Good morning from Aberdeen airport. Could I please offer my congratulations to @NickPalmer ? His attempted smear of the Liberal Democrat’s over Cyril Smith in response to his own candidate being thrown out in disgrace was quality entertainment.
It’s pretty clear in this by election. We have a choice of disgraced former Labour candidates - Ali, Galloway, Danczuk. We have a disgraced party - the Tories. Or we have the LibDems.
We know that people want to Get The Tories Out. Happily in Rochdale they don’t have a chance. Plenty of people also seem to want to vote for foaming dog fever. If you want to stop both, vote LibDem.
On this topic; ages ago I argued that Labour were going to get such a stonking majority, that they would be inundated with new, untested MPs. And therefore there might be more examples of (ahem) 'poor' MPs, such as the ex-member for Sheffield Hallam (and I don't mean Clegg...).
It seems this is coming true much earlier than I expected. There's something rotten in the way Labour chooses candidates. The same might be true for the other parties, as well.
I’ve been a candidate. I’ve interviewed candidates. I’ve discussed candidates with regional office staff. I cannot understand how they managed to miss this.
Worst thing is that it would appear that at least some local party members had heard the comments - and voted for Ali anyway. Which means the CLP needs suspending. This wasn’t an HQ parachute candidate, the CLP actively chose him.
What have they actually missed though. The only thing the mail on Sunday came up with are remarks the Israeli government allowed the Hamas attack so they could have the war they wanted - not the most blisteringly anti semitic of statements, unless you disagree?
The latest remarks that have come to light are that he said Israel wanted to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
Obviously Labour thinks that even saying that is unacceptable!
I think we just have to accept that all criticism of Israel is a thought crime in Britain. If the Israelis want to kill another 12000 Gazan children who are we to question them?
I think we just have to be very careful what we say on the subject, and to whom, because a lot of people are very touchy about it and desperate to portray their side as victims and the other side as monsters.
Both sides have victims, and both sides have monsters. That's why it's so difficult to speak about without upsetting people.
In comparison, the Ukraine war is exceedingly simple morally: Russia is in the wrong, and Ukraine is in the right.
It's more than that with Ukraine, JJ.
We have a dog in the fight. If Ukraine goes, where next? We stop Putin now, we save ourselves a lot of problems later. That is all very simple.
Indeed. I doubt Putin will stop at Calais because of all the hassle to complete post-Brexit paperwork.
IIRC T-55s have issues at certain speeds. Something to do with the way the gearbox is set up. So, if he tries to invade the UK with his old rust pile, the 20mph zones may prove a problem.
As the Russian tanks grind to a halt at Monmouth because of the 20 mph limits at the Monnow Bridge that's a relief for me here in Wales, but you are still all f***** in England.
We'll remove all the road signs. That will stop them in their tracks.
As many have pointed out, given the difficulty they seem to have had taking Kiev, it seems vanishingly unlikely that Russia will be driving tanks up the Champs Elysee any time soon. And if they were, it's debatable whether it would be our job to do some kind of British Expeditionary Force of the 21st century to stop them.
We need a strong navy, with masses of drones, firstly to protect our land, secondly to try to keep trading routes open, thirdly to help supply our allies and blockade naughty people. That's all we need to do, and it's a lot more than most do.
It'll be fine! We have HMS Prince of Wales on standby.
Namesake sunk by the Japs in 1941
At least if it remains tied up at Rosyth it will avoid that fate.
After all you wouldn't take your vintage Ferrari out in the rain.
Kapitan Leutnant Prien and HMS Royal Oak say otherwise.
Euch, working class people with political power, how awful.
The final paragraph is instructive, though, in that it seems to be gleefully anticipating a bit of class war.
That's not healthy. If it does this then it might entrench division. I can't see anything that would promote a more rapid recovery of the Tories in their base than this. And that's almost regardless of who they select as LoTO:
"The first working-class government in decades will speak that language. It will also be chippy. It will squeeze private schools and spray concrete newbuild homes all over the shires. It will go after companies who make the same mistakes as P&O. It may struggle to hide the pleasure it takes in doing so."
What if class war, against the rich, is good actually? Like - taking their stuff, because they have an over abundance of it, and giving said stuff to people who don't have stuff, and actively need more stuff to live and such - is good. That is a good thing to do. Especially since many of the people who have lots of stuff - have it for no good reason. Like they inherited it, or managed to hide it in a tax haven, or they got lucky and invested in something at the right time and place.
Dealing with the average persons material reality - that life is shit and getting shitter - and making life less shit might be popular.
Sounds great. Can you please define "rich". Does it include those who own their homes mortgage-free?
I mean, the richest 10% of households in the UK hold 43% of the wealth, whereas the bottom 50% have 9% of the wealth. So I would argue whatever makes that figure more proportional would be great. Reminder - wealth is not the same thing as income. Now, if we did this policy starting at the top and working our way down (starting with the wealthiest person we could find and hiving off wealth for the public good until they're left with a still ridiculous amount of money) and we still start hitting people who have very few liquid assets and only have their house as wealth, we can talk about where the line should be and how to manage that. But, to begin with, let's have a crack at the wealth redistribution first.
A CLARIFICATION:
Whereas I previously said that taking stuff from people, for example if they inherited it, and giving it to people who need it was a good thing, I now realise that this was a gross oversimplification of the situation and what I actually meant was we need to segment the country such that I am not in the segment which has to give stuff away.
I mean I think I have a net wealth of a couple of thousand - I don't own anything of much value except a laptop, and I have minimal savings. If the state wants to take my dad by the ankles and shake him until the cash falls out and give it to the deserving - be my guest; his net worth is probably over £1 million because he owns three properties (he isn't a landlord, thank god, but that is one of the few nice things I can say about him).
If they also want to say to my grandparents "by an accident of the time you were born you have a house (that you bought for like £9k literally 50 years ago) that is now worth £500,000, but you literally only have liquid assets of less than £10k, so we're going to take your 3 bedroom house, downsize you into a bungalow and not reimburse you the value of the house" I would be somewhat fucked financially in the long term, but would understand why it was done.
The issue isn't the inherent morality of inheritance - it is the fact that wealth accumulation has been allowed to happen in a few minor ways - by being lucky and owning property in the right place at the right time, by being lucky and inheriting it, or by being lucky and running a business that happens to get successful at the right place and right time.
I'm a worker - I get paid a wage. I'm a lucky worker - I don't have to pay rent - but I still get paid less then half the people in this country and get by putting away a couple of hundred quid a month to save up for the big things I can't afford. And that's being a lucky worker. It sucks, and yet I'm lucky.
Good morning from Aberdeen airport. Could I please offer my congratulations to @NickPalmer ? His attempted smear of the Liberal Democrat’s over Cyril Smith in response to his own candidate being thrown out in disgrace was quality entertainment.
It’s pretty clear in this by election. We have a choice of disgraced former Labour candidates - Ali, Galloway, Danczuk. We have a disgraced party - the Tories. Or we have the LibDems.
We know that people want to Get The Tories Out. Happily in Rochdale they don’t have a chance. Plenty of people also seem to want to vote for foaming dog fever. If you want to stop both, vote LibDem.
On this topic; ages ago I argued that Labour were going to get such a stonking majority, that they would be inundated with new, untested MPs. And therefore there might be more examples of (ahem) 'poor' MPs, such as the ex-member for Sheffield Hallam (and I don't mean Clegg...).
It seems this is coming true much earlier than I expected. There's something rotten in the way Labour chooses candidates. The same might be true for the other parties, as well.
I’ve been a candidate. I’ve interviewed candidates. I’ve discussed candidates with regional office staff. I cannot understand how they managed to miss this.
Worst thing is that it would appear that at least some local party members had heard the comments - and voted for Ali anyway. Which means the CLP needs suspending. This wasn’t an HQ parachute candidate, the CLP actively chose him.
What have they actually missed though. The only thing the mail on Sunday came up with are remarks the Israeli government allowed the Hamas attack so they could have the war they wanted - not the most blisteringly anti semitic of statements, unless you disagree?
The latest remarks that have come to light are that he said Israel wanted to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
Obviously Labour thinks that even saying that is unacceptable!
I think we just have to accept that all criticism of Israel is a thought crime in Britain. If the Israelis want to kill another 12000 Gazan children who are we to question them?
I think we just have to be very careful what we say on the subject, and to whom, because a lot of people are very touchy about it and desperate to portray their side as victims and the other side as monsters.
Both sides have victims, and both sides have monsters. That's why it's so difficult to speak about without upsetting people.
In comparison, the Ukraine war is exceedingly simple morally: Russia is in the wrong, and Ukraine is in the right.
It's more than that with Ukraine, JJ.
We have a dog in the fight. If Ukraine goes, where next? We stop Putin now, we save ourselves a lot of problems later. That is all very simple.
Indeed. I doubt Putin will stop at Calais because of all the hassle to complete post-Brexit paperwork.
IIRC T-55s have issues at certain speeds. Something to do with the way the gearbox is set up. So, if he tries to invade the UK with his old rust pile, the 20mph zones may prove a problem.
As the Russian tanks grind to a halt at Monmouth because of the 20 mph limits at the Monnow Bridge that's a relief for me here in Wales, but you are still all f***** in England.
We'll remove all the road signs. That will stop them in their tracks.
As many have pointed out, given the difficulty they seem to have had taking Kiev, it seems vanishingly unlikely that Russia will be driving tanks up the Champs Elysee any time soon. And if they were, it's debatable whether it would be our job to do some kind of British Expeditionary Force of the 21st century to stop them.
We need a strong navy, with masses of drones, firstly to protect our land, secondly to try to keep trading routes open, thirdly to help supply our allies and blockade naughty people. That's all we need to do, and it's a lot more than most do.
It'll be fine! We have HMS Prince of Wales on standby.
Namesake sunk by the Japs in 1941
At least if it remains tied up at Rosyth it will avoid that fate.
After all you wouldn't take your vintage Ferrari out in the rain.
Kapitan Leutnant Prien and HMS Royal Oak say otherwise.
The R class- a bigger mistake than Fishers Freaks.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
I should think Labour will lead whatever government happens after the GE, but recent events if anything tend to support the NOM possibility. The big problem of the Rochdale shambles is not that the candidate is sub-optimal, or that Labour should have chucked him within 5 minutes. While these are both real problems, the huge one is the light it sheds on the nature of the party and membership at local levels. You can only select an abominable candidate (in this case BTW over the outstanding Paul Waugh) if there are a fair number of members who knowingly do so.
The Tories have this problem. Labour are supposed to have purged itself of bad actors. This is proof they have not.
The extra votes they need are two-three million usually Tory ones. They seem not have learned this at the local level.
Good morning from Aberdeen airport. Could I please offer my congratulations to @NickPalmer ? His attempted smear of the Liberal Democrat’s over Cyril Smith in response to his own candidate being thrown out in disgrace was quality entertainment.
It’s pretty clear in this by election. We have a choice of disgraced former Labour candidates - Ali, Galloway, Danczuk. We have a disgraced party - the Tories. Or we have the LibDems.
We know that people want to Get The Tories Out. Happily in Rochdale they don’t have a chance. Plenty of people also seem to want to vote for foaming dog fever. If you want to stop both, vote LibDem.
On this topic; ages ago I argued that Labour were going to get such a stonking majority, that they would be inundated with new, untested MPs. And therefore there might be more examples of (ahem) 'poor' MPs, such as the ex-member for Sheffield Hallam (and I don't mean Clegg...).
It seems this is coming true much earlier than I expected. There's something rotten in the way Labour chooses candidates. The same might be true for the other parties, as well.
I’ve been a candidate. I’ve interviewed candidates. I’ve discussed candidates with regional office staff. I cannot understand how they managed to miss this.
Worst thing is that it would appear that at least some local party members had heard the comments - and voted for Ali anyway. Which means the CLP needs suspending. This wasn’t an HQ parachute candidate, the CLP actively chose him.
What have they actually missed though. The only thing the mail on Sunday came up with are remarks the Israeli government allowed the Hamas attack so they could have the war they wanted - not the most blisteringly anti semitic of statements, unless you disagree?
The latest remarks that have come to light are that he said Israel wanted to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
Obviously Labour thinks that even saying that is unacceptable!
I think we just have to accept that all criticism of Israel is a thought crime in Britain. If the Israelis want to kill another 12000 Gazan children who are we to question them?
I think we just have to be very careful what we say on the subject, and to whom, because a lot of people are very touchy about it and desperate to portray their side as victims and the other side as monsters.
Both sides have victims, and both sides have monsters. That's why it's so difficult to speak about without upsetting people.
In comparison, the Ukraine war is exceedingly simple morally: Russia is in the wrong, and Ukraine is in the right.
It's more than that with Ukraine, JJ.
We have a dog in the fight. If Ukraine goes, where next? We stop Putin now, we save ourselves a lot of problems later. That is all very simple.
Indeed. I doubt Putin will stop at Calais because of all the hassle to complete post-Brexit paperwork.
IIRC T-55s have issues at certain speeds. Something to do with the way the gearbox is set up. So, if he tries to invade the UK with his old rust pile, the 20mph zones may prove a problem.
As the Russian tanks grind to a halt at Monmouth because of the 20 mph limits at the Monnow Bridge that's a relief for me here in Wales, but you are still all f***** in England.
We'll remove all the road signs. That will stop them in their tracks.
As many have pointed out, given the difficulty they seem to have had taking Kiev, it seems vanishingly unlikely that Russia will be driving tanks up the Champs Elysee any time soon. And if they were, it's debatable whether it would be our job to do some kind of British Expeditionary Force of the 21st century to stop them.
We need a strong navy, with masses of drones, firstly to protect our land, secondly to try to keep trading routes open, thirdly to help supply our allies and blockade naughty people. That's all we need to do, and it's a lot more than most do.
It'll be fine! We have HMS Prince of Wales on standby.
Namesake sunk by the Japs in 1941
At least if it remains tied up at Rosyth it will avoid that fate.
After all you wouldn't take your vintage Ferrari out in the rain.
Kapitan Leutnant Prien and HMS Royal Oak say otherwise.
Rosyth would be a harder nut to crack than Scapa, after all the UK has 7 subs including 3 hunter killers tied up there. Wouldn't take much to get them back in action surely?
Euch, working class people with political power, how awful.
The final paragraph is instructive, though, in that it seems to be gleefully anticipating a bit of class war.
That's not healthy. If it does this then it might entrench division. I can't see anything that would promote a more rapid recovery of the Tories in their base than this. And that's almost regardless of who they select as LoTO:
"The first working-class government in decades will speak that language. It will also be chippy. It will squeeze private schools and spray concrete newbuild homes all over the shires. It will go after companies who make the same mistakes as P&O. It may struggle to hide the pleasure it takes in doing so."
What if class war, against the rich, is good actually? Like - taking their stuff, because they have an over abundance of it, and giving said stuff to people who don't have stuff, and actively need more stuff to live and such - is good. That is a good thing to do. Especially since many of the people who have lots of stuff - have it for no good reason. Like they inherited it, or managed to hide it in a tax haven, or they got lucky and invested in something at the right time and place.
Dealing with the average persons material reality - that life is shit and getting shitter - and making life less shit might be popular.
Sounds great. Can you please define "rich". Does it include those who own their homes mortgage-free?
I mean, the richest 10% of households in the UK hold 43% of the wealth, whereas the bottom 50% have 9% of the wealth. So I would argue whatever makes that figure more proportional would be great. Reminder - wealth is not the same thing as income. Now, if we did this policy starting at the top and working our way down (starting with the wealthiest person we could find and hiving off wealth for the public good until they're left with a still ridiculous amount of money) and we still start hitting people who have very few liquid assets and only have their house as wealth, we can talk about where the line should be and how to manage that. But, to begin with, let's have a crack at the wealth redistribution first.
A CLARIFICATION:
Whereas I previously said that taking stuff from people, for example if they inherited it, and giving it to people who need it was a good thing, I now realise that this was a gross oversimplification of the situation and what I actually meant was we need to segment the country such that I am not in the segment which has to give stuff away.
I mean I think I have a net wealth of a couple of thousand - I don't own anything of much value except a laptop, and I have minimal savings. If the state wants to take my dad by the ankles and shake him until the cash falls out and give it the the deserving - be my guest. If they also want to say to my grandparents "by an accident of the time you were born you have a house (that you bought for like £9k literally 50 years ago) that is now worth £500,000, but you literally only have liquid assets of less than £10k, so we're going to take your 3 bedroom house, downsize you into a bungalow and not reimburse you the value of the house" I would be somewhat fucked financially in the long term, but would understand why it was done.
The issue isn't the inherent morality of inheritance - it is the fact that wealth accumulation has been allowed to happen in a few minor ways - by being lucky and owning property in the right place at the right time, by being lucky and inheriting it, or by being lucky and running a business that happens to get successful at the right place and right time.
I'm a worker - I get paid a wage. I'm a lucky worker - I don't have to pay rent - but I still get paid less then half the people in this country and get by putting away a couple of hundred quid a month to save up for the big things I can't afford. And that's being a lucky worker. It sucks, and yet I'm lucky.
ho hum.
Look, it's fine. You deserve everything you have and so does your dad and I would be there at the garden gate defending you from the mob if they came for you.
But, like Socrates discovered when creating the Republic, the devil is in the detail.
We are joshing you about how owning an inherited house fits in with your desire to take inherited wealth from people but the serious point is that your ideal society will trample all over your special pleading and will, indeed has many times throughout history when this has been tried, take you and your father out in tumbrils for a grisly fate and move 20 people into your house because those people have less than you.
Euch, working class people with political power, how awful.
The final paragraph is instructive, though, in that it seems to be gleefully anticipating a bit of class war.
That's not healthy. If it does this then it might entrench division. I can't see anything that would promote a more rapid recovery of the Tories in their base than this. And that's almost regardless of who they select as LoTO:
"The first working-class government in decades will speak that language. It will also be chippy. It will squeeze private schools and spray concrete newbuild homes all over the shires. It will go after companies who make the same mistakes as P&O. It may struggle to hide the pleasure it takes in doing so."
What if class war, against the rich, is good actually? Like - taking their stuff, because they have an over abundance of it, and giving said stuff to people who don't have stuff, and actively need more stuff to live and such - is good. That is a good thing to do. Especially since many of the people who have lots of stuff - have it for no good reason. Like they inherited it, or managed to hide it in a tax haven, or they got lucky and invested in something at the right time and place.
Dealing with the average persons material reality - that life is shit and getting shitter - and making life less shit might be popular.
Sounds great. Can you please define "rich". Does it include those who own their homes mortgage-free?
I mean, the richest 10% of households in the UK hold 43% of the wealth, whereas the bottom 50% have 9% of the wealth. So I would argue whatever makes that figure more proportional would be great. Reminder - wealth is not the same thing as income. Now, if we did this policy starting at the top and working our way down (starting with the wealthiest person we could find and hiving off wealth for the public good until they're left with a still ridiculous amount of money) and we still start hitting people who have very few liquid assets and only have their house as wealth, we can talk about where the line should be and how to manage that. But, to begin with, let's have a crack at the wealth redistribution first.
Brilliant. So confiscate their shareholdings, as a lot of the top 10% wealth is in shares of public and private companies. Nothing can go wrong except those shares crashing, companies folding, pensions being gutted and nobody wanting to set up a company in the UK.
Then we take their land holdings. Again not a problem as nobody just below that line will think, “hang on they might come for us next so let’s sell”, leaving land prices crashing and huge swathes empty that people cannot build houses on because the housebuilding companies have collapsed due to the asset confiscations, and there are no farmers because they can’t see the point of working all hours for a pittance because their land might just get taken.
But at least we confiscate the expensive houses and we can give them to people who can’t actually afford to live in them because the upkeep is huge and all the tradesmen have gone bust because there aren’t any wealthy people to pay them to upkeep the really expensive houses. And we can’t sell them to foreigners and use the tax receipts to incpvest in the country because foreigners saw the asset seizures and won’t touch the UK with a barge pole.
But as long as they don’t get down to the level of mortgage free university tutors it’s all heart warming and good for the soul as well as the country.
Okay - so wealth is just the way we take score. Nothing the wealthy leverage to be able to live the lifestyle they want is actually worth that amount of money unless it's the wealthy who have it - because that's the system. In which case - the poverty is by design. The poverty is the policy.
If you take ownership of wealth via the mechanisms of wealth and wealth creation (and land is a means of wealth creation beyond development) - then these things won't necessarily crash.
I also feel that people have mistaken my whole "I'm lucky enough to live in a mortgage free house" position. I don't own a mortgage free house. My dad does. I just live in it. It got paid off when my mum died, and my dad refused to live in it any more after that. So I just live in it rent free. Again - I'm lucky as hell. But it isn't my asset. As he has reminded me many, many times.
Euch, working class people with political power, how awful.
The final paragraph is instructive, though, in that it seems to be gleefully anticipating a bit of class war.
That's not healthy. If it does this then it might entrench division. I can't see anything that would promote a more rapid recovery of the Tories in their base than this. And that's almost regardless of who they select as LoTO:
"The first working-class government in decades will speak that language. It will also be chippy. It will squeeze private schools and spray concrete newbuild homes all over the shires. It will go after companies who make the same mistakes as P&O. It may struggle to hide the pleasure it takes in doing so."
What if class war, against the rich, is good actually? Like - taking their stuff, because they have an over abundance of it, and giving said stuff to people who don't have stuff, and actively need more stuff to live and such - is good. That is a good thing to do. Especially since many of the people who have lots of stuff - have it for no good reason. Like they inherited it, or managed to hide it in a tax haven, or they got lucky and invested in something at the right time and place.
Dealing with the average persons material reality - that life is shit and getting shitter - and making life less shit might be popular.
Didn't you say you inherited your house? Lets start with taking that then - lots of the poor need a house.
Oh - don't think it applies to you? Just like everyone wants tax rises for other people.
This is an example of what I mean by lazy journalism.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/12/politics/house-republicans-robert-hur/index.html ...Hur's special counsel report found that Biden willfully retained classified information, including top secret documents, and knew he was in possession of some documents as far back as 2017. He also shared some of that information with the ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir.
The special counsel decided not to charge the president in the case – primarily because he found that nothing proved a willful intent by Biden to illegally hold onto classified information and the president cooperated with the investigation...
There's an obvious contradiction here - and in the report - but they just republish it, rather than question it.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
Euch, working class people with political power, how awful.
The final paragraph is instructive, though, in that it seems to be gleefully anticipating a bit of class war.
That's not healthy. If it does this then it might entrench division. I can't see anything that would promote a more rapid recovery of the Tories in their base than this. And that's almost regardless of who they select as LoTO:
"The first working-class government in decades will speak that language. It will also be chippy. It will squeeze private schools and spray concrete newbuild homes all over the shires. It will go after companies who make the same mistakes as P&O. It may struggle to hide the pleasure it takes in doing so."
What if class war, against the rich, is good actually? Like - taking their stuff, because they have an over abundance of it, and giving said stuff to people who don't have stuff, and actively need more stuff to live and such - is good. That is a good thing to do. Especially since many of the people who have lots of stuff - have it for no good reason. Like they inherited it, or managed to hide it in a tax haven, or they got lucky and invested in something at the right time and place.
Dealing with the average persons material reality - that life is shit and getting shitter - and making life less shit might be popular.
Sounds great. Can you please define "rich". Does it include those who own their homes mortgage-free?
I mean, the richest 10% of households in the UK hold 43% of the wealth, whereas the bottom 50% have 9% of the wealth. So I would argue whatever makes that figure more proportional would be great. Reminder - wealth is not the same thing as income. Now, if we did this policy starting at the top and working our way down (starting with the wealthiest person we could find and hiving off wealth for the public good until they're left with a still ridiculous amount of money) and we still start hitting people who have very few liquid assets and only have their house as wealth, we can talk about where the line should be and how to manage that. But, to begin with, let's have a crack at the wealth redistribution first.
Brilliant. So confiscate their shareholdings, as a lot of the top 10% wealth is in shares of public and private companies. Nothing can go wrong except those shares crashing, companies folding, pensions being gutted and nobody wanting to set up a company in the UK.
Then we take their land holdings. Again not a problem as nobody just below that line will think, “hang on they might come for us next so let’s sell”, leaving land prices crashing and huge swathes empty that people cannot build houses on because the housebuilding companies have collapsed due to the asset confiscations, and there are no farmers because they can’t see the point of working all hours for a pittance because their land might just get taken.
But at least we confiscate the expensive houses and we can give them to people who can’t actually afford to live in them because the upkeep is huge and all the tradesmen have gone bust because there aren’t any wealthy people to pay them to upkeep the really expensive houses. And we can’t sell them to foreigners and use the tax receipts to incpvest in the country because foreigners saw the asset seizures and won’t touch the UK with a barge pole.
But as long as they don’t get down to the level of mortgage free university tutors it’s all heart warming and good for the soul as well as the country.
Okay - so wealth is just the way we take score. Nothing the wealthy leverage to be able to live the lifestyle they want is actually worth that amount of money unless it's the wealthy who have it - because that's the system. In which case - the poverty is by design. The poverty is the policy.
If you take ownership of wealth via the mechanisms of wealth and wealth creation (and land is a means of wealth creation beyond development) - then these things won't necessarily crash.
I also feel that people have mistaken my whole "I'm lucky enough to live in a mortgage free house" position. I don't own a mortgage free house. My dad does. I just live in it. It got paid off when my mum died, and my dad refused to live in it any more after that. So I just live in it rent free. Again - I'm lucky as hell. But it isn't my asset. As he has reminded me many, many times.
Will your dad be leaving the house to a homeless charity in his Will or do you think you might be able to continue to live rent free?
Good morning from Aberdeen airport. Could I please offer my congratulations to @NickPalmer ? His attempted smear of the Liberal Democrat’s over Cyril Smith in response to his own candidate being thrown out in disgrace was quality entertainment.
It’s pretty clear in this by election. We have a choice of disgraced former Labour candidates - Ali, Galloway, Danczuk. We have a disgraced party - the Tories. Or we have the LibDems.
We know that people want to Get The Tories Out. Happily in Rochdale they don’t have a chance. Plenty of people also seem to want to vote for foaming dog fever. If you want to stop both, vote LibDem.
On this topic; ages ago I argued that Labour were going to get such a stonking majority, that they would be inundated with new, untested MPs. And therefore there might be more examples of (ahem) 'poor' MPs, such as the ex-member for Sheffield Hallam (and I don't mean Clegg...).
It seems this is coming true much earlier than I expected. There's something rotten in the way Labour chooses candidates. The same might be true for the other parties, as well.
I’ve been a candidate. I’ve interviewed candidates. I’ve discussed candidates with regional office staff. I cannot understand how they managed to miss this.
Worst thing is that it would appear that at least some local party members had heard the comments - and voted for Ali anyway. Which means the CLP needs suspending. This wasn’t an HQ parachute candidate, the CLP actively chose him.
What have they actually missed though. The only thing the mail on Sunday came up with are remarks the Israeli government allowed the Hamas attack so they could have the war they wanted - not the most blisteringly anti semitic of statements, unless you disagree?
The latest remarks that have come to light are that he said Israel wanted to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
Obviously Labour thinks that even saying that is unacceptable!
I think we just have to accept that all criticism of Israel is a thought crime in Britain. If the Israelis want to kill another 12000 Gazan children who are we to question them?
I think we just have to be very careful what we say on the subject, and to whom, because a lot of people are very touchy about it and desperate to portray their side as victims and the other side as monsters.
Both sides have victims, and both sides have monsters. That's why it's so difficult to speak about without upsetting people.
In comparison, the Ukraine war is exceedingly simple morally: Russia is in the wrong, and Ukraine is in the right.
It's more than that with Ukraine, JJ.
We have a dog in the fight. If Ukraine goes, where next? We stop Putin now, we save ourselves a lot of problems later. That is all very simple.
Indeed. I doubt Putin will stop at Calais because of all the hassle to complete post-Brexit paperwork.
IIRC T-55s have issues at certain speeds. Something to do with the way the gearbox is set up. So, if he tries to invade the UK with his old rust pile, the 20mph zones may prove a problem.
As the Russian tanks grind to a halt at Monmouth because of the 20 mph limits at the Monnow Bridge that's a relief for me here in Wales, but you are still all f***** in England.
We'll remove all the road signs. That will stop them in their tracks.
As many have pointed out, given the difficulty they seem to have had taking Kiev, it seems vanishingly unlikely that Russia will be driving tanks up the Champs Elysee any time soon. And if they were, it's debatable whether it would be our job to do some kind of British Expeditionary Force of the 21st century to stop them.
We need a strong navy, with masses of drones, firstly to protect our land, secondly to try to keep trading routes open, thirdly to help supply our allies and blockade naughty people. That's all we need to do, and it's a lot more than most do.
It'll be fine! We have HMS Prince of Wales on standby.
Namesake sunk by the Japs in 1941
At least if it remains tied up at Rosyth it will avoid that fate.
After all you wouldn't take your vintage Ferrari out in the rain.
Kapitan Leutnant Prien and HMS Royal Oak say otherwise.
Rosyth would be a harder nut to crack than Scapa, after all the UK has 7 subs including 3 hunter killers tied up there. Wouldn't take much to get them back in action surely?
Fisher always hated the idea of Roysth - he believed that if the bridge was destroyed, a fleet could be bottled up for months.
This is an example of what I mean by lazy journalism.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/12/politics/house-republicans-robert-hur/index.html ...Hur's special counsel report found that Biden willfully retained classified information, including top secret documents, and knew he was in possession of some documents as far back as 2017. He also shared some of that information with the ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir.
The special counsel decided not to charge the president in the case – primarily because he found that nothing proved a willful intent by Biden to illegally hold onto classified information and the president cooperated with the investigation...
There's an obvious contradiction here - and in the report - but they just republish it, rather than question it.
And they do not even mention that Hur is a Cambridge-educated lawyer.
Euch, working class people with political power, how awful.
The final paragraph is instructive, though, in that it seems to be gleefully anticipating a bit of class war.
That's not healthy. If it does this then it might entrench division. I can't see anything that would promote a more rapid recovery of the Tories in their base than this. And that's almost regardless of who they select as LoTO:
"The first working-class government in decades will speak that language. It will also be chippy. It will squeeze private schools and spray concrete newbuild homes all over the shires. It will go after companies who make the same mistakes as P&O. It may struggle to hide the pleasure it takes in doing so."
What if class war, against the rich, is good actually? Like - taking their stuff, because they have an over abundance of it, and giving said stuff to people who don't have stuff, and actively need more stuff to live and such - is good. That is a good thing to do. Especially since many of the people who have lots of stuff - have it for no good reason. Like they inherited it, or managed to hide it in a tax haven, or they got lucky and invested in something at the right time and place.
Dealing with the average persons material reality - that life is shit and getting shitter - and making life less shit might be popular.
Didn't you say you inherited your house? Lets start with taking that then - lots of the poor need a house.
Oh - don't think it applies to you? Just like everyone wants tax rises for other people.
No - I said I live in a mortgage free house. I did not inherit it, my dad did. I just live there. And I take in housemates without charging rent, because renteering is bad. That includes people who have literally been homeless and people who have literally just arrived in the country as refugees. I try, within the best of my resources, to live a life in line with my morality and politics, and leverage the luck and benefits I have for others.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
Donald Tusk: “We have to wake up and understand that we have to protect our borders. If we are open to all forms of migration, our world will collapse... This is a question of the survival of Western civilization.”
Good morning from Aberdeen airport. Could I please offer my congratulations to @NickPalmer ? His attempted smear of the Liberal Democrat’s over Cyril Smith in response to his own candidate being thrown out in disgrace was quality entertainment.
It’s pretty clear in this by election. We have a choice of disgraced former Labour candidates - Ali, Galloway, Danczuk. We have a disgraced party - the Tories. Or we have the LibDems.
We know that people want to Get The Tories Out. Happily in Rochdale they don’t have a chance. Plenty of people also seem to want to vote for foaming dog fever. If you want to stop both, vote LibDem.
On this topic; ages ago I argued that Labour were going to get such a stonking majority, that they would be inundated with new, untested MPs. And therefore there might be more examples of (ahem) 'poor' MPs, such as the ex-member for Sheffield Hallam (and I don't mean Clegg...).
It seems this is coming true much earlier than I expected. There's something rotten in the way Labour chooses candidates. The same might be true for the other parties, as well.
I’ve been a candidate. I’ve interviewed candidates. I’ve discussed candidates with regional office staff. I cannot understand how they managed to miss this.
Worst thing is that it would appear that at least some local party members had heard the comments - and voted for Ali anyway. Which means the CLP needs suspending. This wasn’t an HQ parachute candidate, the CLP actively chose him.
What have they actually missed though. The only thing the mail on Sunday came up with are remarks the Israeli government allowed the Hamas attack so they could have the war they wanted - not the most blisteringly anti semitic of statements, unless you disagree?
The latest remarks that have come to light are that he said Israel wanted to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
Obviously Labour thinks that even saying that is unacceptable!
I think we just have to accept that all criticism of Israel is a thought crime in Britain. If the Israelis want to kill another 12000 Gazan children who are we to question them?
I think we just have to be very careful what we say on the subject, and to whom, because a lot of people are very touchy about it and desperate to portray their side as victims and the other side as monsters.
Both sides have victims, and both sides have monsters. That's why it's so difficult to speak about without upsetting people.
In comparison, the Ukraine war is exceedingly simple morally: Russia is in the wrong, and Ukraine is in the right.
It's more than that with Ukraine, JJ.
We have a dog in the fight. If Ukraine goes, where next? We stop Putin now, we save ourselves a lot of problems later. That is all very simple.
Indeed. I doubt Putin will stop at Calais because of all the hassle to complete post-Brexit paperwork.
IIRC T-55s have issues at certain speeds. Something to do with the way the gearbox is set up. So, if he tries to invade the UK with his old rust pile, the 20mph zones may prove a problem.
As the Russian tanks grind to a halt at Monmouth because of the 20 mph limits at the Monnow Bridge that's a relief for me here in Wales, but you are still all f***** in England.
We'll remove all the road signs. That will stop them in their tracks.
As many have pointed out, given the difficulty they seem to have had taking Kiev, it seems vanishingly unlikely that Russia will be driving tanks up the Champs Elysee any time soon. And if they were, it's debatable whether it would be our job to do some kind of British Expeditionary Force of the 21st century to stop them.
We need a strong navy, with masses of drones, firstly to protect our land, secondly to try to keep trading routes open, thirdly to help supply our allies and blockade naughty people. That's all we need to do, and it's a lot more than most do.
It'll be fine! We have HMS Prince of Wales on standby.
Namesake sunk by the Japs in 1941
At least if it remains tied up at Rosyth it will avoid that fate.
After all you wouldn't take your vintage Ferrari out in the rain.
Kapitan Leutnant Prien and HMS Royal Oak say otherwise.
The R class- a bigger mistake than Fishers Freaks.
Euch, working class people with political power, how awful.
The final paragraph is instructive, though, in that it seems to be gleefully anticipating a bit of class war.
That's not healthy. If it does this then it might entrench division. I can't see anything that would promote a more rapid recovery of the Tories in their base than this. And that's almost regardless of who they select as LoTO:
"The first working-class government in decades will speak that language. It will also be chippy. It will squeeze private schools and spray concrete newbuild homes all over the shires. It will go after companies who make the same mistakes as P&O. It may struggle to hide the pleasure it takes in doing so."
What if class war, against the rich, is good actually? Like - taking their stuff, because they have an over abundance of it, and giving said stuff to people who don't have stuff, and actively need more stuff to live and such - is good. That is a good thing to do. Especially since many of the people who have lots of stuff - have it for no good reason. Like they inherited it, or managed to hide it in a tax haven, or they got lucky and invested in something at the right time and place.
Dealing with the average persons material reality - that life is shit and getting shitter - and making life less shit might be popular.
Didn't you say you inherited your house? Lets start with taking that then - lots of the poor need a house.
Oh - don't think it applies to you? Just like everyone wants tax rises for other people.
No - I said I live in a mortgage free house. I did not inherit it, my dad did. I just live there. And I take in housemates without charging rent, because renteering is bad. That includes people who have literally been homeless and people who have literally just arrived in the country as refugees. I try, within the best of my resources, to live a life in line with my morality and politics, and leverage the luck and benefits I have for others.
OK, I'm going to say it: I find the whole Israel/Gaza/Palestine thing deeply deeply boring and I'm not sure I care.
Next.
Almost 13,000 dead kids - *yawns* One old man with sausage fingers gets bum cancer - hold my beer!
Most moral monarchist in the world!
You want to talk numbers?
"More than 7 million displaced by Sudan fighting as safe zones shrink
More than seven million people have been displaced by fighting in Sudan, the United Nations said on Thursday as more displaced people continued to flee a former safe haven."
And yet not a peep from the likes of you about Sudan. Nothing. Nothing at all. What is it about the Israel-Gaza conflict that so exercises you, whereas stuff in Africa, on an epically greater scale, makes you yawn?
i mean, what could it be? Why isn't Azhar Ali going on about Sudan in Rochdale? Why aren't there marches in London? What a mystery
Euch, working class people with political power, how awful.
The final paragraph is instructive, though, in that it seems to be gleefully anticipating a bit of class war.
That's not healthy. If it does this then it might entrench division. I can't see anything that would promote a more rapid recovery of the Tories in their base than this. And that's almost regardless of who they select as LoTO:
"The first working-class government in decades will speak that language. It will also be chippy. It will squeeze private schools and spray concrete newbuild homes all over the shires. It will go after companies who make the same mistakes as P&O. It may struggle to hide the pleasure it takes in doing so."
What if class war, against the rich, is good actually? Like - taking their stuff, because they have an over abundance of it, and giving said stuff to people who don't have stuff, and actively need more stuff to live and such - is good. That is a good thing to do. Especially since many of the people who have lots of stuff - have it for no good reason. Like they inherited it, or managed to hide it in a tax haven, or they got lucky and invested in something at the right time and place.
Dealing with the average persons material reality - that life is shit and getting shitter - and making life less shit might be popular.
Sounds great. Can you please define "rich". Does it include those who own their homes mortgage-free?
I mean, the richest 10% of households in the UK hold 43% of the wealth, whereas the bottom 50% have 9% of the wealth. So I would argue whatever makes that figure more proportional would be great. Reminder - wealth is not the same thing as income. Now, if we did this policy starting at the top and working our way down (starting with the wealthiest person we could find and hiving off wealth for the public good until they're left with a still ridiculous amount of money) and we still start hitting people who have very few liquid assets and only have their house as wealth, we can talk about where the line should be and how to manage that. But, to begin with, let's have a crack at the wealth redistribution first.
A CLARIFICATION:
Whereas I previously said that taking stuff from people, for example if they inherited it, and giving it to people who need it was a good thing, I now realise that this was a gross oversimplification of the situation and what I actually meant was we need to segment the country such that I am not in the segment which has to give stuff away.
I mean I think I have a net wealth of a couple of thousand - I don't own anything of much value except a laptop, and I have minimal savings. If the state wants to take my dad by the ankles and shake him until the cash falls out and give it to the deserving - be my guest; his net worth is probably over £1 million because he owns three properties (he isn't a landlord, thank god, but that is one of the few nice things I can say about him).
If they also want to say to my grandparents "by an accident of the time you were born you have a house (that you bought for like £9k literally 50 years ago) that is now worth £500,000, but you literally only have liquid assets of less than £10k, so we're going to take your 3 bedroom house, downsize you into a bungalow and not reimburse you the value of the house" I would be somewhat fucked financially in the long term, but would understand why it was done.
The issue isn't the inherent morality of inheritance - it is the fact that wealth accumulation has been allowed to happen in a few minor ways - by being lucky and owning property in the right place at the right time, by being lucky and inheriting it, or by being lucky and running a business that happens to get successful at the right place and right time.
I'm a worker - I get paid a wage. I'm a lucky worker - I don't have to pay rent - but I still get paid less then half the people in this country and get by putting away a couple of hundred quid a month to save up for the big things I can't afford. And that's being a lucky worker. It sucks, and yet I'm lucky.
If you are paying no rent on a Uni salary (I'm thinking grade 7/8 based on what you've said) you ought to be able to put a bit more than 200 quid a month away. Where else is the money going?
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
Euch, working class people with political power, how awful.
The final paragraph is instructive, though, in that it seems to be gleefully anticipating a bit of class war.
That's not healthy. If it does this then it might entrench division. I can't see anything that would promote a more rapid recovery of the Tories in their base than this. And that's almost regardless of who they select as LoTO:
"The first working-class government in decades will speak that language. It will also be chippy. It will squeeze private schools and spray concrete newbuild homes all over the shires. It will go after companies who make the same mistakes as P&O. It may struggle to hide the pleasure it takes in doing so."
What if class war, against the rich, is good actually? Like - taking their stuff, because they have an over abundance of it, and giving said stuff to people who don't have stuff, and actively need more stuff to live and such - is good. That is a good thing to do. Especially since many of the people who have lots of stuff - have it for no good reason. Like they inherited it, or managed to hide it in a tax haven, or they got lucky and invested in something at the right time and place.
Dealing with the average persons material reality - that life is shit and getting shitter - and making life less shit might be popular.
Didn't you say you inherited your house? Lets start with taking that then - lots of the poor need a house.
Oh - don't think it applies to you? Just like everyone wants tax rises for other people.
No - I said I live in a mortgage free house. I did not inherit it, my dad did. I just live there. And I take in housemates without charging rent, because renteering is bad. That includes people who have literally been homeless and people who have literally just arrived in the country as refugees. I try, within the best of my resources, to live a life in line with my morality and politics, and leverage the luck and benefits I have for others.
"renteering" ?
It’s the new woke version of orienteering to avoid offending people from Asia.
Euch, working class people with political power, how awful.
The final paragraph is instructive, though, in that it seems to be gleefully anticipating a bit of class war.
That's not healthy. If it does this then it might entrench division. I can't see anything that would promote a more rapid recovery of the Tories in their base than this. And that's almost regardless of who they select as LoTO:
"The first working-class government in decades will speak that language. It will also be chippy. It will squeeze private schools and spray concrete newbuild homes all over the shires. It will go after companies who make the same mistakes as P&O. It may struggle to hide the pleasure it takes in doing so."
What if class war, against the rich, is good actually? Like - taking their stuff, because they have an over abundance of it, and giving said stuff to people who don't have stuff, and actively need more stuff to live and such - is good. That is a good thing to do. Especially since many of the people who have lots of stuff - have it for no good reason. Like they inherited it, or managed to hide it in a tax haven, or they got lucky and invested in something at the right time and place.
Dealing with the average persons material reality - that life is shit and getting shitter - and making life less shit might be popular.
Sounds great. Can you please define "rich". Does it include those who own their homes mortgage-free?
I mean, the richest 10% of households in the UK hold 43% of the wealth, whereas the bottom 50% have 9% of the wealth. So I would argue whatever makes that figure more proportional would be great. Reminder - wealth is not the same thing as income. Now, if we did this policy starting at the top and working our way down (starting with the wealthiest person we could find and hiving off wealth for the public good until they're left with a still ridiculous amount of money) and we still start hitting people who have very few liquid assets and only have their house as wealth, we can talk about where the line should be and how to manage that. But, to begin with, let's have a crack at the wealth redistribution first.
Brilliant. So confiscate their shareholdings, as a lot of the top 10% wealth is in shares of public and private companies. Nothing can go wrong except those shares crashing, companies folding, pensions being gutted and nobody wanting to set up a company in the UK.
Then we take their land holdings. Again not a problem as nobody just below that line will think, “hang on they might come for us next so let’s sell”, leaving land prices crashing and huge swathes empty that people cannot build houses on because the housebuilding companies have collapsed due to the asset confiscations, and there are no farmers because they can’t see the point of working all hours for a pittance because their land might just get taken.
But at least we confiscate the expensive houses and we can give them to people who can’t actually afford to live in them because the upkeep is huge and all the tradesmen have gone bust because there aren’t any wealthy people to pay them to upkeep the really expensive houses. And we can’t sell them to foreigners and use the tax receipts to incpvest in the country because foreigners saw the asset seizures and won’t touch the UK with a barge pole.
But as long as they don’t get down to the level of mortgage free university tutors it’s all heart warming and good for the soul as well as the country.
Okay - so wealth is just the way we take score. Nothing the wealthy leverage to be able to live the lifestyle they want is actually worth that amount of money unless it's the wealthy who have it - because that's the system. In which case - the poverty is by design. The poverty is the policy.
If you take ownership of wealth via the mechanisms of wealth and wealth creation (and land is a means of wealth creation beyond development) - then these things won't necessarily crash.
I also feel that people have mistaken my whole "I'm lucky enough to live in a mortgage free house" position. I don't own a mortgage free house. My dad does. I just live in it. It got paid off when my mum died, and my dad refused to live in it any more after that. So I just live in it rent free. Again - I'm lucky as hell. But it isn't my asset. As he has reminded me many, many times.
Aww, you've spoiled a morning spasm of 'curse those lefty hypocrites' for the PB righties. They'll no doubt move seamlessly on to criticising other areas of your life.
Euch, working class people with political power, how awful.
The final paragraph is instructive, though, in that it seems to be gleefully anticipating a bit of class war.
That's not healthy. If it does this then it might entrench division. I can't see anything that would promote a more rapid recovery of the Tories in their base than this. And that's almost regardless of who they select as LoTO:
"The first working-class government in decades will speak that language. It will also be chippy. It will squeeze private schools and spray concrete newbuild homes all over the shires. It will go after companies who make the same mistakes as P&O. It may struggle to hide the pleasure it takes in doing so."
What if class war, against the rich, is good actually? Like - taking their stuff, because they have an over abundance of it, and giving said stuff to people who don't have stuff, and actively need more stuff to live and such - is good. That is a good thing to do. Especially since many of the people who have lots of stuff - have it for no good reason. Like they inherited it, or managed to hide it in a tax haven, or they got lucky and invested in something at the right time and place.
Dealing with the average persons material reality - that life is shit and getting shitter - and making life less shit might be popular.
Sounds great. Can you please define "rich". Does it include those who own their homes mortgage-free?
I mean, the richest 10% of households in the UK hold 43% of the wealth, whereas the bottom 50% have 9% of the wealth. So I would argue whatever makes that figure more proportional would be great. Reminder - wealth is not the same thing as income. Now, if we did this policy starting at the top and working our way down (starting with the wealthiest person we could find and hiving off wealth for the public good until they're left with a still ridiculous amount of money) and we still start hitting people who have very few liquid assets and only have their house as wealth, we can talk about where the line should be and how to manage that. But, to begin with, let's have a crack at the wealth redistribution first.
Brilliant. So confiscate their shareholdings, as a lot of the top 10% wealth is in shares of public and private companies. Nothing can go wrong except those shares crashing, companies folding, pensions being gutted and nobody wanting to set up a company in the UK.
Then we take their land holdings. Again not a problem as nobody just below that line will think, “hang on they might come for us next so let’s sell”, leaving land prices crashing and huge swathes empty that people cannot build houses on because the housebuilding companies have collapsed due to the asset confiscations, and there are no farmers because they can’t see the point of working all hours for a pittance because their land might just get taken.
But at least we confiscate the expensive houses and we can give them to people who can’t actually afford to live in them because the upkeep is huge and all the tradesmen have gone bust because there aren’t any wealthy people to pay them to upkeep the really expensive houses. And we can’t sell them to foreigners and use the tax receipts to incpvest in the country because foreigners saw the asset seizures and won’t touch the UK with a barge pole.
But as long as they don’t get down to the level of mortgage free university tutors it’s all heart warming and good for the soul as well as the country.
Okay - so wealth is just the way we take score. Nothing the wealthy leverage to be able to live the lifestyle they want is actually worth that amount of money unless it's the wealthy who have it - because that's the system. In which case - the poverty is by design. The poverty is the policy.
If you take ownership of wealth via the mechanisms of wealth and wealth creation (and land is a means of wealth creation beyond development) - then these things won't necessarily crash.
I also feel that people have mistaken my whole "I'm lucky enough to live in a mortgage free house" position. I don't own a mortgage free house. My dad does. I just live in it. It got paid off when my mum died, and my dad refused to live in it any more after that. So I just live in it rent free. Again - I'm lucky as hell. But it isn't my asset. As he has reminded me many, many times.
Will your dad be leaving the house to a homeless charity in his Will or do you think you might be able to continue to live rent free?
He'll probably leave half to me and half to my sister - although I have never asked and he and I don't always get on, it's possible he'll leave it all to her. Then it will be down to me with what I do with my inherited wealth (after tax, which I will happily pay). I will probably liquidate the asset, downsize, and use my money in a way in line with my morals and politics. Unfortunately for me I'm in my early 30s and my dad is in his early 50s (teenage parents for the win) - so this will be something that won't likely happen for a long time.
Also - this isn't about the virtues of individuals, this is about an entire system of wealth accumulation that is reinforced and propped up by the policies of the state! Individuals can only do so much, and the state we live under. I would have absolutely no problem with a system that decided the wealthiest should pay more to make sure the poorest had a better standard of living, and if I fell into the category of "wealthiest" then I'd be happy for them to take my stuff. To give to others.
Euch, working class people with political power, how awful.
The final paragraph is instructive, though, in that it seems to be gleefully anticipating a bit of class war.
That's not healthy. If it does this then it might entrench division. I can't see anything that would promote a more rapid recovery of the Tories in their base than this. And that's almost regardless of who they select as LoTO:
"The first working-class government in decades will speak that language. It will also be chippy. It will squeeze private schools and spray concrete newbuild homes all over the shires. It will go after companies who make the same mistakes as P&O. It may struggle to hide the pleasure it takes in doing so."
What if class war, against the rich, is good actually? Like - taking their stuff, because they have an over abundance of it, and giving said stuff to people who don't have stuff, and actively need more stuff to live and such - is good. That is a good thing to do. Especially since many of the people who have lots of stuff - have it for no good reason. Like they inherited it, or managed to hide it in a tax haven, or they got lucky and invested in something at the right time and place.
Dealing with the average persons material reality - that life is shit and getting shitter - and making life less shit might be popular.
Sounds great. Can you please define "rich". Does it include those who own their homes mortgage-free?
I mean, the richest 10% of households in the UK hold 43% of the wealth, whereas the bottom 50% have 9% of the wealth. So I would argue whatever makes that figure more proportional would be great. Reminder - wealth is not the same thing as income. Now, if we did this policy starting at the top and working our way down (starting with the wealthiest person we could find and hiving off wealth for the public good until they're left with a still ridiculous amount of money) and we still start hitting people who have very few liquid assets and only have their house as wealth, we can talk about where the line should be and how to manage that. But, to begin with, let's have a crack at the wealth redistribution first.
A CLARIFICATION:
Whereas I previously said that taking stuff from people, for example if they inherited it, and giving it to people who need it was a good thing, I now realise that this was a gross oversimplification of the situation and what I actually meant was we need to segment the country such that I am not in the segment which has to give stuff away.
I mean I think I have a net wealth of a couple of thousand - I don't own anything of much value except a laptop, and I have minimal savings. If the state wants to take my dad by the ankles and shake him until the cash falls out and give it to the deserving - be my guest; his net worth is probably over £1 million because he owns three properties (he isn't a landlord, thank god, but that is one of the few nice things I can say about him).
If they also want to say to my grandparents "by an accident of the time you were born you have a house (that you bought for like £9k literally 50 years ago) that is now worth £500,000, but you literally only have liquid assets of less than £10k, so we're going to take your 3 bedroom house, downsize you into a bungalow and not reimburse you the value of the house" I would be somewhat fucked financially in the long term, but would understand why it was done.
The issue isn't the inherent morality of inheritance - it is the fact that wealth accumulation has been allowed to happen in a few minor ways - by being lucky and owning property in the right place at the right time, by being lucky and inheriting it, or by being lucky and running a business that happens to get successful at the right place and right time.
I'm a worker - I get paid a wage. I'm a lucky worker - I don't have to pay rent - but I still get paid less then half the people in this country and get by putting away a couple of hundred quid a month to save up for the big things I can't afford. And that's being a lucky worker. It sucks, and yet I'm lucky.
If you are paying no rent on a Uni salary (I'm thinking grade 7/8 based on what you've said) you ought to be able to put a bit more than 200 quid a month away. Where else is the money going?
All on subscriptions to left wing student journals to be absorbed then spewed out here. It’s not cheap being righteous.
OK, I'm going to say it: I find the whole Israel/Gaza/Palestine thing deeply deeply boring and I'm not sure I care.
Next.
Almost 13,000 dead kids - *yawns* One old man with sausage fingers gets bum cancer - hold my beer!
Most moral monarchist in the world!
You want to talk numbers?
"More than 7 million displaced by Sudan fighting as safe zones shrink
More than seven million people have been displaced by fighting in Sudan, the United Nations said on Thursday as more displaced people continued to flee a former safe haven."
And yet not a peep from the likes of you about Sudan. Nothing. Nothing at all. What is it about the Israel-Gaza conflict that so exercises you, whereas stuff in Africa, on an epically greater scale, makes you yawn?
i mean, what could it be? Why isn't Azhar Ali going on about Sudan in Rochdale? Why aren't there marches in London? What a mystery
Will you be marching in London, then?
I'm in Phnom Penh but I will do a small march down Bassac Lane to the gay Austrian gin bar, I've been planning it for a while
Good morning from Aberdeen airport. Could I please offer my congratulations to @NickPalmer ? His attempted smear of the Liberal Democrat’s over Cyril Smith in response to his own candidate being thrown out in disgrace was quality entertainment.
It’s pretty clear in this by election. We have a choice of disgraced former Labour candidates - Ali, Galloway, Danczuk. We have a disgraced party - the Tories. Or we have the LibDems.
We know that people want to Get The Tories Out. Happily in Rochdale they don’t have a chance. Plenty of people also seem to want to vote for foaming dog fever. If you want to stop both, vote LibDem.
On this topic; ages ago I argued that Labour were going to get such a stonking majority, that they would be inundated with new, untested MPs. And therefore there might be more examples of (ahem) 'poor' MPs, such as the ex-member for Sheffield Hallam (and I don't mean Clegg...).
It seems this is coming true much earlier than I expected. There's something rotten in the way Labour chooses candidates. The same might be true for the other parties, as well.
I’ve been a candidate. I’ve interviewed candidates. I’ve discussed candidates with regional office staff. I cannot understand how they managed to miss this.
Worst thing is that it would appear that at least some local party members had heard the comments - and voted for Ali anyway. Which means the CLP needs suspending. This wasn’t an HQ parachute candidate, the CLP actively chose him.
What have they actually missed though. The only thing the mail on Sunday came up with are remarks the Israeli government allowed the Hamas attack so they could have the war they wanted - not the most blisteringly anti semitic of statements, unless you disagree?
The latest remarks that have come to light are that he said Israel wanted to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
Obviously Labour thinks that even saying that is unacceptable!
I think we just have to accept that all criticism of Israel is a thought crime in Britain. If the Israelis want to kill another 12000 Gazan children who are we to question them?
I think we just have to be very careful what we say on the subject, and to whom, because a lot of people are very touchy about it and desperate to portray their side as victims and the other side as monsters.
Both sides have victims, and both sides have monsters. That's why it's so difficult to speak about without upsetting people.
In comparison, the Ukraine war is exceedingly simple morally: Russia is in the wrong, and Ukraine is in the right.
It's more than that with Ukraine, JJ.
We have a dog in the fight. If Ukraine goes, where next? We stop Putin now, we save ourselves a lot of problems later. That is all very simple.
Indeed. I doubt Putin will stop at Calais because of all the hassle to complete post-Brexit paperwork.
IIRC T-55s have issues at certain speeds. Something to do with the way the gearbox is set up. So, if he tries to invade the UK with his old rust pile, the 20mph zones may prove a problem.
As the Russian tanks grind to a halt at Monmouth because of the 20 mph limits at the Monnow Bridge that's a relief for me here in Wales, but you are still all f***** in England.
We'll remove all the road signs. That will stop them in their tracks.
As many have pointed out, given the difficulty they seem to have had taking Kiev, it seems vanishingly unlikely that Russia will be driving tanks up the Champs Elysee any time soon. And if they were, it's debatable whether it would be our job to do some kind of British Expeditionary Force of the 21st century to stop them.
We need a strong navy, with masses of drones, firstly to protect our land, secondly to try to keep trading routes open, thirdly to help supply our allies and blockade naughty people. That's all we need to do, and it's a lot more than most do.
It'll be fine! We have HMS Prince of Wales on standby.
Namesake sunk by the Japs in 1941
At least if it remains tied up at Rosyth it will avoid that fate.
After all you wouldn't take your vintage Ferrari out in the rain.
Kapitan Leutnant Prien and HMS Royal Oak say otherwise.
The R class- a bigger mistake than Fishers Freaks.
At least they had 8 main guns and decent armour.
And a top speed of 21 knots - *after* the QEs. And no space for upgrading the crap deck armour.
So they were useless by the 1920s
The alternative, suggested at the time, was to build lengthened, faster QEs. Since the German naval challenge was facing back, cut down one ship. So QEs with 28-29 knots.
Fishers Freaks became the first (relatively) homogeneous aircraft carrier squadron. Admiral Henderson used them to invent carrier operations. They served well into WWII, while the R class were an embarrassment that had to be hidden from actual combat.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Good morning from Aberdeen airport. Could I please offer my congratulations to @NickPalmer ? His attempted smear of the Liberal Democrat’s over Cyril Smith in response to his own candidate being thrown out in disgrace was quality entertainment.
It’s pretty clear in this by election. We have a choice of disgraced former Labour candidates - Ali, Galloway, Danczuk. We have a disgraced party - the Tories. Or we have the LibDems.
We know that people want to Get The Tories Out. Happily in Rochdale they don’t have a chance. Plenty of people also seem to want to vote for foaming dog fever. If you want to stop both, vote LibDem.
On this topic; ages ago I argued that Labour were going to get such a stonking majority, that they would be inundated with new, untested MPs. And therefore there might be more examples of (ahem) 'poor' MPs, such as the ex-member for Sheffield Hallam (and I don't mean Clegg...).
It seems this is coming true much earlier than I expected. There's something rotten in the way Labour chooses candidates. The same might be true for the other parties, as well.
I’ve been a candidate. I’ve interviewed candidates. I’ve discussed candidates with regional office staff. I cannot understand how they managed to miss this.
Worst thing is that it would appear that at least some local party members had heard the comments - and voted for Ali anyway. Which means the CLP needs suspending. This wasn’t an HQ parachute candidate, the CLP actively chose him.
What have they actually missed though. The only thing the mail on Sunday came up with are remarks the Israeli government allowed the Hamas attack so they could have the war they wanted - not the most blisteringly anti semitic of statements, unless you disagree?
The latest remarks that have come to light are that he said Israel wanted to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
Obviously Labour thinks that even saying that is unacceptable!
I think we just have to accept that all criticism of Israel is a thought crime in Britain. If the Israelis want to kill another 12000 Gazan children who are we to question them?
I think we just have to be very careful what we say on the subject, and to whom, because a lot of people are very touchy about it and desperate to portray their side as victims and the other side as monsters.
Both sides have victims, and both sides have monsters. That's why it's so difficult to speak about without upsetting people.
In comparison, the Ukraine war is exceedingly simple morally: Russia is in the wrong, and Ukraine is in the right.
It's more than that with Ukraine, JJ.
We have a dog in the fight. If Ukraine goes, where next? We stop Putin now, we save ourselves a lot of problems later. That is all very simple.
Indeed. I doubt Putin will stop at Calais because of all the hassle to complete post-Brexit paperwork.
IIRC T-55s have issues at certain speeds. Something to do with the way the gearbox is set up. So, if he tries to invade the UK with his old rust pile, the 20mph zones may prove a problem.
As the Russian tanks grind to a halt at Monmouth because of the 20 mph limits at the Monnow Bridge that's a relief for me here in Wales, but you are still all f***** in England.
Blockade the Brynglas tunnels! It’s taken the Welsh about three decades to manage not build a road around them.
We live in an age where globalised megamillionaires build space forces for fun and our children cannot buy homes. We cannot fix our teeth and the Government is importing hundreds of thousands of people per year to compete with us. Participation is low and driven lower by spurious ID requirements. Disillusion is everywhere and we are so distorted in our perception that wars thousands of miles away engage our emotions. A by-election is deteriorating into farce as each candidate is disavowed. We are increasingly poor and the country is possibly insane and certainly badly run.
Nobody knows how to fix this with conventional methods.
In such an environment, unconventional methods will be tried. We have the joy-of-destruction in the bizarre Milei in Argentina. If we *just* end up with, say, Wilsonian/Callaghan socialism we will count ourselves lucky.
Rehan Ahmed is waiting to hear whether he can play in the third Test after the England tour was hit by more visa issues.
Ahmed was held briefly at Rajkot airport when the team returned to India after their break in the UAE because he only had a single entry visa.
He was eventually allowed to leave and the England team travelled to their hotel in Rajkot on Monday night together. Officials are confident the situation can be resolved in the next 48 hours but after the problems with Shoaib Bashir’s visa at the start of the tour, there will be an anxious wait until Ahmed is cleared with an emergency visa to stay in the country.
It is staggering that after all publicity and problems around Bashir’s visa that it was not noticed that Ahmed only had a single entry visa for India. The trip to the UAE was organised months ago. Ahmed, like Bashir, has Pakistani heritage although it is not clear if that will be an issue this time.
Lord Cameron could, even while retaining his peerage, relinquish his right to sit in the Lords and then be elected as a Conservative MP and then be elected party leader (who must sit in the House of Commons) and thus Prime Minister. That might be worth 100/1 since a safe seat can be arranged.
But the scheme discussed in the header for a PM in the House of Lords which even in 1940 was unacceptable, is far more than a 100/1 shot.
That's a myth about it being unacceptable in 1940 for a PM to sit in the Lords. To state the most obvious point: you do not risk losing a world war for a minor, and unembedded, point of constitutional nicety. Had the roles been reversed, with Churchill in the Lords and Halifax in the Commons (not that implausible a scenario - Churchill was the grandson of a duke; Halifax was his father's fourth son), would it really have been impossible for such an obvious candidate to serve as PM?
The very fact that Halifax was so seriously considered for the job of itself proves that his being a peer wasn't a bar. A drawback, certainly, but not a disqualification. Likewise, while the fact that Curzon was a peer was a fact held against him succeeding Bonar Law in 1923, it wasn't of itself decisive.
Indeed, IIRC, at least two schemes were considered whereby Halifax could address the Commons were he appointed. One was to amend the Commons' standing orders (or to pass a brief Act?) to allow him to speak from the despatch box; the other was for the king to put Halifax's peerages into abeyance and so to enable him to return to the Commons.
Obviously, circumstances in 1940 were rather more desperate than the politics-as-normal now, and such constitutional indulgences couldn't be expected as might have been necessary then. But the point is that they could have been done.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
The changes required are both subtle and dramatic. Subtle because they require a program of investment and change over decades.
Dramatic, because they mean hitting the managerial-but-no-domain-expertise class head on. And that is what politics (and the permanent apparatus of government) is full of.
Ah, what have we here? It's yet another "They're on the Left but not giving all their money away" hypocrite shocker!
Aka PB Tories who can't argue rationally against a point instead targeting the personal circumstances of the person making it.
It's of course much more comfortable to those rich lefties to try to deflect such an argument. I mean you worked hard for your possessions you aren't about to give them away for some absurd political ideology, now, are you.
Euch, working class people with political power, how awful.
The final paragraph is instructive, though, in that it seems to be gleefully anticipating a bit of class war.
That's not healthy. If it does this then it might entrench division. I can't see anything that would promote a more rapid recovery of the Tories in their base than this. And that's almost regardless of who they select as LoTO:
"The first working-class government in decades will speak that language. It will also be chippy. It will squeeze private schools and spray concrete newbuild homes all over the shires. It will go after companies who make the same mistakes as P&O. It may struggle to hide the pleasure it takes in doing so."
What if class war, against the rich, is good actually? Like - taking their stuff, because they have an over abundance of it, and giving said stuff to people who don't have stuff, and actively need more stuff to live and such - is good. That is a good thing to do. Especially since many of the people who have lots of stuff - have it for no good reason. Like they inherited it, or managed to hide it in a tax haven, or they got lucky and invested in something at the right time and place.
Dealing with the average persons material reality - that life is shit and getting shitter - and making life less shit might be popular.
Sounds great. Can you please define "rich". Does it include those who own their homes mortgage-free?
I mean, the richest 10% of households in the UK hold 43% of the wealth, whereas the bottom 50% have 9% of the wealth. So I would argue whatever makes that figure more proportional would be great. Reminder - wealth is not the same thing as income. Now, if we did this policy starting at the top and working our way down (starting with the wealthiest person we could find and hiving off wealth for the public good until they're left with a still ridiculous amount of money) and we still start hitting people who have very few liquid assets and only have their house as wealth, we can talk about where the line should be and how to manage that. But, to begin with, let's have a crack at the wealth redistribution first.
A CLARIFICATION:
Whereas I previously said that taking stuff from people, for example if they inherited it, and giving it to people who need it was a good thing, I now realise that this was a gross oversimplification of the situation and what I actually meant was we need to segment the country such that I am not in the segment which has to give stuff away.
I mean I think I have a net wealth of a couple of thousand - I don't own anything of much value except a laptop, and I have minimal savings. If the state wants to take my dad by the ankles and shake him until the cash falls out and give it to the deserving - be my guest; his net worth is probably over £1 million because he owns three properties (he isn't a landlord, thank god, but that is one of the few nice things I can say about him).
If they also want to say to my grandparents "by an accident of the time you were born you have a house (that you bought for like £9k literally 50 years ago) that is now worth £500,000, but you literally only have liquid assets of less than £10k, so we're going to take your 3 bedroom house, downsize you into a bungalow and not reimburse you the value of the house" I would be somewhat fucked financially in the long term, but would understand why it was done.
The issue isn't the inherent morality of inheritance - it is the fact that wealth accumulation has been allowed to happen in a few minor ways - by being lucky and owning property in the right place at the right time, by being lucky and inheriting it, or by being lucky and running a business that happens to get successful at the right place and right time.
I'm a worker - I get paid a wage. I'm a lucky worker - I don't have to pay rent - but I still get paid less then half the people in this country and get by putting away a couple of hundred quid a month to save up for the big things I can't afford. And that's being a lucky worker. It sucks, and yet I'm lucky.
If you are paying no rent on a Uni salary (I'm thinking grade 7/8 based on what you've said) you ought to be able to put a bit more than 200 quid a month away. Where else is the money going?
I mean bills (council tax, electric, gas, water, wifi, etc) is about a third of my salary. In my place of work I'm a grade 6 (although I know that grades here don't necessarily translate to other public sector grading systems). I have to pay for some of my healthcare out of pocket (because mental health waiting lists on the NHS could have literally killed me). I have an extended family who I do stuff for (my aunt is on UC and lives in a council house, my grandparents are in their 80s-90s and I go there regularly to help out). I donate to local political and activist groups. I travel into London semi regularly to have fun and see friends. I eat food and use public transport. I do fun things, like buy books and eat out and go to the theatre and listen to music. I'm not impoverished, I would say I live comfortably. I just don't have much wealth because, to live comfortably on a wage, there isn't much room to save much money because things are expensive. Again - I accept that I'm one of the lucky ones.
And before people go all "you could just live a life of dull drudgery eating only gruel and only going outside to see the sun on rare occasions" I say bread and roses, bread and roses.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
The changes required are both subtle and dramatic. Subtle because they require a program of investment and change over decades.
Dramatic, because they mean hitting the managerial-but-no-domain-expertise class head on. And that is what politics (and the permanent apparatus of government) is full of.
Business and commerce too. Managerial mediocrity is the British disease.
Good morning from Aberdeen airport. Could I please offer my congratulations to @NickPalmer ? His attempted smear of the Liberal Democrat’s over Cyril Smith in response to his own candidate being thrown out in disgrace was quality entertainment.
It’s pretty clear in this by election. We have a choice of disgraced former Labour candidates - Ali, Galloway, Danczuk. We have a disgraced party - the Tories. Or we have the LibDems.
We know that people want to Get The Tories Out. Happily in Rochdale they don’t have a chance. Plenty of people also seem to want to vote for foaming dog fever. If you want to stop both, vote LibDem.
On this topic; ages ago I argued that Labour were going to get such a stonking majority, that they would be inundated with new, untested MPs. And therefore there might be more examples of (ahem) 'poor' MPs, such as the ex-member for Sheffield Hallam (and I don't mean Clegg...).
It seems this is coming true much earlier than I expected. There's something rotten in the way Labour chooses candidates. The same might be true for the other parties, as well.
I’ve been a candidate. I’ve interviewed candidates. I’ve discussed candidates with regional office staff. I cannot understand how they managed to miss this.
Worst thing is that it would appear that at least some local party members had heard the comments - and voted for Ali anyway. Which means the CLP needs suspending. This wasn’t an HQ parachute candidate, the CLP actively chose him.
What have they actually missed though. The only thing the mail on Sunday came up with are remarks the Israeli government allowed the Hamas attack so they could have the war they wanted - not the most blisteringly anti semitic of statements, unless you disagree?
The latest remarks that have come to light are that he said Israel wanted to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
Obviously Labour thinks that even saying that is unacceptable!
I think we just have to accept that all criticism of Israel is a thought crime in Britain. If the Israelis want to kill another 12000 Gazan children who are we to question them?
I think we just have to be very careful what we say on the subject, and to whom, because a lot of people are very touchy about it and desperate to portray their side as victims and the other side as monsters.
Both sides have victims, and both sides have monsters. That's why it's so difficult to speak about without upsetting people.
In comparison, the Ukraine war is exceedingly simple morally: Russia is in the wrong, and Ukraine is in the right.
It's more than that with Ukraine, JJ.
We have a dog in the fight. If Ukraine goes, where next? We stop Putin now, we save ourselves a lot of problems later. That is all very simple.
Euch, working class people with political power, how awful.
The final paragraph is instructive, though, in that it seems to be gleefully anticipating a bit of class war.
That's not healthy. If it does this then it might entrench division. I can't see anything that would promote a more rapid recovery of the Tories in their base than this. And that's almost regardless of who they select as LoTO:
"The first working-class government in decades will speak that language. It will also be chippy. It will squeeze private schools and spray concrete newbuild homes all over the shires. It will go after companies who make the same mistakes as P&O. It may struggle to hide the pleasure it takes in doing so."
What if class war, against the rich, is good actually? Like - taking their stuff, because they have an over abundance of it, and giving said stuff to people who don't have stuff, and actively need more stuff to live and such - is good. That is a good thing to do. Especially since many of the people who have lots of stuff - have it for no good reason. Like they inherited it, or managed to hide it in a tax haven, or they got lucky and invested in something at the right time and place.
Dealing with the average persons material reality - that life is shit and getting shitter - and making life less shit might be popular.
Sounds great. Can you please define "rich". Does it include those who own their homes mortgage-free?
I mean, the richest 10% of households in the UK hold 43% of the wealth, whereas the bottom 50% have 9% of the wealth. So I would argue whatever makes that figure more proportional would be great. Reminder - wealth is not the same thing as income. Now, if we did this policy starting at the top and working our way down (starting with the wealthiest person we could find and hiving off wealth for the public good until they're left with a still ridiculous amount of money) and we still start hitting people who have very few liquid assets and only have their house as wealth, we can talk about where the line should be and how to manage that. But, to begin with, let's have a crack at the wealth redistribution first.
A CLARIFICATION:
Whereas I previously said that taking stuff from people, for example if they inherited it, and giving it to people who need it was a good thing, I now realise that this was a gross oversimplification of the situation and what I actually meant was we need to segment the country such that I am not in the segment which has to give stuff away.
I mean I think I have a net wealth of a couple of thousand - I don't own anything of much value except a laptop, and I have minimal savings. If the state wants to take my dad by the ankles and shake him until the cash falls out and give it to the deserving - be my guest; his net worth is probably over £1 million because he owns three properties (he isn't a landlord, thank god, but that is one of the few nice things I can say about him).
If they also want to say to my grandparents "by an accident of the time you were born you have a house (that you bought for like £9k literally 50 years ago) that is now worth £500,000, but you literally only have liquid assets of less than £10k, so we're going to take your 3 bedroom house, downsize you into a bungalow and not reimburse you the value of the house" I would be somewhat fucked financially in the long term, but would understand why it was done.
The issue isn't the inherent morality of inheritance - it is the fact that wealth accumulation has been allowed to happen in a few minor ways - by being lucky and owning property in the right place at the right time, by being lucky and inheriting it, or by being lucky and running a business that happens to get successful at the right place and right time.
I'm a worker - I get paid a wage. I'm a lucky worker - I don't have to pay rent - but I still get paid less then half the people in this country and get by putting away a couple of hundred quid a month to save up for the big things I can't afford. And that's being a lucky worker. It sucks, and yet I'm lucky.
If you are paying no rent on a Uni salary (I'm thinking grade 7/8 based on what you've said) you ought to be able to put a bit more than 200 quid a month away. Where else is the money going?
I mean bills (council tax, electric, gas, water, wifi, etc) is about a third of my salary. In my place of work I'm a grade 6 (although I know that grades here don't necessarily translate to other public sector grading systems). I have to pay for some of my healthcare out of pocket (because mental health waiting lists on the NHS could have literally killed me). I have an extended family who I do stuff for (my aunt is on UC and lives in a council house, my grandparents are in their 80s-90s and I go there regularly to help out). I donate to local political and activist groups. I travel into London semi regularly to have fun and see friends. I eat food and use public transport. I do fun things, like buy books and eat out and go to the theatre and listen to music. I'm not impoverished, I would say I live comfortably. I just don't have much wealth because, to live comfortably on a wage, there isn't much room to save much money because things are expensive. Again - I accept that I'm one of the lucky ones.
And before people go all "you could just live a life of dull drudgery eating only gruel and only going outside to see the sun on rare occasions" I say bread and roses, bread and roses.
Congratulations on living a very good life - I hope you realise just how lucky you are to be doing all those things.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour were to be so inept as to increase child hunger and poverty, Victorian age childhood diseases, surface water pollution on an industrial scale, and a collapse in international trade by keeping the Brexit ghost train on the tracks, past current Tory levels of wilful ineptitude, I'll be voting for the fellow in Lewis, who wasn't Lewis too.
Lord Cameron could, even while retaining his peerage, relinquish his right to sit in the Lords and then be elected as a Conservative MP and then be elected party leader (who must sit in the House of Commons) and thus Prime Minister. That might be worth 100/1 since a safe seat can be arranged.
But the scheme discussed in the header for a PM in the House of Lords which even in 1940 was unacceptable, is far more than a 100/1 shot.
That's a myth about it being unacceptable in 1940 for a PM to sit in the Lords. To state the most obvious point: you do not risk losing a world war for a minor, and unembedded, point of constitutional nicety. Had the roles been reversed, with Churchill in the Lords and Halifax in the Commons (not that implausible a scenario - Churchill was the grandson of a duke; Halifax was his father's fourth son), would it really have been impossible for such an obvious candidate to serve as PM?
The very fact that Halifax was so seriously considered for the job of itself proves that his being a peer wasn't a bar. A drawback, certainly, but not a disqualification. Likewise, while the fact that Curzon was a peer was a fact held against him succeeding Bonar Law in 1923, it wasn't of itself decisive.
Indeed, IIRC, at least two schemes were considered whereby Halifax could address the Commons were he appointed. One was to amend the Commons' standing orders (or to pass a brief Act?) to allow him to speak from the despatch box; the other was for the king to put Halifax's peerages into abeyance and so to enable him to return to the Commons.
Obviously, circumstances in 1940 were rather more desperate than the politics-as-normal now, and such constitutional indulgences couldn't be expected as might have been necessary then. But the point is that they could have been done.
That much is true but in the conventional telling, it was Lord Halifax himself who decided that even with all these Heath-Robinson constitutional arrangements, he could not be PM from the Lords.
Euch, working class people with political power, how awful.
The final paragraph is instructive, though, in that it seems to be gleefully anticipating a bit of class war.
That's not healthy. If it does this then it might entrench division. I can't see anything that would promote a more rapid recovery of the Tories in their base than this. And that's almost regardless of who they select as LoTO:
"The first working-class government in decades will speak that language. It will also be chippy. It will squeeze private schools and spray concrete newbuild homes all over the shires. It will go after companies who make the same mistakes as P&O. It may struggle to hide the pleasure it takes in doing so."
What if class war, against the rich, is good actually? Like - taking their stuff, because they have an over abundance of it, and giving said stuff to people who don't have stuff, and actively need more stuff to live and such - is good. That is a good thing to do. Especially since many of the people who have lots of stuff - have it for no good reason. Like they inherited it, or managed to hide it in a tax haven, or they got lucky and invested in something at the right time and place.
Dealing with the average persons material reality - that life is shit and getting shitter - and making life less shit might be popular.
Didn't you say you inherited your house? Lets start with taking that then - lots of the poor need a house.
Oh - don't think it applies to you? Just like everyone wants tax rises for other people.
No - I said I live in a mortgage free house. I did not inherit it, my dad did. I just live there. And I take in housemates without charging rent, because renteering is bad. That includes people who have literally been homeless and people who have literally just arrived in the country as refugees. I try, within the best of my resources, to live a life in line with my morality and politics, and leverage the luck and benefits I have for others.
"renteering" ?
I assumed that was the verb of "to do rentier capitalism", but rent-seeking is the term typically used.
OK, I'm going to say it: I find the whole Israel/Gaza/Palestine thing deeply deeply boring and I'm not sure I care.
Next.
Almost 13,000 dead kids - *yawns* One old man with sausage fingers gets bum cancer - hold my beer!
Most moral monarchist in the world!
You want to talk numbers?
"More than 7 million displaced by Sudan fighting as safe zones shrink
More than seven million people have been displaced by fighting in Sudan, the United Nations said on Thursday as more displaced people continued to flee a former safe haven."
And yet not a peep from the likes of you about Sudan. Nothing. Nothing at all. What is it about the Israel-Gaza conflict that so exercises you, whereas stuff in Africa, on an epically greater scale, makes you yawn?
i mean, what could it be? Why isn't Azhar Ali going on about Sudan in Rochdale? Why aren't there marches in London? What a mystery
Will you be marching in London, then?
In this case the only interest in the suffering in Sudan is as a whataboutery tool to smear people who support the Palestinian cause as antisemites.
OK, I'm going to say it: I find the whole Israel/Gaza/Palestine thing deeply deeply boring and I'm not sure I care.
Next.
Almost 13,000 dead kids - *yawns* One old man with sausage fingers gets bum cancer - hold my beer!
Most moral monarchist in the world!
You want to talk numbers?
"More than 7 million displaced by Sudan fighting as safe zones shrink
More than seven million people have been displaced by fighting in Sudan, the United Nations said on Thursday as more displaced people continued to flee a former safe haven."
And yet not a peep from the likes of you about Sudan. Nothing. Nothing at all. What is it about the Israel-Gaza conflict that so exercises you, whereas stuff in Africa, on an epically greater scale, makes you yawn?
i mean, what could it be? Why isn't Azhar Ali going on about Sudan in Rochdale? Why aren't there marches in London? What a mystery
Will you be marching in London, then?
In this case the only interest in the suffering in Sudan is as a whataboutery tool to smear people who support the Palestinian cause as antisemites.
Or, to point out that they are, actually, anti-Semites
Euch, working class people with political power, how awful.
The final paragraph is instructive, though, in that it seems to be gleefully anticipating a bit of class war.
That's not healthy. If it does this then it might entrench division. I can't see anything that would promote a more rapid recovery of the Tories in their base than this. And that's almost regardless of who they select as LoTO:
"The first working-class government in decades will speak that language. It will also be chippy. It will squeeze private schools and spray concrete newbuild homes all over the shires. It will go after companies who make the same mistakes as P&O. It may struggle to hide the pleasure it takes in doing so."
What if class war, against the rich, is good actually? Like - taking their stuff, because they have an over abundance of it, and giving said stuff to people who don't have stuff, and actively need more stuff to live and such - is good. That is a good thing to do. Especially since many of the people who have lots of stuff - have it for no good reason. Like they inherited it, or managed to hide it in a tax haven, or they got lucky and invested in something at the right time and place.
Dealing with the average persons material reality - that life is shit and getting shitter - and making life less shit might be popular.
Didn't you say you inherited your house? Lets start with taking that then - lots of the poor need a house.
Oh - don't think it applies to you? Just like everyone wants tax rises for other people.
No - I said I live in a mortgage free house. I did not inherit it, my dad did. I just live there. And I take in housemates without charging rent, because renteering is bad. That includes people who have literally been homeless and people who have literally just arrived in the country as refugees. I try, within the best of my resources, to live a life in line with my morality and politics, and leverage the luck and benefits I have for others.
"renteering" ?
I assumed that was the verb of "to do rentier capitalism", but rent-seeking is the term typically used.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
Which is why the election campaign could blow up for Labour. "Sir Keir, how much better will my life be after the first year of a Labour Government?"
The PM Presumptive looks at his shoes, no clear answer to be had...
Lord Cameron could, even while retaining his peerage, relinquish his right to sit in the Lords and then be elected as a Conservative MP and then be elected party leader (who must sit in the House of Commons) and thus Prime Minister. That might be worth 100/1 since a safe seat can be arranged.
But the scheme discussed in the header for a PM in the House of Lords which even in 1940 was unacceptable, is far more than a 100/1 shot.
That's a myth about it being unacceptable in 1940 for a PM to sit in the Lords. To state the most obvious point: you do not risk losing a world war for a minor, and unembedded, point of constitutional nicety. Had the roles been reversed, with Churchill in the Lords and Halifax in the Commons (not that implausible a scenario - Churchill was the grandson of a duke; Halifax was his father's fourth son), would it really have been impossible for such an obvious candidate to serve as PM?
The very fact that Halifax was so seriously considered for the job of itself proves that his being a peer wasn't a bar. A drawback, certainly, but not a disqualification. Likewise, while the fact that Curzon was a peer was a fact held against him succeeding Bonar Law in 1923, it wasn't of itself decisive.
Indeed, IIRC, at least two schemes were considered whereby Halifax could address the Commons were he appointed. One was to amend the Commons' standing orders (or to pass a brief Act?) to allow him to speak from the despatch box; the other was for the king to put Halifax's peerages into abeyance and so to enable him to return to the Commons.
Obviously, circumstances in 1940 were rather more desperate than the politics-as-normal now, and such constitutional indulgences couldn't be expected as might have been necessary then. But the point is that they could have been done.
That much is true but in the conventional telling, it was Lord Halifax himself who decided that even with all these Heath-Robinson constitutional arrangements, he could not be PM from the Lords.
That was the public story. The reality was that Halifax realised that he could not be PM with Churchill in the cabinet, and that Churchill had to be in the cabinet. It wasn't (just) his peerage; it was the respective national leadership he and Churchill could (or couldn't) provide.
Ah, what have we here? It's yet another "They're on the Left but not giving all their money away" hypocrite shocker!
Aka PB Tories who can't argue rationally against a point instead targeting the personal circumstances of the person making it.
I am not making any of these points about anyone, but in evaluation both of arguments and of personal lives (not least one's own), it is not a bad idea to look at how coherent and consistent they are, and how aligned they are with how you or another is actually prepared to live.
The dialectic of 'left' and 'right' in politics gives the appearance of reflecting the idea that individual nature is somewhat to the right, and collective nature rather more to the left. Maybe this is because cooperation and competition (apparent opposites) are both basic to our evolved nature.
Euch, working class people with political power, how awful.
The final paragraph is instructive, though, in that it seems to be gleefully anticipating a bit of class war.
That's not healthy. If it does this then it might entrench division. I can't see anything that would promote a more rapid recovery of the Tories in their base than this. And that's almost regardless of who they select as LoTO:
"The first working-class government in decades will speak that language. It will also be chippy. It will squeeze private schools and spray concrete newbuild homes all over the shires. It will go after companies who make the same mistakes as P&O. It may struggle to hide the pleasure it takes in doing so."
What if class war, against the rich, is good actually? Like - taking their stuff, because they have an over abundance of it, and giving said stuff to people who don't have stuff, and actively need more stuff to live and such - is good. That is a good thing to do. Especially since many of the people who have lots of stuff - have it for no good reason. Like they inherited it, or managed to hide it in a tax haven, or they got lucky and invested in something at the right time and place.
Dealing with the average persons material reality - that life is shit and getting shitter - and making life less shit might be popular.
Sounds great. Can you please define "rich". Does it include those who own their homes mortgage-free?
I mean, the richest 10% of households in the UK hold 43% of the wealth, whereas the bottom 50% have 9% of the wealth. So I would argue whatever makes that figure more proportional would be great. Reminder - wealth is not the same thing as income. Now, if we did this policy starting at the top and working our way down (starting with the wealthiest person we could find and hiving off wealth for the public good until they're left with a still ridiculous amount of money) and we still start hitting people who have very few liquid assets and only have their house as wealth, we can talk about where the line should be and how to manage that. But, to begin with, let's have a crack at the wealth redistribution first.
A CLARIFICATION:
Whereas I previously said that taking stuff from people, for example if they inherited it, and giving it to people who need it was a good thing, I now realise that this was a gross oversimplification of the situation and what I actually meant was we need to segment the country such that I am not in the segment which has to give stuff away.
I mean I think I have a net wealth of a couple of thousand - I don't own anything of much value except a laptop, and I have minimal savings. If the state wants to take my dad by the ankles and shake him until the cash falls out and give it to the deserving - be my guest; his net worth is probably over £1 million because he owns three properties (he isn't a landlord, thank god, but that is one of the few nice things I can say about him).
If they also want to say to my grandparents "by an accident of the time you were born you have a house (that you bought for like £9k literally 50 years ago) that is now worth £500,000, but you literally only have liquid assets of less than £10k, so we're going to take your 3 bedroom house, downsize you into a bungalow and not reimburse you the value of the house" I would be somewhat fucked financially in the long term, but would understand why it was done.
The issue isn't the inherent morality of inheritance - it is the fact that wealth accumulation has been allowed to happen in a few minor ways - by being lucky and owning property in the right place at the right time, by being lucky and inheriting it, or by being lucky and running a business that happens to get successful at the right place and right time.
I'm a worker - I get paid a wage. I'm a lucky worker - I don't have to pay rent - but I still get paid less then half the people in this country and get by putting away a couple of hundred quid a month to save up for the big things I can't afford. And that's being a lucky worker. It sucks, and yet I'm lucky.
If you are paying no rent on a Uni salary (I'm thinking grade 7/8 based on what you've said) you ought to be able to put a bit more than 200 quid a month away. Where else is the money going?
I mean bills (council tax, electric, gas, water, wifi, etc) is about a third of my salary. In my place of work I'm a grade 6 (although I know that grades here don't necessarily translate to other public sector grading systems). I have to pay for some of my healthcare out of pocket (because mental health waiting lists on the NHS could have literally killed me). I have an extended family who I do stuff for (my aunt is on UC and lives in a council house, my grandparents are in their 80s-90s and I go there regularly to help out). I donate to local political and activist groups. I travel into London semi regularly to have fun and see friends. I eat food and use public transport. I do fun things, like buy books and eat out and go to the theatre and listen to music. I'm not impoverished, I would say I live comfortably. I just don't have much wealth because, to live comfortably on a wage, there isn't much room to save much money because things are expensive. Again - I accept that I'm one of the lucky ones.
And before people go all "you could just live a life of dull drudgery eating only gruel and only going outside to see the sun on rare occasions" I say bread and roses, bread and roses.
Congratulations on living a very good life - I hope you realise just how lucky you are to be doing all those things.
No, not at all, it's not like throughout all of these personal revelations I've felt obliged to make to back up my Lefty credentials I have often made clear that I am one of the the luckier workers. Not at all, completely passed me by.
There's a character in Pratchett's Pyramids novel in the Discworld series whose mind is described as a steel ball, because his thoughts bounce off it and return to his centre no matter what thoughts he has or what external stimuli he receives. He is incapable of empathy because he is trapped in a mind prison of his own making - a mind prison that reinforces his own view of himself and the world around him. On his death, he is released from this mind prison, and is unable to move forward in the afterlife because he has no way of orienteering himself, no possible refence point for what he can or should do after his life of power grabbing and oppression. He is utterly alone, unable to progress into an imagined heaven, like all the other characters high and low we see who have died before him (typically at his will).
I don't know why that popped into my head and I felt the need to share that about a discussion on wealth redistribution and the relative poverty people live in in the face of people making this about how I, personally, live and whether or not I live a comfortable or not life to be allowed to argue in favour of policies that may alleviate misery for others whilst still allowing rich people to live lives of comfort, if not overabundance, because those rich people have the wealth.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
Which is why the election campaign could blow up for Labour. "Sir Keir, how much better will my life be after the first year of a Labour Government?"
The PM Presumptive looks at his shoes, no clear answer to be had...
They have a real problem with expectations management
Their polls leads are so huge, they've got millions of not-natural Labour voters looking at them, quite desperately, for hope and change
And if that fails to arrive? Ouch
We could enter a period of exceptional political volatility, even by the standards of the last ten years
This is an example of what I mean by lazy journalism.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/12/politics/house-republicans-robert-hur/index.html ...Hur's special counsel report found that Biden willfully retained classified information, including top secret documents, and knew he was in possession of some documents as far back as 2017. He also shared some of that information with the ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir.
The special counsel decided not to charge the president in the case – primarily because he found that nothing proved a willful intent by Biden to illegally hold onto classified information and the president cooperated with the investigation...
There's an obvious contradiction here - and in the report - but they just republish it, rather than question it.
And they do not even mention that Hur is a Cambridge-educated lawyer.
It would look like they were doing a hit job on Hur if they brought that up
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
Which is why the election campaign could blow up for Labour. "Sir Keir, how much better will my life be after the first year of a Labour Government?"
The PM Presumptive looks at his shoes, no clear answer to be had...
Perhaps. Maybe no-one believes in quick fixes. And perhaps another question would be: Why after your purge of the racists and buffoons has the membership in Rochdale not got the memo, and why are they allowed to be members in the first place?
This issue can blow up the votes of the Tories he needs to win, much more than he needs the Muslim vote.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Question is how much Change-with-a-capital-C is needed to improve things.
One of the apoligias for the Truss disaster was that Britain clearly was in a bad way, so we needed to try something drastic to shake ourselves out of it. Unfortunately, the effect of what was tried was to make things, if anything, worse.
The other way out of holes like that is the very cautious slow shuffle. Not dignified, not quick, not fun, and no, it might not work either. But it's what's on the menu, and nobody seems to have a more palatable alternative.
If we're lucky, there's enough low hanging fruit to pick and keep us fed on the way. Perhaps Just Trying Not To Be Awful is worth a shot.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Ah, what have we here? It's yet another "They're on the Left but not giving all their money away" hypocrite shocker!
Aka PB Tories who can't argue rationally against a point instead targeting the personal circumstances of the person making it.
It's of course much more comfortable to those rich lefties to try to deflect such an argument. I mean you worked hard for your possessions you aren't about to give them away for some absurd political ideology, now, are you.
lol - "rich lefty, poor lefty, lefty in between"
Brilliant. I thought I'd made the point well enough but it's nice to have it reinforced so neatly.
Ah, what have we here? It's yet another "They're on the Left but not giving all their money away" hypocrite shocker!
Aka PB Tories who can't argue rationally against a point instead targeting the personal circumstances of the person making it.
It's of course much more comfortable to those rich lefties to try to deflect such an argument. I mean you worked hard for your possessions you aren't about to give them away for some absurd political ideology, now, are you.
What possessions? My clothes? My books? My phone or laptop? Outside of that I do not really own much - I buy toiletries; I own a toothbrush and a razor. Maybe I own the bathroom in the house I live in because I paid to refurbish it because my dad refused, but outside of that? My furniture is all second hand or has been in the house since I was a literal child. I don't own a car - I use public transport. Half the stuff I use regularly to dull my mind, such as music or the odd PC game, aren't actually mine - they're rented to me. I own some cutlery, a few kitchen knives. I did buy my own fridge freezer and washer dryer (although I'm still using a 30 year old oven because I can't afford a new one any time soon).
How much do I have to not own before I'm allowed to suggest society may be a bit better if instead of allowing people to own slum empires or super yachts we redistribute some wealth to allow the millions of mal and undernourished people of this country (let alone the world) to eat? Can I only advocate for the homeless if I don't have a roof over my head (because I'm sure you'd take me much more seriously if I was pan handling on the street)? In a country where I'll be invited to "say that to my face" about some rich bastard who lives in a literal palace with literal gold all around him can I only complain about workers wages if I'm paid minimum wage to shine his shoes, or wipe his bottom?
OK, I'm going to say it: I find the whole Israel/Gaza/Palestine thing deeply deeply boring and I'm not sure I care.
Next.
Almost 13,000 dead kids - *yawns* One old man with sausage fingers gets bum cancer - hold my beer!
Most moral monarchist in the world!
You want to talk numbers?
"More than 7 million displaced by Sudan fighting as safe zones shrink
More than seven million people have been displaced by fighting in Sudan, the United Nations said on Thursday as more displaced people continued to flee a former safe haven."
And yet not a peep from the likes of you about Sudan. Nothing. Nothing at all. What is it about the Israel-Gaza conflict that so exercises you, whereas stuff in Africa, on an epically greater scale, makes you yawn?
i mean, what could it be? Why isn't Azhar Ali going on about Sudan in Rochdale? Why aren't there marches in London? What a mystery
Will you be marching in London, then?
In this case the only interest in the suffering in Sudan is as a whataboutery tool to smear people who support the Palestinian cause as antisemites.
I think you may be forgetting those of us who want the Sudanese people to live in peace and prosperity, and the Palestinians to be able to do the same. That great too quiet group who just want good, better and best things for all, better leaders and better governance, have had a tough year. A human task is to promote the humanist cause without distinction.
Ah, what have we here? It's yet another "They're on the Left but not giving all their money away" hypocrite shocker!
Aka PB Tories who can't argue rationally against a point instead targeting the personal circumstances of the person making it.
It's of course much more comfortable to those rich lefties to try to deflect such an argument. I mean you worked hard for your possessions you aren't about to give them away for some absurd political ideology, now, are you.
lol - "rich lefty, poor lefty, lefty in between"
Brilliant. I thought I'd made the point well enough but it's nice to have it reinforced so neatly.
As I said easy to laugh at the notion that those with abnormal wealth should make an abnormal contribution because you are campaigning for all of society to change and would happily pay more in such a society.
"Would happily pay more". But not of course "are actually paying more regardless of which government is in power".
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Or, worse, a far-left government: like Sinn Fein on acid.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
Ah, what have we here? It's yet another "They're on the Left but not giving all their money away" hypocrite shocker!
Aka PB Tories who can't argue rationally against a point instead targeting the personal circumstances of the person making it.
It's of course much more comfortable to those rich lefties to try to deflect such an argument. I mean you worked hard for your possessions you aren't about to give them away for some absurd political ideology, now, are you.
What possessions? My clothes? My books? My phone or laptop? Outside of that I do not really own much - I buy toiletries; I own a toothbrush and a razor. Maybe I own the bathroom in the house I live in because I paid to refurbish it because my dad refused, but outside of that? My furniture is all second hand or has been in the house since I was a literal child. I don't own a car - I use public transport. Half the stuff I use regularly to dull my mind, such as music or the odd PC game, aren't actually mine - they're rented to me. I own some cutlery, a few kitchen knives. I did buy my own fridge freezer and washer dryer (although I'm still using a 30 year old oven because I can't afford a new one any time soon).
How much do I have to not own before I'm allowed to suggest society may be a bit better if instead of allowing people to own slum empires or super yachts we redistribute some wealth to allow the millions of mal and undernourished people of this country (let alone the world) to eat? Can I only advocate for the homeless if I don't have a roof over my head (because I'm sure you'd take me much more seriously if I was pan handling on the street)? In a country where I'll be invited to "say that to my face" about some rich bastard who lives in a literal palace with literal gold all around him can I only complain about workers wages if I'm paid minimum wage to shine his shoes, or wipe his bottom?
You are doing a lot of protesting. You are living rent free in a house which is your Dad's he having been left it or somehow has it mortgage free after your mum died. I have no doubt that you would rather your mother was still alive and living in the house and I hope the discussion about it all is not too upsetting.
But the point is that you are the direct beneficiary of inherited property whoever owns it, you or your dad. And you want to dispossess people of inherited property.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
Which is why the election campaign could blow up for Labour. "Sir Keir, how much better will my life be after the first year of a Labour Government?"
The PM Presumptive looks at his shoes, no clear answer to be had...
They have a real problem with expectations management
Their polls leads are so huge, they've got millions of not-natural Labour voters looking at them, quite desperately, for hope and change
And if that fails to arrive? Ouch
We could enter a period of exceptional political volatility, even by the standards of the last ten years
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
Which is why the election campaign could blow up for Labour. "Sir Keir, how much better will my life be after the first year of a Labour Government?"
The PM Presumptive looks at his shoes, no clear answer to be had...
They have a real problem with expectations management
Their polls leads are so huge, they've got millions of not-natural Labour voters looking at them, quite desperately, for hope and change
And if that fails to arrive? Ouch
We could enter a period of exceptional political volatility, even by the standards of the last ten years
It's why the 28 Billion Pound row was so important. Acknowledge that things are not good and that the easy ways out are blocked or have been tried and failed. And whilst there has been some complaining, it doesn't seem to have had much effect.
I think a lot of people know, deep down, that there's a hangover incoming. The question isn't whether things will be better after year 1, they will probably be worse. More important is whether things are better in year 4.
First Light Fusion to become the first fusion company granted access to Sandia’s ‘Z’ Machine https://firstlightfusion.com/media/first-light-fusion-to-become-the-first-fusion-company-granted-access-to-sandias-z-machine 13 FEBRUARY 2024, Oxford UK – First Light Fusion (“First Light”), the world’s leading inertial fusion start-up, has been awarded two additional shots on the on the ‘Z Machine’ at Sandia National Laboratories (“Sandia”) next year, as the UK fusion leader deepens its partnership with the US government-funded research organisation.
The two additional shots will follow First Light’s first later this month (February 2024) when it will make history as the first private fusion company to conduct an experiment on Sandia’s ‘Z Machine’ in New Mexico. First Light is the only privately-funded fusion company to have this unprecedented access to the Z Machine.
The Z Machine is the most powerful pulsed power facility in the world. Using high magnetic fields, it produces pressures that can release up to 80 trillion watts of electricity in one, single ‘shot’. To compare, all the power plants in the world combined generate around 15 trillion watts. The Oxford-based pioneer will leverage that colossal power to fire a projectile at its unique amplifier technology, which has unlocked a new and proven method of inertial fusion.
Additional shots were awarded to First Light after its amplifier technology successfully broke the quartz pressure record on Sandia’s two-stage light-gas gun by a factor of 5 in June 2023, increasing the attainable pressure from 200 Gigapascals (GPa) to 1080 GPa. This pressure is equivalent to 2.5x the pressure of the Earth’s centre.
First Light is focusing on exploring the limits of its unique amplifier technology. Access to the Z Machine will allow First Light access to pressure regimes that simply aren’t possible anywhere else in the world, including on its own pulsed power machine, Machine 3, one the largest machines of its kind in Europe.
Funded by the US Department of Energy, Sandia allows the Z Machine to be used for multiple high-energy density research fields in stockpile stewardship science and other forms of energy generation. It fires around 200 shots per year...
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
Which is why the election campaign could blow up for Labour. "Sir Keir, how much better will my life be after the first year of a Labour Government?"
The PM Presumptive looks at his shoes, no clear answer to be had...
High on Starmer’s risk register for the campaign, is candidates and senior party figures giving the impression that nothing has changed since Corbyn was leader.
It doesn’t need many of the hardcore Palestine supporters holding segregated campaign meetings, nor many of the hardcore culture warriors going on about why women with penises should be playing women’s sport and anyone who disagrees is a Nazi bigot who doesn’t belong in society, for the floating voters to start deciding to sit on their hands. 90% of the party are not like those two examples, but the more extreme voices often get attention above their numbers.
The same goes, to a more limited extent, for a ‘bash the rich’ campaign, where ‘rich’ means someone who owns a house, or for the uncosted environmental packages which are currently under discussion within the party.
Lord Cameron could, even while retaining his peerage, relinquish his right to sit in the Lords and then be elected as a Conservative MP and then be elected party leader (who must sit in the House of Commons) and thus Prime Minister. That might be worth 100/1 since a safe seat can be arranged.
But the scheme discussed in the header for a PM in the House of Lords which even in 1940 was unacceptable, is far more than a 100/1 shot.
That's a myth about it being unacceptable in 1940 for a PM to sit in the Lords. To state the most obvious point: you do not risk losing a world war for a minor, and unembedded, point of constitutional nicety. Had the roles been reversed, with Churchill in the Lords and Halifax in the Commons (not that implausible a scenario - Churchill was the grandson of a duke; Halifax was his father's fourth son), would it really have been impossible for such an obvious candidate to serve as PM?
The very fact that Halifax was so seriously considered for the job of itself proves that his being a peer wasn't a bar. A drawback, certainly, but not a disqualification. Likewise, while the fact that Curzon was a peer was a fact held against him succeeding Bonar Law in 1923, it wasn't of itself decisive.
Indeed, IIRC, at least two schemes were considered whereby Halifax could address the Commons were he appointed. One was to amend the Commons' standing orders (or to pass a brief Act?) to allow him to speak from the despatch box; the other was for the king to put Halifax's peerages into abeyance and so to enable him to return to the Commons.
Obviously, circumstances in 1940 were rather more desperate than the politics-as-normal now, and such constitutional indulgences couldn't be expected as might have been necessary then. But the point is that they could have been done.
That much is true but in the conventional telling, it was Lord Halifax himself who decided that even with all these Heath-Robinson constitutional arrangements, he could not be PM from the Lords.
That was the public story. The reality was that Halifax realised that he could not be PM with Churchill in the cabinet, and that Churchill had to be in the cabinet. It wasn't (just) his peerage; it was the respective national leadership he and Churchill could (or couldn't) provide.
Perhaps. It is greatly ironic that Churchill entered Downing Street after Chamberlain's government fell because of the Norway campaign whose principal architect had been Winston Churchill.
Boris sought to draw parallels between himself and Churchill but perhaps in one way it is Rishi Sunak who is closer, being selected after what he had been loudly warning about (a market collapse triggered by Liz Truss's economic policies) came true.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Or, worse, a far-left government: like Sinn Fein on acid.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
It must deliver for its supporters.
It's much more likely to be hard right or even far right
Look around the western world:
Trump Meloni Le Pen Orban Wilders AfD True Finns Sweden Democrats Denmark in toto For Poland see Tusk's remarks below Etc etc etc
Britain is the great exception in swinging left, but if that swing does not work, it won't go further left, I am certain
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
Which is why the election campaign could blow up for Labour. "Sir Keir, how much better will my life be after the first year of a Labour Government?"
The PM Presumptive looks at his shoes, no clear answer to be had...
Someone of your financial and social status will see no discernable benefit to a change in the Government. In fact you may see your standard of living falling. Nonetheless if an alternative Government can make even the most minor changes to benefit children who are suffering from crumbling schools, tooth decay, Victorian diseases, hunger, violent child-on- child crime (yes, yes Labour run London, but violent crime is even worse in the Tory West Midlands- so that's a red herring) and currently inadequate living conditions, I believe things will only seem better.
You may have your work cut out on the doorsteps of Totnes as you step over some vagrant sleeping in the voter's porch, explaining this is all Starmer's fault.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Question is how much Change-with-a-capital-C is needed to improve things.
One of the apoligias for the Truss disaster was that Britain clearly was in a bad way, so we needed to try something drastic to shake ourselves out of it. Unfortunately, the effect of what was tried was to make things, if anything, worse.
The other way out of holes like that is the very cautious slow shuffle. Not dignified, not quick, not fun, and no, it might not work either. But it's what's on the menu, and nobody seems to have a more palatable alternative.
If we're lucky, there's enough low hanging fruit to pick and keep us fed on the way. Perhaps Just Trying Not To Be Awful is worth a shot.
The difficulty is that the situation for Britain is akin to trying to walk up a down escalator. There are significant headwinds that will make the situation worse, all other things being equal - the demographic transition, a growing population, international competition from authoritarian dictatorships, climate change, possibly others.
So a slow shuffle of improvements might still see the country end up lower down the escalator. The pace of improvements has to be great enough to overcome the headwinds. It's a big ask.
It's very disappointing to hear that Starmer's government has been such a failure, especially roughly nine months before its inception.
Meanwhile, I read that Michael Gove is concerned about the availability of housing, especially for younger people. So quick. The Tories are on a roll.
The opposition response to the sudden caring for younger people by the Tories should simply be “ they’re only bothering because it’s election year , if they win you’ll be forgotten again for the next 5 years “.
First Light Fusion to become the first fusion company granted access to Sandia’s ‘Z’ Machine https://firstlightfusion.com/media/first-light-fusion-to-become-the-first-fusion-company-granted-access-to-sandias-z-machine 13 FEBRUARY 2024, Oxford UK – First Light Fusion (“First Light”), the world’s leading inertial fusion start-up, has been awarded two additional shots on the on the ‘Z Machine’ at Sandia National Laboratories (“Sandia”) next year, as the UK fusion leader deepens its partnership with the US government-funded research organisation.
The two additional shots will follow First Light’s first later this month (February 2024) when it will make history as the first private fusion company to conduct an experiment on Sandia’s ‘Z Machine’ in New Mexico. First Light is the only privately-funded fusion company to have this unprecedented access to the Z Machine.
The Z Machine is the most powerful pulsed power facility in the world. Using high magnetic fields, it produces pressures that can release up to 80 trillion watts of electricity in one, single ‘shot’. To compare, all the power plants in the world combined generate around 15 trillion watts. The Oxford-based pioneer will leverage that colossal power to fire a projectile at its unique amplifier technology, which has unlocked a new and proven method of inertial fusion.
Additional shots were awarded to First Light after its amplifier technology successfully broke the quartz pressure record on Sandia’s two-stage light-gas gun by a factor of 5 in June 2023, increasing the attainable pressure from 200 Gigapascals (GPa) to 1080 GPa. This pressure is equivalent to 2.5x the pressure of the Earth’s centre.
First Light is focusing on exploring the limits of its unique amplifier technology. Access to the Z Machine will allow First Light access to pressure regimes that simply aren’t possible anywhere else in the world, including on its own pulsed power machine, Machine 3, one the largest machines of its kind in Europe.
Funded by the US Department of Energy, Sandia allows the Z Machine to be used for multiple high-energy density research fields in stockpile stewardship science and other forms of energy generation. It fires around 200 shots per year...
"can release up to 80 trillion watts of electricity in one, single ‘shot’"
Eugh
A tabletop Van de Graaf generator can produce hundreds of kilowatts of electricitypower. It's just a meaningless big number without duration.
Still, exciting stuff beyond the meaningless number-spaghetti.
ETA: Actually I wonder re the VdG generator. That was from a quick google, but at a few hundred kV (which is routine) that would require ~ an amp of discharge, which seems high even over a very short period.... Maybe better comparison is the tens of billions of Watts of power from a single lightning bolt, which also shows that the quoted number is a lot of instantaneous power.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Or, worse, a far-left government: like Sinn Fein on acid.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
It must deliver for its supporters.
It's much more likely to be hard right or even far right
Look around the western world:
Trump Meloni Le Pen Orban Wilders AfD True Finns Sweden Democrats Denmark in toto For Poland see Tusk's remarks below Etc etc etc
Britain is the great exception in swinging left, but if that swing does not work, it won't go further left, I am certain
Surely the question is whether Britain has been there, done that, in the shape of Boris and Brexit. Of course, Boris himself was not far right but he was a populist leader spouting a populist policy.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
Which is why the election campaign could blow up for Labour. "Sir Keir, how much better will my life be after the first year of a Labour Government?"
The PM Presumptive looks at his shoes, no clear answer to be had...
High on Starmer’s risk register for the campaign, is candidates and senior party figures giving the impression that nothing has changed since Corbyn was leader.
It doesn’t need many of the hardcore Palestine supporters holding segregated campaign meetings, nor many of the hardcore culture warriors going on about why women with penises should be playing women’s sport and anyone who disagrees is a Nazi bigot who doesn’t belong in society, for the floating voters to start deciding to sit on their hands. 90% of the party are not like those two examples, but the more extreme voices often get attention above their numbers. The same goes, to a more limited extent, for a ‘bash the rich’ campaign, where ‘rich’ means someone who owns a house.
A balanced comment, as you acknowledge that 90% of the party don't hold such views.
It's worth noting that the vast majority of the people who do hold the views you outline wouldn't touch Labour Party membership with a bargepole.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Question is how much Change-with-a-capital-C is needed to improve things.
One of the apoligias for the Truss disaster was that Britain clearly was in a bad way, so we needed to try something drastic to shake ourselves out of it. Unfortunately, the effect of what was tried was to make things, if anything, worse.
The other way out of holes like that is the very cautious slow shuffle. Not dignified, not quick, not fun, and no, it might not work either. But it's what's on the menu, and nobody seems to have a more palatable alternative.
If we're lucky, there's enough low hanging fruit to pick and keep us fed on the way. Perhaps Just Trying Not To Be Awful is worth a shot.
Not being utterly useless and not threatening fundamental democratic principles like the rule of law and human rights would be a start but is nowhere near enough. There needs to be a discernible improvement in living standards. Given the mess the Tories have made, that is a relatively low bar - but it still has to be got over.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
Which is why the election campaign could blow up for Labour. "Sir Keir, how much better will my life be after the first year of a Labour Government?"
The PM Presumptive looks at his shoes, no clear answer to be had...
They have a real problem with expectations management
Their polls leads are so huge, they've got millions of not-natural Labour voters looking at them, quite desperately, for hope and change
And if that fails to arrive? Ouch
We could enter a period of exceptional political volatility, even by the standards of the last ten years
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
Which is why the election campaign could blow up for Labour. "Sir Keir, how much better will my life be after the first year of a Labour Government?"
The PM Presumptive looks at his shoes, no clear answer to be had...
They have a real problem with expectations management
Their polls leads are so huge, they've got millions of not-natural Labour voters looking at them, quite desperately, for hope and change
And if that fails to arrive? Ouch
We could enter a period of exceptional political volatility, even by the standards of the last ten years
It's why the 28 Billion Pound row was so important. Acknowledge that things are not good and that the easy ways out are blocked or have been tried and failed. And whilst there has been some complaining, it doesn't seem to have had much effect.
I think a lot of people know, deep down, that there's a hangover incoming. The question isn't whether things will be better after year 1, they will probably be worse. More important is whether things are better in year 4.
Fair. Starmer will have four years. But there really needs to be SERIOUS improvement in those four years
So many of Britain's problems come from mass immigration, it is the great oft-unspoken cause of so many UK woes, from the creaking infra to pressures on NHS to our lame productivity
We are hooked on cheap immigration even of low skilled people yet it makes life worse for everyone in the medium term
How does leftwing lawyer Keir Starmer address that? I cannot see him doing it, yet that is what he must do
I am not optimistic. But I am patriotic. So it would be great if he surprises on the upside
Just worth giving credit where credit is due. For all the flack @isam sometimes gets I think I am right in saying it was him who highlighted the Rochdale Labour candidate issues here first.
It's very disappointing to hear that Starmer's government has been such a failure, especially roughly nine months before its inception.
Meanwhile, I read that Michael Gove is concerned about the availability of housing, especially for younger people. So quick. The Tories are on a roll.
The opposition response to the sudden caring for younger people by the Tories should simply be “ they’re only bothering because it’s election year , if they win you’ll be forgotten again for the next 5 years “.
I guess there's another Mr Gove around. The one who backed down in the face of Theresa Villiers and folded on reform of planning laws to actually...erm... build some houses for young people, can't be the same person.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Or, worse, a far-left government: like Sinn Fein on acid.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
It must deliver for its supporters.
It's much more likely to be hard right or even far right
Look around the western world:
Trump Meloni Le Pen Orban Wilders AfD True Finns Sweden Democrats Denmark in toto For Poland see Tusk's remarks below Etc etc etc
Britain is the great exception in swinging left, but if that swing does not work, it won't go further left, I am certain
Yes and no. While most threats globally to the mainstream have come from the right, not all have: Greece a decade ago gives one example, and the French populist left remain an under-rated threat due to flying under Le Pen's radar.
Labour remains vulnerable to capture from extremists, despite its reforms - and it was Labour's swing to the left that in no small way enabled Johnson in the Tories, both by refusing compromise on Brexit and by presenting a potent and credible enough threat to the right that they coalesced around the person best able to unite them and beat off Corbyn.
That said, dynamics alone mean that under a first-term Labour govt, the radical right will get first dibs at trying to break the system in the UK. Plus, if Galloway wins Rochdale, the consequences of that will also embolden and strengthen the far right.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Or, worse, a far-left government: like Sinn Fein on acid.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
It must deliver for its supporters.
It's much more likely to be hard right or even far right
Look around the western world:
Trump Meloni Le Pen Orban Wilders AfD True Finns Sweden Democrats Denmark in toto For Poland see Tusk's remarks below Etc etc etc
Britain is the great exception in swinging left, but if that swing does not work, it won't go further left, I am certain
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Or, worse, a far-left government: like Sinn Fein on acid.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
It must deliver for its supporters.
It's much more likely to be hard right or even far right
Look around the western world:
Trump Meloni Le Pen Orban Wilders AfD True Finns Sweden Democrats Denmark in toto For Poland see Tusk's remarks below Etc etc etc
Britain is the great exception in swinging left, but if that swing does not work, it won't go further left, I am certain
FWIW, Monbiot is also worried that if Starmer fails then the next lot will be alt-right populist authoritarians and so on.
Starmer needs a Minister for the Future Generation or some such title. Working across Whitehall to actually deliver something for younger people.
Edit: And of course Cummings is working on some kind of new party apparently: The StartUp.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
Which is why the election campaign could blow up for Labour. "Sir Keir, how much better will my life be after the first year of a Labour Government?"
The PM Presumptive looks at his shoes, no clear answer to be had...
High on Starmer’s risk register for the campaign, is candidates and senior party figures giving the impression that nothing has changed since Corbyn was leader.
It doesn’t need many of the hardcore Palestine supporters holding segregated campaign meetings, nor many of the hardcore culture warriors going on about why women with penises should be playing women’s sport and anyone who disagrees is a Nazi bigot who doesn’t belong in society, for the floating voters to start deciding to sit on their hands. 90% of the party are not like those two examples, but the more extreme voices often get attention above their numbers. The same goes, to a more limited extent, for a ‘bash the rich’ campaign, where ‘rich’ means someone who owns a house.
A balanced comment, as you acknowledge that 90% of the party don't hold such views.
It's worth noting that the vast majority of the people who do hold the views you outline wouldn't touch Labour Party membership with a bargepole.
It’s a risk for all parties, that a couple of idiots will disrupt a campaign. I’m sure someone at the UKIP end of the Tories will say something equally silly, perhaps around immigration, that will make for uncomfortable headlines.
Looking at today’s case of Mr Ali from Rochdale, it’s yet another failure of vetting. I’m constantly amazed that such people ever end up on the candidates’ list for a mainstream party.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Or, worse, a far-left government: like Sinn Fein on acid.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
It must deliver for its supporters.
It's much more likely to be hard right or even far right
Look around the western world:
Trump Meloni Le Pen Orban Wilders AfD True Finns Sweden Democrats Denmark in toto For Poland see Tusk's remarks below Etc etc etc
Britain is the great exception in swinging left, but if that swing does not work, it won't go further left, I am certain
Surely the question is whether Britain has been there, done that, in the shape of Boris and Brexit. Of course, Boris himself was not far right but he was a populist leader spouting a populist policy.
No, we've never gone near to an actual hard right government. Or even seriously rightwing government, unless you count "austerity"
That is the great irony and tragedy of the Tories, they talk rightwing and propose rightwing but they actual do pathetic tepid leftwing shit, we have high taxes, high immigration. Wokeness rampant, special trans generals in the Pride Army of Royal Drag Marines, so the stupid Tories get painted as basically fascist but the country does not actually benefit from rightwing policies coz HMG do not enact any. Get rid
If it ever happens, we will notice a genuine hard right government. We will definitely notice
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Or, worse, a far-left government: like Sinn Fein on acid.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
It must deliver for its supporters.
It's much more likely to be hard right or even far right
Look around the western world:
Trump Meloni Le Pen Orban Wilders AfD True Finns Sweden Democrats Denmark in toto For Poland see Tusk's remarks below Etc etc etc
Britain is the great exception in swinging left, but if that swing does not work, it won't go further left, I am certain
Surely the question is whether Britain has been there, done that, in the shape of Boris and Brexit. Of course, Boris himself was not far right but he was a populist leader spouting a populist policy.
No, we've never gone near to an actual hard right government. Or even seriously rightwing government, unless you count "austerity"
That is the great irony and tragedy of the Tories, they talk rightwing and propose rightwing but they actual do pathetic tepid leftwing shit, we have high taxes, high immigration. Wokeness rampant, special trans generals in the Pride Army of Royal Drag Marines, so the stupid Tories get painted as basically fascist but the country does not actually benefit from rightwing policies coz HMG do not enact any. Get rid
If it ever happens, we will notice a genuine hard right government. We will definitely notice
There's economically right and there's socially right. They are basically incompatible. Good luck having a low tax economy with low levels of immigration, for example.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Or, worse, a far-left government: like Sinn Fein on acid.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
It must deliver for its supporters.
It's much more likely to be hard right or even far right
Look around the western world:
Trump Meloni Le Pen Orban Wilders AfD True Finns Sweden Democrats Denmark in toto For Poland see Tusk's remarks below Etc etc etc
Britain is the great exception in swinging left, but if that swing does not work, it won't go further left, I am certain
Surely the question is whether Britain has been there, done that, in the shape of Boris and Brexit. Of course, Boris himself was not far right but he was a populist leader spouting a populist policy.
No, we've never gone near to an actual hard right government. Or even seriously rightwing government, unless you count "austerity"
That is the great irony and tragedy of the Tories, they talk rightwing and propose rightwing but they actual do pathetic tepid leftwing shit, we have high taxes, high immigration. Wokeness rampant, special trans generals in the Pride Army of Royal Drag Marines, so the stupid Tories get painted as basically fascist but the country does not actually benefit from rightwing policies coz HMG do not enact any. Get rid
If it ever happens, we will notice a genuine hard right government. We will definitely notice
Will they hire vans going around neighbourhoods promoting deportations or implement tax breaks for the super rich?
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Or, worse, a far-left government: like Sinn Fein on acid.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
It must deliver for its supporters.
It's much more likely to be hard right or even far right
Look around the western world:
Trump Meloni Le Pen Orban Wilders AfD True Finns Sweden Democrats Denmark in toto For Poland see Tusk's remarks below Etc etc etc
Britain is the great exception in swinging left, but if that swing does not work, it won't go further left, I am certain
Surely the question is whether Britain has been there, done that, in the shape of Boris and Brexit. Of course, Boris himself was not far right but he was a populist leader spouting a populist policy.
No, we've never gone near to an actual hard right government. Or even seriously rightwing government, unless you count "austerity"
That is the great irony and tragedy of the Tories, they talk rightwing and propose rightwing but they actual do pathetic tepid leftwing shit, we have high taxes, high immigration. Wokeness rampant, special trans generals in the Pride Army of Royal Drag Marines, so the stupid Tories get painted as basically fascist but the country does not actually benefit from rightwing policies coz HMG do not enact any. Get rid
If it ever happens, we will notice a genuine hard right government. We will definitely notice
I would say the Liz Truss government was far Right, though it concentrated (if that's the right word) on the Ayn Rand economic libertarianism rather than the jack-boot stuff. Where Liz would have gone after all that was done and dusted is a thought to conjure with.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Or, worse, a far-left government: like Sinn Fein on acid.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
It must deliver for its supporters.
It's much more likely to be hard right or even far right
Look around the western world:
Trump Meloni Le Pen Orban Wilders AfD True Finns Sweden Democrats Denmark in toto For Poland see Tusk's remarks below Etc etc etc
Britain is the great exception in swinging left, but if that swing does not work, it won't go further left, I am certain
Surely the question is whether Britain has been there, done that, in the shape of Boris and Brexit. Of course, Boris himself was not far right but he was a populist leader spouting a populist policy.
No, we've never gone near to an actual hard right government. Or even seriously rightwing government, unless you count "austerity"
That is the great irony and tragedy of the Tories, they talk rightwing and propose rightwing but they actual do pathetic tepid leftwing shit, we have high taxes, high immigration. Wokeness rampant, special trans generals in the Pride Army of Royal Drag Marines, so the stupid Tories get painted as basically fascist but the country does not actually benefit from rightwing policies coz HMG do not enact any. Get rid
If it ever happens, we will notice a genuine hard right government. We will definitely notice
I would say the Liz Truss government was far Right, though it concentrated (if that's the right word) on the Ayn Rand economic libertarianism rather than the jack-boot stuff. Where Liz would have gone after all that was done and dusted is a thought to conjure with.
Really? Far Right?
Do PB-ers not read history?
The Overton Window has shifted so far to the left Liz Truss is now Hitler. It's ludicrous
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Or, worse, a far-left government: like Sinn Fein on acid.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
It must deliver for its supporters.
It's much more likely to be hard right or even far right
Look around the western world:
Trump Meloni Le Pen Orban Wilders AfD True Finns Sweden Democrats Denmark in toto For Poland see Tusk's remarks below Etc etc etc
Britain is the great exception in swinging left, but if that swing does not work, it won't go further left, I am certain
Just one comment. Despite the rhetoric, Meloni has not done actual ultra rightish things. This could well prove to be true of the moves rightwards in France and Germany. In mature liberal democracies it is much easier to do ultra right (and ultra left) rhetoric than it is to do such ultra things. A mixture of the rule of law and our dislike of little girls crying as they hold their unhappy teddies (both outstandingly fine instincts, never leading us astray) are powerful forces.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Or, worse, a far-left government: like Sinn Fein on acid.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
It must deliver for its supporters.
It's much more likely to be hard right or even far right
Look around the western world:
Trump Meloni Le Pen Orban Wilders AfD True Finns Sweden Democrats Denmark in toto For Poland see Tusk's remarks below Etc etc etc
Britain is the great exception in swinging left, but if that swing does not work, it won't go further left, I am certain
Surely the question is whether Britain has been there, done that, in the shape of Boris and Brexit. Of course, Boris himself was not far right but he was a populist leader spouting a populist policy.
No, we've never gone near to an actual hard right government. Or even seriously rightwing government, unless you count "austerity"
That is the great irony and tragedy of the Tories, they talk rightwing and propose rightwing but they actual do pathetic tepid leftwing shit, we have high taxes, high immigration. Wokeness rampant, special trans generals in the Pride Army of Royal Drag Marines, so the stupid Tories get painted as basically fascist but the country does not actually benefit from rightwing policies coz HMG do not enact any. Get rid
If it ever happens, we will notice a genuine hard right government. We will definitely notice
I would say the Liz Truss government was far Right, though it concentrated (if that's the right word) on the Ayn Rand economic libertarianism rather than the jack-boot stuff. Where Liz would have gone after all that was done and dusted is a thought to conjure with.
She was turfed out for wanting Tony Blair's income tax policy.
New Labour in general would be seen as far right in the current political climate. That's how far we've drifted to the left.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Or, worse, a far-left government: like Sinn Fein on acid.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
It must deliver for its supporters.
It's much more likely to be hard right or even far right
Look around the western world:
Trump Meloni Le Pen Orban Wilders AfD True Finns Sweden Democrats Denmark in toto For Poland see Tusk's remarks below Etc etc etc
Britain is the great exception in swinging left, but if that swing does not work, it won't go further left, I am certain
Surely the question is whether Britain has been there, done that, in the shape of Boris and Brexit. Of course, Boris himself was not far right but he was a populist leader spouting a populist policy.
No, we've never gone near to an actual hard right government. Or even seriously rightwing government, unless you count "austerity"
That is the great irony and tragedy of the Tories, they talk rightwing and propose rightwing but they actual do pathetic tepid leftwing shit, we have high taxes, high immigration. Wokeness rampant, special trans generals in the Pride Army of Royal Drag Marines, so the stupid Tories get painted as basically fascist but the country does not actually benefit from rightwing policies coz HMG do not enact any. Get rid
If it ever happens, we will notice a genuine hard right government. We will definitely notice
There's economically right and there's socially right. They are basically incompatible. Good luck having a low tax economy with low levels of immigration, for example.
I see your point, but some governments are low tax and low immigration - just not in the west
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Or, worse, a far-left government: like Sinn Fein on acid.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
It must deliver for its supporters.
It's much more likely to be hard right or even far right
Look around the western world:
Trump Meloni Le Pen Orban Wilders AfD True Finns Sweden Democrats Denmark in toto For Poland see Tusk's remarks below Etc etc etc
Britain is the great exception in swinging left, but if that swing does not work, it won't go further left, I am certain
Surely the question is whether Britain has been there, done that, in the shape of Boris and Brexit. Of course, Boris himself was not far right but he was a populist leader spouting a populist policy.
No, we've never gone near to an actual hard right government. Or even seriously rightwing government, unless you count "austerity"
That is the great irony and tragedy of the Tories, they talk rightwing and propose rightwing but they actual do pathetic tepid leftwing shit, we have high taxes, high immigration. Wokeness rampant, special trans generals in the Pride Army of Royal Drag Marines, so the stupid Tories get painted as basically fascist but the country does not actually benefit from rightwing policies coz HMG do not enact any. Get rid
If it ever happens, we will notice a genuine hard right government. We will definitely notice
Yes. By current standards on any measure we have never in modern times had a hard right or hard left government. Scandalously Park Lane has not yet run with the blood of dukes and earls, and appallingly 5 year olds are not allowed to climb up chimneys.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Or, worse, a far-left government: like Sinn Fein on acid.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
It must deliver for its supporters.
It's much more likely to be hard right or even far right
Look around the western world:
Trump Meloni Le Pen Orban Wilders AfD True Finns Sweden Democrats Denmark in toto For Poland see Tusk's remarks below Etc etc etc
Britain is the great exception in swinging left, but if that swing does not work, it won't go further left, I am certain
Surely the question is whether Britain has been there, done that, in the shape of Boris and Brexit. Of course, Boris himself was not far right but he was a populist leader spouting a populist policy.
No, we've never gone near to an actual hard right government. Or even seriously rightwing government, unless you count "austerity"
That is the great irony and tragedy of the Tories, they talk rightwing and propose rightwing but they actual do pathetic tepid leftwing shit, we have high taxes, high immigration. Wokeness rampant, special trans generals in the Pride Army of Royal Drag Marines, so the stupid Tories get painted as basically fascist but the country does not actually benefit from rightwing policies coz HMG do not enact any. Get rid
If it ever happens, we will notice a genuine hard right government. We will definitely notice
There's economically right and there's socially right. They are basically incompatible. Good luck having a low tax economy with low levels of immigration, for example.
I see your point, but some governments are low tax and low immigration - just not in the west
Saudi Arabia Thailand Hungary Brunei....
40% of the Saudi population is (or are) foreign nationals.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Or, worse, a far-left government: like Sinn Fein on acid.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
It must deliver for its supporters.
It's much more likely to be hard right or even far right
Look around the western world:
Trump Meloni Le Pen Orban Wilders AfD True Finns Sweden Democrats Denmark in toto For Poland see Tusk's remarks below Etc etc etc
Britain is the great exception in swinging left, but if that swing does not work, it won't go further left, I am certain
Surely the question is whether Britain has been there, done that, in the shape of Boris and Brexit. Of course, Boris himself was not far right but he was a populist leader spouting a populist policy.
No, we've never gone near to an actual hard right government. Or even seriously rightwing government, unless you count "austerity"
That is the great irony and tragedy of the Tories, they talk rightwing and propose rightwing but they actual do pathetic tepid leftwing shit, we have high taxes, high immigration. Wokeness rampant, special trans generals in the Pride Army of Royal Drag Marines, so the stupid Tories get painted as basically fascist but the country does not actually benefit from rightwing policies coz HMG do not enact any. Get rid
If it ever happens, we will notice a genuine hard right government. We will definitely notice
There's economically right and there's socially right. They are basically incompatible. Good luck having a low tax economy with low levels of immigration, for example.
Immigration can be managed in different ways. You don't have to start from the assumption that people who come to work should have a pathway to citizenship.
If we do get a Labour government - still an if as far as I am concerned - it will be on the back of votes from the under-60s. A government elected by working people. That, not class, is what will matter.
And what happens when Labour are unable to improve their lot?
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
If Labour fails then I guess the Tories have a chance if they haven't gone too far down the Trump and MAGA rabbit hole. Much will depend on who they make their next leader.
If Labour fail dramatically I suspect we will see a British Trump, Wilders or Le Pen. The voters will lurch hard right in despair
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
It's important for the country that the next government is a lot better than this one. Relentless decline is clearly going to lead to dramatic reaction at some point.
Indeed. I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. Starmer seems scared of his own shadow and that lack of self-/confidence feeds through to Labour. There are some capable members of the Shadow Cabinet but overall, the quality is some way below Labour in the mid-90s, and the vision, positivity and programme that Blair, Brown and team laid out (even if overdone at the time), is completely lacking now.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Or, worse, a far-left government: like Sinn Fein on acid.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
It must deliver for its supporters.
It's much more likely to be hard right or even far right
Look around the western world:
Trump Meloni Le Pen Orban Wilders AfD True Finns Sweden Democrats Denmark in toto For Poland see Tusk's remarks below Etc etc etc
Britain is the great exception in swinging left, but if that swing does not work, it won't go further left, I am certain
Just one comment. Despite the rhetoric, Meloni has not done actual ultra rightish things. This could well prove to be true of the moves rightwards in France and Germany. In mature liberal democracies it is much easier to do ultra right (and ultra left) rhetoric than it is to do such ultra things. A mixture of the rule of law and our dislike of little girls crying as they hold their unhappy teddies (both outstandingly fine instincts, never leading us astray) are powerful forces.
Meloni is hamstrung by the relative weakness of the Italian economy, and being in the EU
I reckon Le Pen would be much more bracing, and France is much more willing to tell Brussels to do one. And I am absolutely sure the AfD would be pretty scary (however I am highly skeptical they will ever achieve serious power)
All that said, with all these countries swinging right, there may come a time when a tipping point is reached and suddenly everyone goes full El Salvador
Comments
If they also want to say to my grandparents "by an accident of the time you were born you have a house (that you bought for like £9k literally 50 years ago) that is now worth £500,000, but you literally only have liquid assets of less than £10k, so we're going to take your 3 bedroom house, downsize you into a bungalow and not reimburse you the value of the house" I would be somewhat fucked financially in the long term, but would understand why it was done.
The issue isn't the inherent morality of inheritance - it is the fact that wealth accumulation has been allowed to happen in a few minor ways - by being lucky and owning property in the right place at the right time, by being lucky and inheriting it, or by being lucky and running a business that happens to get successful at the right place and right time.
I'm a worker - I get paid a wage. I'm a lucky worker - I don't have to pay rent - but I still get paid less then half the people in this country and get by putting away a couple of hundred quid a month to save up for the big things I can't afford. And that's being a lucky worker. It sucks, and yet I'm lucky.
The Tories have this problem. Labour are supposed to have purged itself of bad actors. This is proof they have not.
The extra votes they need are two-three million usually Tory ones. They seem not have learned this at the local level.
https://x.com/collinrugg/status/1757217532921221518?s=46
During El Niño events there’s always a few of these multi-million dollar real estate landslides, then when it’s La Niña they’re back to forest fires.
Look, it's fine. You deserve everything you have and so does your dad and I would be there at the garden gate defending you from the mob if they came for you.
But, like Socrates discovered when creating the Republic, the devil is in the detail.
We are joshing you about how owning an inherited house fits in with your desire to take inherited wealth from people but the serious point is that your ideal society will trample all over your special pleading and will, indeed has many times throughout history when this has been tried, take you and your father out in tumbrils for a grisly fate and move 20 people into your house because those people have less than you.
If you take ownership of wealth via the mechanisms of wealth and wealth creation (and land is a means of wealth creation beyond development) - then these things won't necessarily crash.
I also feel that people have mistaken my whole "I'm lucky enough to live in a mortgage free house" position. I don't own a mortgage free house. My dad does. I just live in it. It got paid off when my mum died, and my dad refused to live in it any more after that. So I just live in it rent free. Again - I'm lucky as hell. But it isn't my asset. As he has reminded me many, many times.
Oh - don't think it applies to you? Just like everyone wants tax rises for other people.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/12/politics/house-republicans-robert-hur/index.html
...Hur's special counsel report found that Biden willfully retained classified information, including top secret documents, and knew he was in possession of some documents as far back as 2017. He also shared some of that information with the ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir.
The special counsel decided not to charge the president in the case – primarily because he found that nothing proved a willful intent by Biden to illegally hold onto classified information and the president cooperated with the investigation...
There's an obvious contradiction here - and in the report - but they just republish it, rather than question it.
Because I see absolutely no signs of them doing that. No plans, no policies, no hint of pzazz, nothing
Indeed it's quite possible Labour will make life worse by failing to take a grip on migration, and adding layers of Woke shit that make life even more tiresome, and business even more difficult
What then? Whither the voter?
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cost-of-brexit-is-a-5-percent-knock-to-uk-economy-says-goldman-sachs-pwwqwhfwc (£££)
https://www.bild.de/politik/ausland/politik-ausland/polens-regierungschef-warnt-vor-migration-dann-wird-unsere-welt-zusammenbrechen-87129682.bild.html
So it is quite important, especially if you are on the left, that Starmer gets shit done
Also - this isn't about the virtues of individuals, this is about an entire system of wealth accumulation that is reinforced and propped up by the policies of the state! Individuals can only do so much, and the state we live under. I would have absolutely no problem with a system that decided the wealthiest should pay more to make sure the poorest had a better standard of living, and if I fell into the category of "wealthiest" then I'd be happy for them to take my stuff. To give to others.
So they were useless by the 1920s
The alternative, suggested at the time, was to build lengthened, faster QEs. Since the German naval challenge was facing back, cut down one ship. So QEs with 28-29 knots.
Fishers Freaks became the first (relatively) homogeneous aircraft carrier squadron. Admiral Henderson used them to invent carrier operations. They served well into WWII, while the R class were an embarrassment that had to be hidden from actual combat.
Aka PB Tories who can't argue rationally against a point instead targeting the personal circumstances of the person making it.
We live in an age where globalised megamillionaires build space forces for fun and our children cannot buy homes. We cannot fix our teeth and the Government is importing hundreds of thousands of people per year to compete with us. Participation is low and driven lower by spurious ID requirements. Disillusion is everywhere and we are so distorted in our perception that wars thousands of miles away engage our emotions. A by-election is deteriorating into farce as each candidate is disavowed. We are increasingly poor and the country is possibly insane and certainly badly run.
Nobody knows how to fix this with conventional methods.
In such an environment, unconventional methods will be tried. We have the joy-of-destruction in the bizarre Milei in Argentina. If we *just* end up with, say, Wilsonian/Callaghan socialism we will count ourselves lucky.
Rehan Ahmed is waiting to hear whether he can play in the third Test after the England tour was hit by more visa issues.
Ahmed was held briefly at Rajkot airport when the team returned to India after their break in the UAE because he only had a single entry visa.
He was eventually allowed to leave and the England team travelled to their hotel in Rajkot on Monday night together. Officials are confident the situation can be resolved in the next 48 hours but after the problems with Shoaib Bashir’s visa at the start of the tour, there will be an anxious wait until Ahmed is cleared with an emergency visa to stay in the country.
It is staggering that after all publicity and problems around Bashir’s visa that it was not noticed that Ahmed only had a single entry visa for India. The trip to the UAE was organised months ago. Ahmed, like Bashir, has Pakistani heritage although it is not clear if that will be an issue this time.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2024/02/13/rehan-ahmed-visa-problem-india-england-third-test-rajkot/
The very fact that Halifax was so seriously considered for the job of itself proves that his being a peer wasn't a bar. A drawback, certainly, but not a disqualification. Likewise, while the fact that Curzon was a peer was a fact held against him succeeding Bonar Law in 1923, it wasn't of itself decisive.
Indeed, IIRC, at least two schemes were considered whereby Halifax could address the Commons were he appointed. One was to amend the Commons' standing orders (or to pass a brief Act?) to allow him to speak from the despatch box; the other was for the king to put Halifax's peerages into abeyance and so to enable him to return to the Commons.
Obviously, circumstances in 1940 were rather more desperate than the politics-as-normal now, and such constitutional indulgences couldn't be expected as might have been necessary then. But the point is that they could have been done.
Dramatic, because they mean hitting the managerial-but-no-domain-expertise class head on. And that is what politics (and the permanent apparatus of government) is full of.
And before people go all "you could just live a life of dull drudgery eating only gruel and only going outside to see the sun on rare occasions" I say bread and roses, bread and roses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
The PM Presumptive looks at his shoes, no clear answer to be had...
The dialectic of 'left' and 'right' in politics gives the appearance of reflecting the idea that individual nature is somewhat to the right, and collective nature rather more to the left. Maybe this is because cooperation and competition (apparent opposites) are both basic to our evolved nature.
"None of the current cabinet members will be in Government!"
And there was much rejoicing...
There's a character in Pratchett's Pyramids novel in the Discworld series whose mind is described as a steel ball, because his thoughts bounce off it and return to his centre no matter what thoughts he has or what external stimuli he receives. He is incapable of empathy because he is trapped in a mind prison of his own making - a mind prison that reinforces his own view of himself and the world around him. On his death, he is released from this mind prison, and is unable to move forward in the afterlife because he has no way of orienteering himself, no possible refence point for what he can or should do after his life of power grabbing and oppression. He is utterly alone, unable to progress into an imagined heaven, like all the other characters high and low we see who have died before him (typically at his will).
I don't know why that popped into my head and I felt the need to share that about a discussion on wealth redistribution and the relative poverty people live in in the face of people making this about how I, personally, live and whether or not I live a comfortable or not life to be allowed to argue in favour of policies that may alleviate misery for others whilst still allowing rich people to live lives of comfort, if not overabundance, because those rich people have the wealth.
Their polls leads are so huge, they've got millions of not-natural Labour voters looking at them, quite desperately, for hope and change
And if that fails to arrive? Ouch
We could enter a period of exceptional political volatility, even by the standards of the last ten years
This issue can blow up the votes of the Tories he needs to win, much more than he needs the Muslim vote.
One of the apoligias for the Truss disaster was that Britain clearly was in a bad way, so we needed to try something drastic to shake ourselves out of it. Unfortunately, the effect of what was tried was to make things, if anything, worse.
The other way out of holes like that is the very cautious slow shuffle. Not dignified, not quick, not fun, and no, it might not work either. But it's what's on the menu, and nobody seems to have a more palatable alternative.
If we're lucky, there's enough low hanging fruit to pick and keep us fed on the way. Perhaps Just Trying Not To Be Awful is worth a shot.
But yes, the risk of the far-/populist-right is very real.
*Something* will rise up as opposition to Labour once they start failing and flailing in office. From the left, no doubt the Lib Dems, Greens and maybe Galloway's current mob will seek opportunity but 30% of the country will always be right-of-centre: if not the Tories, who do they turn to?
Brilliant. I thought I'd made the point well enough but it's nice to have it reinforced so neatly.
How much do I have to not own before I'm allowed to suggest society may be a bit better if instead of allowing people to own slum empires or super yachts we redistribute some wealth to allow the millions of mal and undernourished people of this country (let alone the world) to eat? Can I only advocate for the homeless if I don't have a roof over my head (because I'm sure you'd take me much more seriously if I was pan handling on the street)? In a country where I'll be invited to "say that to my face" about some rich bastard who lives in a literal palace with literal gold all around him can I only complain about workers wages if I'm paid minimum wage to shine his shoes, or wipe his bottom?
Another U-turn...
"Would happily pay more". But not of course "are actually paying more regardless of which government is in power".
Amiright.
I deeply fear a Corbynista government in blood and soul that would exappropriate pensions, savings and property and completely Venezuela the country.
Yes, it could happen here. That's why I don't want the next Labour government to "fail", despite being a staunch Tory.
It must deliver for its supporters.
But the point is that you are the direct beneficiary of inherited property whoever owns it, you or your dad. And you want to dispossess people of inherited property.
Is all.
Meanwhile, I read that Michael Gove is concerned about the availability of housing, especially for younger people. So quick. The Tories are on a roll.
I think a lot of people know, deep down, that there's a hangover incoming. The question isn't whether things will be better after year 1, they will probably be worse. More important is whether things are better in year 4.
First Light Fusion to become the first fusion company granted access to Sandia’s ‘Z’ Machine
https://firstlightfusion.com/media/first-light-fusion-to-become-the-first-fusion-company-granted-access-to-sandias-z-machine
13 FEBRUARY 2024, Oxford UK – First Light Fusion (“First Light”), the world’s leading inertial fusion start-up, has been awarded two additional shots on the on the ‘Z Machine’ at Sandia National Laboratories (“Sandia”) next year, as the UK fusion leader deepens its partnership with the US government-funded research organisation.
The two additional shots will follow First Light’s first later this month (February 2024) when it will make history as the first private fusion company to conduct an experiment on Sandia’s ‘Z Machine’ in New Mexico. First Light is the only privately-funded fusion company to have this unprecedented access to the Z Machine.
The Z Machine is the most powerful pulsed power facility in the world. Using high magnetic fields, it produces pressures that can release up to 80 trillion watts of electricity in one, single ‘shot’. To compare, all the power plants in the world combined generate around 15 trillion watts. The Oxford-based pioneer will leverage that colossal power to fire a projectile at its unique amplifier technology, which has unlocked a new and proven method of inertial fusion.
Additional shots were awarded to First Light after its amplifier technology successfully broke the quartz pressure record on Sandia’s two-stage light-gas gun by a factor of 5 in June 2023, increasing the attainable pressure from 200 Gigapascals (GPa) to 1080 GPa. This pressure is equivalent to 2.5x the pressure of the Earth’s centre.
First Light is focusing on exploring the limits of its unique amplifier technology. Access to the Z Machine will allow First Light access to pressure regimes that simply aren’t possible anywhere else in the world, including on its own pulsed power machine, Machine 3, one the largest machines of its kind in Europe.
Funded by the US Department of Energy, Sandia allows the Z Machine to be used for multiple high-energy density research fields in stockpile stewardship science and other forms of energy generation. It fires around 200 shots per year...
For a commercial fusion plant, you'd need something in the order of a shot every 30 seconds. Which is what FLF are planning.
https://firstlightfusion.com/technology/power-plant
It doesn’t need many of the hardcore Palestine supporters holding segregated campaign meetings, nor many of the hardcore culture warriors going on about why women with penises should be playing women’s sport and anyone who disagrees is a Nazi bigot who doesn’t belong in society, for the floating voters to start deciding to sit on their hands. 90% of the party are not like those two examples, but the more extreme voices often get attention above their numbers.
The same goes, to a more limited extent, for a ‘bash the rich’ campaign, where ‘rich’ means someone who owns a house, or for the uncosted environmental packages which are currently under discussion within the party.
Boris sought to draw parallels between himself and Churchill but perhaps in one way it is Rishi Sunak who is closer, being selected after what he had been loudly warning about (a market collapse triggered by Liz Truss's economic policies) came true.
Look around the western world:
Trump
Meloni
Le Pen
Orban
Wilders
AfD
True Finns
Sweden Democrats
Denmark in toto
For Poland see Tusk's remarks below
Etc etc etc
Britain is the great exception in swinging left, but if that swing does not work, it won't go further left, I am certain
You may have your work cut out on the doorsteps of Totnes as you step over some vagrant sleeping in the voter's porch, explaining this is all Starmer's fault.
Cue D.Ream!
So a slow shuffle of improvements might still see the country end up lower down the escalator. The pace of improvements has to be great enough to overcome the headwinds. It's a big ask.
The opposition response to the sudden caring for younger people by the Tories should simply be “ they’re only bothering because it’s election year , if they win you’ll be forgotten again for the next 5 years “.
Eugh
A tabletop Van de Graaf generator can produce hundreds of kilowatts of electricity power. It's just a meaningless big number without duration.
Still, exciting stuff beyond the meaningless number-spaghetti.
ETA: Actually I wonder re the VdG generator. That was from a quick google, but at a few hundred kV (which is routine) that would require ~ an amp of discharge, which seems high even over a very short period.... Maybe better comparison is the tens of billions of Watts of power from a single lightning bolt, which also shows that the quoted number is a lot of instantaneous power.
It's worth noting that the vast majority of the people who do hold the views you outline wouldn't touch Labour Party membership with a bargepole.
So many of Britain's problems come from mass immigration, it is the great oft-unspoken cause of so many UK woes, from the creaking infra to pressures on NHS to our lame productivity
We are hooked on cheap immigration even of low skilled people yet it makes life worse for everyone in the medium term
How does leftwing lawyer Keir Starmer address that? I cannot see him doing it, yet that is what he must do
I am not optimistic. But I am patriotic. So it would be great if he surprises on the upside
Labour remains vulnerable to capture from extremists, despite its reforms - and it was Labour's swing to the left that in no small way enabled Johnson in the Tories, both by refusing compromise on Brexit and by presenting a potent and credible enough threat to the right that they coalesced around the person best able to unite them and beat off Corbyn.
That said, dynamics alone mean that under a first-term Labour govt, the radical right will get first dibs at trying to break the system in the UK. Plus, if Galloway wins Rochdale, the consequences of that will also embolden and strengthen the far right.
Starmer needs a Minister for the Future Generation or some such title. Working across Whitehall to actually deliver something for younger people.
Edit: And of course Cummings is working on some kind of new party apparently: The StartUp.
Looking at today’s case of Mr Ali from Rochdale, it’s yet another failure of vetting. I’m constantly amazed that such people ever end up on the candidates’ list for a mainstream party.
That is the great irony and tragedy of the Tories, they talk rightwing and propose rightwing but they actual do pathetic tepid leftwing shit, we have high taxes, high immigration. Wokeness rampant, special trans generals in the Pride Army of Royal Drag Marines, so the stupid Tories get painted as basically fascist but the country does not actually benefit from rightwing policies coz HMG do not enact any. Get rid
If it ever happens, we will notice a genuine hard right government. We will definitely notice
Do PB-ers not read history?
The Overton Window has shifted so far to the left Liz Truss is now Hitler. It's ludicrous
New Labour in general would be seen as far right in the current political climate. That's how far we've drifted to the left.
Saudi Arabia
Thailand
Hungary
Brunei....
I reckon Le Pen would be much more bracing, and France is much more willing to tell Brussels to do one. And I am absolutely sure the AfD would be pretty scary (however I am highly skeptical they will ever achieve serious power)
All that said, with all these countries swinging right, there may come a time when a tipping point is reached and suddenly everyone goes full El Salvador