This election is going to play very differently regionally. I expect the Tories to be all but wiped out in London, metropolitan areas and to have a shocker in the South West and Wales. Conversely, I think their vote will be stickier than expected in the midlands and in some northern county/small towns.
I can't speak for the Midlands. For northern England they are going to get absolutely destroyed. Whilst there will remain pockets of shire Tories, all of the places where blue collar Boris Brexit Toryism exploded in 2019 will be lost. All. Maybe keep a random couple if they are lucky and the vote splits right to allow their collapse to still leave them on top.
Why? Because, to get all northern again for a minute, they've done fuck all round here. Too. many morons unexpectedly elected, fed the spin lines by head office which they parrot about all the things they are delivering. Whilst delivering nothing. Voters are used to nothing, but they're not used to being lied to about it.
Worse still is the parochial bigotry that was always close to the surface in many towns now whipped to a frenzy. They voted Brexit and then Boris to get the foreigners out. Gone. Its their fault we can't see a doctor, why the schools are crap, why there's no jobs and no money. And even in 2019 the lure of the further right was strong - the Brexit Party saved Labour in a stack of seats. I expect the number of FUKkers to be even higher this time, and vs 2019 they will mostly be transfers from Tory 2019 totals.
It is going to be a political bloodbath. And well deserved - will be fun to see what Lord Ben I'll Sue Houchen will do with his local support all gone and the wolves closing in on the scent of malfeasance...
Round here a comment I’ve heard often is where have all these coloured people come from.
And it’s not usually as a racist comment we’ve always had a few people of Asian / African descent but there are noticeably more than used to be the case
Granted a lot of the people complaining won’t actually vote but it does show how many people think Bozo and co have utterly failed to deliver what they promised
It's a lot worse than "not delivering", they have done the opposite of delivering. We have had 1.3 million migrants in two years, which is: simply off the dial, unprecedented in our history, changing the country visibly and briskly, and is a larger rate per capita than any annual immigration into the "land of immigrants" - the USA
We are importing more people than America in the era of Ellis Island. Take a minute and grasp that
It is screamingly insane, it is a kind of Ponzi scheme, and all of this is happening as everyone admits the NHS can't cope, our sewage system can't cope, our infrastructure is fucked, and house-ownership is becoming a dream for anyone under 50
The Tories are going to be obliterated, and deservedly, to the extent they may never recover
However, Starmer will then have to tackle this issue. It cannot be ignored. What will he do?
How much off that 1.3 million is Ukraine/Hong Kong and adjustments of student numbers after covid?
I believe about 100-150,000 is Ukraine/HK
Students dunno, but an awful lot of them have brought dependants (much more than usual), and a much higher propertion are now converting their student visas to work visas, so they stay
Now it's great that people want to come here, it's good our unis are attractive, I am sure 98% of these people are fantastic brain surgeons to be, but the simple fact is the UK cannot cope with 700,000 net immigrants a year. Remember when Cameron vowed to get it down to tens of thousands? Now it is SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND
To grasp this nettle will take courage. Does Starmer possess it? I doubt it, and it's not in Labour's nature to clamp down on migration
It is perfectly possible to integrate 700K people in UK society a year.
To do so will take investment in infrastructure, and in the effort to socially integrate them. Nothing is free, all the options require work to be done.
What, in perpetuity? 700,000 a year for the next 30 years? That will add 20 million people to the population and transform entire cities and regions, in ethnicity, culture, religion, mores, laws, everything - coz those 20 million people won’t be from Ireland or Denmark
This is absolute madness - and it really is the way you guarantee a far right party governing the country
People like you are fucking dangerous
It's worth pointing out, it took years and years and years and years and years just to integrate the Irish when there was mass immigration from Ireland in the 19th century. We still have separate Catholic schools. It's still the case that Irish surnames are disproportionately common among the poorest parts of white British society. Now the irish are foreign, but as foreigners go they're not very foreign. Integration is very very hard.
Are you some kind of Nazi???
Integrating 700,000 Africans, Asians, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, Bolivians, Peruvians every single year is fine. 1.3m every two years - good. 3 million every four years even better. Doddle. What’s your problem, DOCTOR GOEBBELS?? Don’t you like foreigners?
All you have to do is look across Europe and see that the Hard and Far Right is now a minuscule and diminishing threat, even after large scale immigration, and everyone can tell that you are basically parroting Mein Kampf
This is my objection to the 'progressive mindset'. 'Integration' is seen as a case of education and eliminating prejudice amongst the local population. Where this fails, then it can be compelled by law. However, this applies only to existing majority populations, not incomers. I have encountered this type of thinking amongst 'liberals' for 10 years and it is much in evidence on PB. The more extreme it gets, the more radical the eventual response will be. The rise of Trump, the AfD etc can be predicted almost like an algorhythm. If you think you can outlaw Trump and the AfD, then the response you eventually encounter gets more and more gruesome until you get an actual Hitler. In this way the left are responsible for the return of fascism, because it is all a product of their own fascism in ignoring legitimate opposition to their policies and suppressing ideas, speech and beliefs through law. In this context, it may not be such a bad idea to start working with the "far right" to address these problems, as they have been doing (for instance) in Finland for a decade.
Indeed. This is why the Left is not just delusional, it is dangerous
It is basically waving a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler
And they just don’t get it
A sensible Left would propose more foreign aid, investment, conflict resolution, and bilateral agreements, including help at source, to "stop the boats".
Instead, they say "safe and legal routes" which I don't think they realise is heard as: create an open door for anyone who wants it.
These are the arguments made by the "loony left" - whereas the idea of increasing foreign aid is anathema because people always say "but we should help our own first". Which goes back to my point - if you meet the material needs of people, there is no frustration that will build up to be misattributed to "the other". The neoliberal capitalist consensus cannot do that - more profit must be skimmed and therefore the average person will lose out. The right do not want to do that - they like having an "other" to have grievances against to protect the fact that capitalism is the reason for this. The left want to deal with this issue - and get called communists for proposing policy solutions or slight social democratic reform with wealth redistribution and investment in civic infrastructure.
I haven't heard the left make a cogent argument on this.
In fact, phrases like "neoliberal capitalist consensus" sort of show both why you don't think it's worth bothering to try and how you'd get it badly wrong if you did.
The Matt Goodwin right and Aaron Bastani left both hate the same thing: centrist liberals. They just have different names for them. The left bang in about the neoliberal capitalist consensus or “late capitalism”, the right talk about the woke liberal establishment or “new elites”. Same people: the fabled blob.
The Matt Goodwin right are mostly people who believe in the same things as centrist liberals in about 1990.
Ms. Haley told reporters on Tuesday that she planned to continue her campaign regardless of the outcome in New Hampshire, and her campaign manager indicated as much in a memo shared with The New York Times.
Ms. Haley told reporters on Tuesday that she planned to continue her campaign regardless of the outcome in New Hampshire, and her campaign manager indicated as much in a memo shared with The New York Times.
This election is going to play very differently regionally. I expect the Tories to be all but wiped out in London, metropolitan areas and to have a shocker in the South West and Wales. Conversely, I think their vote will be stickier than expected in the midlands and in some northern county/small towns.
I can't speak for the Midlands. For northern England they are going to get absolutely destroyed. Whilst there will remain pockets of shire Tories, all of the places where blue collar Boris Brexit Toryism exploded in 2019 will be lost. All. Maybe keep a random couple if they are lucky and the vote splits right to allow their collapse to still leave them on top.
Why? Because, to get all northern again for a minute, they've done fuck all round here. Too. many morons unexpectedly elected, fed the spin lines by head office which they parrot about all the things they are delivering. Whilst delivering nothing. Voters are used to nothing, but they're not used to being lied to about it.
Worse still is the parochial bigotry that was always close to the surface in many towns now whipped to a frenzy. They voted Brexit and then Boris to get the foreigners out. Gone. Its their fault we can't see a doctor, why the schools are crap, why there's no jobs and no money. And even in 2019 the lure of the further right was strong - the Brexit Party saved Labour in a stack of seats. I expect the number of FUKkers to be even higher this time, and vs 2019 they will mostly be transfers from Tory 2019 totals.
It is going to be a political bloodbath. And well deserved - will be fun to see what Lord Ben I'll Sue Houchen will do with his local support all gone and the wolves closing in on the scent of malfeasance...
Round here a comment I’ve heard often is where have all these coloured people come from.
And it’s not usually as a racist comment we’ve always had a few people of Asian / African descent but there are noticeably more than used to be the case
Granted a lot of the people complaining won’t actually vote but it does show how many people think Bozo and co have utterly failed to deliver what they promised
It's a lot worse than "not delivering", they have done the opposite of delivering. We have had 1.3 million migrants in two years, which is: simply off the dial, unprecedented in our history, changing the country visibly and briskly, and is a larger rate per capita than any annual immigration into the "land of immigrants" - the USA
We are importing more people than America in the era of Ellis Island. Take a minute and grasp that
It is screamingly insane, it is a kind of Ponzi scheme, and all of this is happening as everyone admits the NHS can't cope, our sewage system can't cope, our infrastructure is fucked, and house-ownership is becoming a dream for anyone under 50
The Tories are going to be obliterated, and deservedly, to the extent they may never recover
However, Starmer will then have to tackle this issue. It cannot be ignored. What will he do?
How much off that 1.3 million is Ukraine/Hong Kong and adjustments of student numbers after covid?
I believe about 100-150,000 is Ukraine/HK
Students dunno, but an awful lot of them have brought dependants (much more than usual), and a much higher propertion are now converting their student visas to work visas, so they stay
Now it's great that people want to come here, it's good our unis are attractive, I am sure 98% of these people are fantastic brain surgeons to be, but the simple fact is the UK cannot cope with 700,000 net immigrants a year. Remember when Cameron vowed to get it down to tens of thousands? Now it is SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND
To grasp this nettle will take courage. Does Starmer possess it? I doubt it, and it's not in Labour's nature to clamp down on migration
It is perfectly possible to integrate 700K people in UK society a year.
To do so will take investment in infrastructure, and in the effort to socially integrate them. Nothing is free, all the options require work to be done.
What, in perpetuity? 700,000 a year for the next 30 years? That will add 20 million people to the population and transform entire cities and regions, in ethnicity, culture, religion, mores, laws, everything - coz those 20 million people won’t be from Ireland or Denmark
This is absolute madness - and it really is the way you guarantee a far right party governing the country
People like you are fucking dangerous
It's worth pointing out, it took years and years and years and years and years just to integrate the Irish when there was mass immigration from Ireland in the 19th century. We still have separate Catholic schools. It's still the case that Irish surnames are disproportionately common among the poorest parts of white British society. Now the irish are foreign, but as foreigners go they're not very foreign. Integration is very very hard.
Are you some kind of Nazi???
Integrating 700,000 Africans, Asians, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, Bolivians, Peruvians every single year is fine. 1.3m every two years - good. 3 million every four years even better. Doddle. What’s your problem, DOCTOR GOEBBELS?? Don’t you like foreigners?
All you have to do is look across Europe and see that the Hard and Far Right is now a minuscule and diminishing threat, even after large scale immigration, and everyone can tell that you are basically parroting Mein Kampf
This is my objection to the 'progressive mindset'. 'Integration' is seen as a case of education and eliminating prejudice amongst the local population. Where this fails, then it can be compelled by law. However, this applies only to existing majority populations, not incomers. I have encountered this type of thinking amongst 'liberals' for 10 years and it is much in evidence on PB. The more extreme it gets, the more radical the eventual response will be. The rise of Trump, the AfD etc can be predicted almost like an algorhythm. If you think you can outlaw Trump and the AfD, then the response you eventually encounter gets more and more gruesome until you get an actual Hitler. In this way the left are responsible for the return of fascism, because it is all a product of their own fascism in ignoring legitimate opposition to their policies and suppressing ideas, speech and beliefs through law. In this context, it may not be such a bad idea to start working with the "far right" to address these problems, as they have been doing (for instance) in Finland for a decade.
Indeed. This is why the Left is not just delusional, it is dangerous
It is basically waving a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler
And they just don’t get it
Lol, reactionary arguing that "progress" is the problem, not being a reactionary. Might as well say "look, it's not okay to allow the gays out of the closet, because it's a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler. Can't give equal rights to women; because what if Hitler?".
The main issue is that liberals (separate group from leftists or the left) refuse to meet these progressive values with progressive material improvements for all people. I remember reading a great study that showed men in the workplace saw improvements for women in the workplace as a zero sum situation - if women gained they must be losing. The same for white men thinking about people of colour. But that feeling was, in part, because the "benefits" of being a man or being white in the workforce were "making up" for where their salaries lacked - the social benefits of being a white man in the workforce were a wage supplement, in a sense, and so when those "benefits" disappeared (by tackling bigotry) they felt they were "losing out".
That would make more sense if so many of the people immigrating weren't the actual cultural and social reactionaries. You talk about equal rights for gays and women as if that's somehow an inevitable corollary of immigration because both are 'progressive'. Where are the biggest obstacles in society now to those rights? It's not gammons in the golf clubs or WWCM in the pubs.
Quite so
The quickest and easiest way to get homosexuality made illegal again, in the UK, is to import about 5m more Muslims with homophobic opinions. That would be enough, if these people caucus, to make a real impact on elections such that homosexuality is once more illegal, and the British Left won’t raise a peep of protest until it is far far too Iate
One thing I find interesting is how some cultures adopt to being immigrants.
For example, Peru. I know the place fairly well. On paper, pretty reactionary (1950s) social values. In actuality, the Peruvians I know, who immigrated, have instantly adopted the British "none-of-my-business-their-private-life" reaction to gay and trans people, have no qualms about abortion etc etc. Yet they were brought up to a rather different set of views at home.
It’s not hard to work out. It’s religion
Islam is a much more tenacious mindset than late stage Catholicism or Buddhism or whatever. We can argue why that is - because Islam is superior? Possibly. Because Islam has blood curdling death statutes against apostasy? Also possible
But the fact is Muslim migrants are MUCH less likely to drop their religion and assimilate to secular liberal western values, and that means that if you import enough Muslims you have a determined, faithful, united minority which will - by sheer persistence (and occasional violence) - impose its views on the apathetic but secular majority
And, good for them, they believe what they believe, and that is their right. Trouble is it impinges on everyone else
We see this everywhere. It is not disputable now. So what do we do about it?
Do you have any evidence that an increase in Muslim immigrants changes policies or hurts local LGBT+ communities? I’ll give you one for free - I know that some of the organising against youth sex education is backed by conservative Muslim groups; but it also has the backing of lots of home grown conservative groups as well.
Islam is the second biggest religion in the UK (if you don’t separate Christian into Catholic and protestant). 6.5% of the population in England and Wales (at the last census) are Muslim. This is not a group with significant political power to enforce their policy preferences, even if “creeping Sharia” were their preferred policy preferences.
This election is going to play very differently regionally. I expect the Tories to be all but wiped out in London, metropolitan areas and to have a shocker in the South West and Wales. Conversely, I think their vote will be stickier than expected in the midlands and in some northern county/small towns.
I can't speak for the Midlands. For northern England they are going to get absolutely destroyed. Whilst there will remain pockets of shire Tories, all of the places where blue collar Boris Brexit Toryism exploded in 2019 will be lost. All. Maybe keep a random couple if they are lucky and the vote splits right to allow their collapse to still leave them on top.
Why? Because, to get all northern again for a minute, they've done fuck all round here. Too. many morons unexpectedly elected, fed the spin lines by head office which they parrot about all the things they are delivering. Whilst delivering nothing. Voters are used to nothing, but they're not used to being lied to about it.
Worse still is the parochial bigotry that was always close to the surface in many towns now whipped to a frenzy. They voted Brexit and then Boris to get the foreigners out. Gone. Its their fault we can't see a doctor, why the schools are crap, why there's no jobs and no money. And even in 2019 the lure of the further right was strong - the Brexit Party saved Labour in a stack of seats. I expect the number of FUKkers to be even higher this time, and vs 2019 they will mostly be transfers from Tory 2019 totals.
It is going to be a political bloodbath. And well deserved - will be fun to see what Lord Ben I'll Sue Houchen will do with his local support all gone and the wolves closing in on the scent of malfeasance...
Round here a comment I’ve heard often is where have all these coloured people come from.
And it’s not usually as a racist comment we’ve always had a few people of Asian / African descent but there are noticeably more than used to be the case
Granted a lot of the people complaining won’t actually vote but it does show how many people think Bozo and co have utterly failed to deliver what they promised
It's a lot worse than "not delivering", they have done the opposite of delivering. We have had 1.3 million migrants in two years, which is: simply off the dial, unprecedented in our history, changing the country visibly and briskly, and is a larger rate per capita than any annual immigration into the "land of immigrants" - the USA
We are importing more people than America in the era of Ellis Island. Take a minute and grasp that
It is screamingly insane, it is a kind of Ponzi scheme, and all of this is happening as everyone admits the NHS can't cope, our sewage system can't cope, our infrastructure is fucked, and house-ownership is becoming a dream for anyone under 50
The Tories are going to be obliterated, and deservedly, to the extent they may never recover
However, Starmer will then have to tackle this issue. It cannot be ignored. What will he do?
How much off that 1.3 million is Ukraine/Hong Kong and adjustments of student numbers after covid?
I believe about 100-150,000 is Ukraine/HK
Students dunno, but an awful lot of them have brought dependants (much more than usual), and a much higher propertion are now converting their student visas to work visas, so they stay
Now it's great that people want to come here, it's good our unis are attractive, I am sure 98% of these people are fantastic brain surgeons to be, but the simple fact is the UK cannot cope with 700,000 net immigrants a year. Remember when Cameron vowed to get it down to tens of thousands? Now it is SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND
To grasp this nettle will take courage. Does Starmer possess it? I doubt it, and it's not in Labour's nature to clamp down on migration
It is perfectly possible to integrate 700K people in UK society a year.
To do so will take investment in infrastructure, and in the effort to socially integrate them. Nothing is free, all the options require work to be done.
What, in perpetuity? 700,000 a year for the next 30 years? That will add 20 million people to the population and transform entire cities and regions, in ethnicity, culture, religion, mores, laws, everything - coz those 20 million people won’t be from Ireland or Denmark
This is absolute madness - and it really is the way you guarantee a far right party governing the country
People like you are fucking dangerous
It's worth pointing out, it took years and years and years and years and years just to integrate the Irish when there was mass immigration from Ireland in the 19th century. We still have separate Catholic schools. It's still the case that Irish surnames are disproportionately common among the poorest parts of white British society. Now the irish are foreign, but as foreigners go they're not very foreign. Integration is very very hard.
Are you some kind of Nazi???
Integrating 700,000 Africans, Asians, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, Bolivians, Peruvians every single year is fine. 1.3m every two years - good. 3 million every four years even better. Doddle. What’s your problem, DOCTOR GOEBBELS?? Don’t you like foreigners?
All you have to do is look across Europe and see that the Hard and Far Right is now a minuscule and diminishing threat, even after large scale immigration, and everyone can tell that you are basically parroting Mein Kampf
This is my objection to the 'progressive mindset'. 'Integration' is seen as a case of education and eliminating prejudice amongst the local population. Where this fails, then it can be compelled by law. However, this applies only to existing majority populations, not incomers. I have encountered this type of thinking amongst 'liberals' for 10 years and it is much in evidence on PB. The more extreme it gets, the more radical the eventual response will be. The rise of Trump, the AfD etc can be predicted almost like an algorhythm. If you think you can outlaw Trump and the AfD, then the response you eventually encounter gets more and more gruesome until you get an actual Hitler. In this way the left are responsible for the return of fascism, because it is all a product of their own fascism in ignoring legitimate opposition to their policies and suppressing ideas, speech and beliefs through law. In this context, it may not be such a bad idea to start working with the "far right" to address these problems, as they have been doing (for instance) in Finland for a decade.
Indeed. This is why the Left is not just delusional, it is dangerous
It is basically waving a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler
And they just don’t get it
Lol, reactionary arguing that "progress" is the problem, not being a reactionary. Might as well say "look, it's not okay to allow the gays out of the closet, because it's a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler. Can't give equal rights to women; because what if Hitler?".
The main issue is that liberals (separate group from leftists or the left) refuse to meet these progressive values with progressive material improvements for all people. I remember reading a great study that showed men in the workplace saw improvements for women in the workplace as a zero sum situation - if women gained they must be losing. The same for white men thinking about people of colour. But that feeling was, in part, because the "benefits" of being a man or being white in the workforce were "making up" for where their salaries lacked - the social benefits of being a white man in the workforce were a wage supplement, in a sense, and so when those "benefits" disappeared (by tackling bigotry) they felt they were "losing out".
That would make more sense if so many of the people immigrating weren't the actual cultural and social reactionaries. You talk about equal rights for gays and women as if that's somehow an inevitable corollary of immigration because both are 'progressive'. Where are the biggest obstacles in society now to those rights? It's not gammons in the golf clubs or WWCM in the pubs.
Quite so
The quickest and easiest way to get homosexuality made illegal again, in the UK, is to import about 5m more Muslims with homophobic opinions. That would be enough, if these people caucus, to make a real impact on elections such that homosexuality is once more illegal, and the British Left won’t raise a peep of protest until it is far far too Iate
One thing I find interesting is how some cultures adopt to being immigrants.
For example, Peru. I know the place fairly well. On paper, pretty reactionary (1950s) social values. In actuality, the Peruvians I know, who immigrated, have instantly adopted the British "none-of-my-business-their-private-life" reaction to gay and trans people, have no qualms about abortion etc etc. Yet they were brought up to a rather different set of views at home.
It’s not hard to work out. It’s religion
Islam is a much more tenacious mindset than late stage Catholicism or Buddhism or whatever. We can argue why that is - because Islam is superior? Possibly. Because Islam has blood curdling death statutes against apostasy? Also possible
But the fact is Muslim migrants are MUCH less likely to drop their religion and assimilate to secular liberal western values, and that means that if you import enough Muslims you have a determined, faithful, united minority which will - by sheer persistence (and occasional violence) - impose its views on the apathetic but secular majority
And, good for them, they believe what they believe, and that is their right. Trouble is it impinges on everyone else
We see this everywhere. It is not disputable now. So what do we do about it?
Do you have any evidence that an increase in Muslim immigrants changes policies or hurts local LGBT+ communities? I’ll give you one for free - I know that some of the organising against youth sex education is backed by conservative Muslim groups; but it also has the backing of lots of home grown conservative groups as well.
Islam is the second biggest religion in the UK (if you don’t separate Christian into Catholic and protestant). 6.5% of the population in England and Wales (at the last census) are Muslim. This is not a group with significant political power to enforce their policy preferences, even if “creeping Sharia” were their preferred policy preferences.
I see the right is getting in early on who’s to blame for the rise of the far right. You’d think after the absolutely dire shift that their own brand of sensible(sic) centre right politics has put in that they might be a smidgeon more reflective.
I don't get this nonsense about lefty liberals being to blame for recent immigration.
Even going back a few generations we have
Sunak - Right, neither liberal nor authoritarian Truss - Right, not in office long enough to show liberal vs authoritarian Johnson - Being generous - centre right, neither liberal nor authoritarian May - Right, authoritarian Cameron - Centre right, liberal Brown - Left, authoritarian Blair - Centrist, neither liberal nor authoritarian Major - Centre right, neither liberal nor authoritarian Thatcher - Right, neither liberal nor authoritarian
There aren't that many left liberals around in the first place and they have never had power here. Our default is centre right to right, neutral to authoritarian. Which to be fair is reflective of the country generally even if not to my taste.
I think you're being quite cautious in ascribing authoritarianism; I would consider all the ones you have described as 'neither' as authoritarian, except Johnson. It's just that some are even more authoritarian than the others. I did think about Blair but then recalled that all his Home Secretaries were exceedingly right wing and authoritarian, more so that almost all Tory Home Secretaries before Theresa May. Thatcher was certainly authoritarian (abolishing the GLC was hardly a liberal act, for example).
So that leaves just 5 years with a liberal in power, and 3 with a neutral, out of the last 45.
This election is going to play very differently regionally. I expect the Tories to be all but wiped out in London, metropolitan areas and to have a shocker in the South West and Wales. Conversely, I think their vote will be stickier than expected in the midlands and in some northern county/small towns.
I can't speak for the Midlands. For northern England they are going to get absolutely destroyed. Whilst there will remain pockets of shire Tories, all of the places where blue collar Boris Brexit Toryism exploded in 2019 will be lost. All. Maybe keep a random couple if they are lucky and the vote splits right to allow their collapse to still leave them on top.
Why? Because, to get all northern again for a minute, they've done fuck all round here. Too. many morons unexpectedly elected, fed the spin lines by head office which they parrot about all the things they are delivering. Whilst delivering nothing. Voters are used to nothing, but they're not used to being lied to about it.
Worse still is the parochial bigotry that was always close to the surface in many towns now whipped to a frenzy. They voted Brexit and then Boris to get the foreigners out. Gone. Its their fault we can't see a doctor, why the schools are crap, why there's no jobs and no money. And even in 2019 the lure of the further right was strong - the Brexit Party saved Labour in a stack of seats. I expect the number of FUKkers to be even higher this time, and vs 2019 they will mostly be transfers from Tory 2019 totals.
It is going to be a political bloodbath. And well deserved - will be fun to see what Lord Ben I'll Sue Houchen will do with his local support all gone and the wolves closing in on the scent of malfeasance...
Round here a comment I’ve heard often is where have all these coloured people come from.
And it’s not usually as a racist comment we’ve always had a few people of Asian / African descent but there are noticeably more than used to be the case
Granted a lot of the people complaining won’t actually vote but it does show how many people think Bozo and co have utterly failed to deliver what they promised
It's a lot worse than "not delivering", they have done the opposite of delivering. We have had 1.3 million migrants in two years, which is: simply off the dial, unprecedented in our history, changing the country visibly and briskly, and is a larger rate per capita than any annual immigration into the "land of immigrants" - the USA
We are importing more people than America in the era of Ellis Island. Take a minute and grasp that
It is screamingly insane, it is a kind of Ponzi scheme, and all of this is happening as everyone admits the NHS can't cope, our sewage system can't cope, our infrastructure is fucked, and house-ownership is becoming a dream for anyone under 50
The Tories are going to be obliterated, and deservedly, to the extent they may never recover
However, Starmer will then have to tackle this issue. It cannot be ignored. What will he do?
How much off that 1.3 million is Ukraine/Hong Kong and adjustments of student numbers after covid?
I believe about 100-150,000 is Ukraine/HK
Students dunno, but an awful lot of them have brought dependants (much more than usual), and a much higher propertion are now converting their student visas to work visas, so they stay
Now it's great that people want to come here, it's good our unis are attractive, I am sure 98% of these people are fantastic brain surgeons to be, but the simple fact is the UK cannot cope with 700,000 net immigrants a year. Remember when Cameron vowed to get it down to tens of thousands? Now it is SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND
To grasp this nettle will take courage. Does Starmer possess it? I doubt it, and it's not in Labour's nature to clamp down on migration
It is perfectly possible to integrate 700K people in UK society a year.
To do so will take investment in infrastructure, and in the effort to socially integrate them. Nothing is free, all the options require work to be done.
What, in perpetuity? 700,000 a year for the next 30 years? That will add 20 million people to the population and transform entire cities and regions, in ethnicity, culture, religion, mores, laws, everything - coz those 20 million people won’t be from Ireland or Denmark
This is absolute madness - and it really is the way you guarantee a far right party governing the country
People like you are fucking dangerous
It's worth pointing out, it took years and years and years and years and years just to integrate the Irish when there was mass immigration from Ireland in the 19th century. We still have separate Catholic schools. It's still the case that Irish surnames are disproportionately common among the poorest parts of white British society. Now the irish are foreign, but as foreigners go they're not very foreign. Integration is very very hard.
Are you some kind of Nazi???
Integrating 700,000 Africans, Asians, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, Bolivians, Peruvians every single year is fine. 1.3m every two years - good. 3 million every four years even better. Doddle. What’s your problem, DOCTOR GOEBBELS?? Don’t you like foreigners?
All you have to do is look across Europe and see that the Hard and Far Right is now a minuscule and diminishing threat, even after large scale immigration, and everyone can tell that you are basically parroting Mein Kampf
This is my objection to the 'progressive mindset'. 'Integration' is seen as a case of education and eliminating prejudice amongst the local population. Where this fails, then it can be compelled by law. However, this applies only to existing majority populations, not incomers. I have encountered this type of thinking amongst 'liberals' for 10 years and it is much in evidence on PB. The more extreme it gets, the more radical the eventual response will be. The rise of Trump, the AfD etc can be predicted almost like an algorhythm. If you think you can outlaw Trump and the AfD, then the response you eventually encounter gets more and more gruesome until you get an actual Hitler. In this way the left are responsible for the return of fascism, because it is all a product of their own fascism in ignoring legitimate opposition to their policies and suppressing ideas, speech and beliefs through law. In this context, it may not be such a bad idea to start working with the "far right" to address these problems, as they have been doing (for instance) in Finland for a decade.
Indeed. This is why the Left is not just delusional, it is dangerous
It is basically waving a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler
And they just don’t get it
Lol, reactionary arguing that "progress" is the problem, not being a reactionary. Might as well say "look, it's not okay to allow the gays out of the closet, because it's a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler. Can't give equal rights to women; because what if Hitler?".
The main issue is that liberals (separate group from leftists or the left) refuse to meet these progressive values with progressive material improvements for all people. I remember reading a great study that showed men in the workplace saw improvements for women in the workplace as a zero sum situation - if women gained they must be losing. The same for white men thinking about people of colour. But that feeling was, in part, because the "benefits" of being a man or being white in the workforce were "making up" for where their salaries lacked - the social benefits of being a white man in the workforce were a wage supplement, in a sense, and so when those "benefits" disappeared (by tackling bigotry) they felt they were "losing out".
That would make more sense if so many of the people immigrating weren't the actual cultural and social reactionaries. You talk about equal rights for gays and women as if that's somehow an inevitable corollary of immigration because both are 'progressive'. Where are the biggest obstacles in society now to those rights? It's not gammons in the golf clubs or WWCM in the pubs.
Quite so
The quickest and easiest way to get homosexuality made illegal again, in the UK, is to import about 5m more Muslims with homophobic opinions. That would be enough, if these people caucus, to make a real impact on elections such that homosexuality is once more illegal, and the British Left won’t raise a peep of protest until it is far far too Iate
One thing I find interesting is how some cultures adopt to being immigrants.
For example, Peru. I know the place fairly well. On paper, pretty reactionary (1950s) social values. In actuality, the Peruvians I know, who immigrated, have instantly adopted the British "none-of-my-business-their-private-life" reaction to gay and trans people, have no qualms about abortion etc etc. Yet they were brought up to a rather different set of views at home.
It’s not hard to work out. It’s religion
Islam is a much more tenacious mindset than late stage Catholicism or Buddhism or whatever. We can argue why that is - because Islam is superior? Possibly. Because Islam has blood curdling death statutes against apostasy? Also possible
But the fact is Muslim migrants are MUCH less likely to drop their religion and assimilate to secular liberal western values, and that means that if you import enough Muslims you have a determined, faithful, united minority which will - by sheer persistence (and occasional violence) - impose its views on the apathetic but secular majority
And, good for them, they believe what they believe, and that is their right. Trouble is it impinges on everyone else
We see this everywhere. It is not disputable now. So what do we do about it?
Do you have any evidence that an increase in Muslim immigrants changes policies or hurts local LGBT+ communities? I’ll give you one for free - I know that some of the organising against youth sex education is backed by conservative Muslim groups; but it also has the backing of lots of home grown conservative groups as well.
Islam is the second biggest religion in the UK (if you don’t separate Christian into Catholic and protestant). 6.5% of the population in England and Wales (at the last census) are Muslim. This is not a group with significant political power to enforce their policy preferences, even if “creeping Sharia” were their preferred policy preferences.
I love Scottish politics. Have just received two leaflets through the door:
Tory leaflet. 3.5 pages of why you have to vote Tory to stop the SNP who are ruining the country. 0.5 pages of lies about how great the Tories are. With an appeal for supporters of other parties to back the Tories to stop the SNP.
SNP leaflet: 4 pages of why you have to vote SNP to stop the Tory, 2 pages of which finger the Tories for everything wrong and how brilliant the SNP are. 1 whole page of why independence is vital to everything and anything. With an appeal for supporters of other parties to back the SNP to stop the Tories.
We have to get away from this Tory/SNP and Holyrood/Westminster are shit and so you must vote SNP/Tory to stop Westminster/Holyrood from ruining Scotland idiocy. Its meaningless. We have *both* of them in government and they are *both* ruining Scotland.
This election is going to play very differently regionally. I expect the Tories to be all but wiped out in London, metropolitan areas and to have a shocker in the South West and Wales. Conversely, I think their vote will be stickier than expected in the midlands and in some northern county/small towns.
I can't speak for the Midlands. For northern England they are going to get absolutely destroyed. Whilst there will remain pockets of shire Tories, all of the places where blue collar Boris Brexit Toryism exploded in 2019 will be lost. All. Maybe keep a random couple if they are lucky and the vote splits right to allow their collapse to still leave them on top.
Why? Because, to get all northern again for a minute, they've done fuck all round here. Too. many morons unexpectedly elected, fed the spin lines by head office which they parrot about all the things they are delivering. Whilst delivering nothing. Voters are used to nothing, but they're not used to being lied to about it.
Worse still is the parochial bigotry that was always close to the surface in many towns now whipped to a frenzy. They voted Brexit and then Boris to get the foreigners out. Gone. Its their fault we can't see a doctor, why the schools are crap, why there's no jobs and no money. And even in 2019 the lure of the further right was strong - the Brexit Party saved Labour in a stack of seats. I expect the number of FUKkers to be even higher this time, and vs 2019 they will mostly be transfers from Tory 2019 totals.
It is going to be a political bloodbath. And well deserved - will be fun to see what Lord Ben I'll Sue Houchen will do with his local support all gone and the wolves closing in on the scent of malfeasance...
Round here a comment I’ve heard often is where have all these coloured people come from.
And it’s not usually as a racist comment we’ve always had a few people of Asian / African descent but there are noticeably more than used to be the case
Granted a lot of the people complaining won’t actually vote but it does show how many people think Bozo and co have utterly failed to deliver what they promised
It's a lot worse than "not delivering", they have done the opposite of delivering. We have had 1.3 million migrants in two years, which is: simply off the dial, unprecedented in our history, changing the country visibly and briskly, and is a larger rate per capita than any annual immigration into the "land of immigrants" - the USA
We are importing more people than America in the era of Ellis Island. Take a minute and grasp that
It is screamingly insane, it is a kind of Ponzi scheme, and all of this is happening as everyone admits the NHS can't cope, our sewage system can't cope, our infrastructure is fucked, and house-ownership is becoming a dream for anyone under 50
The Tories are going to be obliterated, and deservedly, to the extent they may never recover
However, Starmer will then have to tackle this issue. It cannot be ignored. What will he do?
How much off that 1.3 million is Ukraine/Hong Kong and adjustments of student numbers after covid?
I believe about 100-150,000 is Ukraine/HK
Students dunno, but an awful lot of them have brought dependants (much more than usual), and a much higher propertion are now converting their student visas to work visas, so they stay
Now it's great that people want to come here, it's good our unis are attractive, I am sure 98% of these people are fantastic brain surgeons to be, but the simple fact is the UK cannot cope with 700,000 net immigrants a year. Remember when Cameron vowed to get it down to tens of thousands? Now it is SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND
To grasp this nettle will take courage. Does Starmer possess it? I doubt it, and it's not in Labour's nature to clamp down on migration
It is perfectly possible to integrate 700K people in UK society a year.
To do so will take investment in infrastructure, and in the effort to socially integrate them. Nothing is free, all the options require work to be done.
What, in perpetuity? 700,000 a year for the next 30 years? That will add 20 million people to the population and transform entire cities and regions, in ethnicity, culture, religion, mores, laws, everything - coz those 20 million people won’t be from Ireland or Denmark
This is absolute madness - and it really is the way you guarantee a far right party governing the country
People like you are fucking dangerous
It's worth pointing out, it took years and years and years and years and years just to integrate the Irish when there was mass immigration from Ireland in the 19th century. We still have separate Catholic schools. It's still the case that Irish surnames are disproportionately common among the poorest parts of white British society. Now the irish are foreign, but as foreigners go they're not very foreign. Integration is very very hard.
Are you some kind of Nazi???
Integrating 700,000 Africans, Asians, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, Bolivians, Peruvians every single year is fine. 1.3m every two years - good. 3 million every four years even better. Doddle. What’s your problem, DOCTOR GOEBBELS?? Don’t you like foreigners?
All you have to do is look across Europe and see that the Hard and Far Right is now a minuscule and diminishing threat, even after large scale immigration, and everyone can tell that you are basically parroting Mein Kampf
This is my objection to the 'progressive mindset'. 'Integration' is seen as a case of education and eliminating prejudice amongst the local population. Where this fails, then it can be compelled by law. However, this applies only to existing majority populations, not incomers. I have encountered this type of thinking amongst 'liberals' for 10 years and it is much in evidence on PB. The more extreme it gets, the more radical the eventual response will be. The rise of Trump, the AfD etc can be predicted almost like an algorhythm. If you think you can outlaw Trump and the AfD, then the response you eventually encounter gets more and more gruesome until you get an actual Hitler. In this way the left are responsible for the return of fascism, because it is all a product of their own fascism in ignoring legitimate opposition to their policies and suppressing ideas, speech and beliefs through law. In this context, it may not be such a bad idea to start working with the "far right" to address these problems, as they have been doing (for instance) in Finland for a decade.
Indeed. This is why the Left is not just delusional, it is dangerous
It is basically waving a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler
And they just don’t get it
A sensible Left would propose more foreign aid, investment, conflict resolution, and bilateral agreements, including help at source, to "stop the boats".
Instead, they say "safe and legal routes" which I don't think they realise is heard as: create an open door for anyone who wants it.
These are the arguments made by the "loony left" - whereas the idea of increasing foreign aid is anathema because people always say "but we should help our own first". Which goes back to my point - if you meet the material needs of people, there is no frustration that will build up to be misattributed to "the other". The neoliberal capitalist consensus cannot do that - more profit must be skimmed and therefore the average person will lose out. The right do not want to do that - they like having an "other" to have grievances against to protect the fact that capitalism is the reason for this. The left want to deal with this issue - and get called communists for proposing policy solutions or slight social democratic reform with wealth redistribution and investment in civic infrastructure.
I haven't heard the left make a cogent argument on this.
In fact, phrases like "neoliberal capitalist consensus" sort of show both why you don't think it's worth bothering to try and how you'd get it badly wrong if you did.
The Matt Goodwin right and Aaron Bastani left both hate the same thing: centrist liberals. They just have different names for them. The left bang in about the neoliberal capitalist consensus or “late capitalism”, the right talk about the woke liberal establishment or “new elites”. Same people: the fabled blob.
Except that neoliberal and capitalist have definitions that are beyond “woke young people I dislike”.
Neoliberalism was the movement of the Chicago school economists who argued against the (then) economic orthodoxy of Keynesianism, state run services and a welfare state. This led to numerous states experimenting with selling off huge swathes of public assets to private companies in the West, and massive civil unrest in the global South such as under Pinochet.
Capitalism is the economic mode of production where people with capital (capitalists) have a wage relationship with those who actually do labour and create value (the working class). The capitalist is always aiming to make the most money from the surplus labour of their workers - this is profit. This is the difference between the value labour creates and the amount of money the fruits of that labour brings in. This is the hegemonic global economic system.
When you have both of these things you have government pushing more and more public assets and services into private hands, and you have those private hands trying to maximise profit (mostly by not paying labour enough or over-inflating the cost of goods). This is what most states have done (to varying degrees) over the last 30-40 years. This is what the IMF forces on countries if they want loans or debt relief, for example. This is what was forced on Greece. It creates a system where the worst off (the lowest paid labourers) are screwwed from both sides - government retreats in its duty of care towards them and employers / capitalists are squeezing them for everything they can without giving more back.
I don’t see how that is hard to understand or how that is in any way the same as saying “woke people exist and they’re trying to destroy the West with pronouns and race mixing” but that’s just me.
This election is going to play very differently regionally. I expect the Tories to be all but wiped out in London, metropolitan areas and to have a shocker in the South West and Wales. Conversely, I think their vote will be stickier than expected in the midlands and in some northern county/small towns.
I can't speak for the Midlands. For northern England they are going to get absolutely destroyed. Whilst there will remain pockets of shire Tories, all of the places where blue collar Boris Brexit Toryism exploded in 2019 will be lost. All. Maybe keep a random couple if they are lucky and the vote splits right to allow their collapse to still leave them on top.
Why? Because, to get all northern again for a minute, they've done fuck all round here. Too. many morons unexpectedly elected, fed the spin lines by head office which they parrot about all the things they are delivering. Whilst delivering nothing. Voters are used to nothing, but they're not used to being lied to about it.
Worse still is the parochial bigotry that was always close to the surface in many towns now whipped to a frenzy. They voted Brexit and then Boris to get the foreigners out. Gone. Its their fault we can't see a doctor, why the schools are crap, why there's no jobs and no money. And even in 2019 the lure of the further right was strong - the Brexit Party saved Labour in a stack of seats. I expect the number of FUKkers to be even higher this time, and vs 2019 they will mostly be transfers from Tory 2019 totals.
It is going to be a political bloodbath. And well deserved - will be fun to see what Lord Ben I'll Sue Houchen will do with his local support all gone and the wolves closing in on the scent of malfeasance...
Round here a comment I’ve heard often is where have all these coloured people come from.
And it’s not usually as a racist comment we’ve always had a few people of Asian / African descent but there are noticeably more than used to be the case
Granted a lot of the people complaining won’t actually vote but it does show how many people think Bozo and co have utterly failed to deliver what they promised
It's a lot worse than "not delivering", they have done the opposite of delivering. We have had 1.3 million migrants in two years, which is: simply off the dial, unprecedented in our history, changing the country visibly and briskly, and is a larger rate per capita than any annual immigration into the "land of immigrants" - the USA
We are importing more people than America in the era of Ellis Island. Take a minute and grasp that
It is screamingly insane, it is a kind of Ponzi scheme, and all of this is happening as everyone admits the NHS can't cope, our sewage system can't cope, our infrastructure is fucked, and house-ownership is becoming a dream for anyone under 50
The Tories are going to be obliterated, and deservedly, to the extent they may never recover
However, Starmer will then have to tackle this issue. It cannot be ignored. What will he do?
How much off that 1.3 million is Ukraine/Hong Kong and adjustments of student numbers after covid?
I believe about 100-150,000 is Ukraine/HK
Students dunno, but an awful lot of them have brought dependants (much more than usual), and a much higher propertion are now converting their student visas to work visas, so they stay
Now it's great that people want to come here, it's good our unis are attractive, I am sure 98% of these people are fantastic brain surgeons to be, but the simple fact is the UK cannot cope with 700,000 net immigrants a year. Remember when Cameron vowed to get it down to tens of thousands? Now it is SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND
To grasp this nettle will take courage. Does Starmer possess it? I doubt it, and it's not in Labour's nature to clamp down on migration
It is perfectly possible to integrate 700K people in UK society a year.
To do so will take investment in infrastructure, and in the effort to socially integrate them. Nothing is free, all the options require work to be done.
What, in perpetuity? 700,000 a year for the next 30 years? That will add 20 million people to the population and transform entire cities and regions, in ethnicity, culture, religion, mores, laws, everything - coz those 20 million people won’t be from Ireland or Denmark
This is absolute madness - and it really is the way you guarantee a far right party governing the country
People like you are fucking dangerous
It's worth pointing out, it took years and years and years and years and years just to integrate the Irish when there was mass immigration from Ireland in the 19th century. We still have separate Catholic schools. It's still the case that Irish surnames are disproportionately common among the poorest parts of white British society. Now the irish are foreign, but as foreigners go they're not very foreign. Integration is very very hard.
Are you some kind of Nazi???
Integrating 700,000 Africans, Asians, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, Bolivians, Peruvians every single year is fine. 1.3m every two years - good. 3 million every four years even better. Doddle. What’s your problem, DOCTOR GOEBBELS?? Don’t you like foreigners?
All you have to do is look across Europe and see that the Hard and Far Right is now a minuscule and diminishing threat, even after large scale immigration, and everyone can tell that you are basically parroting Mein Kampf
This is my objection to the 'progressive mindset'. 'Integration' is seen as a case of education and eliminating prejudice amongst the local population. Where this fails, then it can be compelled by law. However, this applies only to existing majority populations, not incomers. I have encountered this type of thinking amongst 'liberals' for 10 years and it is much in evidence on PB. The more extreme it gets, the more radical the eventual response will be. The rise of Trump, the AfD etc can be predicted almost like an algorhythm. If you think you can outlaw Trump and the AfD, then the response you eventually encounter gets more and more gruesome until you get an actual Hitler. In this way the left are responsible for the return of fascism, because it is all a product of their own fascism in ignoring legitimate opposition to their policies and suppressing ideas, speech and beliefs through law. In this context, it may not be such a bad idea to start working with the "far right" to address these problems, as they have been doing (for instance) in Finland for a decade.
Indeed. This is why the Left is not just delusional, it is dangerous
It is basically waving a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler
And they just don’t get it
Lol, reactionary arguing that "progress" is the problem, not being a reactionary. Might as well say "look, it's not okay to allow the gays out of the closet, because it's a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler. Can't give equal rights to women; because what if Hitler?".
The main issue is that liberals (separate group from leftists or the left) refuse to meet these progressive values with progressive material improvements for all people. I remember reading a great study that showed men in the workplace saw improvements for women in the workplace as a zero sum situation - if women gained they must be losing. The same for white men thinking about people of colour. But that feeling was, in part, because the "benefits" of being a man or being white in the workforce were "making up" for where their salaries lacked - the social benefits of being a white man in the workforce were a wage supplement, in a sense, and so when those "benefits" disappeared (by tackling bigotry) they felt they were "losing out".
That would make more sense if so many of the people immigrating weren't the actual cultural and social reactionaries. You talk about equal rights for gays and women as if that's somehow an inevitable corollary of immigration because both are 'progressive'. Where are the biggest obstacles in society now to those rights? It's not gammons in the golf clubs or WWCM in the pubs.
Quite so
The quickest and easiest way to get homosexuality made illegal again, in the UK, is to import about 5m more Muslims with homophobic opinions. That would be enough, if these people caucus, to make a real impact on elections such that homosexuality is once more illegal, and the British Left won’t raise a peep of protest until it is far far too Iate
One thing I find interesting is how some cultures adopt to being immigrants.
For example, Peru. I know the place fairly well. On paper, pretty reactionary (1950s) social values. In actuality, the Peruvians I know, who immigrated, have instantly adopted the British "none-of-my-business-their-private-life" reaction to gay and trans people, have no qualms about abortion etc etc. Yet they were brought up to a rather different set of views at home.
It’s not hard to work out. It’s religion
Islam is a much more tenacious mindset than late stage Catholicism or Buddhism or whatever. We can argue why that is - because Islam is superior? Possibly. Because Islam has blood curdling death statutes against apostasy? Also possible
But the fact is Muslim migrants are MUCH less likely to drop their religion and assimilate to secular liberal western values, and that means that if you import enough Muslims you have a determined, faithful, united minority which will - by sheer persistence (and occasional violence) - impose its views on the apathetic but secular majority
And, good for them, they believe what they believe, and that is their right. Trouble is it impinges on everyone else
We see this everywhere. It is not disputable now. So what do we do about it?
Do you have any evidence that an increase in Muslim immigrants changes policies or hurts local LGBT+ communities? I’ll give you one for free - I know that some of the organising against youth sex education is backed by conservative Muslim groups; but it also has the backing of lots of home grown conservative groups as well.
Islam is the second biggest religion in the UK (if you don’t separate Christian into Catholic and protestant). 6.5% of the population in England and Wales (at the last census) are Muslim. This is not a group with significant political power to enforce their policy preferences, even if “creeping Sharia” were their preferred policy preferences.
Yeah - that’s literally the one I said “I’ll give you for free” that is also a coalition with lots of right wing christians / nonmuslim people. It is also a nonrepresentative group of any of those people (knowing lots of people who live in Birmingham, including queer muslims, these people are seen as the weird conservatives that exist in any population of people).
I see the right is getting in early on who’s to blame for the rise of the far right. You’d think after the absolutely dire shift that their own brand of sensible(sic) centre right politics has put in that they might be a smidgeon more reflective.
I don't get this nonsense about lefty liberals being to blame for recent immigration.
Even going back a few generations we have
Sunak - Right, neither liberal nor authoritarian Truss - Right, not in office long enough to show liberal vs authoritarian Johnson - Being generous - centre right, neither liberal nor authoritarian May - Right, authoritarian Cameron - Centre right, liberal Brown - Left, authoritarian Blair - Centrist, neither liberal nor authoritarian Major - Centre right, neither liberal nor authoritarian Thatcher - Right, neither liberal nor authoritarian
There aren't that many left liberals around in the first place and they have never had power here. Our default is centre right to right, neutral to authoritarian. Which to be fair is reflective of the country generally even if not to my taste.
I don't think of any of them have been particularly authoritarian. The closest was probably Thatcher. Nearly all of them have been big supporters of neo-liberalist economic policies.
This election is going to play very differently regionally. I expect the Tories to be all but wiped out in London, metropolitan areas and to have a shocker in the South West and Wales. Conversely, I think their vote will be stickier than expected in the midlands and in some northern county/small towns.
I can't speak for the Midlands. For northern England they are going to get absolutely destroyed. Whilst there will remain pockets of shire Tories, all of the places where blue collar Boris Brexit Toryism exploded in 2019 will be lost. All. Maybe keep a random couple if they are lucky and the vote splits right to allow their collapse to still leave them on top.
Why? Because, to get all northern again for a minute, they've done fuck all round here. Too. many morons unexpectedly elected, fed the spin lines by head office which they parrot about all the things they are delivering. Whilst delivering nothing. Voters are used to nothing, but they're not used to being lied to about it.
Worse still is the parochial bigotry that was always close to the surface in many towns now whipped to a frenzy. They voted Brexit and then Boris to get the foreigners out. Gone. Its their fault we can't see a doctor, why the schools are crap, why there's no jobs and no money. And even in 2019 the lure of the further right was strong - the Brexit Party saved Labour in a stack of seats. I expect the number of FUKkers to be even higher this time, and vs 2019 they will mostly be transfers from Tory 2019 totals.
It is going to be a political bloodbath. And well deserved - will be fun to see what Lord Ben I'll Sue Houchen will do with his local support all gone and the wolves closing in on the scent of malfeasance...
Round here a comment I’ve heard often is where have all these coloured people come from.
And it’s not usually as a racist comment we’ve always had a few people of Asian / African descent but there are noticeably more than used to be the case
Granted a lot of the people complaining won’t actually vote but it does show how many people think Bozo and co have utterly failed to deliver what they promised
It's a lot worse than "not delivering", they have done the opposite of delivering. We have had 1.3 million migrants in two years, which is: simply off the dial, unprecedented in our history, changing the country visibly and briskly, and is a larger rate per capita than any annual immigration into the "land of immigrants" - the USA
We are importing more people than America in the era of Ellis Island. Take a minute and grasp that
It is screamingly insane, it is a kind of Ponzi scheme, and all of this is happening as everyone admits the NHS can't cope, our sewage system can't cope, our infrastructure is fucked, and house-ownership is becoming a dream for anyone under 50
The Tories are going to be obliterated, and deservedly, to the extent they may never recover
However, Starmer will then have to tackle this issue. It cannot be ignored. What will he do?
How much off that 1.3 million is Ukraine/Hong Kong and adjustments of student numbers after covid?
I believe about 100-150,000 is Ukraine/HK
Students dunno, but an awful lot of them have brought dependants (much more than usual), and a much higher propertion are now converting their student visas to work visas, so they stay
Now it's great that people want to come here, it's good our unis are attractive, I am sure 98% of these people are fantastic brain surgeons to be, but the simple fact is the UK cannot cope with 700,000 net immigrants a year. Remember when Cameron vowed to get it down to tens of thousands? Now it is SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND
To grasp this nettle will take courage. Does Starmer possess it? I doubt it, and it's not in Labour's nature to clamp down on migration
It is perfectly possible to integrate 700K people in UK society a year.
To do so will take investment in infrastructure, and in the effort to socially integrate them. Nothing is free, all the options require work to be done.
What, in perpetuity? 700,000 a year for the next 30 years? That will add 20 million people to the population and transform entire cities and regions, in ethnicity, culture, religion, mores, laws, everything - coz those 20 million people won’t be from Ireland or Denmark
This is absolute madness - and it really is the way you guarantee a far right party governing the country
People like you are fucking dangerous
It's worth pointing out, it took years and years and years and years and years just to integrate the Irish when there was mass immigration from Ireland in the 19th century. We still have separate Catholic schools. It's still the case that Irish surnames are disproportionately common among the poorest parts of white British society. Now the irish are foreign, but as foreigners go they're not very foreign. Integration is very very hard.
Are you some kind of Nazi???
Integrating 700,000 Africans, Asians, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, Bolivians, Peruvians every single year is fine. 1.3m every two years - good. 3 million every four years even better. Doddle. What’s your problem, DOCTOR GOEBBELS?? Don’t you like foreigners?
All you have to do is look across Europe and see that the Hard and Far Right is now a minuscule and diminishing threat, even after large scale immigration, and everyone can tell that you are basically parroting Mein Kampf
This is my objection to the 'progressive mindset'. 'Integration' is seen as a case of education and eliminating prejudice amongst the local population. Where this fails, then it can be compelled by law. However, this applies only to existing majority populations, not incomers. I have encountered this type of thinking amongst 'liberals' for 10 years and it is much in evidence on PB. The more extreme it gets, the more radical the eventual response will be. The rise of Trump, the AfD etc can be predicted almost like an algorhythm. If you think you can outlaw Trump and the AfD, then the response you eventually encounter gets more and more gruesome until you get an actual Hitler. In this way the left are responsible for the return of fascism, because it is all a product of their own fascism in ignoring legitimate opposition to their policies and suppressing ideas, speech and beliefs through law. In this context, it may not be such a bad idea to start working with the "far right" to address these problems, as they have been doing (for instance) in Finland for a decade.
Indeed. This is why the Left is not just delusional, it is dangerous
It is basically waving a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler
And they just don’t get it
Lol, reactionary arguing that "progress" is the problem, not being a reactionary. Might as well say "look, it's not okay to allow the gays out of the closet, because it's a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler. Can't give equal rights to women; because what if Hitler?".
The main issue is that liberals (separate group from leftists or the left) refuse to meet these progressive values with progressive material improvements for all people. I remember reading a great study that showed men in the workplace saw improvements for women in the workplace as a zero sum situation - if women gained they must be losing. The same for white men thinking about people of colour. But that feeling was, in part, because the "benefits" of being a man or being white in the workforce were "making up" for where their salaries lacked - the social benefits of being a white man in the workforce were a wage supplement, in a sense, and so when those "benefits" disappeared (by tackling bigotry) they felt they were "losing out".
That would make more sense if so many of the people immigrating weren't the actual cultural and social reactionaries. You talk about equal rights for gays and women as if that's somehow an inevitable corollary of immigration because both are 'progressive'. Where are the biggest obstacles in society now to those rights? It's not gammons in the golf clubs or WWCM in the pubs.
Quite so
The quickest and easiest way to get homosexuality made illegal again, in the UK, is to import about 5m more Muslims with homophobic opinions. That would be enough, if these people caucus, to make a real impact on elections such that homosexuality is once more illegal, and the British Left won’t raise a peep of protest until it is far far too Iate
One thing I find interesting is how some cultures adopt to being immigrants.
For example, Peru. I know the place fairly well. On paper, pretty reactionary (1950s) social values. In actuality, the Peruvians I know, who immigrated, have instantly adopted the British "none-of-my-business-their-private-life" reaction to gay and trans people, have no qualms about abortion etc etc. Yet they were brought up to a rather different set of views at home.
It’s not hard to work out. It’s religion
Islam is a much more tenacious mindset than late stage Catholicism or Buddhism or whatever. We can argue why that is - because Islam is superior? Possibly. Because Islam has blood curdling death statutes against apostasy? Also possible
But the fact is Muslim migrants are MUCH less likely to drop their religion and assimilate to secular liberal western values, and that means that if you import enough Muslims you have a determined, faithful, united minority which will - by sheer persistence (and occasional violence) - impose its views on the apathetic but secular majority
And, good for them, they believe what they believe, and that is their right. Trouble is it impinges on everyone else
We see this everywhere. It is not disputable now. So what do we do about it?
Do you have any evidence that an increase in Muslim immigrants changes policies or hurts local LGBT+ communities? I’ll give you one for free - I know that some of the organising against youth sex education is backed by conservative Muslim groups; but it also has the backing of lots of home grown conservative groups as well.
Islam is the second biggest religion in the UK (if you don’t separate Christian into Catholic and protestant). 6.5% of the population in England and Wales (at the last census) are Muslim. This is not a group with significant political power to enforce their policy preferences, even if “creeping Sharia” were their preferred policy preferences.
If a religious/culturally organised voting block gain a plurality vote there are consequences for the rest.
So this is in the US, which has a hugely different context to us, where (as the article itself notes) this kind of policy has mostly been pushed by right wing GOP politicians in and out of that state. The fact that conservative muslims and conservative christians agree on some aspects of social policy suggests, to me, that the shared attribute (conservatism) is more of a predictor than the specific religion or, indeed, the recency of their migration to the country.
The Rochdale by-election could possibly see a big showing by an pro-Gaza candidate, with about 25% of the electorate being Muslims. Maybe George Galloway will be tempted to stand at a by-election once again.
FWIW -- not a whole lot -- in 2008, Hillary Clinton trailed Barack Obama in polls in the New Hampshire primary by about the same amount Haley has been trailing the Loser. (Clinton won that primary.)
Particularly gratifying is the Guardian’s use of the phrase “English Fizz”
They’ve been searching for a name for this product and the name is right there. English Fizz. It sounds fun and with a hint of poshness - like Eton Mess - or indeed Prosecco
That’s what it must be called. Uncork the English Fizz
English fizz is a colloquiallism that can never be used as an official designation because that would be as vulgar as Christening one's children 'Archie' or 'Lillibet'.
I predict it will become the go-to phrase, because no one can agree on anything else, and it sounds pukka
Here are some other suggested alternatives
Merret
Britagne (cringe value: 10/10)
Pefriog
I’m not joking: Pefriog
Pefriog is the Welsh one. It has a chance I think. But most will call it Welsh fizz.
I find myself in the rare position of agreeing with both you and Luckyguy. But that’s because we’re not discussing immigration or wind turbines. It’ll never be an official designation like Crémant or Cava for naffness reasons but it will increasingly be the informal term used.
Particularly gratifying is the Guardian’s use of the phrase “English Fizz”
They’ve been searching for a name for this product and the name is right there. English Fizz. It sounds fun and with a hint of poshness - like Eton Mess - or indeed Prosecco
That’s what it must be called. Uncork the English Fizz
English fizz is a colloquiallism that can never be used as an official designation because that would be as vulgar as Christening one's children 'Archie' or 'Lillibet'.
I predict it will become the go-to phrase, because no one can agree on anything else, and it sounds pukka
Here are some other suggested alternatives
Merret
Britagne (cringe value: 10/10)
Pefriog
I’m not joking: Pefriog
Yes, it can be the 'go to' phrase, but precisely because it's a nickname. The power of a nickname is that it's a casual term for something that has a different official name.
To be called "*******", there also has to be a set of official standards, so that the name carries significance, otherwise every dickhead with a vineyard and a soda stream will be churning it out, which damages the overall brand. I don't see how you can do this with 'English fizz', because anything that's English and fizzy (and wine I guess) qualifies.
But this is easily sorted. Once English Fizz has a cachet and a brand AND is generally accepted, THEN you invent and apply rules as to what constitutes English Fizz, to maintain the quality
This is literally what happened to drinks like champagne. First they had the drink, then a general name for it, then the French government insisted on rules - and it works brilliantly
Champagne didn’t start with the Elysee Palace insisting that the French start making sparkling wines in a certain way in a certain part of France, then off they went, with Dom Perignon
I don't see how you can stop someone making tacky carbonated wine from calling their product 'English fizz' if it is English and fizzy.
Besides that, the limited 'charm' of the phrase 'fizz' comes from it being a casual downplayed term for Champagne, because we're so rich and classy we just assume it's Champagne and we have it all the time. You lose that if you make it the official marque.
You apply rules. That’s all you have to do
Champagne isn’t some magic substance that can’t be made anywhere else, it is just a kind of sparkling wine made in a certain way. Methode champenoise. And it can absolutely be done in a trillion regions around the world
Ditto Cava, Prosecco, Stilton, Roquefort, any protected origin foodstuff; all it is, is a brand
But this shit works. The French are excellent at it. Does anyone believe their stupid Bresse chickens are better than other well farmed chickens? Not really, but the posh branding still impacts
So that’s what we do with English Fizz. First let it bloom, then let it get a cachet, then impose frankly arbitrary rules so as to give it exclusivity. Sorted
I understand your arguments, and I know you understand the ones I've put forward. I'm comfortable with consumers of the product calling it English fizz (I don't see it getting much traction outside England, but I think England's mainly where the consumer base is), but I don't think it belongs as a badge on a bottle for all the reasons I've outlined.
I also think the quality aspect is as important as the name, so shouldn't be an afterthought - perhaps the name should even stem from the judging criteria. How do we classify British/English wines as a whole, and judge quality? In France, you have the apellations, so a geographical designation, and 'Methode Champagnoise/Traditonelle' speak to the production method; in Germany it's all about how much sugar is in the grapes as to whether its a Prädikatswein or a Qualitätswein etc.. We don't have a massive wine making tradition here so the rules and names put in place now are about establishing success in the long term and creating the whole legand of British/English wine.
Should the judging of the sparkling wine even be marked by some sort of swanky 'fizz' quaffing event attended by the Royals? Let's say the successful sparkling wines were given a badge like 'Grand Cru' (obviously not that) - that's a designation that then potentially has legs to be a term for quality UK sparkling wine.
Traditional method English and Welsh sparkling wine already has PDO (ie appellation contrôlée) status, so it’s unlikely ever to be renamed anything like English fizz or Britagne or whatever.
It’s “English Sparkling Wine” or if you’re in Wales “Welsh sparkling wine”, or (thanks to Rathfinny) Sussex Sparkling wine in Sussex. To get PDO status and use those terms you have to conform to a few rules: only certain permitted varieties (there is an ongoing debate about whether to allow the hybrid Seyval Blanc), minimum alcohol level, made using traditional second fermentation in bottle, limited chaptalization.
There is a similar set of rules for the English Quality Wine PDO for still.
So I expect official nomenclature to remain as it is with some tweaks and probably more regional PDOs in due course (North Downs, South Downs, Weald, “Wessex”, Surrey Hills, Wye Valley and so on. English fizz seems increasingly to be the shorthand and I’d expect that to devolve into Kentish fizz, Wealden fizz etc.
It's somewhat of a missed opportunity. I think there's a good deal of export potential (not to France, most of them are so insular they've never even heard of Prosecco) if a name could stick. I say this as someone who comes from Sussex, but who gives a fuck about the South Downs? As a system I do prefer the German way; it just seems far more logical. If you can make a great wine in Fife, do it and let it be judged alongside everything else.
I wonder whether climate change will make southern England more suited to raising the grapes than champagne in 50 years?
We’re already at the climate of Champagne in the mid 20thC and harvests, sugars etc are comparable.
I think Biggest point is that in 50 years, we might be able to grow other - warmer weather - varietals, like Cabernet Sauvignon.
Half in jest, I have wondered about a long term bet on an olive grove or an orange orchard (is it an orchard for oranges?).
It’s possible now, but olives are a volume game and yields just aren’t up there with the Med. There’s an olive farm on the Kent/Sussex borders - Oxney Olives.
Cabernet Sauv is a long way off. We can already grow and ripen the 4 Pinots, Chardonnay, Sauvignon blanc, Cab Franc (just about), Albariño, Chasselas and Gamay(ish). I am attempting Melon de Bourgogne (Muscadet). Next stop is Riesling which stubbornly refuses to ripen here, then Chenin blanc, Syrah (not actually a hot climate grape despite reputation), then the Bordeaux reds Merlot CS and Malbec.
Interesting. It will be a massive psychological change to get people to accept English red, but then English white was a joke when I was a kid. It feels like growers changed that by targeting and winning awards?
There's no reason why you can't grow Pinot Noir in the UK now. In fact, I think I saw a bottle of English Pinot at M&S.
Not quite so safe on the latest MRPs, but still likely to be one of the last Tories standing.
Lord Frost is near the top of the seats list apparently.
Or was until he wrote about "smoking ruins" of the tory party in telegraph last monday. Suspect he's been dropped a few places.
Tories have already selected - Katie Lam (ex-SPAD, of course) She's got one of the best seats in the house, or at least she should get a seat in the house, come what may.
@TomorrowsMPs is Michael Crick’s X focussing on who’s standing, or hopes to be standing, where
I've followed up the scoop by @tomorrowsmps that @theipaper commentator Paul Waugh (@paulwaugh) is being lined up to be Labour's candidate for the vacant Rochdale seat
I understand he has indeed been approached by Labour members about being a candidate
From Nate Silver's "The Signal and the Noise", p.252: "Hillary Clinton won the state [New Hampshire] by three points when the polls had her losing to Barack Obama by eight."
(About 15,000 people had been polled between the Iowa caucus, and the primary.)
This election is going to play very differently regionally. I expect the Tories to be all but wiped out in London, metropolitan areas and to have a shocker in the South West and Wales. Conversely, I think their vote will be stickier than expected in the midlands and in some northern county/small towns.
I can't speak for the Midlands. For northern England they are going to get absolutely destroyed. Whilst there will remain pockets of shire Tories, all of the places where blue collar Boris Brexit Toryism exploded in 2019 will be lost. All. Maybe keep a random couple if they are lucky and the vote splits right to allow their collapse to still leave them on top.
Why? Because, to get all northern again for a minute, they've done fuck all round here. Too. many morons unexpectedly elected, fed the spin lines by head office which they parrot about all the things they are delivering. Whilst delivering nothing. Voters are used to nothing, but they're not used to being lied to about it.
Worse still is the parochial bigotry that was always close to the surface in many towns now whipped to a frenzy. They voted Brexit and then Boris to get the foreigners out. Gone. Its their fault we can't see a doctor, why the schools are crap, why there's no jobs and no money. And even in 2019 the lure of the further right was strong - the Brexit Party saved Labour in a stack of seats. I expect the number of FUKkers to be even higher this time, and vs 2019 they will mostly be transfers from Tory 2019 totals.
It is going to be a political bloodbath. And well deserved - will be fun to see what Lord Ben I'll Sue Houchen will do with his local support all gone and the wolves closing in on the scent of malfeasance...
Round here a comment I’ve heard often is where have all these coloured people come from.
And it’s not usually as a racist comment we’ve always had a few people of Asian / African descent but there are noticeably more than used to be the case
Granted a lot of the people complaining won’t actually vote but it does show how many people think Bozo and co have utterly failed to deliver what they promised
It's a lot worse than "not delivering", they have done the opposite of delivering. We have had 1.3 million migrants in two years, which is: simply off the dial, unprecedented in our history, changing the country visibly and briskly, and is a larger rate per capita than any annual immigration into the "land of immigrants" - the USA
We are importing more people than America in the era of Ellis Island. Take a minute and grasp that
It is screamingly insane, it is a kind of Ponzi scheme, and all of this is happening as everyone admits the NHS can't cope, our sewage system can't cope, our infrastructure is fucked, and house-ownership is becoming a dream for anyone under 50
The Tories are going to be obliterated, and deservedly, to the extent they may never recover
However, Starmer will then have to tackle this issue. It cannot be ignored. What will he do?
How much off that 1.3 million is Ukraine/Hong Kong and adjustments of student numbers after covid?
I believe about 100-150,000 is Ukraine/HK
Students dunno, but an awful lot of them have brought dependants (much more than usual), and a much higher propertion are now converting their student visas to work visas, so they stay
Now it's great that people want to come here, it's good our unis are attractive, I am sure 98% of these people are fantastic brain surgeons to be, but the simple fact is the UK cannot cope with 700,000 net immigrants a year. Remember when Cameron vowed to get it down to tens of thousands? Now it is SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND
To grasp this nettle will take courage. Does Starmer possess it? I doubt it, and it's not in Labour's nature to clamp down on migration
It is perfectly possible to integrate 700K people in UK society a year.
To do so will take investment in infrastructure, and in the effort to socially integrate them. Nothing is free, all the options require work to be done.
What, in perpetuity? 700,000 a year for the next 30 years? That will add 20 million people to the population and transform entire cities and regions, in ethnicity, culture, religion, mores, laws, everything - coz those 20 million people won’t be from Ireland or Denmark
This is absolute madness - and it really is the way you guarantee a far right party governing the country
People like you are fucking dangerous
It's worth pointing out, it took years and years and years and years and years just to integrate the Irish when there was mass immigration from Ireland in the 19th century. We still have separate Catholic schools. It's still the case that Irish surnames are disproportionately common among the poorest parts of white British society. Now the irish are foreign, but as foreigners go they're not very foreign. Integration is very very hard.
Are you some kind of Nazi???
Integrating 700,000 Africans, Asians, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, Bolivians, Peruvians every single year is fine. 1.3m every two years - good. 3 million every four years even better. Doddle. What’s your problem, DOCTOR GOEBBELS?? Don’t you like foreigners?
All you have to do is look across Europe and see that the Hard and Far Right is now a minuscule and diminishing threat, even after large scale immigration, and everyone can tell that you are basically parroting Mein Kampf
This is my objection to the 'progressive mindset'. 'Integration' is seen as a case of education and eliminating prejudice amongst the local population. Where this fails, then it can be compelled by law. However, this applies only to existing majority populations, not incomers. I have encountered this type of thinking amongst 'liberals' for 10 years and it is much in evidence on PB. The more extreme it gets, the more radical the eventual response will be. The rise of Trump, the AfD etc can be predicted almost like an algorhythm. If you think you can outlaw Trump and the AfD, then the response you eventually encounter gets more and more gruesome until you get an actual Hitler. In this way the left are responsible for the return of fascism, because it is all a product of their own fascism in ignoring legitimate opposition to their policies and suppressing ideas, speech and beliefs through law. In this context, it may not be such a bad idea to start working with the "far right" to address these problems, as they have been doing (for instance) in Finland for a decade.
Indeed. This is why the Left is not just delusional, it is dangerous
It is basically waving a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler
And they just don’t get it
A sensible Left would propose more foreign aid, investment, conflict resolution, and bilateral agreements, including help at source, to "stop the boats".
Instead, they say "safe and legal routes" which I don't think they realise is heard as: create an open door for anyone who wants it.
These are the arguments made by the "loony left" - whereas the idea of increasing foreign aid is anathema because people always say "but we should help our own first". Which goes back to my point - if you meet the material needs of people, there is no frustration that will build up to be misattributed to "the other". The neoliberal capitalist consensus cannot do that - more profit must be skimmed and therefore the average person will lose out. The right do not want to do that - they like having an "other" to have grievances against to protect the fact that capitalism is the reason for this. The left want to deal with this issue - and get called communists for proposing policy solutions or slight social democratic reform with wealth redistribution and investment in civic infrastructure.
I haven't heard the left make a cogent argument on this.
In fact, phrases like "neoliberal capitalist consensus" sort of show both why you don't think it's worth bothering to try and how you'd get it badly wrong if you did.
The Matt Goodwin right and Aaron Bastani left both hate the same thing: centrist liberals. They just have different names for them. The left bang in about the neoliberal capitalist consensus or “late capitalism”, the right talk about the woke liberal establishment or “new elites”. Same people: the fabled blob.
The Matt Goodwin right are mostly people who believe in the same things as centrist liberals in about 1990.
That a multicultural Britain doesn't work? That EU membership is incompatible with national sovereignty? That we should bring back grammar schools? That immigration is to blame for problems in housing and public services? I don't remember much of this sort of thing from the likes of Paddy Ashdown back then.
Ms. Haley told reporters on Tuesday that she planned to continue her campaign regardless of the outcome in New Hampshire, and her campaign manager indicated as much in a memo shared with The New York Times.
This election is going to play very differently regionally. I expect the Tories to be all but wiped out in London, metropolitan areas and to have a shocker in the South West and Wales. Conversely, I think their vote will be stickier than expected in the midlands and in some northern county/small towns.
I can't speak for the Midlands. For northern England they are going to get absolutely destroyed. Whilst there will remain pockets of shire Tories, all of the places where blue collar Boris Brexit Toryism exploded in 2019 will be lost. All. Maybe keep a random couple if they are lucky and the vote splits right to allow their collapse to still leave them on top.
Why? Because, to get all northern again for a minute, they've done fuck all round here. Too. many morons unexpectedly elected, fed the spin lines by head office which they parrot about all the things they are delivering. Whilst delivering nothing. Voters are used to nothing, but they're not used to being lied to about it.
Worse still is the parochial bigotry that was always close to the surface in many towns now whipped to a frenzy. They voted Brexit and then Boris to get the foreigners out. Gone. Its their fault we can't see a doctor, why the schools are crap, why there's no jobs and no money. And even in 2019 the lure of the further right was strong - the Brexit Party saved Labour in a stack of seats. I expect the number of FUKkers to be even higher this time, and vs 2019 they will mostly be transfers from Tory 2019 totals.
It is going to be a political bloodbath. And well deserved - will be fun to see what Lord Ben I'll Sue Houchen will do with his local support all gone and the wolves closing in on the scent of malfeasance...
Round here a comment I’ve heard often is where have all these coloured people come from.
And it’s not usually as a racist comment we’ve always had a few people of Asian / African descent but there are noticeably more than used to be the case
Granted a lot of the people complaining won’t actually vote but it does show how many people think Bozo and co have utterly failed to deliver what they promised
It's a lot worse than "not delivering", they have done the opposite of delivering. We have had 1.3 million migrants in two years, which is: simply off the dial, unprecedented in our history, changing the country visibly and briskly, and is a larger rate per capita than any annual immigration into the "land of immigrants" - the USA
We are importing more people than America in the era of Ellis Island. Take a minute and grasp that
It is screamingly insane, it is a kind of Ponzi scheme, and all of this is happening as everyone admits the NHS can't cope, our sewage system can't cope, our infrastructure is fucked, and house-ownership is becoming a dream for anyone under 50
The Tories are going to be obliterated, and deservedly, to the extent they may never recover
However, Starmer will then have to tackle this issue. It cannot be ignored. What will he do?
How much off that 1.3 million is Ukraine/Hong Kong and adjustments of student numbers after covid?
I believe about 100-150,000 is Ukraine/HK
Students dunno, but an awful lot of them have brought dependants (much more than usual), and a much higher propertion are now converting their student visas to work visas, so they stay
Now it's great that people want to come here, it's good our unis are attractive, I am sure 98% of these people are fantastic brain surgeons to be, but the simple fact is the UK cannot cope with 700,000 net immigrants a year. Remember when Cameron vowed to get it down to tens of thousands? Now it is SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND
To grasp this nettle will take courage. Does Starmer possess it? I doubt it, and it's not in Labour's nature to clamp down on migration
It is perfectly possible to integrate 700K people in UK society a year.
To do so will take investment in infrastructure, and in the effort to socially integrate them. Nothing is free, all the options require work to be done.
What, in perpetuity? 700,000 a year for the next 30 years? That will add 20 million people to the population and transform entire cities and regions, in ethnicity, culture, religion, mores, laws, everything - coz those 20 million people won’t be from Ireland or Denmark
This is absolute madness - and it really is the way you guarantee a far right party governing the country
People like you are fucking dangerous
It's worth pointing out, it took years and years and years and years and years just to integrate the Irish when there was mass immigration from Ireland in the 19th century. We still have separate Catholic schools. It's still the case that Irish surnames are disproportionately common among the poorest parts of white British society. Now the irish are foreign, but as foreigners go they're not very foreign. Integration is very very hard.
Are you some kind of Nazi???
Integrating 700,000 Africans, Asians, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, Bolivians, Peruvians every single year is fine. 1.3m every two years - good. 3 million every four years even better. Doddle. What’s your problem, DOCTOR GOEBBELS?? Don’t you like foreigners?
All you have to do is look across Europe and see that the Hard and Far Right is now a minuscule and diminishing threat, even after large scale immigration, and everyone can tell that you are basically parroting Mein Kampf
This is my objection to the 'progressive mindset'. 'Integration' is seen as a case of education and eliminating prejudice amongst the local population. Where this fails, then it can be compelled by law. However, this applies only to existing majority populations, not incomers. I have encountered this type of thinking amongst 'liberals' for 10 years and it is much in evidence on PB. The more extreme it gets, the more radical the eventual response will be. The rise of Trump, the AfD etc can be predicted almost like an algorhythm. If you think you can outlaw Trump and the AfD, then the response you eventually encounter gets more and more gruesome until you get an actual Hitler. In this way the left are responsible for the return of fascism, because it is all a product of their own fascism in ignoring legitimate opposition to their policies and suppressing ideas, speech and beliefs through law. In this context, it may not be such a bad idea to start working with the "far right" to address these problems, as they have been doing (for instance) in Finland for a decade.
Indeed. This is why the Left is not just delusional, it is dangerous
It is basically waving a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler
And they just don’t get it
Lol, reactionary arguing that "progress" is the problem, not being a reactionary. Might as well say "look, it's not okay to allow the gays out of the closet, because it's a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler. Can't give equal rights to women; because what if Hitler?".
The main issue is that liberals (separate group from leftists or the left) refuse to meet these progressive values with progressive material improvements for all people. I remember reading a great study that showed men in the workplace saw improvements for women in the workplace as a zero sum situation - if women gained they must be losing. The same for white men thinking about people of colour. But that feeling was, in part, because the "benefits" of being a man or being white in the workforce were "making up" for where their salaries lacked - the social benefits of being a white man in the workforce were a wage supplement, in a sense, and so when those "benefits" disappeared (by tackling bigotry) they felt they were "losing out".
That would make more sense if so many of the people immigrating weren't the actual cultural and social reactionaries. You talk about equal rights for gays and women as if that's somehow an inevitable corollary of immigration because both are 'progressive'. Where are the biggest obstacles in society now to those rights? It's not gammons in the golf clubs or WWCM in the pubs.
Quite so
The quickest and easiest way to get homosexuality made illegal again, in the UK, is to import about 5m more Muslims with homophobic opinions. That would be enough, if these people caucus, to make a real impact on elections such that homosexuality is once more illegal, and the British Left won’t raise a peep of protest until it is far far too Iate
One thing I find interesting is how some cultures adopt to being immigrants.
For example, Peru. I know the place fairly well. On paper, pretty reactionary (1950s) social values. In actuality, the Peruvians I know, who immigrated, have instantly adopted the British "none-of-my-business-their-private-life" reaction to gay and trans people, have no qualms about abortion etc etc. Yet they were brought up to a rather different set of views at home.
It’s not hard to work out. It’s religion
Islam is a much more tenacious mindset than late stage Catholicism or Buddhism or whatever. We can argue why that is - because Islam is superior? Possibly. Because Islam has blood curdling death statutes against apostasy? Also possible
But the fact is Muslim migrants are MUCH less likely to drop their religion and assimilate to secular liberal western values, and that means that if you import enough Muslims you have a determined, faithful, united minority which will - by sheer persistence (and occasional violence) - impose its views on the apathetic but secular majority
And, good for them, they believe what they believe, and that is their right. Trouble is it impinges on everyone else
We see this everywhere. It is not disputable now. So what do we do about it?
Do you have any evidence that an increase in Muslim immigrants changes policies or hurts local LGBT+ communities? I’ll give you one for free - I know that some of the organising against youth sex education is backed by conservative Muslim groups; but it also has the backing of lots of home grown conservative groups as well.
Islam is the second biggest religion in the UK (if you don’t separate Christian into Catholic and protestant). 6.5% of the population in England and Wales (at the last census) are Muslim. This is not a group with significant political power to enforce their policy preferences, even if “creeping Sharia” were their preferred policy preferences.
If a religious/culturally organised voting block gain a plurality vote there are consequences for the rest.
So this is in the US, which has a hugely different context to us, where (as the article itself notes) this kind of policy has mostly been pushed by right wing GOP politicians in and out of that state. The fact that conservative muslims and conservative christians agree on some aspects of social policy suggests, to me, that the shared attribute (conservatism) is more of a predictor than the specific religion or, indeed, the recency of their migration to the country.
Ah, so that policy is the GOP’s fault, despite them having nothing to do with it?
Ms. Haley told reporters on Tuesday that she planned to continue her campaign regardless of the outcome in New Hampshire, and her campaign manager indicated as much in a memo shared with The New York Times.
NY Times blog
PredictIt gives her a 7% chance in NH
It gives Trump and Biden an equal chance of the Presidency
I saw this earlier and thought it was a joke of some kind, AI, or a message to an old person on their birthday… but seems it really is a message to Farage from Sunak
Bizarre
WATCH: Rishi Sunak Sends Personal Message To Nigel Farage order-order.com/2024/01/23/wat…
I saw this earlier and thought it was a joke of some kind, AI, or a message to an old person on their birthday… but seems it really is a message to Farage from Sunak
Bizarre
WATCH: Rishi Sunak Sends Personal Message To Nigel Farage order-order.com/2024/01/23/wat…
I’m anticipating DuraAce turning up shortly to berate PB “turning into some fucking Times wine club wankers’ chatroom”.
Why should he? He was an Officer RN and therefore self-evidently possesses Officer-Like Qualities, including Wardroom Grade Wine Appreciation.
Was chatting earlier to someone who experienced the delights of the Vatican cellar. Both visiting it - and experiencing the delights of the wines contained therein.
It is located next to where they store the bones of the saints.
Because whilst they appeal to populist rhetoric their policies are still aimed at capital accumulation. It’s like when Bolsanaro was first elected in Brazil and loads of outlets ran stories about how his opening up of further deforestation of the Amazon would be great for investors and the Brazilian economy - even if it was and is an ecological disaster. Because quarterly reports don’t care about the end of a habitable world.
I love Scottish politics. Have just received two leaflets through the door:
Tory leaflet. 3.5 pages of why you have to vote Tory to stop the SNP who are ruining the country. 0.5 pages of lies about how great the Tories are. With an appeal for supporters of other parties to back the Tories to stop the SNP.
SNP leaflet: 4 pages of why you have to vote SNP to stop the Tory, 2 pages of which finger the Tories for everything wrong and how brilliant the SNP are. 1 whole page of why independence is vital to everything and anything. With an appeal for supporters of other parties to back the SNP to stop the Tories.
We have to get away from this Tory/SNP and Holyrood/Westminster are shit and so you must vote SNP/Tory to stop Westminster/Holyrood from ruining Scotland idiocy. Its meaningless. We have *both* of them in government and they are *both* ruining Scotland.
Hence why the devolution settlement was so poorly thought through.
I saw this earlier and thought it was a joke of some kind, AI, or a message to an old person on their birthday… but seems it really is a message to Farage from Sunak
Bizarre
WATCH: Rishi Sunak Sends Personal Message To Nigel Farage order-order.com/2024/01/23/wat…
I saw this earlier and thought it was a joke of some kind, AI, or a message to an old person on their birthday… but seems it really is a message to Farage from Sunak
Bizarre
WATCH: Rishi Sunak Sends Personal Message To Nigel Farage order-order.com/2024/01/23/wat…
Thoughts and prayers for the 1/2m who take to the street every month in London demanding the West forces Isreal into a ceasefire.
Does this mean that Hamas are Zionist Imperialists?
Yes, but it also means those who twisted themselves into mental brezels to convince themselves that anyone calling for a ceasefire are worse than Hitler, have themselves become Hamas-loving terrorists. I think.
Thoughts and prayers for the 1/2m who take to the street every month in London demanding the West forces Isreal into a ceasefire.
Does this mean that Hamas are Zionist Imperialists?
Yes, but it also means those who twisted themselves into mental brezels to convince themselves that anyone calling for a ceasefire are worse than Hitler, have themselves become Hamas-loving terrorists. I think.
I mean, surely this depends on the terms? Given Israel’s existing policy goals and method of conducting themselves, if the terms are “ceasefire if you all agree to vacate the Gaza Strip” (which is what the Israeli government have said they want) then yeah, of course Hamas would reject a ceasefire.
NH Primary Results from Dixville Notch (Dixville town)
Nikki Haley = 6 all others = 0
Dixville only town that qualified as per state law, for midnight voting for 2024 NH presidential primary.
"Neil Tillotson moved to Dixville Notch in 1954, and became the town moderator and owner of The Balsams Grand Resort Hotel. He did not like having to drive 45 minutes to the nearest polling station, but learned about midnight voting from an Associated Press reporter. The state legislature approved the town's request to become a voting precinct." - wiki
Since then, reports of results from Dixville Notch have been staple of US media reporting on day of New Hampshire presidential primary AND subsequent general election.
My own introduction was way back in 1964, when on the First Tuesday after the First Monday in November, I visited the local HQs of both Democrats and Republicans in my small hometown. Back in those distant days, bumpers were a big thing, along with campaign buttons, also match books, emery board, shoe horns, etc, etc. emblazoned with logos and messages for plethora of national, state and local candidates.
Little old ladies staffed these offices, on volunteer basis, and didn't have much business, most curious and/or bored schoolkids who wanted some of campaign bumpf to mess around with.
Anyway, distinctly remember going into the Republican headquarters, and hearing the ladies talk about the results from Dixville Notch, where result for 1964 general election for President was:
Barry Goldwater = 8 LBJ and all others = 0
The ladies though this was a very good sign . . . though in retrospect I realize that they actually did know better . . .
Thoughts and prayers for the 1/2m who take to the street every month in London demanding the West forces Isreal into a ceasefire.
Does this mean that Hamas are Zionist Imperialists?
Yes, but it also means those who twisted themselves into mental brezels to convince themselves that anyone calling for a ceasefire are worse than Hitler, have themselves become Hamas-loving terrorists. I think.
Doesn't that mean that Hitler is literally worse than Hitler?
That Farage ad makes Sunak look so weak, I can’t believe he’s actually done it. Who is going to be impressed? People who prefer Farage anyway will think it makes their man look stronger, people who hate Farage will think Rishi looks like his bitch! So strange
Thoughts and prayers for the 1/2m who take to the street every month in London demanding the West forces Isreal into a ceasefire.
Does this mean that Hamas are Zionist Imperialists?
Yes, but it also means those who twisted themselves into mental brezels to convince themselves that anyone calling for a ceasefire are worse than Hitler, have themselves become Hamas-loving terrorists. I think.
Doesn't that mean that Hitler is literally worse than Hitler?
I would say that nowadays Hitler is literally worse than Hitler, yes.
I’m anticipating DuraAce turning up shortly to berate PB “turning into some fucking Times wine club wankers’ chatroom”.
Why should he? He was an Officer RN and therefore self-evidently possesses Officer-Like Qualities, including Wardroom Grade Wine Appreciation.
The Times have a Wine Club?
Who knew?
Is Mr Murdoch going to tell us that we all have to sip fruit-loop vintage from Ayers Rock (or alternately Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa) in order to live to be 107? *
I'm aware of the Speccie wine club, but their columnists have in several cases now descended into nutterdom (not commenting on our PB apparently-not-a-Speccie-columnist), so I'm not interested.
* I may be out of line there - was he kicked out of News Corp recently?
1/ QUICK TAKE on the Russian thoughts abut the role of FPV drones and what is needed (by either side) for a breakthrough) at the front: "The number of drones on the frontline is growing exponentially. Up to a dozen “birds”(FPVs) can now strike one vehicle, and 2-3 drones can chase after a single soldier. https://twitter.com/sambendett/status/1749754938542927904
Ms. Haley told reporters on Tuesday that she planned to continue her campaign regardless of the outcome in New Hampshire, and her campaign manager indicated as much in a memo shared with The New York Times.
NY Times blog
PredictIt gives her a 7% chance in NH
It gives Trump and Biden an equal chance of the Presidency
EDIT: There is an interesting divergence between PredictIt and Betfair. Note that only US citizens can sign up to PredictIt.
Predictit and Betfair Exchange and Betfair Sportsbook are different things
Predictit is a prediction market: one player bets on something with toy money, another bets against, Predictit keeps track
Betfair Exchange is an exchange market: one player bets on something with real money, another bets against with real money, BE keeps track and takes a cut
Betfair Sportsbook is a bookmaker: it bet against something, you bet on it
Thoughts and prayers for the 1/2m who take to the street every month in London demanding the West forces Isreal into a ceasefire.
Does this mean that Hamas are Zionist Imperialists?
Yes, but it also means those who twisted themselves into mental brezels to convince themselves that anyone calling for a ceasefire are worse than Hitler, have themselves become Hamas-loving terrorists. I think.
Doesn't that mean that Hitler is literally worse than Hitler?
I would say that nowadays Hitler is literally worse than Hitler, yes.
I thought that Dead Hitler was an improvement on Live Hitler?
NH Primary Results from Dixville Notch (Dixville town)
Nikki Haley = 6 all others = 0
Dixville only town that qualified as per state law, for midnight voting for 2024 NH presidential primary.
"Neil Tillotson moved to Dixville Notch in 1954, and became the town moderator and owner of The Balsams Grand Resort Hotel. He did not like having to drive 45 minutes to the nearest polling station, but learned about midnight voting from an Associated Press reporter. The state legislature approved the town's request to become a voting precinct." - wiki
Since then, reports of results from Dixville Notch have been staple of US media reporting on day of New Hampshire presidential primary AND subsequent general election.
My own introduction was way back in 1964, when on the First Tuesday after the First Monday in November, I visited the local HQs of both Democrats and Republicans in my small hometown. Back in those distant days, bumpers were a big thing, along with campaign buttons, also match books, emery board, shoe horns, etc, etc. emblazoned with logos and messages for plethora of national, state and local candidates.
Little old ladies staffed these offices, on volunteer basis, and didn't have much business, most curious and/or bored schoolkids who wanted some of campaign bumpf to mess around with.
Anyway, distinctly remember going into the Republican headquarters, and hearing the ladies talk about the results from Dixville Notch, where result for 1964 general election for President was:
Barry Goldwater = 8 LBJ and all others = 0
The ladies though this was a very good sign . . . though in retrospect I realize that they actually did know better . . .
On the US Election, it came on my radar that the GOP are playing silly buggers in Nevada, due to not wanting to comply with a new process imposed by the State Legislature for the primaries, and therefore Mr Chump is not going to be on the Presidential Ballot as he did not submit paperwork to the new process, and there are GOP legal challenges to the new process instead.
Which may mean that Haley wins Nevada, as she *is* registered in the new process.
I saw this earlier and thought it was a joke of some kind, AI, or a message to an old person on their birthday… but seems it really is a message to Farage from Sunak
Bizarre
WATCH: Rishi Sunak Sends Personal Message To Nigel Farage order-order.com/2024/01/23/wat…
Desperate stuff! He actually looks desperate with his head to one side, and a weak grin.
Oh my word...
I don't think Sunak gets this leadership concept. You don't be nice to your enemies and flirt with them. You crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women. He is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, for pity's sake. Kick him the nuts, you briefcase carrier.
Thoughts and prayers for the 1/2m who take to the street every month in London demanding the West forces Isreal into a ceasefire.
Does this mean that Hamas are Zionist Imperialists?
Yes, but it also means those who twisted themselves into mental brezels to convince themselves that anyone calling for a ceasefire are worse than Hitler, have themselves become Hamas-loving terrorists. I think.
Doesn't that mean that Hitler is literally worse than Hitler?
I saw this earlier and thought it was a joke of some kind, AI, or a message to an old person on their birthday… but seems it really is a message to Farage from Sunak
Bizarre
WATCH: Rishi Sunak Sends Personal Message To Nigel Farage order-order.com/2024/01/23/wat…
Thoughts and prayers for the 1/2m who take to the street every month in London demanding the West forces Isreal into a ceasefire.
Does this mean that Hamas are Zionist Imperialists?
Yes, but it also means those who twisted themselves into mental brezels to convince themselves that anyone calling for a ceasefire are worse than Hitler, have themselves become Hamas-loving terrorists. I think.
Doesn't that mean that Hitler is literally worse than Hitler?
I would say that nowadays Hitler is literally worse than Hitler, yes.
I thought that Dead Hitler was an improvement on Live Hitler?
No I think you're making the mistake of judging live Hitler by the standards of today. At that time it was considered acceptable to hate Jewish people, at least among Nazis.
Thoughts and prayers for the 1/2m who take to the street every month in London demanding the West forces Isreal into a ceasefire.
Does this mean that Hamas are Zionist Imperialists?
Yes, but it also means those who twisted themselves into mental brezels to convince themselves that anyone calling for a ceasefire are worse than Hitler, have themselves become Hamas-loving terrorists. I think.
Doesn't that mean that Hitler is literally worse than Hitler?
I would say that nowadays Hitler is literally worse than Hitler, yes.
I thought that Dead Hitler was an improvement on Live Hitler?
No I think you're making the mistake of judging live Hitler by the standards of today. At that time it was considered acceptable to hate Jewish people, at least among Nazis.
Does this mean that we can judge modern, non-Nazi, anti-semitists as Cultural Appropriators?
NH Primary Results from Dixville Notch (Dixville town)
Nikki Haley = 6 all others = 0
Dixville only town that qualified as per state law, for midnight voting for 2024 NH presidential primary.
"Neil Tillotson moved to Dixville Notch in 1954, and became the town moderator and owner of The Balsams Grand Resort Hotel. He did not like having to drive 45 minutes to the nearest polling station, but learned about midnight voting from an Associated Press reporter. The state legislature approved the town's request to become a voting precinct." - wiki
Since then, reports of results from Dixville Notch have been staple of US media reporting on day of New Hampshire presidential primary AND subsequent general election.
My own introduction was way back in 1964, when on the First Tuesday after the First Monday in November, I visited the local HQs of both Democrats and Republicans in my small hometown. Back in those distant days, bumpers were a big thing, along with campaign buttons, also match books, emery board, shoe horns, etc, etc. emblazoned with logos and messages for plethora of national, state and local candidates.
Little old ladies staffed these offices, on volunteer basis, and didn't have much business, most curious and/or bored schoolkids who wanted some of campaign bumpf to mess around with.
Anyway, distinctly remember going into the Republican headquarters, and hearing the ladies talk about the results from Dixville Notch, where result for 1964 general election for President was:
Barry Goldwater = 8 LBJ and all others = 0
The ladies though this was a very good sign . . . though in retrospect I realize that they actually did know better . . .
I saw this earlier and thought it was a joke of some kind, AI, or a message to an old person on their birthday… but seems it really is a message to Farage from Sunak
Bizarre
WATCH: Rishi Sunak Sends Personal Message To Nigel Farage order-order.com/2024/01/23/wat…
Ms. Haley told reporters on Tuesday that she planned to continue her campaign regardless of the outcome in New Hampshire, and her campaign manager indicated as much in a memo shared with The New York Times.
NY Times blog
PredictIt gives her a 7% chance in NH
It gives Trump and Biden an equal chance of the Presidency
EDIT: There is an interesting divergence between PredictIt and Betfair. Note that only US citizens can sign up to PredictIt.
Predictit and Betfair Exchange and Betfair Sportsbook are different things
Predictit is a prediction market: one player bets on something with toy money, another bets against, Predictit keeps track
Betfair Exchange is an exchange market: one player bets on something with real money, another bets against with real money, BE keeps track and takes a cut
Betfair Sportsbook is a bookmaker: it bet against something, you bet on it
So it's toy money versus real money? I wonder how good PredictIt is at predicting? It is embroiled in a legal battle at the moment and not opening any new markets.
I saw this earlier and thought it was a joke of some kind, AI, or a message to an old person on their birthday… but seems it really is a message to Farage from Sunak
Bizarre
WATCH: Rishi Sunak Sends Personal Message To Nigel Farage order-order.com/2024/01/23/wat…
Ms. Haley told reporters on Tuesday that she planned to continue her campaign regardless of the outcome in New Hampshire, and her campaign manager indicated as much in a memo shared with The New York Times.
NY Times blog
PredictIt gives her a 7% chance in NH
It gives Trump and Biden an equal chance of the Presidency
EDIT: There is an interesting divergence between PredictIt and Betfair. Note that only US citizens can sign up to PredictIt.
Predictit and Betfair Exchange and Betfair Sportsbook are different things
Predictit is a prediction market: one player bets on something with toy money, another bets against, Predictit keeps track
Betfair Exchange is an exchange market: one player bets on something with real money, another bets against with real money, BE keeps track and takes a cut
Betfair Sportsbook is a bookmaker: it bet against something, you bet on it
So it's toy money versus real money? I wonder how good PredictIt is at predicting? It is embroiled in a legal battle at the moment and not opening any new markets.
PreditIt looks to be real money. You buy "shares" for $ that you can invest in markets and withdraw any winnings (less 5%) in $. So I think there is an incentive to look for real value like Betfair.
NH Primary Results from Dixville Notch (Dixville town)
Nikki Haley = 6 all others = 0
Dixville only town that qualified as per state law, for midnight voting for 2024 NH presidential primary.
"Neil Tillotson moved to Dixville Notch in 1954, and became the town moderator and owner of The Balsams Grand Resort Hotel. He did not like having to drive 45 minutes to the nearest polling station, but learned about midnight voting from an Associated Press reporter. The state legislature approved the town's request to become a voting precinct." - wiki
Since then, reports of results from Dixville Notch have been staple of US media reporting on day of New Hampshire presidential primary AND subsequent general election.
My own introduction was way back in 1964, when on the First Tuesday after the First Monday in November, I visited the local HQs of both Democrats and Republicans in my small hometown. Back in those distant days, bumpers were a big thing, along with campaign buttons, also match books, emery board, shoe horns, etc, etc. emblazoned with logos and messages for plethora of national, state and local candidates.
Little old ladies staffed these offices, on volunteer basis, and didn't have much business, most curious and/or bored schoolkids who wanted some of campaign bumpf to mess around with.
Anyway, distinctly remember going into the Republican headquarters, and hearing the ladies talk about the results from Dixville Notch, where result for 1964 general election for President was:
Barry Goldwater = 8 LBJ and all others = 0
The ladies though this was a very good sign . . . though in retrospect I realize that they actually did know better . . .
NH Primary Results from Dixville Notch (Dixville town)
Nikki Haley = 6 all others = 0
Dixville only town that qualified as per state law, for midnight voting for 2024 NH presidential primary.
"Neil Tillotson moved to Dixville Notch in 1954, and became the town moderator and owner of The Balsams Grand Resort Hotel. He did not like having to drive 45 minutes to the nearest polling station, but learned about midnight voting from an Associated Press reporter. The state legislature approved the town's request to become a voting precinct." - wiki
Since then, reports of results from Dixville Notch have been staple of US media reporting on day of New Hampshire presidential primary AND subsequent general election.
My own introduction was way back in 1964, when on the First Tuesday after the First Monday in November, I visited the local HQs of both Democrats and Republicans in my small hometown. Back in those distant days, bumpers were a big thing, along with campaign buttons, also match books, emery board, shoe horns, etc, etc. emblazoned with logos and messages for plethora of national, state and local candidates.
Little old ladies staffed these offices, on volunteer basis, and didn't have much business, most curious and/or bored schoolkids who wanted some of campaign bumpf to mess around with.
Anyway, distinctly remember going into the Republican headquarters, and hearing the ladies talk about the results from Dixville Notch, where result for 1964 general election for President was:
Barry Goldwater = 8 LBJ and all others = 0
The ladies though this was a very good sign . . . though in retrospect I realize that they actually did know better . . .
It isn't exactly a secret ballot when you only have 6 voters?!
True, but in this case the voters know going in, that possibility exists for unanimous result, given small number of folks voting.
Note that in 2016 > Dixville vote was split in GOP primary: John Kasich 3, Donald Trump 2 > in Democratic primary, vote was Bernie Sanders 4, everyone else including Hillary Clinton 0 > then in November, Dixville vote was: Clinton 4, Trump 2, Gary Johnson (Libertarian) 1, and Mitt Romney (write in) 1
And in 2020 > Dixville midnight primary Democratic result: Michael Bloomberg (write ins) 3, Bernie Sanders 1, Pete Buttigeig 1 > Plus in the Republican primary Dixville recorded 1 write-in vote for (Democrat) Bloomberg, 0 for Trump or anybody else. > General election results from Dixville: Biden 5, Trump and etc. 0
I saw this earlier and thought it was a joke of some kind, AI, or a message to an old person on their birthday… but seems it really is a message to Farage from Sunak
Bizarre
WATCH: Rishi Sunak Sends Personal Message To Nigel Farage order-order.com/2024/01/23/wat…
I really do think that a Farage-led party could end up ahead of the Tories in 2024 the way things are going.
OK, "tell us your grumbles so we can play them back to you in a mailmerged letter" is old hat as campaign gimmicks go.
And it wasn't really Rishi sending a grovelling video to Nigel F, it was Guido running the system to create that.
But who on God's Good Earth thought this was a good idea? Of course it was going to be abused.
(One of my theories about old-school election campaigns is that they're a reasonable proxy for government. If you can manage resources, people and ideas well enough to do a good stump campaign, you're probably to be trusted with the levers of power. On that basis, the Conservatives are doomed.)
NH Primary Results from Dixville Notch (Dixville town)
Nikki Haley = 6 all others = 0
Dixville only town that qualified as per state law, for midnight voting for 2024 NH presidential primary.
"Neil Tillotson moved to Dixville Notch in 1954, and became the town moderator and owner of The Balsams Grand Resort Hotel. He did not like having to drive 45 minutes to the nearest polling station, but learned about midnight voting from an Associated Press reporter. The state legislature approved the town's request to become a voting precinct." - wiki
Since then, reports of results from Dixville Notch have been staple of US media reporting on day of New Hampshire presidential primary AND subsequent general election.
My own introduction was way back in 1964, when on the First Tuesday after the First Monday in November, I visited the local HQs of both Democrats and Republicans in my small hometown. Back in those distant days, bumpers were a big thing, along with campaign buttons, also match books, emery board, shoe horns, etc, etc. emblazoned with logos and messages for plethora of national, state and local candidates.
Little old ladies staffed these offices, on volunteer basis, and didn't have much business, most curious and/or bored schoolkids who wanted some of campaign bumpf to mess around with.
Anyway, distinctly remember going into the Republican headquarters, and hearing the ladies talk about the results from Dixville Notch, where result for 1964 general election for President was:
Barry Goldwater = 8 LBJ and all others = 0
The ladies though this was a very good sign . . . though in retrospect I realize that they actually did know better . . .
Particularly gratifying is the Guardian’s use of the phrase “English Fizz”
They’ve been searching for a name for this product and the name is right there. English Fizz. It sounds fun and with a hint of poshness - like Eton Mess - or indeed Prosecco
That’s what it must be called. Uncork the English Fizz
English fizz is a colloquiallism that can never be used as an official designation because that would be as vulgar as Christening one's children 'Archie' or 'Lillibet'.
I predict it will become the go-to phrase, because no one can agree on anything else, and it sounds pukka
Here are some other suggested alternatives
Merret
Britagne (cringe value: 10/10)
Pefriog
I’m not joking: Pefriog
Pefriog is the Welsh one. It has a chance I think. But most will call it Welsh fizz.
I find myself in the rare position of agreeing with both you and Luckyguy. But that’s because we’re not discussing immigration or wind turbines. It’ll never be an official designation like Crémant or Cava for naffness reasons but it will increasingly be the informal term used.
Particularly gratifying is the Guardian’s use of the phrase “English Fizz”
They’ve been searching for a name for this product and the name is right there. English Fizz. It sounds fun and with a hint of poshness - like Eton Mess - or indeed Prosecco
That’s what it must be called. Uncork the English Fizz
English fizz is a colloquiallism that can never be used as an official designation because that would be as vulgar as Christening one's children 'Archie' or 'Lillibet'.
I predict it will become the go-to phrase, because no one can agree on anything else, and it sounds pukka
Here are some other suggested alternatives
Merret
Britagne (cringe value: 10/10)
Pefriog
I’m not joking: Pefriog
Yes, it can be the 'go to' phrase, but precisely because it's a nickname. The power of a nickname is that it's a casual term for something that has a different official name.
To be called "*******", there also has to be a set of official standards, so that the name carries significance, otherwise every dickhead with a vineyard and a soda stream will be churning it out, which damages the overall brand. I don't see how you can do this with 'English fizz', because anything that's English and fizzy (and wine I guess) qualifies.
But this is easily sorted. Once English Fizz has a cachet and a brand AND is generally accepted, THEN you invent and apply rules as to what constitutes English Fizz, to maintain the quality
This is literally what happened to drinks like champagne. First they had the drink, then a general name for it, then the French government insisted on rules - and it works brilliantly
Champagne didn’t start with the Elysee Palace insisting that the French start making sparkling wines in a certain way in a certain part of France, then off they went, with Dom Perignon
I don't see how you can stop someone making tacky carbonated wine from calling their product 'English fizz' if it is English and fizzy.
Besides that, the limited 'charm' of the phrase 'fizz' comes from it being a casual downplayed term for Champagne, because we're so rich and classy we just assume it's Champagne and we have it all the time. You lose that if you make it the official marque.
You apply rules. That’s all you have to do
Champagne isn’t some magic substance that can’t be made anywhere else, it is just a kind of sparkling wine made in a certain way. Methode champenoise. And it can absolutely be done in a trillion regions around the world
Ditto Cava, Prosecco, Stilton, Roquefort, any protected origin foodstuff; all it is, is a brand
But this shit works. The French are excellent at it. Does anyone believe their stupid Bresse chickens are better than other well farmed chickens? Not really, but the posh branding still impacts
So that’s what we do with English Fizz. First let it bloom, then let it get a cachet, then impose frankly arbitrary rules so as to give it exclusivity. Sorted
I understand your arguments, and I know you understand the ones I've put forward. I'm comfortable with consumers of the product calling it English fizz (I don't see it getting much traction outside England, but I think England's mainly where the consumer base is), but I don't think it belongs as a badge on a bottle for all the reasons I've outlined.
I also think the quality aspect is as important as the name, so shouldn't be an afterthought - perhaps the name should even stem from the judging criteria. How do we classify British/English wines as a whole, and judge quality? In France, you have the apellations, so a geographical designation, and 'Methode Champagnoise/Traditonelle' speak to the production method; in Germany it's all about how much sugar is in the grapes as to whether its a Prädikatswein or a Qualitätswein etc.. We don't have a massive wine making tradition here so the rules and names put in place now are about establishing success in the long term and creating the whole legand of British/English wine.
Should the judging of the sparkling wine even be marked by some sort of swanky 'fizz' quaffing event attended by the Royals? Let's say the successful sparkling wines were given a badge like 'Grand Cru' (obviously not that) - that's a designation that then potentially has legs to be a term for quality UK sparkling wine.
Traditional method English and Welsh sparkling wine already has PDO (ie appellation contrôlée) status, so it’s unlikely ever to be renamed anything like English fizz or Britagne or whatever.
It’s “English Sparkling Wine” or if you’re in Wales “Welsh sparkling wine”, or (thanks to Rathfinny) Sussex Sparkling wine in Sussex. To get PDO status and use those terms you have to conform to a few rules: only certain permitted varieties (there is an ongoing debate about whether to allow the hybrid Seyval Blanc), minimum alcohol level, made using traditional second fermentation in bottle, limited chaptalization.
There is a similar set of rules for the English Quality Wine PDO for still.
So I expect official nomenclature to remain as it is with some tweaks and probably more regional PDOs in due course (North Downs, South Downs, Weald, “Wessex”, Surrey Hills, Wye Valley and so on. English fizz seems increasingly to be the shorthand and I’d expect that to devolve into Kentish fizz, Wealden fizz etc.
It's somewhat of a missed opportunity. I think there's a good deal of export potential (not to France, most of them are so insular they've never even heard of Prosecco) if a name could stick. I say this as someone who comes from Sussex, but who gives a fuck about the South Downs? As a system I do prefer the German way; it just seems far more logical. If you can make a great wine in Fife, do it and let it be judged alongside everything else.
I wonder whether climate change will make southern England more suited to raising the grapes than champagne in 50 years?
We’re already at the climate of Champagne in the mid 20thC and harvests, sugars etc are comparable.
I think Biggest point is that in 50 years, we might be able to grow other - warmer weather - varietals, like Cabernet Sauvignon.
Half in jest, I have wondered about a long term bet on an olive grove or an orange orchard (is it an orchard for oranges?).
It’s possible now, but olives are a volume game and yields just aren’t up there with the Med. There’s an olive farm on the Kent/Sussex borders - Oxney Olives.
Cabernet Sauv is a long way off. We can already grow and ripen the 4 Pinots, Chardonnay, Sauvignon blanc, Cab Franc (just about), Albariño, Chasselas and Gamay(ish). I am attempting Melon de Bourgogne (Muscadet). Next stop is Riesling which stubbornly refuses to ripen here, then Chenin blanc, Syrah (not actually a hot climate grape despite reputation), then the Bordeaux reds Merlot CS and Malbec.
Interesting. It will be a massive psychological change to get people to accept English red, but then English white was a joke when I was a kid. It feels like growers changed that by targeting and winning awards?
There's no reason why you can't grow Pinot Noir in the UK now. In fact, I think I saw a bottle of English Pinot at M&S.
Went to several southern vineyards in the summer and was told by one proprietor that growing drinkable wine in England wasn’t that difficult, marketing it is. We’ve had summers where he could have happily bottled good quality Pinot noir but he’d then have to spend £££ marketing it. And weather factors might mean the next year did not reliably produce a similar standard so it would be wasted effort.
I saw this earlier and thought it was a joke of some kind, AI, or a message to an old person on their birthday… but seems it really is a message to Farage from Sunak
Bizarre
WATCH: Rishi Sunak Sends Personal Message To Nigel Farage order-order.com/2024/01/23/wat…
I really do think that a Farage-led party could end up ahead of the Tories in 2024 the way things are going.
OK, "tell us your grumbles so we can play them back to you in a mailmerged letter" is old hat as campaign gimmicks go.
And it wasn't really Rishi sending a grovelling video to Nigel F, it was Guido running the system to create that.
It was Rishi sending a grovelling video to Farage acknowledging that immigration was a bad thing, and other people then seeing it. Who could have predicted that other people than the anti-immigration target group would ever see it?
NH Primary Results from Dixville Notch (Dixville town)
Nikki Haley = 6 all others = 0
Dixville only town that qualified as per state law, for midnight voting for 2024 NH presidential primary.
"Neil Tillotson moved to Dixville Notch in 1954, and became the town moderator and owner of The Balsams Grand Resort Hotel. He did not like having to drive 45 minutes to the nearest polling station, but learned about midnight voting from an Associated Press reporter. The state legislature approved the town's request to become a voting precinct." - wiki
Since then, reports of results from Dixville Notch have been staple of US media reporting on day of New Hampshire presidential primary AND subsequent general election.
My own introduction was way back in 1964, when on the First Tuesday after the First Monday in November, I visited the local HQs of both Democrats and Republicans in my small hometown. Back in those distant days, bumpers were a big thing, along with campaign buttons, also match books, emery board, shoe horns, etc, etc. emblazoned with logos and messages for plethora of national, state and local candidates.
Little old ladies staffed these offices, on volunteer basis, and didn't have much business, most curious and/or bored schoolkids who wanted some of campaign bumpf to mess around with.
Anyway, distinctly remember going into the Republican headquarters, and hearing the ladies talk about the results from Dixville Notch, where result for 1964 general election for President was:
Barry Goldwater = 8 LBJ and all others = 0
The ladies though this was a very good sign . . . though in retrospect I realize that they actually did know better . . .
It isn't exactly a secret ballot when you only have 6 voters?!
Maybe they all agreed with each other to vote for Trump but each of them in the privacy of the booth decided to vote for Haley?
That would be a great precedent! Could be an effect. Don't want to out themselves in their community as anti-Trump but they all are!
This would inevitably lead to a 'Stop The Steal' narrative in which the electorate's publicly expressed intentions were not reflected in their privately cast votes.
This election is going to play very differently regionally. I expect the Tories to be all but wiped out in London, metropolitan areas and to have a shocker in the South West and Wales. Conversely, I think their vote will be stickier than expected in the midlands and in some northern county/small towns.
I can't speak for the Midlands. For northern England they are going to get absolutely destroyed. Whilst there will remain pockets of shire Tories, all of the places where blue collar Boris Brexit Toryism exploded in 2019 will be lost. All. Maybe keep a random couple if they are lucky and the vote splits right to allow their collapse to still leave them on top.
Why? Because, to get all northern again for a minute, they've done fuck all round here. Too. many morons unexpectedly elected, fed the spin lines by head office which they parrot about all the things they are delivering. Whilst delivering nothing. Voters are used to nothing, but they're not used to being lied to about it.
Worse still is the parochial bigotry that was always close to the surface in many towns now whipped to a frenzy. They voted Brexit and then Boris to get the foreigners out. Gone. Its their fault we can't see a doctor, why the schools are crap, why there's no jobs and no money. And even in 2019 the lure of the further right was strong - the Brexit Party saved Labour in a stack of seats. I expect the number of FUKkers to be even higher this time, and vs 2019 they will mostly be transfers from Tory 2019 totals.
It is going to be a political bloodbath. And well deserved - will be fun to see what Lord Ben I'll Sue Houchen will do with his local support all gone and the wolves closing in on the scent of malfeasance...
Round here a comment I’ve heard often is where have all these coloured people come from.
And it’s not usually as a racist comment we’ve always had a few people of Asian / African descent but there are noticeably more than used to be the case
Granted a lot of the people complaining won’t actually vote but it does show how many people think Bozo and co have utterly failed to deliver what they promised
It's a lot worse than "not delivering", they have done the opposite of delivering. We have had 1.3 million migrants in two years, which is: simply off the dial, unprecedented in our history, changing the country visibly and briskly, and is a larger rate per capita than any annual immigration into the "land of immigrants" - the USA
We are importing more people than America in the era of Ellis Island. Take a minute and grasp that
It is screamingly insane, it is a kind of Ponzi scheme, and all of this is happening as everyone admits the NHS can't cope, our sewage system can't cope, our infrastructure is fucked, and house-ownership is becoming a dream for anyone under 50
The Tories are going to be obliterated, and deservedly, to the extent they may never recover
However, Starmer will then have to tackle this issue. It cannot be ignored. What will he do?
How much off that 1.3 million is Ukraine/Hong Kong and adjustments of student numbers after covid?
I believe about 100-150,000 is Ukraine/HK
Students dunno, but an awful lot of them have brought dependants (much more than usual), and a much higher propertion are now converting their student visas to work visas, so they stay
Now it's great that people want to come here, it's good our unis are attractive, I am sure 98% of these people are fantastic brain surgeons to be, but the simple fact is the UK cannot cope with 700,000 net immigrants a year. Remember when Cameron vowed to get it down to tens of thousands? Now it is SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND
To grasp this nettle will take courage. Does Starmer possess it? I doubt it, and it's not in Labour's nature to clamp down on migration
It is perfectly possible to integrate 700K people in UK society a year.
To do so will take investment in infrastructure, and in the effort to socially integrate them. Nothing is free, all the options require work to be done.
What, in perpetuity? 700,000 a year for the next 30 years? That will add 20 million people to the population and transform entire cities and regions, in ethnicity, culture, religion, mores, laws, everything - coz those 20 million people won’t be from Ireland or Denmark
This is absolute madness - and it really is the way you guarantee a far right party governing the country
People like you are fucking dangerous
It's worth pointing out, it took years and years and years and years and years just to integrate the Irish when there was mass immigration from Ireland in the 19th century. We still have separate Catholic schools. It's still the case that Irish surnames are disproportionately common among the poorest parts of white British society. Now the irish are foreign, but as foreigners go they're not very foreign. Integration is very very hard.
Are you some kind of Nazi???
Integrating 700,000 Africans, Asians, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, Bolivians, Peruvians every single year is fine. 1.3m every two years - good. 3 million every four years even better. Doddle. What’s your problem, DOCTOR GOEBBELS?? Don’t you like foreigners?
All you have to do is look across Europe and see that the Hard and Far Right is now a minuscule and diminishing threat, even after large scale immigration, and everyone can tell that you are basically parroting Mein Kampf
This is my objection to the 'progressive mindset'. 'Integration' is seen as a case of education and eliminating prejudice amongst the local population. Where this fails, then it can be compelled by law. However, this applies only to existing majority populations, not incomers. I have encountered this type of thinking amongst 'liberals' for 10 years and it is much in evidence on PB. The more extreme it gets, the more radical the eventual response will be. The rise of Trump, the AfD etc can be predicted almost like an algorhythm. If you think you can outlaw Trump and the AfD, then the response you eventually encounter gets more and more gruesome until you get an actual Hitler. In this way the left are responsible for the return of fascism, because it is all a product of their own fascism in ignoring legitimate opposition to their policies and suppressing ideas, speech and beliefs through law. In this context, it may not be such a bad idea to start working with the "far right" to address these problems, as they have been doing (for instance) in Finland for a decade.
Indeed. This is why the Left is not just delusional, it is dangerous
It is basically waving a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler
And they just don’t get it
Around 2017 I switched from seeing the right as the most dangerous threat to civilisation, to the left. Not so much the political 'far left' but the left in terms of all its cultural power which encompasses most of mainstream politics and elite culture.
When I think of the terrible politicians that have come to power, the likes of Trump, Orban, Erdoğan, Kaczyński, Milei, DeSantis… they’re not exactly centrists or social democrats, are they? I’m trying to think of an appropriate way of describing them all on the political spectrum…
This election is going to play very differently regionally. I expect the Tories to be all but wiped out in London, metropolitan areas and to have a shocker in the South West and Wales. Conversely, I think their vote will be stickier than expected in the midlands and in some northern county/small towns.
I can't speak for the Midlands. For northern England they are going to get absolutely destroyed. Whilst there will remain pockets of shire Tories, all of the places where blue collar Boris Brexit Toryism exploded in 2019 will be lost. All. Maybe keep a random couple if they are lucky and the vote splits right to allow their collapse to still leave them on top.
Why? Because, to get all northern again for a minute, they've done fuck all round here. Too. many morons unexpectedly elected, fed the spin lines by head office which they parrot about all the things they are delivering. Whilst delivering nothing. Voters are used to nothing, but they're not used to being lied to about it.
Worse still is the parochial bigotry that was always close to the surface in many towns now whipped to a frenzy. They voted Brexit and then Boris to get the foreigners out. Gone. Its their fault we can't see a doctor, why the schools are crap, why there's no jobs and no money. And even in 2019 the lure of the further right was strong - the Brexit Party saved Labour in a stack of seats. I expect the number of FUKkers to be even higher this time, and vs 2019 they will mostly be transfers from Tory 2019 totals.
It is going to be a political bloodbath. And well deserved - will be fun to see what Lord Ben I'll Sue Houchen will do with his local support all gone and the wolves closing in on the scent of malfeasance...
Round here a comment I’ve heard often is where have all these coloured people come from.
And it’s not usually as a racist comment we’ve always had a few people of Asian / African descent but there are noticeably more than used to be the case
Granted a lot of the people complaining won’t actually vote but it does show how many people think Bozo and co have utterly failed to deliver what they promised
It's a lot worse than "not delivering", they have done the opposite of delivering. We have had 1.3 million migrants in two years, which is: simply off the dial, unprecedented in our history, changing the country visibly and briskly, and is a larger rate per capita than any annual immigration into the "land of immigrants" - the USA
We are importing more people than America in the era of Ellis Island. Take a minute and grasp that
It is screamingly insane, it is a kind of Ponzi scheme, and all of this is happening as everyone admits the NHS can't cope, our sewage system can't cope, our infrastructure is fucked, and house-ownership is becoming a dream for anyone under 50
The Tories are going to be obliterated, and deservedly, to the extent they may never recover
However, Starmer will then have to tackle this issue. It cannot be ignored. What will he do?
How much off that 1.3 million is Ukraine/Hong Kong and adjustments of student numbers after covid?
I believe about 100-150,000 is Ukraine/HK
Students dunno, but an awful lot of them have brought dependants (much more than usual), and a much higher propertion are now converting their student visas to work visas, so they stay
Now it's great that people want to come here, it's good our unis are attractive, I am sure 98% of these people are fantastic brain surgeons to be, but the simple fact is the UK cannot cope with 700,000 net immigrants a year. Remember when Cameron vowed to get it down to tens of thousands? Now it is SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND
To grasp this nettle will take courage. Does Starmer possess it? I doubt it, and it's not in Labour's nature to clamp down on migration
It is perfectly possible to integrate 700K people in UK society a year.
To do so will take investment in infrastructure, and in the effort to socially integrate them. Nothing is free, all the options require work to be done.
What, in perpetuity? 700,000 a year for the next 30 years? That will add 20 million people to the population and transform entire cities and regions, in ethnicity, culture, religion, mores, laws, everything - coz those 20 million people won’t be from Ireland or Denmark
This is absolute madness - and it really is the way you guarantee a far right party governing the country
People like you are fucking dangerous
It's worth pointing out, it took years and years and years and years and years just to integrate the Irish when there was mass immigration from Ireland in the 19th century. We still have separate Catholic schools. It's still the case that Irish surnames are disproportionately common among the poorest parts of white British society. Now the irish are foreign, but as foreigners go they're not very foreign. Integration is very very hard.
Are you some kind of Nazi???
Integrating 700,000 Africans, Asians, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, Bolivians, Peruvians every single year is fine. 1.3m every two years - good. 3 million every four years even better. Doddle. What’s your problem, DOCTOR GOEBBELS?? Don’t you like foreigners?
All you have to do is look across Europe and see that the Hard and Far Right is now a minuscule and diminishing threat, even after large scale immigration, and everyone can tell that you are basically parroting Mein Kampf
This is my objection to the 'progressive mindset'. 'Integration' is seen as a case of education and eliminating prejudice amongst the local population. Where this fails, then it can be compelled by law. However, this applies only to existing majority populations, not incomers. I have encountered this type of thinking amongst 'liberals' for 10 years and it is much in evidence on PB. The more extreme it gets, the more radical the eventual response will be. The rise of Trump, the AfD etc can be predicted almost like an algorhythm. If you think you can outlaw Trump and the AfD, then the response you eventually encounter gets more and more gruesome until you get an actual Hitler. In this way the left are responsible for the return of fascism, because it is all a product of their own fascism in ignoring legitimate opposition to their policies and suppressing ideas, speech and beliefs through law. In this context, it may not be such a bad idea to start working with the "far right" to address these problems, as they have been doing (for instance) in Finland for a decade.
Indeed. This is why the Left is not just delusional, it is dangerous
It is basically waving a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler
And they just don’t get it
Lol, reactionary arguing that "progress" is the problem, not being a reactionary. Might as well say "look, it's not okay to allow the gays out of the closet, because it's a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler. Can't give equal rights to women; because what if Hitler?".
The main issue is that liberals (separate group from leftists or the left) refuse to meet these progressive values with progressive material improvements for all people. I remember reading a great study that showed men in the workplace saw improvements for women in the workplace as a zero sum situation - if women gained they must be losing. The same for white men thinking about people of colour. But that feeling was, in part, because the "benefits" of being a man or being white in the workforce were "making up" for where their salaries lacked - the social benefits of being a white man in the workforce were a wage supplement, in a sense, and so when those "benefits" disappeared (by tackling bigotry) they felt they were "losing out".
That would make more sense if so many of the people immigrating weren't the actual cultural and social reactionaries. You talk about equal rights for gays and women as if that's somehow an inevitable corollary of immigration because both are 'progressive'. Where are the biggest obstacles in society now to those rights? It's not gammons in the golf clubs or WWCM in the pubs.
Quite so
The quickest and easiest way to get homosexuality made illegal again, in the UK, is to import about 5m more Muslims with homophobic opinions. That would be enough, if these people caucus, to make a real impact on elections such that homosexuality is once more illegal, and the British Left won’t raise a peep of protest until it is far far too Iate
One thing I find interesting is how some cultures adopt to being immigrants.
For example, Peru. I know the place fairly well. On paper, pretty reactionary (1950s) social values. In actuality, the Peruvians I know, who immigrated, have instantly adopted the British "none-of-my-business-their-private-life" reaction to gay and trans people, have no qualms about abortion etc etc. Yet they were brought up to a rather different set of views at home.
NH Primary Results from Dixville Notch (Dixville town)
Nikki Haley = 6 all others = 0
Dixville only town that qualified as per state law, for midnight voting for 2024 NH presidential primary.
"Neil Tillotson moved to Dixville Notch in 1954, and became the town moderator and owner of The Balsams Grand Resort Hotel. He did not like having to drive 45 minutes to the nearest polling station, but learned about midnight voting from an Associated Press reporter. The state legislature approved the town's request to become a voting precinct." - wiki
Since then, reports of results from Dixville Notch have been staple of US media reporting on day of New Hampshire presidential primary AND subsequent general election.
My own introduction was way back in 1964, when on the First Tuesday after the First Monday in November, I visited the local HQs of both Democrats and Republicans in my small hometown. Back in those distant days, bumpers were a big thing, along with campaign buttons, also match books, emery board, shoe horns, etc, etc. emblazoned with logos and messages for plethora of national, state and local candidates.
Little old ladies staffed these offices, on volunteer basis, and didn't have much business, most curious and/or bored schoolkids who wanted some of campaign bumpf to mess around with.
Anyway, distinctly remember going into the Republican headquarters, and hearing the ladies talk about the results from Dixville Notch, where result for 1964 general election for President was:
Barry Goldwater = 8 LBJ and all others = 0
The ladies though this was a very good sign . . . though in retrospect I realize that they actually did know better . . .
It isn't exactly a secret ballot when you only have 6 voters?!
Maybe they all agreed with each other to vote for Trump but each of them in the privacy of the booth decided to vote for Haley?
That would be a great precedent! Could be an effect. Don't want to out themselves in their community as anti-Trump but they all are!
This would inevitably lead to a 'Stop The Steal' narrative in which the electorate's publicly expressed intentions were not reflected in their privately cast votes.
Tata are literally "stopping the Steel" at Port Talbot...
This election is going to play very differently regionally. I expect the Tories to be all but wiped out in London, metropolitan areas and to have a shocker in the South West and Wales. Conversely, I think their vote will be stickier than expected in the midlands and in some northern county/small towns.
I can't speak for the Midlands. For northern England they are going to get absolutely destroyed. Whilst there will remain pockets of shire Tories, all of the places where blue collar Boris Brexit Toryism exploded in 2019 will be lost. All. Maybe keep a random couple if they are lucky and the vote splits right to allow their collapse to still leave them on top.
Why? Because, to get all northern again for a minute, they've done fuck all round here. Too. many morons unexpectedly elected, fed the spin lines by head office which they parrot about all the things they are delivering. Whilst delivering nothing. Voters are used to nothing, but they're not used to being lied to about it.
Worse still is the parochial bigotry that was always close to the surface in many towns now whipped to a frenzy. They voted Brexit and then Boris to get the foreigners out. Gone. Its their fault we can't see a doctor, why the schools are crap, why there's no jobs and no money. And even in 2019 the lure of the further right was strong - the Brexit Party saved Labour in a stack of seats. I expect the number of FUKkers to be even higher this time, and vs 2019 they will mostly be transfers from Tory 2019 totals.
It is going to be a political bloodbath. And well deserved - will be fun to see what Lord Ben I'll Sue Houchen will do with his local support all gone and the wolves closing in on the scent of malfeasance...
Round here a comment I’ve heard often is where have all these coloured people come from.
And it’s not usually as a racist comment we’ve always had a few people of Asian / African descent but there are noticeably more than used to be the case
Granted a lot of the people complaining won’t actually vote but it does show how many people think Bozo and co have utterly failed to deliver what they promised
It's a lot worse than "not delivering", they have done the opposite of delivering. We have had 1.3 million migrants in two years, which is: simply off the dial, unprecedented in our history, changing the country visibly and briskly, and is a larger rate per capita than any annual immigration into the "land of immigrants" - the USA
We are importing more people than America in the era of Ellis Island. Take a minute and grasp that
It is screamingly insane, it is a kind of Ponzi scheme, and all of this is happening as everyone admits the NHS can't cope, our sewage system can't cope, our infrastructure is fucked, and house-ownership is becoming a dream for anyone under 50
The Tories are going to be obliterated, and deservedly, to the extent they may never recover
However, Starmer will then have to tackle this issue. It cannot be ignored. What will he do?
How much off that 1.3 million is Ukraine/Hong Kong and adjustments of student numbers after covid?
I believe about 100-150,000 is Ukraine/HK
Students dunno, but an awful lot of them have brought dependants (much more than usual), and a much higher propertion are now converting their student visas to work visas, so they stay
Now it's great that people want to come here, it's good our unis are attractive, I am sure 98% of these people are fantastic brain surgeons to be, but the simple fact is the UK cannot cope with 700,000 net immigrants a year. Remember when Cameron vowed to get it down to tens of thousands? Now it is SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND
To grasp this nettle will take courage. Does Starmer possess it? I doubt it, and it's not in Labour's nature to clamp down on migration
It is perfectly possible to integrate 700K people in UK society a year.
To do so will take investment in infrastructure, and in the effort to socially integrate them. Nothing is free, all the options require work to be done.
What, in perpetuity? 700,000 a year for the next 30 years? That will add 20 million people to the population and transform entire cities and regions, in ethnicity, culture, religion, mores, laws, everything - coz those 20 million people won’t be from Ireland or Denmark
This is absolute madness - and it really is the way you guarantee a far right party governing the country
People like you are fucking dangerous
It's worth pointing out, it took years and years and years and years and years just to integrate the Irish when there was mass immigration from Ireland in the 19th century. We still have separate Catholic schools. It's still the case that Irish surnames are disproportionately common among the poorest parts of white British society. Now the irish are foreign, but as foreigners go they're not very foreign. Integration is very very hard.
Are you some kind of Nazi???
Integrating 700,000 Africans, Asians, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, Bolivians, Peruvians every single year is fine. 1.3m every two years - good. 3 million every four years even better. Doddle. What’s your problem, DOCTOR GOEBBELS?? Don’t you like foreigners?
All you have to do is look across Europe and see that the Hard and Far Right is now a minuscule and diminishing threat, even after large scale immigration, and everyone can tell that you are basically parroting Mein Kampf
This is my objection to the 'progressive mindset'. 'Integration' is seen as a case of education and eliminating prejudice amongst the local population. Where this fails, then it can be compelled by law. However, this applies only to existing majority populations, not incomers. I have encountered this type of thinking amongst 'liberals' for 10 years and it is much in evidence on PB. The more extreme it gets, the more radical the eventual response will be. The rise of Trump, the AfD etc can be predicted almost like an algorhythm. If you think you can outlaw Trump and the AfD, then the response you eventually encounter gets more and more gruesome until you get an actual Hitler. In this way the left are responsible for the return of fascism, because it is all a product of their own fascism in ignoring legitimate opposition to their policies and suppressing ideas, speech and beliefs through law. In this context, it may not be such a bad idea to start working with the "far right" to address these problems, as they have been doing (for instance) in Finland for a decade.
Indeed. This is why the Left is not just delusional, it is dangerous
It is basically waving a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler
And they just don’t get it
A sensible Left would propose more foreign aid, investment, conflict resolution, and bilateral agreements, including help at source, to "stop the boats".
Instead, they say "safe and legal routes" which I don't think they realise is heard as: create an open door for anyone who wants it.
These are the arguments made by the "loony left" - whereas the idea of increasing foreign aid is anathema because people always say "but we should help our own first". Which goes back to my point - if you meet the material needs of people, there is no frustration that will build up to be misattributed to "the other". The neoliberal capitalist consensus cannot do that - more profit must be skimmed and therefore the average person will lose out. The right do not want to do that - they like having an "other" to have grievances against to protect the fact that capitalism is the reason for this. The left want to deal with this issue - and get called communists for proposing policy solutions or slight social democratic reform with wealth redistribution and investment in civic infrastructure.
I haven't heard the left make a cogent argument on this.
In fact, phrases like "neoliberal capitalist consensus" sort of show both why you don't think it's worth bothering to try and how you'd get it badly wrong if you did.
The Matt Goodwin right and Aaron Bastani left both hate the same thing: centrist liberals. They just have different names for them. The left bang in about the neoliberal capitalist consensus or “late capitalism”, the right talk about the woke liberal establishment or “new elites”. Same people: the fabled blob.
Whatever his flaws Matt Goodwin is a liberal. He believes in classical liberal freedoms of expression and thought, in the multiplicity of sources of truth, in democracy, in an open society vigilant to protect this from its enemies, in free inquiry being the best way of eliciting truths and so on. He is a classic John Stuart Mill liberal, in company with almost everyone of any significance in mainstream UK political life and thought. He is one of liberalism's better defenders.
I often, of course, disagree with him. But not about being a liberal.
I saw this earlier and thought it was a joke of some kind, AI, or a message to an old person on their birthday… but seems it really is a message to Farage from Sunak
Bizarre
WATCH: Rishi Sunak Sends Personal Message To Nigel Farage order-order.com/2024/01/23/wat…
I really do think that a Farage-led party could end up ahead of the Tories in 2024 the way things are going.
OK, "tell us your grumbles so we can play them back to you in a mailmerged letter" is old hat as campaign gimmicks go.
And it wasn't really Rishi sending a grovelling video to Nigel F, it was Guido running the system to create that.
But who on God's Good Earth thought this was a good idea? Of course it was going to be abused.
(One of my theories about old-school election campaigns is that they're a reasonable proxy for government. If you can manage resources, people and ideas well enough to do a good stump campaign, you're probably to be trusted with the levers of power. On that basis, the Conservatives are doomed.)
Ah, so it was a wind up of sorts.
“ Latest ads from the Tories, spotted by James Heale, now have an option to create your own “personalised message” from Rishi Sunak. All you have to do is sign up your name, email address, town and what issue matters most to you. That’s certainly one way to gather a bunch of data…
Guido decided he should do one on behalf of Nigel Farage. After wishing Nigel a happy New Year, Rishi goes on to say “like you, I think immigration levels are too high”. Touching…
Nigel tells Guido:
“I’m glad Rishi says he is finally taking my concerns seriously, but I think it’s going to take a bit more than a personalised video message to Stop the Boats”.
Guido can confirm that none of this is AI, meaning Rishi has literally filmed all different versions of the video and has recorded himself saying various different names. It must have been a busy few days…”
Is anybody in the Labour or Conservative Parties talking about this and preferably putting forward a solution? Serious question. It's not going to influence my vote, but it would be nice to know that somebody somewhere can find their couch in their living room.
Most of the local government problems seem to stem from either speculative investments not working out, or being unable to raise sufficient revenues to make their costs, mostly because of central government regulations on council tax increases.
LAs need to be able to raise much more of their own money, which means the councils both rely less on central government for their incomes, and are incentivised to allow more housebuilding in their area.
That is dangerous though. Once LAs have significant and independent borrowing powers, not moderated by the public works loan board, that’s a serious potential risk to public finances. It’s all of a lot less use to, say, Crewe than it is to Westminster.
I’d only let them borrow from banks on commercial terms, not to issue bonds or other government borrowing types.
If they want to build a building then fine, the bank will have a building if the LA doesn’t keep up the payments. But no borrowing for general spending, raise council tax if you want to do that.
Errr… Woking?
Local governments shouldn’t be engaging in speculation. And (IIRC) their borrowings are consolidated into the government borrowing figures.
And they are limited on the amount they can raise council tax.
I don't think local government borrowing is consolidated into gross government debt numbers.
Ms. Haley told reporters on Tuesday that she planned to continue her campaign regardless of the outcome in New Hampshire, and her campaign manager indicated as much in a memo shared with The New York Times.
NY Times blog
PredictIt gives her a 7% chance in NH
It gives Trump and Biden an equal chance of the Presidency
I saw this earlier and thought it was a joke of some kind, AI, or a message to an old person on their birthday… but seems it really is a message to Farage from Sunak
Bizarre
WATCH: Rishi Sunak Sends Personal Message To Nigel Farage order-order.com/2024/01/23/wat…
I really do think that a Farage-led party could end up ahead of the Tories in 2024 the way things are going.
OK, "tell us your grumbles so we can play them back to you in a mailmerged letter" is old hat as campaign gimmicks go.
And it wasn't really Rishi sending a grovelling video to Nigel F, it was Guido running the system to create that.
It was Rishi sending a grovelling video to Farage acknowledging that immigration was a bad thing, and other people then seeing it. Who could have predicted that other people than the anti-immigration target group would ever see it?
Yes, but the Nigel bit is the least interesting part. If one really wanted to show the PM up, either give him a comedy fake name to read out (think Bart phoning Moe in The Simpsons) or get hold of Rishi making contradictory promises to different people.
Basically, if you have an idea and want to know the ways it can fail by schoolboy humour, ask a teacher. Or better still, a reliable schoolboy, if you can find one.
This election is going to play very differently regionally. I expect the Tories to be all but wiped out in London, metropolitan areas and to have a shocker in the South West and Wales. Conversely, I think their vote will be stickier than expected in the midlands and in some northern county/small towns.
I can't speak for the Midlands. For northern England they are going to get absolutely destroyed. Whilst there will remain pockets of shire Tories, all of the places where blue collar Boris Brexit Toryism exploded in 2019 will be lost. All. Maybe keep a random couple if they are lucky and the vote splits right to allow their collapse to still leave them on top.
Why? Because, to get all northern again for a minute, they've done fuck all round here. Too. many morons unexpectedly elected, fed the spin lines by head office which they parrot about all the things they are delivering. Whilst delivering nothing. Voters are used to nothing, but they're not used to being lied to about it.
Worse still is the parochial bigotry that was always close to the surface in many towns now whipped to a frenzy. They voted Brexit and then Boris to get the foreigners out. Gone. Its their fault we can't see a doctor, why the schools are crap, why there's no jobs and no money. And even in 2019 the lure of the further right was strong - the Brexit Party saved Labour in a stack of seats. I expect the number of FUKkers to be even higher this time, and vs 2019 they will mostly be transfers from Tory 2019 totals.
It is going to be a political bloodbath. And well deserved - will be fun to see what Lord Ben I'll Sue Houchen will do with his local support all gone and the wolves closing in on the scent of malfeasance...
Round here a comment I’ve heard often is where have all these coloured people come from.
And it’s not usually as a racist comment we’ve always had a few people of Asian / African descent but there are noticeably more than used to be the case
Granted a lot of the people complaining won’t actually vote but it does show how many people think Bozo and co have utterly failed to deliver what they promised
It's a lot worse than "not delivering", they have done the opposite of delivering. We have had 1.3 million migrants in two years, which is: simply off the dial, unprecedented in our history, changing the country visibly and briskly, and is a larger rate per capita than any annual immigration into the "land of immigrants" - the USA
We are importing more people than America in the era of Ellis Island. Take a minute and grasp that
It is screamingly insane, it is a kind of Ponzi scheme, and all of this is happening as everyone admits the NHS can't cope, our sewage system can't cope, our infrastructure is fucked, and house-ownership is becoming a dream for anyone under 50
The Tories are going to be obliterated, and deservedly, to the extent they may never recover
However, Starmer will then have to tackle this issue. It cannot be ignored. What will he do?
How much off that 1.3 million is Ukraine/Hong Kong and adjustments of student numbers after covid?
I believe about 100-150,000 is Ukraine/HK
Students dunno, but an awful lot of them have brought dependants (much more than usual), and a much higher propertion are now converting their student visas to work visas, so they stay
Now it's great that people want to come here, it's good our unis are attractive, I am sure 98% of these people are fantastic brain surgeons to be, but the simple fact is the UK cannot cope with 700,000 net immigrants a year. Remember when Cameron vowed to get it down to tens of thousands? Now it is SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND
To grasp this nettle will take courage. Does Starmer possess it? I doubt it, and it's not in Labour's nature to clamp down on migration
It is perfectly possible to integrate 700K people in UK society a year.
To do so will take investment in infrastructure, and in the effort to socially integrate them. Nothing is free, all the options require work to be done.
What, in perpetuity? 700,000 a year for the next 30 years? That will add 20 million people to the population and transform entire cities and regions, in ethnicity, culture, religion, mores, laws, everything - coz those 20 million people won’t be from Ireland or Denmark
This is absolute madness - and it really is the way you guarantee a far right party governing the country
People like you are fucking dangerous
It's worth pointing out, it took years and years and years and years and years just to integrate the Irish when there was mass immigration from Ireland in the 19th century. We still have separate Catholic schools. It's still the case that Irish surnames are disproportionately common among the poorest parts of white British society. Now the irish are foreign, but as foreigners go they're not very foreign. Integration is very very hard.
Are you some kind of Nazi???
Integrating 700,000 Africans, Asians, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, Bolivians, Peruvians every single year is fine. 1.3m every two years - good. 3 million every four years even better. Doddle. What’s your problem, DOCTOR GOEBBELS?? Don’t you like foreigners?
All you have to do is look across Europe and see that the Hard and Far Right is now a minuscule and diminishing threat, even after large scale immigration, and everyone can tell that you are basically parroting Mein Kampf
This is my objection to the 'progressive mindset'. 'Integration' is seen as a case of education and eliminating prejudice amongst the local population. Where this fails, then it can be compelled by law. However, this applies only to existing majority populations, not incomers. I have encountered this type of thinking amongst 'liberals' for 10 years and it is much in evidence on PB. The more extreme it gets, the more radical the eventual response will be. The rise of Trump, the AfD etc can be predicted almost like an algorhythm. If you think you can outlaw Trump and the AfD, then the response you eventually encounter gets more and more gruesome until you get an actual Hitler. In this way the left are responsible for the return of fascism, because it is all a product of their own fascism in ignoring legitimate opposition to their policies and suppressing ideas, speech and beliefs through law. In this context, it may not be such a bad idea to start working with the "far right" to address these problems, as they have been doing (for instance) in Finland for a decade.
Indeed. This is why the Left is not just delusional, it is dangerous
It is basically waving a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler
And they just don’t get it
Lol, reactionary arguing that "progress" is the problem, not being a reactionary. Might as well say "look, it's not okay to allow the gays out of the closet, because it's a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler. Can't give equal rights to women; because what if Hitler?".
The main issue is that liberals (separate group from leftists or the left) refuse to meet these progressive values with progressive material improvements for all people. I remember reading a great study that showed men in the workplace saw improvements for women in the workplace as a zero sum situation - if women gained they must be losing. The same for white men thinking about people of colour. But that feeling was, in part, because the "benefits" of being a man or being white in the workforce were "making up" for where their salaries lacked - the social benefits of being a white man in the workforce were a wage supplement, in a sense, and so when those "benefits" disappeared (by tackling bigotry) they felt they were "losing out".
That would make more sense if so many of the people immigrating weren't the actual cultural and social reactionaries. You talk about equal rights for gays and women as if that's somehow an inevitable corollary of immigration because both are 'progressive'. Where are the biggest obstacles in society now to those rights? It's not gammons in the golf clubs or WWCM in the pubs.
Quite so
The quickest and easiest way to get homosexuality made illegal again, in the UK, is to import about 5m more Muslims with homophobic opinions. That would be enough, if these people caucus, to make a real impact on elections such that homosexuality is once more illegal, and the British Left won’t raise a peep of protest until it is far far too Iate
One thing I find interesting is how some cultures adopt to being immigrants.
For example, Peru. I know the place fairly well. On paper, pretty reactionary (1950s) social values. In actuality, the Peruvians I know, who immigrated, have instantly adopted the British "none-of-my-business-their-private-life" reaction to gay and trans people, have no qualms about abortion etc etc. Yet they were brought up to a rather different set of views at home.
Yes, this is what happens with most immigrants.
Surveys of Muslim attitudes on e.g. freedom of speech would suggest however that there are significant exceptions to this.
This election is going to play very differently regionally. I expect the Tories to be all but wiped out in London, metropolitan areas and to have a shocker in the South West and Wales. Conversely, I think their vote will be stickier than expected in the midlands and in some northern county/small towns.
I can't speak for the Midlands. For northern England they are going to get absolutely destroyed. Whilst there will remain pockets of shire Tories, all of the places where blue collar Boris Brexit Toryism exploded in 2019 will be lost. All. Maybe keep a random couple if they are lucky and the vote splits right to allow their collapse to still leave them on top.
Why? Because, to get all northern again for a minute, they've done fuck all round here. Too. many morons unexpectedly elected, fed the spin lines by head office which they parrot about all the things they are delivering. Whilst delivering nothing. Voters are used to nothing, but they're not used to being lied to about it.
Worse still is the parochial bigotry that was always close to the surface in many towns now whipped to a frenzy. They voted Brexit and then Boris to get the foreigners out. Gone. Its their fault we can't see a doctor, why the schools are crap, why there's no jobs and no money. And even in 2019 the lure of the further right was strong - the Brexit Party saved Labour in a stack of seats. I expect the number of FUKkers to be even higher this time, and vs 2019 they will mostly be transfers from Tory 2019 totals.
It is going to be a political bloodbath. And well deserved - will be fun to see what Lord Ben I'll Sue Houchen will do with his local support all gone and the wolves closing in on the scent of malfeasance...
Round here a comment I’ve heard often is where have all these coloured people come from.
And it’s not usually as a racist comment we’ve always had a few people of Asian / African descent but there are noticeably more than used to be the case
Granted a lot of the people complaining won’t actually vote but it does show how many people think Bozo and co have utterly failed to deliver what they promised
It's a lot worse than "not delivering", they have done the opposite of delivering. We have had 1.3 million migrants in two years, which is: simply off the dial, unprecedented in our history, changing the country visibly and briskly, and is a larger rate per capita than any annual immigration into the "land of immigrants" - the USA
We are importing more people than America in the era of Ellis Island. Take a minute and grasp that
It is screamingly insane, it is a kind of Ponzi scheme, and all of this is happening as everyone admits the NHS can't cope, our sewage system can't cope, our infrastructure is fucked, and house-ownership is becoming a dream for anyone under 50
The Tories are going to be obliterated, and deservedly, to the extent they may never recover
However, Starmer will then have to tackle this issue. It cannot be ignored. What will he do?
How much off that 1.3 million is Ukraine/Hong Kong and adjustments of student numbers after covid?
I believe about 100-150,000 is Ukraine/HK
Students dunno, but an awful lot of them have brought dependants (much more than usual), and a much higher propertion are now converting their student visas to work visas, so they stay
Now it's great that people want to come here, it's good our unis are attractive, I am sure 98% of these people are fantastic brain surgeons to be, but the simple fact is the UK cannot cope with 700,000 net immigrants a year. Remember when Cameron vowed to get it down to tens of thousands? Now it is SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND
To grasp this nettle will take courage. Does Starmer possess it? I doubt it, and it's not in Labour's nature to clamp down on migration
It is perfectly possible to integrate 700K people in UK society a year.
To do so will take investment in infrastructure, and in the effort to socially integrate them. Nothing is free, all the options require work to be done.
What, in perpetuity? 700,000 a year for the next 30 years? That will add 20 million people to the population and transform entire cities and regions, in ethnicity, culture, religion, mores, laws, everything - coz those 20 million people won’t be from Ireland or Denmark
This is absolute madness - and it really is the way you guarantee a far right party governing the country
People like you are fucking dangerous
It's worth pointing out, it took years and years and years and years and years just to integrate the Irish when there was mass immigration from Ireland in the 19th century. We still have separate Catholic schools. It's still the case that Irish surnames are disproportionately common among the poorest parts of white British society. Now the irish are foreign, but as foreigners go they're not very foreign. Integration is very very hard.
Are you some kind of Nazi???
Integrating 700,000 Africans, Asians, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, Bolivians, Peruvians every single year is fine. 1.3m every two years - good. 3 million every four years even better. Doddle. What’s your problem, DOCTOR GOEBBELS?? Don’t you like foreigners?
All you have to do is look across Europe and see that the Hard and Far Right is now a minuscule and diminishing threat, even after large scale immigration, and everyone can tell that you are basically parroting Mein Kampf
This is my objection to the 'progressive mindset'. 'Integration' is seen as a case of education and eliminating prejudice amongst the local population. Where this fails, then it can be compelled by law. However, this applies only to existing majority populations, not incomers. I have encountered this type of thinking amongst 'liberals' for 10 years and it is much in evidence on PB. The more extreme it gets, the more radical the eventual response will be. The rise of Trump, the AfD etc can be predicted almost like an algorhythm. If you think you can outlaw Trump and the AfD, then the response you eventually encounter gets more and more gruesome until you get an actual Hitler. In this way the left are responsible for the return of fascism, because it is all a product of their own fascism in ignoring legitimate opposition to their policies and suppressing ideas, speech and beliefs through law. In this context, it may not be such a bad idea to start working with the "far right" to address these problems, as they have been doing (for instance) in Finland for a decade.
Indeed. This is why the Left is not just delusional, it is dangerous
It is basically waving a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler
And they just don’t get it
A sensible Left would propose more foreign aid, investment, conflict resolution, and bilateral agreements, including help at source, to "stop the boats".
Instead, they say "safe and legal routes" which I don't think they realise is heard as: create an open door for anyone who wants it.
These are the arguments made by the "loony left" - whereas the idea of increasing foreign aid is anathema because people always say "but we should help our own first". Which goes back to my point - if you meet the material needs of people, there is no frustration that will build up to be misattributed to "the other". The neoliberal capitalist consensus cannot do that - more profit must be skimmed and therefore the average person will lose out. The right do not want to do that - they like having an "other" to have grievances against to protect the fact that capitalism is the reason for this. The left want to deal with this issue - and get called communists for proposing policy solutions or slight social democratic reform with wealth redistribution and investment in civic infrastructure.
I haven't heard the left make a cogent argument on this.
In fact, phrases like "neoliberal capitalist consensus" sort of show both why you don't think it's worth bothering to try and how you'd get it badly wrong if you did.
The Matt Goodwin right and Aaron Bastani left both hate the same thing: centrist liberals. They just have different names for them. The left bang in about the neoliberal capitalist consensus or “late capitalism”, the right talk about the woke liberal establishment or “new elites”. Same people: the fabled blob.
Whatever his flaws Matt Goodwin is a liberal. He believes in classical liberal freedoms of expression and thought, in the multiplicity of sources of truth, in democracy, in an open society vigilant to protect this from its enemies, in free inquiry being the best way of eliciting truths and so on. He is a classic John Stuart Mill liberal, in company with almost everyone of any significance in mainstream UK political life and thought. He is one of liberalism's better defenders.
I often, of course, disagree with him. But not about being a liberal.
I think he voted remain, lumping him in with the 'far right' is quite amusing. It is a fair criticism that he does seem to have got quite emotionally attached to the findings of his research and now has an audience on the political right which he speaks to, but the same process can be observed with academics on the left.
This election is going to play very differently regionally. I expect the Tories to be all but wiped out in London, metropolitan areas and to have a shocker in the South West and Wales. Conversely, I think their vote will be stickier than expected in the midlands and in some northern county/small towns.
I can't speak for the Midlands. For northern England they are going to get absolutely destroyed. Whilst there will remain pockets of shire Tories, all of the places where blue collar Boris Brexit Toryism exploded in 2019 will be lost. All. Maybe keep a random couple if they are lucky and the vote splits right to allow their collapse to still leave them on top.
Why? Because, to get all northern again for a minute, they've done fuck all round here. Too. many morons unexpectedly elected, fed the spin lines by head office which they parrot about all the things they are delivering. Whilst delivering nothing. Voters are used to nothing, but they're not used to being lied to about it.
Worse still is the parochial bigotry that was always close to the surface in many towns now whipped to a frenzy. They voted Brexit and then Boris to get the foreigners out. Gone. Its their fault we can't see a doctor, why the schools are crap, why there's no jobs and no money. And even in 2019 the lure of the further right was strong - the Brexit Party saved Labour in a stack of seats. I expect the number of FUKkers to be even higher this time, and vs 2019 they will mostly be transfers from Tory 2019 totals.
It is going to be a political bloodbath. And well deserved - will be fun to see what Lord Ben I'll Sue Houchen will do with his local support all gone and the wolves closing in on the scent of malfeasance...
Round here a comment I’ve heard often is where have all these coloured people come from.
And it’s not usually as a racist comment we’ve always had a few people of Asian / African descent but there are noticeably more than used to be the case
Granted a lot of the people complaining won’t actually vote but it does show how many people think Bozo and co have utterly failed to deliver what they promised
It's a lot worse than "not delivering", they have done the opposite of delivering. We have had 1.3 million migrants in two years, which is: simply off the dial, unprecedented in our history, changing the country visibly and briskly, and is a larger rate per capita than any annual immigration into the "land of immigrants" - the USA
We are importing more people than America in the era of Ellis Island. Take a minute and grasp that
It is screamingly insane, it is a kind of Ponzi scheme, and all of this is happening as everyone admits the NHS can't cope, our sewage system can't cope, our infrastructure is fucked, and house-ownership is becoming a dream for anyone under 50
The Tories are going to be obliterated, and deservedly, to the extent they may never recover
However, Starmer will then have to tackle this issue. It cannot be ignored. What will he do?
How much off that 1.3 million is Ukraine/Hong Kong and adjustments of student numbers after covid?
I believe about 100-150,000 is Ukraine/HK
Students dunno, but an awful lot of them have brought dependants (much more than usual), and a much higher propertion are now converting their student visas to work visas, so they stay
Now it's great that people want to come here, it's good our unis are attractive, I am sure 98% of these people are fantastic brain surgeons to be, but the simple fact is the UK cannot cope with 700,000 net immigrants a year. Remember when Cameron vowed to get it down to tens of thousands? Now it is SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND
To grasp this nettle will take courage. Does Starmer possess it? I doubt it, and it's not in Labour's nature to clamp down on migration
It is perfectly possible to integrate 700K people in UK society a year.
To do so will take investment in infrastructure, and in the effort to socially integrate them. Nothing is free, all the options require work to be done.
What, in perpetuity? 700,000 a year for the next 30 years? That will add 20 million people to the population and transform entire cities and regions, in ethnicity, culture, religion, mores, laws, everything - coz those 20 million people won’t be from Ireland or Denmark
This is absolute madness - and it really is the way you guarantee a far right party governing the country
People like you are fucking dangerous
It's worth pointing out, it took years and years and years and years and years just to integrate the Irish when there was mass immigration from Ireland in the 19th century. We still have separate Catholic schools. It's still the case that Irish surnames are disproportionately common among the poorest parts of white British society. Now the irish are foreign, but as foreigners go they're not very foreign. Integration is very very hard.
Are you some kind of Nazi???
Integrating 700,000 Africans, Asians, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, Bolivians, Peruvians every single year is fine. 1.3m every two years - good. 3 million every four years even better. Doddle. What’s your problem, DOCTOR GOEBBELS?? Don’t you like foreigners?
All you have to do is look across Europe and see that the Hard and Far Right is now a minuscule and diminishing threat, even after large scale immigration, and everyone can tell that you are basically parroting Mein Kampf
This is my objection to the 'progressive mindset'. 'Integration' is seen as a case of education and eliminating prejudice amongst the local population. Where this fails, then it can be compelled by law. However, this applies only to existing majority populations, not incomers. I have encountered this type of thinking amongst 'liberals' for 10 years and it is much in evidence on PB. The more extreme it gets, the more radical the eventual response will be. The rise of Trump, the AfD etc can be predicted almost like an algorhythm. If you think you can outlaw Trump and the AfD, then the response you eventually encounter gets more and more gruesome until you get an actual Hitler. In this way the left are responsible for the return of fascism, because it is all a product of their own fascism in ignoring legitimate opposition to their policies and suppressing ideas, speech and beliefs through law. In this context, it may not be such a bad idea to start working with the "far right" to address these problems, as they have been doing (for instance) in Finland for a decade.
Indeed. This is why the Left is not just delusional, it is dangerous
It is basically waving a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler
And they just don’t get it
A sensible Left would propose more foreign aid, investment, conflict resolution, and bilateral agreements, including help at source, to "stop the boats".
Instead, they say "safe and legal routes" which I don't think they realise is heard as: create an open door for anyone who wants it.
These are the arguments made by the "loony left" - whereas the idea of increasing foreign aid is anathema because people always say "but we should help our own first". Which goes back to my point - if you meet the material needs of people, there is no frustration that will build up to be misattributed to "the other". The neoliberal capitalist consensus cannot do that - more profit must be skimmed and therefore the average person will lose out. The right do not want to do that - they like having an "other" to have grievances against to protect the fact that capitalism is the reason for this. The left want to deal with this issue - and get called communists for proposing policy solutions or slight social democratic reform with wealth redistribution and investment in civic infrastructure.
I haven't heard the left make a cogent argument on this.
In fact, phrases like "neoliberal capitalist consensus" sort of show both why you don't think it's worth bothering to try and how you'd get it badly wrong if you did.
The Matt Goodwin right and Aaron Bastani left both hate the same thing: centrist liberals. They just have different names for them. The left bang in about the neoliberal capitalist consensus or “late capitalism”, the right talk about the woke liberal establishment or “new elites”. Same people: the fabled blob.
Whatever his flaws Matt Goodwin is a liberal. He believes in classical liberal freedoms of expression and thought, in the multiplicity of sources of truth, in democracy, in an open society vigilant to protect this from its enemies, in free inquiry being the best way of eliciting truths and so on. He is a classic John Stuart Mill liberal, in company with almost everyone of any significance in mainstream UK political life and thought. He is one of liberalism's better defenders.
I often, of course, disagree with him. But not about being a liberal.
Rob Ford has accused Matt Goodwin of repeatedly lying. When you say “multiplicity of sources of truth”, is this like Kellyanne Conway talking about “alternative facts”?
I saw this earlier and thought it was a joke of some kind, AI, or a message to an old person on their birthday… but seems it really is a message to Farage from Sunak
Bizarre
WATCH: Rishi Sunak Sends Personal Message To Nigel Farage order-order.com/2024/01/23/wat…
I really do think that a Farage-led party could end up ahead of the Tories in 2024 the way things are going.
OK, "tell us your grumbles so we can play them back to you in a mailmerged letter" is old hat as campaign gimmicks go.
And it wasn't really Rishi sending a grovelling video to Nigel F, it was Guido running the system to create that.
But who on God's Good Earth thought this was a good idea? Of course it was going to be abused.
(One of my theories about old-school election campaigns is that they're a reasonable proxy for government. If you can manage resources, people and ideas well enough to do a good stump campaign, you're probably to be trusted with the levers of power. On that basis, the Conservatives are doomed.)
Ah, so it was a wind up of sorts.
“ Latest ads from the Tories, spotted by James Heale, now have an option to create your own “personalised message” from Rishi Sunak. All you have to do is sign up your name, email address, town and what issue matters most to you. That’s certainly one way to gather a bunch of data…
Guido decided he should do one on behalf of Nigel Farage. After wishing Nigel a happy New Year, Rishi goes on to say “like you, I think immigration levels are too high”. Touching…
Nigel tells Guido:
“I’m glad Rishi says he is finally taking my concerns seriously, but I think it’s going to take a bit more than a personalised video message to Stop the Boats”.
Guido can confirm that none of this is AI, meaning Rishi has literally filmed all different versions of the video and has recorded himself saying various different names. It must have been a busy few days…”
This election is going to play very differently regionally. I expect the Tories to be all but wiped out in London, metropolitan areas and to have a shocker in the South West and Wales. Conversely, I think their vote will be stickier than expected in the midlands and in some northern county/small towns.
I can't speak for the Midlands. For northern England they are going to get absolutely destroyed. Whilst there will remain pockets of shire Tories, all of the places where blue collar Boris Brexit Toryism exploded in 2019 will be lost. All. Maybe keep a random couple if they are lucky and the vote splits right to allow their collapse to still leave them on top.
Why? Because, to get all northern again for a minute, they've done fuck all round here. Too. many morons unexpectedly elected, fed the spin lines by head office which they parrot about all the things they are delivering. Whilst delivering nothing. Voters are used to nothing, but they're not used to being lied to about it.
Worse still is the parochial bigotry that was always close to the surface in many towns now whipped to a frenzy. They voted Brexit and then Boris to get the foreigners out. Gone. Its their fault we can't see a doctor, why the schools are crap, why there's no jobs and no money. And even in 2019 the lure of the further right was strong - the Brexit Party saved Labour in a stack of seats. I expect the number of FUKkers to be even higher this time, and vs 2019 they will mostly be transfers from Tory 2019 totals.
It is going to be a political bloodbath. And well deserved - will be fun to see what Lord Ben I'll Sue Houchen will do with his local support all gone and the wolves closing in on the scent of malfeasance...
Round here a comment I’ve heard often is where have all these coloured people come from.
And it’s not usually as a racist comment we’ve always had a few people of Asian / African descent but there are noticeably more than used to be the case
Granted a lot of the people complaining won’t actually vote but it does show how many people think Bozo and co have utterly failed to deliver what they promised
It's a lot worse than "not delivering", they have done the opposite of delivering. We have had 1.3 million migrants in two years, which is: simply off the dial, unprecedented in our history, changing the country visibly and briskly, and is a larger rate per capita than any annual immigration into the "land of immigrants" - the USA
We are importing more people than America in the era of Ellis Island. Take a minute and grasp that
It is screamingly insane, it is a kind of Ponzi scheme, and all of this is happening as everyone admits the NHS can't cope, our sewage system can't cope, our infrastructure is fucked, and house-ownership is becoming a dream for anyone under 50
The Tories are going to be obliterated, and deservedly, to the extent they may never recover
However, Starmer will then have to tackle this issue. It cannot be ignored. What will he do?
How much off that 1.3 million is Ukraine/Hong Kong and adjustments of student numbers after covid?
I believe about 100-150,000 is Ukraine/HK
Students dunno, but an awful lot of them have brought dependants (much more than usual), and a much higher propertion are now converting their student visas to work visas, so they stay
Now it's great that people want to come here, it's good our unis are attractive, I am sure 98% of these people are fantastic brain surgeons to be, but the simple fact is the UK cannot cope with 700,000 net immigrants a year. Remember when Cameron vowed to get it down to tens of thousands? Now it is SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND
To grasp this nettle will take courage. Does Starmer possess it? I doubt it, and it's not in Labour's nature to clamp down on migration
It is perfectly possible to integrate 700K people in UK society a year.
To do so will take investment in infrastructure, and in the effort to socially integrate them. Nothing is free, all the options require work to be done.
What, in perpetuity? 700,000 a year for the next 30 years? That will add 20 million people to the population and transform entire cities and regions, in ethnicity, culture, religion, mores, laws, everything - coz those 20 million people won’t be from Ireland or Denmark
This is absolute madness - and it really is the way you guarantee a far right party governing the country
People like you are fucking dangerous
It's worth pointing out, it took years and years and years and years and years just to integrate the Irish when there was mass immigration from Ireland in the 19th century. We still have separate Catholic schools. It's still the case that Irish surnames are disproportionately common among the poorest parts of white British society. Now the irish are foreign, but as foreigners go they're not very foreign. Integration is very very hard.
Are you some kind of Nazi???
Integrating 700,000 Africans, Asians, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, Bolivians, Peruvians every single year is fine. 1.3m every two years - good. 3 million every four years even better. Doddle. What’s your problem, DOCTOR GOEBBELS?? Don’t you like foreigners?
All you have to do is look across Europe and see that the Hard and Far Right is now a minuscule and diminishing threat, even after large scale immigration, and everyone can tell that you are basically parroting Mein Kampf
This is my objection to the 'progressive mindset'. 'Integration' is seen as a case of education and eliminating prejudice amongst the local population. Where this fails, then it can be compelled by law. However, this applies only to existing majority populations, not incomers. I have encountered this type of thinking amongst 'liberals' for 10 years and it is much in evidence on PB. The more extreme it gets, the more radical the eventual response will be. The rise of Trump, the AfD etc can be predicted almost like an algorhythm. If you think you can outlaw Trump and the AfD, then the response you eventually encounter gets more and more gruesome until you get an actual Hitler. In this way the left are responsible for the return of fascism, because it is all a product of their own fascism in ignoring legitimate opposition to their policies and suppressing ideas, speech and beliefs through law. In this context, it may not be such a bad idea to start working with the "far right" to address these problems, as they have been doing (for instance) in Finland for a decade.
Indeed. This is why the Left is not just delusional, it is dangerous
It is basically waving a THIS WAY sign to the next Hitler
And they just don’t get it
A sensible Left would propose more foreign aid, investment, conflict resolution, and bilateral agreements, including help at source, to "stop the boats".
Instead, they say "safe and legal routes" which I don't think they realise is heard as: create an open door for anyone who wants it.
These are the arguments made by the "loony left" - whereas the idea of increasing foreign aid is anathema because people always say "but we should help our own first". Which goes back to my point - if you meet the material needs of people, there is no frustration that will build up to be misattributed to "the other". The neoliberal capitalist consensus cannot do that - more profit must be skimmed and therefore the average person will lose out. The right do not want to do that - they like having an "other" to have grievances against to protect the fact that capitalism is the reason for this. The left want to deal with this issue - and get called communists for proposing policy solutions or slight social democratic reform with wealth redistribution and investment in civic infrastructure.
I haven't heard the left make a cogent argument on this.
In fact, phrases like "neoliberal capitalist consensus" sort of show both why you don't think it's worth bothering to try and how you'd get it badly wrong if you did.
The Matt Goodwin right and Aaron Bastani left both hate the same thing: centrist liberals. They just have different names for them. The left bang in about the neoliberal capitalist consensus or “late capitalism”, the right talk about the woke liberal establishment or “new elites”. Same people: the fabled blob.
Whatever his flaws Matt Goodwin is a liberal. He believes in classical liberal freedoms of expression and thought, in the multiplicity of sources of truth, in democracy, in an open society vigilant to protect this from its enemies, in free inquiry being the best way of eliciting truths and so on. He is a classic John Stuart Mill liberal, in company with almost everyone of any significance in mainstream UK political life and thought. He is one of liberalism's better defenders.
I often, of course, disagree with him. But not about being a liberal.
Rob Ford has accused Matt Goodwin of repeatedly lying. When you say “multiplicity of sources of truth”, is this like Kellyanne Conway talking about “alternative facts”?
Funny how the two of them first became famous when they wrote a book together!
"Revolt on the Right by Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin – review Ford and Goodwin's fact-packed study takes a compelling look at how Ukip has become a threat to both Labour and the Tory party, fuelling the rise of the radical right in Britain"
I saw this earlier and thought it was a joke of some kind, AI, or a message to an old person on their birthday… but seems it really is a message to Farage from Sunak
Bizarre
WATCH: Rishi Sunak Sends Personal Message To Nigel Farage order-order.com/2024/01/23/wat…
Is anybody in the Labour or Conservative Parties talking about this and preferably putting forward a solution? Serious question. It's not going to influence my vote, but it would be nice to know that somebody somewhere can find their couch in their living room.
Most of the local government problems seem to stem from either speculative investments not working out, or being unable to raise sufficient revenues to make their costs, mostly because of central government regulations on council tax increases.
LAs need to be able to raise much more of their own money, which means the councils both rely less on central government for their incomes, and are incentivised to allow more housebuilding in their area.
That is dangerous though. Once LAs have significant and independent borrowing powers, not moderated by the public works loan board, that’s a serious potential risk to public finances. It’s all of a lot less use to, say, Crewe than it is to Westminster.
I’d only let them borrow from banks on commercial terms, not to issue bonds or other government borrowing types.
If they want to build a building then fine, the bank will have a building if the LA doesn’t keep up the payments. But no borrowing for general spending, raise council tax if you want to do that.
Errr… Woking?
Local governments shouldn’t be engaging in speculation. And (IIRC) their borrowings are consolidated into the government borrowing figures.
And they are limited on the amount they can raise council tax.
I don't think local government borrowing is consolidated into gross government debt numbers.
I saw this earlier and thought it was a joke of some kind, AI, or a message to an old person on their birthday… but seems it really is a message to Farage from Sunak
Bizarre
WATCH: Rishi Sunak Sends Personal Message To Nigel Farage order-order.com/2024/01/23/wat…
I really do think that a Farage-led party could end up ahead of the Tories in 2024 the way things are going.
OK, "tell us your grumbles so we can play them back to you in a mailmerged letter" is old hat as campaign gimmicks go.
And it wasn't really Rishi sending a grovelling video to Nigel F, it was Guido running the system to create that.
But who on God's Good Earth thought this was a good idea? Of course it was going to be abused.
(One of my theories about old-school election campaigns is that they're a reasonable proxy for government. If you can manage resources, people and ideas well enough to do a good stump campaign, you're probably to be trusted with the levers of power. On that basis, the Conservatives are doomed.)
Ah, so it was a wind up of sorts.
“ Latest ads from the Tories, spotted by James Heale, now have an option to create your own “personalised message” from Rishi Sunak. All you have to do is sign up your name, email address, town and what issue matters most to you. That’s certainly one way to gather a bunch of data…
Guido decided he should do one on behalf of Nigel Farage. After wishing Nigel a happy New Year, Rishi goes on to say “like you, I think immigration levels are too high”. Touching…
Nigel tells Guido:
“I’m glad Rishi says he is finally taking my concerns seriously, but I think it’s going to take a bit more than a personalised video message to Stop the Boats”.
Guido can confirm that none of this is AI, meaning Rishi has literally filmed all different versions of the video and has recorded himself saying various different names. It must have been a busy few days…”
I saw this earlier and thought it was a joke of some kind, AI, or a message to an old person on their birthday… but seems it really is a message to Farage from Sunak
Bizarre
WATCH: Rishi Sunak Sends Personal Message To Nigel Farage order-order.com/2024/01/23/wat…
Comments
Thoughts and prayers for the 1/2m who take to the street every month in London demanding the West forces Isreal into a ceasefire.
NY Times blog
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/17/hamtramck-michigan-muslim-council-lgbtq-pride-flags-banned
If a religious/culturally organised voting block gain a plurality vote there are consequences for the rest.
So that leaves just 5 years with a liberal in power, and 3 with a neutral, out of the last 45.
Net agree 18% (strongly agree 8%, tend to agree 10%)
Net disagree: 52% (strongly disagree: 38%, tend to disagree: 14%)”
https://www.channel4.com/press/news/c4-survey-and-documentary-reveals-what-british-muslims-really-think
Tory leaflet. 3.5 pages of why you have to vote Tory to stop the SNP who are ruining the country. 0.5 pages of lies about how great the Tories are. With an appeal for supporters of other parties to back the Tories to stop the SNP.
SNP leaflet: 4 pages of why you have to vote SNP to stop the Tory, 2 pages of which finger the Tories for everything wrong and how brilliant the SNP are. 1 whole page of why independence is vital to everything and anything. With an appeal for supporters of other parties to back the SNP to stop the Tories.
We have to get away from this Tory/SNP and Holyrood/Westminster are shit and so you must vote SNP/Tory to stop Westminster/Holyrood from ruining Scotland idiocy. Its meaningless. We have *both* of them in government and they are *both* ruining Scotland.
Neoliberalism was the movement of the Chicago school economists who argued against the (then) economic orthodoxy of Keynesianism, state run services and a welfare state. This led to numerous states experimenting with selling off huge swathes of public assets to private companies in the West, and massive civil unrest in the global South such as under Pinochet.
Capitalism is the economic mode of production where people with capital (capitalists) have a wage relationship with those who actually do labour and create value (the working class). The capitalist is always aiming to make the most money from the surplus labour of their workers - this is profit. This is the difference between the value labour creates and the amount of money the fruits of that labour brings in. This is the hegemonic global economic system.
When you have both of these things you have government pushing more and more public assets and services into private hands, and you have those private hands trying to maximise profit (mostly by not paying labour enough or over-inflating the cost of goods). This is what most states have done (to varying degrees) over the last 30-40 years. This is what the IMF forces on countries if they want loans or debt relief, for example. This is what was forced on Greece. It creates a system where the worst off (the lowest paid labourers) are screwwed from both sides - government retreats in its duty of care towards them and employers / capitalists are squeezing them for everything they can without giving more back.
I don’t see how that is hard to understand or how that is in any way the same as saying “woke people exist and they’re trying to destroy the West with pronouns and race mixing” but that’s just me.
https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/uk-news/2024/01/23/nottingham-triple-killer-had-history-of-mental-health-problems-court-told/
I bet there is a market for a list of their names amongst conmen, so they know whom to target with their next scam.
It reminds me of that letter somebody mass-mailed: "Send me £1 and I'll give you a list of everybody else who sends me £1".
https://www.amazon.com/Skeleton-Man-Leaphorn-Chee-Novel/dp/0061967793
She's got one of the best seats in the house, or at least she should get a seat in the house, come what may.
I've followed up the scoop by @tomorrowsmps that @theipaper commentator Paul Waugh (@paulwaugh) is being lined up to be Labour's candidate for the vacant Rochdale seat
I understand he has indeed been approached by Labour members about being a candidate
thenorthernagenda.co.uk
https://x.com/robparsonsnorth/status/1749441783673573859?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
(About 15,000 people had been polled between the Iowa caucus, and the primary.)
High levels of it are a sign of a healthy and dynamic society
Gideon Rachman"
https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/in-praise-of-mass-immigration
It gives Trump and Biden an equal chance of the Presidency
https://www.predictit.org/markets/3/President
EDIT: There is an interesting divergence between PredictIt and Betfair.
Note that only US citizens can sign up to PredictIt.
For example, France in 1940 saw a lot of immigration, and that wasn't a very positive experience for most of the French.
Bizarre
WATCH: Rishi Sunak Sends Personal Message To Nigel Farage order-order.com/2024/01/23/wat…
https://x.com/guidofawkes/status/1749738272526397475?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
Donald Trump, Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu have all presided over growth
Janan Ganesh"
https://www.ft.com/content/31d99405-69b7-4d61-bfe6-3b855f1813b8
Can this really not be corrected?
He actually looks desperate with his head to one side, and a weak grin.
It is located next to where they store the bones of the saints.
""KIRK SEMPLE AND JONAH M. KESSEL
We Need to Get Back to 1980 on Immigration
How The Middle Ground on Immigration Collapsed"
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/opinion/immigration-migrants-border-crisis.html
NH Primary Results from Dixville Notch (Dixville town)
Nikki Haley = 6
all others = 0
Dixville only town that qualified as per state law, for midnight voting for 2024 NH presidential primary.
"Neil Tillotson moved to Dixville Notch in 1954, and became the town moderator and owner of The Balsams Grand Resort Hotel. He did not like having to drive 45 minutes to the nearest polling station, but learned about midnight voting from an Associated Press reporter. The state legislature approved the town's request to become a voting precinct." - wiki
Since then, reports of results from Dixville Notch have been staple of US media reporting on day of New Hampshire presidential primary AND subsequent general election.
My own introduction was way back in 1964, when on the First Tuesday after the First Monday in November, I visited the local HQs of both Democrats and Republicans in my small hometown. Back in those distant days, bumpers were a big thing, along with campaign buttons, also match books, emery board, shoe horns, etc, etc. emblazoned with logos and messages for plethora of national, state and local candidates.
Little old ladies staffed these offices, on volunteer basis, and didn't have much business, most curious and/or bored schoolkids who wanted some of campaign bumpf to mess around with.
Anyway, distinctly remember going into the Republican headquarters, and hearing the ladies talk about the results from Dixville Notch, where result for 1964 general election for President was:
Barry Goldwater = 8
LBJ and all others = 0
The ladies though this was a very good sign . . . though in retrospect I realize that they actually did know better . . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hampshire_midnight_voting
Who knew?
Is Mr Murdoch going to tell us that we all have to sip fruit-loop vintage from Ayers Rock (or alternately Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa) in order to live to be 107? *
I'm aware of the Speccie wine club, but their columnists have in several cases now descended into nutterdom (not commenting on our PB apparently-not-a-Speccie-columnist), so I'm not interested.
* I may be out of line there - was he kicked out of News Corp recently?
1/ QUICK TAKE on the Russian thoughts abut the role of FPV drones and what is needed (by either side) for a breakthrough) at the front: "The number of drones on the frontline is growing exponentially. Up to a dozen “birds”(FPVs) can now strike one vehicle, and 2-3 drones can chase after a single soldier.
https://twitter.com/sambendett/status/1749754938542927904
Which may mean that Haley wins Nevada, as she *is* registered in the new process.
Can anyone elucidate, or am I am about right?
I don't think Sunak gets this leadership concept. You don't be nice to your enemies and flirt with them. You crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women. He is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, for pity's sake. Kick him the nuts, you briefcase carrier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monowi,_Nebraska
More lyrically. "There was an 87 year old running a bar.."
https://www.eater.com/22357222/monowi-nebraska-population-one-elsie-eiler
I really do think that a Farage-led party could end up ahead of the Tories in 2024 the way things are going.
I wonder how good PredictIt is at predicting?
It is embroiled in a legal battle at the moment and not opening any new markets.
*potentially in more ways than one, not all of them suitable for a family website.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68065904
Note that in 2016
> Dixville vote was split in GOP primary: John Kasich 3, Donald Trump 2
> in Democratic primary, vote was Bernie Sanders 4, everyone else including Hillary Clinton 0
> then in November, Dixville vote was: Clinton 4, Trump 2, Gary Johnson (Libertarian) 1, and Mitt Romney (write in) 1
And in 2020
> Dixville midnight primary Democratic result: Michael Bloomberg (write ins) 3, Bernie Sanders 1, Pete Buttigeig 1
> Plus in the Republican primary Dixville recorded 1 write-in vote for (Democrat) Bloomberg, 0 for Trump or anybody else.
> General election results from Dixville: Biden 5, Trump and etc. 0
And it wasn't really Rishi sending a grovelling video to Nigel F, it was Guido running the system to create that.
But who on God's Good Earth thought this was a good idea? Of course it was going to be abused.
(One of my theories about old-school election campaigns is that they're a reasonable proxy for government. If you can manage resources, people and ideas well enough to do a good stump campaign, you're probably to be trusted with the levers of power. On that basis, the Conservatives are doomed.)
I often, of course, disagree with him. But not about being a liberal.
“ Latest ads from the Tories, spotted by James Heale, now have an option to create your own “personalised message” from Rishi Sunak. All you have to do is sign up your name, email address, town and what issue matters most to you. That’s certainly one way to gather a bunch of data…
Guido decided he should do one on behalf of Nigel Farage. After wishing Nigel a happy New Year, Rishi goes on to say “like you, I think immigration levels are too high”. Touching…
Nigel tells Guido:
“I’m glad Rishi says he is finally taking my concerns seriously, but I think it’s going to take a bit more than a personalised video message to Stop the Boats”.
Guido can confirm that none of this is AI, meaning Rishi has literally filmed all different versions of the video and has recorded himself saying various different names. It must have been a busy few days…”
https://order-order.com/2024/01/23/watch-rishi-sunak-sends-personal-message-to-nigel-farage/
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxes/publicspending/bulletins/ukgovernmentdebtanddeficitforeurostatmaast/march2023#:~:text=Debt represents the cumulative amount,Treasury bills it has issued.
“General government” comprises central and local government
Basically, if you have an idea and want to know the ways it can fail by schoolboy humour, ask a teacher. Or better still, a reliable schoolboy, if you can find one.
"Revolt on the Right by Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin – review
Ford and Goodwin's fact-packed study takes a compelling look at how Ukip has become a threat to both Labour and the Tory party, fuelling the rise of the radical right in Britain"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/23/revolt-on-right-robert-ford-matthew-goodwin-review
It was BRIGHTER future
But it’s intriguing that’s what you assumed he said and tried to publicise. I’m assuming you’re prejudiced about him