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Even Reform don’t want toxic Lee Anderson – politicalbetting.com

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Comments

  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 35,986
    @alexwickham

    The govt is calling on a second Tory MP to withdraw their comments about Muslims this morning

    Paul Scully should take back his claim that parts of Tower Hamlets and Birmingham are ‘no go zones’, legal migration minister Tom Pursglove tells
    @KayBurley
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 35,986
    @DPJHodges

    Some Tory Ministers have started to seriously talk about “Crossover”, the moment Reform overtake the Conservatives in the polls. If this row continues that moment will arrive very very quickly.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,412
    nico679 said:

    Heathener said:

    For all our sakes it would be great if the tory party of @TSE were, indeed, the tory party.

    Alas, it’s not the case. There are plenty on the vocal right for whom Lager Lee is totemic:

    'Grassroots Conservative supporters have called Rishi Sunak a “snake” over Lee Anderson’s suspension as MPs on the Tory right said he should be given a route back in.

    In leaked WhatsApp messages obtained by the Guardian, members of the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO), which was founded by disgruntled Tories after Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss were ousted, attacked the prime minister for kicking Anderson out of the parliamentary party.

    Several of the activists endorsed Anderson’s comments and some went further in decrying “the threat of Islam”.’

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/26/tory-supporters-lash-out-at-snake-sunak-over-lee-anderson-suspension


    I was chatting with a tory friend yesterday about all of this. She thinks the whole lot of them (Badenoch, Braverman, Anderson etc. etc.) should be booted out of the party so they can join Reform. But we then got talking about when it all started and who is responsible.

    A lot of this goes back to Boris who deliberately stoked the right wing rabble with its ‘anti-woke’ hatred, but I suggested that Boris is too dilettantish to devise such a thing.

    At which point we both settled on Dominic Cummings.

    Boris purging the moderates naturally shifted the party to the right. It also created a vacuum at the top filled by the promotion of right wingers. Whether that idea came from Boris, Cummings or someone else is left as an exercise for the reader.
    It started with Brexit, which (a) proved that weaponised bullshit could win an election, (b) polarised the electorate along cultural lines and (c) created a vacuum for the role of national scapegoat.
    The national scapegoat used to be the EU and FOM . Now that the sunny uplands sold as Brexit has been shown to be a load of tripe the Tories and their arselicking media friends have continued to find new scapegoats .
    Really? Freedom of movement did cause a great deal of inward migration. Now we don't have FOM any more, those who want to limit migration are blaming the Home Office (for illegal and asylum-based migration) and the Government's low wage threshold (for legal migration). Those seem like simple facts to me.
  • nico679nico679 Posts: 6,275
    I’m surprised Scully made such a gaff . I remember him being critical of Braverman a while ago and he seemed a bit more sensible .
  • Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,239
    Scott_xP said:

    @alexwickham

    The govt is calling on a second Tory MP to withdraw their comments about Muslims this morning

    Paul Scully should take back his claim that parts of Tower Hamlets and Birmingham are ‘no go zones’, legal migration minister Tom Pursglove tells
    @KayBurley

    I’ve entitled this one

    “At least I’m not talking ‘bout Brexit”


    https://app.suno.ai/song/0ba9b285-999a-4c1a-8ba4-cf6e31ed1b9d
  • Scott_xP said:

    @alexwickham

    The govt is calling on a second Tory MP to withdraw their comments about Muslims this morning

    Paul Scully should take back his claim that parts of Tower Hamlets and Birmingham are ‘no go zones’, legal migration minister Tom Pursglove tells
    @KayBurley

    Paul Scully is the failed CCHQ-backed candidate for London Mayor. Maybe the party dodged a bullet when nominating Susan Hall. Not a sentence you will see every day.
  • Scott_xP said:

    @DPJHodges

    Some Tory Ministers have started to seriously talk about “Crossover”, the moment Reform overtake the Conservatives in the polls. If this row continues that moment will arrive very very quickly.

    I am baffled. They are trying to dogwhistle the bigots. But can't say what the bigots think because if they go half way there ("no-go areas", Islamist Khan etc) they get booted.

    So they are opening the door to let all the "I blame the pakis" voters start talking, and then confirming that the Tory party can't satiate them. Which will only drive the UFUK vote even higher.
  • SelebianSelebian Posts: 8,721

    .

    Selebian said:

    Taz said:

    Scotland is facing a cancer “timebomb on the SNP’s watch”, critics have warned, after new research revealed Scots face longer waiting times and lower treatment rates than other countries.

    Patients waited on average more than two weeks longer for both chemotherapy and radiotherapy north of the border than people living in England.

    The studies, carried out by the International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership (ICBP), co-funded by Cancer Research UK and published in The Lancet Oncology, showed lags compared with the rest of Britain, Norway and Australia.


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/snp-to-blame-for-cancer-timebomb-as-scots-wait-longer-for-care-63jk52cmd

    NHS failing in Conservative England.
    NHS failing in Labour Wales.
    NHS failing in SNP Scotland.

    Perhaps, jut perhaps, the problem is not just the party in power, but the NHS model itself?
    rNHS is almost a national religion. Banging pans on the doorstep, FFS. If it is so wonderful why does no other major nation copy it ?

    Criticise it and the counter argument is always about the USA and its health system. This ignores many other nations who have perfectly functioning health systems that is not our sainted NHS.

    Wes Streeting does seem to get that.
    Many European countries have better healthcare systems. They also spend more on them. I've got no problem moving to one of the better funded European models.
    We could, but that would mean moving to a social insurance system where we pay in, say, 5% extra into schemes (bit like with pensions) on top of the 10% national insurance we already pay, with employers contributing a bit more too.

    Are you up for that?
    Yes.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,412
    edited February 27

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    Sorry, I stopped reading after the second sentence.

    Try not to fart out your basest emotions if you want to be taken seriously on here.
    I have to ask how many decades you have lived in red wall towns to tell me from your own lived experience that people like my uncle don't think what I posted?

    There is a huge amount of baseline bigotry in places like Rochdale. That "bigoted woman" is normal for Rochdale. They absolutely think their town has been taken over by "the pakis" - a descriptor used for any British Asian community regardless of their heritage.

    These are the people that 20p prey on - usually someone from elsewhere with more life experience and intelligence who is gas-lighting them for votes, but now with Lee Anderson they get the real deal. The moron's moron.

    I grew up in Rochdale and family there. I spent another decade and a half on Teesside. Don't presume to tell me what the red wall is like.
    Rochdale has had a particularly bad experience with that community. Personally I blame the inaction of the police for what happened with the grooming gangs, but it is quite easy to see why someone from Rochdale might resonate with a statement warning of an authority figure favouring the Muslim community. Though Anderson seems to have had zero evidence for his claim.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 35,986
    ...
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,239
    I would actually BUY - or download - “At least I’m not talking ‘bout Brexit”
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 60,407

    algarkirk said:

    Heathener said:

    For all our sakes it would be great if the tory party of @TSE were, indeed, the tory party.

    Alas, it’s not the case. There are plenty on the vocal right for whom Lager Lee is totemic:

    'Grassroots Conservative supporters have called Rishi Sunak a “snake” over Lee Anderson’s suspension as MPs on the Tory right said he should be given a route back in.

    In leaked WhatsApp messages obtained by the Guardian, members of the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO), which was founded by disgruntled Tories after Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss were ousted, attacked the prime minister for kicking Anderson out of the parliamentary party.

    Several of the activists endorsed Anderson’s comments and some went further in decrying “the threat of Islam”.’

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/26/tory-supporters-lash-out-at-snake-sunak-over-lee-anderson-suspension


    I was chatting with a tory friend yesterday about all of this. She thinks the whole lot of them (Badenoch, Braverman, Anderson etc. etc.) should be booted out of the party so they can join Reform. But we then got talking about when it all started and who is responsible.

    A lot of this goes back to Boris who deliberately stoked the right wing rabble with its ‘anti-woke’ hatred, but I suggested that Boris is too dilettantish to devise such a thing.

    At which point we both settled on Dominic Cummings.

    What you're arguing for is a Conservative Party that more liberals and centre-left can feel comfortable with.

    There's certainly a small (and very voluble) audience for that but it's not one that would come close to winning an election: non-Tories might be slightly more comfortable with the Tories being in office but it would win over very few of their votes.
    Two points. It is still very unclear what a right wing Tory government would do different, WRT migration, employment, borrowing, spending, pensions, taxing, benefits, debt and deficit.

    Secondly, at the moment polling shows under 40% support for the right+centre right, and 60+% support for the centre and centre left and left. This suggests that the next election, like most, will be won from the centre, which is where the next Tory GE win will come from in a few years' time.
    The Conservatives biggest problem is they haven't delivered.

    In fact, in one area where I think they largely have - checking identity politics - they get reams of criticism, much of which we've seen on this board this morning.
    Yes, because 'identity politics' is a load of divisive crud which, like 'anti-woke', does f-all to fix the country. It's an irrelevance on the greater scale of things.
    Except it isn't when it divides and polarises society. Stability and harmony within the country is essential for any progress to be made.

    It's actually a basic One Nation position.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 60,407

    algarkirk said:

    Heathener said:

    For all our sakes it would be great if the tory party of @TSE were, indeed, the tory party.

    Alas, it’s not the case. There are plenty on the vocal right for whom Lager Lee is totemic:

    'Grassroots Conservative supporters have called Rishi Sunak a “snake” over Lee Anderson’s suspension as MPs on the Tory right said he should be given a route back in.

    In leaked WhatsApp messages obtained by the Guardian, members of the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO), which was founded by disgruntled Tories after Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss were ousted, attacked the prime minister for kicking Anderson out of the parliamentary party.

    Several of the activists endorsed Anderson’s comments and some went further in decrying “the threat of Islam”.’

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/26/tory-supporters-lash-out-at-snake-sunak-over-lee-anderson-suspension


    I was chatting with a tory friend yesterday about all of this. She thinks the whole lot of them (Badenoch, Braverman, Anderson etc. etc.) should be booted out of the party so they can join Reform. But we then got talking about when it all started and who is responsible.

    A lot of this goes back to Boris who deliberately stoked the right wing rabble with its ‘anti-woke’ hatred, but I suggested that Boris is too dilettantish to devise such a thing.

    At which point we both settled on Dominic Cummings.

    What you're arguing for is a Conservative Party that more liberals and centre-left can feel comfortable with.

    There's certainly a small (and very voluble) audience for that but it's not one that would come close to winning an election: non-Tories might be slightly more comfortable with the Tories being in office but it would win over very few of their votes.
    Two points. It is still very unclear what a right wing Tory government would do different, WRT migration, employment, borrowing, spending, pensions, taxing, benefits, debt and deficit.

    Secondly, at the moment polling shows under 40% support for the right+centre right, and 60+% support for the centre and centre left and left. This suggests that the next election, like most, will be won from the centre, which is where the next Tory GE win will come from in a few years' time.
    The Conservatives biggest problem is they haven't delivered.

    In fact, in one area where I think they largely have - checking identity politics - they get reams of criticism, much of which we've seen on this board this morning.
    The Tories haven't checked identity politics, they've grabbed it with both hands.
    No, they'd put up an opposition to it.

    In your eyes, and those of many others who are too blind to see, that's akin to starting a fight.
  • TimSTimS Posts: 12,984

    Scott_xP said:

    @DPJHodges

    Some Tory Ministers have started to seriously talk about “Crossover”, the moment Reform overtake the Conservatives in the polls. If this row continues that moment will arrive very very quickly.

    I am baffled. They are trying to dogwhistle the bigots. But can't say what the bigots think because if they go half way there ("no-go areas", Islamist Khan etc) they get booted.

    So they are opening the door to let all the "I blame the pakis" voters start talking, and then confirming that the Tory party can't satiate them. Which will only drive the UFUK vote even higher.
    Immigration probably the biggest example of this.

    We’ve seen a bit of a similar issue on the Labour side with public spending. Labour have so powerfully bemoaned the crumbling of our public services and infrastructure that they’ve got all the tax and spend voters talking, but seem to be confirming the Labour Party can’t satiate them. It’s a tricky political thing, expectation management.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,412

    Scott_xP said:

    @alexwickham

    The govt is calling on a second Tory MP to withdraw their comments about Muslims this morning

    Paul Scully should take back his claim that parts of Tower Hamlets and Birmingham are ‘no go zones’, legal migration minister Tom Pursglove tells
    @KayBurley

    Paul Scully is the failed CCHQ-backed candidate for London Mayor. Maybe the party dodged a bullet when nominating Susan Hall. Not a sentence you will see every day.
    No he isn't, he's the candidate they passed over for the alleged groper.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 60,407

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    Sorry, I stopped reading after the second sentence.

    Try not to fart out your basest emotions if you want to be taken seriously on here.
    I have to ask how many decades you have lived in red wall towns to tell me from your own lived experience that people like my uncle don't think what I posted?

    There is a huge amount of baseline bigotry in places like Rochdale. That "bigoted woman" is normal for Rochdale. They absolutely think their town has been taken over by "the pakis" - a descriptor used for any British Asian community regardless of their heritage.

    These are the people that 20p prey on - usually someone from elsewhere with more life experience and intelligence who is gas-lighting them for votes, but now with Lee Anderson they get the real deal. The moron's moron.

    I grew up in Rochdale and have family there. I spent another decade and a half on Teesside. Don't presume to tell me what the red wall is like.
    Faaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrtt... faaaaaa.. faaaaaaaaaaaaarr....

    ..F...Fa...FA.. FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRTT.

    Ah, that's better.
  • SelebianSelebian Posts: 8,721

    Taz said:
    Well you could turn to the IEA who come out with bollocks like this:

    How red tape is fuelling the cost of living crisis

    📈 Since 2000, sectors with heavy state intervention have experienced large price rises while competitive markets have experienced price falls.


    image

    https://x.com/iealondon/status/1760582275928920174?s=20
    :lol:

    Waiting for the IEA report on there being more fires in areas with larger fire services, too. I mean, the evidence is clear, fire fighters are arsonists :wink:
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,062

    algarkirk said:

    Heathener said:

    For all our sakes it would be great if the tory party of @TSE were, indeed, the tory party.

    Alas, it’s not the case. There are plenty on the vocal right for whom Lager Lee is totemic:

    'Grassroots Conservative supporters have called Rishi Sunak a “snake” over Lee Anderson’s suspension as MPs on the Tory right said he should be given a route back in.

    In leaked WhatsApp messages obtained by the Guardian, members of the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO), which was founded by disgruntled Tories after Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss were ousted, attacked the prime minister for kicking Anderson out of the parliamentary party.

    Several of the activists endorsed Anderson’s comments and some went further in decrying “the threat of Islam”.’

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/26/tory-supporters-lash-out-at-snake-sunak-over-lee-anderson-suspension


    I was chatting with a tory friend yesterday about all of this. She thinks the whole lot of them (Badenoch, Braverman, Anderson etc. etc.) should be booted out of the party so they can join Reform. But we then got talking about when it all started and who is responsible.

    A lot of this goes back to Boris who deliberately stoked the right wing rabble with its ‘anti-woke’ hatred, but I suggested that Boris is too dilettantish to devise such a thing.

    At which point we both settled on Dominic Cummings.

    What you're arguing for is a Conservative Party that more liberals and centre-left can feel comfortable with.

    There's certainly a small (and very voluble) audience for that but it's not one that would come close to winning an election: non-Tories might be slightly more comfortable with the Tories being in office but it would win over very few of their votes.
    Two points. It is still very unclear what a right wing Tory government would do different, WRT migration, employment, borrowing, spending, pensions, taxing, benefits, debt and deficit.

    Secondly, at the moment polling shows under 40% support for the right+centre right, and 60+% support for the centre and centre left and left. This suggests that the next election, like most, will be won from the centre, which is where the next Tory GE win will come from in a few years' time.
    The Conservatives biggest problem is they haven't delivered.

    In fact, in one area where I think they largely have - checking identity politics - they get reams of criticism, much of which we've seen on this board this morning.
    Have they checked it - or have they just weaponised their own form of it ?

    What you appear to mean is that they've checked the form of it you don't like.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,239

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
  • Nigelb said:

    malcolmg said:

    Taz said:

    FPT:

    Taz said:

    Newcastle council proceed with its assault on the elderly and marginalised in society by forcing through Cashless car parks. Great if you have a smartphone. Sadly many do not.

    https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/newcastle-council-claims-not-sustainable-28691686

    I had a bit of a giggle at Stansted Airport on Sunday. I arrived to pick Mrs J and son up, timing it so I arrived shortly after their plane landed. Went to the orange short-stay car park, picked them up, and after a loo break, was back out in seventeen minutes. The car park cots £10 for half an hour; £18 for an hour.

    Except the car park ticket machine would not accept my ticket. Another was out of order. A third accepted my ticket, but was cash only. Ditto the fourth and fifth. We only had twenties, and it would not accept those as it did not give change. Eventually we risked it and drove to the exit, where fortunately chip-and-pin worked. But we'd gone over the half-hour mark, so it cost us an extra eight quid.

    For the extortionate amount they charge, you'd think they could actually ensure the machines worked properly...
    Airport short stay parking costs are astronomical.
    airport carparks in general are legal robbery
    That's the market for you.
    Supply and demand - and a local monopoly.
    People paying £thousands for foreign holidays moaning about a few quid extra.
  • I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    Sorry, I stopped reading after the second sentence.

    Try not to fart out your basest emotions if you want to be taken seriously on here.
    I have to ask how many decades you have lived in red wall towns to tell me from your own lived experience that people like my uncle don't think what I posted?

    There is a huge amount of baseline bigotry in places like Rochdale. That "bigoted woman" is normal for Rochdale. They absolutely think their town has been taken over by "the pakis" - a descriptor used for any British Asian community regardless of their heritage.

    These are the people that 20p prey on - usually someone from elsewhere with more life experience and intelligence who is gas-lighting them for votes, but now with Lee Anderson they get the real deal. The moron's moron.

    I grew up in Rochdale and have family there. I spent another decade and a half on Teesside. Don't presume to tell me what the red wall is like.
    Faaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrtt... faaaaaa.. faaaaaaaaaaaaarr....

    ..F...Fa...FA.. FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRTT.

    Ah, that's better.
    Do you do make me laugh. Keep it up luv
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 60,407
    Nigelb said:

    algarkirk said:

    Heathener said:

    For all our sakes it would be great if the tory party of @TSE were, indeed, the tory party.

    Alas, it’s not the case. There are plenty on the vocal right for whom Lager Lee is totemic:

    'Grassroots Conservative supporters have called Rishi Sunak a “snake” over Lee Anderson’s suspension as MPs on the Tory right said he should be given a route back in.

    In leaked WhatsApp messages obtained by the Guardian, members of the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO), which was founded by disgruntled Tories after Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss were ousted, attacked the prime minister for kicking Anderson out of the parliamentary party.

    Several of the activists endorsed Anderson’s comments and some went further in decrying “the threat of Islam”.’

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/26/tory-supporters-lash-out-at-snake-sunak-over-lee-anderson-suspension


    I was chatting with a tory friend yesterday about all of this. She thinks the whole lot of them (Badenoch, Braverman, Anderson etc. etc.) should be booted out of the party so they can join Reform. But we then got talking about when it all started and who is responsible.

    A lot of this goes back to Boris who deliberately stoked the right wing rabble with its ‘anti-woke’ hatred, but I suggested that Boris is too dilettantish to devise such a thing.

    At which point we both settled on Dominic Cummings.

    What you're arguing for is a Conservative Party that more liberals and centre-left can feel comfortable with.

    There's certainly a small (and very voluble) audience for that but it's not one that would come close to winning an election: non-Tories might be slightly more comfortable with the Tories being in office but it would win over very few of their votes.
    Two points. It is still very unclear what a right wing Tory government would do different, WRT migration, employment, borrowing, spending, pensions, taxing, benefits, debt and deficit.

    Secondly, at the moment polling shows under 40% support for the right+centre right, and 60+% support for the centre and centre left and left. This suggests that the next election, like most, will be won from the centre, which is where the next Tory GE win will come from in a few years' time.
    The Conservatives biggest problem is they haven't delivered.

    In fact, in one area where I think they largely have - checking identity politics - they get reams of criticism, much of which we've seen on this board this morning.
    Have they checked it - or have they just weaponised their own form of it ?

    What you appear to mean is that they've checked the form of it you don't like.
    No, there was a lot of heat in the aftermath of BLM about pulling down statues, renaming buildings, infrastructure and institutions - left, right and centre - calls for reparations, a pretty much compulsory identity politics reading list, and formal programmes of unconscious bias and white privilege throughout the professions and public services. A big jump in EDI employment and deployment. All, essentially, imported from America.

    Whilst we got a little bit of that in the first few months Oliver Dowden successfully checked it, including with legislation, and organisations like Stonewall have since been challenged on their agenda. Whilst it's still around in the background it's definitely gone off the boil a bit over the last 18-24 months. We haven't quite yet, in my view, calmed down entirely on British history and identity but it's better than it was.

    We don't have anything like the divisions in the USA over it - except that the word "Woke" can trigger people into apoplexy on both sides - and far too many Liberals (not all) deny there was ever an issue, despite opposing each and every single one of the challenges all the way down the line.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,814
    edited February 27

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    Sorry, I stopped reading after the second sentence.

    Try not to fart out your basest emotions if you want to be taken seriously on here.
    I have to ask how many decades you have lived in red wall towns to tell me from your own lived experience that people like my uncle don't think what I posted?

    There is a huge amount of baseline bigotry in places like Rochdale. That "bigoted woman" is normal for Rochdale. They absolutely think their town has been taken over by "the pakis" - a descriptor used for any British Asian community regardless of their heritage.

    These are the people that 20p prey on - usually someone from elsewhere with more life experience and intelligence who is gas-lighting them for votes, but now with Lee Anderson they get the real deal. The moron's moron.

    I grew up in Rochdale and have family there. I spent another decade and a half on Teesside. Don't presume to tell me what the red wall is like.
    Faaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrtt... faaaaaa.. faaaaaaaaaaaaarr....

    ..F...Fa...FA.. FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRTT.

    Ah, that's better.
    Early in the day for such reasoned and cogent argument, too.
  • kjhkjh Posts: 11,782

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    Sorry, I stopped reading after the second sentence.

    Try not to fart out your basest emotions if you want to be taken seriously on here.
    I have to ask how many decades you have lived in red wall towns to tell me from your own lived experience that people like my uncle don't think what I posted?

    There is a huge amount of baseline bigotry in places like Rochdale. That "bigoted woman" is normal for Rochdale. They absolutely think their town has been taken over by "the pakis" - a descriptor used for any British Asian community regardless of their heritage.

    These are the people that 20p prey on - usually someone from elsewhere with more life experience and intelligence who is gas-lighting them for votes, but now with Lee Anderson they get the real deal. The moron's moron.

    I grew up in Rochdale and have family there. I spent another decade and a half on Teesside. Don't presume to tell me what the red wall is like.
    It is bizarre to think what you say is not true, much as we may wish it were not. My father was the same. His reason for voting for Brexit was to keep the blacks out (how he came to that conclusion goodness knows). We are no longer in the 70s where this was a lot more commonplace, but to think it has disappeared particularly in deprived areas is daft.
  • Selebian said:

    Taz said:
    Well you could turn to the IEA who come out with bollocks like this:

    How red tape is fuelling the cost of living crisis

    📈 Since 2000, sectors with heavy state intervention have experienced large price rises while competitive markets have experienced price falls.


    image

    https://x.com/iealondon/status/1760582275928920174?s=20
    :lol:

    Waiting for the IEA report on there being more fires in areas with larger fire services, too. I mean, the evidence is clear, fire fighters are arsonists :wink:
    And the report about owning Labradors making you go blind.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,952
    Scott_xP said:

    ...

    Good point I can't think of any Cons muslim MPs who, say, have held any of the great offices of state in living memory, or indeed quite recently.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,239
    edited February 27
    A classic 50s rock n roll song

    About partying at Gobekli Tepe

    https://www.reddit.com/r/SunoAI/s/dhx6UezZDS
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,814
    Selebian said:

    Taz said:
    Well you could turn to the IEA who come out with bollocks like this:

    How red tape is fuelling the cost of living crisis

    📈 Since 2000, sectors with heavy state intervention have experienced large price rises while competitive markets have experienced price falls.


    image

    https://x.com/iealondon/status/1760582275928920174?s=20
    :lol:

    Waiting for the IEA report on there being more fires in areas with larger fire services, too. I mean, the evidence is clear, fire fighters are arsonists :wink:
    Odd too that communication isn't regarded as regulated.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,603
    https://www.politico.eu/article/slovak-pm-fico-says-eu-and-nato-states-consider-sending-troops-to-ukraine/

    “Several EU and NATO members are considering military deployments to Ukraine, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico claimed on Monday.”
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,814

    Selebian said:

    Taz said:
    Well you could turn to the IEA who come out with bollocks like this:

    How red tape is fuelling the cost of living crisis

    📈 Since 2000, sectors with heavy state intervention have experienced large price rises while competitive markets have experienced price falls.


    image

    https://x.com/iealondon/status/1760582275928920174?s=20
    :lol:

    Waiting for the IEA report on there being more fires in areas with larger fire services, too. I mean, the evidence is clear, fire fighters are arsonists :wink:
    And the report about owning Labradors making you go blind.
    And voting Tory in the Home Counties makes you a millionaire with a des. det. ho. benefiting from ch and dg.
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    Are we again having a conversation about Free Speech where there has not been any retaliation from the state? Anderson has freedom of speech; he said what he said to a wide audience. What he does not have is freedom from consequences of his speech - because to do that you would have to curtail the freedom of speech of others. It's down to Sunak who he wants in his party, it's down to individuals if they like or dislike what Anderson has said and (if Khan wants to sue) it will be down to a judge to decide if this is defamatory.

    If I call everyone I meet one of the various slurs every time I see them - I have the freedom to do that. And everyone else has the freedom to believe I'm a tosser and not want to spend any time with me. That's how a lot of you right wingers feel about woke people - why aren't we allowed to feel it about you?

    As for the whole "he's trotted out to talk to the north from the north" that's drivel too. I lived in Stoke for ~7 years, it's where I started being politically active and it's where I first door knocked. When I moved there the local council had something like 11 UKIP councillors. Yes, people held bigotries that made them vote that way, but they also had real grievances about the way the country was (around poverty, around services, around housing) and nobody was owning up to those issues and the only party really pointing to a cause (even if that cause was a scapegoat) were UKIP pointing towards foreigners. I talked to a lot of people who were seeing the beginning of the LD/Con coalition who said "they're all the same, I don't trust em, I'm voting UKIP to piss them off". As a Green I understood the premise, even if I couldn't disagree more with the conclusion. Some of the most productive conversations I had on the doorstep were with people who had given up on politics and were voting UKIP to protest (some UKIP voters were also bigotted thugs, but from my chats that was a vast minority). People need something to believe in politically, and if that isn't provided the nearest miniature Mosley will use that as an opportunity to spread fear and division.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,889
    edited February 27
    20% of voters ie almost the current Tory poll rating and a plurality of Conservative and Leave voters thinking the party was wrong to suspend Anderson is significant even if a plurality of voters over all back his suspension. It shows the Tories cannot afford to expel or deselect Anderson without even further leakage to Reform, maybe even leading to them level pegging with Reform.

    Habib is probably right but the average Reform voters is closer to Anderson than him I suspect
  • Nigelb said:

    malcolmg said:

    Taz said:

    FPT:

    Taz said:

    Newcastle council proceed with its assault on the elderly and marginalised in society by forcing through Cashless car parks. Great if you have a smartphone. Sadly many do not.

    https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/newcastle-council-claims-not-sustainable-28691686

    I had a bit of a giggle at Stansted Airport on Sunday. I arrived to pick Mrs J and son up, timing it so I arrived shortly after their plane landed. Went to the orange short-stay car park, picked them up, and after a loo break, was back out in seventeen minutes. The car park cots £10 for half an hour; £18 for an hour.

    Except the car park ticket machine would not accept my ticket. Another was out of order. A third accepted my ticket, but was cash only. Ditto the fourth and fifth. We only had twenties, and it would not accept those as it did not give change. Eventually we risked it and drove to the exit, where fortunately chip-and-pin worked. But we'd gone over the half-hour mark, so it cost us an extra eight quid.

    For the extortionate amount they charge, you'd think they could actually ensure the machines worked properly...
    Airport short stay parking costs are astronomical.
    airport carparks in general are legal robbery
    That's the market for you.
    Supply and demand - and a local monopoly.
    People paying £thousands for foreign holidays moaning about a few quid extra.
    A friend proudly explained to me how he'd exploited the train ticket system to save £20 on a £10,000 holiday.
  • to let all the "I blame the pakis" voters

    "Language, Timothy!"
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 27,867
    edited February 27
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155

    algarkirk said:

    Heathener said:

    For all our sakes it would be great if the tory party of @TSE were, indeed, the tory party.

    Alas, it’s not the case. There are plenty on the vocal right for whom Lager Lee is totemic:

    'Grassroots Conservative supporters have called Rishi Sunak a “snake” over Lee Anderson’s suspension as MPs on the Tory right said he should be given a route back in.

    In leaked WhatsApp messages obtained by the Guardian, members of the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO), which was founded by disgruntled Tories after Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss were ousted, attacked the prime minister for kicking Anderson out of the parliamentary party.

    Several of the activists endorsed Anderson’s comments and some went further in decrying “the threat of Islam”.’

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/26/tory-supporters-lash-out-at-snake-sunak-over-lee-anderson-suspension


    I was chatting with a tory friend yesterday about all of this. She thinks the whole lot of them (Badenoch, Braverman, Anderson etc. etc.) should be booted out of the party so they can join Reform. But we then got talking about when it all started and who is responsible.

    A lot of this goes back to Boris who deliberately stoked the right wing rabble with its ‘anti-woke’ hatred, but I suggested that Boris is too dilettantish to devise such a thing.

    At which point we both settled on Dominic Cummings.

    What you're arguing for is a Conservative Party that more liberals and centre-left can feel comfortable with.

    There's certainly a small (and very voluble) audience for that but it's not one that would come close to winning an election: non-Tories might be slightly more comfortable with the Tories being in office but it would win over very few of their votes.
    Two points. It is still very unclear what a right wing Tory government would do different, WRT migration, employment, borrowing, spending, pensions, taxing, benefits, debt and deficit.

    Secondly, at the moment polling shows under 40% support for the right+centre right, and 60+% support for the centre and centre left and left. This suggests that the next election, like most, will be won from the centre, which is where the next Tory GE win will come from in a few years' time.
    The Conservatives biggest problem is they haven't delivered.

    In fact, in one area where I think they largely have - checking identity politics - they get reams of criticism, much of which we've seen on this board this morning.
    The Tories haven't checked identity politics, they've grabbed it with both hands.
    No, they'd put up an opposition to it.

    In your eyes, and those of many others who are too blind to see, that's akin to starting a fight.
    What is identity politics? Like "woke" it just seems to be a word that is used to define "anything that I don't like".

    If it's identity politics to be inclined to being considerate of things like race or gender or sexuality or whatever, surely it is identity politics to be inclined to be inconsiderate of things like race or gender or sexuality or whatever - just in the opposite direction? What is the "neutral" identity politics position?
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,814
    edited February 27

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    Sorry, I stopped reading after the second sentence.

    Try not to fart out your basest emotions if you want to be taken seriously on here.
    I have to ask how many decades you have lived in red wall towns to tell me from your own lived experience that people like my uncle don't think what I posted?

    There is a huge amount of baseline bigotry in places like Rochdale. That "bigoted woman" is normal for Rochdale. They absolutely think their town has been taken over by "the pakis" - a descriptor used for any British Asian community regardless of their heritage.

    These are the people that 20p prey on - usually someone from elsewhere with more life experience and intelligence who is gas-lighting them for votes, but now with Lee Anderson they get the real deal. The moron's moron.

    I grew up in Rochdale and have family there. I spent another decade and a half on Teesside. Don't presume to tell me what the red wall is like.
    As for 20p - more like 38p now. Depressing piece on food inflation and the actual effect on people, right down to hospital admissions for immediate results of inadequate diet.

    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/27/health-emergency-15-of-uk-households-went-hungry-last-month-data-shows

    'Although inflation had decreased in recent months, food prices remained high, the foundation said. The price of a “reasonably costed, adequately nutritious” weekly basket of food has increased by 24-26% in the past two years, it said.'
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 13,677
    edited February 27
    DavidL said:

    Nigelb said:

    He doesn't rule it in, either.

    Macron refuses to rule out putting troops on ground in Ukraine in call to galvanise Europe
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/27/french-president-emmanuel-macron-ukraine-french-ground-troops

    Let's face it our army is not fit to go into battle in Ukraine. They don't have nearly enough drones. They don't have nearly enough protection from drones. They don't know what tactics are required to survive on such a battlefield. War has evolved well beyond their current capacity.
    I think this is a bit unfair. The British Army is NEVER going to Ukraine while the conflict is hot but if they did then they would very good at some aspects of warfare (squad level infantry actions) and fucking appalling at others (catering). The British armed forces are not universally shit, despite the best efforts of the tories, and neither are they universally brilliant.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,952
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    It is amazing but again let's not get carried away. Where would that song be without @Rochdale's poetic plea and response to Casino.

    It needs a human at the heart of it.

    I mean Kraftwerk did similar things. Using the technology as a tool and complement to their own creativity.

    Put that to (either a power ballad or perhaps Remote Control era) AI, sunshine.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,814
    148grss said:

    algarkirk said:

    Heathener said:

    For all our sakes it would be great if the tory party of @TSE were, indeed, the tory party.

    Alas, it’s not the case. There are plenty on the vocal right for whom Lager Lee is totemic:

    'Grassroots Conservative supporters have called Rishi Sunak a “snake” over Lee Anderson’s suspension as MPs on the Tory right said he should be given a route back in.

    In leaked WhatsApp messages obtained by the Guardian, members of the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO), which was founded by disgruntled Tories after Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss were ousted, attacked the prime minister for kicking Anderson out of the parliamentary party.

    Several of the activists endorsed Anderson’s comments and some went further in decrying “the threat of Islam”.’

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/26/tory-supporters-lash-out-at-snake-sunak-over-lee-anderson-suspension


    I was chatting with a tory friend yesterday about all of this. She thinks the whole lot of them (Badenoch, Braverman, Anderson etc. etc.) should be booted out of the party so they can join Reform. But we then got talking about when it all started and who is responsible.

    A lot of this goes back to Boris who deliberately stoked the right wing rabble with its ‘anti-woke’ hatred, but I suggested that Boris is too dilettantish to devise such a thing.

    At which point we both settled on Dominic Cummings.

    What you're arguing for is a Conservative Party that more liberals and centre-left can feel comfortable with.

    There's certainly a small (and very voluble) audience for that but it's not one that would come close to winning an election: non-Tories might be slightly more comfortable with the Tories being in office but it would win over very few of their votes.
    Two points. It is still very unclear what a right wing Tory government would do different, WRT migration, employment, borrowing, spending, pensions, taxing, benefits, debt and deficit.

    Secondly, at the moment polling shows under 40% support for the right+centre right, and 60+% support for the centre and centre left and left. This suggests that the next election, like most, will be won from the centre, which is where the next Tory GE win will come from in a few years' time.
    The Conservatives biggest problem is they haven't delivered.

    In fact, in one area where I think they largely have - checking identity politics - they get reams of criticism, much of which we've seen on this board this morning.
    The Tories haven't checked identity politics, they've grabbed it with both hands.
    No, they'd put up an opposition to it.

    In your eyes, and those of many others who are too blind to see, that's akin to starting a fight.
    What is identity politics? Like "woke" it just seems to be a word that is used to define "anything that I don't like".

    If it's identity politics to be inclined to being considerate of things like race or gender or sexuality or whatever, surely it is identity politics to be inclined to be inconsiderate of things like race or gender or sexuality or whatever - just in the opposite direction? What is the "neutral" identity politics position?
    Is|n't being a patriotic British royalist a form of identity politics, come to think of it?
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,952
    Dura_Ace said:

    DavidL said:

    Nigelb said:

    He doesn't rule it in, either.

    Macron refuses to rule out putting troops on ground in Ukraine in call to galvanise Europe
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/27/french-president-emmanuel-macron-ukraine-french-ground-troops

    Let's face it our army is not fit to go into battle in Ukraine. They don't have nearly enough drones. They don't have nearly enough protection from drones. They don't know what tactics are required to survive on such a battlefield. War has evolved well beyond their current capacity.
    I think this is a bit unfair. The British Army is NEVER going to Ukraine while the conflict is hot but if they did then they would very good at some aspects of warfare (squad level infantry actions) and fucking appalling at others (catering). The British armed forces are not universally shit, despite the best efforts of the tories, and neither are they universally brilliant.
    bib - your welcome.

    There is also a huge amount of work going on within HMF around drones in case anyone thought that the phenomenon had been completely missed (not an unfair assumption, that said).
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,889
    DavidL said:

    Nigelb said:

    He doesn't rule it in, either.

    Macron refuses to rule out putting troops on ground in Ukraine in call to galvanise Europe
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/27/french-president-emmanuel-macron-ukraine-french-ground-troops

    Let's face it our army is not fit to go into battle in Ukraine. They don't have nearly enough drones. They don't have nearly enough protection from drones. They don't know what tactics are required to survive on such a battlefield. War has evolved well beyond their current capacity.
    Nor was the Russian army fit to go into battle in Ukraine as its early losses showed
  • eekeek Posts: 28,366

    Nigelb said:

    malcolmg said:

    Taz said:

    FPT:

    Taz said:

    Newcastle council proceed with its assault on the elderly and marginalised in society by forcing through Cashless car parks. Great if you have a smartphone. Sadly many do not.

    https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/newcastle-council-claims-not-sustainable-28691686

    I had a bit of a giggle at Stansted Airport on Sunday. I arrived to pick Mrs J and son up, timing it so I arrived shortly after their plane landed. Went to the orange short-stay car park, picked them up, and after a loo break, was back out in seventeen minutes. The car park cots £10 for half an hour; £18 for an hour.

    Except the car park ticket machine would not accept my ticket. Another was out of order. A third accepted my ticket, but was cash only. Ditto the fourth and fifth. We only had twenties, and it would not accept those as it did not give change. Eventually we risked it and drove to the exit, where fortunately chip-and-pin worked. But we'd gone over the half-hour mark, so it cost us an extra eight quid.

    For the extortionate amount they charge, you'd think they could actually ensure the machines worked properly...
    Airport short stay parking costs are astronomical.
    airport carparks in general are legal robbery
    That's the market for you.
    Supply and demand - and a local monopoly.
    People paying £thousands for foreign holidays moaning about a few quid extra.
    A friend proudly explained to me how he'd exploited the train ticket system to save £20 on a £10,000 holiday.
    People are always happy if they think they’ve beaten a system.

    I’m not going to comment - because of the cost of parking (and convenience) we are flying to Paris via Schiphol because it means we leave from Teeside where everything is painless and it’s a £14 taxi each way
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155

    Nigelb said:

    algarkirk said:

    Heathener said:

    For all our sakes it would be great if the tory party of @TSE were, indeed, the tory party.

    Alas, it’s not the case. There are plenty on the vocal right for whom Lager Lee is totemic:

    'Grassroots Conservative supporters have called Rishi Sunak a “snake” over Lee Anderson’s suspension as MPs on the Tory right said he should be given a route back in.

    In leaked WhatsApp messages obtained by the Guardian, members of the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO), which was founded by disgruntled Tories after Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss were ousted, attacked the prime minister for kicking Anderson out of the parliamentary party.

    Several of the activists endorsed Anderson’s comments and some went further in decrying “the threat of Islam”.’

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/26/tory-supporters-lash-out-at-snake-sunak-over-lee-anderson-suspension


    I was chatting with a tory friend yesterday about all of this. She thinks the whole lot of them (Badenoch, Braverman, Anderson etc. etc.) should be booted out of the party so they can join Reform. But we then got talking about when it all started and who is responsible.

    A lot of this goes back to Boris who deliberately stoked the right wing rabble with its ‘anti-woke’ hatred, but I suggested that Boris is too dilettantish to devise such a thing.

    At which point we both settled on Dominic Cummings.

    What you're arguing for is a Conservative Party that more liberals and centre-left can feel comfortable with.

    There's certainly a small (and very voluble) audience for that but it's not one that would come close to winning an election: non-Tories might be slightly more comfortable with the Tories being in office but it would win over very few of their votes.
    Two points. It is still very unclear what a right wing Tory government would do different, WRT migration, employment, borrowing, spending, pensions, taxing, benefits, debt and deficit.

    Secondly, at the moment polling shows under 40% support for the right+centre right, and 60+% support for the centre and centre left and left. This suggests that the next election, like most, will be won from the centre, which is where the next Tory GE win will come from in a few years' time.
    The Conservatives biggest problem is they haven't delivered.

    In fact, in one area where I think they largely have - checking identity politics - they get reams of criticism, much of which we've seen on this board this morning.
    Have they checked it - or have they just weaponised their own form of it ?

    What you appear to mean is that they've checked the form of it you don't like.
    No, there was a lot of heat in the aftermath of BLM about pulling down statues, renaming buildings, infrastructure and institutions - left, right and centre - calls for reparations, a pretty much compulsory identity politics reading list, and formal programmes of unconscious bias and white privilege throughout the professions and public services. A big jump in EDI employment and deployment. All, essentially, imported from America.

    Whilst we got a little bit of that in the first few months Oliver Dowden successfully checked it, including with legislation, and organisations like Stonewall have since been challenged on their agenda. Whilst it's still around in the background it's definitely gone off the boil a bit over the last 18-24 months. We haven't quite yet, in my view, calmed down entirely on British history and identity but it's better than it was.

    We don't have anything like the divisions in the USA over it - except that the word "Woke" can trigger people into apoplexy on both sides - and far too many Liberals (not all) deny there was ever an issue, despite opposing each and every single one of the challenges all the way down the line.
    Do you think that there is a reasonable argument to be made that people who live in this country may not want statues or plaques, for example, to people who made their money off of the slave trade hailing them as good men and such? Or, in your view, is there absolutely no argument to be made for that kind of thing?

    I think I can guess your position, as someone who wishes to defend Chazza with his fists, but still - trying to figure out what is so egregious here.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,952
    Is this 20p, 15p, etc thing another Richi Bliar arch jibe at the evil Conservatives?
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,889
    algarkirk said:

    Heathener said:

    For all our sakes it would be great if the tory party of @TSE were, indeed, the tory party.

    Alas, it’s not the case. There are plenty on the vocal right for whom Lager Lee is totemic:

    'Grassroots Conservative supporters have called Rishi Sunak a “snake” over Lee Anderson’s suspension as MPs on the Tory right said he should be given a route back in.

    In leaked WhatsApp messages obtained by the Guardian, members of the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO), which was founded by disgruntled Tories after Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss were ousted, attacked the prime minister for kicking Anderson out of the parliamentary party.

    Several of the activists endorsed Anderson’s comments and some went further in decrying “the threat of Islam”.’

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/26/tory-supporters-lash-out-at-snake-sunak-over-lee-anderson-suspension


    I was chatting with a tory friend yesterday about all of this. She thinks the whole lot of them (Badenoch, Braverman, Anderson etc. etc.) should be booted out of the party so they can join Reform. But we then got talking about when it all started and who is responsible.

    A lot of this goes back to Boris who deliberately stoked the right wing rabble with its ‘anti-woke’ hatred, but I suggested that Boris is too dilettantish to devise such a thing.

    At which point we both settled on Dominic Cummings.

    What you're arguing for is a Conservative Party that more liberals and centre-left can feel comfortable with.

    There's certainly a small (and very voluble) audience for that but it's not one that would come close to winning an election: non-Tories might be slightly more comfortable with the Tories being in office but it would win over very few of their votes.
    Two points. It is still very unclear what a right wing Tory government would do different, WRT migration, employment, borrowing, spending, pensions, taxing, benefits, debt and deficit.

    Secondly, at the moment polling shows under 40% support for the right+centre right, and 60+% support for the centre and centre left and left. This suggests that the next election, like most, will be won from the centre, which is where the next Tory GE win will come from in a few years' time.
    Thatcher thrice and Boris in 2019 got over 40% from the right
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,239

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 13,677
    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Nigelb said:

    He doesn't rule it in, either.

    Macron refuses to rule out putting troops on ground in Ukraine in call to galvanise Europe
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/27/french-president-emmanuel-macron-ukraine-french-ground-troops

    Let's face it our army is not fit to go into battle in Ukraine. They don't have nearly enough drones. They don't have nearly enough protection from drones. They don't know what tactics are required to survive on such a battlefield. War has evolved well beyond their current capacity.
    Nor was the Russian army fit to go into battle in Ukraine as its early losses showed
    The British don't have the Russian stoicism for pointlessly dying in large numbers though. 600 casualties/day would bring the government down in a week.
  • .
    TOPPING said:

    Is this 20p, 15p, etc thing another Richi Bliar arch jibe at the evil Conservatives?

    I'm just taking the piss a little. He was dubbed "50p" after saying thats how much the thieving scroungers need to feed themselves. Surely his share price has fallen somewhat after soiling himself politically hence dropping the price.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,814
    Dura_Ace said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Nigelb said:

    He doesn't rule it in, either.

    Macron refuses to rule out putting troops on ground in Ukraine in call to galvanise Europe
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/27/french-president-emmanuel-macron-ukraine-french-ground-troops

    Let's face it our army is not fit to go into battle in Ukraine. They don't have nearly enough drones. They don't have nearly enough protection from drones. They don't know what tactics are required to survive on such a battlefield. War has evolved well beyond their current capacity.
    Nor was the Russian army fit to go into battle in Ukraine as its early losses showed
    The British don't have the Russian stoicism for pointlessly dying in large numbers though. 600 casualties/day would bring the government down in a week.
    That's about 1% of the first day of the Somme. But then the video took three months to come out and was censored anyway.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,952
    Dura_Ace said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Nigelb said:

    He doesn't rule it in, either.

    Macron refuses to rule out putting troops on ground in Ukraine in call to galvanise Europe
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/27/french-president-emmanuel-macron-ukraine-french-ground-troops

    Let's face it our army is not fit to go into battle in Ukraine. They don't have nearly enough drones. They don't have nearly enough protection from drones. They don't know what tactics are required to survive on such a battlefield. War has evolved well beyond their current capacity.
    Nor was the Russian army fit to go into battle in Ukraine as its early losses showed
    The British don't have the Russian stoicism for pointlessly dying in large numbers though. 600 casualties/day would bring the government down in a week.
    As you may remember (you might be a bit young), in Granby the initial forecasts were for 300 casualties a day. As pl comd of a BCR platoon (actually our corps of drums) it was pretty sobering. Until they crossed the start line, that is.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,814

    .

    TOPPING said:

    Is this 20p, 15p, etc thing another Richi Bliar arch jibe at the evil Conservatives?

    I'm just taking the piss a little. He was dubbed "50p" after saying thats how much the thieving scroungers need to feed themselves. Surely his share price has fallen somewhat after soiling himself politically hence dropping the price.
    30p actually. But out of date even by his own terms.
  • kjhkjh Posts: 11,782
    HYUFD said:

    20% of voters ie almost the current Tory poll rating and a plurality of Conservative and Leave voters thinking the party was wrong to suspend Anderson is significant even if a plurality of voters over all back his suspension. It shows the Tories cannot afford to expel or deselect Anderson without even further leakage to Reform, maybe even leading to them level pegging with Reform.

    Habib is probably right but the average Reform voters is closer to Anderson than him I suspect

    That is a well argued post @HYUFD, but as a Tory what do you suggest as a solution, or do you think there isn't one this side of the election and that they have to muddle through and reset afterwards?
  • SelebianSelebian Posts: 8,721
    Carnyx said:

    Selebian said:

    Taz said:
    Well you could turn to the IEA who come out with bollocks like this:

    How red tape is fuelling the cost of living crisis

    📈 Since 2000, sectors with heavy state intervention have experienced large price rises while competitive markets have experienced price falls.


    image

    https://x.com/iealondon/status/1760582275928920174?s=20
    :lol:

    Waiting for the IEA report on there being more fires in areas with larger fire services, too. I mean, the evidence is clear, fire fighters are arsonists :wink:
    Odd too that communication isn't regarded as regulated.
    'Regulated' isn't defined in the image (may be at source) but it does seem odd. If price-regulated then food should not be in the regulated category (ex some alcohol minimum pricing if that's included). Insurance is also not price regulated and nor is housing... If regulated as in minimum standards required of products then the electricals and toys should be 'regulated', too.
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
    Music, art, etc. is not just some formula or maths puzzle that you can replicate - it is something personal and human. I listen to a song or see some art and I can see how a person tried to express themselves - and try to engage with that as another person. AI music may be able to make pretty patterns but (in my mind) it comes below even the wonder of beauty in nature, which is created without intent, because AI is so clearly a facsimile. No one will want to go to an AI concert, or put on AI music to feel a specific emotion, because AI music will not be able to produce that in the way a person can - not because of some innate magicness of humanity, but because part of what makes art art is experience. It would be like saying a parrot who can perfectly mimic the sounds of a great diva will one day perform operas on stage; no one would care. It will have a small following, for sure, but it will never supplant human made art.
  • algarkirk said:

    Heathener said:

    For all our sakes it would be great if the tory party of @TSE were, indeed, the tory party.

    Alas, it’s not the case. There are plenty on the vocal right for whom Lager Lee is totemic:

    'Grassroots Conservative supporters have called Rishi Sunak a “snake” over Lee Anderson’s suspension as MPs on the Tory right said he should be given a route back in.

    In leaked WhatsApp messages obtained by the Guardian, members of the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO), which was founded by disgruntled Tories after Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss were ousted, attacked the prime minister for kicking Anderson out of the parliamentary party.

    Several of the activists endorsed Anderson’s comments and some went further in decrying “the threat of Islam”.’

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/26/tory-supporters-lash-out-at-snake-sunak-over-lee-anderson-suspension


    I was chatting with a tory friend yesterday about all of this. She thinks the whole lot of them (Badenoch, Braverman, Anderson etc. etc.) should be booted out of the party so they can join Reform. But we then got talking about when it all started and who is responsible.

    A lot of this goes back to Boris who deliberately stoked the right wing rabble with its ‘anti-woke’ hatred, but I suggested that Boris is too dilettantish to devise such a thing.

    At which point we both settled on Dominic Cummings.

    What you're arguing for is a Conservative Party that more liberals and centre-left can feel comfortable with.

    There's certainly a small (and very voluble) audience for that but it's not one that would come close to winning an election: non-Tories might be slightly more comfortable with the Tories being in office but it would win over very few of their votes.
    Two points. It is still very unclear what a right wing Tory government would do different, WRT migration, employment, borrowing, spending, pensions, taxing, benefits, debt and deficit.

    Secondly, at the moment polling shows under 40% support for the right+centre right, and 60+% support for the centre and centre left and left. This suggests that the next election, like most, will be won from the centre, which is where the next Tory GE win will come from in a few years' time.
    The Conservatives biggest problem is they haven't delivered.

    In fact, in one area where I think they largely have - checking identity politics - they get reams of criticism, much of which we've seen on this board this morning.
    The Conservative problem is that they've been loud about things they've failed with and quiet about things they've succeeded with.

    Well one of their problems, there are others.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 8,643

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    Sorry, I stopped reading after the second sentence.

    Try not to fart out your basest emotions if you want to be taken seriously on here.
    I have to ask how many decades you have lived in red wall towns to tell me from your own lived experience that people like my uncle don't think what I posted?

    There is a huge amount of baseline bigotry in places like Rochdale. That "bigoted woman" is normal for Rochdale. They absolutely think their town has been taken over by "the pakis" - a descriptor used for any British Asian community regardless of their heritage.

    These are the people that 20p prey on - usually someone from elsewhere with more life experience and intelligence who is gas-lighting them for votes, but now with Lee Anderson they get the real deal. The moron's moron.

    I grew up in Rochdale and have family there. I spent another decade and a half on Teesside. Don't presume to tell me what the red wall is like.
    Faaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrtt... faaaaaa.. faaaaaaaaaaaaarr....

    ..F...Fa...FA.. FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRTT.

    Ah, that's better.
    Try Barty's carnivore diet. Swap the flatulence for diarrhoea.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,814
    Selebian said:

    Carnyx said:

    Selebian said:

    Taz said:
    Well you could turn to the IEA who come out with bollocks like this:

    How red tape is fuelling the cost of living crisis

    📈 Since 2000, sectors with heavy state intervention have experienced large price rises while competitive markets have experienced price falls.


    image

    https://x.com/iealondon/status/1760582275928920174?s=20
    :lol:

    Waiting for the IEA report on there being more fires in areas with larger fire services, too. I mean, the evidence is clear, fire fighters are arsonists :wink:
    Odd too that communication isn't regarded as regulated.
    'Regulated' isn't defined in the image (may be at source) but it does seem odd. If price-regulated then food should not be in the regulated category (ex some alcohol minimum pricing if that's included). Insurance is also not price regulated and nor is housing... If regulated as in minimum standards required of products then the electricals and toys should be 'regulated', too.
    Indeed. There are various ombudsmans for insurance etc IIRC. Food is quality regulated (at least in theory) by trading standards offices. Housing is regulated in the planning sense, but when the big builders have landbanks ... maybe they mean social housing, but that if anything should drive prices down.

    Slight suspicion that the selection of regulated vs not-regulated isn't quite sound. But, as you sau, maybe the source explains all.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,580
    edited February 27
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
    The music industry finances got there some time ago. No-one, not even Taylor Swift, is making millions from Spotify streams.

    The money is in live music, and the internet is simply how they advertise the live concerts to the fans. The response after the pandemic has been astonishing, with every entertainer (musician, actor, comedian, and many more) all now permanently on tour, with halls, theatres and arenas everywhere selling out. A new act doesn’t play small venues in big cities hoping to be ‘spotted’ by someone from ‘industry’ to ‘sign’ them; they go out and find their audience online, then sell tickets for gigs around the country, and even further afield.

    Swift even made a movie of her concert and put it in cinemas, because there were so many fans who couldn’t get tickets for the live show.

    To think it was little more than a decade ago that the money was in little shiny disks, and that a few weeks in the studio could make you enough money to never have to work again. Spotify launched in the US in 2011, at which time streaming was 3% of the global music market. https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-us-launch-apple-music-future/
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 13,677
    TOPPING said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Nigelb said:

    He doesn't rule it in, either.

    Macron refuses to rule out putting troops on ground in Ukraine in call to galvanise Europe
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/27/french-president-emmanuel-macron-ukraine-french-ground-troops

    Let's face it our army is not fit to go into battle in Ukraine. They don't have nearly enough drones. They don't have nearly enough protection from drones. They don't know what tactics are required to survive on such a battlefield. War has evolved well beyond their current capacity.
    Nor was the Russian army fit to go into battle in Ukraine as its early losses showed
    The British don't have the Russian stoicism for pointlessly dying in large numbers though. 600 casualties/day would bring the government down in a week.
    As you may remember (you might be a bit young), in Granby the initial forecasts were for 300 casualties a day. As pl comd of a BCR platoon (actually our corps of drums) it was pretty sobering. Until they crossed the start line, that is.
    No that young, I was 24.... I got sent to Bruggen to act (and 'act' was the operative term) as an Ops Officer as the whole Tornado wing had gone to Mesopotamia. I had no fucking idea what I was doing and was soon overwhelmed by the paperwork. I just started shredding it all and throwing in the bin behind my hotel. They sent me back to Valley after about 3 weeks when the RAF finally found somebody who knew what they were doing. Where's my medal?
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 60,407
    Carnyx said:


    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    Sorry, I stopped reading after the second sentence.

    Try not to fart out your basest emotions if you want to be taken seriously on here.
    I have to ask how many decades you have lived in red wall towns to tell me from your own lived experience that people like my uncle don't think what I posted?

    There is a huge amount of baseline bigotry in places like Rochdale. That "bigoted woman" is normal for Rochdale. They absolutely think their town has been taken over by "the pakis" - a descriptor used for any British Asian community regardless of their heritage.

    These are the people that 20p prey on - usually someone from elsewhere with more life experience and intelligence who is gas-lighting them for votes, but now with Lee Anderson they get the real deal. The moron's moron.

    I grew up in Rochdale and have family there. I spent another decade and a half on Teesside. Don't presume to tell me what the red wall is like.
    Faaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrtt... faaaaaa.. faaaaaaaaaaaaarr....

    ..F...Fa...FA.. FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRTT.

    Ah, that's better.
    Early in the day for such reasoned and cogent argument, too.
    I'm happy to argue with those who are open to argument. However, this board does have its quota of diehards and grandstanders who can't or won't engage meaningfully on certain subjects, but are quite happy to waste other people's time by endlessly asking non-questions and repeating the same statements to keep their positions "fresh" on the threads each and every day.

    I respond as seriously to those as they deserve.
  • kjhkjh Posts: 11,782
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
    It is interesting how live music has changed for the better. In the 70s groups only toured to promote their new album so you sat through that until the encore so as to hear the stuff you really wanted to hear. Also it was far too loud and distorted. Now live concerts are a pleasure. All the old stuff, sensible volumes and real money earners for the bands.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 60,407
    Dura_Ace said:

    DavidL said:

    Nigelb said:

    He doesn't rule it in, either.

    Macron refuses to rule out putting troops on ground in Ukraine in call to galvanise Europe
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/27/french-president-emmanuel-macron-ukraine-french-ground-troops

    Let's face it our army is not fit to go into battle in Ukraine. They don't have nearly enough drones. They don't have nearly enough protection from drones. They don't know what tactics are required to survive on such a battlefield. War has evolved well beyond their current capacity.
    I think this is a bit unfair. The British Army is NEVER going to Ukraine while the conflict is hot but if they did then they would very good at some aspects of warfare (squad level infantry actions) and fucking appalling at others (catering). The British armed forces are not universally shit, despite the best efforts of the tories, and neither are they universally brilliant.
    Last time I checked (although admittedly that was over a decade ago) I heard the Yanks quite liked our ration packs in comparison to their own.

    Admittedly, that's not the be all and end all of front-line catering, such as it is.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,952
    edited February 27
    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
    The music industry finances got there some time ago. No-one, not even Taylor Swift, is making millions from Spotify streams.

    The money is in live music, and the internet is simply how they advertise the live concerts to the fans. The response after the pandemic has been astonishing, with every entertainer (musician, actor, comedian, and many more) all now permanently on tour, with halls, theatres and arenas everywhere selling out.

    Swift even made a movie of her concert and put it in cinemas, because there were so many fans who couldn’t get tickets for the live show.

    To think it was little more than a decade ago that the money was in little shiny disks, and that a few weeks in the studio could make you enough money to never have to work again. Spotify launched in the US in 2011, at which time streaming was 3% of the global music market. https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-us-launch-apple-music-future/
    If any of us think of any band of our youth, you name it, from Chris de Burgh to the UK Subs you will find that they (or the remnants of them) are touring as we speak.

    Edit: and I just checked both Chris de Burgh and the UK Subs and yes, they are on tour in 2024.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 43,311
    Nigelb said:

    malcolmg said:

    Taz said:

    FPT:

    Taz said:

    Newcastle council proceed with its assault on the elderly and marginalised in society by forcing through Cashless car parks. Great if you have a smartphone. Sadly many do not.

    https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/newcastle-council-claims-not-sustainable-28691686

    I had a bit of a giggle at Stansted Airport on Sunday. I arrived to pick Mrs J and son up, timing it so I arrived shortly after their plane landed. Went to the orange short-stay car park, picked them up, and after a loo break, was back out in seventeen minutes. The car park cots £10 for half an hour; £18 for an hour.

    Except the car park ticket machine would not accept my ticket. Another was out of order. A third accepted my ticket, but was cash only. Ditto the fourth and fifth. We only had twenties, and it would not accept those as it did not give change. Eventually we risked it and drove to the exit, where fortunately chip-and-pin worked. But we'd gone over the half-hour mark, so it cost us an extra eight quid.

    For the extortionate amount they charge, you'd think they could actually ensure the machines worked properly...
    Airport short stay parking costs are astronomical.
    airport carparks in general are legal robbery
    That's the market for you.
    Supply and demand - and a local monopoly.
    That si teh UK for you , as TIMS said in Europe many allow you first 30 mins for pickup/dropoff. Not in ripoff UK , they gouge you at every opportunity.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 8,643
    edited February 27
    Selebian said:

    Taz said:
    Well you could turn to the IEA who come out with bollocks like this:

    How red tape is fuelling the cost of living crisis

    📈 Since 2000, sectors with heavy state intervention have experienced large price rises while competitive markets have experienced price falls.


    image

    https://x.com/iealondon/status/1760582275928920174?s=20
    :lol:

    Waiting for the IEA report on there being more fires in areas with larger fire services, too. I mean, the evidence is clear, fire fighters are arsonists :wink:
    It's the joggers I don't trust. Always the ones to find the bodies.

    But seriously - have these people never come across the concept of a natural monopoly? And if they have, do they expect every rail service/electricity provider to build their own own exclusive infrastructure?
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,814

    Carnyx said:


    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    Sorry, I stopped reading after the second sentence.

    Try not to fart out your basest emotions if you want to be taken seriously on here.
    I have to ask how many decades you have lived in red wall towns to tell me from your own lived experience that people like my uncle don't think what I posted?

    There is a huge amount of baseline bigotry in places like Rochdale. That "bigoted woman" is normal for Rochdale. They absolutely think their town has been taken over by "the pakis" - a descriptor used for any British Asian community regardless of their heritage.

    These are the people that 20p prey on - usually someone from elsewhere with more life experience and intelligence who is gas-lighting them for votes, but now with Lee Anderson they get the real deal. The moron's moron.

    I grew up in Rochdale and have family there. I spent another decade and a half on Teesside. Don't presume to tell me what the red wall is like.
    Faaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrtt... faaaaaa.. faaaaaaaaaaaaarr....

    ..F...Fa...FA.. FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRTT.

    Ah, that's better.
    Early in the day for such reasoned and cogent argument, too.
    I'm happy to argue with those who are open to argument. However, this board does have its quota of diehards and grandstanders who can't or won't engage meaningfully on certain subjects, but are quite happy to waste other people's time by endlessly asking non-questions and repeating the same statements to keep their positions "fresh" on the threads each and every day.

    I respond as seriously to those as they deserve.
    I thought you both made interesting points so I don't see why you had to shift to intestinal gases.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 27,867
    edited February 27
    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
    The music industry finances got there some time ago. No-one, not even Taylor Swift, is making millions from Spotify streams.

    The money is in live music, and the internet is simply how they advertise the live concerts to the fans. The response after the pandemic has been astonishing, with every entertainer (musician, actor, comedian, and many more) all now permanently on tour, with halls, theatres and arenas everywhere selling out. A new act doesn’t play small venues in big cities hoping to be ‘spotted’ by someone from ‘industry’ to ‘sign’ them; they go out and find their audience online, then sell tickets for gigs around the country, and even further afield.

    Swift even made a movie of her concert and put it in cinemas, because there were so many fans who couldn’t get tickets for the live show.

    To think it was little more than a decade ago that the money was in little shiny disks, and that a few weeks in the studio could make you enough money to never have to work again. Spotify launched in the US in 2011, at which time streaming was 3% of the global music market. https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-us-launch-apple-music-future/
    Yes, basically the music industry turned on its head. It used to be that tours were loss leaders to sell albums.

    ETA scooped by kjh!
  • kjhkjh Posts: 11,782
    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
    The music industry finances got there some time ago. No-one, not even Taylor Swift, is making millions from Spotify streams.

    The money is in live music, and the internet is simply how they advertise the live concerts to the fans. The response after the pandemic has been astonishing, with every entertainer (musician, actor, comedian, and many more) all now permanently on tour, with halls, theatres and arenas everywhere selling out. A new act doesn’t play small venues in big cities hoping to be ‘spotted’ by someone from ‘industry’ to ‘sign’ them; they go out and find their audience online, then sell tickets for gigs around the country, and even further afield.

    Swift even made a movie of her concert and put it in cinemas, because there were so many fans who couldn’t get tickets for the live show.

    To think it was little more than a decade ago that the money was in little shiny disks, and that a few weeks in the studio could make you enough money to never have to work again. Spotify launched in the US in 2011, at which time streaming was 3% of the global music market. https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-us-launch-apple-music-future/
    Bugger - Said the same as me, but before me and better than me.
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 11,044
    There's a Mayoral by-election in Lewisham at the same time as the London Mayoral election. This is after the Labour Mayor went off and became MP for Kingswood. Labour has always won this position. The closest they have come to losing it was the first two elections, 2002 and 2006, which were 36% to 21% over the Tories and then 38% to 21% over the LibDems. (The LibDem candidate from that 2006 election is standing again this year, his fifth go.)

    Labour have gotten over 50% in the last 3 elections. The Greens were second last time, on 16%. In all, the Greens have been second once, the LibDems twice and the Conservatives thrice.

    Labour obviously have a new candidate. The LibDem is the only returning candidate. The Conservative candidate, Siama Qadar, is Muslim, but I've not seen a comment from her on Anderson/Braverman/Scully. George Galloway's Workers Party is standing (but not Galloway himself). No RefUK candidate.

    I cannot see a betting market up. I cannot see much betting interest! Maybe in who comes second?
  • kjhkjh Posts: 11,782

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
    The music industry finances got there some time ago. No-one, not even Taylor Swift, is making millions from Spotify streams.

    The money is in live music, and the internet is simply how they advertise the live concerts to the fans. The response after the pandemic has been astonishing, with every entertainer (musician, actor, comedian, and many more) all now permanently on tour, with halls, theatres and arenas everywhere selling out. A new act doesn’t play small venues in big cities hoping to be ‘spotted’ by someone from ‘industry’ to ‘sign’ them; they go out and find their audience online, then sell tickets for gigs around the country, and even further afield.

    Swift even made a movie of her concert and put it in cinemas, because there were so many fans who couldn’t get tickets for the live show.

    To think it was little more than a decade ago that the money was in little shiny disks, and that a few weeks in the studio could make you enough money to never have to work again. Spotify launched in the US in 2011, at which time streaming was 3% of the global music market. https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-us-launch-apple-music-future/
    Yes, basically the music industry turned on its head. It used to be that tours were loss leaders to sell albums.

    ETA scooped by kjh!
    The three of us need to coordinate our posts to save time.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 43,311
    Nigelb said:

    He doesn't rule it in, either.

    Macron refuses to rule out putting troops on ground in Ukraine in call to galvanise Europe
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/27/french-president-emmanuel-macron-ukraine-french-ground-troops

    Macron has done precious little for Ukraine , apart from odd times trying to get self publicity.
  • kjh said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
    It is interesting how live music has changed for the better. In the 70s groups only toured to promote their new album so you sat through that until the encore so as to hear the stuff you really wanted to hear. Also it was far too loud and distorted. Now live concerts are a pleasure. All the old stuff, sensible volumes and real money earners for the bands.
    In large part due to tribute bands who gave the fans exactly what they wanted, the greatest hits played exactly the same as on the records. Then bands got back together to become their own tribute acts playing their greatest hits...
  • mwadamsmwadams Posts: 3,588
    HYUFD said:

    20% of voters ie almost the current Tory poll rating and a plurality of Conservative and Leave voters thinking the party was wrong to suspend Anderson is significant even if a plurality of voters over all back his suspension. It shows the Tories cannot afford to expel or deselect Anderson without even further leakage to Reform, maybe even leading to them level pegging with Reform.

    Habib is probably right but the average Reform voters is closer to Anderson than him I suspect

    When coupled with the proportion of 2019 Con voters who think it was *right* to suspend him, it tends to reinforce the notion that they are those who have already moved to other parties (including the 'sitting on my hands party')
  • david_herdsondavid_herdson Posts: 17,742
    On topic: they'll take him. They took Simon Danczuk. They'll have any number of other iffy and incapable candidates up and down the country, even allowing for the fact that a sitting MP is rather different from a deposit-losing nonentity in Shrewsbury.
  • Home Office launches probe after faulty mobile phone data used in police evidence
    EXCLUSIVE: Fears convictions could be challenged and trials delayed after police chiefs told of concerns about accuracy of information 02 provides to forces

    https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/investigation-o2-home-office-police-faulty-data-trials-tim-loughton-b1141695.html

    More appeals for DavidL, more headers from Cyclefree, more posts from Leon about how AI can fabricate evidence better than people.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,239
    148grss said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
    Music, art, etc. is not just some formula or maths puzzle that you can replicate - it is something personal and human. I listen to a song or see some art and I can see how a person tried to express themselves - and try to engage with that as another person. AI music may be able to make pretty patterns but (in my mind) it comes below even the wonder of beauty in nature, which is created without intent, because AI is so clearly a facsimile. No one will want to go to an AI concert, or put on AI music to feel a specific emotion, because AI music will not be able to produce that in the way a person can - not because of some innate magicness of humanity, but because part of what makes art art is experience. It would be like saying a parrot who can perfectly mimic the sounds of a great diva will one day perform operas on stage; no one would care. It will have a small following, for sure, but it will never supplant human made art.
    You won’t know the difference - unless it’s live and in front of your eyes

    A song will stream on your device and you’ll think “that’s good” and it will be composed and performed by AI and you’ll never know. Clever music companies may actually lie and pretend a human did it; again you won’t know

    You have to be really quite dim not to get this
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 43,311
    Sandpit said:

    Nigelb said:

    malcolmg said:

    Taz said:

    FPT:

    Taz said:

    Newcastle council proceed with its assault on the elderly and marginalised in society by forcing through Cashless car parks. Great if you have a smartphone. Sadly many do not.

    https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/newcastle-council-claims-not-sustainable-28691686

    I had a bit of a giggle at Stansted Airport on Sunday. I arrived to pick Mrs J and son up, timing it so I arrived shortly after their plane landed. Went to the orange short-stay car park, picked them up, and after a loo break, was back out in seventeen minutes. The car park cots £10 for half an hour; £18 for an hour.

    Except the car park ticket machine would not accept my ticket. Another was out of order. A third accepted my ticket, but was cash only. Ditto the fourth and fifth. We only had twenties, and it would not accept those as it did not give change. Eventually we risked it and drove to the exit, where fortunately chip-and-pin worked. But we'd gone over the half-hour mark, so it cost us an extra eight quid.

    For the extortionate amount they charge, you'd think they could actually ensure the machines worked properly...
    Airport short stay parking costs are astronomical.
    airport carparks in general are legal robbery
    That's the market for you.
    Supply and demand - and a local monopoly.
    It’s a function of the airports being screwed by the airlines, especially the lo-cos who would play them off against each other over service charges. The result is that the ‘customers’ of the airports are now not the airlines as much as the visitors, who are getting nickeled and dimed as a result, making the whole process worse for everyone.

    But people insist on making their travel decision purely on airline ticket price, often without properly considering the whole cost of their journey. If we all agreed to add a fiver to the ticket price, the airports themselves would be much nicer places.
    Usual UK, all foreign owned and subsidising their own countries while rinsing the UK mugs.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 43,311
    Nigelb said:

    Scotland is facing a cancer “timebomb on the SNP’s watch”, critics have warned, after new research revealed Scots face longer waiting times and lower treatment rates than other countries.

    Patients waited on average more than two weeks longer for both chemotherapy and radiotherapy north of the border than people living in England.

    The studies, carried out by the International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership (ICBP), co-funded by Cancer Research UK and published in The Lancet Oncology, showed lags compared with the rest of Britain, Norway and Australia.


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/snp-to-blame-for-cancer-timebomb-as-scots-wait-longer-for-care-63jk52cmd

    RUK is hardly any better.

    UK trails other countries on waiting times for cancer treatment, study finds
    Research compared access to radiotherapy and chemotherapy in Australia, Canada, Norway and UK
    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/27/uk-bottom-list-waiting-times-radiotherapy-chemotherapy-study
    Typical bollox from London based toilet roll makers.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,580
    edited February 27

    kjh said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
    It is interesting how live music has changed for the better. In the 70s groups only toured to promote their new album so you sat through that until the encore so as to hear the stuff you really wanted to hear. Also it was far too loud and distorted. Now live concerts are a pleasure. All the old stuff, sensible volumes and real money earners for the bands.
    In large part due to tribute bands who gave the fans exactly what they wanted, the greatest hits played exactly the same as on the records. Then bands got back together to become their own tribute acts playing their greatest hits...
    Ha yes. The bands started ignoring their old stuff and playing new stuff no-one was interested in, while a tribute band would play more accessible concerts and mostly do a damn good job of the Greatest Hits. Obviously that band isn’t selling any music, just the experience.

    At the other end of the scale, there’s also covers bands such as Postmodern Jukebox, an internet-famous jazz collective re-interpreting modern pop songs in classic styles. They’re playing 20 theatres in the UK in late spring. https://postmodernjukebox.com/shows/ Before the internet, these guys would be playing NY jazz clubs and maybe a few weddings, but they’re massively talented and have found a worldwide audience for their shows.
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 13,677

    Dura_Ace said:

    DavidL said:

    Nigelb said:

    He doesn't rule it in, either.

    Macron refuses to rule out putting troops on ground in Ukraine in call to galvanise Europe
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/27/french-president-emmanuel-macron-ukraine-french-ground-troops

    Let's face it our army is not fit to go into battle in Ukraine. They don't have nearly enough drones. They don't have nearly enough protection from drones. They don't know what tactics are required to survive on such a battlefield. War has evolved well beyond their current capacity.
    I think this is a bit unfair. The British Army is NEVER going to Ukraine while the conflict is hot but if they did then they would very good at some aspects of warfare (squad level infantry actions) and fucking appalling at others (catering). The British armed forces are not universally shit, despite the best efforts of the tories, and neither are they universally brilliant.
    Last time I checked (although admittedly that was over a decade ago) I heard the Yanks quite liked our ration packs in comparison to their own.

    Admittedly, that's not the be all and end all of front-line catering, such as it is.
    Probably novelty value. There was a lot more variety in the American MREs, the British ones had four different "menus". There was a chicken one and three others that were all brown and indistinguishable in flavour, texture and odour from each other.

    The Italian Air Force security dogs at Basra airport ate better than us. They had fresh fish flown in from Bahrain.
  • eekeek Posts: 28,366

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
    The music industry finances got there some time ago. No-one, not even Taylor Swift, is making millions from Spotify streams.

    The money is in live music, and the internet is simply how they advertise the live concerts to the fans. The response after the pandemic has been astonishing, with every entertainer (musician, actor, comedian, and many more) all now permanently on tour, with halls, theatres and arenas everywhere selling out. A new act doesn’t play small venues in big cities hoping to be ‘spotted’ by someone from ‘industry’ to ‘sign’ them; they go out and find their audience online, then sell tickets for gigs around the country, and even further afield.

    Swift even made a movie of her concert and put it in cinemas, because there were so many fans who couldn’t get tickets for the live show.

    To think it was little more than a decade ago that the money was in little shiny disks, and that a few weeks in the studio could make you enough money to never have to work again. Spotify launched in the US in 2011, at which time streaming was 3% of the global music market. https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-us-launch-apple-music-future/
    Yes, basically the music industry turned on its head. It used to be that tours were loss leaders to sell albums.

    ETA scooped by kjh!
    Richard Osman now has a podcast and one of the questions last week was how many musicians make money.

    His brother (in Suede so knows the industry) reckons that nowadays only 5% of the bands you’ve heard of make any money and everyone and everything tries to chip away bits of it
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    Leon said:

    148grss said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
    Music, art, etc. is not just some formula or maths puzzle that you can replicate - it is something personal and human. I listen to a song or see some art and I can see how a person tried to express themselves - and try to engage with that as another person. AI music may be able to make pretty patterns but (in my mind) it comes below even the wonder of beauty in nature, which is created without intent, because AI is so clearly a facsimile. No one will want to go to an AI concert, or put on AI music to feel a specific emotion, because AI music will not be able to produce that in the way a person can - not because of some innate magicness of humanity, but because part of what makes art art is experience. It would be like saying a parrot who can perfectly mimic the sounds of a great diva will one day perform operas on stage; no one would care. It will have a small following, for sure, but it will never supplant human made art.
    You won’t know the difference - unless it’s live and in front of your eyes

    A song will stream on your device and you’ll think “that’s good” and it will be composed and performed by AI and you’ll never know. Clever music companies may actually lie and pretend a human did it; again you won’t know

    You have to be really quite dim not to get this
    I just don't agree with you - I think most people will know. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the idea of a music uncanny valley (much like the animation uncanny valley) will exist and be quite clear. Maybe like electro, synth music, or orchestral music without voices might become more AI dominated, but even then I doubt it, because the way that songs and such get mixed can be very spur of the moment, with DJs reacting to the club at the time and such, and I think that lots of classical orchestral music has extremely experiential roots. I've seen the hyper realistic videos and such, and in some I've not been able to tell that they're primarily AI, but they still too fall into an uncanny valley. Same with the hyper-realistic photos of people - the vast majority of them do have the uncanny valley vibe. Again, maybe I'm being anthrocentric, but I do kind of think this sort of thing won't fly with the vast majority of people.
  • eekeek Posts: 28,366
    Sandpit said:

    kjh said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
    It is interesting how live music has changed for the better. In the 70s groups only toured to promote their new album so you sat through that until the encore so as to hear the stuff you really wanted to hear. Also it was far too loud and distorted. Now live concerts are a pleasure. All the old stuff, sensible volumes and real money earners for the bands.
    In large part due to tribute bands who gave the fans exactly what they wanted, the greatest hits played exactly the same as on the records. Then bands got back together to become their own tribute acts playing their greatest hits...
    Ha yes. The bands started ignoring their old stuff and playing new stuff no-one was interested in, while a tribute band would play more accessible concerts and mostly do a damn good job of the Greatest Hits. Obviously that band isn’t selling any music, just the experience.

    At the other end of the scale, there’s also covers bands such as Postmodern Jukebox, an internet-famous jazz collective re-interpreting modern pop songs in classic styles. They’re playing 20 theatres in the UK in late spring. https://postmodernjukebox.com/shows/ Before the internet, these guys would be playing NY jazz clubs and maybe a few weddings, but they’re massively talented and have found a worldwide audience for their shows.
    I remember seeing Paul Heaton a decade or so back in front of 150 people max - because at the time he wouldn’t play Housemartin / Beautiful South songs.

    Now he’s changed his mind his audience is 3000+
  • nico679nico679 Posts: 6,275
    Richard Tice saying he turned down two Tory MPs defecting to Reform over the last 13 months . Just how bad could they have been to not be accepted . You’d think it would be a massive coup for Reform to get those defections .

  • kjhkjh Posts: 11,782
    Sandpit said:

    kjh said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
    It is interesting how live music has changed for the better. In the 70s groups only toured to promote their new album so you sat through that until the encore so as to hear the stuff you really wanted to hear. Also it was far too loud and distorted. Now live concerts are a pleasure. All the old stuff, sensible volumes and real money earners for the bands.
    In large part due to tribute bands who gave the fans exactly what they wanted, the greatest hits played exactly the same as on the records. Then bands got back together to become their own tribute acts playing their greatest hits...
    Ha yes. The bands started ignoring their old stuff and playing new stuff no-one was interested in, while a tribute band would play more accessible concerts and mostly do a damn good job of the Greatest Hits. Obviously that band isn’t selling any music, just the experience.

    At the other end of the scale, there’s also covers bands such as Postmodern Jukebox, an internet-famous jazz collective re-interpreting modern pop songs in classic styles. They’re playing 20 theatres in the UK in late spring. https://postmodernjukebox.com/shows/ Before the internet, these guys would be playing NY jazz clubs and maybe a few weddings, but they’re massively talented and have found a worldwide audience for their shows.
    I've a friend (yep I really do!) who is the same age as me. He won't go to concerts because his memory is of the 70s and damaged ears. I'm trying to convince him it has changed.

    I have tickets booked for Santana in Las Vegas and and Eric Clapton at the Albert Hall, both in May. They both better be good as I have forked out over £1000 for them (2 tickets each) whereas the Classic Rock show a few weeks ago was fantastic and cost just over £100 for 2 and I will have been a damn sight closer to the stage. The skill level is awesome. The two leads played Freebird while walking around the audience.
  • malcolmg said:

    Nigelb said:

    He doesn't rule it in, either.

    Macron refuses to rule out putting troops on ground in Ukraine in call to galvanise Europe
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/27/french-president-emmanuel-macron-ukraine-french-ground-troops

    Macron has done precious little for Ukraine , apart from odd times trying to get self publicity.
    France was the largest arms exporter to Ukraine between 2014 and 2020, and it was Macron who put the most effort into attempting to avert the war by diplomacy.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,889
    kjh said:

    HYUFD said:

    20% of voters ie almost the current Tory poll rating and a plurality of Conservative and Leave voters thinking the party was wrong to suspend Anderson is significant even if a plurality of voters over all back his suspension. It shows the Tories cannot afford to expel or deselect Anderson without even further leakage to Reform, maybe even leading to them level pegging with Reform.

    Habib is probably right but the average Reform voters is closer to Anderson than him I suspect

    That is a well argued post @HYUFD, but as a Tory what do you suggest as a solution, or do you think there isn't one this side of the election and that they have to muddle through and reset afterwards?
    Stick with the suspension of Anderson but don't expel him or remove him from the candidates list, given he has now not ruled out defecting to Reform as a last resort
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68400775
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,580
    eek said:

    Sandpit said:

    kjh said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
    It is interesting how live music has changed for the better. In the 70s groups only toured to promote their new album so you sat through that until the encore so as to hear the stuff you really wanted to hear. Also it was far too loud and distorted. Now live concerts are a pleasure. All the old stuff, sensible volumes and real money earners for the bands.
    In large part due to tribute bands who gave the fans exactly what they wanted, the greatest hits played exactly the same as on the records. Then bands got back together to become their own tribute acts playing their greatest hits...
    Ha yes. The bands started ignoring their old stuff and playing new stuff no-one was interested in, while a tribute band would play more accessible concerts and mostly do a damn good job of the Greatest Hits. Obviously that band isn’t selling any music, just the experience.

    At the other end of the scale, there’s also covers bands such as Postmodern Jukebox, an internet-famous jazz collective re-interpreting modern pop songs in classic styles. They’re playing 20 theatres in the UK in late spring. https://postmodernjukebox.com/shows/ Before the internet, these guys would be playing NY jazz clubs and maybe a few weddings, but they’re massively talented and have found a worldwide audience for their shows.
    I remember seeing Paul Heaton a decade or so back in front of 150 people max - because at the time he wouldn’t play Housemartin / Beautiful South songs.

    Now he’s changed his mind his audience is 3000+
    My brother saw him live last year, I think a pandemic-postponed show, and said it was a fantastic night. All the hits.

    Now that the cheques from CD sales have dried up, artists like Heaton need to give the audience what they want. Fair play to him.
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    Sandpit said:

    kjh said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
    It is interesting how live music has changed for the better. In the 70s groups only toured to promote their new album so you sat through that until the encore so as to hear the stuff you really wanted to hear. Also it was far too loud and distorted. Now live concerts are a pleasure. All the old stuff, sensible volumes and real money earners for the bands.
    In large part due to tribute bands who gave the fans exactly what they wanted, the greatest hits played exactly the same as on the records. Then bands got back together to become their own tribute acts playing their greatest hits...
    Ha yes. The bands started ignoring their old stuff and playing new stuff no-one was interested in, while a tribute band would play more accessible concerts and mostly do a damn good job of the Greatest Hits. Obviously that band isn’t selling any music, just the experience.

    At the other end of the scale, there’s also covers bands such as Postmodern Jukebox, an internet-famous jazz collective re-interpreting modern pop songs in classic styles. They’re playing 20 theatres in the UK in late spring. https://postmodernjukebox.com/shows/ Before the internet, these guys would be playing NY jazz clubs and maybe a few weddings, but they’re massively talented and have found a worldwide audience for their shows.
    I'm going to be seeing Puddles when he's over here in a few weeks - have been looking forward to that for ages. One thing that I do think is due a renaissance is jazz music - if we're going to replay the 20s and 30s of the 20th century at least let us have jazz again.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,889
    Dura_Ace said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Nigelb said:

    He doesn't rule it in, either.

    Macron refuses to rule out putting troops on ground in Ukraine in call to galvanise Europe
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/27/french-president-emmanuel-macron-ukraine-french-ground-troops

    Let's face it our army is not fit to go into battle in Ukraine. They don't have nearly enough drones. They don't have nearly enough protection from drones. They don't know what tactics are required to survive on such a battlefield. War has evolved well beyond their current capacity.
    Nor was the Russian army fit to go into battle in Ukraine as its early losses showed
    The British don't have the Russian stoicism for pointlessly dying in large numbers though. 600 casualties/day would bring the government down in a week.
    The Ukranians are prepared to take even more casualties than the Russians though given they are actually defending their nation not invading a neighbour.

    Hence ensuring they continue to get weapons supplies from us is more important than British and French boots on the ground
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 8,643
    nico679 said:

    Richard Tice saying he turned down two Tory MPs defecting to Reform over the last 13 months . Just how bad could they have been to not be accepted . You’d think it would be a massive coup for Reform to get those defections .

    Maybe not. Reform will want to pick up some of the Brexit vote in the red wall, and that's a cohort which is more naturally aligned with Labour (at least historically).

    Why sully your brand with rats from the sinking ship?
  • nico679nico679 Posts: 6,275
    HYUFD said:

    kjh said:

    HYUFD said:

    20% of voters ie almost the current Tory poll rating and a plurality of Conservative and Leave voters thinking the party was wrong to suspend Anderson is significant even if a plurality of voters over all back his suspension. It shows the Tories cannot afford to expel or deselect Anderson without even further leakage to Reform, maybe even leading to them level pegging with Reform.

    Habib is probably right but the average Reform voters is closer to Anderson than him I suspect

    That is a well argued post @HYUFD, but as a Tory what do you suggest as a solution, or do you think there isn't one this side of the election and that they have to muddle through and reset afterwards?
    Stick with the suspension of Anderson but don't expel him or remove him from the candidates list, given he has now not ruled out defecting to Reform as a last resort
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68400775
    How does he get the Tory whip back ?

    He’s made it clear he won’t apologize.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,889
    edited February 27
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
    Come to think of it are there any current major boy bands or girl bands under 25 or indeed solo singers that age? Only one I can think of is Korean band BTS but most of them are 25-30. Even Taylor Swift is 34.

    Most 18-24 talented musicians are already doing it on Youtube
  • kjhkjh Posts: 11,782
    Leon said:

    148grss said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Genuinely brilliant! Its Milli Vanilli I feel sorry for.
    Isn’t it incredible? AI music is here

    It’s roughly where AI art was about 18 months ago. It will follow the same exponential trajectory

    It is the death of most human music

    But you will be able to create songs just for yourself, friends, birthdays, weddings, as cruel jokes, etc. So it’s not all bad
    Yes but that is half the point. Is AI an existential threat to the music industry or is it merely democratising it? You have twice [edit: 3x] had new songs created on this thread but how often did you phone Elton John to commission an original tune?
    Elton John will be fine. He’s about 100 years old and he’s made a billion quid

    It’s all the young people with genuine musical talent - musicians, singers, composers, arrangers - plus all the people surrounding that industry - who are now completely fucked

    Sure, a few might go on and become Taylor Swifts (if they are really good looking and have the charisma to play live and captivate a crowd) - but for the rest, it’s over

    Live music will be the last redoubt. Recorded music will be dominated by AI music - because it can be made for nothing. It will swamp Spotify

    Also some of it will be really good. Just not made by humans
    Music, art, etc. is not just some formula or maths puzzle that you can replicate - it is something personal and human. I listen to a song or see some art and I can see how a person tried to express themselves - and try to engage with that as another person. AI music may be able to make pretty patterns but (in my mind) it comes below even the wonder of beauty in nature, which is created without intent, because AI is so clearly a facsimile. No one will want to go to an AI concert, or put on AI music to feel a specific emotion, because AI music will not be able to produce that in the way a person can - not because of some innate magicness of humanity, but because part of what makes art art is experience. It would be like saying a parrot who can perfectly mimic the sounds of a great diva will one day perform operas on stage; no one would care. It will have a small following, for sure, but it will never supplant human made art.
    You won’t know the difference - unless it’s live and in front of your eyes

    A song will stream on your device and you’ll think “that’s good” and it will be composed and performed by AI and you’ll never know. Clever music companies may actually lie and pretend a human did it; again you won’t know

    You have to be really quite dim not to get this
    @Leon seeing as you have looked into this a lot and look out for what is wrong in AI pictures/film (eg the film of the dog typing was a good example) can you explain what to look for in a picture of someone (head and shoulders only no hands). So here is the example:

    The pressure group I am involved in is building a web site. The pictures of the committee are currently filled with dummy pictures. Every picture shouts out to me that it is not a real human, but created artificially. But I don't know why. It just does.
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 13,677
    nico679 said:

    HYUFD said:

    kjh said:

    HYUFD said:

    20% of voters ie almost the current Tory poll rating and a plurality of Conservative and Leave voters thinking the party was wrong to suspend Anderson is significant even if a plurality of voters over all back his suspension. It shows the Tories cannot afford to expel or deselect Anderson without even further leakage to Reform, maybe even leading to them level pegging with Reform.

    Habib is probably right but the average Reform voters is closer to Anderson than him I suspect

    That is a well argued post @HYUFD, but as a Tory what do you suggest as a solution, or do you think there isn't one this side of the election and that they have to muddle through and reset afterwards?
    Stick with the suspension of Anderson but don't expel him or remove him from the candidates list, given he has now not ruled out defecting to Reform as a last resort
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68400775
    How does he get the Tory whip back ?

    He’s made it clear he won’t apologize.
    The piece of shit will probably be tory leader and LotO by Christmas so he can give the whip back to himself.
  • Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,678
    Leon said:

    I see Lee Anderson is trotting out a free speech defence. He said on GBNews that we have free speech and he should be free to say what he thinks. Of course, he is free to say what he thinks. It’s just that what he said was (a) wrong, and (b) racist. Other people used their free speech to point this out.

    When will the right stop bleating about free speech, when what they want is consequence-free speech?

    I think Lee Anderson thought he was "licenced" to speak freely as a Tory to the Red Wall base in language they'd understand, and to some extent he was.

    The trouble was that what he said about Khan was slanderous: if he'd just said he thought Khan was far too tolerant of the Gaza protests and not doing enough, because he had some sympathy with them, then there'd have still been some howls of outrage but he wouldn't have been suspended.
    Both parts are true. They sent him off as the thickie to talk to the northern thickies. The ones with cloth caps and ferrets in their trousers. And when you live up north you think London is another country. There are plenty of northern towns that the WWC still think have been "taken over" by muslims and "Londonistan" is worse.

    Of course what 25p said was defamatory. So they had to suspend him. But the reported avalanche of "15p is right" messages received by doomed MPs shows that an awful lot of WWC voters think it wasn't defamatory and "someone had to say it".

    Free speech? Too many parochial bigots think they should be allowed to openly say the racist stupid defamatory stuff because its true innit? Its the loony left and woke remoaners who should be forced to shut up, not them.
    That’s powerfully put

    So powerful someone has ALREADY set it to the tune of an epic rock ballad. That’s incredible


    https://app.suno.ai/song/91270dcb-ef95-45f7-b6d2-acc5c3bb8a12
    Just had a few goes on that. Interesting. Thanks. It will put the people who write elevator music out of business that's for sure.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,889
    nico679 said:

    HYUFD said:

    kjh said:

    HYUFD said:

    20% of voters ie almost the current Tory poll rating and a plurality of Conservative and Leave voters thinking the party was wrong to suspend Anderson is significant even if a plurality of voters over all back his suspension. It shows the Tories cannot afford to expel or deselect Anderson without even further leakage to Reform, maybe even leading to them level pegging with Reform.

    Habib is probably right but the average Reform voters is closer to Anderson than him I suspect

    That is a well argued post @HYUFD, but as a Tory what do you suggest as a solution, or do you think there isn't one this side of the election and that they have to muddle through and reset afterwards?
    Stick with the suspension of Anderson but don't expel him or remove him from the candidates list, given he has now not ruled out defecting to Reform as a last resort
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68400775
    How does he get the Tory whip back ?

    He’s made it clear he won’t apologize.
    Once his suspension ends
This discussion has been closed.