STORYLast night Rishi Sunak vowed "leadership" to "face down extremists."An hour later Brendan Clarke-Smith and Liz Truss welcomed Lee Anderson to an event raising money for Tory campaign coffers.Today, the party says neither MP will be suspended.https://t.co/vgaIzF0Miw
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GE = 2 May 👍
Reality is the people voting Labour will be voting Labour no matter when the election is because the Tory party are spent (and utterly useless) at the moment...
“Trump now has a commanding lead. Beating Biden with Hispanics, scoring very well with Blacks and young voters x.com/patrickruffini…”
https://x.com/macaesbruno/status/1763927741483663674?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
By someone who's a self-professed Tory.
Wouldn't have put it past Ecclestone to do it. Not sure about Domenicali.
Sunak does not have control over his chaotic party but his speech was well made and to be fair endorsed by Starmer
The other unknown question is just how much toxicity Galloway may cause Starmer who still has his own issues coming down the line
Anyway the conservatives will lose office this year and they need to to decide just who they are and whether they go to the right and win over Reform but lose a lot of one nation conservatives
Frank Luntz
@FrankLuntz
·
18s
“Joe Biden should be expected to win this election. He’s an incumbent president running for re-election with a reasonably healthy economy against an unpopular opponent accused of multiple federal crimes.
And yet President Biden is not winning.”
https://twitter.com/FrankLuntz
Bill Kristol
@BillKristol
·
2m
Re the 2024 presidential race:
"If you don't like how the table is set, turn over the table."
-- Frank Underwood.
One person can turn over the table: Joe Biden.
https://twitter.com/BillKristol/status/1763955356533928027
I can't get beyond "learn to play 'Nearer, My God to Thee' really well and call the election ASAP."
https://x.com/steven_swinford/status/1763887319663149071
The conspiracy nuts are back I see.
The only councils with a fighting chance of avoiding bankruptcy are lower-tier authorities in two-tier areas that don't have loads of homeless families to deal with. As things stand, all the rest of them are doomed, irrespective of how well managed they are and how much non-statutory spending they cull. It's simply a matter of time.
It seems to me to have three elements, whose contents can change. There has to be an underlying philosophy, maybe liberalism is the best word, though in its Victorian moral and not party politics sense.
It is also Burkean and anti-Napoleonic in the sense that it takes for granted that we start the present moment from where we actually are and not from any sort of ideal or idea. There are no 'Year Noughts' no revolutions and no change for the sake of change.
Thirdly it is open to gradualist revolutions both through governance intervention and from the operation, under the rule of law, of a free market in a free society. In particular it aspires to maximising the (impossible to complete) aim of equality of opportunity.
BTW, blame Aristotle. One of his ideas is that all good stuff lies at the 'mean between two extremes' and this has found its way even as far distant as our own, anti Aristotelian, culture.
I also have some sympathy for Muslims in this - is Islam some form of mild disease that results in you being a loony suicide bomber if you catch an 'extreme' case? Or is it actually an issue of Wahabbism, a particularly harmful doctrine, being pushed in Mosques by Saudi Arabia?
Part of the extremism thing is a form of not wishing to offend I think. But in its attempt not to offend, it is offensive. If something is bad, let's describe and proscribe the actual thing.
"Only one in four voters think the country is moving in the right direction. More than twice as many voters believe Mr. Biden’s policies have personally hurt them as believe his policies have helped them. A majority of voters think the economy is in poor condition. And the share of voters who strongly disapprove of Mr. Biden’s handling of his job has reached 47 percent, higher than in Times/Siena polls at any point in his presidency."
NY Times report on their poll.
The economy is in poor condition? Jeez! Wait until they see an economy that actually is in poor condition. They are gonna freak.
(Monday week is presumably Monday May 11th)
Christianity is an odd one as it is really three religions bolted together. The central, most important bit, is giving up world possessions and forgiving folks Christ-like. But the other two bits, of the Old Testament and the Pauline letters, are much more ugly.
The problem is Biden might be losing a fair number.
It's completely ruthless and cynical, and stands an excellent chance of working.
The support for Labour evident in the polls is a mile wide and an inch deep. Labour aren't popular at all, offer nothing to the young, and the grey vote will gratefully grasp any reason to just stick with what they know and pray for the whole tedious business of politics to go away for another five years.
They have executive responsibility for carrying out the core functions of the OBR, including responsibility for the judgements reached in its forecasts.
Galloway, Corbyn and Burgon are not on it.
In a way we don’t really comprehend in Europe
Now, most of America doesn’t live there. They live in generally nice suburbs. But enough of them encounter it, or pay for it with their taxes, for it to make an electoral difference
And Biden’s abject inability to control the border is not helping
And a large increase in tax on tobacco
- Foreword to "The Prime Minsters", edited by Iain Dale, ninth edition 2031,
Sunak is Hindu.
Sadly there is a deep engrained prejudice that TSE may not even be aware of himself but it’s been evident since day 1.
But I don't think it's happening 😡
Everyone knows the next General Election is three days after Trump's inauguration.
Over the last year I have been to the city centres of New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, Charlotte, Miami, Virginia Beach and San Francisco. All seemed nice places, sometimes a bit dirty but no worse than the grimmer areas of central London. Of course, worse areas exist, but most Americans don't encounter them because most people don't travel to ghettos.
What they do have is a constant inundation of images of the ghettos on social media and cable news, due to a highly effective right wing media network. That is why people think it is worse now than during the 1980s of sunny Reaganism, despite crime and poverty at the time being substantially worse.
His only redeeming feature was that he genuinely believed that what he was doing was in his victims’ best interests
Is that the time?
Sunak’s Friday Nite sermonette created a Rod of Thorns for his own and his parties back. Having said what he said, as party of government, Rishi and his party is where the buck stops now - not to stoke division, nor to try and politically exploit from any division, instead lead by example.
TSE is doing a fantastic job with some of the headers the last couple of days. Rather than partisan political attack CR moaned about, TSE is providing fine journalism by flagging up what awful strategy and communications from the Conservatives has been over a very long course of time now, not just last evenings disaster. We say it’s rubbish old Sunak, or Truss, or Boris, but I suspect the truth is, previous PMs had far far better people around them, to prevent them making these stupid immediate and long term mistakes.
He's already tried 'British Homes for British Workers', and yesterday evening he had a go at implying that Rochdale voters were bigoted, so what could be next?
I reckon he'd might be up for riffing on Brown's infamous Gulags for Slags policy...
Or maybe that's me.
It used to be one of my favourite places in America.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6399457.stm
But there is no driver with the combined talent and equipment of a Schumacher to make it interesting.
Alonso may have the talent, and Leclerc the equipment. But not the package.
‘… you can see why the AI industry is, er, reluctant about coming clean on its probable energy and cooling requirements. After all, there’s a bubble on, and awkward facts can cause punctures. So it’s nice to be able to report that soon they may be obliged to open up. Over in the US, a group of senators and representatives have introduced a bill to require the federal government to assess AI’s current environmental footprint and develop a standardised system for reporting future impacts. And over in Europe, the EU’s AI Act is about to become law. Among other things, it requires “high-risk AI systems” (which include the powerful “foundation models” that power ChatGPT and similar AIs) to report their energy consumption, use of resources and other impacts throughout their lifespan.‘
Bloody good job we’ve dodged some more of that pesky EU red tape. Buccaneering Britain, cut loose of the sclerotic EU, can use our world class energy generation and unrivalled water infrastructure to steal a march on those shifty, backstabbing, woke, effete continentals. Rule Britannia! God Save the King! Stop the boats!
"Extremism in the defense of liberty," Senator Goldwater declared, "is no vice . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue" - New York Times, front page, July 7, 1964
from another source:
To my mind the single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom. I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue! - Barry Goldwater
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater#
SSI - The instant BEFORE AuH2O uttered his most famous soundbite, was the apogee of his presidential campaign. All downhill from there.
Perhaps worth noting, that in 1964 the most well-known extremists associated with Goldwater, were the John Birch Society AND the activist wing of Southern segregationists; while he never officially welcomed the former, and did sorta, kinda "bar" the Klan from his campaign that did NOT curb their enthusiasm. (Very similar to Trump re: today's White supremacists).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society
AND with respect to segregation, etc. which was very much a thing in 1964, further note AuH2O was expressly opposed to even "moderation in the pursuit of justice".
Perhaps one reason WHY only states he carried versus LBJ that November, besides his own Arizona, were Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi Burning and South Carolina.
So first of all, I'm not of Indian heritage.
I praise where praise is due, such as the appointment of The Lord Cameron.
But tell me about the prejudices I had when I criticised Truss and Johnson. I can be dispassionate when I said Johnson would win a majority of 40 to 70 plus Scotland.
My robust views on Truss allowed me to trouser £500 when PBers were saying I was wrong.
I’m glad one person did.
.
A measured and polite post when unparliamentary, profane, invective would have sufficed.
https://twitter.com/sentdefender/status/1763954930388238449
One PBer will be celebrating...
10 Downing Street,
London,
SW1A 2AA
More likely the next day and go to the Palace after PMQs.
Of course, there are some very nice parts. But the center and SoMa are - and have always been - utterly horrendous.
Central Seattle, which I haven't visited for twenty years was the same: an urban hell hole filled with ragged clothed people with few teeth begging for money for whatever the drug de jour for the mentally ill is.
Los Angeles is a little different, because there's a lot more "temporary" homelessness of people living in RVs, having jobs, but not being able to afford the local housing market.
But we also - of course - have the crystal meth-heads wandering around.
In the middle of the thread there was some quibbling over proposed fees.
It ended with my colleague, never the promptest in these situations but long since departed for pastures new, finally sending a promised draft paper which Mr Sunak had been chasing repeatedly with an increasing note of mild frustration.
*In a Neil Hamilton became leader of UKIP sort of comeback