Mind you, he is just 22. How can you be that good a chef, at 22?? Phenomenal. He will have a fine career
Amazing he did so well considering his heritage of enslavement.
I noticed some Moroccan flavors in his recipes so my guess is his forefathers made good their escape from Casablanca
The two I liked, the French geeky lad with the specs and the Caribbean girl, both got canned when I predicted they'd go all the way along with Ginger guy who they just seem to adore.
No one, on this show, has ever cooked dog before. Do you reckon they should ?
It would be hilarious: barbecued dog
Sadly they won’t because the BBC would lose the licence fee the next day
Yes the disappearance of French African geeky dude was a surprise. The even bigger surprise for me was when they kicked out the Arabian fusion Bath restaurant woman. One minute she was a genius, next: gone
Yes, we were shocked at that too as she sailed through her first round. The other three were poor in comparison.
If not barbecued dog then deep fried Tarantula (apparently it tastes like bacon with a texture of prawn) or Scorpion. When I worked in the rail industry with a supplier in Hong Kong one of the guys I deakt with adored scorpion.
They are keen on a wide variety of cuisine so why not.
I hope Kasae wins.
If Leon was doing his job properly he would have tried both tarantula and scorpion.
(I don't believe that Cambodians really eat tarantulas, except when starving, and suspect it is a big joke on barangs)
No, they really eat them
I saw them widely on sale during the Water Festival ten days ago in Phnom Penh. They love them, they are seen as a a treat
Being a vegetarian I wouldn't eat this anyway, but if you eat any animal too small to gut you are eating its entire digestive tract including its shit. No thanks.
It's quite common to eat whole fish (sprats, whitebait) and shellfish. Snails are usually starved for a couple of days before you eat them though, to clear out the shit.
Snipe and woodcock entrails are also commonly eaten (on toast, or they make a nice gravy) but apparently they always shit before flying so that's OK.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
I live in a seat with an 18,000 Tory majority (old boundaries) and it is quite a long time since I met anyone planning to vote Tory. Funnily enough I used to meet them all the time.
Well given even on current polls 25-30% are planning to vote Tory and more in a seat like yours, you can't be looking very hard!
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
I wouldn't let him get to you. Leon's a tongue in cheek fascist. Its just, his tongue will still be there when he's marching down Camden Road.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
I live in a seat with an 18,000 Tory majority (old boundaries) and it is quite a long time since I met anyone planning to vote Tory. Funnily enough I used to meet them all the time.
Well given even on current polls 25-30% are planning to vote Tory and more in a seat like yours, you can't be looking very hard!
Even those telling posters they're still voting Tory are far too embarrassed to admit it in public.
Has Michael Crick been living in a cave or something? How can an experienced journalist not only not know this was already the case, but find it 'bizarre'?
It was quite a bizarre apology, & I suspect the BBC will have to apologise for its apology. If we now include Jewish people among ethnic minorities then we are going to have to revise all our stats about ethnic minorities - in BBC staff, universities, & my own @tomorrowsMPs etc https://nitter.net/MichaelLCrick/status/1732687339544031312#m
Actually this is quite controversial and caused a fuss in the last census: is Judaism an ethnicity or a religion?
As far as I know it is classed as a religion not an ethnicity. When you fill in those forms that monitor ethnicity I don't think I have ever seen a White-Jewish category, just white-British, White-Irish, White-Traveller and White-Other as far as I can recall. Perhaps that's a mistake, I don't know, but certainly it seems the norm at the moment is to treat it as a religion and not an ethnicity. It raises some interesting questions. Eg Judaism passes through the mother IIRC so someone with a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish white father might consider themselves Jewish, but shouldn't they be classed as mixed: White Jewish and White Other, if Jewish is an ethnicity? Like my kids are mixed-white and Asian? And what about converts? You can't convert to be Black (people who have have got in a whole load of trouble). So if being Jewish is an ethnicity does a convert change their ethnicity? Or only their religion?
Surely being Jewish is both an ethnicity and a religion, with a big but not 100% overlap
Incidentally, to harp on about OFSTED I do wonder what will happen to Alan Derry and Chris Russell.
Difficult to imagine either will be able to remain in role if the organisation is to have a shred of credibility (well, not that it does now but if it is to try and regain it). And even harder to see who will want to give them a job in education after this.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
I live in a seat with an 18,000 Tory majority (old boundaries) and it is quite a long time since I met anyone planning to vote Tory. Funnily enough I used to meet them all the time.
Well given even on current polls 25-30% are planning to vote Tory and more in a seat like yours, you can't be looking very hard!
Maybe they are just not publicising the fact they intend to vote Tory. I'd keep quiet about it if I was.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
I live in a seat with an 18,000 Tory majority (old boundaries) and it is quite a long time since I met anyone planning to vote Tory. Funnily enough I used to meet them all the time.
Well given even on current polls 25-30% are planning to vote Tory and more in a seat like yours, you can't be looking very hard!
Maybe they are just not publicising the fact they intend to vote Tory. I'd keep quiet about it if I was.
I suspect Labour voters were also relatively quiet in the Brown years
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
The Baltic states are part of NATO, if Putin tries to take those we are at war.
The UK and France alone have bigger economies than Russia, let alone the entirety of NATO.
If we actually spent the same percentage on defence as Putin does of Russia's gdp we could easily contain him
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
The Baltic states are part of NATO, if Putin tries to take those we are at war
Question: Scottish Declaration of Independence, and Russian invasion of Latvia. Where do you send the tanks first?
Has Michael Crick been living in a cave or something? How can an experienced journalist not only not know this was already the case, but find it 'bizarre'?
It was quite a bizarre apology, & I suspect the BBC will have to apologise for its apology. If we now include Jewish people among ethnic minorities then we are going to have to revise all our stats about ethnic minorities - in BBC staff, universities, & my own @tomorrowsMPs etc https://nitter.net/MichaelLCrick/status/1732687339544031312#m
Actually this is quite controversial and caused a fuss in the last census: is Judaism an ethnicity or a religion?
As far as I know it is classed as a religion not an ethnicity. When you fill in those forms that monitor ethnicity I don't think I have ever seen a White-Jewish category, just white-British, White-Irish, White-Traveller and White-Other as far as I can recall. Perhaps that's a mistake, I don't know, but certainly it seems the norm at the moment is to treat it as a religion and not an ethnicity. It raises some interesting questions. Eg Judaism passes through the mother IIRC so someone with a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish white father might consider themselves Jewish, but shouldn't they be classed as mixed: White Jewish and White Other, if Jewish is an ethnicity? Like my kids are mixed-white and Asian? And what about converts? You can't convert to be Black (people who have have got in a whole load of trouble). So if being Jewish is an ethnicity does a convert change their ethnicity? Or only their religion?
Ethnicity monitoring forms tend to use the census questions, which indeed do not have an ethnicity category for Jewish. However, ethnicity monitoring forms don't have to use the census questions. Different people may choose to categorise ethnicity in different ways.
Judaism is generally considered an ethno-religious group, like Druze, Sikhs, Yazidis, Mandaeans, Amish, Marionites, Lipovans etc. Both ethnicity and religion are pretty woollily defined things, so there aren't any right/wrong answers.
That point in a relationship where the other person feels so let down/angry/betrayed that there's not really any point saying/doing anything, because it won't be heard. The main cure is years in the doghouse.
It happened to Major's Conservatives after September 1992. It's probably what happend between Labour and the red wall switchers.
The current crop of the Conservatives managed the genius move of doing it twice. A lot of voters were repulsed by Boris's antics, then the Trusstershambles turned off a load more.
Even if Sunak were a political and governmental genius, it probably wouldn't help much. But he is neither, so it's all moot.
Incidentally, to harp on about OFSTED I do wonder what will happen to Alan Derry and Chris Russell.
Difficult to imagine either will be able to remain in role if the organisation is to have a shred of credibility (well, not that it does now but if it is to try and regain it). And even harder to see who will want to give them a job in education after this.
Chris Russell is retiring on 31 December this year.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
Is there any profession more maligned than investment management?
It's a shame because it is a great industry to work in - the work is fascinating and varied, it is highly meritocratic and a lot more diverse than law or journalism, and it pays well.
Don't be silly, the pay's shit, which is why the recruitment targets are being miss...oh, sorry, did you mean investment fund management?
Talking of which...
Breaking🚨 The government has recruited just HALF of the secondary teacher trainees it needed this year according to Department for Education data
This is even worse than last year when 57% of the target needed were recruited
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
Have you actually heard of the concept of "self-determination" ?
Incidentally, to harp on about OFSTED I do wonder what will happen to Alan Derry and Chris Russell.
Difficult to imagine either will be able to remain in role if the organisation is to have a shred of credibility (well, not that it does now but if it is to try and regain it). And even harder to see who will want to give them a job in education after this.
Chris Russell is retiring on 31 December this year.
Well, that simplifies one. Spielman of course goes at the same time.
Is there any profession more maligned than investment management?
It's a shame because it is a great industry to work in - the work is fascinating and varied, it is highly meritocratic and a lot more diverse than law or journalism, and it pays well.
Don't be silly, the pay's shit, which is why the recruitment targets are being miss...oh, sorry, did you mean investment fund management?
Talking of which...
Breaking🚨 The government has recruited just HALF of the secondary teacher trainees it needed this year according to Department for Education data
This is even worse than last year when 57% of the target needed were recruited
A Improve pay and conditions B Import immigrants to do the job C Run out of teachers
Choose at least one.
This lot are quite capable of trying to do all three at once and failing spectacularly in all of them.
Incidentally English is now a shortage subject due to a collapse in the numbers taking it at A-level and degree level. And why's that? Oh yes, the new GCSE is putting children off it.
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
The Baltic states are part of NATO, if Putin tries to take those we are at war.
The UK and France alone have bigger economies than Russia, let alone the entirety of NATO.
If we actually spent the same percentage on defence as Putin does of Russia's gdp we could easily contain him
Look at the map. The Baltics are an eerie, freakish appendage. A kind of NATO panhandle - it’s better to accept reality and give them back to Putin, I suspect most Estonians would be fine with this, it’s just a tiny but vocal minority that we hear in the West
Eastern Poland is trickier. Up to the Poles, lots of it is just cottages and sheds, and weird hopping chickens - I’ve been there and talked with the locals. It’s no great loss if Vlad insists
Has Michael Crick been living in a cave or something? How can an experienced journalist not only not know this was already the case, but find it 'bizarre'?
It was quite a bizarre apology, & I suspect the BBC will have to apologise for its apology. If we now include Jewish people among ethnic minorities then we are going to have to revise all our stats about ethnic minorities - in BBC staff, universities, & my own @tomorrowsMPs etc https://nitter.net/MichaelLCrick/status/1732687339544031312#m
Actually this is quite controversial and caused a fuss in the last census: is Judaism an ethnicity or a religion?
As far as I know it is classed as a religion not an ethnicity. When you fill in those forms that monitor ethnicity I don't think I have ever seen a White-Jewish category, just white-British, White-Irish, White-Traveller and White-Other as far as I can recall. Perhaps that's a mistake, I don't know, but certainly it seems the norm at the moment is to treat it as a religion and not an ethnicity. It raises some interesting questions. Eg Judaism passes through the mother IIRC so someone with a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish white father might consider themselves Jewish, but shouldn't they be classed as mixed: White Jewish and White Other, if Jewish is an ethnicity? Like my kids are mixed-white and Asian? And what about converts? You can't convert to be Black (people who have have got in a whole load of trouble). So if being Jewish is an ethnicity does a convert change their ethnicity? Or only their religion?
Ethnicity monitoring forms tend to use the census questions, which indeed do not have an ethnicity category for Jewish. However, ethnicity monitoring forms don't have to use the census questions. Different people may choose to categorise ethnicity in different ways.
Judaism is generally considered an ethno-religious group, like Druze, Sikhs, Yazidis, Mandaeans, Amish, Marionites, Lipovans etc. Both ethnicity and religion are pretty woollily defined things, so there aren't any right/wrong answers.
That list, with one fairly glaring exception, shows how being an ethnoreligious group makes you particularly vulnerable to persecution.
Surrounding groups have two reasons to see them as different or suspicious, religion and culture/ethnicity, and by their nature they tend to be introspective self-contained societies, which also makes them an easy out-group.
The one glaring exception being the Sikhs, I think probably because they’ve fought back hard in the past, and have their own defined homeland.
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
The Baltic states are part of NATO, if Putin tries to take those we are at war.
The UK and France alone have bigger economies than Russia, let alone the entirety of NATO.
If we actually spent the same percentage on defence as Putin does of Russia's gdp we could easily contain him
Look at the map. The Baltics are a weird freakish appendage. A kind of NATO panhandle - it’s better to accept reality and give them back to Putin, I suspect most Estonians would be fine with this, it’s just a tiny but vocal minority that we hear in the West
Eastern Poland is trickier. Up to the Poles, lots of it is just cottages and sheds, and weird hopping chickens - I’ve been there and talked with the locals. It’s no great loss if Vlad insists
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
The Baltic states are part of NATO, if Putin tries to take those we are at war
Question: Scottish Declaration of Independence, and Russian invasion of Latvia. Where do you send the tanks first?
The former if an armed revolt as the latter we will do as part of a NATO coalition, whereas we have to maintain order in the former ourselves
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
Have you actually heard of the concept of "self-determination" ?
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
I know you are just trolling, but that is pretty embarrassing even so. Go back to your ladyboys.
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
Have you actually heard of the concept of "self-determination" ?
Really what has happened to the Conservatives? They’ve gone completely mad. The list of ‘can you imagine what xxxxx would think?’ is infinite
They assume their remaining voters are ignorant morons and they are tret accordingly. The horror for the Tories is that the moron vote has scabbed off to ReFUK and the rest aren't actually morons.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Not to mention my own chances in Aberdeenshire North and Moray East. I have some bar chart ideas brewing...
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
The Baltic states are part of NATO, if Putin tries to take those we are at war.
The UK and France alone have bigger economies than Russia, let alone the entirety of NATO.
If we actually spent the same percentage on defence as Putin does of Russia's gdp we could easily contain him
Look at the map. The Baltics are an eerie, freakish appendage. A kind of NATO panhandle - it’s better to accept reality and give them back to Putin, I suspect most Estonians would be fine with this, it’s just a tiny but vocal minority that we hear in the West
Eastern Poland is trickier. Up to the Poles, lots of it is just cottages and sheds, and weird hopping chickens - I’ve been there and talked with the locals. It’s no great loss if Vlad insists
Prague is worth saving
No, because once you allow Putin to take one or two NATO states without military retaliation swiftly he will try and seize the lot.
Of course as soon as Hitler took Poland that started WW2 (not that I think Putin is mad enough to go beyond Ukraine into NATO states even if he captured Kyiv)
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
The Baltic states are part of NATO, if Putin tries to take those we are at war.
The UK and France alone have bigger economies than Russia, let alone the entirety of NATO.
If we actually spent the same percentage on defence as Putin does of Russia's gdp we could easily contain him
Look at the map. The Baltics are an eerie, freakish appendage. A kind of NATO panhandle - it’s better to accept reality and give them back to Putin, I suspect most Estonians would be fine with this, it’s just a tiny but vocal minority that we hear in the West
Eastern Poland is trickier. Up to the Poles, lots of it is just cottages and sheds, and weird hopping chickens - I’ve been there and talked with the locals. It’s no great loss if Vlad insists
Prague is worth saving
So you've reverted to where you started out, as Putin's little helper.
What are the lines of best fit for the other parties?
Extrapolation has its limits, as extending a few more years would see the Tories in negative territory - votes only from Zombie Undead.
That is no way to refer to the pensioner vote. Show a little more respect for your compatriots.
I notice that your hagiographic post on the previous thread has now got 9 'likes'! Either I don't know what I'm talking about or 9 posters are trying to give me that message (or maybe it's just the Tory posters last hurrah)
As I recall it, David's post was, and I paraphrase, saying 'people who are saying absolutely everything is terrible are over-egging it'. That's not a hagiography. Apart from by the very special standards of the sort of people who, for example, considered anything less than screaming hatred of Boris all the time to be being a Boris fanboi.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
The Baltic states are part of NATO, if Putin tries to take those we are at war.
The UK and France alone have bigger economies than Russia, let alone the entirety of NATO.
If we actually spent the same percentage on defence as Putin does of Russia's gdp we could easily contain him
Look at the map. The Baltics are an eerie, freakish appendage. A kind of NATO panhandle - it’s better to accept reality and give them back to Putin, I suspect most Estonians would be fine with this, it’s just a tiny but vocal minority that we hear in the West
Eastern Poland is trickier. Up to the Poles, lots of it is just cottages and sheds, and weird hopping chickens - I’ve been there and talked with the locals. It’s no great loss if Vlad insists
Prague is worth saving
So you've reverted to where you started out, as Putin's little helper.
Have you even lived in Riga, or Wroclaw? I doubt it
I spent many months shuttling between the two trading the hopping chickens. You know nothing but dog love
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Not to mention my own chances in Aberdeenshire North and Moray East. I have some bar chart ideas brewing...
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
The Baltic states are part of NATO, if Putin tries to take those we are at war.
The UK and France alone have bigger economies than Russia, let alone the entirety of NATO.
If we actually spent the same percentage on defence as Putin does of Russia's gdp we could easily contain him
Look at the map. The Baltics are an eerie, freakish appendage. A kind of NATO panhandle - it’s better to accept reality and give them back to Putin, I suspect most Estonians would be fine with this, it’s just a tiny but vocal minority that we hear in the West
Eastern Poland is trickier. Up to the Poles, lots of it is just cottages and sheds, and weird hopping chickens - I’ve been there and talked with the locals. It’s no great loss if Vlad insists
Strategically I do actually wonder if Sunak’s best bet is to call a Stop The Boats election now.
The alternative simply seems to be to run the clock down while being utterly dysfunctional and lurching from crisis to crisis.
Of course, it being Sunak, he will go for the strategically poorest choice, so he’ll keep on struggling to get his policy through, unsuccessfully, and get no credit whatsoever.
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
The Baltic states are part of NATO, if Putin tries to take those we are at war.
The UK and France alone have bigger economies than Russia, let alone the entirety of NATO.
If we actually spent the same percentage on defence as Putin does of Russia's gdp we could easily contain him
Look at the map. The Baltics are an eerie, freakish appendage. A kind of NATO panhandle - it’s better to accept reality and give them back to Putin, I suspect most Estonians would be fine with this, it’s just a tiny but vocal minority that we hear in the West
Eastern Poland is trickier. Up to the Poles, lots of it is just cottages and sheds, and weird hopping chickens - I’ve been there and talked with the locals. It’s no great loss if Vlad insists
Prague is worth saving
So you've reverted to where you started out, as Putin's little helper.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
The Baltic states are part of NATO, if Putin tries to take those we are at war.
The UK and France alone have bigger economies than Russia, let alone the entirety of NATO.
If we actually spent the same percentage on defence as Putin does of Russia's gdp we could easily contain him
Look at the map. The Baltics are an eerie, freakish appendage. A kind of NATO panhandle - it’s better to accept reality and give them back to Putin, I suspect most Estonians would be fine with this, it’s just a tiny but vocal minority that we hear in the West
Eastern Poland is trickier. Up to the Poles, lots of it is just cottages and sheds, and weird hopping chickens - I’ve been there and talked with the locals. It’s no great loss if Vlad insists
Prague is worth saving
Keep doing that and you will be back in hospital again... So little wit, so much massive tosser.
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
The Baltic states are part of NATO, if Putin tries to take those we are at war.
The UK and France alone have bigger economies than Russia, let alone the entirety of NATO.
If we actually spent the same percentage on defence as Putin does of Russia's gdp we could easily contain him
Look at the map. The Baltics are an eerie, freakish appendage. A kind of NATO panhandle - it’s better to accept reality and give them back to Putin, I suspect most Estonians would be fine with this, it’s just a tiny but vocal minority that we hear in the West
Eastern Poland is trickier. Up to the Poles, lots of it is just cottages and sheds, and weird hopping chickens - I’ve been there and talked with the locals. It’s no great loss if Vlad insists
Prague is worth saving
Keep doing that and you will be back in hospital again... So little wit, so much massive tosser.
lol. Are you actually making a threat to hospitalise me?
There has been a slight improvement in Conservative polling misfortunes this week though it's more a case of Labour losing ground and slipping back to the low 40s. The LLG vs Con/Ref numbers on Savanta this week are 57-35 from 60-33 last week.
My theory - for what little it's worth - falling fuel prices. We've commented on here about Conservative prospects tracking petrol prices and with prices falling perhaps some are thinking the worst is over in terms of the cost of living crisis.
All of this of course before last night's nonsense which may or may not have much impact. I was thinking we might see a 30% Conservative VI on More In Common next week, which would be the first since (oddly enough) More In Common in mid October.
We need to see if Techne, YouGov and Ipsos-MORI all continue to show a small Conservative recovery and Labour trending back towards 40%.
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
The Baltic states are part of NATO, if Putin tries to take those we are at war.
The UK and France alone have bigger economies than Russia, let alone the entirety of NATO.
If we actually spent the same percentage on defence as Putin does of Russia's gdp we could easily contain him
Look at the map. The Baltics are an eerie, freakish appendage. A kind of NATO panhandle - it’s better to accept reality and give them back to Putin, I suspect most Estonians would be fine with this, it’s just a tiny but vocal minority that we hear in the West
Eastern Poland is trickier. Up to the Poles, lots of it is just cottages and sheds, and weird hopping chickens - I’ve been there and talked with the locals. It’s no great loss if Vlad insists
Prague is worth saving
By that argument we should slso let Putin have most of the North of England, Slough and Luton as well.
We can't condemn places to tyranny just because they're not Primrose Hill, tempting though it sometimes is.
Really what has happened to the Conservatives? They’ve gone completely mad. The list of ‘can you imagine what xxxxx would think?’ is infinite
They assume their remaining voters are ignorant morons and they are tret accordingly. The horror for the Tories is that the moron vote has scabbed off to ReFUK and the rest aren't actually morons.
And it's the wrong battle for the image, surely? The caption should be 'This is what the BBC think of your request not to ramp up the license fee'.
Really what has happened to the Conservatives? They’ve gone completely mad. The list of ‘can you imagine what xxxxx would think?’ is infinite
They've got some overexcited teenager on twitter duty this week.
Sort of like our Saturday morning chums, only without the talent.
This is fine for fringe parties who need the publicity/clicks - had Farage’s UKIP done it in 2015 it would have been a bit much but forgivable, but not the Conservatives. I’d imagine lifelong members of the party who haven’t left will be soon
Surely this is the kind of thing that you’d get someone sympathetic to your cause but not actually attached to it to post, get the message across with none of the comeback. Say ‘not how I’d have put it but I see how they’re feeling’
I look forward to future emergency legislation this parliament, such as:
- Sunak is, by law, defined to be above average in height - Sunak's dad could beat Starmer's dad in a fight - The general public is very appreciative for the last 13 years' of Conservative rule, especially the last one
Cons had a lead in at least one opinion poll in each of the last 12 months running into the 2015 GE and had at least one in 15 of the last 17 months running into the 1992 GE.
Lab's last lead over 15% was 17 months out from 1992 and was 25 months out from 2015. Lab had only two leads over 10% in the 12 months running into both 1992 and 2015.
Polls can be wrong but they are no more wrong now than they were then. The Cons are clearly in a much worse position. It is not quite 1997 but it need not be. Anything close to 1997 and over half the Con MPs lose their seats.
The Con reaction. They swerve from 'flagship policy' to 'flagship policy', from theme to theme, from strategy to strategy. This does not make them look innovative and full of new ideas. It makes them look indecisive and weak.
The folk at No 10 are way off being able to rescue this. They are out-of-touch to cringeworthy degrees. To me only a 2010 style event could do that. In other words a third party surging forward and muddying the waters. It seems odd to say it but maybe the Cons last hope is Reform UK?
Really what has happened to the Conservatives? They’ve gone completely mad. The list of ‘can you imagine what xxxxx would think?’ is infinite
They assume their remaining voters are ignorant morons and they are tret accordingly. The horror for the Tories is that the moron vote has scabbed off to ReFUK and the rest aren't actually morons.
And it's the wrong battle for the image, surely? The caption should be 'This is what the BBC think of your request not to ramp up the license fee'.
They also should have put the BBC News logo on the image, otherwise unless you read the caption it looks like the gesture is on behalf of the Conservatives.
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
The Baltic states are part of NATO, if Putin tries to take those we are at war.
The UK and France alone have bigger economies than Russia, let alone the entirety of NATO.
If we actually spent the same percentage on defence as Putin does of Russia's gdp we could easily contain him
Look at the map. The Baltics are an eerie, freakish appendage. A kind of NATO panhandle - it’s better to accept reality and give them back to Putin, I suspect most Estonians would be fine with this, it’s just a tiny but vocal minority that we hear in the West
Eastern Poland is trickier. Up to the Poles, lots of it is just cottages and sheds, and weird hopping chickens - I’ve been there and talked with the locals. It’s no great loss if Vlad insists
Prague is worth saving
By that argument we should slso let Putin have most of the North of England, Slough and Luton as well.
We can't condemn places to tyranny just because they're not Primrose Hill, tempting though it sometimes is.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
I think we should offer up Leon's flat in Camden as the first place to be annexed by Putin.
Isn't the North Korean Embassy a little detached house somewhere in North London? In which case, a reduced Russia might want to use Leon's gaff for its embassy.
Although he'd have to fight Corbyn for the honour...
TL;DR: we’re more stuffed than we think we are because of the global homogeneity we have created within different but interconnected systems. As climate change bites (probably harder than we think) crises will spread more quickly than ever before unless we diversify to combat that homogeneity.
And because almost no one is talking (or even thinking) about stuff like this, we really are fucked.
Really what has happened to the Conservatives? They’ve gone completely mad. The list of ‘can you imagine what xxxxx would think?’ is infinite
They assume their remaining voters are ignorant morons and they are tret accordingly. The horror for the Tories is that the moron vote has scabbed off to ReFUK and the rest aren't actually morons.
And it's the wrong battle for the image, surely? The caption should be 'This is what the BBC think of your request not to ramp up the license fee'.
They also should have put the BBC News logo on the image, otherwise unless you read the caption it looks like the gesture is on behalf of the Conservatives.
Dipshits are going to create a brain drain aren't they?
They've put the bar at a point that excludes Oxbridge Research Fellows, which shows how insane it is.
But it will be a nation fit for be global bankers, even quite junior ones, and that's the main thing.
The bigger issue is going to be what they do with care, which is going to deteriorate, from the already stressed position, very quickly.
10% Minimum wage increase without corresponding budget increase Impact of minimum wage on differentials - why work in the care sector for MW or just above when you could be in a supermarket instead? Massive drop in overseas recruitment Ever growing number of people needing care Side effects from NHS also struggling
Of course the answer is stick their head in the sands for a year and it will be someone elses problem.
The contemptible Putin fanboy drivel on display here this evening needs a heavy corrective.
If you want to compare Ukraine to another Western European country, it could be Ireland, and for at least four centuries there has been a different political sense in Ukraine, whether Cossack or Ukrainian, than that of Russia, That many Ukrainians speak Russian does not make them Russian, any more than English speakers in Ireland, or Australia or wherever, are English.
The problem is that Russia does not have an analogue. It is an Imperium, not a nation. It refuses to accept that its economic and political system, of theft and corruption, is profoundly unattractive and it demands recognition for a cultural superiority it does not possess. Indeed, as the demonisation of minorities, Gays in Russia, Jews in NSDAP Germany, shows, the parallels with fascism are now uncomfortably exact.
Putin will attack the West, How do we know? Because he has been doing it for more than 20 years.
A campaign of bribery, propaganda, subversion, cyberattacks and the whole panoply of Hybrid war have been focussed on the political systems of the democratic world and beyond. From the Gilets Jeunes to the Bad Boys of Brexit, there has been covert Russian activity for many years. So Ukraine is no "more a far away country of which we know nothing" than Poland or Czechoslovakia were.
The fact that the subversion of Russia has now successfully delayed further assistance to Ukraine should not discourage us, it should galvanise those who care about democratic freedom at home as well as abroad, to redouble our efforts.
Estonians need no reminder. At the border crossing between Estonia and Russia, the Putinists have put up a poster- "Russian borders have no limits". Both here and in Poland, we are preparing for war,
We have an opportunity to put Putin in his box now. If we do not, the survivors will ask why we did not destroy Russian neo-fascism while we had the chance and before millions died in the destruction of Western cities after a botched, but still partly successful Russian nuclear strike.
Cowardice does not make you stronger or safer. We need to accept that and when idiotic fools proclaim "Putin is right" we put them in the same box as all the other enemies of democracy, freedom and justice.
No one wants nuclear war, not even Putin
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
The Baltic states are part of NATO, if Putin tries to take those we are at war.
The UK and France alone have bigger economies than Russia, let alone the entirety of NATO.
If we actually spent the same percentage on defence as Putin does of Russia's gdp we could easily contain him
Look at the map. The Baltics are a weird freakish appendage. A kind of NATO panhandle - it’s better to accept reality and give them back to Putin, I suspect most Estonians would be fine with this, it’s just a tiny but vocal minority that we hear in the West
Eastern Poland is trickier. Up to the Poles, lots of it is just cottages and sheds, and weird hopping chickens - I’ve been there and talked with the locals. It’s no great loss if Vlad insists
Prague is worth saving
OK, what has Bangkok supplied you with this time?
Methinks it’s Thai marching powder washed down with Buckfast.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Not to mention my own chances in Aberdeenshire North and Moray East. I have some bar chart ideas brewing...
Dipshits are going to create a brain drain aren't they?
They've put the bar at a point that excludes Oxbridge Research Fellows, which shows how insane it is.
But it will be a nation fit for be global bankers, even quite junior ones, and that's the main thing.
Even if you earned a bit above it, would you relocate your family now if you knew the government could arbitrarily raise it again and kick you out a year or two down the road? The whole thing just illustrates the Tories' mindset on this - anyone who comes here should consider themselves lucky and be ready to jump through any hoops for the honour of working here. Whereas in reality we are competing globally for talent and our businesses are often struggling to find people who want to come. I do sometimes find the whole discussion on this topic embarrassingly parochial, including on here. Talk to people who are globally mobile, who have options as to where they live and pay their taxes, and see how far the perception of this country has slipped in the last decade.
I think we should offer up Leon's flat in Camden as the first place to be annexed by Putin.
Isn't the North Korean Embassy a little detached house somewhere in North London? In which case, a reduced Russia might want to use Leon's gaff for its embassy.
Although he'd have to fight Corbyn for the honour...
It's on the North Circular Road, not far from Chiswick.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
And pre 1997 the Tories held most seats if not control in most Surrey councils. Devon has never been true blue Tory in the way Surrey has, even in the 19th century the Liberals won seats in Devon on a nonconfomist ticket and pre LDs North Devon was Jeremy Thorpe's seat as Liberal leader for many years. In 1997 the LDs won lots of seats in Devon but every Surrey seat stayed Tory blue despite Major's landslide defeat nationally (even in 2001 only Guildford went LD and went blue again in 2005).
The shock would be if the LDs won more MPs in Surrey than Devon, not the reverse and Brexit certainly makes it possible.
Even on a larger than national swing in the West you would expect the Tories to hold most seats there as their majorities are so big in most seats there now
Is there any profession more maligned than investment management?
It's a shame because it is a great industry to work in - the work is fascinating and varied, it is highly meritocratic and a lot more diverse than law or journalism, and it pays well.
Don't be silly, the pay's shit, which is why the recruitment targets are being miss...oh, sorry, did you mean investment fund management?
Talking of which...
Breaking🚨 The government has recruited just HALF of the secondary teacher trainees it needed this year according to Department for Education data
This is even worse than last year when 57% of the target needed were recruited
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
Is there any profession more maligned than investment management?
It's a shame because it is a great industry to work in - the work is fascinating and varied, it is highly meritocratic and a lot more diverse than law or journalism, and it pays well.
Don't be silly, the pay's shit, which is why the recruitment targets are being miss...oh, sorry, did you mean investment fund management?
Talking of which...
Breaking🚨 The government has recruited just HALF of the secondary teacher trainees it needed this year according to Department for Education data
This is even worse than last year when 57% of the target needed were recruited
Is there any profession more maligned than investment management?
It's a shame because it is a great industry to work in - the work is fascinating and varied, it is highly meritocratic and a lot more diverse than law or journalism, and it pays well.
Don't be silly, the pay's shit, which is why the recruitment targets are being miss...oh, sorry, did you mean investment fund management?
Talking of which...
Breaking🚨 The government has recruited just HALF of the secondary teacher trainees it needed this year according to Department for Education data
This is even worse than last year when 57% of the target needed were recruited
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Is there any profession more maligned than investment management?
It's a shame because it is a great industry to work in - the work is fascinating and varied, it is highly meritocratic and a lot more diverse than law or journalism, and it pays well.
Don't be silly, the pay's shit, which is why the recruitment targets are being miss...oh, sorry, did you mean investment fund management?
Talking of which...
Breaking🚨 The government has recruited just HALF of the secondary teacher trainees it needed this year according to Department for Education data
This is even worse than last year when 57% of the target needed were recruited
A Improve pay and conditions B Import immigrants to do the job C Run out of teachers
Choose at least one.
Option 4: reduce the qualifications and training necessary to be a teacher.
Option 5: Trash the economy and increase unemployment, teacher training colleges always see a surge in applications in a recession, as they did post 2008.
In a booming economy a teacher's pay looks less enticing than a high paid job in the City or private sector company for a graduate, in a recession however a teacher's pay is a secure regular wage
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
I think we should offer up Leon's flat in Camden as the first place to be annexed by Putin.
Isn't the North Korean Embassy a little detached house somewhere in North London? In which case, a reduced Russia might want to use Leon's gaff for its embassy.
Although he'd have to fight Corbyn for the honour...
It's on the North Circular Road, not far from Chiswick.
Soon they can apply for asylum and upgrade to Rwanda.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
I suspect you are right. Quite a lot of the movement Tory to LD in the SE happened in 2017/19. Many people there never wanted Brexit and were annoyed. Not to say LDs won't flip seats where they came quite close in 2019 - they are almost certain to if Tory vote is at 30%-ish.
But SW was Brexit-y and "Bollocks to Brexit" was a disaster for LDs in 2019. However, now that it's happened, people are absolutely furious - none of the promised gains have happened, and they aren't even a northern area that has been wooed. In short, they've been royally f***ed over.
Not actually sure LDs will gain that many as they start from so far back. But the swings will be HUGE.
I think we should offer up Leon's flat in Camden as the first place to be annexed by Putin.
Isn't the North Korean Embassy a little detached house somewhere in North London? In which case, a reduced Russia might want to use Leon's gaff for its embassy.
Although he'd have to fight Corbyn for the honour...
West London, it's on the edge of Gunnerbsury Park by Ealing, IIRC.
Is there any profession more maligned than investment management?
It's a shame because it is a great industry to work in - the work is fascinating and varied, it is highly meritocratic and a lot more diverse than law or journalism, and it pays well.
Don't be silly, the pay's shit, which is why the recruitment targets are being miss...oh, sorry, did you mean investment fund management?
Talking of which...
Breaking🚨 The government has recruited just HALF of the secondary teacher trainees it needed this year according to Department for Education data
This is even worse than last year when 57% of the target needed were recruited
Is there any profession more maligned than investment management?
It's a shame because it is a great industry to work in - the work is fascinating and varied, it is highly meritocratic and a lot more diverse than law or journalism, and it pays well.
Don't be silly, the pay's shit, which is why the recruitment targets are being miss...oh, sorry, did you mean investment fund management?
Talking of which...
Breaking🚨 The government has recruited just HALF of the secondary teacher trainees it needed this year according to Department for Education data
This is even worse than last year when 57% of the target needed were recruited
I think we should offer up Leon's flat in Camden as the first place to be annexed by Putin.
Isn't the North Korean Embassy a little detached house somewhere in North London? In which case, a reduced Russia might want to use Leon's gaff for its embassy.
Although he'd have to fight Corbyn for the honour...
It's on the North Circular Road, not far from Chiswick.
Soon they can apply for asylum and upgrade to Rwanda.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
Two of which do actually have yellow walls as they’re build from oolitic limestone.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Not to mention my own chances in Aberdeenshire North and Moray East. I have some bar chart ideas brewing...
Is there any profession more maligned than investment management?
It's a shame because it is a great industry to work in - the work is fascinating and varied, it is highly meritocratic and a lot more diverse than law or journalism, and it pays well.
Don't be silly, the pay's shit, which is why the recruitment targets are being miss...oh, sorry, did you mean investment fund management?
Talking of which...
Breaking🚨 The government has recruited just HALF of the secondary teacher trainees it needed this year according to Department for Education data
This is even worse than last year when 57% of the target needed were recruited
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
Two of which do actually have yellow walls as they’re build from oolitic limestone.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
And Spa Towns from Bath to Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham to Harrogate
I think we should offer up Leon's flat in Camden as the first place to be annexed by Putin.
Isn't the North Korean Embassy a little detached house somewhere in North London? In which case, a reduced Russia might want to use Leon's gaff for its embassy.
Although he'd have to fight Corbyn for the honour...
It's on the North Circular Road, not far from Chiswick.
Soon they can apply for asylum and upgrade to Rwanda.
Comments
Snipe and woodcock entrails are also commonly eaten (on toast, or they make a nice gravy) but apparently they always shit before flying so that's OK.
Even those telling posters they're still voting Tory are far too embarrassed to admit it in public.
Difficult to imagine either will be able to remain in role if the organisation is to have a shred of credibility (well, not that it does now but if it is to try and regain it). And even harder to see who will want to give them a job in education after this.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
Just 12 of the top 50 LD target seats are in the SW now (and that includes wealthy spa town Cheltenham)
https://www.electionpolling.co.uk/battleground/targets/liberal-democrat
A fair exchange would be handing back the Baltic states and eastern Ukraine to Moscow, they were unjustly taken and they can’t be easily defended. It’s a sad fact, but a fact. Then we must fortify the remaining, defensible frontier of NATO against Muscovy
Unfortunately it applies to all parties.
The UK and France alone have bigger economies than Russia, let alone the entirety of NATO.
If we actually spent the same percentage on defence as Putin does of Russia's gdp we could easily contain him
Sort of like our Saturday morning chums, only without the talent.
Judaism is generally considered an ethno-religious group, like Druze, Sikhs, Yazidis, Mandaeans, Amish, Marionites, Lipovans etc. Both ethnicity and religion are pretty woollily defined things, so there aren't any right/wrong answers.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
Breaking🚨
The government has recruited just HALF of the secondary teacher trainees it needed this year according to Department for Education data
This is even worse than last year when 57% of the target needed were recruited
https://twitter.com/matilda__martin/status/1732697308322504881
So the options are:
A Improve pay and conditions
B Import immigrants to do the job
C Run out of teachers
Choose at least one.
Incidentally English is now a shortage subject due to a collapse in the numbers taking it at A-level and degree level. And why's that? Oh yes, the new GCSE is putting children off it.
Grrrrr.
Eastern Poland is trickier. Up to the Poles, lots of it is just cottages and sheds, and weird hopping chickens - I’ve been there and talked with the locals. It’s no great loss if Vlad insists
Prague is worth saving
Surrounding groups have two reasons to see them as different or suspicious, religion and culture/ethnicity, and by their nature they tend to be introspective self-contained societies, which also makes them an easy out-group.
The one glaring exception being the Sikhs, I think probably because they’ve fought back hard in the past, and have their own defined homeland.
Of course as soon as Hitler took Poland that started WW2 (not that I think Putin is mad enough to go beyond Ukraine into NATO states even if he captured Kyiv)
Allow some nuance, Roger!
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/07/everything-is-in-jeopardy-how-new-uk-visa-rules-are-tearing-families-apart
Dipshits are going to create a brain drain aren't they?
I spent many months shuttling between the two trading the hopping chickens. You know nothing but dog love
The alternative simply seems to be to run the clock down while being utterly dysfunctional and lurching from crisis to crisis.
Of course, it being Sunak, he will go for the strategically poorest choice, so he’ll keep on struggling to get his policy through, unsuccessfully, and get no credit whatsoever.
…Not to take Leon seriously when he’s drunk.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
There has been a slight improvement in Conservative polling misfortunes this week though it's more a case of Labour losing ground and slipping back to the low 40s. The LLG vs Con/Ref numbers on Savanta this week are 57-35 from 60-33 last week.
My theory - for what little it's worth - falling fuel prices. We've commented on here about Conservative prospects tracking petrol prices and with prices falling perhaps some are thinking the worst is over in terms of the cost of living crisis.
All of this of course before last night's nonsense which may or may not have much impact. I was thinking we might see a 30% Conservative VI on More In Common next week, which would be the first since (oddly enough) More In Common in mid October.
We need to see if Techne, YouGov and Ipsos-MORI all continue to show a small Conservative recovery and Labour trending back towards 40%.
But it will be a nation fit for be global bankers, even quite junior ones, and that's the main thing.
We can't condemn places to tyranny just because they're not Primrose Hill, tempting though it sometimes is.
https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salary/Oxford-University-Professor-Salaries-E12941_D_KO18,27.htm#:~:text=How much does a Professor,67,959 - £242,511 per year.
Surely this is the kind of thing that you’d get someone sympathetic to your cause but not actually attached to it to post, get the message across with none of the comeback. Say ‘not how I’d have put it but I see how they’re feeling’
- Sunak is, by law, defined to be above average in height
- Sunak's dad could beat Starmer's dad in a fight
- The general public is very appreciative for the last 13 years' of Conservative rule, especially the last one
...and other the critical issues of the day.
But I want to know about the brilliant, expensive, sharpenable knives that people were talking about here
I want to get my Italian brother a really good knife
For cooking, not revenge
Cons had a lead in at least one opinion poll in each of the last 12 months running into the 2015 GE and had at least one in 15 of the last 17 months running into the 1992 GE.
Lab's last lead over 15% was 17 months out from 1992 and was 25 months out from 2015. Lab had only two leads over 10% in the 12 months running into both 1992 and 2015.
Polls can be wrong but they are no more wrong now than they were then. The Cons are clearly in a much worse position. It is not quite 1997 but it need not be. Anything close to 1997 and over half the Con MPs lose their seats.
The Con reaction. They swerve from 'flagship policy' to 'flagship policy', from theme to theme, from strategy to strategy. This does not make them look innovative and full of new ideas. It makes them look indecisive and weak.
The folk at No 10 are way off being able to rescue this. They are out-of-touch to cringeworthy degrees. To me only a 2010 style event could do that. In other words a third party surging forward and muddying the waters. It seems odd to say it but maybe the Cons last hope is Reform UK?
Well done, have a biscuit.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
Although he'd have to fight Corbyn for the honour...
ULEZ as wedge issueCounter-terror police investigating possible use of IED.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/metropolitan-police-ulez-camera-vandalism-london-destruction-sidcup-b1125391.html
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23920997/polycrisis-climate-pandemic-population-connectivity
TL;DR: we’re more stuffed than we think we are because of the global homogeneity we have created within different but interconnected systems. As climate change bites (probably harder than we think) crises will spread more quickly than ever before unless we diversify to combat that homogeneity.
And because almost no one is talking (or even thinking) about stuff like this, we really are fucked.
10% Minimum wage increase without corresponding budget increase
Impact of minimum wage on differentials - why work in the care sector for MW or just above when you could be in a supermarket instead?
Massive drop in overseas recruitment
Ever growing number of people needing care
Side effects from NHS also struggling
Of course the answer is stick their head in the sands for a year and it will be someone elses problem.
I do sometimes find the whole discussion on this topic embarrassingly parochial, including on here. Talk to people who are globally mobile, who have options as to where they live and pay their taxes, and see how far the perception of this country has slipped in the last decade.
The shock would be if the LDs won more MPs in Surrey than Devon, not the reverse and Brexit certainly makes it possible.
Even on a larger than national swing in the West you would expect the Tories to hold most seats there as their majorities are so big in most seats there now
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
In a booming economy a teacher's pay looks less enticing than a high paid job in the City or private sector company for a graduate, in a recession however a teacher's pay is a secure regular wage
But SW was Brexit-y and "Bollocks to Brexit" was a disaster for LDs in 2019. However, now that it's happened, people are absolutely furious - none of the promised gains have happened, and they aren't even a northern area that has been wooed. In short, they've been royally f***ed over.
Not actually sure LDs will gain that many as they start from so far back. But the swings will be HUGE.
(BBC on High Court case.)
When you are a prince of the blood royal, and 5th in line to the throne there is a fairly obvious path to this ambition.
Alternatively replace teachers with AI as seen in many sic-fi shows.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
She got what she wanted from marrying Harry, a move from C list to A list and income to match and he then had to follow her home