As one senior government source put it: “Unfortunately for us, most voters don’t really make a distinction between Rishi and Boris. To them it is the same old Tory mess. It’s not great.” The criticisms from Dorries and Johnson are also likely to hit Sunak at a particularly vulnerable point in his premiership. Labour’s lead in the polls has remained stubbornly high and Sunak’s plans to reset his premiership have continually foundered.
Privately some ministers are beginning to wonder if they “overcorrected” by moving to Sunak after Johnson and Liz Truss.
“Ministers are more restive than I’ve seen them for a long time. It’s not like there is going to be a leadership challenge or anything, but everyone is getting frustrated by the micromanagement of Downing Street,” a senior conservative said.
“We’ve overcorrected from a No 10 [under Johnson] which was big on vision and bad on detail to one which is obsessed by detail and has no vision.
“It is not a good way to run a government if you want PhD levels of information on every subject before you’re prepared to make a decision.” While those close to Sunak accept the polls are “stuck”, many still express confidence that disaffected Tory voters will return.
I do think a lot of their problems come from the way they completely flubbed 2022, but there were no easy options at that time.
If it had been anyone else, I’d have suggested they should have stuck with Liz Truss because, for better or worse, it is only right to give a new leader time. The problem was that it was Liz Truss - and I think it was becoming obvious she couldn’t handle the job - and in some ways had to go just because she wasn’t cut out to handle the pressures of the role (particularly given the fires she’d started).
They were absolutely right to axe Boris Johnson. However the following leadership election where candidates moved completely away from the 2019 manifesto and just made up their own weird True Blue pitches that didn’t chime with public priorities, was also very damaging IMHO.
The problem is the Party, not the Leadership.
The Party has to reform and rebuild. I'm not sure how they do that and I'm glad it's not my problem.
Step one is wanting to reform. That's probably going to take defeats in 2024 and 2028 to happen.
Fortunately, that's often the slow bit. As Starmer and Cameron both showed, the right leader can sort out a party fairly quickly, especially if bits are starting to fall off the other lot.
The danger for the Conservatives is how extreme their age profile has become. This is new- in the early 2000s, people like Cameron, Gove and Johnson were clearly coming up the pipeline. If you leave it for a decade, will there actually be much Conservative party left to salvage, let alone use as a base for rebuilding?
During the Corbyn years, there were places for more moderate elements of Labour to hunker down and rebuild from because the leader does not automatically own the party. There’s a very detailed organisational map, controlled by a legally enforceable constitution. CLPs have rights, there are regional operations, ones that focus on conference, the NEC, the unions etc etc. So there are always ways back if you are smart and prepared to put the work in. Starmer has managed to take control of a lot of the levers of power because he is a very strong manager and, as a lawyer, understands the rules and how they work. Thankfully, Corbyn and his team did not possess such skills.
I don’t know the Tory set-up that well, but from the outside it seems like the leader has much more personal power. That could mean a very quick return to the mainstream for the Tories if they go into opposition. But it could also mean a further lurch to the right. The choice that Tory MPs make about which leader to put in front of members is going to be decisive. Again, from the outside, a coronation of someone like Cleverley or Mordaunt would seem the best option. But are Tory MPs a cohesive enough grouping for that to happen?
You talk about rural Tory seats. But is Suffolk a Tory heartland or a soon-to-be EX-Tory heartland?
Last May the Greens flipped Mid-Suffolk Council (area around Stowmarket) - about 30 miles away from Waveney Valley ie nearly next door - with a jump from 12 seats to 24, out of a total 36. The vote share jump from 34% to 56.8%, and now their only majority control Council in the whole country.
Now that's a local election and the General Election is national - true. But I think there is space for optimism for the Greens.
(As an aside, it looks to me as though the Mid-Suffolk victory was local politics over a long period - but I'd be interested to hear about any particular themes from Anyone Who Knows.)
The very best the Greens can hope for at the General Election is to hold Brighton Pavilion (and I'd not make them favourites to do that). None of their other targets are in the slightest bit viable this time around.
Bristol Central might be winnable in an election with a fairly unpopular Labour Government seeking re-election, but there is absolutely no chance next year. In the others, they are miles away and the idea hoovering up some protest votes at a low turnout district council election presages coming from nowhere to win at a general election is just fantasy.
That's not to say they aren't going in the right direction as a party - they've built up a good local government base. But the electoral system is what it is, and they don't have a range of attractive targets in practice.
I mostly agree with this (err, spoiler warning for the next article?) but I wouldn't rule out Bristol Central. If we approach the next election with Labour still holding a 10%+ lead it will likely be obvious to people they are going to win and the Greens can run a campaign on 'Get who you really want here, it won't let the Tories in anyway' which could just work.
WRT Watford and its electoral habits, none of this is irrational. There are three reasons for differentiating between different sorts of election.
Running the country and emptying the bins really are different subjects and require different talents. (And no-one actually believes the Greens could run a country for 5 minutes, even though the live issue is whether anyone can).
Secondly, the local vote is often personal and people are much more voting for the individual.
Thirdly, it is selfishly rational, regardless of whether it works: many people support building N zillion houses, but not in their ward/small town/allotment patch. It is possible to believe that voting Tory/Lab nationally but Independent/LD/Loony/Green locally works towards that end.
Just to say I mostly agree with this (I'm a disbeliever in personal votes even at the local level, but agree with #1 and #3) and would have included it in the article but it was already too long and needed splitting in two.
I do always feel a little sorry for the party affected though. Winning local votes over and over but unable to get those same voters to trust them with the MP! That's being in an abusive relationship with the electorate. She ain't ever gonna love you back, girl!!
The very best the Greens can hope for at the General Election is to hold Brighton Pavilion (and I'd not make them favourites to do that). None of their other targets are in the slightest bit viable this time around.
Bristol Central might be winnable in an election with a fairly unpopular Labour Government seeking re-election, but there is absolutely no chance next year. In the others, they are miles the idea hoovering up some protest votes at a low turnout district council election presages coming from nowhere to win at a general election is just fantasy.
That's not to say they aren't going in the right direction as a party - they've built up a good local government base. But the electoral system is what it is, and they don't have a range of attractive targets in practice.
This is pretty much the view inside the party - whose members have the lowest average BMI and highest IQ of all the parties.
Our main problem as a political movement is that, because we're always right about everything eventually, many Green political positions end up being absorbed into the mainstream. Climate change, fox hunting, marriage equality, the list goes on...
So we continually have to fight for clear green water and exist mainly as a pressure group to the left of Labour.
Except the list doesn't go on, does it?
We could all play that game. Indeed, you could probably find a couple of OMRLP policies that were adopted by the mainstream, too, if you wanted to.
Climate change was absorbed into the political mainstream because it became a mainstream issue, and it's being tackled far from how the Greens would like to tackle it. And, you haven't listed out the far longer list of totally barking and barmy policies that were rejected by parties on all sides.
The Green Party membership reflects its niche as a cadre of priviledged radical left-wing activists who have the privilege of indulging an ideology that they secretly know will never be enacted so they have to take responsibility for all the policies they advocate. And, where they do get a taste of office, some of their nutty policies have totally backfired in the last year as in Brighton and Scotland.
Sure, many may have been educated to tertiary level but that doesn't reflect superior intelligence - simply that they are not a mass democratic movement and their small numbers (of those who have the time and resources to indulge in dogma) skew the average.
Votes at 18 was one of the original policies of Screaming Lord Sutch.
Greens are a diverse bunch, and prize local action over the cult of the leader. Certainly there are some far left ex-Corbynites, but there are also elderly hippies, crusties, but also respectable middle class folk appalled at how we are trashing our country and planet.
Re the notion the list of Green shopping is shrinking - it's growing as the Tories under Mr Sunak go into full blast reverse back to the 1950s of Marplesism. And SKS tries to follow them.
The very best the Greens can hope for at the General Election is to hold Brighton Pavilion (and I'd not make them favourites to do that). None of their other targets are in the slightest bit viable this time around.
Bristol Central might be winnable in an election with a fairly unpopular Labour Government seeking re-election, but there is absolutely no chance next year. In the others, they are miles away and the idea hoovering up some protest votes at a low turnout district council election presages coming from nowhere to win at a general election is just fantasy.
That's not to say they aren't going in the right direction as a party - they've built up a good local government base. But the electoral system is what it is, and they don't have a range of attractive targets in practice.
I mostly agree with this (err, spoiler warning for the next article?) but I wouldn't rule out Bristol Central. If we approach the next election with Labour still holding a 10%+ lead it will likely be obvious to people they are going to win and the Greens can run a campaign on 'Get who you really want here, it won't let the Tories in anyway' which could just work.
It seems to be over-thinking it to believe Labour being way ahead paradoxically means they may lose Bristol Central.
The argument is just too complex to sell to the electorate there. People want a change of Government in that seat and will simply vote for the alternative Government. It won't even be vaguely close.
As one senior government source put it: “Unfortunately for us, most voters don’t really make a distinction between Rishi and Boris. To them it is the same old Tory mess. It’s not great.” The criticisms from Dorries and Johnson are also likely to hit Sunak at a particularly vulnerable point in his premiership. Labour’s lead in the polls has remained stubbornly high and Sunak’s plans to reset his premiership have continually foundered.
Privately some ministers are beginning to wonder if they “overcorrected” by moving to Sunak after Johnson and Liz Truss.
“Ministers are more restive than I’ve seen them for a long time. It’s not like there is going to be a leadership challenge or anything, but everyone is getting frustrated by the micromanagement of Downing Street,” a senior conservative said.
“We’ve overcorrected from a No 10 [under Johnson] which was big on vision and bad on detail to one which is obsessed by detail and has no vision.
“It is not a good way to run a government if you want PhD levels of information on every subject before you’re prepared to make a decision.” While those close to Sunak accept the polls are “stuck”, many still express confidence that disaffected Tory voters will return.
I don't mind a PM or minister wanting all the info, if they are going to formulate some really well crafted reform / policy. Rishi and Hunt may have steadied the general day to day governance, but it is same old same old, high tax, low productivity, with no real vision of how to change that other than more maths lessons for kids. The only major "policy" being the shit show of scraping HS2.
And as i have said for donkeys years, whoever was left holding the bag when interest rates return to historic norms will get pounded like a dockside hooker. When your mortgage has gone up £100s of a month, you aren't going to get benefit of the doubt on anything.
He's turning into Gordon Brown with the micromanagement, it leads to atrophying taking place in government and that's not good.
I have to say i thought Cameron's approach was the right one...i am CEO of UK PLC, i am the figurehead who sets the general tone / vision and ultimately the fall guy if it goes wrong, but i delegate and trust people like Osborne, Danny Alexander etc to do the PhD level research.
He always gave the impression he was a bit flighty and never checked up on what his minions were doing. A similar approach was maybe his undoing at Greensill.
Precisely. Cameron (and Osborne) did not know what IDS was up to with Universal Credit, nor Lansley with his NHS reforms (or wrecking ball, delete to taste). All the more remarkable given they'd spent years in opposition formulating these policies.
Cameron is a textbook case of how not to be PM. His Achilles heel was that he believed his own spin.
His Achilles heel was that he resigned at exactly the moment it was most essential to stay.
I don't think he could have stayed to deliver Brexit. Iirc, Cameron said he would stay until there was a new leader in place, and there was a timetable for that election, but it concluded very quickly and so he left very quickly.
Or the alternative plan. Referendum had deliberately been set up as non-binding. Ignore it. Say you'll work harder with the EU to negotiate a deal. Tory party splits - lunatics defect to UKIP. Lose a confidence vote and fight an election. Would have been interesting...
UKIP might well have eclipsed the Conservative Party.
As it did in real world vote share. Point is that a Tory party without the Euro lunatics would be capable of governing. Instead the Euro loons took over and its heading for absolute demolition.
UKIP would have been the right's SDP. A stack of MPs defect and then lose their seats at the next GE.
As one senior government source put it: “Unfortunately for us, most voters don’t really make a distinction between Rishi and Boris. To them it is the same old Tory mess. It’s not great.” The criticisms from Dorries and Johnson are also likely to hit Sunak at a particularly vulnerable point in his premiership. Labour’s lead in the polls has remained stubbornly high and Sunak’s plans to reset his premiership have continually foundered.
Privately some ministers are beginning to wonder if they “overcorrected” by moving to Sunak after Johnson and Liz Truss.
“Ministers are more restive than I’ve seen them for a long time. It’s not like there is going to be a leadership challenge or anything, but everyone is getting frustrated by the micromanagement of Downing Street,” a senior conservative said.
“We’ve overcorrected from a No 10 [under Johnson] which was big on vision and bad on detail to one which is obsessed by detail and has no vision.
“It is not a good way to run a government if you want PhD levels of information on every subject before you’re prepared to make a decision.” While those close to Sunak accept the polls are “stuck”, many still express confidence that disaffected Tory voters will return.
I don't mind a PM or minister wanting all the info, if they are going to formulate some really well crafted reform / policy. Rishi and Hunt may have steadied the general day to day governance, but it is same old same old, high tax, low productivity, with no real vision of how to change that other than more maths lessons for kids. The only major "policy" being the shit show of scraping HS2.
And as i have said for donkeys years, whoever was left holding the bag when interest rates return to historic norms will get pounded like a dockside hooker. When your mortgage has gone up £100s of a month, you aren't going to get benefit of the doubt on anything.
He's turning into Gordon Brown with the micromanagement, it leads to atrophying taking place in government and that's not good.
I have to say i thought Cameron's approach was the right one...i am CEO of UK PLC, i am the figurehead who sets the general tone / vision and ultimately the fall guy if it goes wrong, but i delegate and trust people like Osborne, Danny Alexander etc to do the PhD level research.
He always gave the impression he was a bit flighty and never checked up on what his minions were doing. A similar approach was maybe his undoing at Greensill.
Precisely. Cameron (and Osborne) did not know what IDS was up to with Universal Credit, nor Lansley with his NHS reforms (or wrecking ball, delete to taste). All the more remarkable given they'd spent years in opposition formulating these policies.
Cameron is a textbook case of how not to be PM. His Achilles heel was that he believed his own spin.
His Achilles heel was that he resigned at exactly the moment it was most essential to stay.
I don't think he could have stayed to deliver Brexit. Iirc, Cameron said he would stay until there was a new leader in place, and there was a timetable for that election, but it concluded very quickly and so he left very quickly.
Or the alternative plan. Referendum had deliberately been set up as non-binding. Ignore it. Say you'll work harder with the EU to negotiate a deal. Tory party splits - lunatics defect to UKIP. Lose a confidence vote and fight an election. Would have been interesting...
UKIP might well have eclipsed the Conservative Party.
As it did in real world vote share. Point is that a Tory party without the Euro lunatics would be capable of governing. Instead the Euro loons took over and its heading for absolute demolition.
UKIP would have been the right's SDP. A stack of MPs defect and then lose their seats at the next GE.
I don't think it would have been politically feasible for Cameron to respond to the referendum result by saying "Sorry, ha ha, you were had, suckers."
And, we'd have finished up with that nice Mr. Corbyn in charge, dealing with Covid, Ukraine, and Israel/Palestine conflict.
The very best the Greens can hope for at the General Election is to hold Brighton Pavilion (and I'd not make them favourites to do that). None of their other targets are in the slightest bit viable this time around.
Bristol Central might be winnable in an election with a fairly unpopular Labour Government seeking re-election, but there is absolutely no chance next year. In the others, they are miles the idea hoovering up some protest votes at a low turnout district council election presages coming from nowhere to win at a general election is just fantasy.
That's not to say they aren't going in the right direction as a party - they've built up a good local government base. But the electoral system is what it is, and they don't have a range of attractive targets in practice.
This is pretty much the view inside the party - whose members have the lowest average BMI and highest IQ of all the parties.
Our main problem as a political movement is that, because we're always right about everything eventually, many Green political positions end up being absorbed into the mainstream. Climate change, fox hunting, marriage equality, the list goes on...
So we continually have to fight for clear green water and exist mainly as a pressure group to the left of Labour.
Except the list doesn't go on, does it?
We could all play that game. Indeed, you could probably find a couple of OMRLP policies that were adopted by the mainstream, too, if you wanted to.
Climate change was absorbed into the political mainstream because it became a mainstream issue, and it's being tackled far from how the Greens would like to tackle it. And, you haven't listed out the far longer list of totally barking and barmy policies that were rejected by parties on all sides.
The Green Party membership reflects its niche as a cadre of priviledged radical left-wing activists who have the privilege of indulging an ideology that they secretly know will never be enacted so they have to take responsibility for all the policies they advocate. And, where they do get a taste of office, some of their nutty policies have totally backfired in the last year as in Brighton and Scotland.
Sure, many may have been educated to tertiary level but that doesn't reflect superior intelligence - simply that they are not a mass democratic movement and their small numbers (of those who have the time and resources to indulge in dogma) skew the average.
Votes at 18 was one of the original policies of Screaming Lord Sutch.
Greens are a diverse bunch, and prize local action over the cult of the leader. Certainly there are some far left ex-Corbynites, but there are also elderly hippies, crusties, but also respectable middle class folk appalled at how we are trashing our country and planet.
Also pet passports. It's Screaming Lord Sutch's world, we're just living in it.
Votes at 18 happens right now in a lot of the UK, of course.
I remember someone putting together a quiz comparing the policies of UKIP and the MRLP about a decade ago - one was given a policy and asked, which party's manifesto did it come from? It was quite a revelation as to the relative sanity and humaneness of the two.
As one senior government source put it: “Unfortunately for us, most voters don’t really make a distinction between Rishi and Boris. To them it is the same old Tory mess. It’s not great.” The criticisms from Dorries and Johnson are also likely to hit Sunak at a particularly vulnerable point in his premiership. Labour’s lead in the polls has remained stubbornly high and Sunak’s plans to reset his premiership have continually foundered.
Privately some ministers are beginning to wonder if they “overcorrected” by moving to Sunak after Johnson and Liz Truss.
“Ministers are more restive than I’ve seen them for a long time. It’s not like there is going to be a leadership challenge or anything, but everyone is getting frustrated by the micromanagement of Downing Street,” a senior conservative said.
“We’ve overcorrected from a No 10 [under Johnson] which was big on vision and bad on detail to one which is obsessed by detail and has no vision.
“It is not a good way to run a government if you want PhD levels of information on every subject before you’re prepared to make a decision.” While those close to Sunak accept the polls are “stuck”, many still express confidence that disaffected Tory voters will return.
I do think a lot of their problems come from the way they completely flubbed 2022, but there were no easy options at that time.
If it had been anyone else, I’d have suggested they should have stuck with Liz Truss because, for better or worse, it is only right to give a new leader time. The problem was that it was Liz Truss - and I think it was becoming obvious she couldn’t handle the job - and in some ways had to go just because she wasn’t cut out to handle the pressures of the role (particularly given the fires she’d started).
They were absolutely right to axe Boris Johnson. However the following leadership election where candidates moved completely away from the 2019 manifesto and just made up their own weird True Blue pitches that didn’t chime with public priorities, was also very damaging IMHO.
The problem is the Party, not the Leadership.
The Party has to reform and rebuild. I'm not sure how they do that and I'm glad it's not my problem.
Step one is wanting to reform. That's probably going to take defeats in 2024 and 2028 to happen.
Fortunately, that's often the slow bit. As Starmer and Cameron both showed, the right leader can sort out a party fairly quickly, especially if bits are starting to fall off the other lot.
The danger for the Conservatives is how extreme their age profile has become. This is new- in the early 2000s, people like Cameron, Gove and Johnson were clearly coming up the pipeline. If you leave it for a decade, will there actually be much Conservative party left to salvage, let alone use as a base for rebuilding?
During the Corbyn years, there were places for more moderate elements of Labour to hunker down and rebuild from because the leader does not automatically own the party. There’s a very detailed organisational map, controlled by a legally enforceable constitution. CLPs have rights, there are regional operations, ones that focus on conference, the NEC, the unions etc etc. So there are always ways back if you are smart and prepared to put the work in. Starmer has managed to take control of a lot of the levers of power because he is a very strong manager and, as a lawyer, understands the rules and how they work. Thankfully, Corbyn and his team did not possess such skills.
I don’t know the Tory set-up that well, but from the outside it seems like the leader has much more personal power. That could mean a very quick return to the mainstream for the Tories if they go into opposition. But it could also mean a further lurch to the right. The choice that Tory MPs make about which leader to put in front of members is going to be decisive. Again, from the outside, a coronation of someone like Cleverley or Mordaunt would seem the best option. But are Tory MPs a cohesive enough grouping for that to happen?
What also helped the rebellion against Corbynism inside the party was that the entryists fought amongst themselves. Political absolutism means that the worst traitor is the guy sat next to you with a slight difference of opinion.
Starmer is a shiny foreheaded, fucking gooner with great hair but I do think, one area where is he adept is holding together the warp and weft of his polychromatic coalition. There will be scant electoral opportunities for les Verts while he is at the helm of the Labour Party.
He has held it together while in Opposition when the one thing they agree on is that they want the Conservatives out. But it'll be MUCH more difficult, perhaps impossible, to hold it together when they are in government.
Blair managed it, but he was a once-in-a-century political genius and had lots of other people's money to buy them off with. Starmer isn't and won't have.
Starmer's team has been far more ruthless in the candidate selection process and exclusion of dissidents than Tony Blair (or Brown or Corbyn) were, and consequently will have much less trouble in holding the PLP together when things get difficult, as of course they will. You can see that over Gaza, where the left actually has a majority of the population and the membership behind a strongly-held view that the assault on Gaza is being pursued too ruthlessly, denying even clean water to most of the civilian population. You don't have to be a Corbynite to feel uneasy that we, like Sunak, are silent except for a vague call for humanitarian pauses. Yet the revolt comes down to a handful of councillors going independent and a couple of obscure council leaders calling for his resignation, plus some MPs giving strictly off-the-record grumbles.
The very best the Greens can hope for at the General Election is to hold Brighton Pavilion (and I'd not make them favourites to do that). None of their other targets are in the slightest bit viable this time around.
Bristol Central might be winnable in an election with a fairly unpopular Labour Government seeking re-election, but there is absolutely no chance next year. In the others, they are miles away and the idea hoovering up some protest votes at a low turnout district council election presages coming from nowhere to win at a general election is just fantasy.
That's not to say they aren't going in the right direction as a party - they've built up a good local government base. But the electoral system is what it is, and they don't have a range of attractive targets in practice.
I mostly agree with this (err, spoiler warning for the next article?) but I wouldn't rule out Bristol Central. If we approach the next election with Labour still holding a 10%+ lead it will likely be obvious to people they are going to win and the Greens can run a campaign on 'Get who you really want here, it won't let the Tories in anyway' which could just work.
It seems to be over-thinking it to believe Labour being way ahead paradoxically means they may lose Bristol Central.
The argument is just too complex to sell to the electorate there. People want a change of Government in that seat and will simply vote for the alternative Government. It won't even be vaguely close.
I suspect you are right: Labour didn't lose any seats in 1997 after all.
The very best the Greens can hope for at the General Election is to hold Brighton Pavilion (and I'd not make them favourites to do that). None of their other targets are in the slightest bit viable this time around.
Bristol Central might be winnable in an election with a fairly unpopular Labour Government seeking re-election, but there is absolutely no chance next year. In the others, they are miles the idea hoovering up some protest votes at a low turnout district council election presages coming from nowhere to win at a general election is just fantasy.
That's not to say they aren't going in the right direction as a party - they've built up a good local government base. But the electoral system is what it is, and they don't have a range of attractive targets in practice.
This is pretty much the view inside the party - whose members have the lowest average BMI and highest IQ of all the parties.
Our main problem as a political movement is that, because we're always right about everything eventually, many Green political positions end up being absorbed into the mainstream. Climate change, fox hunting, marriage equality, the list goes on...
So we continually have to fight for clear green water and exist mainly as a pressure group to the left of Labour.
Except the list doesn't go on, does it?
We could all play that game. Indeed, you could probably find a couple of OMRLP policies that were adopted by the mainstream, too, if you wanted to.
Climate change was absorbed into the political mainstream because it became a mainstream issue, and it's being tackled far from how the Greens would like to tackle it. And, you haven't listed out the far longer list of totally barking and barmy policies that were rejected by parties on all sides.
The Green Party membership reflects its niche as a cadre of priviledged radical left-wing activists who have the privilege of indulging an ideology that they secretly know will never be enacted so they have to take responsibility for all the policies they advocate. And, where they do get a taste of office, some of their nutty policies have totally backfired in the last year as in Brighton and Scotland.
Sure, many may have been educated to tertiary level but that doesn't reflect superior intelligence - simply that they are not a mass democratic movement and their small numbers (of those who have the time and resources to indulge in dogma) skew the average.
Votes at 18 was one of the original policies of Screaming Lord Sutch.
Greens are a diverse bunch, and prize local action over the cult of the leader. Certainly there are some far left ex-Corbynites, but there are also elderly hippies, crusties, but also respectable middle class folk appalled at how we are trashing our country and planet.
Also pet passports. It's Screaming Lord Sutch's world, we're just living in it.
Votes at 18 happens right now in a lot of the UK, of course.
I remember someone putting together a quiz comparing the policies of UKIP and the MRLP about a decade ago - one was given a policy and asked, which party's manifesto did it come from? It was quite a revelation as to the relative sanity and humaneness of the two.
Votes at 18 introduced by Wilson in 1969 iirc, which was more than a decade before the foundation of the MRLP, if not before David Such's political career.
As one senior government source put it: “Unfortunately for us, most voters don’t really make a distinction between Rishi and Boris. To them it is the same old Tory mess. It’s not great.” The criticisms from Dorries and Johnson are also likely to hit Sunak at a particularly vulnerable point in his premiership. Labour’s lead in the polls has remained stubbornly high and Sunak’s plans to reset his premiership have continually foundered.
Privately some ministers are beginning to wonder if they “overcorrected” by moving to Sunak after Johnson and Liz Truss.
“Ministers are more restive than I’ve seen them for a long time. It’s not like there is going to be a leadership challenge or anything, but everyone is getting frustrated by the micromanagement of Downing Street,” a senior conservative said.
“We’ve overcorrected from a No 10 [under Johnson] which was big on vision and bad on detail to one which is obsessed by detail and has no vision.
“It is not a good way to run a government if you want PhD levels of information on every subject before you’re prepared to make a decision.” While those close to Sunak accept the polls are “stuck”, many still express confidence that disaffected Tory voters will return.
I do think a lot of their problems come from the way they completely flubbed 2022, but there were no easy options at that time.
If it had been anyone else, I’d have suggested they should have stuck with Liz Truss because, for better or worse, it is only right to give a new leader time. The problem was that it was Liz Truss - and I think it was becoming obvious she couldn’t handle the job - and in some ways had to go just because she wasn’t cut out to handle the pressures of the role (particularly given the fires she’d started).
They were absolutely right to axe Boris Johnson. However the following leadership election where candidates moved completely away from the 2019 manifesto and just made up their own weird True Blue pitches that didn’t chime with public priorities, was also very damaging IMHO.
The problem is the Party, not the Leadership.
The Party has to reform and rebuild. I'm not sure how they do that and I'm glad it's not my problem.
Step one is wanting to reform. That's probably going to take defeats in 2024 and 2028 to happen.
Fortunately, that's often the slow bit. As Starmer and Cameron both showed, the right leader can sort out a party fairly quickly, especially if bits are starting to fall off the other lot.
The danger for the Conservatives is how extreme their age profile has become. This is new- in the early 2000s, people like Cameron, Gove and Johnson were clearly coming up the pipeline. If you leave it for a decade, will there actually be much Conservative party left to salvage, let alone use as a base for rebuilding?
Being in opposition and the passage of time will tend to smooth out the age profile a bit.
Indeed. Unless there is something that replaces it (which is not inconceivable, but deaths of political parties have been oft prophesied and rarely happen), the Tory Party will recover, because the country always needs a focal point of opposition to a current government. For all the Lib Dems get excited about taking that main opposition role, in a country like Britain it is unlikely the main two parties will both be on the centre to centre left.
The big point of interest to me is what happens to the Tory Party in opposition, because I think rather than going down a trajectory of slowly working their way back to Cameroony centre-right basic principles, they are actually on track to become GOPUK.
As one senior government source put it: “Unfortunately for us, most voters don’t really make a distinction between Rishi and Boris. To them it is the same old Tory mess. It’s not great.” The criticisms from Dorries and Johnson are also likely to hit Sunak at a particularly vulnerable point in his premiership. Labour’s lead in the polls has remained stubbornly high and Sunak’s plans to reset his premiership have continually foundered.
Privately some ministers are beginning to wonder if they “overcorrected” by moving to Sunak after Johnson and Liz Truss.
“Ministers are more restive than I’ve seen them for a long time. It’s not like there is going to be a leadership challenge or anything, but everyone is getting frustrated by the micromanagement of Downing Street,” a senior conservative said.
“We’ve overcorrected from a No 10 [under Johnson] which was big on vision and bad on detail to one which is obsessed by detail and has no vision.
“It is not a good way to run a government if you want PhD levels of information on every subject before you’re prepared to make a decision.” While those close to Sunak accept the polls are “stuck”, many still express confidence that disaffected Tory voters will return.
I do think a lot of their problems come from the way they completely flubbed 2022, but there were no easy options at that time.
If it had been anyone else, I’d have suggested they should have stuck with Liz Truss because, for better or worse, it is only right to give a new leader time. The problem was that it was Liz Truss - and I think it was becoming obvious she couldn’t handle the job - and in some ways had to go just because she wasn’t cut out to handle the pressures of the role (particularly given the fires she’d started).
They were absolutely right to axe Boris Johnson. However the following leadership election where candidates moved completely away from the 2019 manifesto and just made up their own weird True Blue pitches that didn’t chime with public priorities, was also very damaging IMHO.
The problem is the Party, not the Leadership.
The Party has to reform and rebuild. I'm not sure how they do that and I'm glad it's not my problem.
Step one is wanting to reform. That's probably going to take defeats in 2024 and 2028 to happen.
Fortunately, that's often the slow bit. As Starmer and Cameron both showed, the right leader can sort out a party fairly quickly, especially if bits are starting to fall off the other lot.
The danger for the Conservatives is how extreme their age profile has become. This is new- in the early 2000s, people like Cameron, Gove and Johnson were clearly coming up the pipeline. If you leave it for a decade, will there actually be much Conservative party left to salvage, let alone use as a base for rebuilding?
During the Corbyn years, there were places for more moderate elements of Labour to hunker down and rebuild from because the leader does not automatically own the party. There’s a very detailed organisational map, controlled by a legally enforceable constitution. CLPs have rights, there are regional operations, ones that focus on conference, the NEC, the unions etc etc. So there are always ways back if you are smart and prepared to put the work in. Starmer has managed to take control of a lot of the levers of power because he is a very strong manager and, as a lawyer, understands the rules and how they work. Thankfully, Corbyn and his team did not possess such skills.
I don’t know the Tory set-up that well, but from the outside it seems like the leader has much more personal power. That could mean a very quick return to the mainstream for the Tories if they go into opposition. But it could also mean a further lurch to the right. The choice that Tory MPs make about which leader to put in front of members is going to be decisive. Again, from the outside, a coronation of someone like Cleverley or Mordaunt would seem the best option. But are Tory MPs a cohesive enough grouping for that to happen?
I can't see the Conservative membership accepting a coronation for Leader of the Opposition. So the only way to avoid Braverman or similar is to present a stacked shortlist to the membership; "Yes, we know you really want Braverman, but you have a choice between Cleverly and Mordant. Happy voting!"
That needs a fairly well organised 67% or so of Conservative MPs to keep her out of the final two. Which seems unlikely.
Vaguely on topic: the new "live" bus trackers at each stop in Edinburgh now only reflect the timetable, rather than how the wait will actually be.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
The very best the Greens can hope for at the General Election is to hold Brighton Pavilion (and I'd not make them favourites to do that). None of their other targets are in the slightest bit viable this time around.
Bristol Central might be winnable in an election with a fairly unpopular Labour Government seeking re-election, but there is absolutely no chance next year. In the others, they are miles the idea hoovering up some protest votes at a low turnout district council election presages coming from nowhere to win at a general election is just fantasy.
That's not to say they aren't going in the right direction as a party - they've built up a good local government base. But the electoral system is what it is, and they don't have a range of attractive targets in practice.
This is pretty much the view inside the party - whose members have the lowest average BMI and highest IQ of all the parties.
Our main problem as a political movement is that, because we're always right about everything eventually, many Green political positions end up being absorbed into the mainstream. Climate change, fox hunting, marriage equality, the list goes on...
So we continually have to fight for clear green water and exist mainly as a pressure group to the left of Labour.
Except the list doesn't go on, does it?
We could all play that game. Indeed, you could probably find a couple of OMRLP policies that were adopted by the mainstream, too, if you wanted to.
Climate change was absorbed into the political mainstream because it became a mainstream issue, and it's being tackled far from how the Greens would like to tackle it. And, you haven't listed out the far longer list of totally barking and barmy policies that were rejected by parties on all sides.
The Green Party membership reflects its niche as a cadre of priviledged radical left-wing activists who have the privilege of indulging an ideology that they secretly know will never be enacted so they have to take responsibility for all the policies they advocate. And, where they do get a taste of office, some of their nutty policies have totally backfired in the last year as in Brighton and Scotland.
Sure, many may have been educated to tertiary level but that doesn't reflect superior intelligence - simply that they are not a mass democratic movement and their small numbers (of those who have the time and resources to indulge in dogma) skew the average.
Votes at 18 was one of the original policies of Screaming Lord Sutch.
Greens are a diverse bunch, and prize local action over the cult of the leader. Certainly there are some far left ex-Corbynites, but there are also elderly hippies, crusties, but also respectable middle class folk appalled at how we are trashing our country and planet.
Also pet passports. It's Screaming Lord Sutch's world, we're just living in it.
Votes at 18 happens right now in a lot of the UK, of course.
I remember someone putting together a quiz comparing the policies of UKIP and the MRLP about a decade ago - one was given a policy and asked, which party's manifesto did it come from? It was quite a revelation as to the relative sanity and humaneness of the two.
Votes at 18 introduced by Wilson in 1969 iirc, which was more than a decade before the foundation of the MRLP, if not before David Such's political career.
THat was indeed LDS's precursor party - the National Teenage Party.
Vaguely on topic: the new "live" bus trackers at each stop in Edinburgh now only reflect the timetable, rather than how the wait will actually be.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
Do you have a source for that, please? IT was always the non-LT buses that were the problem, so I don't understand this.
As one senior government source put it: “Unfortunately for us, most voters don’t really make a distinction between Rishi and Boris. To them it is the same old Tory mess. It’s not great.” The criticisms from Dorries and Johnson are also likely to hit Sunak at a particularly vulnerable point in his premiership. Labour’s lead in the polls has remained stubbornly high and Sunak’s plans to reset his premiership have continually foundered.
Privately some ministers are beginning to wonder if they “overcorrected” by moving to Sunak after Johnson and Liz Truss.
“Ministers are more restive than I’ve seen them for a long time. It’s not like there is going to be a leadership challenge or anything, but everyone is getting frustrated by the micromanagement of Downing Street,” a senior conservative said.
“We’ve overcorrected from a No 10 [under Johnson] which was big on vision and bad on detail to one which is obsessed by detail and has no vision.
“It is not a good way to run a government if you want PhD levels of information on every subject before you’re prepared to make a decision.” While those close to Sunak accept the polls are “stuck”, many still express confidence that disaffected Tory voters will return.
I do think a lot of their problems come from the way they completely flubbed 2022, but there were no easy options at that time.
If it had been anyone else, I’d have suggested they should have stuck with Liz Truss because, for better or worse, it is only right to give a new leader time. The problem was that it was Liz Truss - and I think it was becoming obvious she couldn’t handle the job - and in some ways had to go just because she wasn’t cut out to handle the pressures of the role (particularly given the fires she’d started).
They were absolutely right to axe Boris Johnson. However the following leadership election where candidates moved completely away from the 2019 manifesto and just made up their own weird True Blue pitches that didn’t chime with public priorities, was also very damaging IMHO.
The problem is the Party, not the Leadership.
The Party has to reform and rebuild. I'm not sure how they do that and I'm glad it's not my problem.
Step one is wanting to reform. That's probably going to take defeats in 2024 and 2028 to happen.
Fortunately, that's often the slow bit. As Starmer and Cameron both showed, the right leader can sort out a party fairly quickly, especially if bits are starting to fall off the other lot.
The danger for the Conservatives is how extreme their age profile has become. This is new- in the early 2000s, people like Cameron, Gove and Johnson were clearly coming up the pipeline. If you leave it for a decade, will there actually be much Conservative party left to salvage, let alone use as a base for rebuilding?
During the Corbyn years, there were places for more moderate elements of Labour to hunker down and rebuild from because the leader does not automatically own the party. There’s a very detailed organisational map, controlled by a legally enforceable constitution. CLPs have rights, there are regional operations, ones that focus on conference, the NEC, the unions etc etc. So there are always ways back if you are smart and prepared to put the work in. Starmer has managed to take control of a lot of the levers of power because he is a very strong manager and, as a lawyer, understands the rules and how they work. Thankfully, Corbyn and his team did not possess such skills.
I don’t know the Tory set-up that well, but from the outside it seems like the leader has much more personal power. That could mean a very quick return to the mainstream for the Tories if they go into opposition. But it could also mean a further lurch to the right. The choice that Tory MPs make about which leader to put in front of members is going to be decisive. Again, from the outside, a coronation of someone like Cleverley or Mordaunt would seem the best option. But are Tory MPs a cohesive enough grouping for that to happen?
I can't see the Conservative membership accepting a coronation for Leader of the Opposition. So the only way to avoid Braverman or similar is to present a stacked shortlist to the membership; "Yes, we know you really want Braverman, but you have a choice between Cleverly and Mordant. Happy voting!"
That needs a fairly well organised 67% or so of Conservative MPs to keep her out of the final two. Which seems unlikely.
It doesn’t help that I think from memory the profile of the safer MP for the Tory leans more right-wing than the party generally.
I don’t think the moderates in the parliamentary party will be in a state* to really run an organised and smart tactical campaign to freeze out Braverman. In fact the party is more likely to say to itself “well, given where we are, let’s roll the dice and keep the members happy.”
*unless the party manages a non-apocalyptic result (say 220-240 seats) in which case there may be enough of a sizeable rump to try and keep some sense in the room, but I still have my doubts.
Vaguely on topic: the new "live" bus trackers at each stop in Edinburgh now only reflect the timetable, rather than how the wait will actually be.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
Do you have a source for that, please? IT was always the non-LT buses that were the problem, so I don't understand this.
Vaguely on topic: the new "live" bus trackers at each stop in Edinburgh now only reflect the timetable, rather than how the wait will actually be.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
Do you have a source for that, please? IT was always the non-LT buses that were the problem, so I don't understand this.
Vaguely on topic: the new "live" bus trackers at each stop in Edinburgh now only reflect the timetable, rather than how the wait will actually be.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
Reminds me of the screens at London commuter boat piers. They often have information that doesn't reflect what's actually happening.
Vaguely on topic: the new "live" bus trackers at each stop in Edinburgh now only reflect the timetable, rather than how the wait will actually be.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
Sounds like the interface between the system tracking bus location, and the system displaying wait time at bus shelters, not functioning correctly. So they’ve told the latter to use the timetable rather than a blank screen, until they fix the interface issue.
Vaguely on topic: the new "live" bus trackers at each stop in Edinburgh now only reflect the timetable, rather than how the wait will actually be.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
PS May be useful for the Greens at Holyrood though, with Mr Cole-Hamilton so against LTNs.
Vaguely on topic: the new "live" bus trackers at each stop in Edinburgh now only reflect the timetable, rather than how the wait will actually be.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
Sounds like the interface between the system tracking bus location, and the system displaying wait time at bus shelters, not functioning correctly. So they’ve told the latter to use the timetable rather than a blank screen, until they fix the interface issue.
Possibly the issue is reconciling info from different companies - it used to show Lothian Transport buses only, most of the time perfectly happily.
Vaguely on topic: the new "live" bus trackers at each stop in Edinburgh now only reflect the timetable, rather than how the wait will actually be.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
PS May be useful for the Greens at Holyrood though, with Mr Cole-Hamilton so against LTNs.
Liberal Democrats continue to baffle me in general. Absolutely no idea what they stand for other than being marginally more pro-Europe than the others.
ACH started campaigning against air pollution and then pivoted towards the Piers Corbyn conspiracy theorists.
The stadium is half empty for an England Australia World Cup match.
ODI cricket is dead.
Depends what the capacity is. Some of these Indian cricket grounds can take enormous crowds. You can have 30,000 people there and it still looks very empty.
Visited Nottingham recently. Great city, great food scene, great nightlife. Some handsome buildings. Trams are superb and they have London-style regulated buses each in different colours to indicate their route. Real time information at the bus stops. Something for everyone.
Vaguely on topic: the new "live" bus trackers at each stop in Edinburgh now only reflect the timetable, rather than how the wait will actually be.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
PS May be useful for the Greens at Holyrood though, with Mr Cole-Hamilton so against LTNs.
Liberal Democrats continue to baffle me in general. Absolutely no idea what they stand for other than being marginally more pro-Europe than the others.
ACH started campaigning against air pollution and then pivoted towards the Piers Corbyn conspiracy theorists.
The very best the Greens can hope for at the General Election is to hold Brighton Pavilion (and I'd not make them favourites to do that). None of their other targets are in the slightest bit viable this time around.
Bristol Central might be winnable in an election with a fairly unpopular Labour Government seeking re-election, but there is absolutely no chance next year. In the others, they are miles the idea hoovering up some protest votes at a low turnout district council election presages coming from nowhere to win at a general election is just fantasy.
That's not to say they aren't going in the right direction as a party - they've built up a good local government base. But the electoral system is what it is, and they don't have a range of attractive targets in practice.
This is pretty much the view inside the party - whose members have the lowest average BMI and highest IQ of all the parties.
Our main problem as a political movement is that, because we're always right about everything eventually, many Green political positions end up being absorbed into the mainstream. Climate change, fox hunting, marriage equality, the list goes on...
So we continually have to fight for clear green water and exist mainly as a pressure group to the left of Labour.
Except the list doesn't go on, does it?
We could all play that game. Indeed, you could probably find a couple of OMRLP policies that were adopted by the mainstream, too, if you wanted to.
Climate change was absorbed into the political mainstream because it became a mainstream issue, and it's being tackled far from how the Greens would like to tackle it. And, you haven't listed out the far longer list of totally barking and barmy policies that were rejected by parties on all sides.
The Green Party membership reflects its niche as a cadre of priviledged radical left-wing activists who have the privilege of indulging an ideology that they secretly know will never be enacted so they have to take responsibility for all the policies they advocate. And, where they do get a taste of office, some of their nutty policies have totally backfired in the last year as in Brighton and Scotland.
Sure, many may have been educated to tertiary level but that doesn't reflect superior intelligence - simply that they are not a mass democratic movement and their small numbers (of those who have the time and resources to indulge in dogma) skew the average.
Votes at 18 was one of the original policies of Screaming Lord Sutch.
Greens are a diverse bunch, and prize local action over the cult of the leader. Certainly there are some far left ex-Corbynites, but there are also elderly hippies, crusties, but also respectable middle class folk appalled at how we are trashing our country and planet.
Also pet passports. It's Screaming Lord Sutch's world, we're just living in it.
Votes at 18 happens right now in a lot of the UK, of course.
I remember someone putting together a quiz comparing the policies of UKIP and the MRLP about a decade ago - one was given a policy and asked, which party's manifesto did it come from? It was quite a revelation as to the relative sanity and humaneness of the two.
Votes at 18 introduced by Wilson in 1969 iirc, which was more than a decade before the foundation of the MRLP, if not before David Such's political career.
THat was indeed LDS's precursor party - the National Teenage Party.
Vaguely on topic: the new "live" bus trackers at each stop in Edinburgh now only reflect the timetable, rather than how the wait will actually be.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
You mean the data isn’t the GPS on each bus as used by the actual bus operator to keep an eye on what is happening?
Why?
One thing TfL got right is that they make the same data they use available and it’s available by public APi.
I would add, Gordon Brown had this problem of wanting PhD levels of research on any aspect of policy. I wonder if working at Treasury, where everything really revolves around formulating policy once to twice a year makes it worse when you become PM... because as chancellor you not only have time to do this, but dropping a bollocks in a budget is massive compared to floating some stupid policy like wooden toys for all.
One of Gordon Brown's problems was that in the 20 years before becoming Prime Minister he had only ever done economic jobs.
1997-2007 - Chancellor of the Exchequer
1992 - 1997 - Shadow Chancellor
1989 - 1992 - Shadow Trade & Industry Secretary
1987 - 1992 - Shadow Chief Secretary
He just wasn't used to dealing non economic policies when he became PM.
Although as it turned out his defining challenge as PM was right in his wheelhouse.
Thanks Q for the header. Sadly I think the Greens will gain no seats and lose the one they have. The only downside of the coming Labour landslide as far as I'm concerned.
The very best the Greens can hope for at the General Election is to hold Brighton Pavilion (and I'd not make them favourites to do that). None of their other targets are in the slightest bit viable this time around.
Bristol Central might be winnable in an election with a fairly unpopular Labour Government seeking re-election, but there is absolutely no chance next year. In the others, they are miles away and the idea hoovering up some protest votes at a low turnout district council election presages coming from nowhere to win at a general election is just fantasy.
That's not to say they aren't going in the right direction as a party - they've built up a good local government base. But the electoral system is what it is, and they don't have a range of attractive targets in practice.
This is pretty much the view inside the party - whose members have the lowest average BMI and highest IQ of all the parties.
Our main problem as a political movement is that, because we're always right about everything eventually, many Green political positions end up being absorbed into the mainstream. Climate change, fox hunting, marriage equality, the list goes on...
So we continually have to fight for clear green water and exist mainly as a pressure group to the left of Labour.
And that means that classic electoral success needs a Labour government paying too little attention to its left flank. See the win in Brighton.
Starmer is a shiny foreheaded, fucking gooner with great hair but I do think, one area where is he adept is holding together the warp and weft of his polychromatic coalition. There will be scant electoral opportunities for les Verts while he is at the helm of the Labour Party.
He has held it together while in Opposition when the one thing they agree on is that they want the Conservatives out. But it'll be MUCH more difficult, perhaps impossible, to hold it together when they are in government.
Blair managed it, but he was a once-in-a-century political genius and had lots of other people's money to buy them off with. Starmer isn't and won't have.
I disagree, and am no fan of Starmer. The one skill that he has most demonstrated is his capability as a manager. He has transformed Labour from a chaotic cranky mess to a government in waiting in just over 3 years.
That sort of ability at change management is a rare skill. It could transform our institutions too. It would be nice to have some idea of what those changes will be!
Nonsense. The government has turned into a shitstorm on his watch and given him the chance to stand back and do nothing while they pull themselves apart. Thats called good luck. I have yet to see much evidence that Starmer has managerial skills. In my professional life lawyers were some of the most disorganised people I encountered bested only by Management Consultants.
No, Starmers restructure of the Labour Party was independent of, and preceeded the collapse into chaotic crankery of the Conservatives.
Sure, some lawyers are disorganised but Starmer is not one of them. He reminds me of Attlee, who was also famously well organised and charisma free. I think Starmer will govern better than he campaigns, the antithesis of Johnsonism.
Thanks Q for the header. Sadly I think the Greens will gain no seats and lose the one they have. The only downside of the coming Labour landslide as far as I'm concerned.
Why will the Greens probably lose Brighton Pavilion? They've got a big majority.
Thanks Q for the header. Sadly I think the Greens will gain no seats and lose the one they have. The only downside of the coming Labour landslide as far as I'm concerned.
Why will the Greens probably lose Brighton Pavilion? They've got a big majority.
Because Caroline Lucas is retiring.
Edit - also the Green council was absolutely pummelled in recent elections. It was actually slightly worse than what happened to the LibDems in 2015.
Good morning. Thinking about purchasing a tent today - can anyone suggest some good locations (perhaps under a bridge or bypass) that would be suitable. Want a mixture of leafy London suburb, but close to key coffee shops for my morning chai latte.
Thanks Q for the header. Sadly I think the Greens will gain no seats and lose the one they have. The only downside of the coming Labour landslide as far as I'm concerned.
Yes, I think so too.
Having even a token MP makes a difference in terms of national representation.
Vaguely on topic: the new "live" bus trackers at each stop in Edinburgh now only reflect the timetable, rather than how the wait will actually be.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
You mean the data isn’t the GPS on each bus as used by the actual bus operator to keep an eye on what is happening?
Why?
One thing TfL got right is that they make the same data they use available and it’s available by public APi.
Yep - the Lothian Bus app still works perfectly. It's the council's shiny new trackers that don't work. I'd usually assume that this will be easy fix, but if the council messed up the procurement...
Good morning. Thinking about purchasing a tent today - can anyone suggest some good locations (perhaps under a bridge or bypass) that would be suitable. Want a mixture of leafy London suburb, but close to key coffee shops for my morning chai latte.
The stadium is half empty for an England Australia World Cup match.
ODI cricket is dead.
Depends what the capacity is. Some of these Indian cricket grounds can take enormous crowds. You can have 30,000 people there and it still looks very empty.
Still amazed that so far in to the tournament, they’re still not getting anything close to capacity crowds in though. Surely they could be giving them away to local schools if they don’t sell out?
Vaguely on topic: the new "live" bus trackers at each stop in Edinburgh now only reflect the timetable, rather than how the wait will actually be.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
Sounds like the interface between the system tracking bus location, and the system displaying wait time at bus shelters, not functioning correctly. So they’ve told the latter to use the timetable rather than a blank screen, until they fix the interface issue.
Possibly the issue is reconciling info from different companies - it used to show Lothian Transport buses only, most of the time perfectly happily.
Yes the different bus operators probably use different companies for their bus tracking software, and the software that runs the bus stop signs needs to get the data out of these multiple systems in the same standardised format on a regular basis, then translate bus location, speed, and other traffic information, into an ETA at each stop along the route, then send that to the signs.
If it worked previously for one bus operator, then it’s likely to be that interface between the bus tracking software and the signage software that’s not working. It’s relatively simple software, but perhaps there’s still some bugs in it.
Unbelievable BBC ran footage from Hamas crisis actor last night...this particular guy is so famous for this he is literally a meme now across social media for how shit he is at it i.e. going from patient to doctor in the same day. Obviously BBC verify had gone home early....
Do you have a source with evidence for this? There have been a lot of claims of “crisis actors”, but news agencies have dismissed them as false. See:
Vaguely on topic: the new "live" bus trackers at each stop in Edinburgh now only reflect the timetable, rather than how the wait will actually be.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
Greens should be chucked out , they are nutjobs and useless to boot. They make the SNP look efficient and capable. Never have such weasels been involved in running a country.
Vaguely on topic: the new "live" bus trackers at each stop in Edinburgh now only reflect the timetable, rather than how the wait will actually be.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
Greens should be chucked out , they are nutjobs and useless to boot. They make the SNP look efficient and capable. Never have such weasels been involved in running a country.
Now come on Malc, that's very unfair on the Greens given the National Liberals of 1931.
Vaguely on topic: the new "live" bus trackers at each stop in Edinburgh now only reflect the timetable, rather than how the wait will actually be.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
PS May be useful for the Greens at Holyrood though, with Mr Cole-Hamilton so against LTNs.
Liberal Democrats continue to baffle me in general. Absolutely no idea what they stand for other than being marginally more pro-Europe than the others.
ACH started campaigning against air pollution and then pivoted towards the Piers Corbyn conspiracy theorists.
The SDP faction got the upper hand.
Explains why they are as they are.
As an Orange Book liberal that is NOT something I recognise whatsoever. On the contrary I would say the reverse and it is evidently true that the coalition was definitely an Orange Book coalition and not a Social Democrat coalition. The liberal party has always been a coalition of Social Democrats and Liberals even well before the SDP. After the merger the balance didn't seem to change one iota. Certainly the constituency I was chair of never changed one iota. The SDP members that joined us (and there were quite a few including councillors) simply merged in seamlessly as if the party had not undergone any change.
So from my perspective the Liberals got the upper hand, presumably because most liberals joined up, but a sizeable group of SDP didn't.
Unbelievable BBC ran footage from Hamas crisis actor last night...this particular guy is so famous for this he is literally a meme now across social media for how shit he is at it i.e. going from patient to doctor in the same day. Obviously BBC verify had gone home early....
Do you have a source with evidence for this? There have been a lot of claims of “crisis actors”, but news agencies have dismissed them as false. See:
I'm sure false accusations exist, but in this case it's fairly clear cut:
This is the chap BBC showed in their opening news montage yesterday.
They don’t report Russian news sources as definitive fact on the Ukraine war, so I’m not sure why they’re reporting Hamas sources so uncritically, after so many times they’ve proved to be at best very exaggerated and at worst totally fabricated.
If you can’t get your own journalists into a dangerous place, then that’s understandable - but be honest about it, and say that you have unverified claims from partisan sources. Such as the guy in the pictures above, who’s very clearly an actor.
Unbelievable BBC ran footage from Hamas crisis actor last night...this particular guy is so famous for this he is literally a meme now across social media for how shit he is at it i.e. going from patient to doctor in the same day. Obviously BBC verify had gone home early....
Do you have a source with evidence for this? There have been a lot of claims of “crisis actors”, but news agencies have dismissed them as false. See:
I'm sure false accusations exist, but in this case it's fairly clear cut:
This is the chap BBC showed in their opening news montage yesterday.
They don’t report Russian news sources as definitive fact on the Ukraine war, so I’m not sure why they’re reporting Hamas sources so uncritically, after so many of times they’ve proved to be at best very exaggerated and at worst totally fabricated.
If you can’t get your own journalists into a dangerous place, then that’s understandable - but be honest about it, and say that you have unverified claims from partisan sources.
Or you can do what the NYT have done, hire a guy who openly praised Hitler, with his seemingly only criticism is that he didn't finish the job on the Jews. I am sure his takes are really impartial.
The Middle East gets so much attention on the left and right for a variety of reasons, but surely the primary one is that it is a part of the world in which so much of the world’s oil supplies reside. It may be less the case now, but in the past there was nowhere more globally important. The early 1970s showed that.
Perhaps, but (a) the oil isn’t in Israel/Palestine and (b) we get most of our oil from Norway or North America these days.
Thanks Q for the header. Sadly I think the Greens will gain no seats and lose the one they have. The only downside of the coming Labour landslide as far as I'm concerned.
Why will the Greens probably lose Brighton Pavilion? They've got a big majority.
Because Caroline Lucas is retiring.
Edit - also the Green council was absolutely pummelled in recent elections. It was actually slightly worse than what happened to the LibDems in 2015.
I broadly agree although their remaining councillors are almost all in Pavilion, and they will flood it with activists as they must know how important it is (whereas Labour have a lot of other targets). I suspect it'll be very close, but on balance I think they'll lose.
"The Conservatives have been controlled for 20 years by a cabal known as the “movement”, which brought down Boris Johnson as prime minister, Nadine Dorries has claimed in the latest extract from her new book."
Unbelievable BBC ran footage from Hamas crisis actor last night...this particular guy is so famous for this he is literally a meme now across social media for how shit he is at it i.e. going from patient to doctor in the same day. Obviously BBC verify had gone home early....
Do you have a source with evidence for this? There have been a lot of claims of “crisis actors”, but news agencies have dismissed them as false. See:
I'm sure false accusations exist, but in this case it's fairly clear cut:
This is the chap BBC showed in their opening news montage yesterday.
They don’t report Russian news sources as definitive fact on the Ukraine war, so I’m not sure why they’re reporting Hamas sources so uncritically, after so many times they’ve proved to be at best very exaggerated and at worst totally fabricated.
If you can’t get your own journalists into a dangerous place, then that’s understandable - but be honest about it, and say that you have unverified claims from partisan sources. Such as the guy in the pictures above, who’s very clearly an actor.
Makes the whole BBC (un) verified even more laughable when you are falling for stuff that is literally a meme on social media, as this guy appears daily in a different role. If you spent more than 5 mins looking through coverage on say twitter, posts laughing at him will show up repeatedly.
Vaguely on topic: the new "live" bus trackers at each stop in Edinburgh now only reflect the timetable, rather than how the wait will actually be.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
PS May be useful for the Greens at Holyrood though, with Mr Cole-Hamilton so against LTNs.
Liberal Democrats continue to baffle me in general. Absolutely no idea what they stand for other than being marginally more pro-Europe than the others.
ACH started campaigning against air pollution and then pivoted towards the Piers Corbyn conspiracy theorists.
The SDP faction got the upper hand.
Explains why they are as they are.
As an Orange Book liberal that is NOT something I recognise whatsoever. On the contrary I would say the reverse and it is evidently true that the coalition was definitely an Orange Book coalition and not a Social Democrat coalition. The liberal party has always been a coalition of Social Democrats and Liberals even well before the SDP. After the merger the balance didn't seem to change one iota. Certainly the constituency I was chair of never changed one iota. The SDP members that joined us (and there were quite a few including councillors) simply merged in seamlessly as if the party had not undergone any change.
So from my perspective the Liberals got the upper hand, presumably because most liberals joined up, but a sizeable group of SDP didn't.
PS And also the Liberals had the infrastructure and organisation that the SDP lacked.
Vaguely on topic: the new "live" bus trackers at each stop in Edinburgh now only reflect the timetable, rather than how the wait will actually be.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
PS May be useful for the Greens at Holyrood though, with Mr Cole-Hamilton so against LTNs.
Liberal Democrats continue to baffle me in general. Absolutely no idea what they stand for other than being marginally more pro-Europe than the others.
ACH started campaigning against air pollution and then pivoted towards the Piers Corbyn conspiracy theorists.
The SDP faction got the upper hand.
Explains why they are as they are.
As an Orange Book liberal that is NOT something I recognise whatsoever. On the contrary I would say the reverse and it is evidently true that the coalition was definitely an Orange Book coalition and not a Social Democrat coalition. The liberal party has always been a coalition of Social Democrats and Liberals even well before the SDP. After the merger the balance didn't seem to change one iota. Certainly the constituency I was chair of never changed one iota. The SDP members that joined us (and there were quite a few including councillors) simply merged in seamlessly as if the party had not undergone any change.
So from my perspective the Liberals got the upper hand, presumably because most liberals joined up, but a sizeable group of SDP didn't.
Much depended, IIRC, on whether the constituency was one which was allocated to the SDP or to the Liberals. In mine the SDP were grateful for Liberal help, but it was made clear to us (Liberal officers) that the SDP were in charge.
"The Conservatives have been controlled for 20 years by a cabal known as the “movement”, which brought down Boris Johnson as prime minister, Nadine Dorries has claimed in the latest extract from her new book."
"The Conservatives have been controlled for 20 years by a cabal known as the “movement”, which brought down Boris Johnson as prime minister, Nadine Dorries has claimed in the latest extract from her new book."
Thanks Q for the header. Sadly I think the Greens will gain no seats and lose the one they have. The only downside of the coming Labour landslide as far as I'm concerned.
Why will the Greens probably lose Brighton Pavilion? They've got a big majority.
Because Caroline Lucas is retiring.
Edit - also the Green council was absolutely pummelled in recent elections. It was actually slightly worse than what happened to the LibDems in 2015.
The new Green candidate in Brighton is Sian Berry, currently a councillor in north Camden and London Assembly Member. She’s been spending all her time in Brighton and pressure has led her to stand down as a Camden councillor, so we have a by-election coming up. She still sits on the London Assembly, however, presumably because that pays.
She’s topped the vote in her council ward in recent elections, but she’s had no coattails and the other 2 seats have been won by Labour. One of the other candidates at the last election and now standing in the by-election is a former Labour cllr and deputy mayor who defected to the Greens. I expect the by-election to be close between her and the Labour candidate, but I think Labour will win.
Starmer is a shiny foreheaded, fucking gooner with great hair but I do think, one area where is he adept is holding together the warp and weft of his polychromatic coalition. There will be scant electoral opportunities for les Verts while he is at the helm of the Labour Party.
He has held it together while in Opposition when the one thing they agree on is that they want the Conservatives out. But it'll be MUCH more difficult, perhaps impossible, to hold it together when they are in government.
Blair managed it, but he was a once-in-a-century political genius and had lots of other people's money to buy them off with. Starmer isn't and won't have.
Starmer's team has been far more ruthless in the candidate selection process and exclusion of dissidents than Tony Blair (or Brown or Corbyn) were, and consequently will have much less trouble in holding the PLP together when things get difficult, as of course they will. You can see that over Gaza, where the left actually has a majority of the population and the membership behind a strongly-held view that the assault on Gaza is being pursued too ruthlessly, denying even clean water to most of the civilian population. You don't have to be a Corbynite to feel uneasy that we, like Sunak, are silent except for a vague call for humanitarian pauses. Yet the revolt comes down to a handful of councillors going independent and a couple of obscure council leaders calling for his resignation, plus some MPs giving strictly off-the-record grumbles.
That's a very interesting perspective, thanks.
However you're talking about the PLP. The OP was more about the electoral coalition I think, and that's certainly what I referred to in my response. We've seen in the last four years the impossibility of holding together a diverse coalition without some glue (lots of public money, a charismatic leader or a compelling issue) to bind it. As Starmer doesn't have any of those I think he's going to struggle after a honeymoon period.
Unbelievable BBC ran footage from Hamas crisis actor last night...this particular guy is so famous for this he is literally a meme now across social media for how shit he is at it i.e. going from patient to doctor in the same day. Obviously BBC verify had gone home early....
Do you have a source with evidence for this? There have been a lot of claims of “crisis actors”, but news agencies have dismissed them as false. See:
I'm sure false accusations exist, but in this case it's fairly clear cut:
This is the chap BBC showed in their opening news montage yesterday.
I refer you to the articles I provided links for. Journalists have investigated, as opposed to just making a collage of pictures and posting it to social media, and dismissed many of these allegations. If you or FU have actual evidence, not just claims made on social media, please do share it.
Unbelievable BBC ran footage from Hamas crisis actor last night...this particular guy is so famous for this he is literally a meme now across social media for how shit he is at it i.e. going from patient to doctor in the same day. Obviously BBC verify had gone home early....
Do you have a source with evidence for this? There have been a lot of claims of “crisis actors”, but news agencies have dismissed them as false. See:
I'm sure false accusations exist, but in this case it's fairly clear cut:
This is the chap BBC showed in their opening news montage yesterday.
They don’t report Russian news sources as definitive fact on the Ukraine war, so I’m not sure why they’re reporting Hamas sources so uncritically, after so many times they’ve proved to be at best very exaggerated and at worst totally fabricated.
If you can’t get your own journalists into a dangerous place, then that’s understandable - but be honest about it, and say that you have unverified claims from partisan sources. Such as the guy in the pictures above, who’s very clearly an actor.
Makes the whole BBC (un) verified even more laughable when you are falling for stuff that is literally a meme on social media, as this guy appears daily in a different role. If you spent more than 5 mins looking through coverage on say twitter, posts laughing at him will show up repeatedly.
I did actually think the other day, that the one thing not being discussed during this war is Twitter itself.
The new management, and their very hands-off approach to moderation, means that we’re discussing whether things posted are true, false, or exaggerated, rather than talking about posts, posters, events, or subjects, being censored or banned by Twitter’s moderators.
I suspect that old-management Twitter would have been be totally screwed by this war in particular.
Good morning. Thinking about purchasing a tent today - can anyone suggest some good locations (perhaps under a bridge or bypass) that would be suitable. Want a mixture of leafy London suburb, but close to key coffee shops for my morning chai latte.
Purchasing one? I thought you just picked one up from your local tent charity?
"The Conservatives have been controlled for 20 years by a cabal known as the “movement”, which brought down Boris Johnson as prime minister, Nadine Dorries has claimed in the latest extract from her new book."
"The Conservatives have been controlled for 20 years by a cabal known as the “movement”, which brought down Boris Johnson as prime minister, Nadine Dorries has claimed in the latest extract from her new book."
Starmer is a shiny foreheaded, fucking gooner with great hair but I do think, one area where is he adept is holding together the warp and weft of his polychromatic coalition. There will be scant electoral opportunities for les Verts while he is at the helm of the Labour Party.
He has held it together while in Opposition when the one thing they agree on is that they want the Conservatives out. But it'll be MUCH more difficult, perhaps impossible, to hold it together when they are in government.
Blair managed it, but he was a once-in-a-century political genius and had lots of other people's money to buy them off with. Starmer isn't and won't have.
Starmer's team has been far more ruthless in the candidate selection process and exclusion of dissidents than Tony Blair (or Brown or Corbyn) were, and consequently will have much less trouble in holding the PLP together when things get difficult, as of course they will. You can see that over Gaza, where the left actually has a majority of the population and the membership behind a strongly-held view that the assault on Gaza is being pursued too ruthlessly, denying even clean water to most of the civilian population. You don't have to be a Corbynite to feel uneasy that we, like Sunak, are silent except for a vague call for humanitarian pauses. Yet the revolt comes down to a handful of councillors going independent and a couple of obscure council leaders calling for his resignation, plus some MPs giving strictly off-the-record grumbles.
That's a very interesting perspective, thanks.
However you're talking about the PLP. The OP was more about the electoral coalition I think, and that's certainly what I referred to in my response. We've seen in the last four years the impossibility of holding together a diverse coalition without some glue (lots of public money, a charismatic leader or a compelling issue) to bind it. As Starmer doesn't have any of those I think he's going to struggle after a honeymoon period.
It's a common trait for those who would never ever vote for a given party to assume said party must implode as soon as it is elected - as you, AlanB, Casino and others show.
In fairness, I generally feel exactly the same about the Tories.
Unbelievable BBC ran footage from Hamas crisis actor last night...this particular guy is so famous for this he is literally a meme now across social media for how shit he is at it i.e. going from patient to doctor in the same day. Obviously BBC verify had gone home early....
Do you have a source with evidence for this? There have been a lot of claims of “crisis actors”, but news agencies have dismissed them as false. See:
I'm sure false accusations exist, but in this case it's fairly clear cut:
This is the chap BBC showed in their opening news montage yesterday.
They don’t report Russian news sources as definitive fact on the Ukraine war, so I’m not sure why they’re reporting Hamas sources so uncritically, after so many times they’ve proved to be at best very exaggerated and at worst totally fabricated.
If you can’t get your own journalists into a dangerous place, then that’s understandable - but be honest about it, and say that you have unverified claims from partisan sources. Such as the guy in the pictures above, who’s very clearly an actor.
Makes the whole BBC (un) verified even more laughable when you are falling for stuff that is literally a meme on social media, as this guy appears daily in a different role. If you spent more than 5 mins looking through coverage on say twitter, posts laughing at him will show up repeatedly.
I did actually think the other day, that the one thing not being discussed during this war is Twitter itself. The new management, and their very hands-off approach to moderation, means that we’re discussing whether things posted are true, false, or exaggerated, rather than talking about posts, posters, events, or subjects, being censored or banned by Twitter’s moderators.
I suspect that old-management Twitter would have been be totally screwed by this war.
"The Conservatives have been controlled for 20 years by a cabal known as the “movement”, which brought down Boris Johnson as prime minister, Nadine Dorries has claimed in the latest extract from her new book."
'Cummings responded to the allegations by sarcastically telling the Daily Mail: “She’s right, there was a giant conspiracy including MI6, the CIA and, most crucially, the KGB special operations department. It’s a tribute to Nadine she has figured this out. The movement wishes her well.”
A source close to Gove told the newspaper: “Nadine is a very talented bestselling fiction author.”'
"The Conservatives have been controlled for 20 years by a cabal known as the “movement”, which brought down Boris Johnson as prime minister, Nadine Dorries has claimed in the latest extract from her new book."
Sounds like Mad Nad's book is going to be very illuminati
I'll stop there.
When the Mail's first extract is headlined
Shadowy Tory No10 fixer who had pet rabbit butchered in mafia style warning to his ex girlfriend
one has to wonder.
It seems like the Mail has abandoned its Tory Cheerleader role for the coming election. When even the DM has given up the Tories are in very deep do-do.
Unbelievable BBC ran footage from Hamas crisis actor last night...this particular guy is so famous for this he is literally a meme now across social media for how shit he is at it i.e. going from patient to doctor in the same day. Obviously BBC verify had gone home early....
Do you have a source with evidence for this? There have been a lot of claims of “crisis actors”, but news agencies have dismissed them as false. See:
I'm sure false accusations exist, but in this case it's fairly clear cut:
This is the chap BBC showed in their opening news montage yesterday.
They don’t report Russian news sources as definitive fact on the Ukraine war, so I’m not sure why they’re reporting Hamas sources so uncritically, after so many times they’ve proved to be at best very exaggerated and at worst totally fabricated.
If you can’t get your own journalists into a dangerous place, then that’s understandable - but be honest about it, and say that you have unverified claims from partisan sources. Such as the guy in the pictures above, who’s very clearly an actor.
Makes the whole BBC (un) verified even more laughable when you are falling for stuff that is literally a meme on social media, as this guy appears daily in a different role. If you spent more than 5 mins looking through coverage on say twitter, posts laughing at him will show up repeatedly.
I did actually think the other day, that the one thing not being discussed during this war is Twitter itself. The new management, and their very hands-off approach to moderation, means that we’re discussing whether things posted are true, false, or exaggerated, rather than talking about posts, posters, events, or subjects, being censored or banned by Twitter’s moderators.
I suspect that old-management Twitter would have been be totally screwed by this war.
So loads more fake stuff being published is actually a good thing?
Great to meet you Pollyanna.
Now do loads more racist, antisemitic and Islamophobic stuff is also good.
"The Conservatives have been controlled for 20 years by a cabal known as the “movement”, which brought down Boris Johnson as prime minister, Nadine Dorries has claimed in the latest extract from her new book."
'Cummings responded to the allegations by sarcastically telling the Daily Mail: “She’s right, there was a giant conspiracy including MI6, the CIA and, most crucially, the KGB special operations department. It’s a tribute to Nadine she has figured this out. The movement wishes her well.”
A source close to Gove told the newspaper: “Nadine is a very talented bestselling fiction author.”'
I like that the DM felt it needed to put the word 'sarcastically' in there to help its readers out.
"The Conservatives have been controlled for 20 years by a cabal known as the “movement”, which brought down Boris Johnson as prime minister, Nadine Dorries has claimed in the latest extract from her new book."
'Cummings responded to the allegations by sarcastically telling the Daily Mail: “She’s right, there was a giant conspiracy including MI6, the CIA and, most crucially, the KGB special operations department. It’s a tribute to Nadine she has figured this out. The movement wishes her well.”
A source close to Gove told the newspaper: “Nadine is a very talented bestselling fiction author.”'
I like that the DM felt it needed to put the word 'sarcastically' in there to help its readers out.
Good morning. Thinking about purchasing a tent today - can anyone suggest some good locations (perhaps under a bridge or bypass) that would be suitable. Want a mixture of leafy London suburb, but close to key coffee shops for my morning chai latte.
Purchasing one? I thought you just picked one up from your local tent charity?
Suella will shortly be bringing forward legislation to force charities to only provide tents made from stitched together kitten skins, not to everyone’s taste. Not very functional either.
Starmer is a shiny foreheaded, fucking gooner with great hair but I do think, one area where is he adept is holding together the warp and weft of his polychromatic coalition. There will be scant electoral opportunities for les Verts while he is at the helm of the Labour Party.
He has held it together while in Opposition when the one thing they agree on is that they want the Conservatives out. But it'll be MUCH more difficult, perhaps impossible, to hold it together when they are in government.
Blair managed it, but he was a once-in-a-century political genius and had lots of other people's money to buy them off with. Starmer isn't and won't have.
Starmer's team has been far more ruthless in the candidate selection process and exclusion of dissidents than Tony Blair (or Brown or Corbyn) were, and consequently will have much less trouble in holding the PLP together when things get difficult, as of course they will. You can see that over Gaza, where the left actually has a majority of the population and the membership behind a strongly-held view that the assault on Gaza is being pursued too ruthlessly, denying even clean water to most of the civilian population. You don't have to be a Corbynite to feel uneasy that we, like Sunak, are silent except for a vague call for humanitarian pauses. Yet the revolt comes down to a handful of councillors going independent and a couple of obscure council leaders calling for his resignation, plus some MPs giving strictly off-the-record grumbles.
That's a very interesting perspective, thanks.
However you're talking about the PLP. The OP was more about the electoral coalition I think, and that's certainly what I referred to in my response. We've seen in the last four years the impossibility of holding together a diverse coalition without some glue (lots of public money, a charismatic leader or a compelling issue) to bind it. As Starmer doesn't have any of those I think he's going to struggle after a honeymoon period.
Surely outside the PLP Starmer doesn't have to worry much? Unions maybe, but they are hardly the force they were.
What will he care if the Greens and the SWP tendency get all uppity, provided his backbenchers keep passing his legislation*?
(*Assuming he plans some - given current policy announcements, I begin to wonder.)
"The Conservatives have been controlled for 20 years by a cabal known as the “movement”, which brought down Boris Johnson as prime minister, Nadine Dorries has claimed in the latest extract from her new book."
"The Conservatives have been controlled for 20 years by a cabal known as the “movement”, which brought down Boris Johnson as prime minister, Nadine Dorries has claimed in the latest extract from her new book."
Sounds like Mad Nad's book is going to be very illuminati
I'll stop there.
When the Mail's first extract is headlined
Shadowy Tory No10 fixer who had pet rabbit butchered in mafia style warning to his ex girlfriend
one has to wonder.
It seems like the Mail has abandoned its Tory Cheerleader role for the coming election. When even the DM has given up the Tories are in very deep do-do.
The Mail have got a bit of a problem as well.
For the last decade or so, they have basically got what they wanted, and it's turning out visibly badly, in ways that even they can't easily ignore.
Comments
I don’t know the Tory set-up that well, but from the outside it seems like the leader has much more personal power. That could mean a very quick return to the mainstream for the Tories if they go into opposition. But it could also mean a further lurch to the right. The choice that Tory MPs make about which leader to put in front of members is going to be decisive. Again, from the outside, a coronation of someone like Cleverley or Mordaunt would seem the best option. But are Tory MPs a cohesive enough grouping for that to happen?
Thanks for the header, @Quincel .
You talk about rural Tory seats. But is Suffolk a Tory heartland or a soon-to-be EX-Tory heartland?
Last May the Greens flipped Mid-Suffolk Council (area around Stowmarket) - about 30 miles away from Waveney Valley ie nearly next door - with a jump from 12 seats to 24, out of a total 36. The vote share jump from 34% to 56.8%, and now their only majority control Council in the whole country.
Now that's a local election and the General Election is national - true. But I think there is space for optimism for the Greens.
(As an aside, it looks to me as though the Mid-Suffolk victory was local politics over a long period - but I'd be interested to hear about any particular themes from Anyone Who Knows.)
I do always feel a little sorry for the party affected though. Winning local votes over and over but unable to get those same voters to trust them with the MP! That's being in an abusive relationship with the electorate. She ain't ever gonna love you back, girl!!
The argument is just too complex to sell to the electorate there. People want a change of Government in that seat and will simply vote for the alternative Government. It won't even be vaguely close.
And, we'd have finished up with that nice Mr. Corbyn in charge, dealing with Covid, Ukraine, and Israel/Palestine conflict.
I remember someone putting together a quiz comparing the policies of UKIP and the MRLP about a decade ago - one was given a policy and asked, which party's manifesto did it come from? It was quite a revelation as to the relative sanity and humaneness of the two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Yitzhak_Rabin
The big point of interest to me is what happens to the Tory Party in opposition, because I think rather than going down a trajectory of slowly working their way back to Cameroony centre-right basic principles, they are actually on track to become GOPUK.
ODI cricket is dead.
That needs a fairly well organised 67% or so of Conservative MPs to keep her out of the final two. Which seems unlikely.
This means that the trackers no longer match Lothian Buses' own app or Google maps, leading to mass confusion and incredulity at the collosal waste of money.
Who will do the best job of kicking up a fuss and fixing it? The Green councillors. Will the Greens win any seats in Edinburgh at the GE? No. Politics is cruel.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/usvsth3m/7-monster-raving-loony-party-5644717
I don’t think the moderates in the parliamentary party will be in a state* to really run an organised and smart tactical campaign to freeze out Braverman. In fact the party is more likely to say to itself “well, given where we are, let’s roll the dice and keep the members happy.”
*unless the party manages a non-apocalyptic result (say 220-240 seats) in which case there may be enough of a sizeable rump to try and keep some sense in the room, but I still have my doubts.
(You are right about the old system not working with non-LT buses. They've levelled the system down).
It was further down leg than Bill Clinton.
ACH started campaigning against air pollution and then pivoted towards the Piers Corbyn conspiracy theorists.
Explains why they are as they are.
OMRLP has since been supplanted by the splitters of Count Binface's party. A far more plausible party. Seven bins are not enough!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/live/cricket/66858961
Air Fried Bacon Turnovers for the freezer. Yes, they do thaw well.
TBF, for this quantity it is probably worth doing 20-25 in the big oven.
Does anyone have suggestions for a veggie alternative? I'm wondering about beetroot + mature cheddar.
Why?
One thing TfL got right is that they make the same data they use available and it’s available by public APi.
Sure, some lawyers are disorganised but Starmer is not one of them. He reminds me of Attlee, who was also famously well organised and charisma free. I think Starmer will govern better than he campaigns, the antithesis of Johnsonism.
Edit - also the Green council was absolutely pummelled in recent elections. It was actually slightly worse than what happened to the LibDems in 2015.
Having even a token MP makes a difference in terms of national representation.
But its all past the use by date.
Still amazed that so far in to the tournament, they’re still not getting anything close to capacity crowds in though. Surely they could be giving them away to local schools if they don’t sell out?
https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2023/11/04/how-viable-are-green-targets-in-2024-part-one/
See also
https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/author/quincel2/
https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/author/quincel/
If it worked previously for one bus operator, then it’s likely to be that interface between the bus tracking software and the signage software that’s not working. It’s relatively simple software, but perhaps there’s still some bugs in it.
And scoring runs as well.
This is the chap BBC showed in their opening news montage yesterday.
Which is about 300 more than this England side could chase.
So from my perspective the Liberals got the upper hand, presumably because most liberals joined up, but a sizeable group of SDP didn't.
If you can’t get your own journalists into a dangerous place, then that’s understandable - but be honest about it, and say that you have unverified claims from partisan sources. Such as the guy in the pictures above, who’s very clearly an actor.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/live/cricket/66858957
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nadine-dorries-cabal-movement-boris-b2441545.html
I'll stop there.
She’s topped the vote in her council ward in recent elections, but she’s had no coattails and the other 2 seats have been won by Labour. One of the other candidates at the last election and now standing in the by-election is a former Labour cllr and deputy mayor who defected to the Greens. I expect the by-election to be close between her and the Labour candidate, but I think Labour will win.
However you're talking about the PLP. The OP was more about the electoral coalition I think, and that's certainly what I referred to in my response. We've seen in the last four years the impossibility of holding together a diverse coalition without some glue (lots of public money, a charismatic leader or a compelling issue) to bind it. As Starmer doesn't have any of those I think he's going to struggle after a honeymoon period.
The new management, and their very hands-off approach to moderation, means that we’re discussing whether things posted are true, false, or exaggerated, rather than talking about posts, posters, events, or subjects, being censored or banned by Twitter’s moderators.
I suspect that old-management Twitter would have been be totally screwed by this war in particular.
Shadowy Tory No10 fixer who had pet rabbit butchered in mafia style warning to his ex girlfriend
one has to wonder.
In fairness, I generally feel exactly the same about the Tories.
Musk, unsurprisingly, has gotten into trouble recommending an antisemitic account: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-musk-israel-hamas-war-misinformation-twitter-1234848927/
Unkind:
'Cummings responded to the allegations by sarcastically telling the Daily Mail: “She’s right, there was a giant conspiracy including MI6, the CIA and, most crucially, the KGB special operations department. It’s a tribute to Nadine she has figured this out. The movement wishes her well.”
A source close to Gove told the newspaper: “Nadine is a very talented bestselling fiction author.”'
Great to meet you Pollyanna.
Now do loads more racist, antisemitic and Islamophobic stuff is also good.
What will he care if the Greens and the SWP tendency get all uppity, provided his backbenchers keep passing his legislation*?
(*Assuming he plans some - given current policy announcements, I begin to wonder.)
For the last decade or so, they have basically got what they wanted, and it's turning out visibly badly, in ways that even they can't easily ignore.