living in tiny, shitty properties. Plenty of evidence historically.
If you don't want that, do what the Victorians and Edwardians did. Build whole towns and suburbs, with actual space for people to live.
The ownership is next to immaterial - look at how much council accommodation is flipped into the rental sector.
We do need to increase supply - very much so - but doing only that won't solve the housing crisis. It will help a lot but it won't anywhere near meet the aspiration of a decent affordable home for everyone. The split between private and public sector is also important (if we do have this aspiration). We need a good sized, well funded social housing sector to serve people who can't afford to buy or rent in the private sector. There'll always be plenty of these (unless we're planning a radical overhaul of our whole economic model).
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
Does Putin need an off-ramp? Winter starts soon, and he is up for re-election in March.
"re-election"? LOL.
Like there's any doubt.
Yes, but Russian public affairs are odd. On the one hand the leadership is utterly ruthless when it feels like it, so being regularly critical tends to land you in jail or worse. On the other hand they do allow intermittent dissident voices in the media and run elections which have loaded dice (control of the media etc.) but are not totally fiddled in the sense of just making the numbers up, and a "bad" election result (low turnout, more support for diverse critics who are nominally pro-regime) is possible. In some ways it's a bit like countries like Poland where the Government has moved to take control of most levers of powers and all the media, but are still able to have an embarrassing election result - although in Poland it actually is still possible to unseat the Government (probably, not yet sure).
Well done, Labour: two excellent wins in very different seats. The people have decided, ('the bastards'), and there'll be a Labour government after the next election. The only question will be how much of a majority they get. I expect more playing it safe from Starmer - don't scare the horses.
A qualified well done to the LibDems: no one expected anything in Tamworth, so it means nothing, despite the best efforts of some to label it a poor showing, and in Mid Beds they didn't win or come second, but they got a significant vote increase, almost as much in percentage terms as Labour, despite both of them fighting it hard. Reinforces my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances. Some constituencies will have any more of those, plus where Labour don't fight a big chunk of the vote that went Labour here will go LibDem. It's going to be a good election for the LibDems.
Disastrous for the Cons: Labour majorities in both seats were smaller than the RefUk vote, That doesn't mean they'd have got all those votes if RefUK didn't stand, but it doesn't bode well that they could do that well. as mentoned above, they're going to be fighting a GE on two fronts, requiring completely different campaign messaging. Even a locally prominent and apparently favoured candidate didn't save the, in Mid Beds. Do they have people with the skills to walk that fine line? Do they have people with skills? For any Con supporters look for straws to clutch at - don't bother, they've all gone.
So Greg Hands says he 'doesn't see any great enthusiasm for Labour' - in which case, Greg, how much do people hate the Tories?
Well done the LDs? ".... my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances....."?? Get a grip on reality.
The fall in the Conservative vote share was much the same in both constituencies, 28% in Mid Beds and 25% in Tamworth. Your idea that the LDs somehow aided Labour in mid Beds by causing a collapse in the Conservative vote that otherwise wouldn't have happened doesn't hold water.
What the LDs did do was to badly split the anti-Conservative vote by spending much of the campaign trying to talk down Labour's chances, with blatantly false claims about being set to win and the usual false bar charts even in the face of polling that pointed to the opposite, and highly personal attacks on the Labour candidate. They were desperate to come out ahead of Labour. Some people fell for it but overall the LDs still failed badly. The idea that the LDs somehow helped Labour to win is risible. Labour won in spite of their best efforts.
Breathe! We have stress-tested the theory that Lab & LD vying for votes delivers a Tory victory. Lets assume for a minute that some of the LD votes added may have been winnable for Labour - that is almost certainly true. At the same time some - and likely many more - of the LD votes added were not winnable by Labour.
Labour have 2 tasks - convert people to directly switch Con > Lab. Or if they won't do that to switch Con > not Con. The former is a 2 vote swing to Labour, the latter a 1 vote swing.
Lets say that 60% of the new LD voters weren't winnable by Labour. The safest path is have them vote for someone not Con. Riskier is hope that they don't vote at all - might they change their mind? Riskiest is just not bother with Con voters because Never Kissed A Tory.
Tamworth is nor Mid Beds. Your form of Labour absolutism is a risk to your majority. There are scores of seats where you Cannot Win - even in a landslide. Do you want the Con tally reduced by 1 or not?
While it's obviously true that SOME Tories won't switch to Labour and will switch to LibDem, my impression - IMO reniforced by the results - is that it's now quite rare. What is more common is that Tories don't switch to either of us, but accept a potential PM Starmer as an OK result (so a "stop Starmer!" campaign by the Tories won't pay off as the "stop Corbyn" campaign did).
I do think that the result discredits the kind of scorched-earth LibDem tactical campaigning that they tried in mid-Beds. It's demonstrably untrue that "Labour can't win here" in this sort of seat, but the LD negative tactics and dodgy bar charts came close to misleading the voters and handing the seat to the Tories. I remember that you suggested that your party should ease off in mid-Beds once the polls showed the position.
What seems to me perfeclty fair is Verulamus's comment on the lsst thread that the LibDems should concentrate resources on say 40 seats. There are certaibly 40 seats in Britain (discretion prevents me from naming them) where they can perfectly reasonably say that only they can beat the Tories, and gaining 40 seats would be a damn good result, without trying to go for the seats where Labour were second even in the poor 2019 election.
The 40 seat strategy is absolutely the plan. There won't be resources to go after even 100 seats. But again again, Labour are very unlikely to win scores of seats where we could. Do you want those seats to stay Tory or not?
It's difficult to answer that in general. My starting point would be that Labour and LibDems should respectively prioritise Tory seats where each came second, and shouldn't try hard in seats where we respectively came third. That should surely cope with 90% of cases?
There may be exceptions where there are boundary changes or the 2019 result was a wild one-off for some reason, but in general there will always be problems where the third-placed party makes a massive effort - the second-placed local party members are likely to fight back even if HQ is quietly advising them not to bother. There will be a few seats where the two parties objectively have a roughly equal chance and there a fight may be inevitable, but I hope they will be rare. A seat like mid-Beds shouldn't be an exception merely on the basis that "yes we were third by a long way but only we can appeal to Tories", since that's been disproved.
Yes, I see that even your old friend Anna Soubry is intending to vote Labour nowadays.
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
ATACMS is a proper game-changer. There’s nowhere in occupied Ukraine that’s safe from them, so ammo dumps and command posts need to be moved back all the way to Russia if they don’t want to get blown up.
There’s good reason that Zelensky was asking for it 18 months ago.
Maybe. But on the other hand it seems as though they've only sent the cluster munition version of ATACMS. So that was great for hitting exposed targets at the airfield outside Berdyansk, but it won't be so good at hitting a hardened ammunition dump or command post that is out of Storm Shadow range...
That is possibly as much to do with funding authorisation as anything else. The cluster munition version is due for disposal, so has little or no (perhaps even negative) book value.
Well done, Labour: two excellent wins in very different seats. The people have decided, ('the bastards'), and there'll be a Labour government after the next election. The only question will be how much of a majority they get. I expect more playing it safe from Starmer - don't scare the horses.
A qualified well done to the LibDems: no one expected anything in Tamworth, so it means nothing, despite the best efforts of some to label it a poor showing, and in Mid Beds they didn't win or come second, but they got a significant vote increase, almost as much in percentage terms as Labour, despite both of them fighting it hard. Reinforces my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances. Some constituencies will have any more of those, plus where Labour don't fight a big chunk of the vote that went Labour here will go LibDem. It's going to be a good election for the LibDems.
Disastrous for the Cons: Labour majorities in both seats were smaller than the RefUk vote, That doesn't mean they'd have got all those votes if RefUK didn't stand, but it doesn't bode well that they could do that well. as mentoned above, they're going to be fighting a GE on two fronts, requiring completely different campaign messaging. Even a locally prominent and apparently favoured candidate didn't save the, in Mid Beds. Do they have people with the skills to walk that fine line? Do they have people with skills? For any Con supporters look for straws to clutch at - don't bother, they've all gone.
So Greg Hands says he 'doesn't see any great enthusiasm for Labour' - in which case, Greg, how much do people hate the Tories?
Well done the LDs? ".... my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances....."?? Get a grip on reality.
The fall in the Conservative vote share was much the same in both constituencies, 28% in Mid Beds and 25% in Tamworth. Your idea that the LDs somehow aided Labour in mid Beds by causing a collapse in the Conservative vote that otherwise wouldn't have happened doesn't hold water.
What the LDs did do was to badly split the anti-Conservative vote by spending much of the campaign trying to talk down Labour's chances, with blatantly false claims about being set to win and the usual false bar charts even in the face of polling that pointed to the opposite, and highly personal attacks on the Labour candidate. They were desperate to come out ahead of Labour. Some people fell for it but overall the LDs still failed badly. The idea that the LDs somehow helped Labour to win is risible. Labour won in spite of their best efforts.
Breathe! We have stress-tested the theory that Lab & LD vying for votes delivers a Tory victory. Lets assume for a minute that some of the LD votes added may have been winnable for Labour - that is almost certainly true. At the same time some - and likely many more - of the LD votes added were not winnable by Labour.
Labour have 2 tasks - convert people to directly switch Con > Lab. Or if they won't do that to switch Con > not Con. The former is a 2 vote swing to Labour, the latter a 1 vote swing.
Lets say that 60% of the new LD voters weren't winnable by Labour. The safest path is have them vote for someone not Con. Riskier is hope that they don't vote at all - might they change their mind? Riskiest is just not bother with Con voters because Never Kissed A Tory.
Tamworth is nor Mid Beds. Your form of Labour absolutism is a risk to your majority. There are scores of seats where you Cannot Win - even in a landslide. Do you want the Con tally reduced by 1 or not?
While it's obviously true that SOME Tories won't switch to Labour and will switch to LibDem, my impression - IMO reniforced by the results - is that it's now quite rare. What is more common is that Tories don't switch to either of us, but accept a potential PM Starmer as an OK result (so a "stop Starmer!" campaign by the Tories won't pay off as the "stop Corbyn" campaign did).
I do think that the result discredits the kind of scorched-earth LibDem tactical campaigning that they tried in mid-Beds. It's demonstrably untrue that "Labour can't win here" in this sort of seat, but the LD negative tactics and dodgy bar charts came close to misleading the voters and handing the seat to the Tories. I remember that you suggested that your party should ease off in mid-Beds once the polls showed the position.
What seems to me perfeclty fair is Verulamus's comment on the lsst thread that the LibDems should concentrate resources on say 40 seats. There are certaibly 40 seats in Britain (discretion prevents me from naming them) where they can perfectly reasonably say that only they can beat the Tories, and gaining 40 seats would be a damn good result, without trying to go for the seats where Labour were second even in the poor 2019 election.
The 40 seat strategy is absolutely the plan. There won't be resources to go after even 100 seats. But again again, Labour are very unlikely to win scores of seats where we could. Do you want those seats to stay Tory or not?
It's difficult to answer that in general. My starting point would be that Labour and LibDems should respectively prioritise Tory seats where each came second, and shouldn't try hard in seats where we respectively came third. That should surely cope with 90% of cases?
There may be exceptions where there are boundary changes or the 2019 result was a wild one-off for some reason, but in general there will always be problems where the third-placed party makes a massive effort - the second-placed local party members are likely to fight back even if HQ is quietly advising them not to bother. There will be a few seats where the two parties objectively have a roughly equal chance and there a fight may be inevitable, but I hope they will be rare. A seat like mid-Beds shouldn't be an exception merely on the basis that "yes we were third by a long way but only we can appeal to Tories", since that's been disproved.
Look at it like this. MidBeds showed that competition isn't harmful to the ABC cause. And a near 20% Con > LD swing means we can demolish a whole stack of them in places where even on the current surge you would struggle. Its all good. There will be very very few 3 way battles anyway.
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
ATACMS is a proper game-changer. There’s nowhere in occupied Ukraine that’s safe from them, so ammo dumps and command posts need to be moved back all the way to Russia if they don’t want to get blown up.
There’s good reason that Zelensky was asking for it 18 months ago.
Maybe. But on the other hand it seems as though they've only sent the cluster munition version of ATACMS. So that was great for hitting exposed targets at the airfield outside Berdyansk, but it won't be so good at hitting a hardened ammunition dump or command post that is out of Storm Shadow range...
That is possibly as much to do with funding authorisation as anything else. The cluster munition version is due for disposal, so has little or no (perhaps even negative) book value.
I thought it was also because the US is much less likely to use the cluster munition version itself, and can't easily replace the other munitions (because the new GLSDB is on the way)?
It'a not likely to use them, as they were programmed to be scrapped.
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
ATACMS is a proper game-changer. There’s nowhere in occupied Ukraine that’s safe from them, so ammo dumps and command posts need to be moved back all the way to Russia if they don’t want to get blown up.
There’s good reason that Zelensky was asking for it 18 months ago.
Maybe. But on the other hand it seems as though they've only sent the cluster munition version of ATACMS. So that was great for hitting exposed targets at the airfield outside Berdyansk, but it won't be so good at hitting a hardened ammunition dump or command post that is out of Storm Shadow range...
That is possibly as much to do with funding authorisation as anything else. The cluster munition version is due for disposal, so has little or no (perhaps even negative) book value.
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
ATACMS is a proper game-changer. There’s nowhere in occupied Ukraine that’s safe from them, so ammo dumps and command posts need to be moved back all the way to Russia if they don’t want to get blown up.
There’s good reason that Zelensky was asking for it 18 months ago.
Maybe. But on the other hand it seems as though they've only sent the cluster munition version of ATACMS. So that was great for hitting exposed targets at the airfield outside Berdyansk, but it won't be so good at hitting a hardened ammunition dump or command post that is out of Storm Shadow range...
That is possibly as much to do with funding authorisation as anything else. The cluster munition version is due for disposal, so has little or no (perhaps even negative) book value.
That is quite breathtakingly cynical of the US.
Yes, their daily politics is about the value of stuff sent to Ukraine, but with no discussion about how their valuations are derived.
A bunch of stuff that was going to be scrapped next year anyway, is worth nothing to any company that does accounts. Shipping it to Ukraine costs a few tens of thousands, not tens of billions. So send every ATACMS and HIMARS left in the stocks, we’ve already seen how good they are in theatre in Ukraine.
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
ATACMS is a proper game-changer. There’s nowhere in occupied Ukraine that’s safe from them, so ammo dumps and command posts need to be moved back all the way to Russia if they don’t want to get blown up.
There’s good reason that Zelensky was asking for it 18 months ago.
Maybe. But on the other hand it seems as though they've only sent the cluster munition version of ATACMS. So that was great for hitting exposed targets at the airfield outside Berdyansk, but it won't be so good at hitting a hardened ammunition dump or command post that is out of Storm Shadow range...
That is possibly as much to do with funding authorisation as anything else. The cluster munition version is due for disposal, so has little or no (perhaps even negative) book value.
That is quite breathtakingly cynical of the US.
Why ?
Because they're offloading munitions that much of the world has signed treaties not to use because of the post-conflict danger, rather than putting their hand in their very deep pockets and providing non-cluster munitions.
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
ATACMS is a proper game-changer. There’s nowhere in occupied Ukraine that’s safe from them, so ammo dumps and command posts need to be moved back all the way to Russia if they don’t want to get blown up.
There’s good reason that Zelensky was asking for it 18 months ago.
Maybe. But on the other hand it seems as though they've only sent the cluster munition version of ATACMS. So that was great for hitting exposed targets at the airfield outside Berdyansk, but it won't be so good at hitting a hardened ammunition dump or command post that is out of Storm Shadow range...
That is possibly as much to do with funding authorisation as anything else. The cluster munition version is due for disposal, so has little or no (perhaps even negative) book value.
My constant criticism of the Americans has been the way they value things. Something that cost $1m three decades ago is now valued at $5m, even if it was about to get scrapped.
It’s allowed opposition to form around spending on overseas vs domestic problems, when the spending on the domestic problems are actual money spent today.
So Biden has announced $10m of aid for the train crash in East Palestine, and $100m in aid for the Hawaii fires, while announcing $100m of aid to Palestine, $100BN of aid to Ukraine, and an unknown amount of aid, suspected to be $20BN, to Israel. One can understand why domestic opponents are off at Biden’s priorities being overseas rather than domestic, and the Republicans are going to go hard on this issue.
Most of the kit that has gone to Ukraine is stuff that was going to be thrown out and yet it is valued as billions in aid. It would probably have cost more to decommission it than send it to Ukraine. Not to mention some of the stuff that has been sent there (e.g. HIMARS) has now resulted in big orders from other countries for it having seen how effective it is. The US could well be making a profit out of this aid! Stop delaying and give Ukraine everything it needs.
On a related note, now that the US has given ATACMS I really don't understand why Germany can't give the Taurus missile. Still some in Germany don't seem to want Russia to lose, unfortunately.
Well done, Labour: two excellent wins in very different seats. The people have decided, ('the bastards'), and there'll be a Labour government after the next election. The only question will be how much of a majority they get. I expect more playing it safe from Starmer - don't scare the horses.
A qualified well done to the LibDems: no one expected anything in Tamworth, so it means nothing, despite the best efforts of some to label it a poor showing, and in Mid Beds they didn't win or come second, but they got a significant vote increase, almost as much in percentage terms as Labour, despite both of them fighting it hard. Reinforces my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances. Some constituencies will have any more of those, plus where Labour don't fight a big chunk of the vote that went Labour here will go LibDem. It's going to be a good election for the LibDems.
Disastrous for the Cons: Labour majorities in both seats were smaller than the RefUk vote, That doesn't mean they'd have got all those votes if RefUK didn't stand, but it doesn't bode well that they could do that well. as mentoned above, they're going to be fighting a GE on two fronts, requiring completely different campaign messaging. Even a locally prominent and apparently favoured candidate didn't save the, in Mid Beds. Do they have people with the skills to walk that fine line? Do they have people with skills? For any Con supporters look for straws to clutch at - don't bother, they've all gone.
So Greg Hands says he 'doesn't see any great enthusiasm for Labour' - in which case, Greg, how much do people hate the Tories?
Well done the LDs? ".... my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances....."?? Get a grip on reality.
The fall in the Conservative vote share was much the same in both constituencies, 28% in Mid Beds and 25% in Tamworth. Your idea that the LDs somehow aided Labour in mid Beds by causing a collapse in the Conservative vote that otherwise wouldn't have happened doesn't hold water.
What the LDs did do was to badly split the anti-Conservative vote by spending much of the campaign trying to talk down Labour's chances, with blatantly false claims about being set to win and the usual false bar charts even in the face of polling that pointed to the opposite, and highly personal attacks on the Labour candidate. They were desperate to come out ahead of Labour. Some people fell for it but overall the LDs still failed badly. The idea that the LDs somehow helped Labour to win is risible. Labour won in spite of their best efforts.
Breathe! We have stress-tested the theory that Lab & LD vying for votes delivers a Tory victory. Lets assume for a minute that some of the LD votes added may have been winnable for Labour - that is almost certainly true. At the same time some - and likely many more - of the LD votes added were not winnable by Labour.
Labour have 2 tasks - convert people to directly switch Con > Lab. Or if they won't do that to switch Con > not Con. The former is a 2 vote swing to Labour, the latter a 1 vote swing.
Lets say that 60% of the new LD voters weren't winnable by Labour. The safest path is have them vote for someone not Con. Riskier is hope that they don't vote at all - might they change their mind? Riskiest is just not bother with Con voters because Never Kissed A Tory.
Tamworth is nor Mid Beds. Your form of Labour absolutism is a risk to your majority. There are scores of seats where you Cannot Win - even in a landslide. Do you want the Con tally reduced by 1 or not?
While it's obviously true that SOME Tories won't switch to Labour and will switch to LibDem, my impression - IMO reniforced by the results - is that it's now quite rare. What is more common is that Tories don't switch to either of us, but accept a potential PM Starmer as an OK result (so a "stop Starmer!" campaign by the Tories won't pay off as the "stop Corbyn" campaign did).
I do think that the result discredits the kind of scorched-earth LibDem tactical campaigning that they tried in mid-Beds. It's demonstrably untrue that "Labour can't win here" in this sort of seat, but the LD negative tactics and dodgy bar charts came close to misleading the voters and handing the seat to the Tories. I remember that you suggested that your party should ease off in mid-Beds once the polls showed the position.
What seems to me perfeclty fair is Verulamus's comment on the lsst thread that the LibDems should concentrate resources on say 40 seats. There are certaibly 40 seats in Britain (discretion prevents me from naming them) where they can perfectly reasonably say that only they can beat the Tories, and gaining 40 seats would be a damn good result, without trying to go for the seats where Labour were second even in the poor 2019 election.
The 40 seat strategy is absolutely the plan. There won't be resources to go after even 100 seats. But again again, Labour are very unlikely to win scores of seats where we could. Do you want those seats to stay Tory or not?
It's difficult to answer that in general. My starting point would be that Labour and LibDems should respectively prioritise Tory seats where each came second, and shouldn't try hard in seats where we respectively came third. That should surely cope with 90% of cases?
There may be exceptions where there are boundary changes or the 2019 result was a wild one-off for some reason, but in general there will always be problems where the third-placed party makes a massive effort - the second-placed local party members are likely to fight back even if HQ is quietly advising them not to bother. There will be a few seats where the two parties objectively have a roughly equal chance and there a fight may be inevitable, but I hope they will be rare. A seat like mid-Beds shouldn't be an exception merely on the basis that "yes we were third by a long way but only we can appeal to Tories", since that's been disproved.
Yes, I see that even your old friend Anna Soubry is intending to vote Labour nowadays.
That's strange, Anna seemed so keen on 'party unity' and 'bashing lefties not each other' when her faction was in power.
Totally o/t but I was at a U3a meeting today where someone referred to someone as ‘having a touch of the tar rush’! Anyone else heard that phrase used in the past 40 years? I’d always thought he was reasonably liberal, too.
A massive landslide in line with these results will leave Labour in the same position as The SNP in 2015, with lots of MPs elected in seats they would normally not expect to win. In Scotland that meant a lot of numpties and the occasional rouge elected, dependent on slavishly following the leadership line to preserve their lucrative positions and career progression. It will be interesting to see the calibre and performance of Labour's equivalent.
That prospect is one reason Labour has been so ruthless with its selection processes I think. No doubt they'll get some wrong, but I doubt we'll see any Jared O'Maras or the bizarrely inappropriate people chosen in historically safe Red Wall seats in 2019 because Len and Unite were fans. No doubt we'll start hearing criticism that they are boring drones, but I'd take loads of dull, earnest councillor types over the eccentric firebrands who inevitably seem to end their careers in some form of disgrace.
I’m still amazed, as an IT consultant, how poor the main political parties are at vettting MP candidates for online behaviour. There’s only a couple of hundred new ones each election, it’s really not difficult if you have £1m budget, to weed out the Jared O’Maras before they become a massive problem.
You don't need a big budget. You hire external outfits to do this for x a head. The X depends on how thoroughly they dig.
Oh of course. I’d be happy to enable such research for an appropriate fee.
Jared was sui generis, a paper candidate in an unwinnable seat in an unexpected election called three years too early for the FTPA, and O'Mara was picked only after several other prospective candidates had declined. There was no time for proper vetting, and rule him out and you then have to persuade someone else to stand, and all the best candidates want to stand where they can actually win.
All correct, but you still don’t let people stand for MP seats who haven’t been properly vetted. It only takes a few days.
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
ATACMS is a proper game-changer. There’s nowhere in occupied Ukraine that’s safe from them, so ammo dumps and command posts need to be moved back all the way to Russia if they don’t want to get blown up.
There’s good reason that Zelensky was asking for it 18 months ago.
Maybe. But on the other hand it seems as though they've only sent the cluster munition version of ATACMS. So that was great for hitting exposed targets at the airfield outside Berdyansk, but it won't be so good at hitting a hardened ammunition dump or command post that is out of Storm Shadow range...
That is possibly as much to do with funding authorisation as anything else. The cluster munition version is due for disposal, so has little or no (perhaps even negative) book value.
That is quite breathtakingly cynical of the US.
Yes, their daily politics is about the value of stuff sent to Ukraine, but with no discussion about how their valuations are derived.
A bunch of stuff that was going to be scrapped next year anyway, is worth nothing to any company that does accounts. Shipping it to Ukraine costs a few tens of thousands, not tens of billions. So send every ATACMS and HIMARS left in the stocks, we’ve already seen how good they are in theatre in Ukraine.
Afaicr, America is 'charging' Ukraine for everything it sends rather than donating it. It will never be paid, but they presumably end up owning Ukraine. That would be a good motivation for gussying up cast-offs as high value merchandise.
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
ATACMS is a proper game-changer. There’s nowhere in occupied Ukraine that’s safe from them, so ammo dumps and command posts need to be moved back all the way to Russia if they don’t want to get blown up.
There’s good reason that Zelensky was asking for it 18 months ago.
Maybe. But on the other hand it seems as though they've only sent the cluster munition version of ATACMS. So that was great for hitting exposed targets at the airfield outside Berdyansk, but it won't be so good at hitting a hardened ammunition dump or command post that is out of Storm Shadow range...
That is possibly as much to do with funding authorisation as anything else. The cluster munition version is due for disposal, so has little or no (perhaps even negative) book value.
That is quite breathtakingly cynical of the US.
Why ?
Because they're offloading munitions that much of the world has signed treaties not to use because of the post-conflict danger, rather than putting their hand in their very deep pockets and providing non-cluster munitions.
They're being used against an opponent who has made extensive use of far less reliable cluster munitions in the conflict, and who has laid more mines in Ukraine than exist anywhere else on the planet - all of which will take decades to clear post conflict. The ATACMS strikes are precisely geolocated and recorded, and the cluster munitions involved much less likely to be faulty, so the additional post conflict burden they represent is absolutely minute in comparison to what exists.
And it's nothing too do with "deep pockets' - it's about available stocks, and Congress which is gridlocked in approving additional funding.
Does Greta realise what Hamas would do with her if she protested against them?
Week 270. Today we strike in solidarity with Palestine and Gaza. The world needs to speak up and call for an immediate ceasefire, justice and freedom for Palestinians and all civilians affected. https://x.com/GretaThunberg/status/1715284878919340056?s=20
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
ATACMS is a proper game-changer. There’s nowhere in occupied Ukraine that’s safe from them, so ammo dumps and command posts need to be moved back all the way to Russia if they don’t want to get blown up.
There’s good reason that Zelensky was asking for it 18 months ago.
Maybe. But on the other hand it seems as though they've only sent the cluster munition version of ATACMS. So that was great for hitting exposed targets at the airfield outside Berdyansk, but it won't be so good at hitting a hardened ammunition dump or command post that is out of Storm Shadow range...
That is possibly as much to do with funding authorisation as anything else. The cluster munition version is due for disposal, so has little or no (perhaps even negative) book value.
That is quite breathtakingly cynical of the US.
Why ?
Because they're offloading munitions that much of the world has signed treaties not to use because of the post-conflict danger, rather than putting their hand in their very deep pockets and providing non-cluster munitions.
They're being used against an opponent who has made extensive use of far less reliable cluster munitions in the conflict, and who has laid more mines in Ukraine than exist anywhere else on the planet - all of which will take decades to clear post conflict. The ATACMS strikes are precisely geolocated and recorded, and the cluster munitions involved much less likely to be faulty, so the additional post conflict burden they represent is absolutely minute in comparison to what exists.
And it's nothing too do with "deep pockets' - it's about available stocks, and Congress which is gridlocked in approving additional funding.
I would label all of that pragmatic.
Absolutely, but the US is Ukraine's ally, and therefore presumably is concerned that the post-invasion landscape isn't littered with unexploded bomblets.
What idiot thought selling of social housing for peanuts was a good idea?
The idea of selling council stock was a good one.
Central government nicking most of the proceeds, and legislating to prevent councils building more to replace it was utter idiocy - motivated purely by Thatcher's dislike of local government. But then left unchanged by her successors.
The problem is not so much the lack of social housing as the lack of housing overall. Had much more been built, to meet demand, prices would never have soared as they have in both rental and purchase sectors.
You do need lots of properly funded social housing. If the residential property space is nearly all private sector you're too much in the hands of developers, financiers and landlords whose priorities are not aligned to what should be our national objective: a decent affordable place to live for everybody, homes as homes not money making instruments.
If you have a shortage of housing, then you will have people living in tiny, shitty properties. Plenty of evidence historically.
If you don't want that, do what the Victorians and Edwardians did. Build whole towns and suburbs, with actual space for people to live.
The ownership is next to immaterial - look at how much council accommodation is flipped into the rental sector.
We do need to increase supply - very much so - but doing only that won't solve the housing crisis. It will help a lot but it won't anywhere near meet the aspiration of a decent affordable home for everyone. The split between private and public sector is also important (if we do have this aspiration). We need a good sized, well funded social housing sector to serve people who can't afford to buy or rent in the private sector. There'll always be plenty of these (unless we're planning a radical overhaul of our whole economic model).
If you have adequate supply, prices will fall. A long way. Check out other countries which dot have housing shortages.
Trying to “wall off” public sector housing as cheaper just creates a subletting market.
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
ATACMS is a proper game-changer. There’s nowhere in occupied Ukraine that’s safe from them, so ammo dumps and command posts need to be moved back all the way to Russia if they don’t want to get blown up.
There’s good reason that Zelensky was asking for it 18 months ago.
Maybe. But on the other hand it seems as though they've only sent the cluster munition version of ATACMS. So that was great for hitting exposed targets at the airfield outside Berdyansk, but it won't be so good at hitting a hardened ammunition dump or command post that is out of Storm Shadow range...
That is possibly as much to do with funding authorisation as anything else. The cluster munition version is due for disposal, so has little or no (perhaps even negative) book value.
That is quite breathtakingly cynical of the US.
Why ?
Because they're offloading munitions that much of the world has signed treaties not to use because of the post-conflict danger, rather than putting their hand in their very deep pockets and providing non-cluster munitions.
They're being used against an opponent who has made extensive use of far less reliable cluster munitions in the conflict, and who has laid more mines in Ukraine than exist anywhere else on the planet - all of which will take decades to clear post conflict. The ATACMS strikes are precisely geolocated and recorded, and the cluster munitions involved much less likely to be faulty, so the additional post conflict burden they represent is absolutely minute in comparison to what exists.
And it's nothing too do with "deep pockets' - it's about available stocks, and Congress which is gridlocked in approving additional funding.
I would label all of that pragmatic.
Absolutely, but the US is Ukraine's ally, and therefore presumably is concerned that the post-invasion landscape isn't littered with unexploded bomblets.
Ukraine has been lobbying for these to be supplied for some time. For precisely the reasons I listed.
So it appears that Selby was the byelection to notice, not Uxbridge. Both results clearly in line with Selby.
Yep. I do still fear outer London may be Labour's GE Achilles heel. Saddiq Khan has damaged Labour.
Cameron was right that the country is not Twitter, not that the media notices.
That can be extended though, the country is not London either, not that the media notices.
If you want to run a country that suits the North, or anywhere outside London, it takes more than taking a picture of you pretending to fill up a tank of petrol. It takes more than saying you are on the side of motorists, while increasing taxes on the cars of the future and failing to invest in roads, charging networks, or any other general infrastructure.
Yes, the reason the Conservatives lost Tamworth was because of a lack of investment in roads. It was not because of the cost of living, decay of the NHS, Partygate, Chris Pincher’s behaviour and Peter Bone’s behaviour, Brexit, delays in the court system, cuts in local government services, Liz Truss, the mishandling of the pandemic, failures on immigration, higher taxes, and flip-flopping on HS2.
Well done for completely missing the point.
It's interesting that you see those as alternatives, rather than a failure to invest in the roads being one of the multiple other failures as well.
Especially since you incorporated HS2 in your second list and as we've established that affects far fewer voters.
A failure to invest in roads, or charging infrastructure, while jacking up taxes, is just another in the litany of failures to add to your list. If you can get over your pathological hatred of investing in transportation.
Where have I shown a pathological hatred of investing in transportation? I am for investing in transportation. Bring on more charging points!
I am making fun of your personal obsession, and your belief that doing something about your personal obsession will fix everything else. You want to be a politician: you are convinced that your policies are right, you’d fit right in. This website is about political betting, which requires an understanding of psephology. Whether or not we need more investment in roads, that’s not why the Tories lost 2 by-elections.
It is not a personal obsession and I don't remotely think that doing something about it will fix everything else. I never once suggested otherwise.
Indeed I've repeatedly said it's not either or, it's multiple things.
Our long neglected roads that haven't kept pace with population growth, and our lack of charging infrastructure is just one of the many things that need fixing in this country.
Other capex infrastructure investment that hasn't kept up with population growth needs addressing too.
Sunak went full driving-gloves gammonbait and got trounced in two by-elections.
HERE ENDETH THE LESSON
On the contrary, Sunak's driving sham was a pathetic caricature of what an extremely out of touch individual believes those who drive think.
I said immediately it was preposterous as did other drivers here.
If you are so out of touch, whether it be because you've lived in the centre of a city for too long, or you travel across the country in a private jet, that you think drivers are all flat cap wearing weirdos with driving gloves and interested in any of the nonsense that Sunak spouted then you need to get in touch with some real people.
Perhaps a starting point would be to reflect upon why drivers pay such extreme amounts of net tax to the Exchequer but get so little back. Why the Treasury takes net tens of billions per annum off drivers, but road quality, maintenance, investment and development are all poor.
Because that, unlike any of the caricature gibberish you and Sunak seem to believe, is what real driving voters are reflecting upon. Why when we pay so much tax, is investment so bad?
Until Sunak has an answer to that question, he shouldn't expect any gratitude or votes.
It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.
And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?
I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.
It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.
The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?
Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...
One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.
Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years
That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.
It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.
The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.
A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.
The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.
HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.
We must do something This is something We must do it.
Shouldn't have been an either/or! If the UK properly cracked down on the benefit scrounging pensioners (if you want to be voluntarily unemployed fine, but the state shouldn't pay for it) and put the state pension back to 19/20 levels we'd be able to build a new Crossrail every year with the savings.
Just shows where the Tories have gone wrong this parliament - prioritised benefits for the bone idle boomers over capital spending.
Even if it wasn't an either/or it was/is still an unecessary white elephant finding yesterday's solutions for the last century's problems.
"finding yesterday's solutions for the last century's problems"
LOL. You keep on saying that, and it gives me a good laugh. Thanks.
If high-speed rail is "finding yesterday's solutions for the last century's problems", then why are most major economies in the world (aside from the USA) investing heavily in it? What do you know that they don't?
The pandemic hurt railway usage; but the rebound has been quite staggering. And working from home or telecommuting has not hurt it as much as I feared either. AIUI, long-distance travel is actually up since the end of the pandemic.
Because they are much larger countries where it makes a difference. I am all in favour of a huge expansion in railcapacity but it should not be the High Speed white elephant and it should not be all focused on London. Build more lines going where people want and need to go - more cross country and intra-region. Build more lines suitable for frieght and get stuff off the roads.
That's a different argument, and one I think is also wrong. But it has zero bearing on stupid phrases like "finding yesterday's solutions for the last century's problems", that you are so attached to. HSR is not yesterday's solution, and it is very much trying to help this century's problems in every country where it is built.
"Build more lines going where people want and need to go"
The capacity problem on the southern WCML show that's exactly where people want and need to go. Now, that does not mean I'm against other projects such as NPR or EWR - quite the opposite. We should build them all as part of an integrated network.
"Your desperate attachment to HS2 is illogical and damaging to the economy. "
As if my belief that HS2 is a good idea has any influence! But if you extend that honour to me, I shall do the same to you: your irrational dislike of the project is irrational and hurts the country.
And as for your utter devotion to Brexit over decades - that's hurt the country, financially, politically and economically, orders of magnitude more than any infrastructure project.
Yeah, you just keep believing that. You have consistently ignored the arguments against the economic benefits of HS rail because they don't fit your pre-conceived ideas so I certainly don't expect you to change now. Just like you never changed when you kept denying the massive projected cost increases even when it becaume obvious that they themselves were huge underestinates. I well remember you scorning the idea that costs for it could get anywhere near £85 billion. That seems positively cheap now compared to the final projected costs for the whole thing.
The only good thing out of all of this is that we have finally broken the narrative which was forcing us down the road of a ridiculously expensive waste of money. One thing (perhaps the only one) that I can praise Sunak for. It is just a shame he didn't do it sooner and cancel the whole thing.
I constantly ignore the arguments on the economic benefits of HS rail, as you put it, because many of them are rubbish, pulled out of various anti's odorous posteriors.
Again, if the economic benefits of HS rail are so poor, as you think, then why is every major country, bar the US, building them? What do you know that they do not?
Also remember that the WCML Upgrade of the early 2000s was delivered years late after massive disruption, under-specification (*) and ten times over budget.
(*) No new signalling system and no 140MPH running
So it appears that Selby was the byelection to notice, not Uxbridge. Both results clearly in line with Selby.
Yep. I do still fear outer London may be Labour's GE Achilles heel. Saddiq Khan has damaged Labour.
Cameron was right that the country is not Twitter, not that the media notices.
That can be extended though, the country is not London either, not that the media notices.
If you want to run a country that suits the North, or anywhere outside London, it takes more than taking a picture of you pretending to fill up a tank of petrol. It takes more than saying you are on the side of motorists, while increasing taxes on the cars of the future and failing to invest in roads, charging networks, or any other general infrastructure.
Yes, the reason the Conservatives lost Tamworth was because of a lack of investment in roads. It was not because of the cost of living, decay of the NHS, Partygate, Chris Pincher’s behaviour and Peter Bone’s behaviour, Brexit, delays in the court system, cuts in local government services, Liz Truss, the mishandling of the pandemic, failures on immigration, higher taxes, and flip-flopping on HS2.
Well done for completely missing the point.
It's interesting that you see those as alternatives, rather than a failure to invest in the roads being one of the multiple other failures as well.
Especially since you incorporated HS2 in your second list and as we've established that affects far fewer voters.
A failure to invest in roads, or charging infrastructure, while jacking up taxes, is just another in the litany of failures to add to your list. If you can get over your pathological hatred of investing in transportation.
Where have I shown a pathological hatred of investing in transportation? I am for investing in transportation. Bring on more charging points!
I am making fun of your personal obsession, and your belief that doing something about your personal obsession will fix everything else. You want to be a politician: you are convinced that your policies are right, you’d fit right in. This website is about political betting, which requires an understanding of psephology. Whether or not we need more investment in roads, that’s not why the Tories lost 2 by-elections.
It is not a personal obsession and I don't remotely think that doing something about it will fix everything else. I never once suggested otherwise.
Indeed I've repeatedly said it's not either or, it's multiple things.
Our long neglected roads that haven't kept pace with population growth, and our lack of charging infrastructure is just one of the many things that need fixing in this country.
Other capex infrastructure investment that hasn't kept up with population growth needs addressing too.
Sunak went full driving-gloves gammonbait and got trounced in two by-elections.
HERE ENDETH THE LESSON
On the contrary, Sunak's driving sham was a pathetic caricature of what an extremely out of touch individual believes those who drive think.
I said immediately it was preposterous as did other drivers here.
If you are so out of touch, whether it be because you've lived in the centre of a city for too long, or you travel across the country in a private jet, that you think drivers are all flat cap wearing weirdos with driving gloves and interested in any of the nonsense that Sunak spouted then you need to get in touch with some real people.
Perhaps a starting point would be to reflect upon why drivers pay such extreme amounts of net tax to the Exchequer but get so little back. Why the Treasury takes net tens of billions per annum off drivers, but road quality, maintenance, investment and development are all poor.
Because that, unlike any of the caricature gibberish you and Sunak seem to believe, is what real driving voters are reflecting upon. Why when we pay so much tax, is investment so bad?
Until Sunak has an answer to that question, he shouldn't expect any gratitude or votes.
I drive a car but am I a "driver"? Not sure it's a fundamental part of my identity, a la Alan Partridge.
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
Does Putin need an off-ramp? Winter starts soon, and he is up for re-election in March.
"re-election"? LOL.
Like there's any doubt.
Yes, but Russian public affairs are odd. On the one hand the leadership is utterly ruthless when it feels like it, so being regularly critical tends to land you in jail or worse. On the other hand they do allow intermittent dissident voices in the media and run elections which have loaded dice (control of the media etc.) but are not totally fiddled in the sense of just making the numbers up, and a "bad" election result (low turnout, more support for diverse critics who are nominally pro-regime) is possible. In some ways it's a bit like countries like Poland where the Government has moved to take control of most levers of powers and all the media, but are still able to have an embarrassing election result - although in Poland it actually is still possible to unseat the Government (probably, not yet sure).
The Polish government, at its worst, is a long, long way from Putinism.
For a start, under Putin, all real opposition leaders are dead, in jail or in exile. The opposition that is allowed is a tame franchise of Putinism. Literally - the job of being the fake opponent to Putin goes to someone who is a fairly useless acolyte of Putin, every time.
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
ATACMS is a proper game-changer. There’s nowhere in occupied Ukraine that’s safe from them, so ammo dumps and command posts need to be moved back all the way to Russia if they don’t want to get blown up.
There’s good reason that Zelensky was asking for it 18 months ago.
Maybe. But on the other hand it seems as though they've only sent the cluster munition version of ATACMS. So that was great for hitting exposed targets at the airfield outside Berdyansk, but it won't be so good at hitting a hardened ammunition dump or command post that is out of Storm Shadow range...
That is possibly as much to do with funding authorisation as anything else. The cluster munition version is due for disposal, so has little or no (perhaps even negative) book value.
My constant criticism of the Americans has been the way they value things. Something that cost $1m three decades ago is now valued at $5m, even if it was about to get scrapped.
It’s allowed opposition to form around spending on overseas vs domestic problems, when the spending on the domestic problems are actual money spent today.
So Biden has announced $10m of aid for the train crash in East Palestine, and $100m in aid for the Hawaii fires, while announcing $100m of aid to Palestine, $100BN of aid to Ukraine, and an unknown amount of aid, suspected to be $20BN, to Israel. One can understand why domestic opponents are off at Biden’s priorities being overseas rather than domestic, and the Republicans are going to go hard on this issue.
Didn't the MoD do that for things like Vulcan spares, evem though they would very soon be scrap when the planes themselves went? And then had to value the cost of a fire at one spares store at something absurd. Much comment in the papers. Maybe 20 years ago?
We need to question why Russia are doing this. Is it a last throw of the dice? Have their superiors told them they have to capture something before the onset of winter? What equipment does Russia actually have left (there are videos of them using simple metal pipes as mortar launchers)?
Phew, all those CLP officials that resigned can unresign cos it turns out that when SKS said that Israel had the right to cut off water and power to Gaza he actually meant to say that Israel DIDN’T have the right to cut off water and power to Gaza. Easy done.
So it appears that Selby was the byelection to notice, not Uxbridge. Both results clearly in line with Selby.
Yep. I do still fear outer London may be Labour's GE Achilles heel. Saddiq Khan has damaged Labour.
Cameron was right that the country is not Twitter, not that the media notices.
That can be extended though, the country is not London either, not that the media notices.
If you want to run a country that suits the North, or anywhere outside London, it takes more than taking a picture of you pretending to fill up a tank of petrol. It takes more than saying you are on the side of motorists, while increasing taxes on the cars of the future and failing to invest in roads, charging networks, or any other general infrastructure.
Yes, the reason the Conservatives lost Tamworth was because of a lack of investment in roads. It was not because of the cost of living, decay of the NHS, Partygate, Chris Pincher’s behaviour and Peter Bone’s behaviour, Brexit, delays in the court system, cuts in local government services, Liz Truss, the mishandling of the pandemic, failures on immigration, higher taxes, and flip-flopping on HS2.
Well done for completely missing the point.
It's interesting that you see those as alternatives, rather than a failure to invest in the roads being one of the multiple other failures as well.
Especially since you incorporated HS2 in your second list and as we've established that affects far fewer voters.
A failure to invest in roads, or charging infrastructure, while jacking up taxes, is just another in the litany of failures to add to your list. If you can get over your pathological hatred of investing in transportation.
Where have I shown a pathological hatred of investing in transportation? I am for investing in transportation. Bring on more charging points!
I am making fun of your personal obsession, and your belief that doing something about your personal obsession will fix everything else. You want to be a politician: you are convinced that your policies are right, you’d fit right in. This website is about political betting, which requires an understanding of psephology. Whether or not we need more investment in roads, that’s not why the Tories lost 2 by-elections.
It is not a personal obsession and I don't remotely think that doing something about it will fix everything else. I never once suggested otherwise.
Indeed I've repeatedly said it's not either or, it's multiple things.
Our long neglected roads that haven't kept pace with population growth, and our lack of charging infrastructure is just one of the many things that need fixing in this country.
Other capex infrastructure investment that hasn't kept up with population growth needs addressing too.
Sunak went full driving-gloves gammonbait and got trounced in two by-elections.
HERE ENDETH THE LESSON
On the contrary, Sunak's driving sham was a pathetic caricature of what an extremely out of touch individual believes those who drive think.
I said immediately it was preposterous as did other drivers here.
If you are so out of touch, whether it be because you've lived in the centre of a city for too long, or you travel across the country in a private jet, that you think drivers are all flat cap wearing weirdos with driving gloves and interested in any of the nonsense that Sunak spouted then you need to get in touch with some real people.
Perhaps a starting point would be to reflect upon why drivers pay such extreme amounts of net tax to the Exchequer but get so little back. Why the Treasury takes net tens of billions per annum off drivers, but road quality, maintenance, investment and development are all poor.
Because that, unlike any of the caricature gibberish you and Sunak seem to believe, is what real driving voters are reflecting upon. Why when we pay so much tax, is investment so bad?
Until Sunak has an answer to that question, he shouldn't expect any gratitude or votes.
I drive a car but am I a "driver"? Not sure it's a fundamental part of my identity, a la Alan Partridge.
Its a verb, so yes, if you drive you are a driver.
Which doesn't make it a fundamental part of your identity, everyone is unique.
I am fully aware that any generalising always means speaking generally and won't really represent everyone, but which better reflects your train of thought out of curiosity? Wondering why investment etc [in whatever you want investment in] is so poor, despite how much tax we pay? Or the weird caricature nonsense that Sunak spouted around Tory conference?
Cambridgeshire is not at the centre of the current rainfall event. But yesterday, when driving back from my lunchtime swim, I splashed through a local ford that was still passable. Coming back after today's swim, I found the ford at the highest level I've ever seen it (the footpath and bridge alongside were also flooded), with a Ford Transit stuck in the middle of it.
And this ford is very near the top of the stream's watershed.
If it's like this here, goodness knows what it's like further north...
Phew, all those CLP officials that resigned can unresign cos it turns out that when SKS said that Israel had the right to cut off water and power to Gaza he actually meant to say that Israel DIDN’T have the right to cut off water and power to Gaza. Easy done.
Cambridgeshire is not at the centre of the current rainfall event. But yesterday, when driving back from my lunchtime swim, I splashed through a local ford that was still passable. Coming back after today's swim, I found the ford at the highest level I've ever seen it (the footpath and bridge alongside were also flooded), with a Ford Transit stuck in the middle of it.
And this ford is very near the top of the stream's watershed.
If it's like this here, goodness knows what it's like further north...
Phew, all those CLP officials that resigned can unresign cos it turns out that when SKS said that Israel had the right to cut off water and power to Gaza he actually meant to say that Israel DIDN’T have the right to cut off water and power to Gaza. Easy done.
So in WW2 would Keir Starmer have supplied Nazi Germany with food and medical supplies? If the answer is no then we need to understand why he thinks Israel should behave differently.
Phew, all those CLP officials that resigned can unresign cos it turns out that when SKS said that Israel had the right to cut off water and power to Gaza he actually meant to say that Israel DIDN’T have the right to cut off water and power to Gaza. Easy done.
So it appears that Selby was the byelection to notice, not Uxbridge. Both results clearly in line with Selby.
Yep. I do still fear outer London may be Labour's GE Achilles heel. Saddiq Khan has damaged Labour.
Cameron was right that the country is not Twitter, not that the media notices.
That can be extended though, the country is not London either, not that the media notices.
If you want to run a country that suits the North, or anywhere outside London, it takes more than taking a picture of you pretending to fill up a tank of petrol. It takes more than saying you are on the side of motorists, while increasing taxes on the cars of the future and failing to invest in roads, charging networks, or any other general infrastructure.
Yes, the reason the Conservatives lost Tamworth was because of a lack of investment in roads. It was not because of the cost of living, decay of the NHS, Partygate, Chris Pincher’s behaviour and Peter Bone’s behaviour, Brexit, delays in the court system, cuts in local government services, Liz Truss, the mishandling of the pandemic, failures on immigration, higher taxes, and flip-flopping on HS2.
Well done for completely missing the point.
It's interesting that you see those as alternatives, rather than a failure to invest in the roads being one of the multiple other failures as well.
Especially since you incorporated HS2 in your second list and as we've established that affects far fewer voters.
A failure to invest in roads, or charging infrastructure, while jacking up taxes, is just another in the litany of failures to add to your list. If you can get over your pathological hatred of investing in transportation.
Where have I shown a pathological hatred of investing in transportation? I am for investing in transportation. Bring on more charging points!
I am making fun of your personal obsession, and your belief that doing something about your personal obsession will fix everything else. You want to be a politician: you are convinced that your policies are right, you’d fit right in. This website is about political betting, which requires an understanding of psephology. Whether or not we need more investment in roads, that’s not why the Tories lost 2 by-elections.
It is not a personal obsession and I don't remotely think that doing something about it will fix everything else. I never once suggested otherwise.
Indeed I've repeatedly said it's not either or, it's multiple things.
Our long neglected roads that haven't kept pace with population growth, and our lack of charging infrastructure is just one of the many things that need fixing in this country.
Other capex infrastructure investment that hasn't kept up with population growth needs addressing too.
Sunak went full driving-gloves gammonbait and got trounced in two by-elections.
HERE ENDETH THE LESSON
On the contrary, Sunak's driving sham was a pathetic caricature of what an extremely out of touch individual believes those who drive think.
I said immediately it was preposterous as did other drivers here.
If you are so out of touch, whether it be because you've lived in the centre of a city for too long, or you travel across the country in a private jet, that you think drivers are all flat cap wearing weirdos with driving gloves and interested in any of the nonsense that Sunak spouted then you need to get in touch with some real people.
Perhaps a starting point would be to reflect upon why drivers pay such extreme amounts of net tax to the Exchequer but get so little back. Why the Treasury takes net tens of billions per annum off drivers, but road quality, maintenance, investment and development are all poor.
Because that, unlike any of the caricature gibberish you and Sunak seem to believe, is what real driving voters are reflecting upon. Why when we pay so much tax, is investment so bad?
Until Sunak has an answer to that question, he shouldn't expect any gratitude or votes.
I drive a car but am I a "driver"? Not sure it's a fundamental part of my identity, a la Alan Partridge.
I bet Boris is kicking himself for not contesting Uxbridge...
Well, Boris is several million quid richer but yes, if he were back in Parliament, he'd be prime candidate to replace Sunak.
Will he stand at the GE? That would certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons.
Only if it looks like the Conservatives might win. Boris wants to be World King, not Leader of the Opposition. If Boris had won Uxbridge, he could be back in Number 10 before the election, not in five years' time.
Electorally it is probably better to stand for Leader of the Opposition after election defeat than PM now (and Boris has already won an election and been PM, why would he want to be a fag end PM who loses the next election badly when he can watch Rishi do it?) Plus Boris has to get on the CCHQ approved candidates list again.
There is a chance the next Labour government will muck up the economy and the polls swing back to the Conservatives, there is little chance the Conservatives will be re elected now however
Wes Streeting is seriously impressive, a proper street fighter. A great media combatant and commensurate performer.
He still hasn’t deleted this tweet though, trying to make it look like he was having cancer treatment whilst the Downing St garden party attendees were hungover. I can’t help but think less of him for it
Well done, Labour: two excellent wins in very different seats. The people have decided, ('the bastards'), and there'll be a Labour government after the next election. The only question will be how much of a majority they get. I expect more playing it safe from Starmer - don't scare the horses.
A qualified well done to the LibDems: no one expected anything in Tamworth, so it means nothing, despite the best efforts of some to label it a poor showing, and in Mid Beds they didn't win or come second, but they got a significant vote increase, almost as much in percentage terms as Labour, despite both of them fighting it hard. Reinforces my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances. Some constituencies will have any more of those, plus where Labour don't fight a big chunk of the vote that went Labour here will go LibDem. It's going to be a good election for the LibDems.
Disastrous for the Cons: Labour majorities in both seats were smaller than the RefUk vote, That doesn't mean they'd have got all those votes if RefUK didn't stand, but it doesn't bode well that they could do that well. as mentoned above, they're going to be fighting a GE on two fronts, requiring completely different campaign messaging. Even a locally prominent and apparently favoured candidate didn't save the, in Mid Beds. Do they have people with the skills to walk that fine line? Do they have people with skills? For any Con supporters look for straws to clutch at - don't bother, they've all gone.
So Greg Hands says he 'doesn't see any great enthusiasm for Labour' - in which case, Greg, how much do people hate the Tories?
Well done the LDs? ".... my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances....."?? Get a grip on reality.
The fall in the Conservative vote share was much the same in both constituencies, 28% in Mid Beds and 25% in Tamworth. Your idea that the LDs somehow aided Labour in mid Beds by causing a collapse in the Conservative vote that otherwise wouldn't have happened doesn't hold water.
What the LDs did do was to badly split the anti-Conservative vote by spending much of the campaign trying to talk down Labour's chances, with blatantly false claims about being set to win and the usual false bar charts even in the face of polling that pointed to the opposite, and highly personal attacks on the Labour candidate. They were desperate to come out ahead of Labour. Some people fell for it but overall the LDs still failed badly. The idea that the LDs somehow helped Labour to win is risible. Labour won in spite of their best efforts.
Breathe! We have stress-tested the theory that Lab & LD vying for votes delivers a Tory victory. Lets assume for a minute that some of the LD votes added may have been winnable for Labour - that is almost certainly true. At the same time some - and likely many more - of the LD votes added were not winnable by Labour.
Labour have 2 tasks - convert people to directly switch Con > Lab. Or if they won't do that to switch Con > not Con. The former is a 2 vote swing to Labour, the latter a 1 vote swing.
Lets say that 60% of the new LD voters weren't winnable by Labour. The safest path is have them vote for someone not Con. Riskier is hope that they don't vote at all - might they change their mind? Riskiest is just not bother with Con voters because Never Kissed A Tory.
Tamworth is nor Mid Beds. Your form of Labour absolutism is a risk to your majority. There are scores of seats where you Cannot Win - even in a landslide. Do you want the Con tally reduced by 1 or not?
While it's obviously true that SOME Tories won't switch to Labour and will switch to LibDem, my impression - IMO reniforced by the results - is that it's now quite rare. What is more common is that Tories don't switch to either of us, but accept a potential PM Starmer as an OK result (so a "stop Starmer!" campaign by the Tories won't pay off as the "stop Corbyn" campaign did).
I do think that the result discredits the kind of scorched-earth LibDem tactical campaigning that they tried in mid-Beds. It's demonstrably untrue that "Labour can't win here" in this sort of seat, but the LD negative tactics and dodgy bar charts came close to misleading the voters and handing the seat to the Tories. I remember that you suggested that your party should ease off in mid-Beds once the polls showed the position.
What seems to me perfeclty fair is Verulamus's comment on the lsst thread that the LibDems should concentrate resources on say 40 seats. There are certaibly 40 seats in Britain (discretion prevents me from naming them) where they can perfectly reasonably say that only they can beat the Tories, and gaining 40 seats would be a damn good result, without trying to go for the seats where Labour were second even in the poor 2019 election.
The 40 seat strategy is absolutely the plan. There won't be resources to go after even 100 seats. But again again, Labour are very unlikely to win scores of seats where we could. Do you want those seats to stay Tory or not?
It's difficult to answer that in general. My starting point would be that Labour and LibDems should respectively prioritise Tory seats where each came second, and shouldn't try hard in seats where we respectively came third. That should surely cope with 90% of cases?
There may be exceptions where there are boundary changes or the 2019 result was a wild one-off for some reason, but in general there will always be problems where the third-placed party makes a massive effort - the second-placed local party members are likely to fight back even if HQ is quietly advising them not to bother. There will be a few seats where the two parties objectively have a roughly equal chance and there a fight may be inevitable, but I hope they will be rare. A seat like mid-Beds shouldn't be an exception merely on the basis that "yes we were third by a long way but only we can appeal to Tories", since that's been disproved.
Look at it like this. MidBeds showed that competition isn't harmful to the ABC cause. And a near 20% Con > LD swing means we can demolish a whole stack of them in places where even on the current surge you would struggle. Its all good. There will be very very few 3 way battles anyway.
Mid Beds came very close to becoming an object lesson in how competition is harmful to the ABC cause. A majority of 1,200 could easily have turned into a narrow Conservative hold. Your party is fortunate that that was not the outcome, because the brickbats really would have come your way. But that doesn't stop me from telling it like it is.
From a poor 3rd place the Lib Dems ran a dishonest canoaugn to do everything they could to get Labour voters to switch to the Conservatives. You published fake polls showing the LDs in front. You skewed bar charts. You spread all sorts of false stories about the Labour candidate, and went out of your way with direct attacks against him personally. And so on. You persisted in this even in the face of polls which showed you well behind. Above all it was the dishonesty and intensity of that dishonesty that gets me.
And then today you have the gall to claim that all along your anti-Labour campaign helped Labour defeat the Conservatives.
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It’s only 300k men and 5,000 tanks, did they think war would be easy?
The discussions of the past few weeks have been that the Russians have been bringing forward an awful lot of men and kit, to either defend existing lines or to push them forward, and that they’re going to keep doing this until winter bogs everything down and they can resupply. The risk is that they end up with nothing behind the front line, and suffer a total collapse of dozens of kilometres of ground in very short order, if the defenders can get past a few strategic minefields and trenches.
Putin's spin on ATACMS sounded pretty desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to make another tactical retreat soon.
ATACMS is a proper game-changer. There’s nowhere in occupied Ukraine that’s safe from them, so ammo dumps and command posts need to be moved back all the way to Russia if they don’t want to get blown up.
There’s good reason that Zelensky was asking for it 18 months ago.
Maybe. But on the other hand it seems as though they've only sent the cluster munition version of ATACMS. So that was great for hitting exposed targets at the airfield outside Berdyansk, but it won't be so good at hitting a hardened ammunition dump or command post that is out of Storm Shadow range...
That is possibly as much to do with funding authorisation as anything else. The cluster munition version is due for disposal, so has little or no (perhaps even negative) book value.
It's probably costing the US close to $1m for every C-17 rotation from CONUS to Rzeszow. Pretty soon you're into real money.
If the US are serious about wanting Ukraine to "win" they should be starting a few fires in the RF's backyard. Maybe a colour revolution in Kazakhstan.
So it appears that Selby was the byelection to notice, not Uxbridge. Both results clearly in line with Selby.
Yep. I do still fear outer London may be Labour's GE Achilles heel. Saddiq Khan has damaged Labour.
Cameron was right that the country is not Twitter, not that the media notices.
That can be extended though, the country is not London either, not that the media notices.
If you want to run a country that suits the North, or anywhere outside London, it takes more than taking a picture of you pretending to fill up a tank of petrol. It takes more than saying you are on the side of motorists, while increasing taxes on the cars of the future and failing to invest in roads, charging networks, or any other general infrastructure.
Yes, the reason the Conservatives lost Tamworth was because of a lack of investment in roads. It was not because of the cost of living, decay of the NHS, Partygate, Chris Pincher’s behaviour and Peter Bone’s behaviour, Brexit, delays in the court system, cuts in local government services, Liz Truss, the mishandling of the pandemic, failures on immigration, higher taxes, and flip-flopping on HS2.
Well done for completely missing the point.
It's interesting that you see those as alternatives, rather than a failure to invest in the roads being one of the multiple other failures as well.
Especially since you incorporated HS2 in your second list and as we've established that affects far fewer voters.
A failure to invest in roads, or charging infrastructure, while jacking up taxes, is just another in the litany of failures to add to your list. If you can get over your pathological hatred of investing in transportation.
Where have I shown a pathological hatred of investing in transportation? I am for investing in transportation. Bring on more charging points!
I am making fun of your personal obsession, and your belief that doing something about your personal obsession will fix everything else. You want to be a politician: you are convinced that your policies are right, you’d fit right in. This website is about political betting, which requires an understanding of psephology. Whether or not we need more investment in roads, that’s not why the Tories lost 2 by-elections.
It is not a personal obsession and I don't remotely think that doing something about it will fix everything else. I never once suggested otherwise.
Indeed I've repeatedly said it's not either or, it's multiple things.
Our long neglected roads that haven't kept pace with population growth, and our lack of charging infrastructure is just one of the many things that need fixing in this country.
Other capex infrastructure investment that hasn't kept up with population growth needs addressing too.
Sunak went full driving-gloves gammonbait and got trounced in two by-elections.
HERE ENDETH THE LESSON
On the contrary, Sunak's driving sham was a pathetic caricature of what an extremely out of touch individual believes those who drive think.
I said immediately it was preposterous as did other drivers here.
If you are so out of touch, whether it be because you've lived in the centre of a city for too long, or you travel across the country in a private jet, that you think drivers are all flat cap wearing weirdos with driving gloves and interested in any of the nonsense that Sunak spouted then you need to get in touch with some real people.
Perhaps a starting point would be to reflect upon why drivers pay such extreme amounts of net tax to the Exchequer but get so little back. Why the Treasury takes net tens of billions per annum off drivers, but road quality, maintenance, investment and development are all poor.
Because that, unlike any of the caricature gibberish you and Sunak seem to believe, is what real driving voters are reflecting upon. Why when we pay so much tax, is investment so bad?
Until Sunak has an answer to that question, he shouldn't expect any gratitude or votes.
I drive a car but am I a "driver"? Not sure it's a fundamental part of my identity, a la Alan Partridge.
Are you Human ... or are you Driver?
Or as a human are there hundreds or even thousands of different things that you do that are part of you as an individual?
People are not one primary thing, every human is an individual and each human has an uncountable amount of characteristics or things they do.
Its why racism, sexism, or any other -ism or any other attempt to frame people as their characteristics is doomed to failure.
Phew, all those CLP officials that resigned can unresign cos it turns out that when SKS said that Israel had the right to cut off water and power to Gaza he actually meant to say that Israel DIDN’T have the right to cut off water and power to Gaza. Easy done.
So in WW2 would Keir Starmer have supplied Nazi Germany with food and medical supplies? If the answer is no then we need to understand why he thinks Israel should behave differently.
Are they talking about that blue octopus in the pic with her? If so, it looks like a reversible plushy that are all the rage with kids atm. My son has one. I fear this is a bit of a stretch outrage.
Are they talking about that blue octopus in the pic with her? If so, it looks like a reversible plushy that are all the rage with kids atm. My son has one. I fear this is a bit of a stretch outrage.
Also wonder what the black thingy is next to it and its significance.
Phew, all those CLP officials that resigned can unresign cos it turns out that when SKS said that Israel had the right to cut off water and power to Gaza he actually meant to say that Israel DIDN’T have the right to cut off water and power to Gaza. Easy done.
The closer Starmer gets to being PM the more embittered the hard left become.
It's difficult not to be amused about that. They had their day. And lost.
Forget about the hard left for a moment. How do you think the average Labour member will feel when the realities of office push Starmer towards positions to the right of Suella Braverman?
Are they talking about that blue octopus in the pic with her? If so, it looks like a reversible plushy that are all the rage with kids atm. My son has one. I fear this is a bit of a stretch outrage.
More concerning - she's holding a placard saying 'stand with Gaza' and yet... she sits! Clearly an Israel-sympathiser - afterall, her apparent green posturing is no more than an attempt to undermine the oil-based economies of the Middle East that are the only ones who can stand up to Israel and fund terrorists freedom fighters.
Are they talking about that blue octopus in the pic with her? If so, it looks like a reversible plushy that are all the rage with kids atm. My son has one. I fear this is a bit of a stretch outrage.
My great-grandson has one and his parents are so ‘progressive’ they sometimes make me ashamed!
Wes Streeting is seriously impressive, a proper street fighter. A great media combatant and commensurate performer.
He still hasn’t deleted this tweet though, trying to make it look like he was having cancer treatment whilst the Downing St garden party attendees were hungover. I can’t help but think less of him for it
6-day hangover? A bit of a stretch, I guess... But is the general point undermined by not being in hospital at the exact same time the party took place?
I bet Boris is kicking himself for not contesting Uxbridge...
Well, Boris is several million quid richer but yes, if he were back in Parliament, he'd be prime candidate to replace Sunak.
Will he stand at the GE? That would certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons.
Only if it looks like the Conservatives might win. Boris wants to be World King, not Leader of the Opposition. If Boris had won Uxbridge, he could be back in Number 10 before the election, not in five years' time.
Electorally it is probably better to stand for Leader of the Opposition after election defeat than PM now (and Boris has already won an election and been PM, why would he want to be a fag end PM who loses the next election badly when he can watch Rishi do it?) Plus Boris has to get on the CCHQ approved candidates list again.
There is a chance the next Labour government will muck up the economy and the polls swing back to the Conservatives, there is little chance the Conservatives will be re elected now however
Only once has Labour been in power for more than 6 years.
Comments
If you don't want that, do what the Victorians and Edwardians did. Build whole towns and suburbs, with actual space for people to live.
The ownership is next to immaterial - look at how much council accommodation is flipped into the rental sector.
I hope this helps.
(quite possibly not true, of course - I don't know much about the radiation characteristics of mobile masts, but there could well be a dead zone around the base)
ETA: There's a popular multi-use cycle path in N Yorks with an electricity pole slap bang in the middle. Unlit track too. It does have some pretty worn white paint on it to protect against collisions. Nettles either side, so space enough to have wiggled the path around it if not wanting to move the pole - I'm assuming the pole pre-dates the path!
Aussies could be going for a record score here.
How about Mrs May? IDS? 😂
Ukraine's domestic drone and missile industry developments may prove to be more consequential. They're not shy of using those to hit valuable military targets within Russia. Trump can't so easily put a stop to them if he wins in 2024.
Edward V has a strong case. His father Edward IV had died and the succession was not initially disputed (Edward was clearly named as successor in the will, with Richard as Protector during the minority, a role Richard assumed initially.) Also Henry VII eventually married Edward's sister so legitimising Edward V also helped his own (weak) claim.
By contrast, Matilda was seeking to usurp Stephen, who by contrast was very much living, and despite making all the arrangements the coronation had to be cancelled as she fled London. Also, her son Henry II made an eventual settlement to the civil war with Stephen which recognised Stephen as (still) king and Henry II as his successor.
Lady Jane Grey's case is the more borderline, because Edward VI had died and she was named as successor thanks to a very late amendment to the will. The problem is that outside of the nobles was that there was no popular backing for the move and just two weeks later they were overthrown. The other problem is that the dispute lasted just 14 days. And then Mary was in charge and needed to be recognised as the rightful successor to Edward.
So I think in the case of uncrowned monarchs it's ultimately determined by the interests of who initially writes the history books.
Being crowned might not have been enough. Had Henry VI ultimately prevailed against his usurper Edward IV I suspect that Edward IV would have been written out of the period 1461-70 and treated much as Cromwell is today.
Besides, I do have quite a bit of experience with the social rented sector and the notion that all their properties are "decent affordable place[s] to live" is optimistic. It doesn't happen just by the nature of them being social rented.
The old style persisted to a certain extent for a little while. William I was William the Conqueror, and William II was known as William Rufus (though perhaps that was before he became King?)
I suppose they, given the Normans would have wanted to emphasise their legitimacy and the continuity of their line with the earlier Anglo-Saxon Kings, it's a bit curious that Edward I didn't retrospectively add ordinal numbers to the earlier King Edwards. But then he wasn't short of self-confidence, so I guess he didn't feel like he needed to.
There may be exceptions where there are boundary changes or the 2019 result was a wild one-off for some reason, but in general there will always be problems where the third-placed party makes a massive effort - the second-placed local party members are likely to fight back even if HQ is quietly advising them not to bother. There will be a few seats where the two parties objectively have a roughly equal chance and there a fight may be inevitable, but I hope they will be rare. A seat like mid-Beds shouldn't be an exception merely on the basis that "yes we were third by a long way but only we can appeal to Tories", since that's been disproved.
It’s allowed opposition to form around spending on overseas vs domestic problems, when the spending on the domestic problems are actual money spent today.
So Biden has announced $10m of aid for the train crash in East Palestine, and $100m in aid for the Hawaii fires, while announcing $100m of aid to Palestine, $100BN of aid to Ukraine, and an unknown amount of aid, suspected to be $20BN, to Israel. One can understand why domestic opponents are off at Biden’s priorities being overseas rather than domestic, and the Republicans are going to go hard on this issue.
The earliest I can see the election is autumn 2024 and I'd say December 2024 and even January 2025 is starting to become increasingly likely - as grim as another winter election will be - But why go earlier than you absolutely have to when you're near certain to be obliterated?
The suspension was for 90 sitting days.
Buy a bigger fucking pot.
Not sure who I like less - the zero immigration crowd or the "We love immigration. Just not places for immigrants to live, work, sleep"
When I become unDictator, they will be providing shade for the roads. Maybe on opposite sides of the road? Hmmmmmm.....
That seat was a shock Tory hold because they successfully turned it into a referendum on ULEZ expansion. Had the ex-PM stood down in order to seek a mandate from the People in his righteous crusade against the Privileges Committee "witch hunt", that's just a fundamentally different campaign.
A bunch of stuff that was going to be scrapped next year anyway, is worth nothing to any company that does accounts. Shipping it to Ukraine costs a few tens of thousands, not tens of billions. So send every ATACMS and HIMARS left in the stocks, we’ve already seen how good they are in theatre in Ukraine.
On a related note, now that the US has given ATACMS I really don't understand why Germany can't give the Taurus missile. Still some in Germany don't seem to want Russia to lose, unfortunately.
Anyone else heard that phrase used in the past 40 years?
I’d always thought he was reasonably liberal, too.
The ATACMS strikes are precisely geolocated and recorded, and the cluster munitions involved much less likely to be faulty, so the additional post conflict burden they represent is absolutely minute in comparison to what exists.
And it's nothing too do with "deep pockets' - it's about available stocks, and Congress which is gridlocked in approving additional funding.
I would label all of that pragmatic.
Week 270. Today we strike in solidarity with Palestine and Gaza. The world needs to speak up and call for an immediate ceasefire, justice and freedom for Palestinians and all civilians affected.
https://x.com/GretaThunberg/status/1715284878919340056?s=20
Trying to “wall off” public sector housing as cheaper just creates a subletting market.
For precisely the reasons I listed.
I said immediately it was preposterous as did other drivers here.
If you are so out of touch, whether it be because you've lived in the centre of a city for too long, or you travel across the country in a private jet, that you think drivers are all flat cap wearing weirdos with driving gloves and interested in any of the nonsense that Sunak spouted then you need to get in touch with some real people.
Perhaps a starting point would be to reflect upon why drivers pay such extreme amounts of net tax to the Exchequer but get so little back. Why the Treasury takes net tens of billions per annum off drivers, but road quality, maintenance, investment and development are all poor.
Because that, unlike any of the caricature gibberish you and Sunak seem to believe, is what real driving voters are reflecting upon. Why when we pay so much tax, is investment so bad?
Until Sunak has an answer to that question, he shouldn't expect any gratitude or votes.
The Russian 'offensive' seems utterly aimless; suicidal even.
https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1715343646902395142
Again, if the economic benefits of HS rail are so poor, as you think, then why is every major country, bar the US, building them? What do you know that they do not?
As for HS2's cost over-runs, they are themselves overplayed; you may want to read the following thread:
https://twitter.com/kitchentowel/status/1712546872802599273
Also remember that the WCML Upgrade of the early 2000s was delivered years late after massive disruption, under-specification (*) and ten times over budget.
(*) No new signalling system and no 140MPH running
For a start, under Putin, all real opposition leaders are dead, in jail or in exile. The opposition that is allowed is a tame franchise of Putinism. Literally - the job of being the fake opponent to Putin goes to someone who is a fairly useless acolyte of Putin, every time.
https://x.com/owenjones84/status/1715314166775300199?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
Which doesn't make it a fundamental part of your identity, everyone is unique.
I am fully aware that any generalising always means speaking generally and won't really represent everyone, but which better reflects your train of thought out of curiosity? Wondering why investment etc [in whatever you want investment in] is so poor, despite how much tax we pay? Or the weird caricature nonsense that Sunak spouted around Tory conference?
Cambridgeshire is not at the centre of the current rainfall event. But yesterday, when driving back from my lunchtime swim, I splashed through a local ford that was still passable. Coming back after today's swim, I found the ford at the highest level I've ever seen it (the footpath and bridge alongside were also flooded), with a Ford Transit stuck in the middle of it.
And this ford is very near the top of the stream's watershed.
If it's like this here, goodness knows what it's like further north...
It's difficult not to be amused about that. They had their day. And lost.
https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/olaf-scholz-ueber-migration-es-kommen-zu-viele-a-2d86d2ac-e55a-4b8f-9766-c7060c2dc38a
There is a chance the next Labour government will muck up the economy and the polls swing back to the Conservatives, there is little chance the Conservatives will be re elected now however
https://x.com/wesstreeting/status/1480901993526968328?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
From a poor 3rd place the Lib Dems ran a dishonest canoaugn to do everything they could to get Labour voters to switch to the Conservatives. You published fake polls showing the LDs in front. You skewed bar charts. You spread all sorts of false stories about the Labour candidate, and went out of your way with direct attacks against him personally. And so on. You persisted in this even in the face of polls which showed you well behind. Above all it was the dishonesty and intensity of that dishonesty that gets me.
And then today you have the gall to claim that all along your anti-Labour campaign helped Labour defeat the Conservatives.
DISGUSTING, VILE ANTI-SEMITISM.
This photo of Saint Greta of the Greendoms is an anti-semitic message.
As well as the words, look at that cuddly toy.
It’s an octopus.
What’s an octopus got to do with anything?
Why is it unhappy and prominent?
It’s an anti-semitic trope.
https://x.com/FrauFantastic/status/1715326100094538093?s=20
If the US are serious about wanting Ukraine to "win" they should be starting a few fires in the RF's backyard. Maybe a colour revolution in Kazakhstan.
People are not one primary thing, every human is an individual and each human has an uncountable amount of characteristics or things they do.
Its why racism, sexism, or any other -ism or any other attempt to frame people as their characteristics is doomed to failure.
Not.