Mr. Herdson, indeed. Contrast colours perception immensely. Darius wasn't incompetent or stupid, but up against Alexander the Great he was found wanting (as was everyone else...).
For the last decade and more, England and Scotland have been running a controlled experiment in education. The PISA results yet again make it clear which of those approaches has worked. And it's not the SNP's.
Stunned at this. Just like the SNP's health policies.
No doubt the SNP's very own HYUFD, in these parts, will be along to defend the ineptitude.
It feels like it SHOULD be the final blow for the Nats. They’ve had total control of education: a true test for Indy. And they comprehensively fucked it up
They can’t blame funding - they get more per person than the rUK
It’s a very basic failure. Scotch voters need to do the necessary
Not just education, health too. Totally devolved. They have royally screwed it up.
They will just blame Westminster, say they don't get enough money then Useless will hand out millions for "climate mitigation" to make himself feel relevant on the world stage.
The online cybernats on social media, some of the worst people on social media, will simply repeat and attack anyone who dares point out the limitations of the SNP.
The point about Boris is that he was super Marmite
Those who hated him, hated him. But he had a loyal personal vote that REALLY liked him and would come out to vote for him, which they won’t do for any other Tory
It was possibly 20-25% of the electorate, often in lower social classes
The Tories threw all that away when they dumped bojo
For the last decade and more, England and Scotland have been running a controlled experiment in education. The PISA results yet again make it clear which of those approaches has worked. And it's not the SNP's.
Stunned at this. Just like the SNP's health policies.
No doubt the SNP's very own HYUFD, in these parts, will be along to defend the ineptitude.
It feels like it SHOULD be the final blow for the Nats. They’ve had total control of education: a true test for Indy. And they comprehensively fucked it up
They can’t blame funding - they get more per person than the rUK
It’s a very basic failure. Scotch voters need to do the necessary
I wonder if Scotland's relative fall is explained by a relative lack of immigration?
That would be a rather slick excuse for the SNP given they see migration policy as a key reason for independence.
Putting aside the mechanics of this, my immediate thought is whether the Democrat machinery uses this to lever Biden out. Obviously not by siding with the Republicans but more by dropping hints that ‘there is a case to answer etc’
Why do this? Biden’s poll numbers remain poor. The number one issue electors have with him is his age / seeming fragility and there is nothing he can do about that. At the same time, Biden doesn’t look as though he will step down willingly. At this stage, as people like Sean Trende have argued, you would say Trump has a strong chance of winning.
Does that happen now? No. But it may do in a few months if the poll numbers don’t improve. My guess is, if a move is to be made, it will be done post any cut in interest rates in the US to see if there is any political boost.
Putting aside the mechanics of this, my immediate thought is whether the Democrat machinery uses this to lever Biden out. Obviously not by siding with the Republicans but more by dropping hints that ‘there is a case to answer etc’
Why do this? Biden’s poll numbers remain poor. The number one issue electors have with him is his age / seeming fragility and there is nothing he can do about that. At the same time, Biden doesn’t look as though he will step down willingly. At this stage, as people like Sean Trende have argued, you would say Trump has a strong chance of winning.
Does that happen now? No. But it may do in a few months if the poll numbers don’t improve. My guess is, if a move is to be made, it will be done post any cut in interest rates in the US to see if there is any political boost.
There is no candidate who appears to be in a position to beat Trump more than Biden can so Nope
I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Presumably using a VPN with end point in another country would easily circumvent this (and sites would have no incentive to cut down on such use - quite the opposite). If something like this is to be done, it makes more sense to enforce it at the ISP/DNS provider level, surely? Sure, switching DNS provider is not hard, but something that can fairly easily be locked down on computer/router level by default.
ETA: Afterall, if kids must watch porn, we can at least use it to induce them to increase their computer literacy skills, by working around the protections in place
From your link:- "The potential consequences of data being leaked are catastrophic and could include blackmail, fraud, relationship damage, and the outing of people's sexual preferences in very vulnerable circumstances," https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67615719
Ofcom can't even deal with relatively simple problems effecting the communications and technology sectors.
Even if you thought this latest brainwave was a good idea, which I certainly don't, the idea that Ofcom is capable of enforcing some sort of Great Firewall of Britain is beyond laughable. It will work about as well as the efforts to stop music, video, and software piracy. i.e. Not at all.
It's just nonsense, and most people will deal with these sort of age challenges by ignoring or bypassing them not by handing over their identity to all sorts of dubious verification services.
For the last decade and more, England and Scotland have been running a controlled experiment in education. The PISA results yet again make it clear which of those approaches has worked. And it's not the SNP's.
Stunned at this. Just like the SNP's health policies.
No doubt the SNP's very own HYUFD, in these parts, will be along to defend the ineptitude.
It feels like it SHOULD be the final blow for the Nats. They’ve had total control of education: a true test for Indy. And they comprehensively fucked it up
They can’t blame funding - they get more per person than the rUK
It’s a very basic failure. Scotch voters need to do the necessary
I wonder if Scotland's relative fall is explained by a relative lack of immigration?
That would be a rather slick excuse for the SNP given they see migration policy as a key reason for independence.
A very hard sell though. Essentially, "Scottish parents are complacent and we need immigrants to raise expectations"
Putting aside the mechanics of this, my immediate thought is whether the Democrat machinery uses this to lever Biden out. Obviously not by siding with the Republicans but more by dropping hints that ‘there is a case to answer etc’
Why do this? Biden’s poll numbers remain poor. The number one issue electors have with him is his age / seeming fragility and there is nothing he can do about that. At the same time, Biden doesn’t look as though he will step down willingly. At this stage, as people like Sean Trende have argued, you would say Trump has a strong chance of winning.
Does that happen now? No. But it may do in a few months if the poll numbers don’t improve. My guess is, if a move is to be made, it will be done post any cut in interest rates in the US to see if there is any political boost.
There is no candidate who appears to be in a position to beat Trump more than Biden can so Nope
Indeed and Trump himself has to stay out of jail next year
I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Presumably using a VPN with end point in another country would easily circumvent this (and sites would have no incentive to cut down on such use - quite the opposite). If something like this is to be done, it makes more sense to enforce it at the ISP/DNS provider level, surely? Sure, switching DNS provider is not hard, but something that can fairly easily be locked down on computer/router level by default.
ETA: Afterall, if kids must watch porn, we can at least use it to induce them to increase their computer literacy skills, by working around the protections in place
From your link:- "The potential consequences of data being leaked are catastrophic and could include blackmail, fraud, relationship damage, and the outing of people's sexual preferences in very vulnerable circumstances," https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67615719
Ofcom can't even deal with relatively simple problems effecting the communications and technology sectors.
Even if you thought this latest brainwave was a good idea, which I certainly don't, the idea that Ofcom is capable of enforcing some sort of Great Firewall of Britain is beyond laughable. It will work about as well as the efforts to stop music, video, and software piracy. i.e. Not at all.
It's just nonsense, and most people will deal with these sort of age challenges by ignoring or bypassing them not by handing over their identity to all sorts of dubious verification services.
And the teenage boys, who the legislators and regulators are trying to keep off these websites, will simply see it as a challenge to find the material anyway. No foreign company, except MindGeek, is actually going to implement this specifically for UK users on otherwise-free sites.
I’m currently having ‘care’ due to my current, and probably permanent, inability to do much for myself. This in itself is a result of a malformation of the vertebrae in my neck affecting my spine. I’ve had an operation, and am slowly improving from where I was but the prognosis isn’t good, even for an optimist! Essex County will pay, AIUI, £20 per hour for carers, but because of my total pension income, I’m too well off to get anything! Consequently we’re paying £40 per hour for what seems to me to be quite acceptable assistance. This is provided partly by a mix of experienced middle-aged women, and one man, most of whom are ‘native Brits’, and partly by a group of 20 somethings, male and female, all of whom are using this as income prior to new careers in the ‘care industry’. It’s very interesting talking to them and learning of their different routes into this, and their hopes for the future. All of them make it clear that they’ve plenty to do and hope their employers don’t take on too many more clients. Among their main grouses is that they have to travel between clients, often for quite a distance. They get paid mileage, AIUI, but the time they have to spend driving is the issue.
Sorry to hear about your situation OKC.
Your positivity despite your challenges is inspirational - and I say that as a full-time wheelchair user for 44 years.
If you don’t mind me asking, how come? You must have been in you 20s then?
Feel free to ignore me or tell me to sod off if I am prying
No I don't mind - I had a motorbike accident when I was 19. Broke my back - paraplegia.
Is that why we have historically unprecedented levels of immigration?
We have unprecedented levels because the current Government (sole qualification for membership, support BoZo and Brexit) are spectacularly incompetent.
Really, really bad at their job.
Useless.
Worthless.
They thank you for your vote...
I'm really looking forward to the immigration numbers under a Starmer government. If you think THIS lot are really, really bad at their job... At least they aren't riven by a faction wanting to effectively open the borders.
Our borders are open now. How would we tell the difference between now and this dystopian nightmare you predict?
Out of control immigration is a false narrative. The remedy to this confected scandal, will after yesterday be even bigger hospital crises and care homes closing like fury. Arses and elbows don't even come into it.
There is a significant proportion of the population who don't understand why we didn't send all these foreign workers home after Brexit so that all the jobs would rightly go to Brits. That this isn't possible is beyond their understanding. Hence the increasing wailing and gnashing about migration which is now at CRISIS ARGGHHHH levels in the Tory party.
Last week's revelations about cheaper wage hurdles for migrant workers just revealed how disingenuous the government are. They are happy to gaslight the "foreigners go home" contingent of their vote. Whilst understanding the economic need for foreign labour.
What I hope from Starmer is that we can have an honest conversation. The crank right will foam on about unchecked migration, but *they* have already given us that. We can have controlled migration or uncontrolled. Currently it is the latter. The former would be to everyone's benefit.
The rise of the salary threshold for migrants to £38k and the ban on their bringing in departments Cleverly has announced is precisely to bring migration under greater control
Fantastic! But who wipes your grannie's a*** now?
Think of this another way. Why are care workers paid so little? Because we can easily import people to work in care from abroad. Until we change that, care workers will continue to get paid very little. Will this increase the cost of care? Of course. But care is only cheap because we pay carers - I think most people can agree - an unreasonably small amount for a job which most of us would not want to do; and we only do that because we are importing carers from abroad. Immigration is very much the wrong answer to this particular problem.
And that is a valid conversation to have. We get what we pay for. Lets take care as an example: We don't want to pay for all the preventative measures to stop people sliding into care We don't want to be stuck caring for our own relatives We don't want to pay for care homes that aren't dangerously understaffed We don't want to pay salaries for the people who care for our relatives What the Tories and their handful of voters seem to want is for people to just die quickly and quietly and thus remove the problem. Not their relatives of course, the other people.
Caring is an much of a vocation as healthcare. We could and should elevate it as a priority. Brown proposed it in his dying months. Davey passionately advocates it. But the Tories and big media ensure that "why should I pay" is the prevalent mood. So we get what we pay for...
I think May advocated it in 2017 and that was one of the key reasons she did not get a majority.
Exactly, it was May who advocated taking all a deceased person who had dementia's estate (including their former home) to pay for their care costs, at home as well as residential, with the family only able to keep £100,000.
Labour under Jeremy Corbyn trashed the plan as a 'dementia tax' and May lost her majority as a result.
Boris won a majority on a plan to cap care costs at £86,000 by contrast in 2019 but still has not been implemented
The whole discussion about a “cap” is unhelpful. Fundamentally it means that the state is providing catastrophe insurance.
Which is a reasonable use of the state’s resources (and potentially could even be underwritten by a reinsurer although I’m not sure why you would bother as the state).
But essentially people should save for their old age and not expect that state to pay for them
Which is what May proposed in 2017 and the voters rejected when she lost her majority.
The voters gave Boris a majority for his care costs cap in 2019 however
You are missing the point.
They are the same thing.
And most voters didn’t vote in 2019 based on care policy
But right back to Osborne characterising the Dilnott proposals as a “death tax” politics has screwed up social care policy.
We need it. We need to pay for it.
Voters may need it but they don’t want to pay any more for it, as the 2017 general election result proved
Face eating leopards party going well (Telegraph columnist discovers that increasing the earning level needed to bring a spouse into the country affects his mate)
For the last decade and more, England and Scotland have been running a controlled experiment in education. The PISA results yet again make it clear which of those approaches has worked. And it's not the SNP's.
Stunned at this. Just like the SNP's health policies.
No doubt the SNP's very own HYUFD, in these parts, will be along to defend the ineptitude.
It feels like it SHOULD be the final blow for the Nats. They’ve had total control of education: a true test for Indy. And they comprehensively fucked it up
They can’t blame funding - they get more per person than the rUK
It’s a very basic failure. Scotch voters need to do the necessary
I wonder if Scotland's relative fall is explained by a relative lack of immigration?
That would be a rather slick excuse for the SNP given they see migration policy as a key reason for independence.
Since a PB yoon has extolled the marvellous PISA figs for UK immigrants, the argument already appears to have been made. Bloody Nat government blocking immigration while the UK (Eng) government welcomes it with open arms.
The point about Boris is that he was super Marmite
Those who hated him, hated him. But he had a loyal personal vote that REALLY liked him and would come out to vote for him, which they won’t do for any other Tory
It was possibly 20-25% of the electorate, often in lower social classes
The Tories threw all that away when they dumped bojo
Yes Boris was also the first Tory leader ever to beat Labour with DE unskilled working class and unemployed voters when he won that group in 2019, albeit helped by the get Brexit done message.
Those voters are now back voting Labour and probably won’t vote Tory again, certainly not for Sunak and Hunt. C2 skilled working class voters were also pro Boris
I’m currently having ‘care’ due to my current, and probably permanent, inability to do much for myself. This in itself is a result of a malformation of the vertebrae in my neck affecting my spine. I’ve had an operation, and am slowly improving from where I was but the prognosis isn’t good, even for an optimist! Essex County will pay, AIUI, £20 per hour for carers, but because of my total pension income, I’m too well off to get anything! Consequently we’re paying £40 per hour for what seems to me to be quite acceptable assistance. This is provided partly by a mix of experienced middle-aged women, and one man, most of whom are ‘native Brits’, and partly by a group of 20 somethings, male and female, all of whom are using this as income prior to new careers in the ‘care industry’. It’s very interesting talking to them and learning of their different routes into this, and their hopes for the future. All of them make it clear that they’ve plenty to do and hope their employers don’t take on too many more clients. Among their main grouses is that they have to travel between clients, often for quite a distance. They get paid mileage, AIUI, but the time they have to spend driving is the issue.
That's interesting - are they medically or therapy qualified?
We had twice a day social care from a small provider (who viewed it as a vocation) back in 2019 for my mum in her last months for personal care (dressing, toileting and so on), and our hourly rate was roughly minimum wage + 20%. That is in Ashfield / Mansfield area, and locally we have a good range of care-providers.
The provider only had about 15 staff on their books, and it included a few East Europeans who had come over, school mums wanting flexible working hours, and a few middle aged women. When heavy lift was required, the business owner's husband was called in.
Yours may be more medically qualified.
Except minimum wage +20% isn’t enough to cover costs
Holiday pay and employer NI alone would add 25% on top of the minimum wage.
Add overhead costs, sick pay and travel time and it’s easy to see why the minimum rate needed is £23 an hour and even that doesn’t give you much margin
I think I misrembered.
Checking, minimum wage in the period (2019 Q2/3) was £8.21 per hour - which is less than I assumed.
(Aside: That will be minimum wage up by 40% in 5 years to the April 2024 £11.44 number.)
I'm not going to try and guess a number, having got one wrong already .
And the teenage boys, who the legislators and regulators are trying to keep off these websites, will simply see it as a challenge to find the material anyway. No foreign company, except MindGeek, is actually going to implement this specifically for UK users on otherwise-free sites.
I always remember when I think it was the courts ordered the blocking of The Pirate Bay by UK ISPs. This was meant to be universal. It took me approximately 30 seconds to download the Opera browser and turn on the built-in sort of proxy Turbo feature to bypass the block. 30 seconds, install an application, press one button, and I was able to view The Pirate Bay.
When there are essentially idiot-proof ways of bypassing such blocks the blocks are worthless. But I'm sure Ofcom will give themselves top-marks for "enforcing" these stupid regulations.
If you really want to stop people accessing things it has to be done on the client, and it has to be a whitelist. Anything else becomes an insurmountably large problem to deal with.
I don't think Starmer is going to set the world on fire, but to be fair the Tories have slotted a hospital pass to Labour. The upside is that the Tories should be out of government and that is enough for now. The years 2010 to 2024 will surely go down as the worst set of governments in the history of the country, and I say that after having thought that honour was Brown's.
The Conservatives became a rabble, once May lost her majority.
At the same time, all governments would have struggled with the fallout from the GFC, Covid, and Ukraine. These three are the equivalent of fighting a prolonged war, in fiscal terms.
That's not really a valid excuse. Absolutely it was a challenging era, but the Tories just weren't up to the task. Are Tories only able to govern effectively when the sun is shining?
We are in a 'glass half empty' mode as a nation; and I think there are political reasons for this, which means that a new government (Labour nor Rishi, though he is trying) has an opportunity to turn it into a glass half full.
By this time (13 years) if a government is to survive scrutiny it needs to be easy and clear how to answer these questions in relation to it, in a way which excludes the opposition from the same or better ones:
Where are we How did we get here What do we stand for Where are we going How shall we get there What are our non negotiable principles and values.
My answers to questions 3-6 are that I have no idea. Unless (always possible) Labour looks even worse at the GE, they will win.
The glass isn't half-empty; it's three-quarters empty, at most.
How we describe the glass is of considerably less import than what's in it.
Are the current government so totally inept, or are they smarter than we give them credit for? Have they given up on election 2024 and the programme is now to salt the earth for the next government to ensure a swift return?
They're inept.
Even if we put down the Tories' actions to cynical malice rather than incompetence, there are many elections described as 'a good one to lose' that turn out to have been a really bad one to lose. 2010 was supposed to be one; 1979 was probably another. Both governments inherited awful positions but laid out a narrative to address those problems, implemented policies to deal with them and were able to credibly claim success in 4-5 years time. Labour could, potentially, do the same.
And even if they don't, to be able to recover at the next election means having a front bench and leader clearly capable of identifying and taking on the challenges of government - or, of having a highly capable populist narrative that successfully blames an 'other', puts Labour on the side of that 'other' and them on the side of the public. While the latter is the more likely route they'll go down, I don't see them being able to make either stick.
On top of which, if they are actually doing lasting and serious damage to the country merely to make life harder for Labour, they don't deserve to come back, ever. Let some other party replace them on the centre-right.
On which note, if Labour is struggling but being seen to be doing the right thing by the centre-left, there's always the option of electoral reform and PR, which has substantial support within Labour now.
The point about Boris is that he was super Marmite
Those who hated him, hated him. But he had a loyal personal vote that REALLY liked him and would come out to vote for him, which they won’t do for any other Tory
It was possibly 20-25% of the electorate, often in lower social classes
The Tories threw all that away when they dumped bojo
A number of people liked him enough to marry him
They threw all that away when they divorced him for being a ****
I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Presumably using a VPN with end point in another country would easily circumvent this (and sites would have no incentive to cut down on such use - quite the opposite). If something like this is to be done, it makes more sense to enforce it at the ISP/DNS provider level, surely? Sure, switching DNS provider is not hard, but something that can fairly easily be locked down on computer/router level by default.
ETA: Afterall, if kids must watch porn, we can at least use it to induce them to increase their computer literacy skills, by working around the protections in place
From your link:- "The potential consequences of data being leaked are catastrophic and could include blackmail, fraud, relationship damage, and the outing of people's sexual preferences in very vulnerable circumstances," https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67615719
Everybody should just wear this when they are ripping head off it to GILF WAM shit or whatever.
I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Presumably using a VPN with end point in another country would easily circumvent this (and sites would have no incentive to cut down on such use - quite the opposite). If something like this is to be done, it makes more sense to enforce it at the ISP/DNS provider level, surely? Sure, switching DNS provider is not hard, but something that can fairly easily be locked down on computer/router level by default.
ETA: Afterall, if kids must watch porn, we can at least use it to induce them to increase their computer literacy skills, by working around the protections in place
From your link:- "The potential consequences of data being leaked are catastrophic and could include blackmail, fraud, relationship damage, and the outing of people's sexual preferences in very vulnerable circumstances," https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67615719
Ofcom can't even deal with relatively simple problems effecting the communications and technology sectors.
Even if you thought this latest brainwave was a good idea, which I certainly don't, the idea that Ofcom is capable of enforcing some sort of Great Firewall of Britain is beyond laughable. It will work about as well as the efforts to stop music, video, and software piracy. i.e. Not at all.
It's just nonsense, and most people will deal with these sort of age challenges by ignoring or bypassing them not by handing over their identity to all sorts of dubious verification services.
Oliver Dowden tried to bury the Online Safety Bill but it was resurrected by Nadine Dorries, according to her own account.
I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Presumably using a VPN with end point in another country would easily circumvent this (and sites would have no incentive to cut down on such use - quite the opposite). If something like this is to be done, it makes more sense to enforce it at the ISP/DNS provider level, surely?
Please stop telling people how to do this. This is not something that should be done. Regardless of what one thinks of porn, the legitimization of massive government intrusion into a person's private life is something that should be strongly condemned, not facilitated. How far have we fallen if our first reaction isn't "fuck off you evil bastards".
I don't think Starmer is going to set the world on fire, but to be fair the Tories have slotted a hospital pass to Labour. The upside is that the Tories should be out of government and that is enough for now. The years 2010 to 2024 will surely go down as the worst set of governments in the history of the country, and I say that after having thought that honour was Brown's.
The Conservatives became a rabble, once May lost her majority.
At the same time, all governments would have struggled with the fallout from the GFC, Covid, and Ukraine. These three are the equivalent of fighting a prolonged war, in fiscal terms.
That's not really a valid excuse. Absolutely it was a challenging era, but the Tories just weren't up to the task. Are Tories only able to govern effectively when the sun is shining?
We are in a 'glass half empty' mode as a nation; and I think there are political reasons for this, which means that a new government (Labour nor Rishi, though he is trying) has an opportunity to turn it into a glass half full.
By this time (13 years) if a government is to survive scrutiny it needs to be easy and clear how to answer these questions in relation to it, in a way which excludes the opposition from the same or better ones:
Where are we How did we get here What do we stand for Where are we going How shall we get there What are our non negotiable principles and values.
My answers to questions 3-6 are that I have no idea. Unless (always possible) Labour looks even worse at the GE, they will win.
The glass isn't half-empty; it's three-quarters empty, at most.
How we describe the glass is of considerably less import than what's in it.
Are the current government so totally inept, or are they smarter than we give them credit for? Have they given up on election 2024 and the programme is now to salt the earth for the next government to ensure a swift return?
They're inept.
Even if we put down the Tories' actions to cynical malice rather than incompetence, there are many elections described as 'a good one to lose' that turn out to have been a really bad one to lose. 2010 was supposed to be one; 1979 was probably another. Both governments inherited awful positions but laid out a narrative to address those problems, implemented policies to deal with them and were able to credibly claim success in 4-5 years time. Labour could, potentially, do the same.
And even if they don't, to be able to recover at the next election means having a front bench and leader clearly capable of identifying and taking on the challenges of government - or, of having a highly capable populist narrative that successfully blames an 'other', puts Labour on the side of that 'other' and them on the side of the public. While the latter is the more likely route they'll go down, I don't see them being able to make either stick.
On top of which, if they are actually doing lasting and serious damage to the country merely to make life harder for Labour, they don't deserve to come back, ever. Let some other party replace them on the centre-right.
On which note, if Labour is struggling but being seen to be doing the right thing by the centre-left, there's always the option of electoral reform and PR, which has substantial support within Labour now.
Or if they don’t we are back to the 1960s and 1970s and relatively high inflation, strikes and regular changes of government.
The only party which could replace the Tories on the right is ReformUK and PR would make that more likely then FPTP and on present polling give Reform 50+ MPs
OT: Have we all* seen the GTA6 trailer? Looks good! But 2025 release date? Arghhhh!
*As in all of us who play video games
It’s only got 63m views in 14 hours.
Will be the single biggest media release of all time when it happens, a couple of billion (with a B ) dollars in the first few weeks. I’m planning on getting the PS5 before the shortage starts all over again this time next year.
That wasn't true when he was mayor of London, when he reached far beyond the Brexit classes (different role, granted, and one he was much more suited to).
Problem 1 though is that you can't win an election with a marmite leader that only ~25% love;
Problem 2 is that between them, Johnson and Truss did the Tory brand so much damage (and, in Johnson's case, changed the nature of the party too), that attempting to revert to the norm of boring but competent men in grey suits doesn't work either. And Sunak isn't particularly competent either.
Is this some kind of alternate history. If you don't think he is electable then you must think he is unelectable. Is that your position? That BoJo was unelectable?
The point about Boris is that he was super Marmite
Those who hated him, hated him. But he had a loyal personal vote that REALLY liked him and would come out to vote for him, which they won’t do for any other Tory
It was possibly 20-25% of the electorate, often in lower social classes
The Tories threw all that away when they dumped bojo
A number of people liked him enough to marry him
They threw all that away when they divorced him for being a ****
I don't think Starmer is going to set the world on fire, but to be fair the Tories have slotted a hospital pass to Labour. The upside is that the Tories should be out of government and that is enough for now. The years 2010 to 2024 will surely go down as the worst set of governments in the history of the country, and I say that after having thought that honour was Brown's.
The Conservatives became a rabble, once May lost her majority.
At the same time, all governments would have struggled with the fallout from the GFC, Covid, and Ukraine. These three are the equivalent of fighting a prolonged war, in fiscal terms.
That's not really a valid excuse. Absolutely it was a challenging era, but the Tories just weren't up to the task. Are Tories only able to govern effectively when the sun is shining?
We are in a 'glass half empty' mode as a nation; and I think there are political reasons for this, which means that a new government (Labour nor Rishi, though he is trying) has an opportunity to turn it into a glass half full.
By this time (13 years) if a government is to survive scrutiny it needs to be easy and clear how to answer these questions in relation to it, in a way which excludes the opposition from the same or better ones:
Where are we How did we get here What do we stand for Where are we going How shall we get there What are our non negotiable principles and values.
My answers to questions 3-6 are that I have no idea. Unless (always possible) Labour looks even worse at the GE, they will win.
The glass isn't half-empty; it's three-quarters empty, at most.
How we describe the glass is of considerably less import than what's in it.
Are the current government so totally inept, or are they smarter than we give them credit for? Have they given up on election 2024 and the programme is now to salt the earth for the next government to ensure a swift return?
They're inept.
Even if we put down the Tories' actions to cynical malice rather than incompetence, there are many elections described as 'a good one to lose' that turn out to have been a really bad one to lose. 2010 was supposed to be one; 1979 was probably another. Both governments inherited awful positions but laid out a narrative to address those problems, implemented policies to deal with them and were able to credibly claim success in 4-5 years time. Labour could, potentially, do the same.
And even if they don't, to be able to recover at the next election means having a front bench and leader clearly capable of identifying and taking on the challenges of government - or, of having a highly capable populist narrative that successfully blames an 'other', puts Labour on the side of that 'other' and them on the side of the public. While the latter is the more likely route they'll go down, I don't see them being able to make either stick.
On top of which, if they are actually doing lasting and serious damage to the country merely to make life harder for Labour, they don't deserve to come back, ever. Let some other party replace them on the centre-right.
On which note, if Labour is struggling but being seen to be doing the right thing by the centre-left, there's always the option of electoral reform and PR, which has substantial support within Labour now.
Saying in 2010 that you're going to bring migration down to the tens of thousands and 13 years later the situation is the complete opposite is definitely inept.
And the teenage boys, who the legislators and regulators are trying to keep off these websites, will simply see it as a challenge to find the material anyway. No foreign company, except MindGeek, is actually going to implement this specifically for UK users on otherwise-free sites.
I always remember when I think it was the courts ordered the blocking of The Pirate Bay by UK ISPs. This was meant to be universal. It took me approximately 30 seconds to download the Opera browser and turn on the built-in sort of proxy Turbo feature to bypass the block. 30 seconds, install an application, press one button, and I was able to view The Pirate Bay.
When there are essentially idiot-proof ways of bypassing such blocks the blocks are worthless. But I'm sure Ofcom will give themselves top-marks for "enforcing" these stupid regulations.
If you really want to stop people accessing things it has to be done on the client, and it has to be a whitelist. Anything else becomes an insurmountably large problem to deal with.
Yes, which is how corporate IT does it.
Client-side, permanently connected to the company network even when remote, and with whitelists allowlists rather than blacklists denylists.
Face eating leopards party going well (Telegraph columnist discovers that increasing the earning level needed to bring a spouse into the country affects his mate)
If a British person falls in love with someone from abroad and they want to get married and live together here I really don't think the government should be standing in their way. Whatever happened to family values?
This doesn't sound possible in any industry which both has a regulator and is the single most essential service. No idea about the details, but at 5% (for example), servicing a £14bn debt is £700m per annum. If your turnover really is £1.3 bn per 6 months you have a problem.
Except of course that with water however badly you act, and however much you owe, someone (ie the tax payer) is going to ensure that the south east of England has something coming out of the taps.
The point about Boris is that he was super Marmite
Those who hated him, hated him. But he had a loyal personal vote that REALLY liked him and would come out to vote for him, which they won’t do for any other Tory
It was possibly 20-25% of the electorate, often in lower social classes
The Tories threw all that away when they dumped bojo
Yes Boris was also the first Tory leader ever to beat Labour with DE unskilled working class and unemployed voters when he won that group in 2019, albeit helped by the get Brexit done message.
Those voters are now back voting Labour and probably won’t vote Tory again, certainly not for Sunak and Hunt. C2 skilled working class voters were also pro Boris
For the record, those voters weren't pro-Johnson, they were anti-Corbyn.
The last YouGov leadership poll before the election gave Johnson a -4 net rating with C2DE but Corbyn a net -49. DeltaPoll had the respective scores at -1 and -39. Ipsos Mori had them at -13 and -45.
A lawyer (Geoffrey Robertson) on WATO saying today's agreement in Kigale won't pass through the Supreme Court without changes to the law and relationship with ECHR (which he also doubts will work) and at enormous expense to the taxpayer.
An interesting piece in the Guardian to gladden the hearts of Brexiters, and I'd guess @Leon would take some pleasure from seeing some of his observations repeated.
Most controversial Guardian opinion piece since claims Thomas the Tank engine is racist, sexist, homophobic they published Osama Bin Laden's Letter to America....
I mean I yield to no one in my estimation of Boris as a solipsistic, lazy, useless twat. Albeit a loveable, electable one.
That said, I think when the history books are written they will look, much as they did with the GFC, as this and several years hence as the Covid Era and will cut many economies and the handling of them quite some slack.
Of course Brexit bound one leg to the other so it was always going to be difficult to win the 110m hurdles but nevertheless we are still appreciating the malign effects Covid had on all parts of society.
It's a myth that Johnson was lovable or electable. His ratings at every point in the 2019 election were worse than those of May's at any point in the 2017 one. The difference was that (1) Corbyn had been exposed by that point and was both disliked and feared, and (2) Brexit really did need doing and for all that Johnson's plan was a fraud, it *was* a plan, of sorts; Labour, by contrast, were all over the shop.
His electability was purely a function of facing the most unpopular LotO ever.
Indeed. Without the dreadful opponents Labour kept putting up against him, in London and nationally, we might have been spared his crooked venality altogether.
The point about Boris is that he was super Marmite
Those who hated him, hated him. But he had a loyal personal vote that REALLY liked him and would come out to vote for him, which they won’t do for any other Tory
It was possibly 20-25% of the electorate, often in lower social classes
The Tories threw all that away when they dumped bojo
Yes Boris was also the first Tory leader ever to beat Labour with DE unskilled working class and unemployed voters when he won that group in 2019, albeit helped by the get Brexit done message.
Those voters are now back voting Labour and probably won’t vote Tory again, certainly not for Sunak and Hunt. C2 skilled working class voters were also pro Boris
For the record, those voters weren't pro-Johnson, they were anti-Corbyn.
The last YouGov leadership poll before the election gave Johnson a -4 net rating with C2DE but Corbyn a net -49. DeltaPoll had the respective scores at -1 and -39. Ipsos Mori had them at -13 and -45.
Yet DEs voted for Corbyn over May in 2017 and Boris also won C2s in 2019 by more than May did in 2017
For the last decade and more, England and Scotland have been running a controlled experiment in education. The PISA results yet again make it clear which of those approaches has worked. And it's not the SNP's.
Stunned at this. Just like the SNP's health policies.
No doubt the SNP's very own HYUFD, in these parts, will be along to defend the ineptitude.
It feels like it SHOULD be the final blow for the Nats. They’ve had total control of education: a true test for Indy. And they comprehensively fucked it up
They can’t blame funding - they get more per person than the rUK
It’s a very basic failure. Scotch voters need to do the necessary
I wonder if Scotland's relative fall is explained by a relative lack of immigration?
That would be a rather slick excuse for the SNP given they see migration policy as a key reason for independence.
Since a PB yoon has extolled the marvellous PISA figs for UK immigrants, the argument already appears to have been made. Bloody Nat government blocking immigration while the UK (Eng) government welcomes it with open arms.
But we have unprecedented levels of immigration. Why can’t Scotland get a decent chunk of the seventy eight squillion people coming in every year? Is it possibly because Scotland is a shit hole with a shite government? Just askin
That wasn't true when he was mayor of London, when he reached far beyond the Brexit classes (different role, granted, and one he was much more suited to).
Problem 1 though is that you can't win an election with a marmite leader that only ~25% love;
Problem 2 is that between them, Johnson and Truss did the Tory brand so much damage (and, in Johnson's case, changed the nature of the party too), that attempting to revert to the norm of boring but competent men in grey suits doesn't work either. And Sunak isn't particularly competent either.
Is this some kind of alternate history. If you don't think he is electable then you must think he is unelectable. Is that your position? That BoJo was unelectable?
Next you'll be saying he wasn't loveable.
Is versus was. There's a difference, clearly. Nixon was electable in 1972; not so much in 1974.
This doesn't sound possible in any industry which both has a regulator and is the single most essential service. No idea about the details, but at 5% (for example), servicing a £14bn debt is £700m per annum. If your turnover really is £1.3 bn per 6 months you have a problem.
Except of course that with water however badly you act, and however much you owe, someone (ie the tax payer) is going to ensure that the south east of England has something coming out of the taps.
Of course, but the shareholders and debtholders need to take the hit.
There’s so many businesses that either don’t work with interest rates above zero, and businesses that have overburdened themselves in the last few years to the point where the company itself (as opposed to the actual day-to-day business) is now insolvent.
This doesn't sound possible in any industry which both has a regulator and is the single most essential service. No idea about the details, but at 5% (for example), servicing a £14bn debt is £700m per annum. If your turnover really is £1.3 bn per 6 months you have a problem.
Except of course that with water however badly you act, and however much you owe, someone (ie the tax payer) is going to ensure that the south east of England has something coming out of the taps.
Of course, but the shareholders and debtholders need to take the hit.
There’s so many businesses that either don’t work with interest rates above zero, and businesses that have overburdened themselves in the last few years to the point where the company itself (as opposed to the actual day-to-day business) is now insolvent.
Zombie companies are a problem across the West. And over the past 15 years, everytime the shit has hit the fan, in the past they would have all gone busto, but government instead propped them up (with the perfectly laudable thought that mass unemployment is bad). Problem is they staggered on and on, hidden by the fact they could keep borrowing more and more money at basically 0%.
It like dancing from one 0% credit card balance transfer to another. The music is going to stop eventually.
That wasn't true when he was mayor of London, when he reached far beyond the Brexit classes (different role, granted, and one he was much more suited to).
Problem 1 though is that you can't win an election with a marmite leader that only ~25% love;
Problem 2 is that between them, Johnson and Truss did the Tory brand so much damage (and, in Johnson's case, changed the nature of the party too), that attempting to revert to the norm of boring but competent men in grey suits doesn't work either. And Sunak isn't particularly competent either.
Is this some kind of alternate history. If you don't think he is electable then you must think he is unelectable. Is that your position? That BoJo was unelectable?
Next you'll be saying he wasn't loveable.
What Boris is blooming good at is seduction.
What he's very bad at is maintaining a relationship, see the Max Hastings line about everyone who deals with him regrets it in the end. It's just a matter of time.
Hence the Metro Elite / Salt of the Earth split. Not because one or other is a better judge of character, just that more ME types have had previous dealings with BoJo, or a BoJoalike. Previous infection confers immunity. And that's now spreading, as our Red Wall correspondents report.
Maybe there was a window where Prince Hal could have become King Henry. Spring 2020, massive majority, national crisis. He had the chance to be the national hero he so clearly wanted to be.
He didn't take it. Whether that's because he couldn't or just didn't want to, barely matters.
For the last decade and more, England and Scotland have been running a controlled experiment in education. The PISA results yet again make it clear which of those approaches has worked. And it's not the SNP's.
Stunned at this. Just like the SNP's health policies.
No doubt the SNP's very own HYUFD, in these parts, will be along to defend the ineptitude.
It feels like it SHOULD be the final blow for the Nats. They’ve had total control of education: a true test for Indy. And they comprehensively fucked it up
They can’t blame funding - they get more per person than the rUK
It’s a very basic failure. Scotch voters need to do the necessary
I wonder if Scotland's relative fall is explained by a relative lack of immigration?
That would be a rather slick excuse for the SNP given they see migration policy as a key reason for independence.
Since a PB yoon has extolled the marvellous PISA figs for UK immigrants, the argument already appears to have been made. Bloody Nat government blocking immigration while the UK (Eng) government welcomes it with open arms.
But we have unprecedented levels of immigration. Why can’t Scotland get a decent chunk of the seventy eight squillion people coming in every year? Is it possibly because Scotland is a shit hole with a shite government? Just askin
Scratch a sentimentalising lover of the glories of the Union, find a Scotland hater I always say.
I've pointed out before that Glasgow has a similar demographic to Newcastle. Now you can say Newcastle's relative dearth of immigrants is down to its proximity to Scotland or it's down to its distance from the south, London and established immigrant communities. If you go for the first option that means you're an idiot, but knock yourself out by all means.
Face eating leopards party going well (Telegraph columnist discovers that increasing the earning level needed to bring a spouse into the country affects his mate)
If a British person falls in love with someone from abroad and they want to get married and live together here I really don't think the government should be standing in their way. Whatever happened to family values?
You’re confusing “falls in love with”, with “wants to get married to”. The difference between those two statements, represents the majority of the problem.
And the teenage boys, who the legislators and regulators are trying to keep off these websites, will simply see it as a challenge to find the material anyway. No foreign company, except MindGeek, is actually going to implement this specifically for UK users on otherwise-free sites.
I always remember when I think it was the courts ordered the blocking of The Pirate Bay by UK ISPs. This was meant to be universal. It took me approximately 30 seconds to download the Opera browser and turn on the built-in sort of proxy Turbo feature to bypass the block. 30 seconds, install an application, press one button, and I was able to view The Pirate Bay.
When there are essentially idiot-proof ways of bypassing such blocks the blocks are worthless. But I'm sure Ofcom will give themselves top-marks for "enforcing" these stupid regulations.
If you really want to stop people accessing things it has to be done on the client, and it has to be a whitelist. Anything else becomes an insurmountably large problem to deal with.
I had to look up The Pirate Bay but now that I have it reminds me of a moral question I have:
How is it ok to access paid content via a back-door without paying but it's not ok to steal goods from a shop?
I don't mean to sound prissy over this - I have used 12ft Ladder, which is no different. I just wondered why those of us who wouldn't shoplift don't mind stealing internet content.
An interesting piece in the Guardian to gladden the hearts of Brexiters, and I'd guess @Leon would take some pleasure from seeing some of his observations repeated.
Most controversial Guardian opinion piece since claims Thomas the Tank engine is racist, sexist, homophobic they published Osama Bin Laden's Letter to America....
It’s not the most convincing of pieces, thought, is it, and looks like one of those articles written to construct an argument for a pre-judged conclusion. The EU v US economic size disparity is created significantly by Brexit itself; the EU’s “economic woes” hardly rest on not having a globally leading technology sector, and the US itself is hardly without significant political and economic challenges.
Face eating leopards party going well (Telegraph columnist discovers that increasing the earning level needed to bring a spouse into the country affects his mate)
If a British person falls in love with someone from abroad and they want to get married and live together here I really don't think the government should be standing in their way. Whatever happened to family values?
Any party that had Bojo as a leader does not understand family values...
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
This doesn't sound possible in any industry which both has a regulator and is the single most essential service. No idea about the details, but at 5% (for example), servicing a £14bn debt is £700m per annum. If your turnover really is £1.3 bn per 6 months you have a problem.
Except of course that with water however badly you act, and however much you owe, someone (ie the tax payer) is going to ensure that the south east of England has something coming out of the taps.
Of course, but the shareholders and debtholders need to take the hit.
There’s so many businesses that either don’t work with interest rates above zero, and businesses that have overburdened themselves in the last few years to the point where the company itself (as opposed to the actual day-to-day business) is now insolvent.
Zombie companies are a problem across the West. And over the past 15 years, everytime the shit has hit the fan, in the past they would have all gone busto, but government instead propped them up (with the perfectly laudable thought that mass unemployment is bad). Problem is they staggered on and on, hidden by the fact they could keep borrowing more and more money at basically 0%.
It like dancing from one 0% credit card balance transfer to another. The music is going to stop eventually.
Yup - but it’s only when the banks who continually rolled over those 0% cards have to book the actual loss, that it will stop happening.
The point about Boris is that he was super Marmite
Those who hated him, hated him. But he had a loyal personal vote that REALLY liked him and would come out to vote for him, which they won’t do for any other Tory
It was possibly 20-25% of the electorate, often in lower social classes
The Tories threw all that away when they dumped bojo
Yes Boris was also the first Tory leader ever to beat Labour with DE unskilled working class and unemployed voters when he won that group in 2019, albeit helped by the get Brexit done message.
Those voters are now back voting Labour and probably won’t vote Tory again, certainly not for Sunak and Hunt. C2 skilled working class voters were also pro Boris
For the record, those voters weren't pro-Johnson, they were anti-Corbyn.
The last YouGov leadership poll before the election gave Johnson a -4 net rating with C2DE but Corbyn a net -49. DeltaPoll had the respective scores at -1 and -39. Ipsos Mori had them at -13 and -45.
Yet DEs voted for Corbyn over May in 2017 and Boris also won C2s in 2019 by more than May did in 2017
Because May (and Nick Timothy) blew the election campaign.
I don't have the figures to hand but it'd be interesting to see the C2/DE split at the *local* elections in May 2017.
Anyway, there's nothing particularly magic about gaining the support of any one group, particularly when Johnson had already lost it again by the time he was ousted.
And the teenage boys, who the legislators and regulators are trying to keep off these websites, will simply see it as a challenge to find the material anyway. No foreign company, except MindGeek, is actually going to implement this specifically for UK users on otherwise-free sites.
I always remember when I think it was the courts ordered the blocking of The Pirate Bay by UK ISPs. This was meant to be universal. It took me approximately 30 seconds to download the Opera browser and turn on the built-in sort of proxy Turbo feature to bypass the block. 30 seconds, install an application, press one button, and I was able to view The Pirate Bay.
When there are essentially idiot-proof ways of bypassing such blocks the blocks are worthless. But I'm sure Ofcom will give themselves top-marks for "enforcing" these stupid regulations.
If you really want to stop people accessing things it has to be done on the client, and it has to be a whitelist. Anything else becomes an insurmountably large problem to deal with.
I had to look up The Pirate Bay but now that I have it reminds me of a moral question I have:
How is it ok to access paid content via a back-door without paying but it's not ok to steal goods from a shop?
I don't mean to sound prissy over this - I have used 12ft Ladder, which is no different. I just wondered why those of us who wouldn't shoplift don't mind stealing internet content.
I think there is a psychological disconnect between physical and digital goods. Same with gambling. Much easier to gamble large sums digitally than handing over physical cash.
I would also hazard a guess that digital is infinite reducibility doesn't feel as much like stealing as you stealing it doesn't mean any less is available or that for that individual item the retailer / producer hasn't lost out in the same way i.e. there is a direct cost that stock being stolen has. Where as people stealing digital views of paywalled content, it was going to be there before, during and after. But obviously the business model fails if everybody does that.
I don't think Starmer is going to set the world on fire, but to be fair the Tories have slotted a hospital pass to Labour. The upside is that the Tories should be out of government and that is enough for now. The years 2010 to 2024 will surely go down as the worst set of governments in the history of the country, and I say that after having thought that honour was Brown's.
The Conservatives became a rabble, once May lost her majority.
At the same time, all governments would have struggled with the fallout from the GFC, Covid, and Ukraine. These three are the equivalent of fighting a prolonged war, in fiscal terms.
That's not really a valid excuse. Absolutely it was a challenging era, but the Tories just weren't up to the task. Are Tories only able to govern effectively when the sun is shining?
We are in a 'glass half empty' mode as a nation; and I think there are political reasons for this, which means that a new government (Labour nor Rishi, though he is trying) has an opportunity to turn it into a glass half full.
By this time (13 years) if a government is to survive scrutiny it needs to be easy and clear how to answer these questions in relation to it, in a way which excludes the opposition from the same or better ones:
Where are we How did we get here What do we stand for Where are we going How shall we get there What are our non negotiable principles and values.
My answers to questions 3-6 are that I have no idea. Unless (always possible) Labour looks even worse at the GE, they will win.
The glass isn't half-empty; it's three-quarters empty, at most.
How we describe the glass is of considerably less import than what's in it.
Are the current government so totally inept, or are they smarter than we give them credit for? Have they given up on election 2024 and the programme is now to salt the earth for the next government to ensure a swift return?
They're inept.
Even if we put down the Tories' actions to cynical malice rather than incompetence, there are many elections described as 'a good one to lose' that turn out to have been a really bad one to lose. 2010 was supposed to be one; 1979 was probably another. Both governments inherited awful positions but laid out a narrative to address those problems, implemented policies to deal with them and were able to credibly claim success in 4-5 years time. Labour could, potentially, do the same.
And even if they don't, to be able to recover at the next election means having a front bench and leader clearly capable of identifying and taking on the challenges of government - or, of having a highly capable populist narrative that successfully blames an 'other', puts Labour on the side of that 'other' and them on the side of the public. While the latter is the more likely route they'll go down, I don't see them being able to make either stick.
On top of which, if they are actually doing lasting and serious damage to the country merely to make life harder for Labour, they don't deserve to come back, ever. Let some other party replace them on the centre-right.
On which note, if Labour is struggling but being seen to be doing the right thing by the centre-left, there's always the option of electoral reform and PR, which has substantial support within Labour now.
Saying in 2010 that you're going to bring migration down to the tens of thousands and 13 years later the situation is the complete opposite is definitely inept.
That wasn't the core massage of 2010 though. Not that you're wrong (although technically it is in the 10s of thousands - just seventy-odd tens of thousands).
The point about Boris is that he was super Marmite
Those who hated him, hated him. But he had a loyal personal vote that REALLY liked him and would come out to vote for him, which they won’t do for any other Tory
It was possibly 20-25% of the electorate, often in lower social classes
The Tories threw all that away when they dumped bojo
Yes Boris was also the first Tory leader ever to beat Labour with DE unskilled working class and unemployed voters when he won that group in 2019, albeit helped by the get Brexit done message.
Those voters are now back voting Labour and probably won’t vote Tory again, certainly not for Sunak and Hunt. C2 skilled working class voters were also pro Boris
For the record, those voters weren't pro-Johnson, they were anti-Corbyn.
The last YouGov leadership poll before the election gave Johnson a -4 net rating with C2DE but Corbyn a net -49. DeltaPoll had the respective scores at -1 and -39. Ipsos Mori had them at -13 and -45.
Yet DEs voted for Corbyn over May in 2017 and Boris also won C2s in 2019 by more than May did in 2017
Because May (and Nick Timothy) blew the election campaign.
I don't have the figures to hand but it'd be interesting to see the C2/DE split at the *local* elections in May 2017.
Anyway, there's nothing particularly magic about gaining the support of any one group, particularly when Johnson had already lost it again by the time he was ousted.
Johnson's political life mirrors his personal life. Charm, lie, disappoint then outrage.
For the last decade and more, England and Scotland have been running a controlled experiment in education. The PISA results yet again make it clear which of those approaches has worked. And it's not the SNP's.
Stunned at this. Just like the SNP's health policies.
No doubt the SNP's very own HYUFD, in these parts, will be along to defend the ineptitude.
It feels like it SHOULD be the final blow for the Nats. They’ve had total control of education: a true test for Indy. And they comprehensively fucked it up
They can’t blame funding - they get more per person than the rUK
It’s a very basic failure. Scotch voters need to do the necessary
I wonder if Scotland's relative fall is explained by a relative lack of immigration?
That would be a rather slick excuse for the SNP given they see migration policy as a key reason for independence.
Since a PB yoon has extolled the marvellous PISA figs for UK immigrants, the argument already appears to have been made. Bloody Nat government blocking immigration while the UK (Eng) government welcomes it with open arms.
But we have unprecedented levels of immigration. Why can’t Scotland get a decent chunk of the seventy eight squillion people coming in every year? Is it possibly because Scotland is a shit hole with a shite government? Just askin
Scratch a sentimentalising lover of the glories of the Union, find a Scotland hater I always say.
I've pointed out before that Glasgow has a similar demographic to Newcastle. Now you can say Newcastle's relative dearth of immigrants is down to its proximity to Scotland or it's down to its distance from the south, London and established immigrant communities. If you go for the first option that means you're an idiot, but knock yourself out by all means.
Plenty of Poles where I'm from, but not enough to sustain a growing community (particularly after Brexit). Lots of rUK immigration though, which would undermine the "shithole" argument.
Perhaps Scotland is to England what Essex is to East London?
That wasn't true when he was mayor of London, when he reached far beyond the Brexit classes (different role, granted, and one he was much more suited to).
Problem 1 though is that you can't win an election with a marmite leader that only ~25% love;
Problem 2 is that between them, Johnson and Truss did the Tory brand so much damage (and, in Johnson's case, changed the nature of the party too), that attempting to revert to the norm of boring but competent men in grey suits doesn't work either. And Sunak isn't particularly competent either.
Is this some kind of alternate history. If you don't think he is electable then you must think he is unelectable. Is that your position? That BoJo was unelectable?
Next you'll be saying he wasn't loveable.
He was very much unelectable by the time he was ousted, and is even more so now.
He was elected in 2019 because of the very specific circumstances of the election, and of his opponent. A lot of people (including me, FWIW), voted Tory in the end primarily to keep Corbyn out, despite many misgivings about his record and nature.
“Let's see... on one side of the fight is horny teen boys with a lot of time at their hands who are internet-natives and who can score big respect points from their peers if they can get them access to the forbidden pages. In league with them is the providers of that content who are very keen to offer these horny teens that content if they somehow get away with it.
“Up against them is a group of overprotective busybodies without any real problems so they meddle in stuff they don't know f**k all about, especially that dreaded internets thingamajig, they don't get it, they don't want it, their kids are glued to it and they don't like it, so it should go away, and that's pretty much all they know about it. They get support from an apathetic government that will pay any and all lip service to their "deep concerns" in the vain hope that this could convince the busybodies to vote for them again, but frankly, they couldn't give a toss about whether their regulations have any effect. If anything, it could hurt the economy of those porn businesses, so ... let's not go overboard with that, shall we?
The point about Boris is that he was super Marmite
Those who hated him, hated him. But he had a loyal personal vote that REALLY liked him and would come out to vote for him, which they won’t do for any other Tory
It was possibly 20-25% of the electorate, often in lower social classes
The Tories threw all that away when they dumped bojo
Yes Boris was also the first Tory leader ever to beat Labour with DE unskilled working class and unemployed voters when he won that group in 2019, albeit helped by the get Brexit done message.
Those voters are now back voting Labour and probably won’t vote Tory again, certainly not for Sunak and Hunt. C2 skilled working class voters were also pro Boris
For the record, those voters weren't pro-Johnson, they were anti-Corbyn.
The last YouGov leadership poll before the election gave Johnson a -4 net rating with C2DE but Corbyn a net -49. DeltaPoll had the respective scores at -1 and -39. Ipsos Mori had them at -13 and -45.
Yet DEs voted for Corbyn over May in 2017 and Boris also won C2s in 2019 by more than May did in 2017
As someone who contributed to Boris's vote percentage, as a strong protest vote against Corbyn in a safe Labour seat, but did not and would not have wanted to contribute to his seat count, I can say that my vote for Boris was made with no affection whatsoever, and I hope that is the worst electoral choice I ever have to make.
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
For the last decade and more, England and Scotland have been running a controlled experiment in education. The PISA results yet again make it clear which of those approaches has worked. And it's not the SNP's.
Stunned at this. Just like the SNP's health policies.
No doubt the SNP's very own HYUFD, in these parts, will be along to defend the ineptitude.
It feels like it SHOULD be the final blow for the Nats. They’ve had total control of education: a true test for Indy. And they comprehensively fucked it up
They can’t blame funding - they get more per person than the rUK
It’s a very basic failure. Scotch voters need to do the necessary
I wonder if Scotland's relative fall is explained by a relative lack of immigration?
That would be a rather slick excuse for the SNP given they see migration policy as a key reason for independence.
Since a PB yoon has extolled the marvellous PISA figs for UK immigrants, the argument already appears to have been made. Bloody Nat government blocking immigration while the UK (Eng) government welcomes it with open arms.
But we have unprecedented levels of immigration. Why can’t Scotland get a decent chunk of the seventy eight squillion people coming in every year? Is it possibly because Scotland is a shit hole with a shite government? Just askin
Scratch a sentimentalising lover of the glories of the Union, find a Scotland hater I always say.
I've pointed out before that Glasgow has a similar demographic to Newcastle. Now you can say Newcastle's relative dearth of immigrants is down to its proximity to Scotland or it's down to its distance from the south, London and established immigrant communities. If you go for the first option that means you're an idiot, but knock yourself out by all means.
Well make your mind up. The UK has extraordinary levels of immigration, yet they all refuse to go to Scotland
Why should this be any different, if you are Indy? It won’t. Scotland is a climatic toilet, for 9 months of the year, no one wants to live there
The difference in the UK is that you are a SUBSIDISED toilet, so that keeps you just about flushing; without the beneficence of super-high-IQ England, you’d be back to eating pebbles
So that's 140k health and care workers we won't be seeing come to the UK next year then.
There seems to be 1 very different set of figures being shown for dependants - so I’m now at the point that I don’t trust any figures unless the source is referenced
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I had to look up The Pirate Bay but now that I have it reminds me of a moral question I have:
How is it ok to access paid content via a back-door without paying but it's not ok to steal goods from a shop?
I don't mean to sound prissy over this - I have used 12ft Ladder, which is no different. I just wondered why those of us who wouldn't shoplift don't mind stealing internet content.
Morally I don't think there is any difference, but it is so much easier with little to no enforcement so vast numbers of people pirate music, films, software, football streams and so on.
My argument isn't about the rights and wrongs of pornography, or other age restricted content, it's about the futility of the measures being enforced, and also the inadvisibility of encouraging people to share private documents and information with dubious verification services, litterally telling people to do the very sort of thing that we are generally warned not to do.
The government really need to find a deal with junior doctors .
The length of the industrial action is going to lead to hundreds of thousands of cancelled appointments. Sunak can keep wanking on about immigration but the failure to tackle NHS waiting lists is going to be terminal for the Tories .
When Labour left office there were 2 million on waiting lists . Likely the Tories will have 7 million .
For the last decade and more, England and Scotland have been running a controlled experiment in education. The PISA results yet again make it clear which of those approaches has worked. And it's not the SNP's.
Stunned at this. Just like the SNP's health policies.
No doubt the SNP's very own HYUFD, in these parts, will be along to defend the ineptitude.
It feels like it SHOULD be the final blow for the Nats. They’ve had total control of education: a true test for Indy. And they comprehensively fucked it up
They can’t blame funding - they get more per person than the rUK
It’s a very basic failure. Scotch voters need to do the necessary
I wonder if Scotland's relative fall is explained by a relative lack of immigration?
That would be a rather slick excuse for the SNP given they see migration policy as a key reason for independence.
Since a PB yoon has extolled the marvellous PISA figs for UK immigrants, the argument already appears to have been made. Bloody Nat government blocking immigration while the UK (Eng) government welcomes it with open arms.
But we have unprecedented levels of immigration. Why can’t Scotland get a decent chunk of the seventy eight squillion people coming in every year? Is it possibly because Scotland is a shit hole with a shite government? Just askin
Scratch a sentimentalising lover of the glories of the Union, find a Scotland hater I always say.
I've pointed out before that Glasgow has a similar demographic to Newcastle. Now you can say Newcastle's relative dearth of immigrants is down to its proximity to Scotland or it's down to its distance from the south, London and established immigrant communities. If you go for the first option that means you're an idiot, but knock yourself out by all means.
Well make your mind up. The UK has extraordinary levels of immigration, yet they all refuse to go to Scotland
Why should this be any different, if you are Indy? It won’t. Scotland is a climatic toilet, for 9 months of the year, no one wants to live there
The difference in the UK is that you are a SUBSIDISED toilet, so that keeps you just about flushing; without the beneficence of super-high-IQ England, you’d be back to eating pebbles
Scotland is actually about middling for UK foreign born residents, though slightly better than the inbred part of the world that bore you. Anyway let’s get on to why the climates of Norway and Sweden discourage immigration,
An interesting piece in the Guardian to gladden the hearts of Brexiters, and I'd guess @Leon would take some pleasure from seeing some of his observations repeated.
Most controversial Guardian opinion piece since claims Thomas the Tank engine is racist, sexist, homophobic they published Osama Bin Laden's Letter to America....
It’s not the most convincing of pieces, thought, is it, and looks like one of those articles written to construct an argument for a pre-judged conclusion. The EU v US economic size disparity is created significantly by Brexit itself; the EU’s “economic woes” hardly rest on not having a globally leading technology sector, and the US itself is hardly without significant political and economic challenges.
The EU’s economic woes are ABSOLUTELY and intimately linked to its inability to produce a tech sector to match that in the USA, China, even Japan and Korea
My visit to inland Sicily a few weeks back was quite mind boggling in this respect. Parts of Europe are regressing to North African levels of poverty and helplessness - and ugliness
Even in the dreariest parts of Britain - and my God they can be dreary - it isn’t quite that bad. This might just be the English language, I dunno
If any tech giant emerges from Europe (unlikely, it would be bought by MetaGoogle first) my bet is it would come from London with the Netherlands as a second possibility, after that….
I’ve been very down on America in recent years, and it does have gigantic problems; but its tech prowess is a huge and crucial advantage
The point about Boris is that he was super Marmite
Those who hated him, hated him. But he had a loyal personal vote that REALLY liked him and would come out to vote for him, which they won’t do for any other Tory
It was possibly 20-25% of the electorate, often in lower social classes
The Tories threw all that away when they dumped bojo
A number of people liked him enough to marry him
They threw all that away when they divorced him for being a ****
The electorate were wise to do the same
It's good he's gone, isn't it. You put the news on now and there's virtually no chance of being presented with that bloated posho face, the stupid 'raffish' hair, those dead piggy little eyes and (oh god) the pretentious grating facetious voice. Life is much the better for it. Mine is anyway.
Listening to Chris Huhne's comments re: his case against Murdoch's News Corp, it sounds a credible argument.
I was not aware of the ratchet that Huhne would have been liable for costs if he had taken it to Court, and been awarded less damages by the Court than he had previously been offered in an out of court settlement.
For the last decade and more, England and Scotland have been running a controlled experiment in education. The PISA results yet again make it clear which of those approaches has worked. And it's not the SNP's.
Stunned at this. Just like the SNP's health policies.
No doubt the SNP's very own HYUFD, in these parts, will be along to defend the ineptitude.
It feels like it SHOULD be the final blow for the Nats. They’ve had total control of education: a true test for Indy. And they comprehensively fucked it up
They can’t blame funding - they get more per person than the rUK
It’s a very basic failure. Scotch voters need to do the necessary
I wonder if Scotland's relative fall is explained by a relative lack of immigration?
That would be a rather slick excuse for the SNP given they see migration policy as a key reason for independence.
Since a PB yoon has extolled the marvellous PISA figs for UK immigrants, the argument already appears to have been made. Bloody Nat government blocking immigration while the UK (Eng) government welcomes it with open arms.
But we have unprecedented levels of immigration. Why can’t Scotland get a decent chunk of the seventy eight squillion people coming in every year? Is it possibly because Scotland is a shit hole with a shite government? Just askin
Scratch a sentimentalising lover of the glories of the Union, find a Scotland hater I always say.
I've pointed out before that Glasgow has a similar demographic to Newcastle. Now you can say Newcastle's relative dearth of immigrants is down to its proximity to Scotland or it's down to its distance from the south, London and established immigrant communities. If you go for the first option that means you're an idiot, but knock yourself out by all means.
Well make your mind up. The UK has extraordinary levels of immigration, yet they all refuse to go to Scotland
Why should this be any different, if you are Indy? It won’t. Scotland is a climatic toilet, for 9 months of the year, no one wants to live there
The difference in the UK is that you are a SUBSIDISED toilet, so that keeps you just about flushing; without the beneficence of super-high-IQ England, you’d be back to eating pebbles
So you think net migration correlates to this?
Fife, Moray, County Durham, Lincolnshire, Herefordshire and Norfolk/Suffolk should be packed full.
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
"...everyone who follows me from Germany has written in and asked me when Germany was going to end so I figured today would be a good day...
...Germany has three unsolvable problems that are going to destroy it as a modern economy and maybe even nation state over the course of the next 20 to 30 years the first one of course is..."
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
For the last decade and more, England and Scotland have been running a controlled experiment in education. The PISA results yet again make it clear which of those approaches has worked. And it's not the SNP's.
Stunned at this. Just like the SNP's health policies.
No doubt the SNP's very own HYUFD, in these parts, will be along to defend the ineptitude.
It feels like it SHOULD be the final blow for the Nats. They’ve had total control of education: a true test for Indy. And they comprehensively fucked it up
They can’t blame funding - they get more per person than the rUK
It’s a very basic failure. Scotch voters need to do the necessary
I wonder if Scotland's relative fall is explained by a relative lack of immigration?
That would be a rather slick excuse for the SNP given they see migration policy as a key reason for independence.
Since a PB yoon has extolled the marvellous PISA figs for UK immigrants, the argument already appears to have been made. Bloody Nat government blocking immigration while the UK (Eng) government welcomes it with open arms.
But we have unprecedented levels of immigration. Why can’t Scotland get a decent chunk of the seventy eight squillion people coming in every year? Is it possibly because Scotland is a shit hole with a shite government? Just askin
Scratch a sentimentalising lover of the glories of the Union, find a Scotland hater I always say.
I've pointed out before that Glasgow has a similar demographic to Newcastle. Now you can say Newcastle's relative dearth of immigrants is down to its proximity to Scotland or it's down to its distance from the south, London and established immigrant communities. If you go for the first option that means you're an idiot, but knock yourself out by all means.
Well make your mind up. The UK has extraordinary levels of immigration, yet they all refuse to go to Scotland
Why should this be any different, if you are Indy? It won’t. Scotland is a climatic toilet, for 9 months of the year, no one wants to live there
The difference in the UK is that you are a SUBSIDISED toilet, so that keeps you just about flushing; without the beneficence of super-high-IQ England, you’d be back to eating pebbles
So you think net migration correlates to this?
Fife, Moray, County Durham, Lincolnshire, Herefordshire and Norfolk/Suffolk should be packed full.
That chart doesn’t factor in darkness, incest, dwarfism and midges
The government really need to find a deal with junior doctors .
The length of the industrial action is going to lead to hundreds of thousands of cancelled appointments. Sunak can keep wanking on about immigration but the failure to tackle NHS waiting lists is going to be terminal for the Tories .
When Labour left office there were 2 million on waiting lists . Likely the Tories will have 7 million .
That will be on every election leaflet .
The government is thrashing about in its death throes. It’s only doing to do “radical” right wing policy that appeals to its ERG/ new conservative rump
For the last decade and more, England and Scotland have been running a controlled experiment in education. The PISA results yet again make it clear which of those approaches has worked. And it's not the SNP's.
Stunned at this. Just like the SNP's health policies.
No doubt the SNP's very own HYUFD, in these parts, will be along to defend the ineptitude.
It feels like it SHOULD be the final blow for the Nats. They’ve had total control of education: a true test for Indy. And they comprehensively fucked it up
They can’t blame funding - they get more per person than the rUK
It’s a very basic failure. Scotch voters need to do the necessary
I wonder if Scotland's relative fall is explained by a relative lack of immigration?
That would be a rather slick excuse for the SNP given they see migration policy as a key reason for independence.
Since a PB yoon has extolled the marvellous PISA figs for UK immigrants, the argument already appears to have been made. Bloody Nat government blocking immigration while the UK (Eng) government welcomes it with open arms.
But we have unprecedented levels of immigration. Why can’t Scotland get a decent chunk of the seventy eight squillion people coming in every year? Is it possibly because Scotland is a shit hole with a shite government? Just askin
Scratch a sentimentalising lover of the glories of the Union, find a Scotland hater I always say.
I've pointed out before that Glasgow has a similar demographic to Newcastle. Now you can say Newcastle's relative dearth of immigrants is down to its proximity to Scotland or it's down to its distance from the south, London and established immigrant communities. If you go for the first option that means you're an idiot, but knock yourself out by all means.
Well make your mind up. The UK has extraordinary levels of immigration, yet they all refuse to go to Scotland
Why should this be any different, if you are Indy? It won’t. Scotland is a climatic toilet, for 9 months of the year, no one wants to live there
The difference in the UK is that you are a SUBSIDISED toilet, so that keeps you just about flushing; without the beneficence of super-high-IQ England, you’d be back to eating pebbles
So you think net migration correlates to this?
Fife, Moray, County Durham, Lincolnshire, Herefordshire and Norfolk/Suffolk should be packed full.
For the last decade and more, England and Scotland have been running a controlled experiment in education. The PISA results yet again make it clear which of those approaches has worked. And it's not the SNP's.
Stunned at this. Just like the SNP's health policies.
No doubt the SNP's very own HYUFD, in these parts, will be along to defend the ineptitude.
It feels like it SHOULD be the final blow for the Nats. They’ve had total control of education: a true test for Indy. And they comprehensively fucked it up
They can’t blame funding - they get more per person than the rUK
It’s a very basic failure. Scotch voters need to do the necessary
I wonder if Scotland's relative fall is explained by a relative lack of immigration?
That would be a rather slick excuse for the SNP given they see migration policy as a key reason for independence.
Since a PB yoon has extolled the marvellous PISA figs for UK immigrants, the argument already appears to have been made. Bloody Nat government blocking immigration while the UK (Eng) government welcomes it with open arms.
But we have unprecedented levels of immigration. Why can’t Scotland get a decent chunk of the seventy eight squillion people coming in every year? Is it possibly because Scotland is a shit hole with a shite government? Just askin
Scratch a sentimentalising lover of the glories of the Union, find a Scotland hater I always say.
I've pointed out before that Glasgow has a similar demographic to Newcastle. Now you can say Newcastle's relative dearth of immigrants is down to its proximity to Scotland or it's down to its distance from the south, London and established immigrant communities. If you go for the first option that means you're an idiot, but knock yourself out by all means.
Well make your mind up. The UK has extraordinary levels of immigration, yet they all refuse to go to Scotland
Why should this be any different, if you are Indy? It won’t. Scotland is a climatic toilet, for 9 months of the year, no one wants to live there
The difference in the UK is that you are a SUBSIDISED toilet, so that keeps you just about flushing; without the beneficence of super-high-IQ England, you’d be back to eating pebbles
So you think net migration correlates to this?
Fife, Moray, County Durham, Lincolnshire, Herefordshire and Norfolk/Suffolk should be packed full.
That chart doesn’t factor in darkness, incest, dwarfism and midges
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
Fake Designed by bloke from Chingford Designed by bloke from Pretoria Global effort
And the teenage boys, who the legislators and regulators are trying to keep off these websites, will simply see it as a challenge to find the material anyway. No foreign company, except MindGeek, is actually going to implement this specifically for UK users on otherwise-free sites.
I always remember when I think it was the courts ordered the blocking of The Pirate Bay by UK ISPs. This was meant to be universal. It took me approximately 30 seconds to download the Opera browser and turn on the built-in sort of proxy Turbo feature to bypass the block. 30 seconds, install an application, press one button, and I was able to view The Pirate Bay.
When there are essentially idiot-proof ways of bypassing such blocks the blocks are worthless. But I'm sure Ofcom will give themselves top-marks for "enforcing" these stupid regulations.
If you really want to stop people accessing things it has to be done on the client, and it has to be a whitelist. Anything else becomes an insurmountably large problem to deal with.
I had to look up The Pirate Bay but now that I have it reminds me of a moral question I have:
How is it ok to access paid content via a back-door without paying but it's not ok to steal goods from a shop?
I don't mean to sound prissy over this - I have used 12ft Ladder, which is no different. I just wondered why those of us who wouldn't shoplift don't mind stealing internet content.
I think there is a psychological disconnect between physical and digital goods. Same with gambling. Much easier to gamble large sums digitally than handing over physical cash.
I would also hazard a guess that digital is infinite reducibility doesn't feel as much like stealing as you stealing it doesn't mean any less is available or that for that individual item the retailer / producer hasn't lost out in the same way i.e. there is a direct cost that stock being stolen has. Where as people stealing digital views of paywalled content, it was going to be there before, during and after. But obviously the business model fails if everybody does that.
Yep, the old would you steal a car ads undermined the point in this way. It's not the same as stealing physical goods. It may be better or it may be worse - steal a DVD from a shop and there are actual real losses incurred (manufacturing costs etc). It's worse than simply not watching the film. Pirating online (as a personal copy) does not incur a loss for the producers if the counterfactual without piracy is that the film is not watched and not purchased. Online piracy could also be more damaging if, via bit torrent for example, you end up sharing the film with 20 other people who would have made a purchase. It's different, possibly better, possibly worse depending on the impact, but certainly not equivalent.
One problem was that the pirated goods were better quality (no DRM etc, no forced adverts before viewing) than the retail goods and more convenient. Streaming services solved this to a large extent, by not sucking.
That wasn't true when he was mayor of London, when he reached far beyond the Brexit classes (different role, granted, and one he was much more suited to).
Problem 1 though is that you can't win an election with a marmite leader that only ~25% love;
Problem 2 is that between them, Johnson and Truss did the Tory brand so much damage (and, in Johnson's case, changed the nature of the party too), that attempting to revert to the norm of boring but competent men in grey suits doesn't work either. And Sunak isn't particularly competent either.
Is this some kind of alternate history. If you don't think he is electable then you must think he is unelectable. Is that your position? That BoJo was unelectable?
Next you'll be saying he wasn't loveable.
He was very much unelectable by the time he was ousted, and is even more so now.
He was elected in 2019 because of the very specific circumstances of the election, and of his opponent. A lot of people (including me, FWIW), voted Tory in the end primarily to keep Corbyn out, despite many misgivings about his record and nature.
Me too (not that me too).
But he is electable. I would move it from was to still is. People are fickle. Jeremy Corbyn was nearly our PM ffs. Boris is showbiz, was then is now.
We thought we wanted a boring technocrat after the mad years of the Cons (starting with Brexit) but turns out people want charisma. This is not a post advocating his return to take or keep the Cons in power but just to say that he is electable because people like him.
This doesn't sound possible in any industry which both has a regulator and is the single most essential service. No idea about the details, but at 5% (for example), servicing a £14bn debt is £700m per annum. If your turnover really is £1.3 bn per 6 months you have a problem.
Except of course that with water however badly you act, and however much you owe, someone (ie the tax payer) is going to ensure that the south east of England has something coming out of the taps.
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
Fake Designed by bloke from Chingford Designed by bloke from Pretoria Global effort
Lol. I don't think the iPhone would have been created by Ive without Jobs but I do think it would have been created by Jobs without Ive.
But why am I debating with a guy who thinks the moon landings were faked?
I had to look up The Pirate Bay but now that I have it reminds me of a moral question I have:
How is it ok to access paid content via a back-door without paying but it's not ok to steal goods from a shop?
I don't mean to sound prissy over this - I have used 12ft Ladder, which is no different. I just wondered why those of us who wouldn't shoplift don't mind stealing internet content.
Morally I don't think there is any difference, but it is so much easier with little to no enforcement so vast numbers of people pirate music, films, software, football streams and so on.
My argument isn't about the rights and wrongs of pornography, or other age restricted content, it's about the futility of the measures being enforced, and also the inadvisibility of encouraging people to share private documents and information with dubious verification services, litterally telling people to do the very sort of thing that we are generally warned not to do.
I used to use thebox.bz and zxcv.fm to download a fair bit of material that was uploaded.
I always downloaded material that was not commercially available. So people would upload Network DVD's for example. I wouldn't touch them. But old TV or contemporary TV that was not available I would download. After all that is the only way I would ever have a chance to see it.
The government really need to find a deal with junior doctors .
The length of the industrial action is going to lead to hundreds of thousands of cancelled appointments. Sunak can keep wanking on about immigration but the failure to tackle NHS waiting lists is going to be terminal for the Tories .
When Labour left office there were 2 million on waiting lists . Likely the Tories will have 7 million .
That will be on every election leaflet .
The government is thrashing about in its death throes. It’s only doing to do “radical” right wing policy that appeals to its ERG/ new conservative rump
No 10 probably hopes that they can lay the blame on the strikes and covid and hope enough stupid people believe it .
The waiting lists were going through the roof well before that .
The point about Boris is that he was super Marmite
Those who hated him, hated him. But he had a loyal personal vote that REALLY liked him and would come out to vote for him, which they won’t do for any other Tory
It was possibly 20-25% of the electorate, often in lower social classes
The Tories threw all that away when they dumped bojo
A number of people liked him enough to marry him
They threw all that away when they divorced him for being a ****
The electorate were wise to do the same
Fun fact. Boris Johnson has been divorced as many times as all other UK prime ministers combined.
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
Fake Designed by bloke from Chingford Designed by bloke from Pretoria Global effort
The point about Boris is that he was super Marmite
Those who hated him, hated him. But he had a loyal personal vote that REALLY liked him and would come out to vote for him, which they won’t do for any other Tory
It was possibly 20-25% of the electorate, often in lower social classes
The Tories threw all that away when they dumped bojo
A number of people liked him enough to marry him
They threw all that away when they divorced him for being a ****
The electorate were wise to do the same
Fun fact. Boris Johnson has been divorced as many times as all other UK prime ministers combined.
So far.
Tell me Carrie Symonds, what did you see in the occasional millionaire and soon to be occasional senior politician Boris Johnson?
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
AI, and then AGI, and then ASI - far more important than any of those mentioned
Whichever country/corporation nails this first will race ahead, and most experts are now predicting this will happen in 3-7 years (ie before 2030)
And America is right at the head of the pack. China is about 2-3 years behind (maybe more,but quantum computing is an opaque area). The EU is almost nowhere. The UK is doing OK, we need to make sure we stay close to the USA, symbiotically linking London with Silicon Valley.
TBF to our dreadful government, this is one thing they do seem to get. Sunak is a tech bro manque, after all. I pray Starmer doesn’t fuck it up
The point about Boris is that he was super Marmite
Those who hated him, hated him. But he had a loyal personal vote that REALLY liked him and would come out to vote for him, which they won’t do for any other Tory
It was possibly 20-25% of the electorate, often in lower social classes
The Tories threw all that away when they dumped bojo
Yes Boris was also the first Tory leader ever to beat Labour with DE unskilled working class and unemployed voters when he won that group in 2019, albeit helped by the get Brexit done message.
Those voters are now back voting Labour and probably won’t vote Tory again, certainly not for Sunak and Hunt. C2 skilled working class voters were also pro Boris
For the record, those voters weren't pro-Johnson, they were anti-Corbyn.
The last YouGov leadership poll before the election gave Johnson a -4 net rating with C2DE but Corbyn a net -49. DeltaPoll had the respective scores at -1 and -39. Ipsos Mori had them at -13 and -45.
Yet DEs voted for Corbyn over May in 2017 and Boris also won C2s in 2019 by more than May did in 2017
Because May (and Nick Timothy) blew the election campaign.
I don't have the figures to hand but it'd be interesting to see the C2/DE split at the *local* elections in May 2017.
Anyway, there's nothing particularly magic about gaining the support of any one group, particularly when Johnson had already lost it again by the time he was ousted.
Boris did have a level of appeal to the working class no Tory leader before him could match however.
Certainly his successors, Truss and Sunak, got nowhere near that appeal with them either
The government really need to find a deal with junior doctors .
The length of the industrial action is going to lead to hundreds of thousands of cancelled appointments. Sunak can keep wanking on about immigration but the failure to tackle NHS waiting lists is going to be terminal for the Tories .
When Labour left office there were 2 million on waiting lists . Likely the Tories will have 7 million .
That will be on every election leaflet .
The government is thrashing about in its death throes. It’s only doing to do “radical” right wing policy that appeals to its ERG/ new conservative rump
The top rate of income tax reached 50% and the Equality Act came in in the last years of the Brown government too to try and shore up his left wing base
Comments
They will just blame Westminster, say they don't get enough money then Useless will hand out millions for "climate mitigation" to make himself feel relevant on the world stage.
The online cybernats on social media, some of the worst people on social media, will simply repeat and attack anyone who dares point out the limitations of the SNP.
Government is about more than winning elections
That would be a rather slick excuse for the SNP given they see migration policy as a key reason for independence.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Dec 4
I don't want to be unnecessarily rude, but Leon's Festive Feast wrap is a crime against Christmas.
Dec 4, 2023 12:44 PM UTC
https://twitter.com/rcolvile/status/1731655781223645367
This is astonishing. It just beggars belief.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/thames-water-ceo-cathryn-ross-warns-radical-action-needed-as-firm-s-debt-pile-rises-by-7-to-14-7bn/ar-AA1l145m?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=fa24f2520ded4c408fb50fef37baaa06&ei=12
Even if you thought this latest brainwave was a good idea, which I certainly don't, the idea that Ofcom is capable of enforcing some sort of Great Firewall of Britain is beyond laughable. It will work about as well as the efforts to stop music, video, and software piracy. i.e. Not at all.
It's just nonsense, and most people will deal with these sort of age challenges by ignoring or bypassing them not by handing over their identity to all sorts of dubious verification services.
https://twitter.com/timothy_stanley/status/1731770909877244082
*As in all of us who play video games
Those voters are now back voting Labour and probably won’t vote Tory again, certainly not for Sunak and Hunt. C2 skilled working class voters were also pro Boris
Checking, minimum wage in the period (2019 Q2/3) was £8.21 per hour - which is less than I assumed.
(Aside: That will be minimum wage up by 40% in 5 years to the April 2024 £11.44 number.)
I'm not going to try and guess a number, having got one wrong already
When there are essentially idiot-proof ways of bypassing such blocks the blocks are worthless. But I'm sure Ofcom will give themselves top-marks for "enforcing" these stupid regulations.
If you really want to stop people accessing things it has to be done on the client, and it has to be a whitelist. Anything else becomes an insurmountably large problem to deal with.
Even if we put down the Tories' actions to cynical malice rather than incompetence, there are many elections described as 'a good one to lose' that turn out to have been a really bad one to lose. 2010 was supposed to be one; 1979 was probably another. Both governments inherited awful positions but laid out a narrative to address those problems, implemented policies to deal with them and were able to credibly claim success in 4-5 years time. Labour could, potentially, do the same.
And even if they don't, to be able to recover at the next election means having a front bench and leader clearly capable of identifying and taking on the challenges of government - or, of having a highly capable populist narrative that successfully blames an 'other', puts Labour on the side of that 'other' and them on the side of the public. While the latter is the more likely route they'll go down, I don't see them being able to make either stick.
On top of which, if they are actually doing lasting and serious damage to the country merely to make life harder for Labour, they don't deserve to come back, ever. Let some other party replace them on the centre-right.
On which note, if Labour is struggling but being seen to be doing the right thing by the centre-left, there's always the option of electoral reform and PR, which has substantial support within Labour now.
They threw all that away when they divorced him for being a ****
The electorate were wise to do the same
The only party which could replace the Tories on the right is ReformUK and PR would make that more likely then FPTP and on present polling give Reform 50+ MPs
Will be the single biggest media release of all time when it happens, a couple of billion (with a B ) dollars in the first few weeks. I’m planning on getting the PS5 before the shortage starts all over again this time next year.
Next you'll be saying he wasn't loveable.
Client-side, permanently connected to the company network even when remote, and with whitelists allowlists rather than blacklists denylists.
Except of course that with water however badly you act, and however much you owe, someone (ie the tax payer) is going to ensure that the south east of England has something coming out of the taps.
The last YouGov leadership poll before the election gave Johnson a -4 net rating with C2DE but Corbyn a net -49. DeltaPoll had the respective scores at -1 and -39. Ipsos Mori had them at -13 and -45.
claims Thomas the Tank engine is racist, sexist, homophobicthey published Osama Bin Laden's Letter to America....https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67626218
There’s so many businesses that either don’t work with interest rates above zero, and businesses that have overburdened themselves in the last few years to the point where the company itself (as opposed to the actual day-to-day business) is now insolvent.
“The German PISA results are nothing short of a disaster.”
https://x.com/codendahl/status/1731996765786619992?s=61&t=GGp3Vs1t1kTWDiyA-odnZg
It like dancing from one 0% credit card balance transfer to another. The music is going to stop eventually.
What he's very bad at is maintaining a relationship, see the Max Hastings line about everyone who deals with him regrets it in the end. It's just a matter of time.
Hence the Metro Elite / Salt of the Earth split. Not because one or other is a better judge of character, just that more ME types have had previous dealings with BoJo, or a BoJoalike. Previous infection confers immunity. And that's now spreading, as our Red Wall correspondents report.
Maybe there was a window where Prince Hal could have become King Henry. Spring 2020, massive majority, national crisis. He had the chance to be the national hero he so clearly wanted to be.
He didn't take it. Whether that's because he couldn't or just didn't want to, barely matters.
I've pointed out before that Glasgow has a similar demographic to Newcastle. Now you can say Newcastle's relative dearth of immigrants is down to its proximity to Scotland or it's down to its distance from the south, London and established immigrant communities. If you go for the first option that means you're an idiot, but knock yourself out by all means.
How is it ok to access paid content via a back-door without paying but it's not ok to steal goods from a shop?
I don't mean to sound prissy over this - I have used 12ft Ladder, which is no different. I just wondered why those of us who wouldn't shoplift don't mind stealing internet content.
https://x.com/martin_speer/status/1731983677452681509?s=20
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
https://x.com/AwayCaludio/status/1732013975271870873?s=20
Some unhappy campers.
I don't have the figures to hand but it'd be interesting to see the C2/DE split at the *local* elections in May 2017.
Anyway, there's nothing particularly magic about gaining the support of any one group, particularly when Johnson had already lost it again by the time he was ousted.
I would also hazard a guess that digital is infinite reducibility doesn't feel as much like stealing as you stealing it doesn't mean any less is available or that for that individual item the retailer / producer hasn't lost out in the same way i.e. there is a direct cost that stock being stolen has. Where as people stealing digital views of paywalled content, it was going to be there before, during and after. But obviously the business model fails if everybody does that.
https://x.com/goodwinmj/status/1732018243877945372
Perhaps Scotland is to England what Essex is to East London?
He was elected in 2019 because of the very specific circumstances of the election, and of his opponent. A lot of people (including me, FWIW), voted Tory in the end primarily to keep Corbyn out, despite many misgivings about his record and nature.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/12/05/018235/the-uk-tries-once-again-to-age-gate-pornography
Top comment:
“Let's see... on one side of the fight is horny teen boys with a lot of time at their hands who are internet-natives and who can score big respect points from their peers if they can get them access to the forbidden pages. In league with them is the providers of that content who are very keen to offer these horny teens that content if they somehow get away with it.
“Up against them is a group of overprotective busybodies without any real problems so they meddle in stuff they don't know f**k all about, especially that dreaded internets thingamajig, they don't get it, they don't want it, their kids are glued to it and they don't like it, so it should go away, and that's pretty much all they know about it. They get support from an apathetic government that will pay any and all lip service to their "deep concerns" in the vain hope that this could convince the busybodies to vote for them again, but frankly, they couldn't give a toss about whether their regulations have any effect. If anything, it could hurt the economy of those porn businesses, so ... let's not go overboard with that, shall we?
“Yeah, it's absolutely impossible to predict how this is gonna work out.”
https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23151043&cid=64056155
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well.
Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
https://x.com/PeterDunn_OSINT/status/1732003390979215362?s=20
Why should this be any different, if you are Indy? It won’t. Scotland is a climatic toilet, for 9 months of the year, no one wants to live there
The difference in the UK is that you are a SUBSIDISED toilet, so that keeps you just about flushing; without the beneficence of super-high-IQ England, you’d be back to eating pebbles
One would like to think that Cleverly was told this information before his announcement.
My argument isn't about the rights and wrongs of pornography, or other age restricted content, it's about the futility of the measures being enforced, and also the inadvisibility of encouraging people to share private documents and information with dubious verification services, litterally telling people to do the very sort of thing that we are generally warned not to do.
The length of the industrial action is going to lead to hundreds of thousands of cancelled appointments. Sunak can keep wanking on about immigration but the failure to tackle NHS waiting lists is going to be terminal for the Tories .
When Labour left office there were 2 million on waiting lists . Likely the Tories will have 7 million .
That will be on every election leaflet .
Anyway let’s get on to why the climates of Norway and Sweden discourage immigration,
My visit to inland Sicily a few weeks back was quite mind boggling in this respect. Parts of Europe are regressing to North African levels of poverty and helplessness - and ugliness
Even in the dreariest parts of Britain - and my God they can be dreary - it isn’t quite that bad. This might just be the English language, I dunno
If any tech giant emerges from Europe (unlikely, it would be bought by MetaGoogle first) my bet is it would come from London with the Netherlands as a second possibility, after that….
I’ve been very down on America in recent years, and it does have gigantic problems; but its tech prowess is a huge and crucial advantage
The UK has not much, but it has DeepMind
The EU has….
I was not aware of the ratchet that Huhne would have been liable for costs if he had taken it to Court, and been awarded less damages by the Court than he had previously been offered in an out of court settlement.
Is that correct?
Fife, Moray, County Durham, Lincolnshire, Herefordshire and Norfolk/Suffolk should be packed full.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmEhTFjQB1g
"...everyone who follows me from
Germany has written in and asked me when
Germany was going to end so I figured
today would be a good day...
...Germany has
three unsolvable problems that are going
to destroy it as a modern economy and
maybe even nation state over the course
of the next 20 to 30 years the first one
of course is..."
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation)
- The iPhone?
- SpaceX?
- AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
Designed by bloke from Chingford
Designed by bloke from Pretoria
Global effort
One problem was that the pirated goods were better quality (no DRM etc, no forced adverts before viewing) than the retail goods and more convenient. Streaming services solved this to a large extent, by not sucking.
But he is electable. I would move it from was to still is. People are fickle. Jeremy Corbyn was nearly our PM ffs. Boris is showbiz, was then is now.
We thought we wanted a boring technocrat after the mad years of the Cons (starting with Brexit) but turns out people want charisma. This is not a post advocating his return to take or keep the Cons in power but just to say that he is electable because people like him.
But why am I debating with a guy who thinks the moon landings were faked?
I always downloaded material that was not commercially available. So people would upload Network DVD's for example. I wouldn't touch them. But old TV or contemporary TV that was not available I would download. After all that is the only way I would ever have a chance to see it.
It is morally fine in that case.
The waiting lists were going through the roof well before that .
So far.
Whichever country/corporation nails this first will race ahead, and most experts are now predicting this will happen in 3-7 years (ie before 2030)
And America is right at the head of the pack. China is about 2-3 years behind (maybe more,but quantum computing is an opaque area). The EU is almost nowhere. The UK is doing OK, we need to make sure we stay close to the USA, symbiotically linking London with Silicon Valley.
TBF to our dreadful government, this is one thing they do seem to get. Sunak is a tech bro manque, after all. I pray Starmer doesn’t fuck it up
Certainly his successors, Truss and Sunak, got nowhere near that appeal with them either
https://x.com/ipandacom/status/1731991813211521207?