The path is now very clear for 30p Lee. Defect to UFUK. Noisily. Denouncing the Tories and everything they don't stand for. Foam on about "proper British values" which are anything but. Become the totem for the angry gammonite WWC. Lead the UFUK block in the Commons which will be bigger than the LibDem block as he shows the way for other angry doomed Tories. With a GBeebies show as a pulpit every week. Winning his seat at the GE.
Or, don't. Offer up an insincere apology and get the Tory whip back, only to get demolished at the election.
Didn't Tice offer him £400,000 to join ?
The rancour in politics is hard to witness and it is only getting worse
I did suggest yesterday that post GE the right may come together probably taking over the conservative party
Nothing in the last few days has done anything to change my view
Mind you Starmer has his own issues with a Savanta poll just now saying that 40% think he has an antisemitic problem in his party
Given the current Govt is the most left wing of my lifetime, I do hope the centre right takes back control of the Tory party!
People keep saying that but then don’t provide examples to back it up… so what makes this Tory Government left wing?
People keep asking me this then totally ignoring me when I provide concrete examples:
- Largest set of tax rises since the war - Huge growth in bureaucracy i.e. civil service - Govt paying part of everyone's energy bills - Huge growth in NHS spending
Well, I agree with you regarding energy bills. I think that kind of government support is dumb and means that energy demand doesn't fall as much as it should.
But are you sure regarding bureaucracy? It is worth remembering that - because spending on the NHS and pensions is baked in to keep rising - pretty much every other department is seeing real terms reductions in spending.
And tax rises? Are you sure there too? The early Thatcher budgets were massively tax raising as she closed the big hole in the finances left by Callaghan. (The charts are here: https://obr.uk/box/the-uks-tax-burden-in-historical-and-international-context/ - and '79 to '83 saw a 5 percentage point increase in tax take as a % of GDP against 2 percentage points in the the last few years.)
Basically the civil service is now 26% bigger than it was in 2016 but still not as big as it was in 2005. The Civil Service is also becoming more senior with an ever higher percentage in the higher paid ranks or more chiefs and fewer Indians if you are still allowed to say that.
These figures can be distorted by jobs being contracted out and other definitional problems but a 26% increase is still pretty remarkable. Much of Osborne's good work has been undone for very little obvious benefit.
I would say that this is just part of a clumsy plan to rewrite vast amounts of legislation after Brexit and the obsession post Cameron/Osbourne of creating new processes, mechanisms and agencies to solve problems (something @Malmesbury is very insighftful about), and the never ending ambition of politicians to take this easy but unproductive route rather than trying to find alternative solutions.
If you want to look at an example of the above in action, look up the Office for local government (OFLOG), an new department created within an existing department, with a new highly paid chief exec etc; but no one knows what OFLOG is for, it seems to duplicate the existing function of the department for levelling up, housing and communities, which is the sponsor for local government. It looks like civil servants expanding their empire and finding willing supporters amongst politicians.
I note Susan Hall uses the approved Conservative Party jargon of "anti-Muslim hatred" rather than saying "Islamophobia". God knows why they feel the need to quibble over this. Kemi Badenoch tried explaining.
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism are two separate terms, why not two terms on the opposite side of the "debate"?
Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are intended to mean different things. In so far as I understand the Conservative Party's quibble, anti-Muslim hatred and Islamophobia mean the same thing, but wurble wurble Labour said something wurble.
As long as people make their meaning clear they are entitled to choose their words, and are not obliged to copy others.
One of the problems with 'Islamophobia' is that it expresses fear rather than hatred of Islam; a further problem is that distinguishing between 'Islam' 'Islamic' (hooray) and 'Islamism' and 'Islamist' (boo) is too hard except for those paying an awful lot of attention. We live in a world where large numbers of people confuse 'paedophile' and 'paediatrician'.
They are entitled to choose their words. I think they're being stupid quibbling over minor differences of wording while they're trying to repair the damage done to the party's reputation.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
I note Susan Hall uses the approved Conservative Party jargon of "anti-Muslim hatred" rather than saying "Islamophobia". God knows why they feel the need to quibble over this. Kemi Badenoch tried explaining.
In fairness Bad Enoch is probably right one this one matter. Islamophobia is probably the wrong term – it presents as psychological illness, such as agoraphobia or koumpounophobia (fear of buttons).
Anti-Muslim hatred is actually a better term but unlikely to gain currency.
I note Susan Hall uses the approved Conservative Party jargon of "anti-Muslim hatred" rather than saying "Islamophobia". God knows why they feel the need to quibble over this. Kemi Badenoch tried explaining.
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism are two separate terms, why not two terms on the opposite side of the "debate"?
Islamophobia might be construed as 'fear of Islamists' which is (a) the reaction they crave and (b) far too common to merit disapproval. Wasn't the Speaker motivated by Islamophobia last week when he tore up the rule book to protect MPs from Islamist violence?
No-one defines Islamophobia as "fear of Islamists". Don't be silly.
There'd be quite a stir if someone postulated antisemitism as meaning fear of Benjamin Netanyahu.
I note Susan Hall uses the approved Conservative Party jargon of "anti-Muslim hatred" rather than saying "Islamophobia". God knows why they feel the need to quibble over this. Kemi Badenoch tried explaining.
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism are two separate terms, why not two terms on the opposite side of the "debate"?
Antisemitism and anti zionism are two entirely seperate things, at least in theory, which is not to say that some people don't conflate the two or use one as a vehicle for the other. You get a fair number of anti zionist Jews, both for political and religious reasons, for one thing. It seems to me that the Tory dislike of Islamophobic as a term is that they want to be free to criticise Islam the religion. But AIUI the term Islamophobic means hatred of Muslims, not criticism of Islam, so it seems a rather odd thing to get hung up on. If I was a cynic I'd just say the Tories wanted anti muslim bigots to vote for them and this is the only acceptable way of trying to achieve that. I guess you also have to wonder what would happen if some Muslim councillor in Rochdale said he didn't hate Jews but thought that Judaism was awful, I can't help thinking he'd be out on his ear pdq.
On the other hand, if someone said that they don't hate Christians but think that Christianity is awful, it would be completely unremarkable.
The outrageous treatment of the Scottish at Westminster only proves the point. Scotland must have independence or Gaza will never be free...
Err The Scots
I almost typed Scotch - was trying to satirise the kind of rant that will be written into SNP leaflets.
Well, if you insist that some MPs are to be treated as second class MPs and not allowed to do what other MPs are permitted to do, then what do you expect?
The matter is still rumbling on - but the Speaker is running out of time to resolve it equitably.
Its back to the aim. The SNP have no interest in Gaza other that political shenanigans. What they claim they wanted they have achieved - a call for an immediate ceasefire which is not what the government wanted. The absolute definition of what opposition days are there to try and achieve.
Nevertheless: the rules were broken in a way seriously inimical to the SNP and *any* non-majority party.
It astounds me that PBers, intelligent or otherwise, can't accept that the SNP hold the policy in good faith, given public opinion, and the unusual position of their leader. Of course, kneeing Labour int he nads is a good secondary aim, but in this instance you do need to do better than that.
Sorry, but can we define "policy". Look at Flynn's statement. He is talking as if there was not a motion passed for an immediate ceasefire, the same immediate ceasefire which is their stated policy.
The SNP are outraged because what a glorious opportunity to try and claim the English are treating them badly.
Politics is about working cross party to seek as much consensus as possible. They have no interest in that, and claim faux outrage and concern for Gaza. Bullshit.
The thing is, the SNP have three days and can do what they want with those debates as ultimately if their electors aren’t impressed they will deal with it at the ballot box. Otherwise the key is that they were robbed of their rights for political shenanigans and should be allowed a do-over.
If we are going to start trying to control what opposition parties do with their time in parliament because we don’t agree with it it defeats the object of an opposition.
And you can’t on one hand want SMP representation in Parliament and then decide that you want that representation but only if they keep quiet about foreign affairs etc. Their voice on such matters are every bit as valid as any other party in Parliament.
They have every right to be angry whether you agree with their aim or not.
Indeed, especially as so many Unionists also whine at level 11 if the SNP government touches on foreign affairs at Holyrood. Yet they're not allowed to do it at Westminster, either, it seems?
Repeat for any other UK wide topic such as defence.
Then what's the point of having MPs at Westminster then? And indeed what's the point of the Union?
I'd be amazed if more than 42% of the public have ever heard of 30p Lee. Never overestimate the Man on the Clapham Omnibus's knowledge of middle-ranking politicians.
"And the rate of increase among young people seems flatly terrifying: in 2023, NHS figures suggested that the proportion of people aged 17-19 with an eating disorder stood at 12%, up from 0.8% only six years before."
The amount of youngsters I meet nowadays who claim to be allergic/intolerant to something or other is remarkable. There's a known phenomenon whereby those who say they are intolerant to a foodstuff massively outweigh those who actually are.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
My sense is that things have all got very weird and party allignments/reallignments are not going to work the way we might expect them to. I am in no way typical of any voter but I could end up voting for either Labour or Reform UK. The former as a kind of 'last roll of the dice' for centrism based largely on confidence in Starmer (a confidence that I do not have in the conservative party), the latter as the party who are at least trying to seriously discuss issues that urgently need to be raised but are largely shut down by the main parties. I would regard myself as a centrist, I think that the far right are dangerous, but perhaps less dangerous than the 'woke' left - my ongoing complaint being that the latter get a free pass with people being apparently blind to the dangers they pose.
What issues does Reform UK raise that aren't discussed?
Immigration? One of the number one topics here. The Conservative Party go on about it all the time.
Trans rights? One of the number one topics here. The SNP and Greens go on about them all the time. The Conservative Party talks about them a fair amount too.
Vaccine dangers? Yep, that one is shut down, because it's complete bollocks.
SNP and Greens going on about them all the time? Really? It's been a *lot* quieter of late. Or am I missing something?
The path is now very clear for 30p Lee. Defect to UFUK. Noisily. Denouncing the Tories and everything they don't stand for. Foam on about "proper British values" which are anything but. Become the totem for the angry gammonite WWC. Lead the UFUK block in the Commons which will be bigger than the LibDem block as he shows the way for other angry doomed Tories. With a GBeebies show as a pulpit every week. Winning his seat at the GE.
Or, don't. Offer up an insincere apology and get the Tory whip back, only to get demolished at the election.
Didn't Tice offer him £400,000 to join ?
The rancour in politics is hard to witness and it is only getting worse
I did suggest yesterday that post GE the right may come together probably taking over the conservative party
Nothing in the last few days has done anything to change my view
Mind you Starmer has his own issues with a Savanta poll just now saying that 40% think he has an antisemitic problem in his party
Given the current Govt is the most left wing of my lifetime, I do hope the centre right takes back control of the Tory party!
People keep saying that but then don’t provide examples to back it up… so what makes this Tory Government left wing?
People keep asking me this then totally ignoring me when I provide concrete examples:
- Largest set of tax rises since the war - Huge growth in bureaucracy i.e. civil service - Govt paying part of everyone's energy bills - Huge growth in NHS spending
Well, I agree with you regarding energy bills. I think that kind of government support is dumb and means that energy demand doesn't fall as much as it should.
But are you sure regarding bureaucracy? It is worth remembering that - because spending on the NHS and pensions is baked in to keep rising - pretty much every other department is seeing real terms reductions in spending.
And tax rises? Are you sure there too? The early Thatcher budgets were massively tax raising as she closed the big hole in the finances left by Callaghan. (The charts are here: https://obr.uk/box/the-uks-tax-burden-in-historical-and-international-context/ - and '79 to '83 saw a 5 percentage point increase in tax take as a % of GDP against 2 percentage points in the the last few years.)
Basically the civil service is now 26% bigger than it was in 2016 but still not as big as it was in 2005. The Civil Service is also becoming more senior with an ever higher percentage in the higher paid ranks or more chiefs and fewer Indians if you are still allowed to say that.
These figures can be distorted by jobs being contracted out and other definitional problems but a 26% increase is still pretty remarkable. Much of Osborne's good work has been undone for very little obvious benefit.
As you hint in your penultimate sentence, virtually all of the reduction in the CS numbers was illusory. Maude and Osborne contracted out huge numbers of functions. Where numbers were genuinely cut, gaps then had to be filled by highly-paid consultants, not defined as CS of course. The whole thing was a scam, just to reduce the official CS headcount. I don't reckon it saved a penny -probably the opposite.
We urgently need to start improving the efficiency of our public sector services. At the moment we are spending more and more to get less and less. We cannot afford to continue with this.
I'd be amazed if more than 42% of the public have ever heard of 30p Lee. Never overestimate the Man on the Clapham Omnibus's knowledge of middle-ranking politicians.
According to the media he is a former deputy chairman (which he is) and an important conservative mp
The SNP have every right to carp that they have had one of their three debates spiked by the speaker. The Speaker was out of order.
However, two of the last two debates motioned by the SNP are all about Gaza, as will be the next. It strikes me that mischief making is more important than the domestic issues the SNP were elected to resolve.
It astounds me that intelligent PBers can't grasp that, at Westminster, thje SNP *were* elected to deal with UK foreign policy, inter aliis.
But how much of UK parliamentary time should any of them be dedicating to this? Neither side gives a particular damn what the UK thinks, and the amount of rancorous pontificating we go in for on the issue seems wholly disproportionate.
All MPs have a right to represent their voters on all subjects that are not outwith their remit or the HoC procedures. And the time and energy wasted stems directly from the wrecking tactics of other MPs trying to deny this.
I can't understand why so many normally intellgent PBers seem to be accepting this.
I agree, but that doesn't place them above critique for their choices.
"And the rate of increase among young people seems flatly terrifying: in 2023, NHS figures suggested that the proportion of people aged 17-19 with an eating disorder stood at 12%, up from 0.8% only six years before."
The amount of youngsters I meet nowadays who claim to be allergic/intolerant to something or other is remarkable. There's a known phenomenon whereby those who say they are intolerant to a foodstuff massively outweigh those who actually are.
God knows whats happening to the kids but it does not bode well for them in later life.
I'd be amazed if more than 42% of the public have ever heard of 30p Lee. Never overestimate the Man on the Clapham Omnibus's knowledge of middle-ranking politicians.
I doubt most people have the slightest idea of who 30p Leon is?
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
My sense is that things have all got very weird and party allignments/reallignments are not going to work the way we might expect them to. I am in no way typical of any voter but I could end up voting for either Labour or Reform UK. The former as a kind of 'last roll of the dice' for centrism based largely on confidence in Starmer (a confidence that I do not have in the conservative party), the latter as the party who are at least trying to seriously discuss issues that urgently need to be raised but are largely shut down by the main parties. I would regard myself as a centrist, I think that the far right are dangerous, but perhaps less dangerous than the 'woke' left - my ongoing complaint being that the latter get a free pass with people being apparently blind to the dangers they pose.
What issues does Reform UK raise that aren't discussed?
Immigration? One of the number one topics here. The Conservative Party go on about it all the time.
Trans rights? One of the number one topics here. The SNP and Greens go on about them all the time. The Conservative Party talks about them a fair amount too.
Vaccine dangers? Yep, that one is shut down, because it's complete bollocks.
Talking about is is one thing, the proposition changes somewhat if RefUK can make the case that they will actually do something about it. The Tories are a textbook case of playing to these issues but not really following through on anything (because too difficult/extreme). Like most populists, the siren calls of action where others are incapable/unwilling to do so is an attractive one to some voters. Just look at the orange menace across the Atlantic.
The biggest threat the right wing populists face in this country is themselves, because they’re generally rubbish at staying on message, stray into fringe issues (like anti vax, as you identify) and don’t have a great track record at staying united.
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
The SNP have every right to carp that they have had one of their three debates spiked by the speaker. The Speaker was out of order.
However, two of the last two debates motioned by the SNP are all about Gaza, as will be the next. It strikes me that mischief making is more important than the domestic issues the SNP were elected to resolve.
It astounds me that intelligent PBers can't grasp that, at Westminster, thje SNP *were* elected to deal with UK foreign policy, inter aliis.
But how much of UK parliamentary time should any of them be dedicating to this? Neither side gives a particular damn what the UK thinks, and the amount of rancorous pontificating we go in for on the issue seems wholly disproportionate.
All MPs have a right to represent their voters on all subjects that are not outwith their remit or the HoC procedures. And the time and energy wasted stems directly from the wrecking tactics of other MPs trying to deny this.
I can't understand why so many normally intellgent PBers seem to be accepting this.
I agree, but that doesn't place them above critique for their choices.
Butd that comes later. Not Labour getting their retaliation in advance.
On the SNP row there's a couple of points I want to answer.
Can I understand why they are angry? Sure - they had their opposition day hijacked. From a process perspective that is a Bad Thing. Will future days be similarly hijacked?
Opposition days are for whatever they want to do. And if that is objectively partisan that is their right. Why shouldn't it be - increasing amounts of government stuff is partisan.
I would have no problem if their objection was on those grounds. But it isn't. Flynn said Westminster is ""failing the people of Gaza by blocking a vote on the urgent actions the UK government must take to help make an immediate ceasefire happen"."
That simply isn't true. The government doesn't want an immediate ceasefire, and opposition demands (Lab, LD and SNP) for one have been satisfied by a motion being passed by the Commons. What Flynn claims he wants was passed on Wednesday.
That is why I called him a wazzock. He mentions failing the people of Gaza. Cobblers. Parliament overruled the government and passed a motion demanding an immediate cease fire. Which was the core of the SNP motion. Complain that they have been muzzled - fair. But not that something which has happened supposedly didn't happen.
As for politics is about forging consensus, I do believe that. Laws passed for partisan reasons to benefit only one group are invariably Bad Laws.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Possibly. I am usually the one who calls out the tendency to prophesy that parties are doomed. This time, however, I’m less confident.
The path is now very clear for 30p Lee. Defect to UFUK. Noisily. Denouncing the Tories and everything they don't stand for. Foam on about "proper British values" which are anything but. Become the totem for the angry gammonite WWC. Lead the UFUK block in the Commons which will be bigger than the LibDem block as he shows the way for other angry doomed Tories. With a GBeebies show as a pulpit every week. Winning his seat at the GE.
Or, don't. Offer up an insincere apology and get the Tory whip back, only to get demolished at the election.
Didn't Tice offer him £400,000 to join ?
The rancour in politics is hard to witness and it is only getting worse
I did suggest yesterday that post GE the right may come together probably taking over the conservative party
Nothing in the last few days has done anything to change my view
Mind you Starmer has his own issues with a Savanta poll just now saying that 40% think he has an antisemitic problem in his party
Given the current Govt is the most left wing of my lifetime, I do hope the centre right takes back control of the Tory party!
People keep saying that but then don’t provide examples to back it up… so what makes this Tory Government left wing?
People keep asking me this then totally ignoring me when I provide concrete examples:
- Largest set of tax rises since the war - Huge growth in bureaucracy i.e. civil service - Govt paying part of everyone's energy bills - Huge growth in NHS spending
Well, I agree with you regarding energy bills. I think that kind of government support is dumb and means that energy demand doesn't fall as much as it should.
But are you sure regarding bureaucracy? It is worth remembering that - because spending on the NHS and pensions is baked in to keep rising - pretty much every other department is seeing real terms reductions in spending.
And tax rises? Are you sure there too? The early Thatcher budgets were massively tax raising as she closed the big hole in the finances left by Callaghan. (The charts are here: https://obr.uk/box/the-uks-tax-burden-in-historical-and-international-context/ - and '79 to '83 saw a 5 percentage point increase in tax take as a % of GDP against 2 percentage points in the the last few years.)
Basically the civil service is now 26% bigger than it was in 2016 but still not as big as it was in 2005. The Civil Service is also becoming more senior with an ever higher percentage in the higher paid ranks or more chiefs and fewer Indians if you are still allowed to say that.
These figures can be distorted by jobs being contracted out and other definitional problems but a 26% increase is still pretty remarkable. Much of Osborne's good work has been undone for very little obvious benefit.
As you hint in your penultimate sentence, virtually all of the reduction in the CS numbers was illusory. Maude and Osborne contracted out huge numbers of functions. Where numbers were genuinely cut, gaps then had to be filled by highly-paid consultants, not defined as CS of course. The whole thing was a scam, just to reduce the official CS headcount. I don't reckon it saved a penny -probably the opposite.
We urgently need to start improving the efficiency of our public sector services. At the moment we are spending more and more to get less and less. We cannot afford to continue with this.
It is becoming tempting to just do a Musk and sack half of them to see if anything breaks.
The path is now very clear for 30p Lee. Defect to UFUK. Noisily. Denouncing the Tories and everything they don't stand for. Foam on about "proper British values" which are anything but. Become the totem for the angry gammonite WWC. Lead the UFUK block in the Commons which will be bigger than the LibDem block as he shows the way for other angry doomed Tories. With a GBeebies show as a pulpit every week. Winning his seat at the GE.
Or, don't. Offer up an insincere apology and get the Tory whip back, only to get demolished at the election.
Didn't Tice offer him £400,000 to join ?
The rancour in politics is hard to witness and it is only getting worse
I did suggest yesterday that post GE the right may come together probably taking over the conservative party
Nothing in the last few days has done anything to change my view
Mind you Starmer has his own issues with a Savanta poll just now saying that 40% think he has an antisemitic problem in his party
Given the current Govt is the most left wing of my lifetime, I do hope the centre right takes back control of the Tory party!
People keep saying that but then don’t provide examples to back it up… so what makes this Tory Government left wing?
People keep asking me this then totally ignoring me when I provide concrete examples:
- Largest set of tax rises since the war - Huge growth in bureaucracy i.e. civil service - Govt paying part of everyone's energy bills - Huge growth in NHS spending
Well, I agree with you regarding energy bills. I think that kind of government support is dumb and means that energy demand doesn't fall as much as it should.
But are you sure regarding bureaucracy? It is worth remembering that - because spending on the NHS and pensions is baked in to keep rising - pretty much every other department is seeing real terms reductions in spending.
And tax rises? Are you sure there too? The early Thatcher budgets were massively tax raising as she closed the big hole in the finances left by Callaghan. (The charts are here: https://obr.uk/box/the-uks-tax-burden-in-historical-and-international-context/ - and '79 to '83 saw a 5 percentage point increase in tax take as a % of GDP against 2 percentage points in the the last few years.)
Basically the civil service is now 26% bigger than it was in 2016 but still not as big as it was in 2005. The Civil Service is also becoming more senior with an ever higher percentage in the higher paid ranks or more chiefs and fewer Indians if you are still allowed to say that.
These figures can be distorted by jobs being contracted out and other definitional problems but a 26% increase is still pretty remarkable. Much of Osborne's good work has been undone for very little obvious benefit.
I would say that this is just part of a clumsy plan to rewrite vast amounts of legislation after Brexit and the obsession post Cameron/Osbourne of creating new processes, mechanisms and agencies to solve problems (something @Malmesbury is very insighftful about), and the never ending ambition of politicians to take this easy but unproductive route rather than trying to find alternative solutions.
If you want to look at an example of the above in action, look up the Office for local government (OFLOG), an new department created within an existing department, with a new highly paid chief exec etc; but no one knows what OFLOG is for, it seems to duplicate the existing function of the department for levelling up, housing and communities, which is the sponsor for local government. It looks like civil servants expanding their empire and finding willing supporters amongst politicians.
A lot of extra civil servants were taken on at the time of Covid to run various schemes such as test and trace. We don't seem to have got rid of most of them again. I agree that pointlessly rewriting EU legislation has been a complete waste of time. I also agree that politicians find it easier to start something new than to try to fix something that already exists but I have some sympathy with them in that because it seems almost beyond the power of Ministers to change their departments. Rory Stewart's book Politics on the Edge had a series of deeply dispiriting examples of this.
The path is now very clear for 30p Lee. Defect to UFUK. Noisily. Denouncing the Tories and everything they don't stand for. Foam on about "proper British values" which are anything but. Become the totem for the angry gammonite WWC. Lead the UFUK block in the Commons which will be bigger than the LibDem block as he shows the way for other angry doomed Tories. With a GBeebies show as a pulpit every week. Winning his seat at the GE.
Or, don't. Offer up an insincere apology and get the Tory whip back, only to get demolished at the election.
Didn't Tice offer him £400,000 to join ?
The rancour in politics is hard to witness and it is only getting worse
I did suggest yesterday that post GE the right may come together probably taking over the conservative party
Nothing in the last few days has done anything to change my view
Mind you Starmer has his own issues with a Savanta poll just now saying that 40% think he has an antisemitic problem in his party
Given the current Govt is the most left wing of my lifetime, I do hope the centre right takes back control of the Tory party!
People keep saying that but then don’t provide examples to back it up… so what makes this Tory Government left wing?
People keep asking me this then totally ignoring me when I provide concrete examples:
- Largest set of tax rises since the war - Huge growth in bureaucracy i.e. civil service - Govt paying part of everyone's energy bills - Huge growth in NHS spending
Well, I agree with you regarding energy bills. I think that kind of government support is dumb and means that energy demand doesn't fall as much as it should.
But are you sure regarding bureaucracy? It is worth remembering that - because spending on the NHS and pensions is baked in to keep rising - pretty much every other department is seeing real terms reductions in spending.
And tax rises? Are you sure there too? The early Thatcher budgets were massively tax raising as she closed the big hole in the finances left by Callaghan. (The charts are here: https://obr.uk/box/the-uks-tax-burden-in-historical-and-international-context/ - and '79 to '83 saw a 5 percentage point increase in tax take as a % of GDP against 2 percentage points in the the last few years.)
Basically the civil service is now 26% bigger than it was in 2016 but still not as big as it was in 2005. The Civil Service is also becoming more senior with an ever higher percentage in the higher paid ranks or more chiefs and fewer Indians if you are still allowed to say that.
These figures can be distorted by jobs being contracted out and other definitional problems but a 26% increase is still pretty remarkable. Much of Osborne's good work has been undone for very little obvious benefit.
I would say that this is just part of a clumsy plan to rewrite vast amounts of legislation after Brexit and the obsession post Cameron/Osbourne of creating new processes, mechanisms and agencies to solve problems (something @Malmesbury is very insighftful about), and the never ending ambition of politicians to take this easy but unproductive route rather than trying to find alternative solutions.
If you want to look at an example of the above in action, look up the Office for local government (OFLOG), an new department created within an existing department, with a new highly paid chief exec etc; but no one knows what OFLOG is for, it seems to duplicate the existing function of the department for levelling up, housing and communities, which is the sponsor for local government. It looks like civil servants expanding their empire and finding willing supporters amongst politicians.
A lot of extra civil servants were taken on at the time of Covid to run various schemes such as test and trace. We don't seem to have got rid of most of them again. I agree that pointlessly rewriting EU legislation has been a complete waste of time. I also agree that politicians find it easier to start something new than to try to fix something that already exists but I have some sympathy with them in that because it seems almost beyond the power of Ministers to change their departments. Rory Stewart's book Politics on the Edge had a series of deeply dispiriting examples of this.
Again, every department I have to deal with always have people saying sorry for the delay we are short staffed yet 2 people on here claim that the civil service is overstaffed. Yet not in the areas I encounter....
"And the rate of increase among young people seems flatly terrifying: in 2023, NHS figures suggested that the proportion of people aged 17-19 with an eating disorder stood at 12%, up from 0.8% only six years before."
The amount of youngsters I meet nowadays who claim to be allergic/intolerant to something or other is remarkable. There's a known phenomenon whereby those who say they are intolerant to a foodstuff massively outweigh those who actually are.
God knows whats happening to the kids but it does not bode well for them in later life.
One of the problems is food fads can materially change your diet. So, for example, many who try Veganism for a period become lactose intolerant because their body loses the ability to cope with dairy. There is a lot to be said for maintaining a broad and varied diet. I think it is what we were designed to eat.
On the SNP row there's a couple of points I want to answer.
Can I understand why they are angry? Sure - they had their opposition day hijacked. From a process perspective that is a Bad Thing. Will future days be similarly hijacked?
Opposition days are for whatever they want to do. And if that is objectively partisan that is their right. Why shouldn't it be - increasing amounts of government stuff is partisan.
I would have no problem if their objection was on those grounds. But it isn't. Flynn said Westminster is ""failing the people of Gaza by blocking a vote on the urgent actions the UK government must take to help make an immediate ceasefire happen"."
That simply isn't true. The government doesn't want an immediate ceasefire, and opposition demands (Lab, LD and SNP) for one have been satisfied by a motion being passed by the Commons. What Flynn claims he wants was passed on Wednesday.
That is why I called him a wazzock. He mentions failing the people of Gaza. Cobblers. Parliament overruled the government and passed a motion demanding an immediate cease fire. Which was the core of the SNP motion. Complain that they have been muzzled - fair. But not that something which has happened supposedly didn't happen.
As for politics is about forging consensus, I do believe that. Laws passed for partisan reasons to benefit only one group are invariably Bad Laws.
I think your attempt to justify the loss of the SNP day in the HOC misunderstands Scots, and even my wife feels it is an affront to Scotland no matter the politics of it
it was the SNPs day and they had it stolen from them and made worse today by the Speaker reneging on his promise, which incidentally made my wife very annoyed
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
I am too old now (80 in 3 days) so not able to help in 2028 unfortunately
I note Susan Hall uses the approved Conservative Party jargon of "anti-Muslim hatred" rather than saying "Islamophobia". God knows why they feel the need to quibble over this. Kemi Badenoch tried explaining.
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism are two separate terms, why not two terms on the opposite side of the "debate"?
Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are intended to mean different things. In so far as I understand the Conservative Party's quibble, anti-Muslim hatred and Islamophobia mean the same thing, but wurble wurble Labour said something wurble.
As long as people make their meaning clear they are entitled to choose their words, and are not obliged to copy others.
One of the problems with 'Islamophobia' is that it expresses fear rather than hatred of Islam; a further problem is that distinguishing between 'Islam' 'Islamic' (hooray) and 'Islamism' and 'Islamist' (boo) is too hard except for those paying an awful lot of attention. We live in a world where large numbers of people confuse 'paedophile' and 'paediatrician'.
They are entitled to choose their words. I think they're being stupid quibbling over minor differences of wording while they're trying to repair the damage done to the party's reputation.
Mm, it feels very like the attempt that some Momentum types made in the late 2010s to criticise the term 'antisemitic' - supposedly because it was insufficiently precise...
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
Good design costs money.
I thought that Network Rail had a decent set of template designs to use when building a new station - I take it no one has looked at them.
BR used to have a particularly nasty sort of standard modular design in the 1960s - I forget the name but it made a Bayko set look positively sophisticated. I suppose it did make it easier to replace high-maintenance Victorian buildings with something a bit more than a glorified bus shelter, and witht he size and layout to match the needs, but it would be a shame if we were going back to those days.
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
kamski - In my semi-informed opinion, Trump probably would not have succeeded if he had attempted to continue making agreements with Putin to continue reducing nuclear weapons. But he should have tried, and, by now, the US has had enough experience in such agreements that we have experts who could have conducted such negotiations.
I have thought long and hard about how we could have kept reasonable relations with Putin's Russia, and have come up with no conclusion on a strategy that might have succeeded.
If the US had gifted him Ukraine, and said they wouldn’t come to the defence of European NATO countries if he invaded, it would probably have done the trick.
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
Good design costs money.
I thought that Network Rail had a decent set of template designs to use when building a new station - I take it no one has looked at them.
Yeah, but I'm a bit bored by that argument now. Reopening stations is expensive anyway. Railways are expensive. But I think some of it is just laziness.
I'd like a little 5% extra spent on a bit of vernacular/art - maybe a nice simple booking office/waiting room, with a nod to the local area/heritage - and ensuring our souls don't get destroyed please.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
The path is now very clear for 30p Lee. Defect to UFUK. Noisily. Denouncing the Tories and everything they don't stand for. Foam on about "proper British values" which are anything but. Become the totem for the angry gammonite WWC. Lead the UFUK block in the Commons which will be bigger than the LibDem block as he shows the way for other angry doomed Tories. With a GBeebies show as a pulpit every week. Winning his seat at the GE.
Or, don't. Offer up an insincere apology and get the Tory whip back, only to get demolished at the election.
Didn't Tice offer him £400,000 to join ?
The rancour in politics is hard to witness and it is only getting worse
I did suggest yesterday that post GE the right may come together probably taking over the conservative party
Nothing in the last few days has done anything to change my view
Mind you Starmer has his own issues with a Savanta poll just now saying that 40% think he has an antisemitic problem in his party
Given the current Govt is the most left wing of my lifetime, I do hope the centre right takes back control of the Tory party!
People keep saying that but then don’t provide examples to back it up… so what makes this Tory Government left wing?
People keep asking me this then totally ignoring me when I provide concrete examples:
- Largest set of tax rises since the war - Huge growth in bureaucracy i.e. civil service - Govt paying part of everyone's energy bills - Huge growth in NHS spending
Well, I agree with you regarding energy bills. I think that kind of government support is dumb and means that energy demand doesn't fall as much as it should.
But are you sure regarding bureaucracy? It is worth remembering that - because spending on the NHS and pensions is baked in to keep rising - pretty much every other department is seeing real terms reductions in spending.
And tax rises? Are you sure there too? The early Thatcher budgets were massively tax raising as she closed the big hole in the finances left by Callaghan. (The charts are here: https://obr.uk/box/the-uks-tax-burden-in-historical-and-international-context/ - and '79 to '83 saw a 5 percentage point increase in tax take as a % of GDP against 2 percentage points in the the last few years.)
Basically the civil service is now 26% bigger than it was in 2016 but still not as big as it was in 2005. The Civil Service is also becoming more senior with an ever higher percentage in the higher paid ranks or more chiefs and fewer Indians if you are still allowed to say that.
These figures can be distorted by jobs being contracted out and other definitional problems but a 26% increase is still pretty remarkable. Much of Osborne's good work has been undone for very little obvious benefit.
I would say that this is just part of a clumsy plan to rewrite vast amounts of legislation after Brexit and the obsession post Cameron/Osbourne of creating new processes, mechanisms and agencies to solve problems (something @Malmesbury is very insighftful about), and the never ending ambition of politicians to take this easy but unproductive route rather than trying to find alternative solutions.
If you want to look at an example of the above in action, look up the Office for local government (OFLOG), an new department created within an existing department, with a new highly paid chief exec etc; but no one knows what OFLOG is for, it seems to duplicate the existing function of the department for levelling up, housing and communities, which is the sponsor for local government. It looks like civil servants expanding their empire and finding willing supporters amongst politicians.
A lot of extra civil servants were taken on at the time of Covid to run various schemes such as test and trace. We don't seem to have got rid of most of them again. I agree that pointlessly rewriting EU legislation has been a complete waste of time. I also agree that politicians find it easier to start something new than to try to fix something that already exists but I have some sympathy with them in that because it seems almost beyond the power of Ministers to change their departments. Rory Stewart's book Politics on the Edge had a series of deeply dispiriting examples of this.
Again, every department I have to deal with always have people saying sorry for the delay we are short staffed yet 2 people on here claim that the civil service is overstaffed. Yet not in the areas I encounter....
There was an excellent story told on here once that I have tried to find. A department decided that they needed a night watchman, who then needed a supervisor, who then needed HR input, who needed statistics on ethnicity and sexual orientation and so on until the whole thing became too expensive and so the night watchman was made redundant.
It is not the absolute size of the Civil Service that is the problem. It is the number employed in administrative rather than executive roles. And that is increasing. If you look at chart 2.5 in this https://civilservant.org.uk/information-numbers.html it can be seen that it is grades 6 and 7, that is senior managers, which have been responsible for almost all of the growth in recent years.
We probably need more people on the front line actually providing services but we need flatter management structures and far less bureaucracy behind them.
I note Susan Hall uses the approved Conservative Party jargon of "anti-Muslim hatred" rather than saying "Islamophobia". God knows why they feel the need to quibble over this. Kemi Badenoch tried explaining.
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism are two separate terms, why not two terms on the opposite side of the "debate"?
Antisemitism and anti zionism are two entirely seperate things, at least in theory, which is not to say that some people don't conflate the two or use one as a vehicle for the other. You get a fair number of anti zionist Jews, both for political and religious reasons, for one thing. It seems to me that the Tory dislike of Islamophobic as a term is that they want to be free to criticise Islam the religion. But AIUI the term Islamophobic means hatred of Muslims, not criticism of Islam, so it seems a rather odd thing to get hung up on. If I was a cynic I'd just say the Tories wanted anti muslim bigots to vote for them and this is the only acceptable way of trying to achieve that. I guess you also have to wonder what would happen if some Muslim councillor in Rochdale said he didn't hate Jews but thought that Judaism was awful, I can't help thinking he'd be out on his ear pdq.
On the other hand, if someone said that they don't hate Christians but think that Christianity is awful, it would be completely unremarkable.
This is my precise position on Conservatism. Some of my best friends etc.
On the SNP row there's a couple of points I want to answer.
Can I understand why they are angry? Sure - they had their opposition day hijacked. From a process perspective that is a Bad Thing. Will future days be similarly hijacked?
Opposition days are for whatever they want to do. And if that is objectively partisan that is their right. Why shouldn't it be - increasing amounts of government stuff is partisan.
I would have no problem if their objection was on those grounds. But it isn't. Flynn said Westminster is ""failing the people of Gaza by blocking a vote on the urgent actions the UK government must take to help make an immediate ceasefire happen"."
That simply isn't true. The government doesn't want an immediate ceasefire, and opposition demands (Lab, LD and SNP) for one have been satisfied by a motion being passed by the Commons. What Flynn claims he wants was passed on Wednesday.
That is why I called him a wazzock. He mentions failing the people of Gaza. Cobblers. Parliament overruled the government and passed a motion demanding an immediate cease fire. Which was the core of the SNP motion. Complain that they have been muzzled - fair. But not that something which has happened supposedly didn't happen.
As for politics is about forging consensus, I do believe that. Laws passed for partisan reasons to benefit only one group are invariably Bad Laws.
This is the point. One can think the SNP were hard done by - whether incidentally out of a sincere desire of the speaker to avoid thugs taking their cue from their positioning - or by shenanigans. But throwing a tantrum you don't get your do-over when you've got your ceasefire demand with only a few changes to its wording that make it more plausible, rather exposes what the whole thing was about in the first place. And it certainly wasn't the people of Gaza.
The path is now very clear for 30p Lee. Defect to UFUK. Noisily. Denouncing the Tories and everything they don't stand for. Foam on about "proper British values" which are anything but. Become the totem for the angry gammonite WWC. Lead the UFUK block in the Commons which will be bigger than the LibDem block as he shows the way for other angry doomed Tories. With a GBeebies show as a pulpit every week. Winning his seat at the GE.
Or, don't. Offer up an insincere apology and get the Tory whip back, only to get demolished at the election.
He could be joined by two others, in the shape of Simon Danczuk and Andrew Bridgen.
I note Susan Hall uses the approved Conservative Party jargon of "anti-Muslim hatred" rather than saying "Islamophobia". God knows why they feel the need to quibble over this. Kemi Badenoch tried explaining.
In fairness Bad Enoch is probably right one this one matter. Islamophobia is probably the wrong term – it presents as psychological illness, such as agoraphobia or koumpounophobia (fear of buttons).
Anti-Muslim hatred is actually a better term but unlikely to gain currency.
I agree. I am actually pleased to see some people in the Tory party are thinking about the language they use and attempt to shape the agenda (whether they succeed or fail) rather than be passive adherents to it.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
I am too old now (80 in 3 days) so not able to help in 2028 unfortunately
The path is now very clear for 30p Lee. Defect to UFUK. Noisily. Denouncing the Tories and everything they don't stand for. Foam on about "proper British values" which are anything but. Become the totem for the angry gammonite WWC. Lead the UFUK block in the Commons which will be bigger than the LibDem block as he shows the way for other angry doomed Tories. With a GBeebies show as a pulpit every week. Winning his seat at the GE.
Or, don't. Offer up an insincere apology and get the Tory whip back, only to get demolished at the election.
Didn't Tice offer him £400,000 to join ?
The rancour in politics is hard to witness and it is only getting worse
I did suggest yesterday that post GE the right may come together probably taking over the conservative party
Nothing in the last few days has done anything to change my view
Mind you Starmer has his own issues with a Savanta poll just now saying that 40% think he has an antisemitic problem in his party
Given the current Govt is the most left wing of my lifetime, I do hope the centre right takes back control of the Tory party!
People keep saying that but then don’t provide examples to back it up… so what makes this Tory Government left wing?
People keep asking me this then totally ignoring me when I provide concrete examples:
- Largest set of tax rises since the war - Huge growth in bureaucracy i.e. civil service - Govt paying part of everyone's energy bills - Huge growth in NHS spending
Well, I agree with you regarding energy bills. I think that kind of government support is dumb and means that energy demand doesn't fall as much as it should.
But are you sure regarding bureaucracy? It is worth remembering that - because spending on the NHS and pensions is baked in to keep rising - pretty much every other department is seeing real terms reductions in spending.
And tax rises? Are you sure there too? The early Thatcher budgets were massively tax raising as she closed the big hole in the finances left by Callaghan. (The charts are here: https://obr.uk/box/the-uks-tax-burden-in-historical-and-international-context/ - and '79 to '83 saw a 5 percentage point increase in tax take as a % of GDP against 2 percentage points in the the last few years.)
Basically the civil service is now 26% bigger than it was in 2016 but still not as big as it was in 2005. The Civil Service is also becoming more senior with an ever higher percentage in the higher paid ranks or more chiefs and fewer Indians if you are still allowed to say that.
These figures can be distorted by jobs being contracted out and other definitional problems but a 26% increase is still pretty remarkable. Much of Osborne's good work has been undone for very little obvious benefit.
I would say that this is just part of a clumsy plan to rewrite vast amounts of legislation after Brexit and the obsession post Cameron/Osbourne of creating new processes, mechanisms and agencies to solve problems (something @Malmesbury is very insighftful about), and the never ending ambition of politicians to take this easy but unproductive route rather than trying to find alternative solutions.
If you want to look at an example of the above in action, look up the Office for local government (OFLOG), an new department created within an existing department, with a new highly paid chief exec etc; but no one knows what OFLOG is for, it seems to duplicate the existing function of the department for levelling up, housing and communities, which is the sponsor for local government. It looks like civil servants expanding their empire and finding willing supporters amongst politicians.
A lot of extra civil servants were taken on at the time of Covid to run various schemes such as test and trace. We don't seem to have got rid of most of them again. I agree that pointlessly rewriting EU legislation has been a complete waste of time. I also agree that politicians find it easier to start something new than to try to fix something that already exists but I have some sympathy with them in that because it seems almost beyond the power of Ministers to change their departments. Rory Stewart's book Politics on the Edge had a series of deeply dispiriting examples of this.
Again, every department I have to deal with always have people saying sorry for the delay we are short staffed yet 2 people on here claim that the civil service is overstaffed. Yet not in the areas I encounter....
Let's use some real numbers.
There are (Sept 22) 5.8m public sector employees.
Of these, 1.9 million work for the NHS.
Total civil service employment was 513k - so less than 10% of public sector employees work for the civil service.
The remainder (3.4m) are mostly employed in local government and education - specifically schools.
If you were to get rid of half the people who work for the NHS or who work in schools, I think people might notice.
Reading about Scarlet Blake trial on the BBC. Jeeze. Most women don't go out on a Friday night murdering, let's hope we don't see more of this type of thing.
I’m gonna repeat myself from last thread. Because it got no response and I find that, in itself, utterly fascinating
Here’s a thing. Young people like our own dear @148grss go on and on about climate change. It has been hammered into them, and fair enough - I concur it is a real issue, but I am not sure it is quite as existential as some claim. I believe humans will adapt, although it is, nonetheless, worth us taking measured steps to decrease C02 and it definitely worth us cleaning up the planet. I have seen FAR too much pollution, esp plastic, to be relaxed about that
However you never see young people, or indeed anyone, banging on and on and on about the dangers of AI
Yet these dangers are extremely real, and vastly more ominous than climate change
Let me introduce you to the concept of “P-doom” this is the probability that AGI, when it is achieved, will bring about a doomsday type event for humanity, perhaps total extinction, maybe just enslavement, but definitely something really really really bad. P-doom is expressed as a percentage. Here are the estimates of various experts, of P-Doom
<0.01% Yann LeCun one of three godfathers of AI, works at Meta (less likely than an asteroid)
10% Vitalik Buterin Ethereum founder (Specifically means AI takeover)
10% Geoff Hinton one of three godfathers of AI (chance of extinction in the next 30 years if unregulated)
14% Machine learning researchers (From 2022, median value is 5%)
15% Lina Khan head of FTC
10-20% Paul Christiano (Cumulative risks go to 50% when you get to human-level AI)
10-25% Dario Amodei CEO of Anthropic
20% Yoshua Bengio one of three godfathers of AI
20-30% Elon Musk CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, X
5-50% Emmet Shear Co-founder of Twitch, former short-term CEO of OpenAI
30% AI Safety Researchers (Mean from 44 AI safety researchers in 2021)
33% Scott Alexander Popular Internet blogger at Astral Codex Ten
35% Eli Lifland AI engineer (Estimate mean value, survey methodology may be flawed)
50% Holden Karnofsky Executive Director of Open Philanthropy
10-90% Jan Leike alignment lead at OpenAI
60% Zvi Mowshowitz AI researcher
70% Daniel Kokotajlo OpenAI researcher & forecaster
>80% Dan Hendrycks Head of Center for AI Safety
>99% Eliezer Yudkowsky Founder of MIRI
It is right now estimated we will achieve AGI in the next 1-10 years. That’s the consensus. Indeed it may already be here
Incidentally do not be reassured by the ‘likely as an asteroid’ prediction of Le Cun. He’s the guy who went on stage in Dubai and said AI text-to-video was impossible now, then got utterly humiliated when Sora was released literally two days later - a fortnight ago
Your posts about AI bore me sh1tless. Even if I get terminated by a robot sent by Skynet inside the next 18 months who metallically laughs at me whilst pacing out "Leon was right, you puny human" in a cybernetic Austrian accent I'll still draw my last dying breath recalling your warnings with tedium.
Being exterminated by cyborgs will come as a blessed release from all the guff that @Leon spouts.
The path is now very clear for 30p Lee. Defect to UFUK. Noisily. Denouncing the Tories and everything they don't stand for. Foam on about "proper British values" which are anything but. Become the totem for the angry gammonite WWC. Lead the UFUK block in the Commons which will be bigger than the LibDem block as he shows the way for other angry doomed Tories. With a GBeebies show as a pulpit every week. Winning his seat at the GE.
Or, don't. Offer up an insincere apology and get the Tory whip back, only to get demolished at the election.
Didn't Tice offer him £400,000 to join ?
The rancour in politics is hard to witness and it is only getting worse
I did suggest yesterday that post GE the right may come together probably taking over the conservative party
Nothing in the last few days has done anything to change my view
Mind you Starmer has his own issues with a Savanta poll just now saying that 40% think he has an antisemitic problem in his party
Given the current Govt is the most left wing of my lifetime, I do hope the centre right takes back control of the Tory party!
People keep saying that but then don’t provide examples to back it up… so what makes this Tory Government left wing?
People keep asking me this then totally ignoring me when I provide concrete examples:
- Largest set of tax rises since the war - Huge growth in bureaucracy i.e. civil service - Govt paying part of everyone's energy bills - Huge growth in NHS spending
Well, I agree with you regarding energy bills. I think that kind of government support is dumb and means that energy demand doesn't fall as much as it should.
But are you sure regarding bureaucracy? It is worth remembering that - because spending on the NHS and pensions is baked in to keep rising - pretty much every other department is seeing real terms reductions in spending.
And tax rises? Are you sure there too? The early Thatcher budgets were massively tax raising as she closed the big hole in the finances left by Callaghan. (The charts are here: https://obr.uk/box/the-uks-tax-burden-in-historical-and-international-context/ - and '79 to '83 saw a 5 percentage point increase in tax take as a % of GDP against 2 percentage points in the the last few years.)
Basically the civil service is now 26% bigger than it was in 2016 but still not as big as it was in 2005. The Civil Service is also becoming more senior with an ever higher percentage in the higher paid ranks or more chiefs and fewer Indians if you are still allowed to say that.
These figures can be distorted by jobs being contracted out and other definitional problems but a 26% increase is still pretty remarkable. Much of Osborne's good work has been undone for very little obvious benefit.
I would say that this is just part of a clumsy plan to rewrite vast amounts of legislation after Brexit and the obsession post Cameron/Osbourne of creating new processes, mechanisms and agencies to solve problems (something @Malmesbury is very insighftful about), and the never ending ambition of politicians to take this easy but unproductive route rather than trying to find alternative solutions.
If you want to look at an example of the above in action, look up the Office for local government (OFLOG), an new department created within an existing department, with a new highly paid chief exec etc; but no one knows what OFLOG is for, it seems to duplicate the existing function of the department for levelling up, housing and communities, which is the sponsor for local government. It looks like civil servants expanding their empire and finding willing supporters amongst politicians.
A lot of extra civil servants were taken on at the time of Covid to run various schemes such as test and trace. We don't seem to have got rid of most of them again. I agree that pointlessly rewriting EU legislation has been a complete waste of time. I also agree that politicians find it easier to start something new than to try to fix something that already exists but I have some sympathy with them in that because it seems almost beyond the power of Ministers to change their departments. Rory Stewart's book Politics on the Edge had a series of deeply dispiriting examples of this.
Again, every department I have to deal with always have people saying sorry for the delay we are short staffed yet 2 people on here claim that the civil service is overstaffed. Yet not in the areas I encounter....
There was an excellent story told on here once that I have tried to find. A department decided that they needed a night watchman, who then needed a supervisor, who then needed HR input, who needed statistics on ethnicity and sexual orientation and so on until the whole thing became too expensive and so the night watchman was made redundant.
It is not the absolute size of the Civil Service that is the problem. It is the number employed in administrative rather than executive roles. And that is increasing. If you look at chart 2.5 in this https://civilservant.org.uk/information-numbers.html it can be seen that it is grades 6 and 7, that is senior managers, which have been responsible for almost all of the growth in recent years.
We probably need more people on the front line actually providing services but we need flatter management structures and far less bureaucracy behind them.
It is worth remembering that some rise in civil servant numbers post Brexit was probably inevitable: we used to outsource certain competences to Brussels, and now we're doing them in house.
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
Infrastructure needs good planning, and old station sites are not necessarily the best ones for current ones. As an example, I think Corby station had three sites: the original one, a new one for the first reopening in the 1980s, and another one, near the original station's site, in the 2010s.
Passenger usage is different nowadays: a station site that may have been good for passengers (and freight...) using horse and carts in Victorian times might not be ideal for modern passengers using cars. As an example: is there enough land available for a car park? Before any reopening, there should be studies that look into these issues, including multimodal, and decide where the best location is. Sometimes it will be where the old station is; sometimes close by; sometimes on a very different location.
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
Good design costs money.
I thought that Network Rail had a decent set of template designs to use when building a new station - I take it no one has looked at them.
BR used to have a particularly nasty sort of standard modular design in the 1960s - I forget the name but it made a Bayko set look positively sophisticated. I suppose it did make it easier to replace high-maintenance Victorian buildings with something a bit more than a glorified bus shelter, and witht he size and layout to match the needs, but it would be a shame if we were going back to those days.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
The path is now very clear for 30p Lee. Defect to UFUK. Noisily. Denouncing the Tories and everything they don't stand for. Foam on about "proper British values" which are anything but. Become the totem for the angry gammonite WWC. Lead the UFUK block in the Commons which will be bigger than the LibDem block as he shows the way for other angry doomed Tories. With a GBeebies show as a pulpit every week. Winning his seat at the GE.
Or, don't. Offer up an insincere apology and get the Tory whip back, only to get demolished at the election.
Didn't Tice offer him £400,000 to join ?
The rancour in politics is hard to witness and it is only getting worse
I did suggest yesterday that post GE the right may come together probably taking over the conservative party
Nothing in the last few days has done anything to change my view
Mind you Starmer has his own issues with a Savanta poll just now saying that 40% think he has an antisemitic problem in his party
Given the current Govt is the most left wing of my lifetime, I do hope the centre right takes back control of the Tory party!
People keep saying that but then don’t provide examples to back it up… so what makes this Tory Government left wing?
People keep asking me this then totally ignoring me when I provide concrete examples:
- Largest set of tax rises since the war - Huge growth in bureaucracy i.e. civil service - Govt paying part of everyone's energy bills - Huge growth in NHS spending
Well, I agree with you regarding energy bills. I think that kind of government support is dumb and means that energy demand doesn't fall as much as it should.
But are you sure regarding bureaucracy? It is worth remembering that - because spending on the NHS and pensions is baked in to keep rising - pretty much every other department is seeing real terms reductions in spending.
And tax rises? Are you sure there too? The early Thatcher budgets were massively tax raising as she closed the big hole in the finances left by Callaghan. (The charts are here: https://obr.uk/box/the-uks-tax-burden-in-historical-and-international-context/ - and '79 to '83 saw a 5 percentage point increase in tax take as a % of GDP against 2 percentage points in the the last few years.)
Basically the civil service is now 26% bigger than it was in 2016 but still not as big as it was in 2005. The Civil Service is also becoming more senior with an ever higher percentage in the higher paid ranks or more chiefs and fewer Indians if you are still allowed to say that.
These figures can be distorted by jobs being contracted out and other definitional problems but a 26% increase is still pretty remarkable. Much of Osborne's good work has been undone for very little obvious benefit.
I would say that this is just part of a clumsy plan to rewrite vast amounts of legislation after Brexit and the obsession post Cameron/Osbourne of creating new processes, mechanisms and agencies to solve problems (something @Malmesbury is very insighftful about), and the never ending ambition of politicians to take this easy but unproductive route rather than trying to find alternative solutions.
If you want to look at an example of the above in action, look up the Office for local government (OFLOG), an new department created within an existing department, with a new highly paid chief exec etc; but no one knows what OFLOG is for, it seems to duplicate the existing function of the department for levelling up, housing and communities, which is the sponsor for local government. It looks like civil servants expanding their empire and finding willing supporters amongst politicians.
A lot of extra civil servants were taken on at the time of Covid to run various schemes such as test and trace. We don't seem to have got rid of most of them again. I agree that pointlessly rewriting EU legislation has been a complete waste of time. I also agree that politicians find it easier to start something new than to try to fix something that already exists but I have some sympathy with them in that because it seems almost beyond the power of Ministers to change their departments. Rory Stewart's book Politics on the Edge had a series of deeply dispiriting examples of this.
Again, every department I have to deal with always have people saying sorry for the delay we are short staffed yet 2 people on here claim that the civil service is overstaffed. Yet not in the areas I encounter....
There was an excellent story told on here once that I have tried to find. A department decided that they needed a night watchman, who then needed a supervisor, who then needed HR input, who needed statistics on ethnicity and sexual orientation and so on until the whole thing became too expensive and so the night watchman was made redundant.
It is not the absolute size of the Civil Service that is the problem. It is the number employed in administrative rather than executive roles. And that is increasing. If you look at chart 2.5 in this https://civilservant.org.uk/information-numbers.html it can be seen that it is grades 6 and 7, that is senior managers, which have been responsible for almost all of the growth in recent years.
We probably need more people on the front line actually providing services but we need flatter management structures and far less bureaucracy behind them.
What you will find is a lot of those people on those grade 6/7 roles are IT people - where the market rate outside of the civil service means those people have to be placed there for any chance of getting people.
Got to say to check this I went to look at the jobs available in the Civil service website - the solution architect roles paying £40-60k would be £90-110k in a consultancy...
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
hardly err brave given the tories are going to get crushed at the election as things stand . Basically for not being conservative enough especially on the economy - One thing the tories always used to get right if disliked by some for it. If the tories were going for the big state approach (as they have) then they have to use the largest tax take since WW2 to make things actually work - instead potholes , uncontrolled immigration , police too busy to deal with theft , passport and car test waits for months , NHS waits for years - this country has gone downhill because of politicians not caring enough to be brave once in a while .And if Sunak thinks the country is waiting for him to sort out anybody horrible to Khan over and above the above he will lose even more votes
I note Susan Hall uses the approved Conservative Party jargon of "anti-Muslim hatred" rather than saying "Islamophobia". God knows why they feel the need to quibble over this. Kemi Badenoch tried explaining.
In fairness Bad Enoch is probably right one this one matter. Islamophobia is probably the wrong term – it presents as psychological illness, such as agoraphobia or koumpounophobia (fear of buttons).
Anti-Muslim hatred is actually a better term but unlikely to gain currency.
I agree. I am actually pleased to see some people in the Tory party are thinking about the language they use and attempt to shape the agenda (whether they succeed or fail) rather than be passive adherents to it.
Are we ok with 'homophobia' then? The word, I mean, not the thing obviously.
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
Good design costs money.
I thought that Network Rail had a decent set of template designs to use when building a new station - I take it no one has looked at them.
BR used to have a particularly nasty sort of standard modular design in the 1960s - I forget the name but it made a Bayko set look positively sophisticated. I suppose it did make it easier to replace high-maintenance Victorian buildings with something a bit more than a glorified bus shelter, and witht he size and layout to match the needs, but it would be a shame if we were going back to those days.
CLASP
There was one at Twickenham, but it's been replaced in recent years.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
Has it really? CCHQ is strongly centrist* oriented, and since CCHQ attempts to control the selection process, that leads to centrist MPs, centrist ministers, and centrist peers. I cannot really see that the permeation of centrism within the party goes much further than that. I appreciate that some party activists are also centrists, but they seem to be to be the sort of hanger on types who harbour ambitions of being selected as MPs. In other words all centrist influence stems from patronage within the party aparatus. Nobody pounds pavements because they dream of a future for their kids where the country will do exactly what the the Labour Party want to do but with a posher accent.
*I use the neutral term centrist, though personally I find the centrist agenda extreme and loopy.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
More or less agree, in that, whatever the Tories do, all can vote, all can politically organise and all can stand, with my delusions and everyone else's on a equal footing. It would make a nice change to have a centrist set of Burkean Tories to vote for, ones who spoke and wrote in polite English, are a bit understated and don't acct like wild cats in a cage.
The path is now very clear for 30p Lee. Defect to UFUK. Noisily. Denouncing the Tories and everything they don't stand for. Foam on about "proper British values" which are anything but. Become the totem for the angry gammonite WWC. Lead the UFUK block in the Commons which will be bigger than the LibDem block as he shows the way for other angry doomed Tories. With a GBeebies show as a pulpit every week. Winning his seat at the GE.
Or, don't. Offer up an insincere apology and get the Tory whip back, only to get demolished at the election.
He could be joined by two others, in the shape of Simon Danczuk and Andrew Bridgen.
Simon Danczuk is the Reform candidate in Rochdale !!
I note Susan Hall uses the approved Conservative Party jargon of "anti-Muslim hatred" rather than saying "Islamophobia". God knows why they feel the need to quibble over this. Kemi Badenoch tried explaining.
In fairness Bad Enoch is probably right one this one matter. Islamophobia is probably the wrong term – it presents as psychological illness, such as agoraphobia or koumpounophobia (fear of buttons).
Anti-Muslim hatred is actually a better term but unlikely to gain currency.
I agree. I am actually pleased to see some people in the Tory party are thinking about the language they use and attempt to shape the agenda (whether they succeed or fail) rather than be passive adherents to it.
Are we ok with 'homophobia' then? The word, I mean, not the thing obviously.
I'm OK with the term, but would also be OK if it changed. I've always seen 'a homophobe' as having an added implication that the subject may be trying to over-correct due to their own feelings. That's unlikely to be the case with Islamophobia. But since neither is a recognised medical syndrome, perhaps neither of them should be termed as one.
The path is now very clear for 30p Lee. Defect to UFUK. Noisily. Denouncing the Tories and everything they don't stand for. Foam on about "proper British values" which are anything but. Become the totem for the angry gammonite WWC. Lead the UFUK block in the Commons which will be bigger than the LibDem block as he shows the way for other angry doomed Tories. With a GBeebies show as a pulpit every week. Winning his seat at the GE.
Or, don't. Offer up an insincere apology and get the Tory whip back, only to get demolished at the election.
Didn't Tice offer him £400,000 to join ?
The rancour in politics is hard to witness and it is only getting worse
I did suggest yesterday that post GE the right may come together probably taking over the conservative party
Nothing in the last few days has done anything to change my view
Mind you Starmer has his own issues with a Savanta poll just now saying that 40% think he has an antisemitic problem in his party
Given the current Govt is the most left wing of my lifetime, I do hope the centre right takes back control of the Tory party!
People keep saying that but then don’t provide examples to back it up… so what makes this Tory Government left wing?
People keep asking me this then totally ignoring me when I provide concrete examples:
- Largest set of tax rises since the war - Huge growth in bureaucracy i.e. civil service - Govt paying part of everyone's energy bills - Huge growth in NHS spending
Well, I agree with you regarding energy bills. I think that kind of government support is dumb and means that energy demand doesn't fall as much as it should.
But are you sure regarding bureaucracy? It is worth remembering that - because spending on the NHS and pensions is baked in to keep rising - pretty much every other department is seeing real terms reductions in spending.
And tax rises? Are you sure there too? The early Thatcher budgets were massively tax raising as she closed the big hole in the finances left by Callaghan. (The charts are here: https://obr.uk/box/the-uks-tax-burden-in-historical-and-international-context/ - and '79 to '83 saw a 5 percentage point increase in tax take as a % of GDP against 2 percentage points in the the last few years.)
Basically the civil service is now 26% bigger than it was in 2016 but still not as big as it was in 2005. The Civil Service is also becoming more senior with an ever higher percentage in the higher paid ranks or more chiefs and fewer Indians if you are still allowed to say that.
These figures can be distorted by jobs being contracted out and other definitional problems but a 26% increase is still pretty remarkable. Much of Osborne's good work has been undone for very little obvious benefit.
I would say that this is just part of a clumsy plan to rewrite vast amounts of legislation after Brexit and the obsession post Cameron/Osbourne of creating new processes, mechanisms and agencies to solve problems (something @Malmesbury is very insighftful about), and the never ending ambition of politicians to take this easy but unproductive route rather than trying to find alternative solutions.
If you want to look at an example of the above in action, look up the Office for local government (OFLOG), an new department created within an existing department, with a new highly paid chief exec etc; but no one knows what OFLOG is for, it seems to duplicate the existing function of the department for levelling up, housing and communities, which is the sponsor for local government. It looks like civil servants expanding their empire and finding willing supporters amongst politicians.
A lot of extra civil servants were taken on at the time of Covid to run various schemes such as test and trace. We don't seem to have got rid of most of them again. I agree that pointlessly rewriting EU legislation has been a complete waste of time. I also agree that politicians find it easier to start something new than to try to fix something that already exists but I have some sympathy with them in that because it seems almost beyond the power of Ministers to change their departments. Rory Stewart's book Politics on the Edge had a series of deeply dispiriting examples of this.
Again, every department I have to deal with always have people saying sorry for the delay we are short staffed yet 2 people on here claim that the civil service is overstaffed. Yet not in the areas I encounter....
There was an excellent story told on here once that I have tried to find. A department decided that they needed a night watchman, who then needed a supervisor, who then needed HR input, who needed statistics on ethnicity and sexual orientation and so on until the whole thing became too expensive and so the night watchman was made redundant.
It is not the absolute size of the Civil Service that is the problem. It is the number employed in administrative rather than executive roles. And that is increasing. If you look at chart 2.5 in this https://civilservant.org.uk/information-numbers.html it can be seen that it is grades 6 and 7, that is senior managers, which have been responsible for almost all of the growth in recent years.
We probably need more people on the front line actually providing services but we need flatter management structures and far less bureaucracy behind them.
What you will find is a lot of those people on those grade 6/7 roles are IT people - where the market rate outside of the civil service means those people have to be placed there for any chance of getting people.
Got to say to check this I went to look at the jobs available in the Civil service website - the solution architect roles paying £40-60k would be £90-110k in a consultancy...
I've seen lead/architect-level software dev roles in the civil service receive no applicants whatsoever over the course of an entire year. On digging into it, it turns out that they were being advertised for less than we pay our new grads in the private sector....
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
Your link is well worth a read, as it's a great precis of why nothing ever gets done in this country. Haxby re-opening has been rumbling on for decades. Don't hold your breath.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
I am too old now (80 in 3 days) so not able to help in 2028 unfortunately
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
Good design costs money.
I thought that Network Rail had a decent set of template designs to use when building a new station - I take it no one has looked at them.
BR used to have a particularly nasty sort of standard modular design in the 1960s - I forget the name but it made a Bayko set look positively sophisticated. I suppose it did make it easier to replace high-maintenance Victorian buildings with something a bit more than a glorified bus shelter, and witht he size and layout to match the needs, but it would be a shame if we were going back to those days.
CLASP
There was one at Twickenham, but it's been replaced in recent years.
The path is now very clear for 30p Lee. Defect to UFUK. Noisily. Denouncing the Tories and everything they don't stand for. Foam on about "proper British values" which are anything but. Become the totem for the angry gammonite WWC. Lead the UFUK block in the Commons which will be bigger than the LibDem block as he shows the way for other angry doomed Tories. With a GBeebies show as a pulpit every week. Winning his seat at the GE.
Or, don't. Offer up an insincere apology and get the Tory whip back, only to get demolished at the election.
Didn't Tice offer him £400,000 to join ?
The rancour in politics is hard to witness and it is only getting worse
I did suggest yesterday that post GE the right may come together probably taking over the conservative party
Nothing in the last few days has done anything to change my view
Mind you Starmer has his own issues with a Savanta poll just now saying that 40% think he has an antisemitic problem in his party
Given the current Govt is the most left wing of my lifetime, I do hope the centre right takes back control of the Tory party!
People keep saying that but then don’t provide examples to back it up… so what makes this Tory Government left wing?
People keep asking me this then totally ignoring me when I provide concrete examples:
- Largest set of tax rises since the war - Huge growth in bureaucracy i.e. civil service - Govt paying part of everyone's energy bills - Huge growth in NHS spending
Well, I agree with you regarding energy bills. I think that kind of government support is dumb and means that energy demand doesn't fall as much as it should.
But are you sure regarding bureaucracy? It is worth remembering that - because spending on the NHS and pensions is baked in to keep rising - pretty much every other department is seeing real terms reductions in spending.
And tax rises? Are you sure there too? The early Thatcher budgets were massively tax raising as she closed the big hole in the finances left by Callaghan. (The charts are here: https://obr.uk/box/the-uks-tax-burden-in-historical-and-international-context/ - and '79 to '83 saw a 5 percentage point increase in tax take as a % of GDP against 2 percentage points in the the last few years.)
Basically the civil service is now 26% bigger than it was in 2016 but still not as big as it was in 2005. The Civil Service is also becoming more senior with an ever higher percentage in the higher paid ranks or more chiefs and fewer Indians if you are still allowed to say that.
These figures can be distorted by jobs being contracted out and other definitional problems but a 26% increase is still pretty remarkable. Much of Osborne's good work has been undone for very little obvious benefit.
I would say that this is just part of a clumsy plan to rewrite vast amounts of legislation after Brexit and the obsession post Cameron/Osbourne of creating new processes, mechanisms and agencies to solve problems (something @Malmesbury is very insighftful about), and the never ending ambition of politicians to take this easy but unproductive route rather than trying to find alternative solutions.
If you want to look at an example of the above in action, look up the Office for local government (OFLOG), an new department created within an existing department, with a new highly paid chief exec etc; but no one knows what OFLOG is for, it seems to duplicate the existing function of the department for levelling up, housing and communities, which is the sponsor for local government. It looks like civil servants expanding their empire and finding willing supporters amongst politicians.
A lot of extra civil servants were taken on at the time of Covid to run various schemes such as test and trace. We don't seem to have got rid of most of them again. I agree that pointlessly rewriting EU legislation has been a complete waste of time. I also agree that politicians find it easier to start something new than to try to fix something that already exists but I have some sympathy with them in that because it seems almost beyond the power of Ministers to change their departments. Rory Stewart's book Politics on the Edge had a series of deeply dispiriting examples of this.
Again, every department I have to deal with always have people saying sorry for the delay we are short staffed yet 2 people on here claim that the civil service is overstaffed. Yet not in the areas I encounter....
There was an excellent story told on here once that I have tried to find. A department decided that they needed a night watchman, who then needed a supervisor, who then needed HR input, who needed statistics on ethnicity and sexual orientation and so on until the whole thing became too expensive and so the night watchman was made redundant.
It is not the absolute size of the Civil Service that is the problem. It is the number employed in administrative rather than executive roles. And that is increasing. If you look at chart 2.5 in this https://civilservant.org.uk/information-numbers.html it can be seen that it is grades 6 and 7, that is senior managers, which have been responsible for almost all of the growth in recent years.
We probably need more people on the front line actually providing services but we need flatter management structures and far less bureaucracy behind them.
What you will find is a lot of those people on those grade 6/7 roles are IT people - where the market rate outside of the civil service means those people have to be placed there for any chance of getting people.
Got to say to check this I went to look at the jobs available in the Civil service website - the solution architect roles paying £40-60k would be £90-110k in a consultancy...
yea but civil service pension just about the best still so gotta take that into account
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
hardly err brave given the tories are going to get crushed at the election as things stand . Basically for not being conservative enough especially on the economy - One thing the tories always used to get right if disliked by some for it
So what would be more being more Conservative on the economy? Big unfunded tax cuts? Allow me to introduce you to Liz Truss. Big tax cuts funded by spending cuts? Have you seen the state of public services?
Truth is, it's Conservative policies that have got us into a mess by failing on their own terms, with the Tory Party, like crack addicts, then demanding a bigger purer hit each time to deal with the low caused by the last episode of failure.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
While there is always a case for PR, all it does is push the 'no majority' problem down the line. We have, like most countries, a plurality of political positions. PR faithfully (look at Israel) respects this and has them all separately getting seats, Great.
At that point the compromises necessary to majority government kick in.
All we do is stick the compromises up the line a bit, by compressing them not by post election horse trading, but pre election conjuring.
And in the end it is the voters who choose to have a 2 party system. There is a choice....Farage, Gallaway, Lozza, Binhead, Davey, the rays of sunshine that make up the SNP....
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
Infrastructure needs good planning, and old station sites are not necessarily the best ones for current ones. As an example, I think Corby station had three sites: the original one, a new one for the first reopening in the 1980s, and another one, near the original station's site, in the 2010s.
Passenger usage is different nowadays: a station site that may have been good for passengers (and freight...) using horse and carts in Victorian times might not be ideal for modern passengers using cars. As an example: is there enough land available for a car park? Before any reopening, there should be studies that look into these issues, including multimodal, and decide where the best location is. Sometimes it will be where the old station is; sometimes close by; sometimes on a very different location.
The path is now very clear for 30p Lee. Defect to UFUK. Noisily. Denouncing the Tories and everything they don't stand for. Foam on about "proper British values" which are anything but. Become the totem for the angry gammonite WWC. Lead the UFUK block in the Commons which will be bigger than the LibDem block as he shows the way for other angry doomed Tories. With a GBeebies show as a pulpit every week. Winning his seat at the GE.
Or, don't. Offer up an insincere apology and get the Tory whip back, only to get demolished at the election.
Didn't Tice offer him £400,000 to join ?
The rancour in politics is hard to witness and it is only getting worse
I did suggest yesterday that post GE the right may come together probably taking over the conservative party
Nothing in the last few days has done anything to change my view
Mind you Starmer has his own issues with a Savanta poll just now saying that 40% think he has an antisemitic problem in his party
Given the current Govt is the most left wing of my lifetime, I do hope the centre right takes back control of the Tory party!
People keep saying that but then don’t provide examples to back it up… so what makes this Tory Government left wing?
People keep asking me this then totally ignoring me when I provide concrete examples:
- Largest set of tax rises since the war - Huge growth in bureaucracy i.e. civil service - Govt paying part of everyone's energy bills - Huge growth in NHS spending
Well, I agree with you regarding energy bills. I think that kind of government support is dumb and means that energy demand doesn't fall as much as it should.
But are you sure regarding bureaucracy? It is worth remembering that - because spending on the NHS and pensions is baked in to keep rising - pretty much every other department is seeing real terms reductions in spending.
And tax rises? Are you sure there too? The early Thatcher budgets were massively tax raising as she closed the big hole in the finances left by Callaghan. (The charts are here: https://obr.uk/box/the-uks-tax-burden-in-historical-and-international-context/ - and '79 to '83 saw a 5 percentage point increase in tax take as a % of GDP against 2 percentage points in the the last few years.)
Basically the civil service is now 26% bigger than it was in 2016 but still not as big as it was in 2005. The Civil Service is also becoming more senior with an ever higher percentage in the higher paid ranks or more chiefs and fewer Indians if you are still allowed to say that.
These figures can be distorted by jobs being contracted out and other definitional problems but a 26% increase is still pretty remarkable. Much of Osborne's good work has been undone for very little obvious benefit.
I would say that this is just part of a clumsy plan to rewrite vast amounts of legislation after Brexit and the obsession post Cameron/Osbourne of creating new processes, mechanisms and agencies to solve problems (something @Malmesbury is very insighftful about), and the never ending ambition of politicians to take this easy but unproductive route rather than trying to find alternative solutions.
If you want to look at an example of the above in action, look up the Office for local government (OFLOG), an new department created within an existing department, with a new highly paid chief exec etc; but no one knows what OFLOG is for, it seems to duplicate the existing function of the department for levelling up, housing and communities, which is the sponsor for local government. It looks like civil servants expanding their empire and finding willing supporters amongst politicians.
A lot of extra civil servants were taken on at the time of Covid to run various schemes such as test and trace. We don't seem to have got rid of most of them again. I agree that pointlessly rewriting EU legislation has been a complete waste of time. I also agree that politicians find it easier to start something new than to try to fix something that already exists but I have some sympathy with them in that because it seems almost beyond the power of Ministers to change their departments. Rory Stewart's book Politics on the Edge had a series of deeply dispiriting examples of this.
Again, every department I have to deal with always have people saying sorry for the delay we are short staffed yet 2 people on here claim that the civil service is overstaffed. Yet not in the areas I encounter....
There was an excellent story told on here once that I have tried to find. A department decided that they needed a night watchman, who then needed a supervisor, who then needed HR input, who needed statistics on ethnicity and sexual orientation and so on until the whole thing became too expensive and so the night watchman was made redundant.
It is not the absolute size of the Civil Service that is the problem. It is the number employed in administrative rather than executive roles. And that is increasing. If you look at chart 2.5 in this https://civilservant.org.uk/information-numbers.html it can be seen that it is grades 6 and 7, that is senior managers, which have been responsible for almost all of the growth in recent years.
We probably need more people on the front line actually providing services but we need flatter management structures and far less bureaucracy behind them.
What you will find is a lot of those people on those grade 6/7 roles are IT people - where the market rate outside of the civil service means those people have to be placed there for any chance of getting people.
Got to say to check this I went to look at the jobs available in the Civil service website - the solution architect roles paying £40-60k would be £90-110k in a consultancy...
I can see that being a problem in particular areas of work but there are many others. An example would be what we call procurators fiscal, who prosecute less serious crime in the JP and Sheriff courts. A newly qualified lawyer in the fiscal service gets paid just over £50k a year. Those doing defence work will typically get paid something like £35k at the same stage.
Defence firms have to survive on trainees and recognise that many of their trainees will leave for better paid public sector work on qualification. Legal aid rates simply means that they cannot compete even in the busiest of firms. In the meantime the more senior part of the defence bar gets older and older with very few qualified solicitors coming up behind them.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
hardly err brave given the tories are going to get crushed at the election as things stand . Basically for not being conservative enough especially on the economy - One thing the tories always used to get right if disliked by some for it
So what would be more being more Conservative on the economy? Big unfunded tax cuts? Allow me to introduce you to Liz Truss. Big tax cuts funded by spending cuts? Have you seen the state of public services?
Truth is, it's Conservative policies that have got us into a mess by failing on their own terms, with the Tory Party, like crack addicts, then demanding a bigger purer hit each time to deal with the low caused by the last episode of failure.
the tories have shown (through total weakness) that the largest tax take since WW" has delivered even chitter public services - They could not have been more socialist than Arthur Scargill . If you subsidise anything you get more of it like benefits - try incentivising work and enterprise
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
Has it really? CCHQ is strongly centrist* oriented, and since CCHQ attempts to control the selection process, that leads to centrist MPs, centrist ministers, and centrist peers. I cannot really see that the permeation of centrism within the party goes much further than that. I appreciate that some party activists are also centrists, but they seem to be to be the sort of hanger on types who harbour ambitions of being selected as MPs. In other words all centrist influence stems from patronage within the party aparatus. Nobody pounds pavements because they dream of a future for their kids where the country will do exactly what the the Labour Party want to do but with a posher accent.
*I use the neutral term centrist, though personally I find the centrist agenda extreme and loopy.
I guess everyone looks left-wing when you're out on the far right.
Every one of my friends and relations who are normally Conservative voters (and living in rural Dorset, that's quite a lot) and who have expressed any kind of opinion, seem to be exasperated and dejected by the mess the Tories have got into.
I think some will switch to Labour/LDs/Green but many will just abstain this time at least.
I doubt a move to the populist right would attract any back at all.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
You assume that people will vote according to their identity their whole lives long. I think people will vote based on an assessment of who is going to form a Government that will be more beneficial to them, and will change their allegiances accordingly in ways hitherto unimagined. Quite apart from the fact that the big state approach is rapidly running out of road affordability-wise.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
Has it really? CCHQ is strongly centrist* oriented, and since CCHQ attempts to control the selection process, that leads to centrist MPs, centrist ministers, and centrist peers. I cannot really see that the permeation of centrism within the party goes much further than that. I appreciate that some party activists are also centrists, but they seem to be to be the sort of hanger on types who harbour ambitions of being selected as MPs. In other words all centrist influence stems from patronage within the party aparatus. Nobody pounds pavements because they dream of a future for their kids where the country will do exactly what the the Labour Party want to do but with a posher accent.
*I use the neutral term centrist, though personally I find the centrist agenda extreme and loopy.
I guess everyone looks left-wing when you're out on the far right.
Every one of my friends and relations who are normally Conservative voters (and living in rural Dorset, that's quite a lot) and who have expressed any kind of opinion, seem to be exasperated and dejected by the mess the Tories have got into.
I think some will switch to Labour/LDs/Green but many will just abstain this time at least.
I doubt a move to the populist right would attract any back at all.
Just my opinion. I am biased, no doubt.
in a sense you are right that it is too late for the tories - it will look insincere now to actually spout something conservative in nature. Thats not to say they have not had a chance up unto a couple of years ago
The path is now very clear for 30p Lee. Defect to UFUK. Noisily. Denouncing the Tories and everything they don't stand for. Foam on about "proper British values" which are anything but. Become the totem for the angry gammonite WWC. Lead the UFUK block in the Commons which will be bigger than the LibDem block as he shows the way for other angry doomed Tories. With a GBeebies show as a pulpit every week. Winning his seat at the GE.
Or, don't. Offer up an insincere apology and get the Tory whip back, only to get demolished at the election.
Didn't Tice offer him £400,000 to join ?
The rancour in politics is hard to witness and it is only getting worse
I did suggest yesterday that post GE the right may come together probably taking over the conservative party
Nothing in the last few days has done anything to change my view
Mind you Starmer has his own issues with a Savanta poll just now saying that 40% think he has an antisemitic problem in his party
Given the current Govt is the most left wing of my lifetime, I do hope the centre right takes back control of the Tory party!
People keep saying that but then don’t provide examples to back it up… so what makes this Tory Government left wing?
People keep asking me this then totally ignoring me when I provide concrete examples:
- Largest set of tax rises since the war - Huge growth in bureaucracy i.e. civil service - Govt paying part of everyone's energy bills - Huge growth in NHS spending
Well, I agree with you regarding energy bills. I think that kind of government support is dumb and means that energy demand doesn't fall as much as it should.
But are you sure regarding bureaucracy? It is worth remembering that - because spending on the NHS and pensions is baked in to keep rising - pretty much every other department is seeing real terms reductions in spending.
And tax rises? Are you sure there too? The early Thatcher budgets were massively tax raising as she closed the big hole in the finances left by Callaghan. (The charts are here: https://obr.uk/box/the-uks-tax-burden-in-historical-and-international-context/ - and '79 to '83 saw a 5 percentage point increase in tax take as a % of GDP against 2 percentage points in the the last few years.)
Basically the civil service is now 26% bigger than it was in 2016 but still not as big as it was in 2005. The Civil Service is also becoming more senior with an ever higher percentage in the higher paid ranks or more chiefs and fewer Indians if you are still allowed to say that.
These figures can be distorted by jobs being contracted out and other definitional problems but a 26% increase is still pretty remarkable. Much of Osborne's good work has been undone for very little obvious benefit.
I would say that this is just part of a clumsy plan to rewrite vast amounts of legislation after Brexit and the obsession post Cameron/Osbourne of creating new processes, mechanisms and agencies to solve problems (something @Malmesbury is very insighftful about), and the never ending ambition of politicians to take this easy but unproductive route rather than trying to find alternative solutions.
If you want to look at an example of the above in action, look up the Office for local government (OFLOG), an new department created within an existing department, with a new highly paid chief exec etc; but no one knows what OFLOG is for, it seems to duplicate the existing function of the department for levelling up, housing and communities, which is the sponsor for local government. It looks like civil servants expanding their empire and finding willing supporters amongst politicians.
A lot of extra civil servants were taken on at the time of Covid to run various schemes such as test and trace. We don't seem to have got rid of most of them again. I agree that pointlessly rewriting EU legislation has been a complete waste of time. I also agree that politicians find it easier to start something new than to try to fix something that already exists but I have some sympathy with them in that because it seems almost beyond the power of Ministers to change their departments. Rory Stewart's book Politics on the Edge had a series of deeply dispiriting examples of this.
Again, every department I have to deal with always have people saying sorry for the delay we are short staffed yet 2 people on here claim that the civil service is overstaffed. Yet not in the areas I encounter....
There was an excellent story told on here once that I have tried to find. A department decided that they needed a night watchman, who then needed a supervisor, who then needed HR input, who needed statistics on ethnicity and sexual orientation and so on until the whole thing became too expensive and so the night watchman was made redundant.
It is not the absolute size of the Civil Service that is the problem. It is the number employed in administrative rather than executive roles. And that is increasing. If you look at chart 2.5 in this https://civilservant.org.uk/information-numbers.html it can be seen that it is grades 6 and 7, that is senior managers, which have been responsible for almost all of the growth in recent years.
We probably need more people on the front line actually providing services but we need flatter management structures and far less bureaucracy behind them.
What you will find is a lot of those people on those grade 6/7 roles are IT people - where the market rate outside of the civil service means those people have to be placed there for any chance of getting people.
Got to say to check this I went to look at the jobs available in the Civil service website - the solution architect roles paying £40-60k would be £90-110k in a consultancy...
I can see that being a problem in particular areas of work but there are many others. An example would be what we call procurators fiscal, who prosecute less serious crime in the JP and Sheriff courts. A newly qualified lawyer in the fiscal service gets paid just over £50k a year. Those doing defence work will typically get paid something like £35k at the same stage.
Defence firms have to survive on trainees and recognise that many of their trainees will leave for better paid public sector work on qualification. Legal aid rates simply means that they cannot compete even in the busiest of firms. In the meantime the more senior part of the defence bar gets older and older with very few qualified solicitors coming up behind them.
I am writing the next header.
The problem is static or declining productivity, combined with a rapidly growing population. So you have both ever larger organisations and a shortage of people to do actual work.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
I wonder if Andy Street should be on Tory Party resignation watch? He was mightily pissed off with the HS2 decision, and seems a decent chap who clearly doesn't want any part of the current divisive shitshow.
I'd be amazed if more than 42% of the public have ever heard of 30p Lee. Never overestimate the Man on the Clapham Omnibus's knowledge of middle-ranking politicians.
As indeed why should they. Despite the earnest efforts of people who want citizens' assemblies and deeply engaged focus groups, the great majority of people want representative democracy because they know they neither want to nor are competent to run the country. They delegate it to others and forget about it until next time. This is not a problem. The problem is the ones who think they can run the country.
The Tories used to get criticised for being heartless even if competent ,now they get criticised for being useless and weak . They should worry more they are not getting criticised for the former
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
Infrastructure needs good planning, and old station sites are not necessarily the best ones for current ones. As an example, I think Corby station had three sites: the original one, a new one for the first reopening in the 1980s, and another one, near the original station's site, in the 2010s.
Passenger usage is different nowadays: a station site that may have been good for passengers (and freight...) using horse and carts in Victorian times might not be ideal for modern passengers using cars. As an example: is there enough land available for a car park? Before any reopening, there should be studies that look into these issues, including multimodal, and decide where the best location is. Sometimes it will be where the old station is; sometimes close by; sometimes on a very different location.
Nah, you use the old station.
Just like 99% of the rest of us do - nationwide.
Given your occupation, I'm quite staggered you came out with that. To the extent that I wonder if either you or I have got the wrong end of the stick.
The conversation was about station reopenings; where the vast majority of prospective passengers will not have used any old station at all if it closed in the 1960s, and the best site is judged by metrics rather than nostalgia. The idea is to get people to use the reopened station, and the old station might be the best site for that. In many cases it is not.
The Tories used to get criticised for being heartless even if competent ,now they get criticised for being useless and weak . They should worry more they are not getting criticised for the former
It all feels very similar to late 1996/early 1997. We're just waiting for the electorate boot them into oblivion.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
I am too old now (80 in 3 days) so not able to help in 2028 unfortunately
Surely only 20?
Yes - well spotted
So, you're going to reach the Welsh speed limit in 3 days?
The path is now very clear for 30p Lee. Defect to UFUK. Noisily. Denouncing the Tories and everything they don't stand for. Foam on about "proper British values" which are anything but. Become the totem for the angry gammonite WWC. Lead the UFUK block in the Commons which will be bigger than the LibDem block as he shows the way for other angry doomed Tories. With a GBeebies show as a pulpit every week. Winning his seat at the GE.
Or, don't. Offer up an insincere apology and get the Tory whip back, only to get demolished at the election.
Didn't Tice offer him £400,000 to join ?
The rancour in politics is hard to witness and it is only getting worse
I did suggest yesterday that post GE the right may come together probably taking over the conservative party
Nothing in the last few days has done anything to change my view
Mind you Starmer has his own issues with a Savanta poll just now saying that 40% think he has an antisemitic problem in his party
Given the current Govt is the most left wing of my lifetime, I do hope the centre right takes back control of the Tory party!
People keep saying that but then don’t provide examples to back it up… so what makes this Tory Government left wing?
People keep asking me this then totally ignoring me when I provide concrete examples:
- Largest set of tax rises since the war - Huge growth in bureaucracy i.e. civil service - Govt paying part of everyone's energy bills - Huge growth in NHS spending
Well, I agree with you regarding energy bills. I think that kind of government support is dumb and means that energy demand doesn't fall as much as it should.
But are you sure regarding bureaucracy? It is worth remembering that - because spending on the NHS and pensions is baked in to keep rising - pretty much every other department is seeing real terms reductions in spending.
And tax rises? Are you sure there too? The early Thatcher budgets were massively tax raising as she closed the big hole in the finances left by Callaghan. (The charts are here: https://obr.uk/box/the-uks-tax-burden-in-historical-and-international-context/ - and '79 to '83 saw a 5 percentage point increase in tax take as a % of GDP against 2 percentage points in the the last few years.)
Basically the civil service is now 26% bigger than it was in 2016 but still not as big as it was in 2005. The Civil Service is also becoming more senior with an ever higher percentage in the higher paid ranks or more chiefs and fewer Indians if you are still allowed to say that.
These figures can be distorted by jobs being contracted out and other definitional problems but a 26% increase is still pretty remarkable. Much of Osborne's good work has been undone for very little obvious benefit.
As you hint in your penultimate sentence, virtually all of the reduction in the CS numbers was illusory. Maude and Osborne contracted out huge numbers of functions. Where numbers were genuinely cut, gaps then had to be filled by highly-paid consultants, not defined as CS of course. The whole thing was a scam, just to reduce the official CS headcount. I don't reckon it saved a penny -probably the opposite.
We urgently need to start improving the efficiency of our public sector services. At the moment we are spending more and more to get less and less. We cannot afford to continue with this.
It is becoming tempting to just do a Musk and sack half of them to see if anything breaks.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
Has it really? CCHQ is strongly centrist* oriented, and since CCHQ attempts to control the selection process, that leads to centrist MPs, centrist ministers, and centrist peers. I cannot really see that the permeation of centrism within the party goes much further than that. I appreciate that some party activists are also centrists, but they seem to be to be the sort of hanger on types who harbour ambitions of being selected as MPs. In other words all centrist influence stems from patronage within the party aparatus. Nobody pounds pavements because they dream of a future for their kids where the country will do exactly what the the Labour Party want to do but with a posher accent.
*I use the neutral term centrist, though personally I find the centrist agenda extreme and loopy.
I guess everyone looks left-wing when you're out on the far right.
Every one of my friends and relations who are normally Conservative voters (and living in rural Dorset, that's quite a lot) and who have expressed any kind of opinion, seem to be exasperated and dejected by the mess the Tories have got into.
I think some will switch to Labour/LDs/Green but many will just abstain this time at least.
I doubt a move to the populist right would attract any back at all.
Just my opinion. I am biased, no doubt.
I don't recognise myself as 'far right'. I deplore racism, and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. I want our Government to behave no less or more chauvinistically than that of Switzerland, France or Germany. I support a mixed economy - I don't support privatisation of the BBC, or the selling off of the NHS. Those are not far right opinions, they are right opinions.
The thing I am not is 'centrist' - I don't look at the prevailing political trends and say 'I'm going to put myself in the middle of that' - because to do that would be completely meaningless and give me no actual conscience, no ability to distinguish what is right, wrong, sensible or foolish using my own brain.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
algarkirk didn’t say anything about Reform UK. You can vote for them if you so wish.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
Bits of the Tory party have lost their mind. Surely we are looking at a May election now, the party is falling apart in front of our eyes.
This does all feel "exceptional". I don't think I've seen the Tories fall apart this badly in the ~40 years I've been aware of politics.
Of course, we've seen factions rip each other apart over policy before, but this feels qualitatively different.
I don't think it necessarily leads to a May election though. Pop the tin hats on.
I don't know.
In the 1990s the Tories were riven from top to bottom over Europe. People forget now just how bitter things got after Maastricht. Interestingly we've not heard that much about Europe recently.
This split is more a proxy for the Red Wall Vs the Blue Wall, IMO. I suspect it will soon be resolved at the next election by a mass exodus of "red wall" MP's at the hands of Red Wall voters. Though as someone said down thread, those "red wall" voters aren't necessarily going to be Labour voters...
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
algarkirk didn’t say anything about Reform UK. You can vote for them if you so wish.
Those are Tory principles - RefUK only exist because of the wet centrist miasma the Tory Party suffers from. Thankfully 'the adults in the room' are cruising for a well-deserved shellacking, and with them the centrist cause in the party, after the election if sadly not before.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
Has it really? CCHQ is strongly centrist* oriented, and since CCHQ attempts to control the selection process, that leads to centrist MPs, centrist ministers, and centrist peers. I cannot really see that the permeation of centrism within the party goes much further than that. I appreciate that some party activists are also centrists, but they seem to be to be the sort of hanger on types who harbour ambitions of being selected as MPs. In other words all centrist influence stems from patronage within the party aparatus. Nobody pounds pavements because they dream of a future for their kids where the country will do exactly what the the Labour Party want to do but with a posher accent.
*I use the neutral term centrist, though personally I find the centrist agenda extreme and loopy.
I guess everyone looks left-wing when you're out on the far right.
Every one of my friends and relations who are normally Conservative voters (and living in rural Dorset, that's quite a lot) and who have expressed any kind of opinion, seem to be exasperated and dejected by the mess the Tories have got into.
I think some will switch to Labour/LDs/Green but many will just abstain this time at least.
I doubt a move to the populist right would attract any back at all.
Just my opinion. I am biased, no doubt.
I do wonder if the "Disappointed Cameroon" might become the mid-2020s equivalent of the "Centrist Dad", forming a large pool of despairing voters who see no good choices available to them at the coming GE.
Starmer seems to be winning back the centrist dads... how long will it be before the Tories next have a leader who'll be prepared to even start a conversation with the disappointed Cameroons?
The path is now very clear for 30p Lee. Defect to UFUK. Noisily. Denouncing the Tories and everything they don't stand for. Foam on about "proper British values" which are anything but. Become the totem for the angry gammonite WWC. Lead the UFUK block in the Commons which will be bigger than the LibDem block as he shows the way for other angry doomed Tories. With a GBeebies show as a pulpit every week. Winning his seat at the GE.
Or, don't. Offer up an insincere apology and get the Tory whip back, only to get demolished at the election.
Didn't Tice offer him £400,000 to join ?
The rancour in politics is hard to witness and it is only getting worse
I did suggest yesterday that post GE the right may come together probably taking over the conservative party
Nothing in the last few days has done anything to change my view
Mind you Starmer has his own issues with a Savanta poll just now saying that 40% think he has an antisemitic problem in his party
Given the current Govt is the most left wing of my lifetime, I do hope the centre right takes back control of the Tory party!
People keep saying that but then don’t provide examples to back it up… so what makes this Tory Government left wing?
People keep asking me this then totally ignoring me when I provide concrete examples:
- Largest set of tax rises since the war - Huge growth in bureaucracy i.e. civil service - Govt paying part of everyone's energy bills - Huge growth in NHS spending
Well, I agree with you regarding energy bills. I think that kind of government support is dumb and means that energy demand doesn't fall as much as it should.
But are you sure regarding bureaucracy? It is worth remembering that - because spending on the NHS and pensions is baked in to keep rising - pretty much every other department is seeing real terms reductions in spending.
And tax rises? Are you sure there too? The early Thatcher budgets were massively tax raising as she closed the big hole in the finances left by Callaghan. (The charts are here: https://obr.uk/box/the-uks-tax-burden-in-historical-and-international-context/ - and '79 to '83 saw a 5 percentage point increase in tax take as a % of GDP against 2 percentage points in the the last few years.)
Basically the civil service is now 26% bigger than it was in 2016 but still not as big as it was in 2005. The Civil Service is also becoming more senior with an ever higher percentage in the higher paid ranks or more chiefs and fewer Indians if you are still allowed to say that.
These figures can be distorted by jobs being contracted out and other definitional problems but a 26% increase is still pretty remarkable. Much of Osborne's good work has been undone for very little obvious benefit.
As you hint in your penultimate sentence, virtually all of the reduction in the CS numbers was illusory. Maude and Osborne contracted out huge numbers of functions. Where numbers were genuinely cut, gaps then had to be filled by highly-paid consultants, not defined as CS of course. The whole thing was a scam, just to reduce the official CS headcount. I don't reckon it saved a penny -probably the opposite.
We urgently need to start improving the efficiency of our public sector services. At the moment we are spending more and more to get less and less. We cannot afford to continue with this.
It is becoming tempting to just do a Musk and sack half of them to see if anything breaks.
How did that work out at Twitter? Very badly.
So says everyone who complains whilst still using it, yes.
Comments
If you want to look at an example of the above in action, look up the Office for local government (OFLOG), an new department created within an existing department, with a new highly paid chief exec etc; but no one knows what OFLOG is for, it seems to duplicate the existing function of the department for levelling up, housing and communities, which is the sponsor for local government. It looks like civil servants expanding their empire and finding willing supporters amongst politicians.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
Anti-Muslim hatred is actually a better term but unlikely to gain currency.
Repeat for any other UK wide topic such as defence.
Then what's the point of having MPs at Westminster then? And indeed what's the point of the Union?
More figures here:https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/whitehall-monitor-2023/size-cost-make-civil-service
We urgently need to start improving the efficiency of our public sector services. At the moment we are spending more and more to get less and less. We cannot afford to continue with this.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
https://twitter.com/GBNEWS/status/1762121598360866857
The biggest threat the right wing populists face in this country is themselves, because they’re generally rubbish at staying on message, stray into fringe issues (like anti vax, as you identify) and don’t have a great track record at staying united.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haxby_railway_station
Can I understand why they are angry? Sure - they had their opposition day hijacked. From a process perspective that is a Bad Thing. Will future days be similarly hijacked?
Opposition days are for whatever they want to do. And if that is objectively partisan that is their right. Why shouldn't it be - increasing amounts of government stuff is partisan.
I would have no problem if their objection was on those grounds. But it isn't. Flynn said Westminster is ""failing the people of Gaza by blocking a vote on the urgent actions the UK government must take to help make an immediate ceasefire happen"."
That simply isn't true. The government doesn't want an immediate ceasefire, and opposition demands (Lab, LD and SNP) for one have been satisfied by a motion being passed by the Commons. What Flynn claims he wants was passed on Wednesday.
That is why I called him a wazzock. He mentions failing the people of Gaza. Cobblers. Parliament overruled the government and passed a motion demanding an immediate cease fire. Which was the core of the SNP motion. Complain that they have been muzzled - fair. But not that something which has happened supposedly didn't happen.
As for politics is about forging consensus, I do believe that. Laws passed for partisan reasons to benefit only one group are invariably Bad Laws.
Anglea Rayner reported to the police
Rochdale - Simon Danczuk has received racist death threats and an arrest is expected
The world has gone utterly mad
I agree that pointlessly rewriting EU legislation has been a complete waste of time.
I also agree that politicians find it easier to start something new than to try to fix something that already exists but I have some sympathy with them in that because it seems almost beyond the power of Ministers to change their departments. Rory Stewart's book Politics on the Edge had a series of deeply dispiriting examples of this.
https://x.com/nigel_farage/status/1762177748389261326
I thought that Network Rail had a decent set of template designs to use when building a new station - I take it no one has looked at them.
Scotland no matter the politics of it
it was the SNPs day and they had it stolen from them and made worse today by the Speaker reneging on his promise, which incidentally made my wife very annoyed
Death by utilitarianism.
So that’s what Trump is about.
I'd like a little 5% extra spent on a bit of vernacular/art - maybe a nice simple booking office/waiting room, with a nod to the local area/heritage - and ensuring our souls don't get destroyed please.
Maybe some nice paint and flower baskets too.
It is not the absolute size of the Civil Service that is the problem. It is the number employed in administrative rather than executive roles. And that is increasing. If you look at chart 2.5 in this https://civilservant.org.uk/information-numbers.html it can be seen that it is grades 6 and 7, that is senior managers, which have been responsible for almost all of the growth in recent years.
We probably need more people on the front line actually providing services but we need flatter management structures and far less bureaucracy behind them.
There are (Sept 22) 5.8m public sector employees.
Of these, 1.9 million work for the NHS.
Total civil service employment was 513k - so less than 10% of public sector employees work for the civil service.
The remainder (3.4m) are mostly employed in local government and education - specifically schools.
If you were to get rid of half the people who work for the NHS or who work in schools, I think people might notice.
BBC News - Cat killer Scarlet Blake jailed for Netflix show-inspired murder
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-68401335
https://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/23379759.war-words-best-site-new-railway-station-haxby-york/
Infrastructure needs good planning, and old station sites are not necessarily the best ones for current ones. As an example, I think Corby station had three sites: the original one, a new one for the first reopening in the 1980s, and another one, near the original station's site, in the 2010s.
Passenger usage is different nowadays: a station site that may have been good for passengers (and freight...) using horse and carts in Victorian times might not be ideal for modern passengers using cars. As an example: is there enough land available for a car park? Before any reopening, there should be studies that look into these issues, including multimodal, and decide where the best location is. Sometimes it will be where the old station is; sometimes close by; sometimes on a very different location.
Anything built along those lines that hasn't already been rebuilt will need to be replaced by the end of the decade...
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
Got to say to check this I went to look at the jobs available in the Civil service website - the solution architect roles paying £40-60k would be £90-110k in a consultancy...
There was one at Twickenham, but it's been replaced in recent years.
*I use the neutral term centrist, though personally I find the centrist agenda extreme and loopy.
2008:
2024:
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/02/26/paul-scully-no-go-areas-birmingham-london-islamophobia/
Truth is, it's Conservative policies that have got us into a mess by failing on their own terms, with the Tory Party, like crack addicts, then demanding a bigger purer hit each time to deal with the low caused by the last episode of failure.
At that point the compromises necessary to majority government kick in.
All we do is stick the compromises up the line a bit, by compressing them not by post election horse trading, but pre election conjuring.
And in the end it is the voters who choose to have a 2 party system. There is a choice....Farage, Gallaway, Lozza, Binhead, Davey, the rays of sunshine that make up the SNP....
Just like 99% of the rest of us do - nationwide.
Defence firms have to survive on trainees and recognise that many of their trainees will leave for better paid public sector work on qualification. Legal aid rates simply means that they cannot compete even in the busiest of firms. In the meantime the more senior part of the defence bar gets older and older with very few qualified solicitors coming up behind them.
Every one of my friends and relations who are normally Conservative voters (and living in rural Dorset, that's quite a lot) and who have expressed any kind of opinion, seem to be exasperated and dejected by the mess the Tories have got into.
I think some will switch to Labour/LDs/Green but many will just abstain this time at least.
I doubt a move to the populist right would attract any back at all.
Just my opinion. I am biased, no doubt.
The problem is static or declining productivity, combined with a rapidly growing population. So you have both ever larger organisations and a shortage of people to do actual work.
There is also this -
The conversation was about station reopenings; where the vast majority of prospective passengers will not have used any old station at all if it closed in the 1960s, and the best site is judged by metrics rather than nostalgia. The idea is to get people to use the reopened station, and the old station might be the best site for that. In many cases it is not.
For whom the bell tolls...
Of course, we've seen factions rip each other apart over policy before, but this feels qualitatively different.
I don't think it necessarily leads to a May election though. Pop the tin hats on.
Can't go to the country now, because the party is in a mess.
Can't hold on, because the party is in a mess that's probably going to get worse.
The thing I am not is 'centrist' - I don't look at the prevailing political trends and say 'I'm going to put myself in the middle of that' - because to do that would be completely meaningless and give me no actual conscience, no ability to distinguish what is right, wrong, sensible or foolish using my own brain.
In the 1990s the Tories were riven from top to bottom over Europe. People forget now just how bitter things got after Maastricht. Interestingly we've not heard that much about Europe recently.
This split is more a proxy for the Red Wall Vs the Blue Wall, IMO. I suspect it will soon be resolved at the next election by a mass exodus of "red wall" MP's at the hands of Red Wall voters. Though as someone said down thread, those "red wall" voters aren't necessarily going to be Labour voters...
Starmer seems to be winning back the centrist dads... how long will it be before the Tories next have a leader who'll be prepared to even start a conversation with the disappointed Cameroons?
Feels a bit like Labour 2015-2019.