The Tory Party is so far to the right that Penny Mordaunt is apparently "woke". As I've said many times, this word has lost all definition. It now means anything I don't like.
If she didn’t want to be seen as ‘woke’, then perhaps she shouldn’t have had her flagship legislation on equalities written by Stonewall, and then lied about it when challenged during the leadership campaign.
Who flipping cares? Whatever the merits, this is a fringe issue. It's like disqualifying Rishi Sunak for drinking Coke not Pepsi.
IIRC it was the largest single Tory Commons rebellion of this Parliament, and the legislation was eventually withdrawn to avoid multiple Cabinet-level resignations.
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
Here is a list of wars that Russia has instigated since 1990:
Georgian Civil War South Ossetian War War in Abkhazia Transnistria War Tajikistan Civil War First Chechen War Second Chechan War Georgia 2008 Ukraine (2014) Ukraine (2022)
And America? Heck, New Labour was said to have had seven wars under Tony Blair. It's a big bad world out there and we've been mixing it too.
Since 1990? It hasn't instigated many, has it, particularly on the scale of some of those above? It's hard to argue that Afghanistan was not a casus belli, even if the after-war was terribly handled. Iraq was the biggest negative example IMV.
But the comparison was with NATO. And NATO has had, I think, the Bosnia/Serbia war in 1999, aside from minor peacekeeping missions?
I'm not trying to make the USA or NATO out to be whiter than white; but my goodness, compared to Russia's 'adventures' they're golden.
Its a little depressing how little focus people give to news like the Port Talbot closure. Having long since sold off heavy industry for a fat commission and a quick profit, we are here with the latest foreign owner not needing to invest in British capabilities because it isn't strategically important to them.
It is to us. We really need to take back control of these things and invest in them. Being able to produce steel is a Good Investment. Cheaper than the alternative in the long run. And a lot more secure.
It's a little depressing that, back in New Labour times, people did not focus on the closure of a specialtity steel manufacturer such as Butterley. But it went unmentioned.
It's not just about steelmaking at the raw end; it's about end-products as well.
This is not specialist steel, this is virgin steel. Top quality steel for the automotive, military hardware and consumer electronics. This is our final plant for such a crucial product, it is a big deal. This is why Cameron intervened when the plant was threatened a decade ago.
If you want to apportion blame on previous Governments, Mrs Thatcher shouldn't have allowed key UK industry to be sold off to foreign asset strippers at fire-sale prices.
Yes, I'm well aware of the difference between them, which is why I mentioned it on my last line.
But as I said: there was zero noise from Labour when a speciality steelworks, more than two centuries old, which had built iconic structures such as St Pancras trainshed, the Spinaker Tower, and the Falkirk Wheel, closed. And one that was firmly in a Labour area as well. We need a steel industry that does something with the steel, as well as producing it at the source end.
British Steel was privatised by your lot. You should be arguing that Corus and now Tata had every right to make commercial decisions. I cleared out Ebbw Vale on Major's watch and Llanwern on New Labour's watch. That's what happens in a free market.
This is different, virgin steel is strategic. One instance where perhaps national security should take precedence over zero emissions. Cameron understood this, Sunak doesn't.
Did you know that the plant shuts down every night at teatime so the residents of Neath and Port Talbot can cook an evening meal.
Why on Earth are you saying 'my lot' ? You continually do this.
The Tory Party is so far to the right that Penny Mordaunt is apparently "woke". As I've said many times, this word has lost all definition. It now means anything I don't like.
If she didn’t want to be seen as ‘woke’, then perhaps she shouldn’t have had her flagship legislation on equalities written by Stonewall, and then lied about it when challenged during the leadership campaign.
Who flipping cares? Whatever the merits, this is a fringe issue. It's like disqualifying Rishi Sunak for drinking Coke not Pepsi.
Lying is a fringe issue, now is it?
That's the Tory party's problem in a nutshell right there. And the country's frankly - as any number of scandals prove. Plus the conflict of interest arising from having a one issue lobby group dictate the law - as the recent Meade judgment has shown.
"A man who is honest in small things will be honest in great; the man who is dishonest in small things will be dishonest in great."
Or have we learnt nothing from the career of one Boris Johnson?
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
she delivers her "promise" in that particular sanctimonious, chummy yet condescending style, as if the very idea she would do this is an affront; and, by the way, she IS the nice sensible mother of the nation, reliable and honest, unlike the hated English Tories
There will not be a single person in the country remotely shocked at Nicola Sturgeon deleting all of her Covid WhatsApps. As predictable as night following day. At least she deleted them in a Scottish way, however, unlike Boris Johnson and co.
Has anyone fallen so hard from grace, so quickly, as La Sturgeon? About 18 months ago she was untouchable; now she plunges ever further downwards, and might end up in chokey. It is incredible
The marker was Nick Clegg. Probably a bigger fall than that now?
I used to think Yousaf was doing an ok job, just dealing with legacy Sturgeon and taking an admirable position on Israel/Palestine. The XL Bully fiasco is his own mistake though, and represents what people are losing patience with - petty woke-lite kneejerks against Westminster.
I'd guess it was that kind of instinct that was illustrated in the WhatsApps rather than anything more sinister.
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
President Biden’s top aides told lawmakers in a private meeting that if Congress fails to authorize additional military aid for Ukraine in the coming days, Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks — months at best, according to two sources. https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1748555976754516149
Just what the Trump GOP wants.
It does rather emphasise the importance if having our own capable defences. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, whether or not Europe is a 'backwater' is beside the point.
Yes, quite so
Also, Europe is absolutely not a "backwater". It is probably still the biggest trading bloc on earth (if you add EU to non EU Europe), it is 500 million rich people in highly advanced economies and with colonies and dependencies in strategic spots all over the globe, it is a huge centre of science, education, and the rest
Australia is a backwater. Much of south America and central Africa is a backwater. Europe, no
This is not a political point, nor a Brexity point, it is just a fact
All true. And worth defending. The issue all free Europe hasn't addressed is whether it is willing to defend itself.
To be fair, there does seem to be a general awokening on this
I note that Sweden has introduced what I proposed for the UK a couple of weeks ago: a compulsory national service for young people, but one where you can choose military or civilian work
‘It might as well be me’: young Swedes prepare for new form of national service Historically neutral Sweden prioritises civil defence amid concerns of preparing for possible war"
Let's do this. Why not? This should be in the Labour manifesto.
iirc Blair and Cameron both mentioned something along these lines, which does not fill one with confidence. Traditionally, the services hate the idea. Wasn't this a Yes, Minister plot, btw?
“We keep coming up against the fatal tension between the obvious political collapse of this government and the obvious unwillingness of Conservative MPs to put it out of its misery,” one rebel said. “That tension can’t hold for very long. It can only be resolved by removing the PM.”
The Conservatives face two by-elections in February, both of which they are expected to lose, followed by what Tory MPs fear will be a hugely damaging set of local election results. Time, the rebel argues, is running out. “The local elections are the hard stop — realistically we can’t really change after the end of May,” they said. “The party does need to come to this conclusion organically, but may also need a steer.”
I'm not sure what this anonymous rebel is saying. If they go past May then they can't bin Sunak before the GE? I'm pretty sure they can and probably should.
It’s a dice roll, but it’s hard to see anything getting better for them under Sunak. Of course, they could come out of it looking even more ludicrous and making it even worse.
They really made some terrible unforced errors by elevating Truss and Sunak. That said, who is the alternative who is going to be able to ride in and save the day?
Morning all! One benefit of the Tories endlessly swapping PM is that is has disarmed the notion that you vote for a PM. Presidential politics is unhelpful in our system. Perhaps the reason why recent Tory smears against Starmer and Davey haven’t worked is that people are voting for change, not the person.
If they bin off Sunak then the replacement won’t be Braverman. Too many people are prejudiced against people who aren’t as white and male as themselves.
The problem is the leader the right wants isn’t a Tory MP. They could install the ghosts of Powell or Moseley into an empty vessel (Jonathan Gillis perhaps) and the Nigel would still be the one they want.
Have to laugh. As the Tories head towards the abyss, the person they believe can win them victory won just under 4m votes at the height of his powers. Though if the Tory members would like to be down to 4m votes I think we shouldn’t stand in their way.
Strong point this. I deeply doubt that the current Tory membership would ever choose a non-white leader over a white one.
Can I just remind people Johnson is mixed race, insofar as that label is meaningful?
He looks white. When you are a parochial bigot that is enough. He looks and sounds like us.
So the party that has had 3 female prime ministers, the first Jewish-heritage prime minister and the first Hindu prime minister as well as multiple black and Asian-heritage cabinet ministers is full of parochial bigots.
While the party you suppose, with a long history of being led by white males - and for many years London based white males - is not?
President Biden’s top aides told lawmakers in a private meeting that if Congress fails to authorize additional military aid for Ukraine in the coming days, Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks — months at best, according to two sources. https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1748555976754516149
Just what the Trump GOP wants.
It does rather emphasise the importance if having our own capable defences. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, whether or not Europe is a 'backwater' is beside the point.
Yes, quite so
Also, Europe is absolutely not a "backwater". It is probably still the biggest trading bloc on earth (if you add EU to non EU Europe), it is 500 million rich people in highly advanced economies and with colonies and dependencies in strategic spots all over the globe, it is a huge centre of science, education, and the rest
Australia is a backwater. Much of south America and central Africa is a backwater. Europe, no
This is not a political point, nor a Brexity point, it is just a fact
All true. And worth defending. The issue all free Europe hasn't addressed is whether it is willing to defend itself.
To be fair, there does seem to be a general awokening on this
I note that Sweden has introduced what I proposed for the UK a couple of weeks ago: a compulsory national service for young people, but one where you can choose military or civilian work
‘It might as well be me’: young Swedes prepare for new form of national service Historically neutral Sweden prioritises civil defence amid concerns of preparing for possible war"
Let's do this. Why not? This should be in the Labour manifesto.
iirc Blair and Cameron both mentioned something along these lines, which does not fill one with confidence. Traditionally, the services hate the idea. Wasn't this a Yes, Minister plot, btw?
It was the subject of YPM’s sketch on opinion polling.
President Biden’s top aides told lawmakers in a private meeting that if Congress fails to authorize additional military aid for Ukraine in the coming days, Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks — months at best, according to two sources. https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1748555976754516149
Just what the Trump GOP wants.
It does rather emphasise the importance if having our own capable defences. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, whether or not Europe is a 'backwater' is beside the point.
Yes, quite so
Also, Europe is absolutely not a "backwater". It is probably still the biggest trading bloc on earth (if you add EU to non EU Europe), it is 500 million rich people in highly advanced economies and with colonies and dependencies in strategic spots all over the globe, it is a huge centre of science, education, and the rest
Australia is a backwater. Much of south America and central Africa is a backwater. Europe, no
This is not a political point, nor a Brexity point, it is just a fact
All true. And worth defending. The issue all free Europe hasn't addressed is whether it is willing to defend itself.
To be fair, there does seem to be a general awokening on this
I note that Sweden has introduced what I proposed for the UK a couple of weeks ago: a compulsory national service for young people, but one where you can choose military or civilian work
‘It might as well be me’: young Swedes prepare for new form of national service Historically neutral Sweden prioritises civil defence amid concerns of preparing for possible war"
Let's do this. Why not? This should be in the Labour manifesto.
iirc Blair and Cameron both mentioned something along these lines, which does not fill one with confidence. Traditionally, the services hate the idea. Wasn't this a Yes, Minister plot, btw?
The services might be a little keener now they have completely run out of men
The Tory Party is so far to the right that Penny Mordaunt is apparently "woke". As I've said many times, this word has lost all definition. It now means anything I don't like.
If she didn’t want to be seen as ‘woke’, then perhaps she shouldn’t have had her flagship legislation on equalities written by Stonewall, and then lied about it when challenged during the leadership campaign.
Who flipping cares? Whatever the merits, this is a fringe issue. It's like disqualifying Rishi Sunak for drinking Coke not Pepsi.
Lying is a fringe issue, now is it?
That's the Tory party's problem in a nutshell right there. And the country's frankly - as any number of scandals prove. Plus the conflict of interest arising from having a one issue lobby group dictate the law - as the recent Meade judgment has shown.
"A man who is honest in small things will be honest in great; the man who is dishonest in small things will be dishonest in great."
Or have we learnt nothing from the career of one Boris Johnson?
“We keep coming up against the fatal tension between the obvious political collapse of this government and the obvious unwillingness of Conservative MPs to put it out of its misery,” one rebel said. “That tension can’t hold for very long. It can only be resolved by removing the PM.”
The Conservatives face two by-elections in February, both of which they are expected to lose, followed by what Tory MPs fear will be a hugely damaging set of local election results. Time, the rebel argues, is running out. “The local elections are the hard stop — realistically we can’t really change after the end of May,” they said. “The party does need to come to this conclusion organically, but may also need a steer.”
I'm not sure what this anonymous rebel is saying. If they go past May then they can't bin Sunak before the GE? I'm pretty sure they can and probably should.
It’s a dice roll, but it’s hard to see anything getting better for them under Sunak. Of course, they could come out of it looking even more ludicrous and making it even worse.
They really made some terrible unforced errors by elevating Truss and Sunak. That said, who is the alternative who is going to be able to ride in and save the day?
Morning all! One benefit of the Tories endlessly swapping PM is that is has disarmed the notion that you vote for a PM. Presidential politics is unhelpful in our system. Perhaps the reason why recent Tory smears against Starmer and Davey haven’t worked is that people are voting for change, not the person.
If they bin off Sunak then the replacement won’t be Braverman. Too many people are prejudiced against people who aren’t as white and male as themselves.
The problem is the leader the right wants isn’t a Tory MP. They could install the ghosts of Powell or Moseley into an empty vessel (Jonathan Gillis perhaps) and the Nigel would still be the one they want.
Have to laugh. As the Tories head towards the abyss, the person they believe can win them victory won just under 4m votes at the height of his powers. Though if the Tory members would like to be down to 4m votes I think we shouldn’t stand in their way.
Strong point this. I deeply doubt that the current Tory membership would ever choose a non-white leader over a white one.
Not convinced with that. It is hard to see someone for instance like Barclay, Dowden or Gove winning a member vote against Badenoch or Braverman.
The whole discussion about whether the Tories would do better with or without a new leader is for the birds.
The party is toxic and riven between the ascendant GB News faction that feels the party isn’t toxic enough and the neutered One Nation faction that seems resigned to declaring the water to be wet as the ship goes down.
In the absence of a dynamic, charismatic figure that could unite the party, drag it back to its senses and persuade the public to give it a second look, the leadership is practically irrelevant.
Seriously, which of these prospects would make any difference at all (in the absence of a serious failure on the part of Labour)?
Anderson: too provocative Badenoch: too wild Barclay: too bland Braverman: too fired Cameron: too previous Cleverly: too gaffe-prone Dowden: too forgettable Farage: too outside Frost: too unelected Gove: too weird Hunt: too unpopular Johnson: too Johnson Mordaunt: too woke Shapps: too schizophrenic Truss: to the pub
When a governing party ditches its leader they should have to call a GE. Who is happy with Sunak? What was happy with Truss? Not 2019 Tory voters. They preferred Boris to anyone else
President Biden’s top aides told lawmakers in a private meeting that if Congress fails to authorize additional military aid for Ukraine in the coming days, Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks — months at best, according to two sources. https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1748555976754516149
Just what the Trump GOP wants.
It does rather emphasise the importance if having our own capable defences. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, whether or not Europe is a 'backwater' is beside the point.
Yes, quite so
Also, Europe is absolutely not a "backwater". It is probably still the biggest trading bloc on earth (if you add EU to non EU Europe), it is 500 million rich people in highly advanced economies and with colonies and dependencies in strategic spots all over the globe, it is a huge centre of science, education, and the rest
Australia is a backwater. Much of south America and central Africa is a backwater. Europe, no
This is not a political point, nor a Brexity point, it is just a fact
All true. And worth defending. The issue all free Europe hasn't addressed is whether it is willing to defend itself.
To be fair, there does seem to be a general awokening on this
I note that Sweden has introduced what I proposed for the UK a couple of weeks ago: a compulsory national service for young people, but one where you can choose military or civilian work
‘It might as well be me’: young Swedes prepare for new form of national service Historically neutral Sweden prioritises civil defence amid concerns of preparing for possible war"
Let's do this. Why not? This should be in the Labour manifesto.
iirc Blair and Cameron both mentioned something along these lines, which does not fill one with confidence. Traditionally, the services hate the idea. Wasn't this a Yes, Minister plot, btw?
You'd need significantly to increase the size if the services before conscription could be remotely possible. And the truth is that as a maritime state, the money would anyway be far better spent on the regular forces.
Sweden has a long border with Russia. That needs bodies.
Here is a list of wars that Russia has instigated since 1990:
Georgian Civil War South Ossetian War War in Abkhazia Transnistria War Tajikistan Civil War First Chechen War Second Chechan War Georgia 2008 Ukraine (2014) Ukraine (2022)
Thanks JJ.
Where's our Saturday morning Russian troll? Surely it has something to say about this.
President Biden’s top aides told lawmakers in a private meeting that if Congress fails to authorize additional military aid for Ukraine in the coming days, Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks — months at best, according to two sources. https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1748555976754516149
Just what the Trump GOP wants.
It does rather emphasise the importance if having our own capable defences. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, whether or not Europe is a 'backwater' is beside the point.
Yes, quite so
Also, Europe is absolutely not a "backwater". It is probably still the biggest trading bloc on earth (if you add EU to non EU Europe), it is 500 million rich people in highly advanced economies and with colonies and dependencies in strategic spots all over the globe, it is a huge centre of science, education, and the rest
Australia is a backwater. Much of south America and central Africa is a backwater. Europe, no
This is not a political point, nor a Brexity point, it is just a fact
All true. And worth defending. The issue all free Europe hasn't addressed is whether it is willing to defend itself.
To be fair, there does seem to be a general awokening on this
I note that Sweden has introduced what I proposed for the UK a couple of weeks ago: a compulsory national service for young people, but one where you can choose military or civilian work
‘It might as well be me’: young Swedes prepare for new form of national service Historically neutral Sweden prioritises civil defence amid concerns of preparing for possible war"
Let's do this. Why not? This should be in the Labour manifesto.
iirc Blair and Cameron both mentioned something along these lines, which does not fill one with confidence. Traditionally, the services hate the idea. Wasn't this a Yes, Minister plot, btw?
It was the subject of YPM’s sketch on opinion polling.
And the YPM CoDS is all for nuclear disarmament and increasing conventional forces until he finds out that Hacker intends to introduce conscription as part of his Grand Design
she delivers her "promise" in that particular sanctimonious, chummy yet condescending style, as if the very idea she would do this is an affront; and, by the way, she IS the nice sensible mother of the nation, reliable and honest, unlike the hated English Tories
There will not be a single person in the country remotely shocked at Nicola Sturgeon deleting all of her Covid WhatsApps. As predictable as night following day. At least she deleted them in a Scottish way, however, unlike Boris Johnson and co.
Has anyone fallen so hard from grace, so quickly, as La Sturgeon? About 18 months ago she was untouchable; now she plunges ever further downwards, and might end up in chokey. It is incredible
The marker was Nick Clegg. Probably a bigger fall than that now?
I used to think Yousaf was doing an ok job, just dealing with legacy Sturgeon and taking an admirable position on Israel/Palestine. The XL Bully fiasco is his own mistake though, and represents what people are losing patience with - petty woke-lite kneejerks against Westminster.
I'd guess it was that kind of instinct that was illustrated in the WhatsApps rather than anything more sinister.
There are rumours some of the deleted messages showed Partygate like behaviour. Which would hardly be surprising
Whatever the case, it is a terrible look, esp after her pious "I'm better than Boris" bullshit, earlier on
President Biden’s top aides told lawmakers in a private meeting that if Congress fails to authorize additional military aid for Ukraine in the coming days, Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks — months at best, according to two sources.on https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1748555976754516149
Just what the Trump GOP wants.
It does rather emphasise the importance if having our own capable defences. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, whether or not Europe is a 'backwater' is beside the point.
Yes, quite so
Also, Europe is absolutely not a "backwater". It is probably still the biggest trading bloc on earth (if you add EU to non EU Europe), it is 500 million rich people in highly advanced economies and with colonies and dependencies in strategic spots all over the globe, it is a huge centre of science, education, and the rest
Australia is a backwater. Much of south America and central Africa is a backwater. Europe, no
This is not a political point, nor a Brexity point, it is just a fact
All true. And worth defending. The issue all free Europe hasn't addressed is whether it is willing to defend itself.
To be fair, there does seem to be a general awokening on this
I note that Sweden has introduced what I proposed for the UK a couple of weeks ago: a compulsory national service for young people, but one where you can choose military or civilian work
‘It might as well be me’: young Swedes prepare for new form of national service Historically neutral Sweden prioritises civil defence amid concerns of preparing for possible war"
Let's do this. Why not? This should be in the Labour manifesto.
iirc Blair and Cameron both mentioned something along these lines, which does not fill one with confidence. Traditionally, the services hate the idea. Wasn't this a Yes, Minister plot, btw?
You'd need significantly to increase the size if the services before conscription could be remotely possible. And the truth is that as a maritime state, the money would anyway be far better spent on the regular forces.
Sweden has a long border with Russia. That needs bodies.
There's also the question of the labour market. Who will do the entry level minimum wage jobs? Not migrants, not the young. Maybe we need some form of national service for the minted, retired over 50's?
President Biden’s top aides told lawmakers in a private meeting that if Congress fails to authorize additional military aid for Ukraine in the coming days, Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks — months at best, according to two sources. https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1748555976754516149
Just what the Trump GOP wants.
It does rather emphasise the importance if having our own capable defences. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, whether or not Europe is a 'backwater' is beside the point.
Yes, quite so
Also, Europe is absolutely not a "backwater". It is probably still the biggest trading bloc on earth (if you add EU to non EU Europe), it is 500 million rich people in highly advanced economies and with colonies and dependencies in strategic spots all over the globe, it is a huge centre of science, education, and the rest
Australia is a backwater. Much of south America and central Africa is a backwater. Europe, no
This is not a political point, nor a Brexity point, it is just a fact
All true. And worth defending. The issue all free Europe hasn't addressed is whether it is willing to defend itself.
To be fair, there does seem to be a general awokening on this
I note that Sweden has introduced what I proposed for the UK a couple of weeks ago: a compulsory national service for young people, but one where you can choose military or civilian work
‘It might as well be me’: young Swedes prepare for new form of national service Historically neutral Sweden prioritises civil defence amid concerns of preparing for possible war"
Let's do this. Why not? This should be in the Labour manifesto.
iirc Blair and Cameron both mentioned something along these lines, which does not fill one with confidence. Traditionally, the services hate the idea. Wasn't this a Yes, Minister plot, btw?
The services might be a little keener now they have completely run out of men
President Biden’s top aides told lawmakers in a private meeting that if Congress fails to authorize additional military aid for Ukraine in the coming days, Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks — months at best, according to two sources. https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1748555976754516149
Just what the Trump GOP wants.
It does rather emphasise the importance if having our own capable defences. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, whether or not Europe is a 'backwater' is beside the point.
Yes, quite so
Also, Europe is absolutely not a "backwater". It is probably still the biggest trading bloc on earth (if you add EU to non EU Europe), it is 500 million rich people in highly advanced economies and with colonies and dependencies in strategic spots all over the globe, it is a huge centre of science, education, and the rest
Australia is a backwater. Much of south America and central Africa is a backwater. Europe, no
This is not a political point, nor a Brexity point, it is just a fact
All true. And worth defending. The issue all free Europe hasn't addressed is whether it is willing to defend itself.
To be fair, there does seem to be a general awokening on this
I note that Sweden has introduced what I proposed for the UK a couple of weeks ago: a compulsory national service for young people, but one where you can choose military or civilian work
‘It might as well be me’: young Swedes prepare for new form of national service Historically neutral Sweden prioritises civil defence amid concerns of preparing for possible war"
Let's do this. Why not? This should be in the Labour manifesto.
iirc Blair and Cameron both mentioned something along these lines, which does not fill one with confidence. Traditionally, the services hate the idea. Wasn't this a Yes, Minister plot, btw?
The services might be a little keener now they have completely run out of men
Many of my contemporaries, who did National Service, had positive memories. Many others regarded it as a boring waste of two years. Some also found it hard to return to civilian life.
Here is a list of wars that Russia has instigated since 1990:
Georgian Civil War South Ossetian War War in Abkhazia Transnistria War Tajikistan Civil War First Chechen War Second Chechan War Georgia 2008 Ukraine (2014) Ukraine (2022)
Thanks JJ.
Where's our Saturday morning Russian troll? Surely it has something to say about this.
Not enough likes. Redeployed to Avdiivka. We should be more charitable next time.
President Biden’s top aides told lawmakers in a private meeting that if Congress fails to authorize additional military aid for Ukraine in the coming days, Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks — months at best, according to two sources. https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1748555976754516149
Just what the Trump GOP wants.
It does rather emphasise the importance if having our own capable defences. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, whether or not Europe is a 'backwater' is beside the point.
Yes, quite so
Also, Europe is absolutely not a "backwater". It is probably still the biggest trading bloc on earth (if you add EU to non EU Europe), it is 500 million rich people in highly advanced economies and with colonies and dependencies in strategic spots all over the globe, it is a huge centre of science, education, and the rest
Australia is a backwater. Much of south America and central Africa is a backwater. Europe, no
This is not a political point, nor a Brexity point, it is just a fact
All true. And worth defending. The issue all free Europe hasn't addressed is whether it is willing to defend itself.
To be fair, there does seem to be a general awokening on this
I note that Sweden has introduced what I proposed for the UK a couple of weeks ago: a compulsory national service for young people, but one where you can choose military or civilian work
‘It might as well be me’: young Swedes prepare for new form of national service Historically neutral Sweden prioritises civil defence amid concerns of preparing for possible war"
Let's do this. Why not? This should be in the Labour manifesto.
iirc Blair and Cameron both mentioned something along these lines, which does not fill one with confidence. Traditionally, the services hate the idea. Wasn't this a Yes, Minister plot, btw?
The services might be a little keener now they have completely run out of men
Privatising recruitment was not the brightest idea of whoever had it, but as @Dura_Ace mentioned earlier in this thread, refurbishing accommodation to keep the rain out and increasing salaries might help a bit, or indeed a lot. Privates get the national living wage but working in an Amazon warehouse doesn't involve getting shot at and the uniform's nicer.
she delivers her "promise" in that particular sanctimonious, chummy yet condescending style, as if the very idea she would do this is an affront; and, by the way, she IS the nice sensible mother of the nation, reliable and honest, unlike the hated English Tories
There will not be a single person in the country remotely shocked at Nicola Sturgeon deleting all of her Covid WhatsApps. As predictable as night following day. At least she deleted them in a Scottish way, however, unlike Boris Johnson and co.
Has anyone fallen so hard from grace, so quickly, as La Sturgeon? About 18 months ago she was untouchable; now she plunges ever further downwards, and might end up in chokey. It is incredible
The marker was Nick Clegg. Probably a bigger fall than that now?
I used to think Yousaf was doing an ok job, just dealing with legacy Sturgeon and taking an admirable position on Israel/Palestine. The XL Bully fiasco is his own mistake though, and represents what people are losing patience with - petty woke-lite kneejerks against Westminster.
I'd guess it was that kind of instinct that was illustrated in the WhatsApps rather than anything more sinister.
There are rumours some of the deleted messages showed Partygate like behaviour. Which would hardly be surprising
Whatever the case, it is a terrible look, esp after her pious "I'm better than Boris" bullshit, earlier on
You are right that the Houthi situation needs dealing with but why is it the US and us doing it? Why is the UK firing a number of nurse’s salaries (and the US firing a number of hospital new builds) to keep trade flowing whilst the likes of Italy do fuck all and say “cheers guys, we can keep selling Gucci loafers to China”. Why isn’t China being called out to help - they need to be shamed for being more interested in political games than keeping trade, which they rely on, smooth.
You can call China out if you like but their goal is to keep the US navy as far away from Taiwan as possible. They used to put the economy first but in the last few years that changed and now they care more about military power.
Oh look, the Tories have used Brexit to fall behind the EU on climate and environmental policy. How surprising.
I'm sure other countries were delighted that the UK decided to handicap its industry with green taxes and regulations.
Renewables is one of the few growth industries we have. There might be a national security case for retaining Port Talbot, but we need to stop kidding ourselves that we can go back to a early 20th century coal + steel (and shipbuilding) based economy.
That died with Thatcher - probably before. Oil and gas was going the same way even before we got serious about renewables.
“We keep coming up against the fatal tension between the obvious political collapse of this government and the obvious unwillingness of Conservative MPs to put it out of its misery,” one rebel said. “That tension can’t hold for very long. It can only be resolved by removing the PM.”
The Conservatives face two by-elections in February, both of which they are expected to lose, followed by what Tory MPs fear will be a hugely damaging set of local election results. Time, the rebel argues, is running out. “The local elections are the hard stop — realistically we can’t really change after the end of May,” they said. “The party does need to come to this conclusion organically, but may also need a steer.”
I'm not sure what this anonymous rebel is saying. If they go past May then they can't bin Sunak before the GE? I'm pretty sure they can and probably should.
It’s a dice roll, but it’s hard to see anything getting better for them under Sunak. Of course, they could come out of it looking even more ludicrous and making it even worse.
They really made some terrible unforced errors by elevating Truss and Sunak. That said, who is the alternative who is going to be able to ride in and save the day?
Morning all! One benefit of the Tories endlessly swapping PM is that is has disarmed the notion that you vote for a PM. Presidential politics is unhelpful in our system. Perhaps the reason why recent Tory smears against Starmer and Davey haven’t worked is that people are voting for change, not the person.
If they bin off Sunak then the replacement won’t be Braverman. Too many people are prejudiced against people who aren’t as white and male as themselves.
The problem is the leader the right wants isn’t a Tory MP. They could install the ghosts of Powell or Moseley into an empty vessel (Jonathan Gillis perhaps) and the Nigel would still be the one they want.
Have to laugh. As the Tories head towards the abyss, the person they believe can win them victory won just under 4m votes at the height of his powers. Though if the Tory members would like to be down to 4m votes I think we shouldn’t stand in their way.
Strong point this. I deeply doubt that the current Tory membership would ever choose a non-white leader over a white one.
Not convinced with that. It is hard to see someone for instance like Barclay, Dowden or Gove winning a member vote against Badenoch or Braverman.
The whole discussion about whether the Tories would do better with or without a new leader is for the birds.
The party is toxic and riven between the ascendant GB News faction that feels the party isn’t toxic enough and the neutered One Nation faction that seems resigned to declaring the water to be wet as the ship goes down.
In the absence of a dynamic, charismatic figure that could unite the party, drag it back to its senses and persuade the public to give it a second look, the leadership is practically irrelevant.
Seriously, which of these prospects would make any difference at all (in the absence of a serious failure on the part of Labour)?
Anderson: too provocative Badenoch: too wild Barclay: too bland Braverman: too fired Cameron: too previous Cleverly: too gaffe-prone Dowden: too forgettable Farage: too outside Frost: too unelected Gove: too weird Hunt: too unpopular Johnson: too Johnson Mordaunt: too woke Shapps: too schizophrenic Truss: to the pub
You missed off the star of the show:
#Priti4Leader
Haha! Gosh, what an embarrassment of riches a richness of embarrassments they have to choose from! Here’s the updated list, with additions asterisked:
Anderson: too provocative Badenoch: too wild Barclay: too bland Braverman: too fired Cameron: too previous Cleverly: too gaffe-prone Farage: too outside Frost: too unelected Gove: too weird Hunt: too unpopular ***Jenrick: too cruel Johnson: too Johnson Mordaunt: too woke ***Patel: too sinister ***Rees-Mogg: too Victorian Shapps: too schizophrenic Truss: to the pub ***Tugendhat: Tugendhat
If I was a Tory (and thank Richard Dawkins I’m not), I’d want Tugendhat as the next leader out of that lot or even Mordaunt or Cleverly. I suspect they’ll actually go for Badenoch.
she delivers her "promise" in that particular sanctimonious, chummy yet condescending style, as if the very idea she would do this is an affront; and, by the way, she IS the nice sensible mother of the nation, reliable and honest, unlike the hated English Tories
There will not be a single person in the country remotely shocked at Nicola Sturgeon deleting all of her Covid WhatsApps. As predictable as night following day. At least she deleted them in a Scottish way, however, unlike Boris Johnson and co.
Has anyone fallen so hard from grace, so quickly, as La Sturgeon? About 18 months ago she was untouchable; now she plunges ever further downwards, and might end up in chokey. It is incredible
The marker was Nick Clegg. Probably a bigger fall than that now?
I used to think Yousaf was doing an ok job, just dealing with legacy Sturgeon and taking an admirable position on Israel/Palestine. The XL Bully fiasco is his own mistake though, and represents what people are losing patience with - petty woke-lite kneejerks against Westminster.
I'd guess it was that kind of instinct that was illustrated in the WhatsApps rather than anything more sinister.
There are rumours some of the deleted messages showed Partygate like behaviour. Which would hardly be surprising
Whatever the case, it is a terrible look, esp after her pious "I'm better than Boris" bullshit, earlier on
Perhaps our first "Mrs Fujitsu" of the year
I haven't examined the legalities. There are claims on TwiX that Sturgeon could be in legal trouble. as she is required to keep messages and comms relevant to the Covid inquiry.
Is that true? If it is true, presumably it is UK wide, not Scottish law, so others could be fecked, as well
My guess is no one will be prosecuted, as so many are implicated, on all sides
Its a little depressing how little focus people give to news like the Port Talbot closure. Having long since sold off heavy industry for a fat commission and a quick profit, we are here with the latest foreign owner not needing to invest in British capabilities because it isn't strategically important to them.
It is to us. We really need to take back control of these things and invest in them. Being able to produce steel is a Good Investment. Cheaper than the alternative in the long run. And a lot more secure.
It's a little depressing that, back in New Labour times, people did not focus on the closure of a specialtity steel manufacturer such as Butterley. But it went unmentioned.
It's not just about steelmaking at the raw end; it's about end-products as well.
This is not specialist steel, this is virgin steel. Top quality steel for the automotive, military hardware and consumer electronics. This is our final plant for such a crucial product, it is a big deal. This is why Cameron intervened when the plant was threatened a decade ago.
If you want to apportion blame on previous Governments, Mrs Thatcher shouldn't have allowed key UK industry to be sold off to foreign asset strippers at fire-sale prices.
Yes, I'm well aware of the difference between them, which is why I mentioned it on my last line.
But as I said: there was zero noise from Labour when a speciality steelworks, more than two centuries old, which had built iconic structures such as St Pancras trainshed, the Spinaker Tower, and the Falkirk Wheel, closed. And one that was firmly in a Labour area as well. We need a steel industry that does something with the steel, as well as producing it at the source end.
British Steel was privatised by your lot. You should be arguing that Corus and now Tata had every right to make commercial decisions. I cleared out Ebbw Vale on Major's watch and Llanwern on New Labour's watch. That's what happens in a free market.
This is different, virgin steel is strategic. One instance where perhaps national security should take precedence over zero emissions. Cameron understood this, Sunak doesn't.
Did you know that the plant shuts down every night at teatime so the residents of Neath and Port Talbot can cook an evening meal.
Why on Earth are you saying 'my lot' ? You continually do this.
If you didn't tacitly defend the current Government by bellyaching that New Labour didn't get the criticism they deserved I could stop.
I liked Rishi, but his behaviour yesterday confirmed I was wrong and he is hopeless. His reaction to Port Talbot and the ex NHS lady by defending his greatness was pathetic.
Here is a list of wars that Russia has instigated since 1990:
Georgian Civil War South Ossetian War War in Abkhazia Transnistria War Tajikistan Civil War First Chechen War Second Chechan War Georgia 2008 Ukraine (2014) Ukraine (2022)
Strange goings-on here… Toby Young, vaccine sceptic, seems to be blaming media for not engaging with him, which seems a bit odd. The replies are blaming him for scaring people off vaccines, which I thought might be true, but the article actually says is it’s Muslims in the West Midlands refusing to jab their kids, perhaps for halal reasons
Maybe demonising vaccine sceptics instead of debating them in the public square wasn't such a a good idea after all ⬇️⬇️
National health incident declared as measles cases surge
AI has taken Javier Milei's already famous speech to the WEF in Davos, translated it into English, made his lips match the new English words - and it's even given the new version Milei's actual voice and accent
Oh look, the Tories have used Brexit to fall behind the EU on climate and environmental policy. How surprising.
I'm sure other countries were delighted that the UK decided to handicap its industry with green taxes and regulations.
Renewables is one of the few growth industries we have. There might be a national security case for retaining Port Talbot, but we need to stop kidding ourselves that we can go back to a early 20th century coal + steel (and shipbuilding) based economy.
That died with Thatcher - probably before. Oil and gas was going the same way even before we got serious about renewables.
There were plans to deploy carbon capture at Port Talbot to decarbonise steel production.
Instead we'll be importing steel from high carbon sources, buggering up the balance of payments (I'm old enough to remember when that mattered), throwing thousands out of work and screwing the local economy in an already less affluent part of the country.
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
They seem fixated on the idea that they will be able to blame the failure of the Rwanda policy (and thus not stopping the boats) on lefty lawyers and thus skewer Starmer.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
Strange goings-on here… Toby Young, vaccine sceptic, seems to be blaming media for not engaging with him, which seems a bit odd. The replies are blaming him for scaring people off vaccines, which I thought might be true, but the article actually says is it’s Muslims in the West Midlands refusing to jab their kids, perhaps for halal reasons
Maybe demonising vaccine sceptics instead of debating them in the public square wasn't such a a good idea after all ⬇️⬇️
National health incident declared as measles cases surge
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
They seem fixated on the idea that they will be able to blame the failure of the Rwanda policy (and thus not stopping the boats) on lefty lawyers and thus skewer Starmer.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
It can work, but this version of Rwanda will never work
But the basic principle - take all illegals and process them somewhere quite unpleasant, but safe, a long way offshore - is sound. Australia did it
AI has taken Javier Milei's already famous speech to the WEF in Davos, translated it into English, made his lips match the new English words - and it's even given the new version Milei's actual voice and accent
“We keep coming up against the fatal tension between the obvious political collapse of this government and the obvious unwillingness of Conservative MPs to put it out of its misery,” one rebel said. “That tension can’t hold for very long. It can only be resolved by removing the PM.”
The Conservatives face two by-elections in February, both of which they are expected to lose, followed by what Tory MPs fear will be a hugely damaging set of local election results. Time, the rebel argues, is running out. “The local elections are the hard stop — realistically we can’t really change after the end of May,” they said. “The party does need to come to this conclusion organically, but may also need a steer.”
I'm not sure what this anonymous rebel is saying. If they go past May then they can't bin Sunak before the GE? I'm pretty sure they can and probably should.
It’s a dice roll, but it’s hard to see anything getting better for them under Sunak. Of course, they could come out of it looking even more ludicrous and making it even worse.
They really made some terrible unforced errors by elevating Truss and Sunak. That said, who is the alternative who is going to be able to ride in and save the day?
Morning all! One benefit of the Tories endlessly swapping PM is that is has disarmed the notion that you vote for a PM. Presidential politics is unhelpful in our system. Perhaps the reason why recent Tory smears against Starmer and Davey haven’t worked is that people are voting for change, not the person.
If they bin off Sunak then the replacement won’t be Braverman. Too many people are prejudiced against people who aren’t as white and male as themselves.
The problem is the leader the right wants isn’t a Tory MP. They could install the ghosts of Powell or Moseley into an empty vessel (Jonathan Gillis perhaps) and the Nigel would still be the one they want.
Have to laugh. As the Tories head towards the abyss, the person they believe can win them victory won just under 4m votes at the height of his powers. Though if the Tory members would like to be down to 4m votes I think we shouldn’t stand in their way.
Strong point this. I deeply doubt that the current Tory membership would ever choose a non-white leader over a white one.
Not convinced with that. It is hard to see someone for instance like Barclay, Dowden or Gove winning a member vote against Badenoch or Braverman.
The whole discussion about whether the Tories would do better with or without a new leader is for the birds.
The party is toxic and riven between the ascendant GB News faction that feels the party isn’t toxic enough and the neutered One Nation faction that seems resigned to declaring the water to be wet as the ship goes down.
In the absence of a dynamic, charismatic figure that could unite the party, drag it back to its senses and persuade the public to give it a second look, the leadership is practically irrelevant.
Seriously, which of these prospects would make any difference at all (in the absence of a serious failure on the part of Labour)?
Anderson: too provocative Badenoch: too wild Barclay: too bland Braverman: too fired Cameron: too previous Cleverly: too gaffe-prone Dowden: too forgettable Farage: too outside Frost: too unelected Gove: too weird Hunt: too unpopular Johnson: too Johnson Mordaunt: too woke Shapps: too schizophrenic Truss: to the pub
You missed off the star of the show:
#Priti4Leader
Haha! Gosh, what an embarrassment of riches a richness of embarrassments they have to choose from! Here’s the updated list, with additions asterisked:
Anderson: too provocative Badenoch: too wild Barclay: too bland Braverman: too fired Cameron: too previous Cleverly: too gaffe-prone Farage: too outside Frost: too unelected Gove: too weird Hunt: too unpopular ***Jenrick: too cruel Johnson: too Johnson Mordaunt: too woke ***Patel: too sinister ***Rees-Mogg: too Victorian Shapps: too schizophrenic Truss: to the pub ***Tugendhat: Tugendhat
If I was a Tory (and thank Richard Dawkins I’m not), I’d want Tugendhat as the next leader out of that lot or even Mordaunt or Cleverly. I suspect they’ll actually go for Badenoch.
You mean the Minister Pretending Not To Be In Charge Of The Post Office?
She'd be great. She could pretend not to be in charge of the country.
President Biden’s top aides told lawmakers in a private meeting that if Congress fails to authorize additional military aid for Ukraine in the coming days, Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks — months at best, according to two sources. https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1748555976754516149
Just what the Trump GOP wants.
It does rather emphasise the importance if having our own capable defences. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, whether or not Europe is a 'backwater' is beside the point.
Yes, quite so
Also, Europe is absolutely not a "backwater". It is probably still the biggest trading bloc on earth (if you add EU to non EU Europe), it is 500 million rich people in highly advanced economies and with colonies and dependencies in strategic spots all over the globe, it is a huge centre of science, education, and the rest
Australia is a backwater. Much of south America and central Africa is a backwater. Europe, no
This is not a political point, nor a Brexity point, it is just a fact
All true. And worth defending. The issue all free Europe hasn't addressed is whether it is willing to defend itself.
To be fair, there does seem to be a general awokening on this
I note that Sweden has introduced what I proposed for the UK a couple of weeks ago: a compulsory national service for young people, but one where you can choose military or civilian work
‘It might as well be me’: young Swedes prepare for new form of national service Historically neutral Sweden prioritises civil defence amid concerns of preparing for possible war"
Let's do this. Why not? This should be in the Labour manifesto.
iirc Blair and Cameron both mentioned something along these lines, which does not fill one with confidence. Traditionally, the services hate the idea. Wasn't this a Yes, Minister plot, btw?
You'd need significantly to increase the size if the services before conscription could be remotely possible. And the truth is that as a maritime state, the money would anyway be far better spent on the regular forces.
Sweden has a long border with Russia. That needs bodies.
Er, surely some mistake?
I doubt Finland and Norway would appreciate being seen as part of Sweden these days...or Russia, for that matter.
Its a little depressing how little focus people give to news like the Port Talbot closure. Having long since sold off heavy industry for a fat commission and a quick profit, we are here with the latest foreign owner not needing to invest in British capabilities because it isn't strategically important to them.
It is to us. We really need to take back control of these things and invest in them. Being able to produce steel is a Good Investment. Cheaper than the alternative in the long run. And a lot more secure.
It's a little depressing that, back in New Labour times, people did not focus on the closure of a specialtity steel manufacturer such as Butterley. But it went unmentioned.
It's not just about steelmaking at the raw end; it's about end-products as well.
This is not specialist steel, this is virgin steel. Top quality steel for the automotive, military hardware and consumer electronics. This is our final plant for such a crucial product, it is a big deal. This is why Cameron intervened when the plant was threatened a decade ago.
If you want to apportion blame on previous Governments, Mrs Thatcher shouldn't have allowed key UK industry to be sold off to foreign asset strippers at fire-sale prices.
Yes, I'm well aware of the difference between them, which is why I mentioned it on my last line.
But as I said: there was zero noise from Labour when a speciality steelworks, more than two centuries old, which had built iconic structures such as St Pancras trainshed, the Spinaker Tower, and the Falkirk Wheel, closed. And one that was firmly in a Labour area as well. We need a steel industry that does something with the steel, as well as producing it at the source end.
British Steel was privatised by your lot. You should be arguing that Corus and now Tata had every right to make commercial decisions. I cleared out Ebbw Vale on Major's watch and Llanwern on New Labour's watch. That's what happens in a free market.
This is different, virgin steel is strategic. One instance where perhaps national security should take precedence over zero emissions. Cameron understood this, Sunak doesn't.
Did you know that the plant shuts down every night at teatime so the residents of Neath and Port Talbot can cook an evening meal.
Why on Earth are you saying 'my lot' ? You continually do this.
If you didn't tacitly defend the current Government by bellyaching that New Labour didn't get the criticism they deserved I could stop.
I liked Rishi, but his behaviour yesterday confirmed I was wrong and he is hopeless. His reaction to Port Talbot and the ex NHS lady by defending his greatness was pathetic.
Hang on. I've mentioned Butterley on here before; I had minor connections in the area. And the point I make is valid.
I'd like the Port Talbot operation to continue; in fact, I'd like it to be thoroughly modernised and invested in. But perhaps try addressing my point: making steel is rather pointless if we don't have sinks for it to be used in. And the one thing we should be good at is high-tech, rather than volume, uses.
And I repeat there was *zero* noise from Labour when Butterley closed during their watch.
The Tory Party is so far to the right that Penny Mordaunt is apparently "woke". As I've said many times, this word has lost all definition. It now means anything I don't like.
If she didn’t want to be seen as ‘woke’, then perhaps she shouldn’t have had her flagship legislation on equalities written by Stonewall, and then lied about it when challenged during the leadership campaign.
For me, that is the big negative about her. She should have either defended the policy, or u-turned and disowned it. But denying it was the worst of both worlds.
AI has taken Javier Milei's already famous speech to the WEF in Davos, translated it into English, made his lips match the new English words - and it's even given the new version Milei's actual voice and accent
“We keep coming up against the fatal tension between the obvious political collapse of this government and the obvious unwillingness of Conservative MPs to put it out of its misery,” one rebel said. “That tension can’t hold for very long. It can only be resolved by removing the PM.”
The Conservatives face two by-elections in February, both of which they are expected to lose, followed by what Tory MPs fear will be a hugely damaging set of local election results. Time, the rebel argues, is running out. “The local elections are the hard stop — realistically we can’t really change after the end of May,” they said. “The party does need to come to this conclusion organically, but may also need a steer.”
I'm not sure what this anonymous rebel is saying. If they go past May then they can't bin Sunak before the GE? I'm pretty sure they can and probably should.
It’s a dice roll, but it’s hard to see anything getting better for them under Sunak. Of course, they could come out of it looking even more ludicrous and making it even worse.
They really made some terrible unforced errors by elevating Truss and Sunak. That said, who is the alternative who is going to be able to ride in and save the day?
Morning all! One benefit of the Tories endlessly swapping PM is that is has disarmed the notion that you vote for a PM. Presidential politics is unhelpful in our system. Perhaps the reason why recent Tory smears against Starmer and Davey haven’t worked is that people are voting for change, not the person.
If they bin off Sunak then the replacement won’t be Braverman. Too many people are prejudiced against people who aren’t as white and male as themselves.
The problem is the leader the right wants isn’t a Tory MP. They could install the ghosts of Powell or Moseley into an empty vessel (Jonathan Gillis perhaps) and the Nigel would still be the one they want.
Have to laugh. As the Tories head towards the abyss, the person they believe can win them victory won just under 4m votes at the height of his powers. Though if the Tory members would like to be down to 4m votes I think we shouldn’t stand in their way.
Strong point this. I deeply doubt that the current Tory membership would ever choose a non-white leader over a white one.
Not convinced with that. It is hard to see someone for instance like Barclay, Dowden or Gove winning a member vote against Badenoch or Braverman.
The whole discussion about whether the Tories would do better with or without a new leader is for the birds.
The party is toxic and riven between the ascendant GB News faction that feels the party isn’t toxic enough and the neutered One Nation faction that seems resigned to declaring the water to be wet as the ship goes down.
In the absence of a dynamic, charismatic figure that could unite the party, drag it back to its senses and persuade the public to give it a second look, the leadership is practically irrelevant.
Seriously, which of these prospects would make any difference at all (in the absence of a serious failure on the part of Labour)?
Anderson: too provocative Badenoch: too wild Barclay: too bland Braverman: too fired Cameron: too previous Cleverly: too gaffe-prone Dowden: too forgettable Farage: too outside Frost: too unelected Gove: too weird Hunt: too unpopular Johnson: too Johnson Mordaunt: too woke Shapps: too schizophrenic Truss: to the pub
You missed off the star of the show:
#Priti4Leader
Haha! Gosh, what an embarrassment of riches a richness of embarrassments they have to choose from! Here’s the updated list, with additions asterisked:
Anderson: too provocative Badenoch: too wild Barclay: too bland Braverman: too fired Cameron: too previous Cleverly: too gaffe-prone Farage: too outside Frost: too unelected Gove: too weird Hunt: too unpopular ***Jenrick: too cruel Johnson: too Johnson Mordaunt: too woke ***Patel: too sinister ***Rees-Mogg: too Victorian Shapps: too schizophrenic Truss: to the pub ***Tugendhat: Tugendhat
If I was a Tory (and thank Richard Dawkins I’m not), I’d want Tugendhat as the next leader out of that lot or even Mordaunt or Cleverly. I suspect they’ll actually go for Badenoch.
You mean the Minister Pretending Not To Be In Charge Of The Post Office?
She'd be great. She could pretend not to be in charge of the country.
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
They seem fixated on the idea that they will be able to blame the failure of the Rwanda policy (and thus not stopping the boats) on lefty lawyers and thus skewer Starmer.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
It can work, but this version of Rwanda will never work
But the basic principle - take all illegals and process them somewhere quite unpleasant, but safe, a long way offshore - is sound. Australia did it
Rwanda, as posited by Big Rish, isn't the same as the Australian system in two important ways.
1. Australia did tow backs, he is simply to cowardly to do that. 2. Australia did off-shore detention so refugees were picked up at sea and warehoused on Christmas Island which was outside Australian migration law and they therefore had no access to the legal system.
So 'Rwanda' is actually one part of three elements the Australians used. It was also executed with far more aggression, confidence and competence.
AI has taken Javier Milei's already famous speech to the WEF in Davos, translated it into English, made his lips match the new English words - and it's even given the new version Milei's actual voice and accent
This is one of those cases where new technology is so incredible it feels magical. And instantly transformative
It is, of course, the end of human translation
It should be the end of believing video clips of politicians sending small boys up chimneys. It is not the end but the decline of human translation, especially for dubbing foreign films, although if AI knows your language, there's a reasonable chance the studio has dubbed it for you.
Strange goings-on here… Toby Young, vaccine sceptic, seems to be blaming media for not engaging with him, which seems a bit odd. The replies are blaming him for scaring people off vaccines, which I thought might be true, but the article actually says is it’s Muslims in the West Midlands refusing to jab their kids, perhaps for halal reasons
Maybe demonising vaccine sceptics instead of debating them in the public square wasn't such a a good idea after all ⬇️⬇️
National health incident declared as measles cases surge
“We keep coming up against the fatal tension between the obvious political collapse of this government and the obvious unwillingness of Conservative MPs to put it out of its misery,” one rebel said. “That tension can’t hold for very long. It can only be resolved by removing the PM.”
The Conservatives face two by-elections in February, both of which they are expected to lose, followed by what Tory MPs fear will be a hugely damaging set of local election results. Time, the rebel argues, is running out. “The local elections are the hard stop — realistically we can’t really change after the end of May,” they said. “The party does need to come to this conclusion organically, but may also need a steer.”
I'm not sure what this anonymous rebel is saying. If they go past May then they can't bin Sunak before the GE? I'm pretty sure they can and probably should.
It’s a dice roll, but it’s hard to see anything getting better for them under Sunak. Of course, they could come out of it looking even more ludicrous and making it even worse.
They really made some terrible unforced errors by elevating Truss and Sunak. That said, who is the alternative who is going to be able to ride in and save the day?
Morning all! One benefit of the Tories endlessly swapping PM is that is has disarmed the notion that you vote for a PM. Presidential politics is unhelpful in our system. Perhaps the reason why recent Tory smears against Starmer and Davey haven’t worked is that people are voting for change, not the person.
If they bin off Sunak then the replacement won’t be Braverman. Too many people are prejudiced against people who aren’t as white and male as themselves.
The problem is the leader the right wants isn’t a Tory MP. They could install the ghosts of Powell or Moseley into an empty vessel (Jonathan Gillis perhaps) and the Nigel would still be the one they want.
Have to laugh. As the Tories head towards the abyss, the person they believe can win them victory won just under 4m votes at the height of his powers. Though if the Tory members would like to be down to 4m votes I think we shouldn’t stand in their way.
Strong point this. I deeply doubt that the current Tory membership would ever choose a non-white leader over a white one.
Can I just remind people Johnson is mixed race, insofar as that label is meaningful?
He looks white. When you are a parochial bigot that is enough. He looks and sounds like us.
So the party that has had 3 female prime ministers, the first Jewish-heritage prime minister and the first Hindu prime minister as well as multiple black and Asian-heritage cabinet ministers is full of parochial bigots.
While the party you suppose, with a long history of being led by white males - and for many years London based white males - is not?
Right. Glad we’ve cleared that up.
TBF, the Tories have had a lot more PMs recently.
TBF, that was quite funny
More seriously both @Benpointer and @RochdalePioneers declared try e membership of the Tory party to be parochial, bigoted and racist.
Without any consideration of the facts.
That kind of approach, by them and others, is toxic to our society and political discourse and at the root of many of today’s problems
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
They seem fixated on the idea that they will be able to blame the failure of the Rwanda policy (and thus not stopping the boats) on lefty lawyers and thus skewer Starmer.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
It can work, but this version of Rwanda will never work
But the basic principle - take all illegals and process them somewhere quite unpleasant, but safe, a long way offshore - is sound. Australia did it
Rwanda, as posited by Big Rish, isn't the same as the Australian system in two important ways.
1. Australia did tow backs, he is simply to cowardly to do that. 2. Australia did off-shore detention so refugees were picked up at sea and warehoused on Christmas Island which was outside Australian migration law and they therefore had no access to the legal system.
So 'Rwanda' is actually one part of three elements the Australians used. It was also executed with far more aggression, confidence and competence.
Strange goings-on here… Toby Young, vaccine sceptic, seems to be blaming media for not engaging with him, which seems a bit odd. The replies are blaming him for scaring people off vaccines, which I thought might be true, but the article actually says is it’s Muslims in the West Midlands refusing to jab their kids, perhaps for halal reasons
Maybe demonising vaccine sceptics instead of debating them in the public square wasn't such a a good idea after all ⬇️⬇️
National health incident declared as measles cases surge
Anti-vax conspiracy theorists complaining that people haven't got vaxxed is the level of public stupidity that we have now achieved.
But measles has always been a normal part of life. So of course you should be vaccinated. COVID is new, and therefore unsettling and scary. If you ignore it or rage against it, everyone sensible will eventually agree with you, and it will go away. See also many other aspects of the modern world.
“We keep coming up against the fatal tension between the obvious political collapse of this government and the obvious unwillingness of Conservative MPs to put it out of its misery,” one rebel said. “That tension can’t hold for very long. It can only be resolved by removing the PM.”
The Conservatives face two by-elections in February, both of which they are expected to lose, followed by what Tory MPs fear will be a hugely damaging set of local election results. Time, the rebel argues, is running out. “The local elections are the hard stop — realistically we can’t really change after the end of May,” they said. “The party does need to come to this conclusion organically, but may also need a steer.”
I'm not sure what this anonymous rebel is saying. If they go past May then they can't bin Sunak before the GE? I'm pretty sure they can and probably should.
It’s a dice roll, but it’s hard to see anything getting better for them under Sunak. Of course, they could come out of it looking even more ludicrous and making it even worse.
They really made some terrible unforced errors by elevating Truss and Sunak. That said, who is the alternative who is going to be able to ride in and save the day?
Morning all! One benefit of the Tories endlessly swapping PM is that is has disarmed the notion that you vote for a PM. Presidential politics is unhelpful in our system. Perhaps the reason why recent Tory smears against Starmer and Davey haven’t worked is that people are voting for change, not the person.
If they bin off Sunak then the replacement won’t be Braverman. Too many people are prejudiced against people who aren’t as white and male as themselves.
The problem is the leader the right wants isn’t a Tory MP. They could install the ghosts of Powell or Moseley into an empty vessel (Jonathan Gillis perhaps) and the Nigel would still be the one they want.
Have to laugh. As the Tories head towards the abyss, the person they believe can win them victory won just under 4m votes at the height of his powers. Though if the Tory members would like to be down to 4m votes I think we shouldn’t stand in their way.
Strong point this. I deeply doubt that the current Tory membership would ever choose a non-white leader over a white one.
Can I just remind people Johnson is mixed race, insofar as that label is meaningful?
He looks white. When you are a parochial bigot that is enough. He looks and sounds like us.
So the party that has had 3 female prime ministers, the first Jewish-heritage prime minister and the first Hindu prime minister as well as multiple black and Asian-heritage cabinet ministers is full of parochial bigots.
While the party you suppose, with a long history of being led by white males - and for many years London based white males - is not?
Right. Glad we’ve cleared that up.
TBF, the Tories have had a lot more PMs recently.
TBF, that was quite funny
More seriously both @Benpointer and @RochdalePioneers declared try e membership of the Tory party to be parochial, bigoted and racist.
Without any consideration of the facts.
That kind of approach, by them and others, is toxic to our society and political discourse and at the root of many of today’s problems
Facts? The fact that they chose a swivel eyed white candidate rather than a vaguely sensible brown candidate.
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
They seem fixated on the idea that they will be able to blame the failure of the Rwanda policy (and thus not stopping the boats) on lefty lawyers and thus skewer Starmer.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
It can work, but this version of Rwanda will never work
But the basic principle - take all illegals and process them somewhere quite unpleasant, but safe, a long way offshore - is sound. Australia did it
Rwanda, as posited by Big Rish, isn't the same as the Australian system in two important ways.
1. Australia did tow backs, he is simply to cowardly to do that. 2. Australia did off-shore detention so refugees were picked up at sea and warehoused on Christmas Island which was outside Australian migration law and they therefore had no access to the legal system.
So 'Rwanda' is actually one part of three elements the Australians used. It was also executed with far more aggression, confidence and competence.
Australia is also a damn sight further away from its neighbours and much trickier to get to.
President Biden’s top aides told lawmakers in a private meeting that if Congress fails to authorize additional military aid for Ukraine in the coming days, Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks — months at best, according to two sources. https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1748555976754516149
Just what the Trump GOP wants.
It does rather emphasise the importance if having our own capable defences. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, whether or not Europe is a 'backwater' is beside the point.
Yes, quite so
Also, Europe is absolutely not a "backwater". It is probably still the biggest trading bloc on earth (if you add EU to non EU Europe), it is 500 million rich people in highly advanced economies and with colonies and dependencies in strategic spots all over the globe, it is a huge centre of science, education, and the rest
Australia is a backwater. Much of south America and central Africa is a backwater. Europe, no
This is not a political point, nor a Brexity point, it is just a fact
All true. And worth defending. The issue all free Europe hasn't addressed is whether it is willing to defend itself.
To be fair, there does seem to be a general awokening on this
I note that Sweden has introduced what I proposed for the UK a couple of weeks ago: a compulsory national service for young people, but one where you can choose military or civilian work
‘It might as well be me’: young Swedes prepare for new form of national service Historically neutral Sweden prioritises civil defence amid concerns of preparing for possible war"
Let's do this. Why not? This should be in the Labour manifesto.
iirc Blair and Cameron both mentioned something along these lines, which does not fill one with confidence. Traditionally, the services hate the idea. Wasn't this a Yes, Minister plot, btw?
You'd need significantly to increase the size if the services before conscription could be remotely possible. And the truth is that as a maritime state, the money would anyway be far better spent on the regular forces.
Sweden has a long border with Russia. That needs bodies.
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
They seem fixated on the idea that they will be able to blame the failure of the Rwanda policy (and thus not stopping the boats) on lefty lawyers and thus skewer Starmer.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
It can work, but this version of Rwanda will never work
But the basic principle - take all illegals and process them somewhere quite unpleasant, but safe, a long way offshore - is sound. Australia did it
Rwanda, as posited by Big Rish, isn't the same as the Australian system in two important ways.
1. Australia did tow backs, he is simply to cowardly to do that. 2. Australia did off-shore detention so refugees were picked up at sea and warehoused on Christmas Island which was outside Australian migration law and they therefore had no access to the legal system.
So 'Rwanda' is actually one part of three elements the Australians used. It was also executed with far more aggression, confidence and competence.
Australia is also a damn sight further away from its neighbours and much trickier to get to.
AI has taken Javier Milei's already famous speech to the WEF in Davos, translated it into English, made his lips match the new English words - and it's even given the new version Milei's actual voice and accent
This is one of those cases where new technology is so incredible it feels magical. And instantly transformative
It is, of course, the end of human translation
It should be the end of believing video clips of politicians sending small boys up chimneys. It is not the end but the decline of human translation, especially for dubbing foreign films, although if AI knows your language, there's a reasonable chance the studio has dubbed it for you.
It is absolutely the end of human translation. Anyone involved in translation should be looking for a new job, anyone studying languages at school or university should use their time more wisely
It's incredible. And yes there are multitudes of ramifications, too many to compute in one go
For a start it means you can have truly international politicians: an EU president could address the entire EU, all of its nations, yet for Greeks they will see the EU prez speaking Greek, whereas French people will see him/her talking French, and doing it convincingly
Also, someone has analysed the human translation, and compared it to the AI translation, and claims the AI is grammatically and linguistically superior. I have no idea if this is true, but that is the claim
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
They seem fixated on the idea that they will be able to blame the failure of the Rwanda policy (and thus not stopping the boats) on lefty lawyers and thus skewer Starmer.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
It can work, but this version of Rwanda will never work
But the basic principle - take all illegals and process them somewhere quite unpleasant, but safe, a long way offshore - is sound. Australia did it
Rwanda, as posited by Big Rish, isn't the same as the Australian system in two important ways.
1. Australia did tow backs, he is simply to cowardly to do that. 2. Australia did off-shore detention so refugees were picked up at sea and warehoused on Christmas Island which was outside Australian migration law and they therefore had no access to the legal system.
So 'Rwanda' is actually one part of three elements the Australians used. It was also executed with far more aggression, confidence and competence.
Australia is also a damn sight further away from its neighbours and much trickier to get to.
It's 4km from PNG to Australia.
It's 150 between the Mainlands. Also. You can't just hop on a high speed train to get to your starting point.
President Biden’s top aides told lawmakers in a private meeting that if Congress fails to authorize additional military aid for Ukraine in the coming days, Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks — months at best, according to two sources. https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1748555976754516149
Just what the Trump GOP wants.
It does rather emphasise the importance if having our own capable defences. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, whether or not Europe is a 'backwater' is beside the point.
Yes, quite so
Also, Europe is absolutely not a "backwater". It is probably still the biggest trading bloc on earth (if you add EU to non EU Europe), it is 500 million rich people in highly advanced economies and with colonies and dependencies in strategic spots all over the globe, it is a huge centre of science, education, and the rest
Australia is a backwater. Much of south America and central Africa is a backwater. Europe, no
This is not a political point, nor a Brexity point, it is just a fact
All true. And worth defending. The issue all free Europe hasn't addressed is whether it is willing to defend itself.
To be fair, there does seem to be a general awokening on this
I note that Sweden has introduced what I proposed for the UK a couple of weeks ago: a compulsory national service for young people, but one where you can choose military or civilian work
‘It might as well be me’: young Swedes prepare for new form of national service Historically neutral Sweden prioritises civil defence amid concerns of preparing for possible war"
Let's do this. Why not? This should be in the Labour manifesto.
iirc Blair and Cameron both mentioned something along these lines, which does not fill one with confidence. Traditionally, the services hate the idea. Wasn't this a Yes, Minister plot, btw?
You'd need significantly to increase the size if the services before conscription could be remotely possible. And the truth is that as a maritime state, the money would anyway be far better spent on the regular forces.
Sweden has a long border with Russia. That needs bodies.
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
They seem fixated on the idea that they will be able to blame the failure of the Rwanda policy (and thus not stopping the boats) on lefty lawyers and thus skewer Starmer.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
It can work, but this version of Rwanda will never work
But the basic principle - take all illegals and process them somewhere quite unpleasant, but safe, a long way offshore - is sound. Australia did it
Australia did it when the numbers were a lot lot lower, never more than a thousand a year;
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
They seem fixated on the idea that they will be able to blame the failure of the Rwanda policy (and thus not stopping the boats) on lefty lawyers and thus skewer Starmer.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
It can work, but this version of Rwanda will never work
But the basic principle - take all illegals and process them somewhere quite unpleasant, but safe, a long way offshore - is sound. Australia did it
Australia did it when the numbers were a lot lot lower, never more than a thousand a year;
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
They seem fixated on the idea that they will be able to blame the failure of the Rwanda policy (and thus not stopping the boats) on lefty lawyers and thus skewer Starmer.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
It can work, but this version of Rwanda will never work
But the basic principle - take all illegals and process them somewhere quite unpleasant, but safe, a long way offshore - is sound. Australia did it
Australia did it when the numbers were a lot lot lower, never more than a thousand a year;
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
They seem fixated on the idea that they will be able to blame the failure of the Rwanda policy (and thus not stopping the boats) on lefty lawyers and thus skewer Starmer.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
It can work, but this version of Rwanda will never work
But the basic principle - take all illegals and process them somewhere quite unpleasant, but safe, a long way offshore - is sound. Australia did it
And if that is what we were proposing then it could work.
That is not what we are proposing.
Send asylum seekers to Rwanda to process their asylum claims for the UK and bring back the successful ones? That could work. So why didn't we propose that?
Oh yeah, because the knuckle-draggers want zero immigration. Adopting the Australian scheme which allows refugees after processing isn't enough. Just send the foreign vermin away.
President Biden’s top aides told lawmakers in a private meeting that if Congress fails to authorize additional military aid for Ukraine in the coming days, Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks — months at best, according to two sources. https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1748555976754516149
Just what the Trump GOP wants.
It does rather emphasise the importance if having our own capable defences. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, whether or not Europe is a 'backwater' is beside the point.
Yes, quite so
Also, Europe is absolutely not a "backwater". It is probably still the biggest trading bloc on earth (if you add EU to non EU Europe), it is 500 million rich people in highly advanced economies and with colonies and dependencies in strategic spots all over the globe, it is a huge centre of science, education, and the rest
Australia is a backwater. Much of south America and central Africa is a backwater. Europe, no
This is not a political point, nor a Brexity point, it is just a fact
All true. And worth defending. The issue all free Europe hasn't addressed is whether it is willing to defend itself.
To be fair, there does seem to be a general awokening on this
I note that Sweden has introduced what I proposed for the UK a couple of weeks ago: a compulsory national service for young people, but one where you can choose military or civilian work
‘It might as well be me’: young Swedes prepare for new form of national service Historically neutral Sweden prioritises civil defence amid concerns of preparing for possible war"
Let's do this. Why not? This should be in the Labour manifesto.
iirc Blair and Cameron both mentioned something along these lines, which does not fill one with confidence. Traditionally, the services hate the idea. Wasn't this a Yes, Minister plot, btw?
You'd need significantly to increase the size if the services before conscription could be remotely possible. And the truth is that as a maritime state, the money would anyway be far better spent on the regular forces.
Sweden has a long border with Russia. That needs bodies.
President Biden’s top aides told lawmakers in a private meeting that if Congress fails to authorize additional military aid for Ukraine in the coming days, Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks — months at best, according to two sources. https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1748555976754516149
Just what the Trump GOP wants.
It does rather emphasise the importance if having our own capable defences. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, whether or not Europe is a 'backwater' is beside the point.
Yes, quite so
Also, Europe is absolutely not a "backwater". It is probably still the biggest trading bloc on earth (if you add EU to non EU Europe), it is 500 million rich people in highly advanced economies and with colonies and dependencies in strategic spots all over the globe, it is a huge centre of science, education, and the rest
Australia is a backwater. Much of south America and central Africa is a backwater. Europe, no
This is not a political point, nor a Brexity point, it is just a fact
All true. And worth defending. The issue all free Europe hasn't addressed is whether it is willing to defend itself.
To be fair, there does seem to be a general awokening on this
I note that Sweden has introduced what I proposed for the UK a couple of weeks ago: a compulsory national service for young people, but one where you can choose military or civilian work
‘It might as well be me’: young Swedes prepare for new form of national service Historically neutral Sweden prioritises civil defence amid concerns of preparing for possible war"
Let's do this. Why not? This should be in the Labour manifesto.
iirc Blair and Cameron both mentioned something along these lines, which does not fill one with confidence. Traditionally, the services hate the idea. Wasn't this a Yes, Minister plot, btw?
The services might be a little keener now they have completely run out of men
President Biden’s top aides told lawmakers in a private meeting that if Congress fails to authorize additional military aid for Ukraine in the coming days, Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks — months at best, according to two sources. https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1748555976754516149
Just what the Trump GOP wants.
It does rather emphasise the importance if having our own capable defences. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, whether or not Europe is a 'backwater' is beside the point.
Yes, quite so
Also, Europe is absolutely not a "backwater". It is probably still the biggest trading bloc on earth (if you add EU to non EU Europe), it is 500 million rich people in highly advanced economies and with colonies and dependencies in strategic spots all over the globe, it is a huge centre of science, education, and the rest
Australia is a backwater. Much of south America and central Africa is a backwater. Europe, no
This is not a political point, nor a Brexity point, it is just a fact
All true. And worth defending. The issue all free Europe hasn't addressed is whether it is willing to defend itself.
To be fair, there does seem to be a general awokening on this
I note that Sweden has introduced what I proposed for the UK a couple of weeks ago: a compulsory national service for young people, but one where you can choose military or civilian work
‘It might as well be me’: young Swedes prepare for new form of national service Historically neutral Sweden prioritises civil defence amid concerns of preparing for possible war"
Let's do this. Why not? This should be in the Labour manifesto.
iirc Blair and Cameron both mentioned something along these lines, which does not fill one with confidence. Traditionally, the services hate the idea. Wasn't this a Yes, Minister plot, btw?
The services might be a little keener now they have completely run out of men
Many of my contemporaries, who did National Service, had positive memories. Many others regarded it as a boring waste of two years. Some also found it hard to return to civilian life.
I’ve wondered occasionally whether there is a more cost effective and time effective alternative to National Service based on CCF.
Instead of enrolling everyone into the military for NS after school the military chucks a load of money at a system where all kids at school until their final A-level year have a choice between compulsory community service one afternoon a week or Cadet force training for three years.
The military would need to spend money on keeping a load of retiring NCOs or bring back those who want to, uniforms, basic kit and cadet SA80’s and ammunition and ensuring access to new or existing ranges and training areas.
The cadets all learn shooting, basic infantry skills, various other useful skills such as signals, orienteering, fieldcraft.
The result is you have a thousands of people a year who are exposed to certain elements of the armed forces which might appeal once they do these things where they never would have considered joining before, with the added benefit of having hundreds of thousands of people in the country who have learned to shoot, understand basic infantry skills so that any training in a growing hostile situation would be sped up.
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
They seem fixated on the idea that they will be able to blame the failure of the Rwanda policy (and thus not stopping the boats) on lefty lawyers and thus skewer Starmer.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
It can work, but this version of Rwanda will never work
But the basic principle - take all illegals and process them somewhere quite unpleasant, but safe, a long way offshore - is sound. Australia did it
Australia did it when the numbers were a lot lot lower, never more than a thousand a year;
Re next Tory leader (assuming Rishi fights the GE), Badenoch probably does still deserve the favourite position, but I’m not convinced it’s a dead cert. The Post Office scandal has blown up at completely the wrong time for her, and she has been utterly invisible as a cabinet minister (probably part of the strategy, but I’m not convinced that’s definitely going to be a plus).
Her pitch seems to be that she’s articulate and anti woke. Might be enough to get her the gig, but she doesn’t display any great vision beyond that.
I hate to say it, but despite writing her off a few months ago I do think we need to watch Braverman again. If she can get through to the members (a big if) she’s got a pitch ready to go - and I think it will chime.
People on TwiX are also claiming that the Milei AI translation was done IN REAL TIME
I find that hard to believe and I am skeptical. But if it is true, then this is even more of a pivotal moment, in myriad ways
I'm not sure I like it. Why not have him speaking and provide subtitles? It feels disrespectful.
People often dislike transformative technology, because it scares them
You are free to watch the Spanish version, and have subtitles if you want. But that's a bit like someone insisting on watching silent movies just after they introduced the talkies. Quite perverse
This is also the end of all international dubbing and voiceover work for all actors. Right here, right now
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
They seem fixated on the idea that they will be able to blame the failure of the Rwanda policy (and thus not stopping the boats) on lefty lawyers and thus skewer Starmer.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
It can work, but this version of Rwanda will never work
But the basic principle - take all illegals and process them somewhere quite unpleasant, but safe, a long way offshore - is sound. Australia did it
Australia did it when the numbers were a lot lot lower, never more than a thousand a year;
Maths defeats the project, because Rwanda don't have the capacity to deal with enough people for the deterrent factor to kick in.
The EU tacitly uses Libya, which is much bigger and nearer, and suitably nasty
We need something like that. Greenland? Some uninhabited island in the Faroes or Svalbard?
All those are in the EU so detainees could lawyer up. Cruise ships repurposed as Bangladeshi flagged prison hulks sitting just off the 12 mile limit would do it.
I don't know how the tories have got themselves in such deep shit over this but I am amused that they have. They have made their flagship policy illegal immigration while encouraging massive and not particularly choosy legal immigration. Then they conspicuously fail not to solve it while banging on about it and wasting time on it while many other important issues are not being addressed.
The Tory Party is so far to the right that Penny Mordaunt is apparently "woke". As I've said many times, this word has lost all definition. It now means anything I don't like.
If she didn’t want to be seen as ‘woke’, then perhaps she shouldn’t have had her flagship legislation on equalities written by Stonewall, and then lied about it when challenged during the leadership campaign.
For me, that is the big negative about her. She should have either defended the policy, or u-turned and disowned it. But denying it was the worst of both worlds.
Yes, it went from being a matter of policy, which can be debated and argued, to a matter of integrity.
I am seldom hyperbolic on this site, I leave that to the likes of @kle4, but this is a massive moment in human history. This is Babelfish, but better - because the lips move very convincingly
This is potentially the end of languages dividing us, as a species
Re next Tory leader (assuming Rishi fights the GE), Badenoch probably does still deserve the favourite position, but I’m not convinced it’s a dead cert. The Post Office scandal has blown up at completely the wrong time for her, and she has been utterly invisible as a cabinet minister (probably part of the strategy, but I’m not convinced that’s definitely going to be a plus).
Her pitch seems to be that she’s articulate and anti woke. Might be enough to get her the gig, but she doesn’t display any great vision beyond that.
I hate to say it, but despite writing her off a few months ago I do think we need to watch Braverman again. If she can get through to the members (a big if) she’s got a pitch ready to go - and I think it will chime.
If she can get through to the last two then it is surely going to be Braverman for LOTO. Big if of course.
Will depend very much on who is returned. The Red Wallers who seem to be a key part of her support are mainly all gone.
If you haven't already, get a copy of LM Studio or GPT4All and start downloading custom (uncensored) LLMs from huggingface.co/thebloke
(Assuming your computer can handle it - you'll need a decent graphics card or an M1/M2/M3 mac).
I still love the fact that little old ARM processors are now seen as being at the cutting edge, performance-wise. Just as they were when first developed in the mid-1980s.
President Biden’s top aides told lawmakers in a private meeting that if Congress fails to authorize additional military aid for Ukraine in the coming days, Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks — months at best, according to two sources. https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1748555976754516149
Just what the Trump GOP wants.
It does rather emphasise the importance if having our own capable defences. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, whether or not Europe is a 'backwater' is beside the point.
Yes, quite so
Also, Europe is absolutely not a "backwater". It is probably still the biggest trading bloc on earth (if you add EU to non EU Europe), it is 500 million rich people in highly advanced economies and with colonies and dependencies in strategic spots all over the globe, it is a huge centre of science, education, and the rest
Australia is a backwater. Much of south America and central Africa is a backwater. Europe, no
This is not a political point, nor a Brexity point, it is just a fact
All true. And worth defending. The issue all free Europe hasn't addressed is whether it is willing to defend itself.
To be fair, there does seem to be a general awokening on this
I note that Sweden has introduced what I proposed for the UK a couple of weeks ago: a compulsory national service for young people, but one where you can choose military or civilian work
‘It might as well be me’: young Swedes prepare for new form of national service Historically neutral Sweden prioritises civil defence amid concerns of preparing for possible war"
Let's do this. Why not? This should be in the Labour manifesto.
iirc Blair and Cameron both mentioned something along these lines, which does not fill one with confidence. Traditionally, the services hate the idea. Wasn't this a Yes, Minister plot, btw?
The services might be a little keener now they have completely run out of men
President Biden’s top aides told lawmakers in a private meeting that if Congress fails to authorize additional military aid for Ukraine in the coming days, Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks — months at best, according to two sources. https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1748555976754516149
Just what the Trump GOP wants.
It does rather emphasise the importance if having our own capable defences. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, whether or not Europe is a 'backwater' is beside the point.
Yes, quite so
Also, Europe is absolutely not a "backwater". It is probably still the biggest trading bloc on earth (if you add EU to non EU Europe), it is 500 million rich people in highly advanced economies and with colonies and dependencies in strategic spots all over the globe, it is a huge centre of science, education, and the rest
Australia is a backwater. Much of south America and central Africa is a backwater. Europe, no
This is not a political point, nor a Brexity point, it is just a fact
All true. And worth defending. The issue all free Europe hasn't addressed is whether it is willing to defend itself.
To be fair, there does seem to be a general awokening on this
I note that Sweden has introduced what I proposed for the UK a couple of weeks ago: a compulsory national service for young people, but one where you can choose military or civilian work
‘It might as well be me’: young Swedes prepare for new form of national service Historically neutral Sweden prioritises civil defence amid concerns of preparing for possible war"
Let's do this. Why not? This should be in the Labour manifesto.
iirc Blair and Cameron both mentioned something along these lines, which does not fill one with confidence. Traditionally, the services hate the idea. Wasn't this a Yes, Minister plot, btw?
The services might be a little keener now they have completely run out of men
Many of my contemporaries, who did National Service, had positive memories. Many others regarded it as a boring waste of two years. Some also found it hard to return to civilian life.
I’ve wondered occasionally whether there is a more cost effective and time effective alternative to National Service based on CCF.
Instead of enrolling everyone into the military for NS after school the military chucks a load of money at a system where all kids at school until their final A-level year have a choice between compulsory community service one afternoon a week or Cadet force training for three years.
The military would need to spend money on keeping a load of retiring NCOs or bring back those who want to, uniforms, basic kit and cadet SA80’s and ammunition and ensuring access to new or existing ranges and training areas.
The cadets all learn shooting, basic infantry skills, various other useful skills such as signals, orienteering, fieldcraft.
The result is you have a thousands of people a year who are exposed to certain elements of the armed forces which might appeal once they do these things where they never would have considered joining before, with the added benefit of having hundreds of thousands of people in the country who have learned to shoot, understand basic infantry skills so that any training in a growing hostile situation would be sped up.
You need room in the schools for that, armouries, stores for outward bound kit, offices, orficers = teaachers who have the training? Not now, not like the 1960s-1980s when many teachers had done National Service or come to think of it the real thing - one of my schoolmasters was a Lancaster pilot in the bomber offensive.
Either that or the equivalent of the old TA facilities in every town. Er ... sold off ...
"There will be a lot of people on planes to Mar-a-Lago over the next couple of weeks," one former Trump campaign official who is in close contact with donors and elected officials said, anticipating visits planned to Trump's home in Palm Beach, Florida. "A lot of folks trying to make sure they kiss the ring in the appropriate time frame."
Its a little depressing how little focus people give to news like the Port Talbot closure. Having long since sold off heavy industry for a fat commission and a quick profit, we are here with the latest foreign owner not needing to invest in British capabilities because it isn't strategically important to them.
It is to us. We really need to take back control of these things and invest in them. Being able to produce steel is a Good Investment. Cheaper than the alternative in the long run. And a lot more secure.
It's a little depressing that, back in New Labour times, people did not focus on the closure of a specialtity steel manufacturer such as Butterley. But it went unmentioned.
It's not just about steelmaking at the raw end; it's about end-products as well.
This is not specialist steel, this is virgin steel. Top quality steel for the automotive, military hardware and consumer electronics. This is our final plant for such a crucial product, it is a big deal. This is why Cameron intervened when the plant was threatened a decade ago.
If you want to apportion blame on previous Governments, Mrs Thatcher shouldn't have allowed key UK industry to be sold off to foreign asset strippers at fire-sale prices.
Yes, I'm well aware of the difference between them, which is why I mentioned it on my last line.
But as I said: there was zero noise from Labour when a speciality steelworks, more than two centuries old, which had built iconic structures such as St Pancras trainshed, the Spinaker Tower, and the Falkirk Wheel, closed. And one that was firmly in a Labour area as well. We need a steel industry that does something with the steel, as well as producing it at the source end.
British Steel was privatised by your lot. You should be arguing that Corus and now Tata had every right to make commercial decisions. I cleared out Ebbw Vale on Major's watch and Llanwern on New Labour's watch. That's what happens in a free market.
This is different, virgin steel is strategic. One instance where perhaps national security should take precedence over zero emissions. Cameron understood this, Sunak doesn't.
Did you know that the plant shuts down every night at teatime so the residents of Neath and Port Talbot can cook an evening meal.
Why on Earth are you saying 'my lot' ? You continually do this.
If you didn't tacitly defend the current Government by bellyaching that New Labour didn't get the criticism they deserved I could stop.
I liked Rishi, but his behaviour yesterday confirmed I was wrong and he is hopeless. His reaction to Port Talbot and the ex NHS lady by defending his greatness was pathetic.
Hang on. I've mentioned Butterley on here before; I had minor connections in the area. And the point I make is valid.
I'd like the Port Talbot operation to continue; in fact, I'd like it to be thoroughly modernised and invested in. But perhaps try addressing my point: making steel is rather pointless if we don't have sinks for it to be used in. And the one thing we should be good at is high-tech, rather than volume, uses.
And I repeat there was *zero* noise from Labour when Butterley closed during their watch.
I was not aware of Butterley. Thank you for the history lesson.
I was furious at New Labour for the collapse of MG Rover.
This in terms of scale and strategy is wholly different.
Have you fucking pussies been at Leon's hysteria inducing tonic?
You regular reminder that RF forces can't take Kharkov which is a short bus ride from their border. They are zero conventional threat to the UK.
Some of the autodidact military experten on here even think Ukraine can beat Russia so why does the UK need to gun up to defend against them?
Absolutely right, as I said yesterday. The Defence establishment want some new toys and plenty of money. This is the most self interested nonsense since the junior doctors strike.
Russia will take decades to recover from this war if they ever do. The huge legacy of kit they inherited from the Soviet Union has been depleted and is largely gone. They can't even make new gun barrels for themselves as they don't have the right steel thanks to sanctions. (If we genuinely want to boost our own defence capability then spending on keeping the blast furnaces at Port Talbot open might be a better idea). They are having to cannibalise their existing stock.
The fundamental fact is that Europe is now a backwater of little interest to the world at large. We are less likely to become involved in a major war now than at almost any time in our history. If we still want to strut across the world stage we need to get our carriers working and staffed and some navy support vessels so they can operate far from base. That way we can play a small part where the action is should we want to.
But we are not at risk from conventional warfare.
I utterly disagree, when we talk about a decade of two. As I mentioned below, Germany rearmed in the two decades between 1918 and 1938 to the extent that they could conquer nearly all of Europe. And that was despite supposed hefty restrictions on what they could do (which led them to do stuff like train with the Russians...).
I'd strongly argue that Russia is in a much better position than Germany was in the 1920s; both in terms of resources, industry and people.
Yes, people forget the Russian arms industry is still intact, and Uncle Vlad has not just announced the closure of his last blast furnace.
Daniel Hannan will tell us that we don't need steel we can 'trade for it'.
I'm sure China will sell us as much high quality steel as we need for infrastructure and defence purposes, although just in case, we should probably keep the receipt.
and even the US and other allies will make sure their supply is met long before our requirement.
I said yesterday that the forthcoming closure of our blast furnace (contributed to by Government Net Zero policies) was a simple case of treason. It's a bigger blow to our ability to fight any kind of prolonged war than a hundred Kim Philby's could have ever hoped to acheive. Obviously some knobend then got sniffy about it and accused me of behaving a US republican.
The idea that we are doing anything for the planet by reducing “our” carbon footprint and then importing that same steel from elsewhere is just so parochially stupid and ridiculous that it beggars belief.
“We keep coming up against the fatal tension between the obvious political collapse of this government and the obvious unwillingness of Conservative MPs to put it out of its misery,” one rebel said. “That tension can’t hold for very long. It can only be resolved by removing the PM.”
The Conservatives face two by-elections in February, both of which they are expected to lose, followed by what Tory MPs fear will be a hugely damaging set of local election results. Time, the rebel argues, is running out. “The local elections are the hard stop — realistically we can’t really change after the end of May,” they said. “The party does need to come to this conclusion organically, but may also need a steer.”
I'm not sure what this anonymous rebel is saying. If they go past May then they can't bin Sunak before the GE? I'm pretty sure they can and probably should.
It’s a dice roll, but it’s hard to see anything getting better for them under Sunak. Of course, they could come out of it looking even more ludicrous and making it even worse.
They really made some terrible unforced errors by elevating Truss and Sunak. That said, who is the alternative who is going to be able to ride in and save the day?
Morning all! One benefit of the Tories endlessly swapping PM is that is has disarmed the notion that you vote for a PM. Presidential politics is unhelpful in our system. Perhaps the reason why recent Tory smears against Starmer and Davey haven’t worked is that people are voting for change, not the person.
If they bin off Sunak then the replacement won’t be Braverman. Too many people are prejudiced against people who aren’t as white and male as themselves.
The problem is the leader the right wants isn’t a Tory MP. They could install the ghosts of Powell or Moseley into an empty vessel (Jonathan Gillis perhaps) and the Nigel would still be the one they want.
Have to laugh. As the Tories head towards the abyss, the person they believe can win them victory won just under 4m votes at the height of his powers. Though if the Tory members would like to be down to 4m votes I think we shouldn’t stand in their way.
Strong point this. I deeply doubt that the current Tory membership would ever choose a non-white leader over a white one.
Not convinced with that. It is hard to see someone for instance like Barclay, Dowden or Gove winning a member vote against Badenoch or Braverman.
The whole discussion about whether the Tories would do better with or without a new leader is for the birds.
The party is toxic and riven between the ascendant GB News faction that feels the party isn’t toxic enough and the neutered One Nation faction that seems resigned to declaring the water to be wet as the ship goes down.
In the absence of a dynamic, charismatic figure that could unite the party, drag it back to its senses and persuade the public to give it a second look, the leadership is practically irrelevant.
Seriously, which of these prospects would make any difference at all (in the absence of a serious failure on the part of Labour)?
Anderson: too provocative Badenoch: too wild Barclay: too bland Braverman: too fired Cameron: too previous Cleverly: too gaffe-prone Dowden: too forgettable Farage: too outside Frost: too unelected Gove: too weird Hunt: too unpopular Johnson: too Johnson Mordaunt: too woke Shapps: too schizophrenic Truss: to the pub
You missed off the star of the show:
#Priti4Leader
Haha! Gosh, what an embarrassment of riches a richness of embarrassments they have to choose from! Here’s the updated list, with additions asterisked:
Anderson: too provocative Badenoch: too wild Barclay: too bland Braverman: too fired Cameron: too previous Cleverly: too gaffe-prone Farage: too outside Frost: too unelected Gove: too weird Hunt: too unpopular ***Jenrick: too cruel Johnson: too Johnson Mordaunt: too woke ***Patel: too sinister ***Rees-Mogg: too Victorian Shapps: too schizophrenic Truss: to the pub ***Tugendhat: Tugendhat
If I was a Tory (and thank Richard Dawkins I’m not), I’d want Tugendhat as the next leader out of that lot or even Mordaunt or Cleverly. I suspect they’ll actually go for Badenoch.
You mean the Minister Pretending Not To Be In Charge Of The Post Office?
She'd be great. She could pretend not to be in charge of the country.
That list made me stop and look more carefully. It's obviously completely unintentional, but 'fired' is not an expression I would use - a large part of the UK uses 'well-fired' as a descriptive adjective in a bakery context. Too dismissed?
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
They seem fixated on the idea that they will be able to blame the failure of the Rwanda policy (and thus not stopping the boats) on lefty lawyers and thus skewer Starmer.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
It can work, but this version of Rwanda will never work
But the basic principle - take all illegals and process them somewhere quite unpleasant, but safe, a long way offshore - is sound. Australia did it
Australia did it when the numbers were a lot lot lower, never more than a thousand a year;
Maths defeats the project, because Rwanda don't have the capacity to deal with enough people for the deterrent factor to kick in.
The EU tacitly uses Libya, which is much bigger and nearer, and suitably nasty
We need something like that. Greenland? Some uninhabited island in the Faroes or Svalbard?
All those are in the EU so detainees could lawyer up. Cruise ships repurposed as Bangladeshi flagged prison hulks sitting just off the 12 mile limit would do it.
I don't know how the tories have got themselves in such deep shit over this but I am amused that they have. They have made their flagship policy illegal immigration while encouraging massive and not particularly choosy legal immigration. Then they conspicuously fail not to solve it while banging on about it and wasting time on it while many other important issues are not being addressed.
Quite right. If they’d lowered legal migration for a couple of years, then started to try and deal with this issue, no one bar Farage would be talking about it.
When people on here thought Boris had said ‘People of Colour’ rather than ‘People of talent’ prior to GE19, they reasoned it showed that he was an awful racist that was using the end of FOM as an excuse to stop non white immigration. Obviously he didn’t actually say ‘POC’ and as Johnson is quite a liberal elite type anyway, he was never going to employ Nick Griffin-esque immigration policies. I didn’t think he’d increase it to 600,000 a year though… and the haters still aren’t pleased
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
They seem fixated on the idea that they will be able to blame the failure of the Rwanda policy (and thus not stopping the boats) on lefty lawyers and thus skewer Starmer.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
It can work, but this version of Rwanda will never work
But the basic principle - take all illegals and process them somewhere quite unpleasant, but safe, a long way offshore - is sound. Australia did it
Australia did it when the numbers were a lot lot lower, never more than a thousand a year;
Maths defeats the project, because Rwanda don't have the capacity to deal with enough people for the deterrent factor to kick in.
The EU tacitly uses Libya, which is much bigger and nearer, and suitably nasty
We need something like that. Greenland? Some uninhabited island in the Faroes or Svalbard?
Falklands. An added advantage is that it is actually ours so nobody could complain. And I think if I was a genuine asylum seeker I would tolerate a year in the cold and damp while my claim was processed.
And we could build a high quality camp with good facilities in the middle of West Falkland and wouldn't have to worry about fences as there would be nowhere else to go or any way to leave. Even more so than from Rwanda.
If I wanted to slip into the UK to enter the black market this would be a total deterrent.
Oh look, the Tories have used Brexit to fall behind the EU on climate and environmental policy. How surprising.
Two points:
1. A lot of the EU regulation is wrong-headed and anti-scientific. They misapply the precautionary principle. But there are certainly areas where the UK can and should improve
2. This quote is revealing. She doesn’t like what the democratically-elected Irish government does so she advocated using EU legislation to overrule them.
“In Ireland, where previous governments have failed to prioritise the environment, EU legislation like this was instrumental in obliging the government to act to protect its own people from poor water treatment practices.”
Have you fucking pussies been at Leon's hysteria inducing tonic?
You regular reminder that RF forces can't take Kharkov which is a short bus ride from their border. They are zero conventional threat to the UK.
Some of the autodidact military experten on here even think Ukraine can beat Russia so why does the UK need to gun up to defend against them?
Absolutely right, as I said yesterday. The Defence establishment want some new toys and plenty of money. This is the most self interested nonsense since the junior doctors strike.
Russia will take decades to recover from this war if they ever do. The huge legacy of kit they inherited from the Soviet Union has been depleted and is largely gone. They can't even make new gun barrels for themselves as they don't have the right steel thanks to sanctions. (If we genuinely want to boost our own defence capability then spending on keeping the blast furnaces at Port Talbot open might be a better idea). They are having to cannibalise their existing stock.
The fundamental fact is that Europe is now a backwater of little interest to the world at large. We are less likely to become involved in a major war now than at almost any time in our history. If we still want to strut across the world stage we need to get our carriers working and staffed and some navy support vessels so they can operate far from base. That way we can play a small part where the action is should we want to.
But we are not at risk from conventional warfare.
I utterly disagree, when we talk about a decade of two. As I mentioned below, Germany rearmed in the two decades between 1918 and 1938 to the extent that they could conquer nearly all of Europe. And that was despite supposed hefty restrictions on what they could do (which led them to do stuff like train with the Russians...).
I'd strongly argue that Russia is in a much better position than Germany was in the 1920s; both in terms of resources, industry and people.
Yes, people forget the Russian arms industry is still intact, and Uncle Vlad has not just announced the closure of his last blast furnace.
Daniel Hannan will tell us that we don't need steel we can 'trade for it'.
I'm sure China will sell us as much high quality steel as we need for infrastructure and defence purposes, although just in case, we should probably keep the receipt.
and even the US and other allies will make sure their supply is met long before our requirement.
I said yesterday that the forthcoming closure of our blast furnace (contributed to by Government Net Zero policies) was a simple case of treason. It's a bigger blow to our ability to fight any kind of prolonged war than a hundred Kim Philby's could have ever hoped to acheive. Obviously some knobend then got sniffy about it and accused me of behaving a US republican.
The idea that we are doing anything for the planet by reducing “our” carbon footprint and then importing that same steel from elsewhere is just so parochially stupid and ridiculous that it beggars belief.
What's going to happen to the steel produced by the new process then, isn't that going to substitute the stuff currently produced?
'McGrath said that she has been repeatedly asked to prove her existence since 2020 and faces losing her income each time. [...]
She had fallen victim to a vetting procedure that regularly checks pension beneficiaries against the death register to prevent ineligible payments. According to the Department for Education (DfE), which oversees Teachers’ Pensions, death register entries may be matched to scheme members even if personal details differ.
The DfE told the Guardian that once a possible match has been identified, the beneficiary may be asked to confirm that they are not the same deceased stranger every 12 months since the system, administered by Capita, does not log a disproved link.'
So Capita gets paid £x a time to hassle people but not the £x it would cost to add a last disproved date on the database table
Ouch. A very similar problem it seems.
I think I'd add an extra table with pairs of records to be excluded from matching (with a few audit details). It surely can't be beyond the wit of Capita (or Fujitsu, in HMRC's case). Can it?
Mrs Flatlander spent an hour or so on the phone but the conclusion was that they couldn't do anything to fix her problem now because it would mean locking her account for 6-8 weeks while they looked at it (and thus there would be no way to submit a return).
If you haven't already, get a copy of LM Studio or GPT4All and start downloading custom (uncensored) LLMs from huggingface.co/thebloke
(Assuming your computer can handle it - you'll need a decent graphics card or an M1/M2/M3 mac).
I very much doubt my computer can handle it, and I am annoyingly illiterate at complex coding. Is it hard to do?
If you don't have the above hardware (e.g. you have a bog standard pc laptop), you won't be able to run the models.
It used to be hard to do because you had to install software at the command line, but now it's relatively easy with LM studio or GPT4All which are one click installs. Then you download a single file containing your LLM (TheBloke is reliable), load it into LM Studio, and chat like it's chatgpt.
But you'll need a PC with an up to date non-integrated graphics card (e.g. an Nvidia 3090 or later) or an M1/M2/M3 mac to do it.
Edit: even if you can't run this stuff yourself, I strongly suggest you check out the open source community just to see how fast things are moving. It's getting like being able to 3d print a nuclear bomb at home with a 9gb download... the idea that OpenAI or whoever can keep a lid on it is for the birds.
The Tory Party is so far to the right that Penny Mordaunt is apparently "woke". As I've said many times, this word has lost all definition. It now means anything I don't like.
If she didn’t want to be seen as ‘woke’, then perhaps she shouldn’t have had her flagship legislation on equalities written by Stonewall, and then lied about it when challenged during the leadership campaign.
Who flipping cares? Whatever the merits, this is a fringe issue. It's like disqualifying Rishi Sunak for drinking Coke not Pepsi.
IIRC it was the largest single Tory Commons rebellion of this Parliament, and the legislation was eventually withdrawn to avoid multiple Cabinet-level resignations.
Do you think Palestine is a fringe issue? I’d put both of those on the same level of importance to the public but I know which one the Tories will want to talk about for some reason despite being a failing strategy.
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
They seem fixated on the idea that they will be able to blame the failure of the Rwanda policy (and thus not stopping the boats) on lefty lawyers and thus skewer Starmer.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
It can work, but this version of Rwanda will never work
But the basic principle - take all illegals and process them somewhere quite unpleasant, but safe, a long way offshore - is sound. Australia did it
Australia did it when the numbers were a lot lot lower, never more than a thousand a year;
Maths defeats the project, because Rwanda don't have the capacity to deal with enough people for the deterrent factor to kick in.
The EU tacitly uses Libya, which is much bigger and nearer, and suitably nasty
We need something like that. Greenland? Some uninhabited island in the Faroes or Svalbard?
Falklands. An added advantage is that it is actually ours so nobody could complain. And I think if I was a genuine asylum seeker I would tolerate a year in the cold and damp while my claim was processed.
And we could build a high quality camp with good facilities in the middle of West Falkland and wouldn't have to worry about fences as there would be nowhere else to go or any way to leave. Even more so than from Rwanda.
If I wanted to slip into the UK to enter the black market this would be a total deterrent.
With those facilities built by Nick Griffin’s hardcore murderers & rapists!
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
They seem fixated on the idea that they will be able to blame the failure of the Rwanda policy (and thus not stopping the boats) on lefty lawyers and thus skewer Starmer.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
It can work, but this version of Rwanda will never work
But the basic principle - take all illegals and process them somewhere quite unpleasant, but safe, a long way offshore - is sound. Australia did it
Australia did it when the numbers were a lot lot lower, never more than a thousand a year;
Maths defeats the project, because Rwanda don't have the capacity to deal with enough people for the deterrent factor to kick in.
The EU tacitly uses Libya, which is much bigger and nearer, and suitably nasty
We need something like that. Greenland? Some uninhabited island in the Faroes or Svalbard?
Falklands. An added advantage is that it is actually ours so nobody could complain. And I think if I was a genuine asylum seeker I would tolerate a year in the cold and damp while my claim was processed.
And we could build a high quality camp with good facilities in the middle of West Falkland and wouldn't have to worry about fences as there would be nowhere else to go or any way to leave. Even more so than from Rwanda.
If I wanted to slip into the UK to enter the black market this would be a total deterrent.
That's actually quite a good idea, expensive, but it would probably work
The Falklanders would complain but then we would say "Er, do you want to be defended from Argentina, or not"?
I cannot comment on Port Talbot as I do not know the details but I assume this is an example of insufficient time to transition to net zero, much like the banning of oil and gas licences in the North Sea
However on the subject of immigration I note the report this morning that 16,000 asylum seekers have been given jobs whilst their applications are considered
What an utterly sensible idea but predictably the right in the guise of Isabel Oakeshott and Reform have had a fit of the vapours
Reform and the right of the conservative party are a group of people who need to lose, and at least that seems inevitable sometime this year and for me, the sooner the better
I just don't understand the "no immigration" mentality. OK so they have some misremembered memory of what England was like which they want to restore. But idealism doesn't fill care homes and factories with staff.
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
It is quite mad, and I am someone who would really like to see the boas stopped, and I approve of the Rwanda policy, only I want it to be much tougher and universal, for several years
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
They seem fixated on the idea that they will be able to blame the failure of the Rwanda policy (and thus not stopping the boats) on lefty lawyers and thus skewer Starmer.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
It can work, but this version of Rwanda will never work
But the basic principle - take all illegals and process them somewhere quite unpleasant, but safe, a long way offshore - is sound. Australia did it
Australia did it when the numbers were a lot lot lower, never more than a thousand a year;
Maths defeats the project, because Rwanda don't have the capacity to deal with enough people for the deterrent factor to kick in.
The EU tacitly uses Libya, which is much bigger and nearer, and suitably nasty
We need something like that. Greenland? Some uninhabited island in the Faroes or Svalbard?
Falklands. An added advantage is that it is actually ours so nobody could complain. And I think if I was a genuine asylum seeker I would tolerate a year in the cold and damp while my claim was processed.
And we could build a high quality camp with good facilities in the middle of West Falkland and wouldn't have to worry about fences as there would be nowhere else to go or any way to leave. Even more so than from Rwanda.
If I wanted to slip into the UK to enter the black market this would be a total deterrent.
You would need the fences because the bennies would shoot them on sight.
Have you fucking pussies been at Leon's hysteria inducing tonic?
You regular reminder that RF forces can't take Kharkov which is a short bus ride from their border. They are zero conventional threat to the UK.
Some of the autodidact military experten on here even think Ukraine can beat Russia so why does the UK need to gun up to defend against them?
Absolutely right, as I said yesterday. The Defence establishment want some new toys and plenty of money. This is the most self interested nonsense since the junior doctors strike.
Russia will take decades to recover from this war if they ever do. The huge legacy of kit they inherited from the Soviet Union has been depleted and is largely gone. They can't even make new gun barrels for themselves as they don't have the right steel thanks to sanctions. (If we genuinely want to boost our own defence capability then spending on keeping the blast furnaces at Port Talbot open might be a better idea). They are having to cannibalise their existing stock.
The fundamental fact is that Europe is now a backwater of little interest to the world at large. We are less likely to become involved in a major war now than at almost any time in our history. If we still want to strut across the world stage we need to get our carriers working and staffed and some navy support vessels so they can operate far from base. That way we can play a small part where the action is should we want to.
But we are not at risk from conventional warfare.
I utterly disagree, when we talk about a decade of two. As I mentioned below, Germany rearmed in the two decades between 1918 and 1938 to the extent that they could conquer nearly all of Europe. And that was despite supposed hefty restrictions on what they could do (which led them to do stuff like train with the Russians...).
I'd strongly argue that Russia is in a much better position than Germany was in the 1920s; both in terms of resources, industry and people.
Yes, people forget the Russian arms industry is still intact, and Uncle Vlad has not just announced the closure of his last blast furnace.
Daniel Hannan will tell us that we don't need steel we can 'trade for it'.
I'm sure China will sell us as much high quality steel as we need for infrastructure and defence purposes, although just in case, we should probably keep the receipt.
and even the US and other allies will make sure their supply is met long before our requirement.
I said yesterday that the forthcoming closure of our blast furnace (contributed to by Government Net Zero policies) was a simple case of treason. It's a bigger blow to our ability to fight any kind of prolonged war than a hundred Kim Philby's could have ever hoped to acheive. Obviously some knobend then got sniffy about it and accused me of behaving a US republican.
The idea that we are doing anything for the planet by reducing “our” carbon footprint and then importing that same steel from elsewhere is just so parochially stupid and ridiculous that it beggars belief.
What's going to happen to the steel produced by the new process then, isn't that going to substitute the stuff currently produced?
"Where is the analysis that a country the size of the UK, with an ambition to rewire its electricity grid and reboot its entire energy sector, can do it without virgin steel?"
“We keep coming up against the fatal tension between the obvious political collapse of this government and the obvious unwillingness of Conservative MPs to put it out of its misery,” one rebel said. “That tension can’t hold for very long. It can only be resolved by removing the PM.”
The Conservatives face two by-elections in February, both of which they are expected to lose, followed by what Tory MPs fear will be a hugely damaging set of local election results. Time, the rebel argues, is running out. “The local elections are the hard stop — realistically we can’t really change after the end of May,” they said. “The party does need to come to this conclusion organically, but may also need a steer.”
I'm not sure what this anonymous rebel is saying. If they go past May then they can't bin Sunak before the GE? I'm pretty sure they can and probably should.
It’s a dice roll, but it’s hard to see anything getting better for them under Sunak. Of course, they could come out of it looking even more ludicrous and making it even worse.
They really made some terrible unforced errors by elevating Truss and Sunak. That said, who is the alternative who is going to be able to ride in and save the day?
Morning all! One benefit of the Tories endlessly swapping PM is that is has disarmed the notion that you vote for a PM. Presidential politics is unhelpful in our system. Perhaps the reason why recent Tory smears against Starmer and Davey haven’t worked is that people are voting for change, not the person.
If they bin off Sunak then the replacement won’t be Braverman. Too many people are prejudiced against people who aren’t as white and male as themselves.
The problem is the leader the right wants isn’t a Tory MP. They could install the ghosts of Powell or Moseley into an empty vessel (Jonathan Gillis perhaps) and the Nigel would still be the one they want.
Have to laugh. As the Tories head towards the abyss, the person they believe can win them victory won just under 4m votes at the height of his powers. Though if the Tory members would like to be down to 4m votes I think we shouldn’t stand in their way.
Strong point this. I deeply doubt that the current Tory membership would ever choose a non-white leader over a white one.
Can I just remind people Johnson is mixed race, insofar as that label is meaningful?
He looks white. When you are a parochial bigot that is enough. He looks and sounds like us.
So the party that has had 3 female prime ministers, the first Jewish-heritage prime minister and the first Hindu prime minister as well as multiple black and Asian-heritage cabinet ministers is full of parochial bigots.
While the party you suppose, with a long history of being led by white males - and for many years London based white males - is not?
Right. Glad we’ve cleared that up.
TBF, the Tories have had a lot more PMs recently.
TBF, that was quite funny
More seriously both @Benpointer and @RochdalePioneers declared try e membership of the Tory party to be parochial, bigoted and racist.
Without any consideration of the facts.
That kind of approach, by them and others, is toxic to our society and political discourse and at the root of many of today’s problems
Facts? The fact that they chose a swivel eyed white candidate rather than a vaguely sensible brown candidate.
It’s a bit harsh to call Starmer “swivel-eyed”
As for Truss she stroked their political prostate during the election while Rishi proved himself to be useless and tin-eared
Comments
The detail always ends this. I remember entertaining discussions with Bart's predecessor about why its impractical for the unemployed of Widnes to fill the vacancies in Wisbech. Perhaps the No Immigration brigade think they can simply order the work-shy into these jobs. Great! Where will they live? Who will look after their kids? How do they get to work? Who will pay their bills?
STOP THE BOATS truly is the Tory ruination project. We can't physically stop the boats, we don't want to stop the boats, we're letting in much larger numbers legally whilst labelling the legals as illegal alien invaders.
They cannot ever satisfy the people they have gaslit with this idiocy. The only prospect is defeat. And yet they shriek ever louder about how they must overcome the latest battle.
But the comparison was with NATO. And NATO has had, I think, the Bosnia/Serbia war in 1999, aside from minor peacekeeping missions?
I'm not trying to make the USA or NATO out to be whiter than white; but my goodness, compared to Russia's 'adventures' they're golden.
That's the Tory party's problem in a nutshell right there. And the country's frankly - as any number of scandals prove. Plus the conflict of interest arising from having a one issue lobby group dictate the law - as the recent Meade judgment has shown.
"A man who is honest in small things will be honest in great; the man who is dishonest in small things will be dishonest in great."
Or have we learnt nothing from the career of one Boris Johnson?
I used to think Yousaf was doing an ok job, just dealing with legacy Sturgeon and taking an admirable position on Israel/Palestine. The XL Bully fiasco is his own mistake though, and represents what people are losing patience with - petty woke-lite kneejerks against Westminster.
I'd guess it was that kind of instinct that was illustrated in the WhatsApps rather than anything more sinister.
But the fact is the Tories haven't the brains or the bollocks to see it through, in that way, yet they are spending half a billion quid SHOWING us that they can't do it, like this will impress people: an expensive failure
There are no votes in catastrophic if well-meaning ineptitude, perhaps they don't understand that
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/07/15/trans-debate-not-political-issue-insists-penny-mordaunt-backer/ (£££)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Mordaunt
And the truth is that as a maritime state, the money would anyway be far better spent on the regular forces.
Sweden has a long border with Russia. That needs bodies.
Whatever the case, it is a terrible look, esp after her pious "I'm better than Boris" bullshit, earlier on
Who will do the entry level minimum wage jobs?
Not migrants, not the young.
Maybe we need some form of national service for the minted, retired over 50's?
Oh look, the Tories have used Brexit to fall behind the EU on climate and environmental policy. How surprising.
Some also found it hard to return to civilian life.
That died with Thatcher - probably before. Oil and gas was going the same way even before we got serious about renewables.
Anderson: too provocative
Badenoch: too wild
Barclay: too bland
Braverman: too fired
Cameron: too previous
Cleverly: too gaffe-prone
Farage: too outside
Frost: too unelected
Gove: too weird
Hunt: too unpopular
***Jenrick: too cruel
Johnson: too Johnson
Mordaunt: too woke
***Patel: too sinister
***Rees-Mogg: too Victorian
Shapps: too schizophrenic
Truss: to the pub
***Tugendhat: Tugendhat
If I was a Tory (and thank Richard Dawkins I’m not), I’d want Tugendhat as the next leader out of that lot or even Mordaunt or Cleverly. I suspect they’ll actually go for Badenoch.
Is that true? If it is true, presumably it is UK wide, not Scottish law, so others could be fecked, as well
My guess is no one will be prosecuted, as so many are implicated, on all sides
Hundreds and hundreds of them. Looks like the end of days.
I liked Rishi, but his behaviour yesterday confirmed I was wrong and he is hopeless. His reaction to Port Talbot and the ex NHS lady by defending his greatness was pathetic.
Maybe demonising vaccine sceptics instead of debating them in the public square wasn't such a a good idea after all ⬇️⬇️
National health incident declared as measles cases surge
https://x.com/toadmeister/status/1748452285347176567?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
AI has taken Javier Milei's already famous speech to the WEF in Davos, translated it into English, made his lips match the new English words - and it's even given the new version Milei's actual voice and accent
https://x.com/aphysicist/status/1747868626948907325?s=20
This is one of those cases where new technology is so incredible it feels magical. And instantly transformative
It is, of course, the end of human translation
Instead we'll be importing steel from high carbon sources, buggering up the balance of payments (I'm old enough to remember when that mattered), throwing thousands out of work and screwing the local economy in an already less affluent part of the country.
Something else for Sunak to laugh at.
But the failure of the policy is that it can't work. At all. At any level. And people (you included) have fitted themselves with blinkers to ignore all of the massive issues which will stop it working.
Worst of all is the disconnect between the slogan and the political need. STOP THE BOATS is - they think - about stopping the boats. But to their voters it is about stopping migration. Completely....
But the basic principle - take all illegals and process them somewhere quite unpleasant, but safe, a long way offshore - is sound. Australia did it
MilAI !
She'd be great. She could pretend not to be in charge of the country.
I doubt Finland and Norway would appreciate being seen as part of Sweden these days...or Russia, for that matter.
I'd like the Port Talbot operation to continue; in fact, I'd like it to be thoroughly modernised and invested in. But perhaps try addressing my point: making steel is rather pointless if we don't have sinks for it to be used in. And the one thing we should be good at is high-tech, rather than volume, uses.
And I repeat there was *zero* noise from Labour when Butterley closed during their watch.
She should have either defended the policy, or u-turned and disowned it.
But denying it was the worst of both worlds.
MilAI!!!
I'd like to know how quickly AI did this. Did it take days, hours, minutes?
Very soon it will be able to it in real time, of course (if it can't yet, who knows), and then that will change human interaction, worldwide
1. Australia did tow backs, he is simply to cowardly to do that.
2. Australia did off-shore detention so refugees were picked up at sea and warehoused on Christmas Island which was outside Australian migration law and they therefore had no access to the legal system.
So 'Rwanda' is actually one part of three elements the Australians used. It was also executed with far more aggression, confidence and competence.
More seriously both @Benpointer and @RochdalePioneers declared try e membership of the Tory party to be parochial, bigoted and racist.
Without any consideration of the facts.
That kind of approach, by them and others, is toxic to our society and political discourse and at the root of many of today’s problems
If you ignore it or rage against it, everyone sensible will eventually agree with you, and it will go away.
See also many other aspects of the modern world.
It's incredible. And yes there are multitudes of ramifications, too many to compute in one go
For a start it means you can have truly international politicians: an EU president could address the entire EU, all of its nations, yet for Greeks they will see the EU prez speaking Greek, whereas French people will see him/her talking French, and doing it convincingly
Also, someone has analysed the human translation, and compared it to the AI translation, and claims the AI is grammatically and linguistically superior. I have no idea if this is true, but that is the claim
Also. You can't just hop on a high speed train to get to your starting point.
https://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/asylum-boats-statistics/
Maths defeats the project, because Rwanda don't have the capacity to deal with enough people for the deterrent factor to kick in.
We need something like that. Greenland? Some uninhabited island in the Faroes or Svalbard?
https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/library/prspub/2958111/upload_binary/2958111.pdf;fileType=application/pdf
That is not what we are proposing.
Send asylum seekers to Rwanda to process their asylum claims for the UK and bring back the successful ones? That could work. So why didn't we propose that?
Oh yeah, because the knuckle-draggers want zero immigration. Adopting the Australian scheme which allows refugees after processing isn't enough. Just send the foreign vermin away.
Muchas gracias y Viva la libertad carajo.
I find that hard to believe and I am skeptical. But if it is true, then this is even more of a pivotal moment, in myriad ways
Instead of enrolling everyone into the military for NS after school the military chucks a load of money at a system where all kids at school until their final A-level year have a choice between compulsory community service one afternoon a week or Cadet force training for three years.
The military would need to spend money on keeping a load of retiring NCOs or bring back those who want to, uniforms, basic kit and cadet SA80’s and ammunition and ensuring access to new or existing ranges and training areas.
The cadets all learn shooting, basic infantry skills, various other useful skills such as signals, orienteering, fieldcraft.
The result is you have a thousands of people a year who are exposed to certain elements of the armed forces which might appeal once they do these things where they never would have considered joining before, with the added benefit of having hundreds of thousands of people in the country who have learned to shoot, understand basic infantry skills so that any training in a growing hostile situation would be sped up.
FUCK
Her pitch seems to be that she’s articulate and anti woke. Might be enough to get her the gig, but she doesn’t display any great vision beyond that.
I hate to say it, but despite writing her off a few months ago I do think we need to watch Braverman again. If she can get through to the members (a big if) she’s got a pitch ready to go - and I think it will chime.
You are free to watch the Spanish version, and have subtitles if you want. But that's a bit like someone insisting on watching silent movies just after they introduced the talkies. Quite perverse
This is also the end of all international dubbing and voiceover work for all actors. Right here, right now
I don't know how the tories have got themselves in such deep shit over this but I am amused that they have. They have made their flagship policy illegal immigration while encouraging massive and not particularly choosy legal immigration. Then they conspicuously fail not to solve it while banging on about it and wasting time on it while many other important issues are not being addressed.
.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68040614
(Assuming your computer can handle it - you'll need a decent graphics card or an M1/M2/M3 mac).
It's not the C word, it's worse.
https://www.timesnownews.com/technology-science/ai-translates-argentinian-presidents-address-at-world-economic-forum-in-real-time-article-106976390
I am seldom hyperbolic on this site, I leave that to the likes of @kle4, but this is a massive moment in human history. This is Babelfish, but better - because the lips move very convincingly
This is potentially the end of languages dividing us, as a species
Will depend very much on who is returned. The Red Wallers who seem to be a key part of her support are mainly all gone.
Either that or the equivalent of the old TA facilities in every town. Er ... sold off ...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/republicans-close-ranks-trump-2024-gop-nomination-rcna134739
I was furious at New Labour for the collapse of MG Rover.
This in terms of scale and strategy is wholly different.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-68017180
The idea that we are doing anything for the planet by reducing “our” carbon footprint and then importing that same steel from elsewhere is just so parochially stupid and ridiculous that it beggars belief.
When people on here thought Boris had said ‘People of Colour’ rather than ‘People of talent’ prior to GE19, they reasoned it showed that he was an awful racist that was using the end of FOM as an excuse to stop non white immigration. Obviously he didn’t actually say ‘POC’ and as Johnson is quite a liberal elite type anyway, he was never going to employ Nick Griffin-esque immigration policies. I didn’t think he’d increase it to 600,000 a year though… and the haters still aren’t pleased
And we could build a high quality camp with good facilities in the middle of West Falkland and wouldn't have to worry about fences as there would be nowhere else to go or any way to leave. Even more so than from Rwanda.
If I wanted to slip into the UK to enter the black market this would be a total deterrent.
1. A lot of the EU regulation is wrong-headed and anti-scientific. They misapply the precautionary principle. But there are certainly areas where the UK can and should improve
2. This quote is revealing. She doesn’t like what the democratically-elected Irish government does so she advocated using EU legislation to overrule them.
“In Ireland, where previous governments have failed to prioritise the environment, EU legislation like this was instrumental in obliging the government to act to protect its own people from poor water treatment practices.”
I think I'd add an extra table with pairs of records to be excluded from matching (with a few audit details). It surely can't be beyond the wit of Capita (or Fujitsu, in HMRC's case). Can it?
Mrs Flatlander spent an hour or so on the phone but the conclusion was that they couldn't do anything to fix her problem now because it would mean locking her account for 6-8 weeks while they looked at it (and thus there would be no way to submit a return).
This probably doesn't help:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/16/fujitsu-it-workers-hmrc-systems-to-go-on-strike
It used to be hard to do because you had to install software at the command line, but now it's relatively easy with LM studio or GPT4All which are one click installs. Then you download a single file containing your LLM (TheBloke is reliable), load it into LM Studio, and chat like it's chatgpt.
But you'll need a PC with an up to date non-integrated graphics card (e.g. an Nvidia 3090 or later) or an M1/M2/M3 mac to do it.
If you don't have the hardware, there are instructions here on how to run your own models in the cloud (up to 120 billion parameters, I can only run 13b models at home), but that gets a bit more complex - https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/18sqf84/what_is_the_most_cost_effective_way_to_run/
Edit: even if you can't run this stuff yourself, I strongly suggest you check out the open source community just to see how fast things are moving. It's getting like being able to 3d print a nuclear bomb at home with a 9gb download... the idea that OpenAI or whoever can keep a lid on it is for the birds.
https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/bnp-publish-plans-for-penal-colony-in-the-falkland-islands-1977519
The Falklanders would complain but then we would say "Er, do you want to be defended from Argentina, or not"?
End of argument
"Where is the analysis that a country the size of the UK, with an ambition to rewire its electricity grid and reboot its entire energy sector, can do it without virgin steel?"
https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2024/jan/19/tata-port-talbot-decision-goes-beyond-wales-steel-energy-sector
As for Truss she stroked their political prostate during the election while Rishi proved himself to be useless and tin-eared