There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Watching the Channel 4 documentary on Johnson, it is clear that all of us who has the instincts that Johnson would be TERRIBLE were absolutely spot on the money. Osborne and Cameron were absolutely right to try and stop him.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Yes, they grew up in the shadow of the War, but it was an invented experience, a mythology.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Difference between experience of WW2 as a war (horrible, as wars always are) and as a Sunday afternoon movie or uncle's heroic story.
I appalled myself recently when I realised that it is quite possible that the second best PM since Blair may well be Boris.
He did less damage (somehow) than Cameron*, and certainly was better (somehow) than Truss or Sunak. I’m just not sure where to rank him round May or Brown - difficult as I feel like the latter two are people I feel personally warmer to, whereas Spaffer revolts me.
*Cameron I see as the worst PM in my lifetime, just ahead of Thatcher and Liz ‘History’s Most Expensive Asterisk’ Truss.
I just don't see Johnson anywhere except at the bottom of the heap. I don't like Cameron, however like Blair he is characterised by starkly misjudged foreign policy, but beyond that there was competence and levity. Johnson was punctuated by such a series of egregious scandals, but more than that his time in office was all about being seen through smoke and mirrors, claiming world beating competence out of his incompetence; "I got all the big calls right" (did you, bollocks!).
However Johnson's malignancy is best borne out by the culture he brought with him and stamped on the Party and the Country. His legacy is a damaged party and "broken Britain".
David Cameron is the Conservative Prime Minister from central casting. Smooth, personable, even handsome in a certain light; Eton and Oxford; socially liberal. You could imagine him played by Hugh Grant in a hit romcom.
Leaving foreign policy to one side, Cameron's shadow cabinet spent five years preparing for government, yet gave us a health policy (Lansley's reforms) that was disowned and reversed by Cameron, a social policy, Universal Credit, whose introduction was a shambles, and which was undermined by the Chancellor, an economic policy that killed the recovery inherited from Labour and destroyed any prospect of growth, and that left debt at record levels. Local government was starved of funds. Traditional Tory values were thrown to the wolves as police and defence were cut.
Cameron was also bad at retail politics, at which he was supposed to shine. His relentlessly negative campaign style converted healthy leads over Labour into a hung parliament, almost lost Scotland and did lose Europe. (And before anyone points to 2015, that Conservative victory was due to the SNP driving Labour out of Scotland, not Cameron.)
Worst of all is Cameron's gerrymandering, tampering with the electoral system for partisan advantage. Ironically, it would probably cause Brexit and the end of Cameron's ministry.
David Cameron was our worst prime minister since Lord North.
All valid points, but when one looks at the gravitas of Cameron on the World stage today compared to the bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson and the barely sane nincompoop that is Truss, he ascends the list.
"... bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson"
When it comes to world events, Johnson did excellently on Ukraine. Incidentally, so did May, over Salisbury.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
My view, and it is my own cynical opinion piece, is Johnson got Ukraine right because it was the last chance saloon for saving his skin. I suppose whatever the justification, the call was correct. Nonetheless now the party is over his visits to Kyiv are less frequent, and what was he doing meeting Madura last month?
The appeal of Ukraine to Johnson and other tories was the chance to bask in the reflected glow of a war without any politically inconvenient British Gruz 200s landing back at Brize. All it cost Johson was other people's money which, as we all know, is his preferred type of money.
For a bit there, when the Russians discovered they couldn't do US-style high mobility, combined arms offensives, it was all very exciting for the tories. Now that the Ukrainians have also discovered that they can't do US-style high mobility, combined arms offensives, it's all gone a bit boring and the UK government is losing interest.
That seems to be the military lesson of the war. Offensive combined operations require a level of training, equipment supply and airpower not sustainable for anyone other than the US military. That said the Russians were successful initially, albeit followed by massive retreats and defeats too. The battle experience of their troops in warfare recognisable to my Grandfather on the Somme may be of little use in other wars.
It's ridiculous to think that stopping the boats "matters" to the government in any sense, other than as a purely cosmetic electoral gimmick designed to gull the voters.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
The Tories are all about divide and rule - it's howa corrupt oligarchy that has nothing in common with most of the population and is actively undermining their interests sustains itself in office. Hating on foreigners is a core plank of that strategy, Stop the Boats the latest iteration.
I think that’s true. The people who bankroll the Tory Party don’t really care about immigration, they just knew it was a useful lever to pull to get us out of the EU. They created the hysteria with their newspapers and fed it and nurtured it in order to ultimately remove us from a supranational organisation that wasn’t afraid to curtail their power.
I was in a McDonalds yesterday and the number of Asian males shuttling in and out, picking up orders for delivery, was striking. Here in Yvette Cooper’s constituency, where we’ve a lot of warehouses and logistics and stuff cos we’re where the A1 and M62 cross, the rise since Brexit of non-white faces in the streets and supermarkets is extremely noticeable. Whereas before immigrants were generally white Europeans. Poles, etc.
I welcome it, it’s about time we caught up with the diversity of Leeds, for example. But it isn’t what most Brexit voters round here anticipated as a result of their Leave vote.
Indeed. Though as I have pointed out endlessly the people who wanted the foreign to go home didn’t actually want to do the jobs the foreigners were doing. That’s why we need migration.
Our society has decided that we all need the ability to click on our phone and have anything we like delivered quickly. That means we need an army of workers doing shitty jobs. So we want people delivering McDonalds but “I’m not getting a job delivering McDonalds”. So we have migrants but “how do we stop all these foreigners coming here and delivering my McDonalds”
We can’t blame Covid for making people stupid. Many people pre-date Covid in that regard
This isn't something unique to Britain.
Britain is fairly average now for percentage of immigrants in the developed world, with about 14% of us born abroad. Canada, Australia, Switzerland are notably higher, as are Saudi and the UAE. We see this politically too, with migration being the hot topic in nearly all our countries. The exceptions are places like South Korea and Japan where the population pyramid is dangerously upside down.
In a globalised world people want to move around, seeking out economic and social opportunity. There are many on here who have benefited from living abroad including posters who still do, and many more have friends or family from abroad. My own ancestors migrated to Australia in the 19th Century and back to England in the 1930's for example.
Why should we deny such opportunity to others?
The failure of migration policy is not so much the numbers but rather the failure to plan for such arrivals, and not just the PB obsession with housing, but also with programmes of integration and cultural assimilation.
Agree apart from the fact that they have allowed far too many far too quickly and knackered everything. If done at a manageable rate it may have been ok but now people feel overrun in many areas and the services, housing , facilities have went to rat shit due to no planning and just opening the floodgates to any Tom , Dick or Harry regardless. Add the fact that many immigrants all crowd together and we see why we have so many issues.
This highlights one of my points. Ayrshire has a falling population, even over a period when Scotlands population rose.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Interesting. I was born in the early 60s, and it was everywhere.
I'll have to rethink that one. Any other 50s kids want to weigh in ?
I appalled myself recently when I realised that it is quite possible that the second best PM since Blair may well be Boris.
He did less damage (somehow) than Cameron*, and certainly was better (somehow) than Truss or Sunak. I’m just not sure where to rank him round May or Brown - difficult as I feel like the latter two are people I feel personally warmer to, whereas Spaffer revolts me.
*Cameron I see as the worst PM in my lifetime, just ahead of Thatcher and Liz ‘History’s Most Expensive Asterisk’ Truss.
I just don't see Johnson anywhere except at the bottom of the heap. I don't like Cameron, however like Blair he is characterised by starkly misjudged foreign policy, but beyond that there was competence and levity. Johnson was punctuated by such a series of egregious scandals, but more than that his time in office was all about being seen through smoke and mirrors, claiming world beating competence out of his incompetence; "I got all the big calls right" (did you, bollocks!).
However Johnson's malignancy is best borne out by the culture he brought with him and stamped on the Party and the Country. His legacy is a damaged party and "broken Britain".
David Cameron is the Conservative Prime Minister from central casting. Smooth, personable, even handsome in a certain light; Eton and Oxford; socially liberal. You could imagine him played by Hugh Grant in a hit romcom.
Leaving foreign policy to one side, Cameron's shadow cabinet spent five years preparing for government, yet gave us a health policy (Lansley's reforms) that was disowned and reversed by Cameron, a social policy, Universal Credit, whose introduction was a shambles, and which was undermined by the Chancellor, an economic policy that killed the recovery inherited from Labour and destroyed any prospect of growth, and that left debt at record levels. Local government was starved of funds. Traditional Tory values were thrown to the wolves as police and defence were cut.
Cameron was also bad at retail politics, at which he was supposed to shine. His relentlessly negative campaign style converted healthy leads over Labour into a hung parliament, almost lost Scotland and did lose Europe. (And before anyone points to 2015, that Conservative victory was due to the SNP driving Labour out of Scotland, not Cameron.)
Worst of all is Cameron's gerrymandering, tampering with the electoral system for partisan advantage. Ironically, it would probably cause Brexit and the end of Cameron's ministry.
David Cameron was our worst prime minister since Lord North.
All valid points, but when one looks at the gravitas of Cameron on the World stage today compared to the bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson and the barely sane nincompoop that is Truss, he ascends the list.
"... bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson"
When it comes to world events, Johnson did excellently on Ukraine. Incidentally, so did May, over Salisbury.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
My view, and it is my own cynical opinion piece, is Johnson got Ukraine right because it was the last chance saloon for saving his skin. I suppose whatever the justification, the call was correct. Nonetheless now the party is over his visits to Kyiv are less frequent, and what was he doing meeting Madura last month?
The appeal of Ukraine to Johnson and other tories was the chance to bask in the reflected glow of a war without any politically inconvenient British Gruz 200s landing back at Brize. All it cost Johson was other people's money which, as we all know, is his preferred type of money.
For a bit there, when the Russians discovered they couldn't do US-style high mobility, combined arms offensives, it was all very exciting for the tories. Now that the Ukrainians have also discovered that they can't do US-style high mobility, combined arms offensives, it's all gone a bit boring and the UK government is losing interest.
That seems to be the military lesson of the war. Offensive combined operations require a level of training, equipment supply and airpower not sustainable for anyone other than the US military. That said the Russians were successful initially, albeit followed by massive retreats and defeats too. The battle experience of their troops in warfare recognisable to my Grandfather on the Somme may be of little use in other wars.
Both sides are trying to wear each other out in the hope the other gives up. Neither has any intention of giving up. In that respect the situation is like WW1.
The choice for the West at this time, I think, is to do nothing and allow the Russians slowly to grind its way to Kyiv destroying everything in its path or to support Ukraine at scale to keep Russia at bay. I know which option I would choose.
In any case Germany was ultimately defeated in 1918, as it needed to be.
Are forced adoptions the next scandal on the same scale as the Post Office or bigger?
Britain carries them out at a far higher rate than any other country, including many at birth. Parliament has called for an apology... covering up until the mid-1970s.
Melton Mowbray Sainsbury is currently cash only due to a techno breakdown and the cash point machines ain't working either. Utter carnage!
Massive IT failure according to reports. If anyone is expecting an online delivery from Sainsbury's today then it almost certainly isn't coming either.
A lot of recent British Prime Ministers seem to share one common and surprising failing. Which is a failure to realise that if you want people to follow you, they have to be persuaded to do so. It's kinda baffling that politicians would make this mistake - what with being reliant on voters voting for them at election - but it seems to be the case.
Sunak's Premiership has been a constant hunt for the gimmick that will overturn the political situation. This hunt has meant that he's failed to articulate, even to his own MPs, what a Conservative government is for, and why his MPs should support him in fighting to preserve it.
Truss failed to realise that the chief role of the OBR was to persuade the financial markets that the British government could be trusted with their money.
Boris Johnson stands out as realising that people have to be persuaded - though his approach to persuasion has a limited shelf-life because of its disregard for reality.
Theresa May provided definitive proof of her inability to persuade not once (GE 2017) but twice (Brexit deal). One of the overlooked mysteries of recent British politics is how someone so incapable of persuasion made it so far.
Cameron's end came in part because he rushed the job of persuading the British public to support his EU settlement, in the hope of getting it out of the way quickly and concentrating on other things. But he should have realised that persuasion is the job of politics.
Is it necessary to detail Brown's failures in the art of persuasion?
With Blair I think you can discern a difference between early-Blair, who put a lot of effort into persuasion, into making his case, and late-Blair, who seemed to disdain the necessity of doing so and was frustrated when people disagreed. Early Blair would seek to understand that disagreement and disarm it, but late Blair was simply exasperated.
Major's signature soap box was a powerful symbol of his recognition of the importance of persuading people.
As to Starmer? At the moment his strategy appears to be to do so little that he hopes persuasion becomes superfluous as a consequence. Will be reveal hitherto unseen powers of persuasion when they do become necessary? Only time will tell.
A very good post. Have you considered entering it as a Header, as there is much to discuss.
I agree that there is a failure to pursuade, and it isn't just a UK phenomenon. It is part of why Populism is a dead end. The end of ideological politics means that our politicians wind up with an incoherent ragbag of policies that contradict each other. Hence the Tories being pledged to cut taxes, and also to redistribute via "levelling up" and to keeping the Triple Lock forever. It just doesn't work.
Mrs T made no pretence of levelling up or making benefits more generous. She believed that allowing old industries and communities to die was part of a free enterprise, deregulated dynamic economy within a European Single Market. I would see it as harsh and setting up a lot of division but it did hang together as a political philosophy.
I appalled myself recently when I realised that it is quite possible that the second best PM since Blair may well be Boris.
He did less damage (somehow) than Cameron*, and certainly was better (somehow) than Truss or Sunak. I’m just not sure where to rank him round May or Brown - difficult as I feel like the latter two are people I feel personally warmer to, whereas Spaffer revolts me.
*Cameron I see as the worst PM in my lifetime, just ahead of Thatcher and Liz ‘History’s Most Expensive Asterisk’ Truss.
I just don't see Johnson anywhere except at the bottom of the heap. I don't like Cameron, however like Blair he is characterised by starkly misjudged foreign policy, but beyond that there was competence and levity. Johnson was punctuated by such a series of egregious scandals, but more than that his time in office was all about being seen through smoke and mirrors, claiming world beating competence out of his incompetence; "I got all the big calls right" (did you, bollocks!).
However Johnson's malignancy is best borne out by the culture he brought with him and stamped on the Party and the Country. His legacy is a damaged party and "broken Britain".
David Cameron is the Conservative Prime Minister from central casting. Smooth, personable, even handsome in a certain light; Eton and Oxford; socially liberal. You could imagine him played by Hugh Grant in a hit romcom.
Leaving foreign policy to one side, Cameron's shadow cabinet spent five years preparing for government, yet gave us a health policy (Lansley's reforms) that was disowned and reversed by Cameron, a social policy, Universal Credit, whose introduction was a shambles, and which was undermined by the Chancellor, an economic policy that killed the recovery inherited from Labour and destroyed any prospect of growth, and that left debt at record levels. Local government was starved of funds. Traditional Tory values were thrown to the wolves as police and defence were cut.
Cameron was also bad at retail politics, at which he was supposed to shine. His relentlessly negative campaign style converted healthy leads over Labour into a hung parliament, almost lost Scotland and did lose Europe. (And before anyone points to 2015, that Conservative victory was due to the SNP driving Labour out of Scotland, not Cameron.)
Worst of all is Cameron's gerrymandering, tampering with the electoral system for partisan advantage. Ironically, it would probably cause Brexit and the end of Cameron's ministry.
David Cameron was our worst prime minister since Lord North.
All valid points, but when one looks at the gravitas of Cameron on the World stage today compared to the bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson and the barely sane nincompoop that is Truss, he ascends the list.
"... bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson"
When it comes to world events, Johnson did excellently on Ukraine. Incidentally, so did May, over Salisbury.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
My view, and it is my own cynical opinion piece, is Johnson got Ukraine right because it was the last chance saloon for saving his skin. I suppose whatever the justification, the call was correct. Nonetheless now the party is over his visits to Kyiv are less frequent, and what was he doing meeting Madura last month?
The appeal of Ukraine to Johnson and other tories was the chance to bask in the reflected glow of a war without any politically inconvenient British Gruz 200s landing back at Brize. All it cost Johson was other people's money which, as we all know, is his preferred type of money.
For a bit there, when the Russians discovered they couldn't do US-style high mobility, combined arms offensives, it was all very exciting for the tories. Now that the Ukrainians have also discovered that they can't do US-style high mobility, combined arms offensives, it's all gone a bit boring and the UK government is losing interest.
That seems to be the military lesson of the war. Offensive combined operations require a level of training, equipment supply and airpower not sustainable for anyone other than the US military. That said the Russians were successful initially, albeit followed by massive retreats and defeats too. The battle experience of their troops in warfare recognisable to my Grandfather on the Somme may be of little use in other wars.
Both sides are trying to wear each other out in the hope the other gives up. Neither has any intention of giving up. In that respect the situation is like WW1.
The choice for the West at this time, I think, is to do nothing and allow the Russians slowly to grind its way to Kyiv destroying everything in its path or to support Ukraine at scale to keep Russia at bay. I know which option I would choose.
In any case Germany was ultimately defeated in 1918, as it needed to be.
A very different version of WWI.
Ukraine's Sergyi Flesh: "Mark my words - in six months to a year, both sides will begin to produce enough FPVs to target every single soldier - all will be detected and destroyed day and night in a zone of up to 5-8 km. All infantry will retreat underground, and all surface activity will belong to ground robots." https://twitter.com/sambendett/status/1768732323367821657
Many more FPV drones are already used to target soldiers than vehicles.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Interesting. I was born in the early 60s, and it was everywhere.
I'll have to rethink that one. Any other 50s kids want to weigh in ?
Yes it is not as if I didn't know about it. We played in bomb sites, there were endless films, etc, but I didn't experience rationing (not in my memory anyway) and there was now a greater fear of the cold war and being wiped out by the bomb and we had 60s music which was a world away from WWII. And I don't recall many speaking of their experiences. Many because they weren't in the front line and those that were, weren't keen to do so eg a friend of mine's father was a fighter pilot and said very little. I did get stories of the blitz and evacuations as my father's side were bombed out in London.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
It’s Boomers’ nostalgia for the Carry On UK of their virile youths, where matrons ruled hospital wards with a rod of iron and the working class knew their place. That sweet spot before the Beatles went weird and deference died, and everyone was white and Britannia ruled the world.
Where plucky little Britain told itself it had stood alone against the beastly Germans, conveniently forgetting we had an empire to exploit to keep us going.
Leave exploited that masochistic nostalgia of the morons who post stuff on Facebook like ‘Remember when WE were young and we had frost on the inside of the windows every morning, and my bother died of rickets and all we ate was boiled kidneys and we walked through 15 foot snowdrifts to get to schools that didn’t close, and it never did US any harm!’
A lot of recent British Prime Ministers seem to share one common and surprising failing. Which is a failure to realise that if you want people to follow you, they have to be persuaded to do so. It's kinda baffling that politicians would make this mistake - what with being reliant on voters voting for them at election - but it seems to be the case.
Sunak's Premiership has been a constant hunt for the gimmick that will overturn the political situation. This hunt has meant that he's failed to articulate, even to his own MPs, what a Conservative government is for, and why his MPs should support him in fighting to preserve it.
Truss failed to realise that the chief role of the OBR was to persuade the financial markets that the British government could be trusted with their money.
Boris Johnson stands out as realising that people have to be persuaded - though his approach to persuasion has a limited shelf-life because of its disregard for reality.
Theresa May provided definitive proof of her inability to persuade not once (GE 2017) but twice (Brexit deal). One of the overlooked mysteries of recent British politics is how someone so incapable of persuasion made it so far.
Cameron's end came in part because he rushed the job of persuading the British public to support his EU settlement, in the hope of getting it out of the way quickly and concentrating on other things. But he should have realised that persuasion is the job of politics.
Is it necessary to detail Brown's failures in the art of persuasion?
With Blair I think you can discern a difference between early-Blair, who put a lot of effort into persuasion, into making his case, and late-Blair, who seemed to disdain the necessity of doing so and was frustrated when people disagreed. Early Blair would seek to understand that disagreement and disarm it, but late Blair was simply exasperated.
Major's signature soap box was a powerful symbol of his recognition of the importance of persuading people.
As to Starmer? At the moment his strategy appears to be to do so little that he hopes persuasion becomes superfluous as a consequence. Will be reveal hitherto unseen powers of persuasion when they do become necessary? Only time will tell.
Interesting perspective. I remember Rawnsley writing about post-Iraq Blair that, having once said the thing he hates most is losing, he was acting like a man with nothing to lose.
I think this analysis is correct.
More and more politicians are acting on the basis of “My policies are self evidently good and moral. There is literally no alternative. Opposition is evil.”
To the Head Count this comes across as “Shut up, scum”
This then creates the popularity of the Optimates in late stage Rome.
A lot of recent British Prime Ministers seem to share one common and surprising failing. Which is a failure to realise that if you want people to follow you, they have to be persuaded to do so. It's kinda baffling that politicians would make this mistake - what with being reliant on voters voting for them at election - but it seems to be the case.
Sunak's Premiership has been a constant hunt for the gimmick that will overturn the political situation. This hunt has meant that he's failed to articulate, even to his own MPs, what a Conservative government is for, and why his MPs should support him in fighting to preserve it.
Truss failed to realise that the chief role of the OBR was to persuade the financial markets that the British government could be trusted with their money.
Boris Johnson stands out as realising that people have to be persuaded - though his approach to persuasion has a limited shelf-life because of its disregard for reality.
Theresa May provided definitive proof of her inability to persuade not once (GE 2017) but twice (Brexit deal). One of the overlooked mysteries of recent British politics is how someone so incapable of persuasion made it so far.
Cameron's end came in part because he rushed the job of persuading the British public to support his EU settlement, in the hope of getting it out of the way quickly and concentrating on other things. But he should have realised that persuasion is the job of politics.
Is it necessary to detail Brown's failures in the art of persuasion?
With Blair I think you can discern a difference between early-Blair, who put a lot of effort into persuasion, into making his case, and late-Blair, who seemed to disdain the necessity of doing so and was frustrated when people disagreed. Early Blair would seek to understand that disagreement and disarm it, but late Blair was simply exasperated.
Major's signature soap box was a powerful symbol of his recognition of the importance of persuading people.
As to Starmer? At the moment his strategy appears to be to do so little that he hopes persuasion becomes superfluous as a consequence. Will be reveal hitherto unseen powers of persuasion when they do become necessary? Only time will tell.
A very good post. Have you considered entering it as a Header, as there is much to discuss.
I agree that there is a failure to pursuade, and it isn't just a UK phenomenon. It is part of why Populism is a dead end. The end of ideological politics means that our politicians wind up with an incoherent ragbag of policies that contradict each other. Hence the Tories being pledged to cut taxes, and also to redistribute via "levelling up" and to keeping the Triple Lock forever. It just doesn't work.
Mrs T made no pretence of levelling up or making benefits more generous. She believed that allowing old industries and communities to die was part of a free enterprise, deregulated dynamic economy within a European Single Market. I would see it as harsh and setting up a lot of division but it did hang together as a political philosophy.
More than anything she recognised that in a globalised world the UK had no chance at all of competing with the low labour cost economies, mostly in Asia. Her transformation of the UK economy was timely and very necessary.
Thank you for the heading @Topping. It's an interesting viewpoint and one which I hadn't considered.
Having now considered it, I think the idea that 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control' is too nuanced.
Whenever I hear immigration come up in day-to-day conversation (not that often tbf) it's along the lines of 'there are too many', 'the country's full up', 'we can't take any more', alongside genuinely held concerns about the dilution of our culture and way of life.
So no, I don't think the nation believes 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control'.
One other point: 'In short, when it comes to the huge numbers of people coming to this country, it has been situation: no change.' No, it is not situation no change; the numbers have more than doubled and the nature of that immigration has changed dramatically, fuelling the 'cultural dilution' concern.
Sorry sorry to disagree - still a very thought-provoking thread header though. Thanks!
The main problem is where on Earth we put all the extra people, given the immense opposition to housebuilding - although the burdensome nature of rampant population growth is also overlooked as an important source of the crisis in provision of public services. Demand spirals because of sheer numbers as well as the overall increase in sickness, obesity and old people with complex needs, which just means that more and more money has to be found simply to stand still.
This is a circle that can't be squared. If Government can't or won't find the extra money then no amount of efficiency initiatives and wishful thinking (often one and the same thing) will prevent us from going further and further backwards, as we can see from the progressive disintegration of the entire public realm that is taking place in real time all around us.
Melton Mowbray Sainsbury is currently cash only due to a techno breakdown and the cash point machines ain't working either. Utter carnage!
Massive IT failure according to reports. If anyone is expecting an online delivery from Sainsbury's today then it almost certainly isn't coming either.
Melton Mowbray Sainsbury is currently cash only due to a techno breakdown and the cash point machines ain't working either. Utter carnage!
Massive IT failure according to reports. If anyone is expecting an online delivery from Sainsbury's today then it almost certainly isn't coming either.
Not good. I hope its not dodgy foreign powers causing mischief again.
After the thrills of Cheltenham, I struggle to get excited about today's racing which has more than a touch of after the Lord Mayor's Show about it.
Cheltenham highlighted and brought in to sharp focus some serious issues in British jumps racing but that's for other forums and other days.
I was crunching some numbers around what may happen in the May local elections.
In 2021, the Conservatives got a notional 36% of the vote with Labour on 29% and the Liberal Democrats on 17%. That was pretty good for the Conservatives and they were leading in the GE polls by around 8-10 points at the time so the local elections (which were of course two years in one with the 2020 and 2021 seats contested) weren't far off the national polling (you can often add 10 points to the LD number between national and local elections).
Now, we have Labour leads of let's say 20 points and a crude 45-25-10 split betwen the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats. A 8-10 point lead has become a 20 point deficit so the swing is around 14%.
If we assume both Conservative and Labour will underperform their Westminster numbers locally, we're probably looking at notional figures of Labour 42%, Conservatives 22% and Liberal Democrats 20%. In 1995 when the Conservatives lost 2000 councillors in a single night, the notional numbers were Lab 47%, Con 25%, LD 23%. - the shortfall is more Independents who are polling stronger on a "plague on all your houses" platform.
There are over 5,000 seats being contested this time. There are no elections in Scotland apart from local by-elections and only the PCC contests in Wales so it's all about England which is, after all, where the GE is going to be decided.
Eight Conservative controlled Districts have all their councillors up for elections - Basildon, Epping Forest, Fareham, Gloucester, Harlow, Havant, Nuneaton & Bedworth and Redditch. I think if you are looking at a barometer for Labour performance vs the Conservatives that would be the place to start.
For the LDs the obvious target looks to be Dorset.
Lewis Baston has suggested the Conservatives could lose half the seats they are defending - in 2023, they only lost 31% so it would be a further step down to lose half and no one seems clear how many each party is defending.
I appalled myself recently when I realised that it is quite possible that the second best PM since Blair may well be Boris.
He did less damage (somehow) than Cameron*, and certainly was better (somehow) than Truss or Sunak. I’m just not sure where to rank him round May or Brown - difficult as I feel like the latter two are people I feel personally warmer to, whereas Spaffer revolts me.
*Cameron I see as the worst PM in my lifetime, just ahead of Thatcher and Liz ‘History’s Most Expensive Asterisk’ Truss.
I just don't see Johnson anywhere except at the bottom of the heap. I don't like Cameron, however like Blair he is characterised by starkly misjudged foreign policy, but beyond that there was competence and levity. Johnson was punctuated by such a series of egregious scandals, but more than that his time in office was all about being seen through smoke and mirrors, claiming world beating competence out of his incompetence; "I got all the big calls right" (did you, bollocks!).
However Johnson's malignancy is best borne out by the culture he brought with him and stamped on the Party and the Country. His legacy is a damaged party and "broken Britain".
David Cameron is the Conservative Prime Minister from central casting. Smooth, personable, even handsome in a certain light; Eton and Oxford; socially liberal. You could imagine him played by Hugh Grant in a hit romcom.
Leaving foreign policy to one side, Cameron's shadow cabinet spent five years preparing for government, yet gave us a health policy (Lansley's reforms) that was disowned and reversed by Cameron, a social policy, Universal Credit, whose introduction was a shambles, and which was undermined by the Chancellor, an economic policy that killed the recovery inherited from Labour and destroyed any prospect of growth, and that left debt at record levels. Local government was starved of funds. Traditional Tory values were thrown to the wolves as police and defence were cut.
Cameron was also bad at retail politics, at which he was supposed to shine. His relentlessly negative campaign style converted healthy leads over Labour into a hung parliament, almost lost Scotland and did lose Europe. (And before anyone points to 2015, that Conservative victory was due to the SNP driving Labour out of Scotland, not Cameron.)
Worst of all is Cameron's gerrymandering, tampering with the electoral system for partisan advantage. Ironically, it would probably cause Brexit and the end of Cameron's ministry.
David Cameron was our worst prime minister since Lord North.
All valid points, but when one looks at the gravitas of Cameron on the World stage today compared to the bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson and the barely sane nincompoop that is Truss, he ascends the list.
"... bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson"
When it comes to world events, Johnson did excellently on Ukraine. Incidentally, so did May, over Salisbury.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
My view, and it is my own cynical opinion piece, is Johnson got Ukraine right because it was the last chance saloon for saving his skin. I suppose whatever the justification, the call was correct. Nonetheless now the party is over his visits to Kyiv are less frequent, and what was he doing meeting Madura last month?
The appeal of Ukraine to Johnson and other tories was the chance to bask in the reflected glow of a war without any politically inconvenient British Gruz 200s landing back at Brize. All it cost Johson was other people's money which, as we all know, is his preferred type of money.
For a bit there, when the Russians discovered they couldn't do US-style high mobility, combined arms offensives, it was all very exciting for the tories. Now that the Ukrainians have also discovered that they can't do US-style high mobility, combined arms offensives, it's all gone a bit boring and the UK government is losing interest.
That seems to be the military lesson of the war. Offensive combined operations require a level of training, equipment supply and airpower not sustainable for anyone other than the US military. That said the Russians were successful initially, albeit followed by massive retreats and defeats too. The battle experience of their troops in warfare recognisable to my Grandfather on the Somme may be of little use in other wars.
Both sides are trying to wear each other out in the hope the other gives up. Neither has any intention of giving up. In that respect the situation is like WW1.
The choice for the West at this time, I think, is to do nothing and allow the Russians slowly to grind its way to Kyiv destroying everything in its path or to support Ukraine at scale to keep Russia at bay. I know which option I would choose.
In any case Germany was ultimately defeated in 1918, as it needed to be.
A very different version of WWI.
Ukraine's Sergyi Flesh: "Mark my words - in six months to a year, both sides will begin to produce enough FPVs to target every single soldier - all will be detected and destroyed day and night in a zone of up to 5-8 km. All infantry will retreat underground, and all surface activity will belong to ground robots." https://twitter.com/sambendett/status/1768732323367821657
Many more FPV drones are already used to target soldiers than vehicles.
Hamas have demonstrated tremendous tenacity in their 7 month fight against a vastly larger and better equipped army by digging underground. Helped of course by their complete contempt for their own people and the rules of war. This isn't entirely new as similar to the tunnel war in Vietnam or City fights like Stalingrad in 1942.
Attrition warfare is not over, no matter how much our own nations shrink from it.
I appalled myself recently when I realised that it is quite possible that the second best PM since Blair may well be Boris.
He did less damage (somehow) than Cameron*, and certainly was better (somehow) than Truss or Sunak. I’m just not sure where to rank him round May or Brown - difficult as I feel like the latter two are people I feel personally warmer to, whereas Spaffer revolts me.
*Cameron I see as the worst PM in my lifetime, just ahead of Thatcher and Liz ‘History’s Most Expensive Asterisk’ Truss.
I just don't see Johnson anywhere except at the bottom of the heap. I don't like Cameron, however like Blair he is characterised by starkly misjudged foreign policy, but beyond that there was competence and levity. Johnson was punctuated by such a series of egregious scandals, but more than that his time in office was all about being seen through smoke and mirrors, claiming world beating competence out of his incompetence; "I got all the big calls right" (did you, bollocks!).
However Johnson's malignancy is best borne out by the culture he brought with him and stamped on the Party and the Country. His legacy is a damaged party and "broken Britain".
David Cameron is the Conservative Prime Minister from central casting. Smooth, personable, even handsome in a certain light; Eton and Oxford; socially liberal. You could imagine him played by Hugh Grant in a hit romcom.
Leaving foreign policy to one side, Cameron's shadow cabinet spent five years preparing for government, yet gave us a health policy (Lansley's reforms) that was disowned and reversed by Cameron, a social policy, Universal Credit, whose introduction was a shambles, and which was undermined by the Chancellor, an economic policy that killed the recovery inherited from Labour and destroyed any prospect of growth, and that left debt at record levels. Local government was starved of funds. Traditional Tory values were thrown to the wolves as police and defence were cut.
Cameron was also bad at retail politics, at which he was supposed to shine. His relentlessly negative campaign style converted healthy leads over Labour into a hung parliament, almost lost Scotland and did lose Europe. (And before anyone points to 2015, that Conservative victory was due to the SNP driving Labour out of Scotland, not Cameron.)
Worst of all is Cameron's gerrymandering, tampering with the electoral system for partisan advantage. Ironically, it would probably cause Brexit and the end of Cameron's ministry.
David Cameron was our worst prime minister since Lord North.
All valid points, but when one looks at the gravitas of Cameron on the World stage today compared to the bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson and the barely sane nincompoop that is Truss, he ascends the list.
"... bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson"
When it comes to world events, Johnson did excellently on Ukraine. Incidentally, so did May, over Salisbury.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
My view, and it is my own cynical opinion piece, is Johnson got Ukraine right because it was the last chance saloon for saving his skin. I suppose whatever the justification, the call was correct. Nonetheless now the party is over his visits to Kyiv are less frequent, and what was he doing meeting Madura last month?
The appeal of Ukraine to Johnson and other tories was the chance to bask in the reflected glow of a war without any politically inconvenient British Gruz 200s landing back at Brize. All it cost Johson was other people's money which, as we all know, is his preferred type of money.
For a bit there, when the Russians discovered they couldn't do US-style high mobility, combined arms offensives, it was all very exciting for the tories. Now that the Ukrainians have also discovered that they can't do US-style high mobility, combined arms offensives, it's all gone a bit boring and the UK government is losing interest.
That seems to be the military lesson of the war. Offensive combined operations require a level of training, equipment supply and airpower not sustainable for anyone other than the US military. That said the Russians were successful initially, albeit followed by massive retreats and defeats too. The battle experience of their troops in warfare recognisable to my Grandfather on the Somme may be of little use in other wars.
Both sides are trying to wear each other out in the hope the other gives up. Neither has any intention of giving up. In that respect the situation is like WW1.
The choice for the West at this time, I think, is to do nothing and allow the Russians slowly to grind its way to Kyiv destroying everything in its path or to support Ukraine at scale to keep Russia at bay. I know which option I would choose.
In any case Germany was ultimately defeated in 1918, as it needed to be.
Even if the west gives plenty of help you still have the ultimate problem of lack of ukrainian soldiers. How much of their young men are ukraine prepared to sacrifice and is it right we should expect them to make all the sacrifice rather than sending in our own young men.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Interesting. I was born in the early 60s, and it was everywhere.
I'll have to rethink that one. Any other 50s kids want to weigh in ?
Yes it is not as if I didn't know about it. We played in bomb sites, there were endless films, etc, but I didn't experience rationing (not in my memory anyway) and there was now a greater fear of the cold war and being wiped out by the bomb and we had 60s music which was a world away from WWII. And I don't recall many speaking of their experiences. Many because they weren't in the front line and those that were, weren't keen to do so eg a friend of mine's father was a fighter pilot and said very little. I did get stories of the blitz and evacuations as my father's side were bombed out in London.
I recall growing up with a sense of nostalgia for a past I hadn't experienced. I don't think that was particularly healthy.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Precisely. Heroic myth V nasty reality.
Yes there were mass suicide of germans at the end of ww2 and the occupying russian troops raped at will. Horrible.
A lot of recent British Prime Ministers seem to share one common and surprising failing. Which is a failure to realise that if you want people to follow you, they have to be persuaded to do so. It's kinda baffling that politicians would make this mistake - what with being reliant on voters voting for them at election - but it seems to be the case.
Sunak's Premiership has been a constant hunt for the gimmick that will overturn the political situation. This hunt has meant that he's failed to articulate, even to his own MPs, what a Conservative government is for, and why his MPs should support him in fighting to preserve it.
Truss failed to realise that the chief role of the OBR was to persuade the financial markets that the British government could be trusted with their money.
Boris Johnson stands out as realising that people have to be persuaded - though his approach to persuasion has a limited shelf-life because of its disregard for reality.
Theresa May provided definitive proof of her inability to persuade not once (GE 2017) but twice (Brexit deal). One of the overlooked mysteries of recent British politics is how someone so incapable of persuasion made it so far.
Cameron's end came in part because he rushed the job of persuading the British public to support his EU settlement, in the hope of getting it out of the way quickly and concentrating on other things. But he should have realised that persuasion is the job of politics.
Is it necessary to detail Brown's failures in the art of persuasion?
With Blair I think you can discern a difference between early-Blair, who put a lot of effort into persuasion, into making his case, and late-Blair, who seemed to disdain the necessity of doing so and was frustrated when people disagreed. Early Blair would seek to understand that disagreement and disarm it, but late Blair was simply exasperated.
Major's signature soap box was a powerful symbol of his recognition of the importance of persuading people.
As to Starmer? At the moment his strategy appears to be to do so little that he hopes persuasion becomes superfluous as a consequence. Will be reveal hitherto unseen powers of persuasion when they do become necessary? Only time will tell.
A very good post. Have you considered entering it as a Header, as there is much to discuss.
I agree that there is a failure to pursuade, and it isn't just a UK phenomenon. It is part of why Populism is a dead end. The end of ideological politics means that our politicians wind up with an incoherent ragbag of policies that contradict each other. Hence the Tories being pledged to cut taxes, and also to redistribute via "levelling up" and to keeping the Triple Lock forever. It just doesn't work.
Mrs T made no pretence of levelling up or making benefits more generous. She believed that allowing old industries and communities to die was part of a free enterprise, deregulated dynamic economy within a European Single Market. I would see it as harsh and setting up a lot of division but it did hang together as a political philosophy.
More than anything she recognised that in a globalised world the UK had no chance at all of competing with the low labour cost economies, mostly in Asia. Her transformation of the UK economy was timely and very necessary.
A transformation was certainly necessary. I'm not now convinced hers was a particularly good one overall.
But I agree with Foxy - this is probably the topic for its own weekend header.
Melton Mowbray Sainsbury is currently cash only due to a techno breakdown and the cash point machines ain't working either. Utter carnage!
Massive IT failure according to reports. If anyone is expecting an online delivery from Sainsbury's today then it almost certainly isn't coming either.
Melton Mowbray Sainsbury is currently cash only due to a techno breakdown and the cash point machines ain't working either. Utter carnage!
Massive IT failure according to reports. If anyone is expecting an online delivery from Sainsbury's today then it almost certainly isn't coming either.
Not good. I hope its not dodgy foreign powers causing mischief again.
Indeed. Wasn't Shapps vehicle cyber sabotaged the other day? Are the Rooskies having a bit of a practice?
The Tories are all about divide and rule - it's howa corrupt oligarchy that has nothing in common with most of the population and is actively undermining their interests sustains itself in office. Hating on foreigners is a core plank of that strategy, Stop the Boats the latest iteration.
I think that’s true. The people who bankroll the Tory Party don’t really care about immigration, they just knew it was a useful lever to pull to get us out of the EU. They created the hysteria with their newspapers and fed it and nurtured it in order to ultimately remove us from a supranational organisation that wasn’t afraid to curtail their power.
I was in a McDonalds yesterday and the number of Asian males shuttling in and out, picking up orders for delivery, was striking. Here in Yvette Cooper’s constituency, where we’ve a lot of warehouses and logistics and stuff cos we’re where the A1 and M62 cross, the rise since Brexit of non-white faces in the streets and supermarkets is extremely noticeable. Whereas before immigrants were generally white Europeans. Poles, etc.
I welcome it, it’s about time we caught up with the diversity of Leeds, for example. But it isn’t what most Brexit voters round here anticipated as a result of their Leave vote.
Indeed. Though as I have pointed out endlessly the people who wanted the foreign to go home didn’t actually want to do the jobs the foreigners were doing. That’s why we need migration.
Our society has decided that we all need the ability to click on our phone and have anything we like delivered quickly. That means we need an army of workers doing shitty jobs. So we want people delivering McDonalds but “I’m not getting a job delivering McDonalds”. So we have migrants but “how do we stop all these foreigners coming here and delivering my McDonalds”
We can’t blame Covid for making people stupid. Many people pre-date Covid in that regard
This isn't something unique to Britain.
Britain is fairly average now for percentage of immigrants in the developed world, with about 14% of us born abroad. Canada, Australia, Switzerland are notably higher, as are Saudi and the UAE. We see this politically too, with migration being the hot topic in nearly all our countries. The exceptions are places like South Korea and Japan where the population pyramid is dangerously upside down.
In a globalised world people want to move around, seeking out economic and social opportunity. There are many on here who have benefited from living abroad including posters who still do, and many more have friends or family from abroad. My own ancestors migrated to Australia in the 19th Century and back to England in the 1930's for example.
Why should we deny such opportunity to others?
The failure of migration policy is not so much the numbers but rather the failure to plan for such arrivals, and not just the PB obsession with housing, but also with programmes of integration and cultural assimilation.
Agree apart from the fact that they have allowed far too many far too quickly and knackered everything. If done at a manageable rate it may have been ok but now people feel overrun in many areas and the services, housing , facilities have went to rat shit due to no planning and just opening the floodgates to any Tom , Dick or Harry regardless. Add the fact that many immigrants all crowd together and we see why we have so many issues.
This highlights one of my points. Ayrshire has a falling population, even over a period when Scotlands population rose.
Melton Mowbray Sainsbury is currently cash only due to a techno breakdown and the cash point machines ain't working either. Utter carnage!
Massive IT failure according to reports. If anyone is expecting an online delivery from Sainsbury's today then it almost certainly isn't coming either.
Melton Mowbray Sainsbury is currently cash only due to a techno breakdown and the cash point machines ain't working either. Utter carnage!
Massive IT failure according to reports. If anyone is expecting an online delivery from Sainsbury's today then it almost certainly isn't coming either.
Not good. I hope its not dodgy foreign powers causing mischief again.
The Russian cyber war against the West has been going on for years, but for plenty of reasons, we seem to want to ignore it. In Estonia the systems are now pretty robust against the constant attacks, but as the sabotage of the GPS while Shapps plane was in Poland shows, the activity and capability of the Russian continues to accelerate.
Still, at least it not as hostile as the daily blood curdling threats from Drunken Dimtri Medevedev.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Interesting. I was born in the early 60s, and it was everywhere.
I'll have to rethink that one. Any other 50s kids want to weigh in ?
Yes it is not as if I didn't know about it. We played in bomb sites, there were endless films, etc, but I didn't experience rationing (not in my memory anyway) and there was now a greater fear of the cold war and being wiped out by the bomb and we had 60s music which was a world away from WWII. And I don't recall many speaking of their experiences. Many because they weren't in the front line and those that were, weren't keen to do so eg a friend of mine's father was a fighter pilot and said very little. I did get stories of the blitz and evacuations as my father's side were bombed out in London.
Different experience for me, born in 1965. Everyone talked about what their grandparents did in the war. The war was everywhere in comics, films and TV. Many of those who lived through the war were still around and it was a big part of our national psyche even as a youngster. For me growing up in the 1970s it was still very much a defining point in British life. It certainly wasn't ancient history in any way.
A lot of recent British Prime Ministers seem to share one common and surprising failing. Which is a failure to realise that if you want people to follow you, they have to be persuaded to do so. It's kinda baffling that politicians would make this mistake - what with being reliant on voters voting for them at election - but it seems to be the case.
Sunak's Premiership has been a constant hunt for the gimmick that will overturn the political situation. This hunt has meant that he's failed to articulate, even to his own MPs, what a Conservative government is for, and why his MPs should support him in fighting to preserve it.
Truss failed to realise that the chief role of the OBR was to persuade the financial markets that the British government could be trusted with their money.
Boris Johnson stands out as realising that people have to be persuaded - though his approach to persuasion has a limited shelf-life because of its disregard for reality.
Theresa May provided definitive proof of her inability to persuade not once (GE 2017) but twice (Brexit deal). One of the overlooked mysteries of recent British politics is how someone so incapable of persuasion made it so far.
Cameron's end came in part because he rushed the job of persuading the British public to support his EU settlement, in the hope of getting it out of the way quickly and concentrating on other things. But he should have realised that persuasion is the job of politics.
Is it necessary to detail Brown's failures in the art of persuasion?
With Blair I think you can discern a difference between early-Blair, who put a lot of effort into persuasion, into making his case, and late-Blair, who seemed to disdain the necessity of doing so and was frustrated when people disagreed. Early Blair would seek to understand that disagreement and disarm it, but late Blair was simply exasperated.
Major's signature soap box was a powerful symbol of his recognition of the importance of persuading people.
As to Starmer? At the moment his strategy appears to be to do so little that he hopes persuasion becomes superfluous as a consequence. Will be reveal hitherto unseen powers of persuasion when they do become necessary? Only time will tell.
A very good post. Have you considered entering it as a Header, as there is much to discuss.
I agree that there is a failure to pursuade, and it isn't just a UK phenomenon. It is part of why Populism is a dead end. The end of ideological politics means that our politicians wind up with an incoherent ragbag of policies that contradict each other. Hence the Tories being pledged to cut taxes, and also to redistribute via "levelling up" and to keeping the Triple Lock forever. It just doesn't work.
Mrs T made no pretence of levelling up or making benefits more generous. She believed that allowing old industries and communities to die was part of a free enterprise, deregulated dynamic economy within a European Single Market. I would see it as harsh and setting up a lot of division but it did hang together as a political philosophy.
More than anything she recognised that in a globalised world the UK had no chance at all of competing with the low labour cost economies, mostly in Asia. Her transformation of the UK economy was timely and very necessary.
A transformation was certainly necessary. I'm not now convinced hers was a particularly good one overall.
But I agree with Foxy - this is probably the topic for its own weekend header.
My personal view is that what was bad was the underlying belief that globalisation was an unassailably good thing. Thatcher bought into this idea and I think that has proved very costly for people in the long run.
Thank you for the heading @Topping. It's an interesting viewpoint and one which I hadn't considered.
Having now considered it, I think the idea that 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control' is too nuanced.
Whenever I hear immigration come up in day-to-day conversation (not that often tbf) it's along the lines of 'there are too many', 'the country's full up', 'we can't take any more', alongside genuinely held concerns about the dilution of our culture and way of life.
So no, I don't think the nation believes 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control'.
One other point: 'In short, when it comes to the huge numbers of people coming to this country, it has been situation: no change.' No, it is not situation no change; the numbers have more than doubled and the nature of that immigration has changed dramatically, fuelling the 'cultural dilution' concern.
Sorry sorry to disagree - still a very thought-provoking thread header though. Thanks!
The main problem is where on Earth we put all the extra people, given the immense opposition to housebuilding - although the burdensome nature of rampant population growth is also overlooked as an important source of the crisis in provision of public services. Demand spirals because of sheer numbers as well as the overall increase in sickness, obesity and old people with complex needs, which just means that more and more money has to be found simply to stand still.
This is a circle that can't be squared. If Government can't or won't find the extra money then no amount of efficiency initiatives and wishful thinking (often one and the same thing) will prevent us from going further and further backwards, as we can see from the progressive disintegration of the entire public realm that is taking place in real time all around us.
Yes a strange argument that because the numbers are so high the uk public doesnt mind immigration. In reality they have no choice in the matter. Of course we now have a situation where without very high immigration our economy would collapse yet continuing very high immigration risks social collapse.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Interesting. I was born in the early 60s, and it was everywhere.
I'll have to rethink that one. Any other 50s kids want to weigh in ?
Yes it is not as if I didn't know about it. We played in bomb sites, there were endless films, etc, but I didn't experience rationing (not in my memory anyway) and there was now a greater fear of the cold war and being wiped out by the bomb and we had 60s music which was a world away from WWII. And I don't recall many speaking of their experiences. Many because they weren't in the front line and those that were, weren't keen to do so eg a friend of mine's father was a fighter pilot and said very little. I did get stories of the blitz and evacuations as my father's side were bombed out in London.
Different experience for me, born in 1965. Everyone talked about what their grandparents did in the war. The war was everywhere in comics, films and TV. Many of those who lived through the war were still around and it was a big part of our national psyche even as a youngster. For me growing up in the 1970s it was still very much a defining point in British life. It certainly wasn't ancient history in any way.
That was very much my experience.
Was it different for fifties kids ? Less in the way of kids' popular culture (comics etc) perhaps ?
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Interesting. I was born in the early 60s, and it was everywhere.
I'll have to rethink that one. Any other 50s kids want to weigh in ?
Yes it is not as if I didn't know about it. We played in bomb sites, there were endless films, etc, but I didn't experience rationing (not in my memory anyway) and there was now a greater fear of the cold war and being wiped out by the bomb and we had 60s music which was a world away from WWII. And I don't recall many speaking of their experiences. Many because they weren't in the front line and those that were, weren't keen to do so eg a friend of mine's father was a fighter pilot and said very little. I did get stories of the blitz and evacuations as my father's side were bombed out in London.
My father, who fought in the war, voted remain. None of my family members who were on the front line wanted another war ever again. I suspect the leave supporting armchair generals either weren’t in the forces or were corporals in the Pay Corps.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Interesting. I was born in the early 60s, and it was everywhere.
I'll have to rethink that one. Any other 50s kids want to weigh in ?
I agree that war nostalgia was ubiquitous in the Sixties and Seventies in the cultural landscape. Commando comics, Dad's Army, It Ain't Half Hot Mum, The Battle of Britain film, Airfix models etc etc. My school was named for Montgomery, most of our older teachers were war veterans.
That past is gone now, and as far as war is marked now it is as a mawkish Poppymas each autumn seeing soldiers as victims not victors.
As might have been expected, the last card in the Conservative hand will be an economically irresponsible tax bribe/giveaway in the Autumn Statement of which Messrs Truss and Kwarteng would be proud.
Whether the markets get as spooked as they did last time remains to be seen but the notion of throwing money at the voters and leaving the mess for the next Government to sort out is all the Conservatives have left.
One is of course tempted to ask IF the Conservatives were to be re-elected, how long would it be before a new round of tax rises and spending cuts would be implemented - Budget 2025 perhaps?
What about defence spending - 2.5%, 3% or 1.5%? Never mind, we'll all have a nice tax cut so who cares?
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Interesting. I was born in the early 60s, and it was everywhere.
I'll have to rethink that one. Any other 50s kids want to weigh in ?
Yes it is not as if I didn't know about it. We played in bomb sites, there were endless films, etc, but I didn't experience rationing (not in my memory anyway) and there was now a greater fear of the cold war and being wiped out by the bomb and we had 60s music which was a world away from WWII. And I don't recall many speaking of their experiences. Many because they weren't in the front line and those that were, weren't keen to do so eg a friend of mine's father was a fighter pilot and said very little. I did get stories of the blitz and evacuations as my father's side were bombed out in London.
Different experience for me, born in 1965. Everyone talked about what their grandparents did in the war. The war was everywhere in comics, films and TV. Many of those who lived through the war were still around and it was a big part of our national psyche even as a youngster. For me growing up in the 1970s it was still very much a defining point in British life. It certainly wasn't ancient history in any way.
That's very much my experience too as a mid-Sixties kid. The backstory of every famous person, including our political leaders, featured what they did in the War very heavily.
I appalled myself recently when I realised that it is quite possible that the second best PM since Blair may well be Boris.
He did less damage (somehow) than Cameron*, and certainly was better (somehow) than Truss or Sunak. I’m just not sure where to rank him round May or Brown - difficult as I feel like the latter two are people I feel personally warmer to, whereas Spaffer revolts me.
*Cameron I see as the worst PM in my lifetime, just ahead of Thatcher and Liz ‘History’s Most Expensive Asterisk’ Truss.
I just don't see Johnson anywhere except at the bottom of the heap. I don't like Cameron, however like Blair he is characterised by starkly misjudged foreign policy, but beyond that there was competence and levity. Johnson was punctuated by such a series of egregious scandals, but more than that his time in office was all about being seen through smoke and mirrors, claiming world beating competence out of his incompetence; "I got all the big calls right" (did you, bollocks!).
However Johnson's malignancy is best borne out by the culture he brought with him and stamped on the Party and the Country. His legacy is a damaged party and "broken Britain".
David Cameron is the Conservative Prime Minister from central casting. Smooth, personable, even handsome in a certain light; Eton and Oxford; socially liberal. You could imagine him played by Hugh Grant in a hit romcom.
Leaving foreign policy to one side, Cameron's shadow cabinet spent five years preparing for government, yet gave us a health policy (Lansley's reforms) that was disowned and reversed by Cameron, a social policy, Universal Credit, whose introduction was a shambles, and which was undermined by the Chancellor, an economic policy that killed the recovery inherited from Labour and destroyed any prospect of growth, and that left debt at record levels. Local government was starved of funds. Traditional Tory values were thrown to the wolves as police and defence were cut.
Cameron was also bad at retail politics, at which he was supposed to shine. His relentlessly negative campaign style converted healthy leads over Labour into a hung parliament, almost lost Scotland and did lose Europe. (And before anyone points to 2015, that Conservative victory was due to the SNP driving Labour out of Scotland, not Cameron.)
Worst of all is Cameron's gerrymandering, tampering with the electoral system for partisan advantage. Ironically, it would probably cause Brexit and the end of Cameron's ministry.
David Cameron was our worst prime minister since Lord North.
All valid points, but when one looks at the gravitas of Cameron on the World stage today compared to the bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson and the barely sane nincompoop that is Truss, he ascends the list.
"... bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson"
When it comes to world events, Johnson did excellently on Ukraine. Incidentally, so did May, over Salisbury.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
My view, and it is my own cynical opinion piece, is Johnson got Ukraine right because it was the last chance saloon for saving his skin. I suppose whatever the justification, the call was correct. Nonetheless now the party is over his visits to Kyiv are less frequent, and what was he doing meeting Madura last month?
The appeal of Ukraine to Johnson and other tories was the chance to bask in the reflected glow of a war without any politically inconvenient British Gruz 200s landing back at Brize. All it cost Johson was other people's money which, as we all know, is his preferred type of money.
For a bit there, when the Russians discovered they couldn't do US-style high mobility, combined arms offensives, it was all very exciting for the tories. Now that the Ukrainians have also discovered that they can't do US-style high mobility, combined arms offensives, it's all gone a bit boring and the UK government is losing interest.
That seems to be the military lesson of the war. Offensive combined operations require a level of training, equipment supply and airpower not sustainable for anyone other than the US military. That said the Russians were successful initially, albeit followed by massive retreats and defeats too. The battle experience of their troops in warfare recognisable to my Grandfather on the Somme may be of little use in other wars.
Both sides are trying to wear each other out in the hope the other gives up. Neither has any intention of giving up. In that respect the situation is like WW1.
The choice for the West at this time, I think, is to do nothing and allow the Russians slowly to grind its way to Kyiv destroying everything in its path or to support Ukraine at scale to keep Russia at bay. I know which option I would choose.
In any case Germany was ultimately defeated in 1918, as it needed to be.
A very different version of WWI.
Ukraine's Sergyi Flesh: "Mark my words - in six months to a year, both sides will begin to produce enough FPVs to target every single soldier - all will be detected and destroyed day and night in a zone of up to 5-8 km. All infantry will retreat underground, and all surface activity will belong to ground robots." https://twitter.com/sambendett/status/1768732323367821657
Many more FPV drones are already used to target soldiers than vehicles.
Hamas have demonstrated tremendous tenacity in their 7 month fight against a vastly larger and better equipped army by digging underground. Helped of course by their complete contempt for their own people and the rules of war. This isn't entirely new as similar to the tunnel war in Vietnam or City fights like Stalingrad in 1942.
Attrition warfare is not over, no matter how much our own nations shrink from it.
We were told that Israel would lose huge numbers of soldiers trying to clear those tunnels.
Instead they seem to be using robots.
Being underground with the killer robots coming for you must be an experience similar to being a rabbit with the ferret coming down the warren runs.
After the thrills of Cheltenham, I struggle to get excited about today's racing which has more than a touch of after the Lord Mayor's Show about it.
Cheltenham highlighted and brought in to sharp focus some serious issues in British jumps racing but that's for other forums and other days.
I was crunching some numbers around what may happen in the May local elections.
In 2021, the Conservatives got a notional 36% of the vote with Labour on 29% and the Liberal Democrats on 17%. That was pretty good for the Conservatives and they were leading in the GE polls by around 8-10 points at the time so the local elections (which were of course two years in one with the 2020 and 2021 seats contested) weren't far off the national polling (you can often add 10 points to the LD number between national and local elections).
Now, we have Labour leads of let's say 20 points and a crude 45-25-10 split betwen the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats. A 8-10 point lead has become a 20 point deficit so the swing is around 14%.
If we assume both Conservative and Labour will underperform their Westminster numbers locally, we're probably looking at notional figures of Labour 42%, Conservatives 22% and Liberal Democrats 20%. In 1995 when the Conservatives lost 2000 councillors in a single night, the notional numbers were Lab 47%, Con 25%, LD 23%. - the shortfall is more Independents who are polling stronger on a "plague on all your houses" platform.
There are over 5,000 seats being contested this time. There are no elections in Scotland apart from local by-elections and only the PCC contests in Wales so it's all about England which is, after all, where the GE is going to be decided.
Eight Conservative controlled Districts have all their councillors up for elections - Basildon, Epping Forest, Fareham, Gloucester, Harlow, Havant, Nuneaton & Bedworth and Redditch. I think if you are looking at a barometer for Labour performance vs the Conservatives that would be the place to start.
For the LDs the obvious target looks to be Dorset.
Lewis Baston has suggested the Conservatives could lose half the seats they are defending - in 2023, they only lost 31% so it would be a further step down to lose half and no one seems clear how many each party is defending.
A dog that isn't barking is the Police and Crime Commissioner elections. The latest Labour leaflet in Didcot&Wantage (Thames Valley) has a piece on it, but that's virtually the only reference I've seen to them. It's odd because if parties think they're not important, why are they bothering to even stand?
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Interesting. I was born in the early 60s, and it was everywhere.
I'll have to rethink that one. Any other 50s kids want to weigh in ?
Yes it is not as if I didn't know about it. We played in bomb sites, there were endless films, etc, but I didn't experience rationing (not in my memory anyway) and there was now a greater fear of the cold war and being wiped out by the bomb and we had 60s music which was a world away from WWII. And I don't recall many speaking of their experiences. Many because they weren't in the front line and those that were, weren't keen to do so eg a friend of mine's father was a fighter pilot and said very little. I did get stories of the blitz and evacuations as my father's side were bombed out in London.
Different experience for me, born in 1965. Everyone talked about what their grandparents did in the war. The war was everywhere in comics, films and TV. Many of those who lived through the war were still around and it was a big part of our national psyche even as a youngster. For me growing up in the 1970s it was still very much a defining point in British life. It certainly wasn't ancient history in any way.
That was very much my experience.
Was it different for fifties kids ? Less in the way of kids' popular culture (comics etc) perhaps ?
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Some real bollocks talked on here about boomers , if only today's cosseted lazy I want everything handed to me on a plate , whinge , whine barstewards had half the gumption , work ethics and principles of the boomers.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Interesting. I was born in the early 60s, and it was everywhere.
I'll have to rethink that one. Any other 50s kids want to weigh in ?
Yes it is not as if I didn't know about it. We played in bomb sites, there were endless films, etc, but I didn't experience rationing (not in my memory anyway) and there was now a greater fear of the cold war and being wiped out by the bomb and we had 60s music which was a world away from WWII. And I don't recall many speaking of their experiences. Many because they weren't in the front line and those that were, weren't keen to do so eg a friend of mine's father was a fighter pilot and said very little. I did get stories of the blitz and evacuations as my father's side were bombed out in London.
My father, who fought in the war, voted remain. None of my family members who were on the front line wanted another war ever again. I suspect the leave supporting armchair generals either weren’t in the forces or were corporals in the Pay Corps.
That does seem to have been a massive driving force behind the British politicians of the 60s and 70s who favoured EEC membership. I think it was a false solution to a real problem but one cannot criticise people in positions of power from thinking it was something that needed to be tried.
There was also the rather unsavoury idea post war that (as a result of a century of militarism) German people were inherently warlike and had to be controlled. I really don't think that post war Germany was either practically or psychologically any sort of war risk at all and it is rather insulting to make that claim the basis for a political idea.
What they missed of course was that what had kept peace in Europe for so many decades was the Cold War. Once that went away things degenerated very quickly.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Some real bollocks talked on here about boomers , if only today's cosseted lazy I want everything handed to me on a plate , whinge , whine barstewards had half the gumption , work ethics and principles of the boomers.
Thank you for the heading @Topping. It's an interesting viewpoint and one which I hadn't considered.
Having now considered it, I think the idea that 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control' is too nuanced.
Whenever I hear immigration come up in day-to-day conversation (not that often tbf) it's along the lines of 'there are too many', 'the country's full up', 'we can't take any more', alongside genuinely held concerns about the dilution of our culture and way of life.
So no, I don't think the nation believes 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control'.
One other point: 'In short, when it comes to the huge numbers of people coming to this country, it has been situation: no change.' No, it is not situation no change; the numbers have more than doubled and the nature of that immigration has changed dramatically, fuelling the 'cultural dilution' concern.
Sorry sorry to disagree - still a very thought-provoking thread header though. Thanks!
V much appreciate your comments.
Do you really have conversations where people bemoan high immigration. That is surprising because if nothing else you have to be pretty sure of your company before you start banging on about all the foreigners over here.
And when I say we are evidently fine with high levels of immigration it is because we are an independent, democratic, sovereign nation. If we didn't like it we'd put a stop to it.
And as for "cultural dilution" I'm not sure what that means.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Interesting. I was born in the early 60s, and it was everywhere.
I'll have to rethink that one. Any other 50s kids want to weigh in ?
Yes it is not as if I didn't know about it. We played in bomb sites, there were endless films, etc, but I didn't experience rationing (not in my memory anyway) and there was now a greater fear of the cold war and being wiped out by the bomb and we had 60s music which was a world away from WWII. And I don't recall many speaking of their experiences. Many because they weren't in the front line and those that were, weren't keen to do so eg a friend of mine's father was a fighter pilot and said very little. I did get stories of the blitz and evacuations as my father's side were bombed out in London.
Different experience for me, born in 1965. Everyone talked about what their grandparents did in the war. The war was everywhere in comics, films and TV. Many of those who lived through the war were still around and it was a big part of our national psyche even as a youngster. For me growing up in the 1970s it was still very much a defining point in British life. It certainly wasn't ancient history in any way.
My Dad never talked about it , when I asked him as a youngster he said he used a pea shooter instead of a rifle.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Some real bollocks talked on here about boomers , if only today's cosseted lazy I want everything handed to me on a plate , whinge , whine barstewards had half the gumption , work ethics and principles of the boomers.
Now those are the words of all old man. Problem is it was the boomers driving the 3 day week and winter of discontent. They didnt seem very keen on work then.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Some real bollocks talked on here about boomers , if only today's cosseted lazy I want everything handed to me on a plate , whinge , whine barstewards had half the gumption , work ethics and principles of the boomers.
It's just that you're a shining exception, malc.
Lessons could be learned Nigel, I would knock them into shape one way or the other.
As might have been expected, the last card in the Conservative hand will be an economically irresponsible tax bribe/giveaway in the Autumn Statement of which Messrs Truss and Kwarteng would be proud.
Whether the markets get as spooked as they did last time remains to be seen but the notion of throwing money at the voters and leaving the mess for the next Government to sort out is all the Conservatives have left.
One is of course tempted to ask IF the Conservatives were to be re-elected, how long would it be before a new round of tax rises and spending cuts would be implemented - Budget 2025 perhaps?
What about defence spending - 2.5%, 3% or 1.5%? Never mind, we'll all have a nice tax cut so who cares?
The irony is that most of the Truss/Kwarteng money was to be on energy subsidies which turned out not to be needed with energy costs being much lower than predicted at that time.
Thank you for the heading @Topping. It's an interesting viewpoint and one which I hadn't considered.
Having now considered it, I think the idea that 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control' is too nuanced.
Whenever I hear immigration come up in day-to-day conversation (not that often tbf) it's along the lines of 'there are too many', 'the country's full up', 'we can't take any more', alongside genuinely held concerns about the dilution of our culture and way of life.
So no, I don't think the nation believes 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control'.
One other point: 'In short, when it comes to the huge numbers of people coming to this country, it has been situation: no change.' No, it is not situation no change; the numbers have more than doubled and the nature of that immigration has changed dramatically, fuelling the 'cultural dilution' concern.
Sorry sorry to disagree - still a very thought-provoking thread header though. Thanks!
V much appreciate your comments.
Do you really have conversations where people bemoan high immigration. That is surprising because if nothing else you have to be pretty sure of your company before you start banging on about all the foreigners over here.
And when I say we are evidently fine with high levels of immigration it is because we are an independent, democratic, sovereign nation. If we didn't like it we'd put a stop to it.
And as for "cultural dilution" I'm not sure what that means.
It also depends on social class. In elite circles that you move in Topping high immigration is good as you get cheaper nannies and plumbers. For ordinary people not so much.
When I was soldiering there were around a dozen Old Contemptibles living. I always wanted the Regiment to invite them for lunch but we never got round to it.
Thank you for the heading @Topping. It's an interesting viewpoint and one which I hadn't considered.
Having now considered it, I think the idea that 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control' is too nuanced.
Whenever I hear immigration come up in day-to-day conversation (not that often tbf) it's along the lines of 'there are too many', 'the country's full up', 'we can't take any more', alongside genuinely held concerns about the dilution of our culture and way of life.
So no, I don't think the nation believes 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control'.
One other point: 'In short, when it comes to the huge numbers of people coming to this country, it has been situation: no change.' No, it is not situation no change; the numbers have more than doubled and the nature of that immigration has changed dramatically, fuelling the 'cultural dilution' concern.
Sorry sorry to disagree - still a very thought-provoking thread header though. Thanks!
V much appreciate your comments.
Do you really have conversations where people bemoan high immigration. That is surprising because if nothing else you have to be pretty sure of your company before you start banging on about all the foreigners over here.
And when I say we are evidently fine with high levels of immigration it is because we are an independent, democratic, sovereign nation. If we didn't like it we'd put a stop to it.
And as for "cultural dilution" I'm not sure what that means.
It also depends on social class. In elite circles that you move in Topping high immigration is good as you get cheaper nannies and plumbers. For ordinary people not so much.
Don't working class people also benefit from better access to affordable tradesmen and childcare?
The Tories are all about divide and rule - it's howa corrupt oligarchy that has nothing in common with most of the population and is actively undermining their interests sustains itself in office. Hating on foreigners is a core plank of that strategy, Stop the Boats the latest iteration.
I think that’s true. The people who bankroll the Tory Party don’t really care about immigration, they just knew it was a useful lever to pull to get us out of the EU. They created the hysteria with their newspapers and fed it and nurtured it in order to ultimately remove us from a supranational organisation that wasn’t afraid to curtail their power.
I was in a McDonalds yesterday and the number of Asian males shuttling in and out, picking up orders for delivery, was striking. Here in Yvette Cooper’s constituency, where we’ve a lot of warehouses and logistics and stuff cos we’re where the A1 and M62 cross, the rise since Brexit of non-white faces in the streets and supermarkets is extremely noticeable. Whereas before immigrants were generally white Europeans. Poles, etc.
I welcome it, it’s about time we caught up with the diversity of Leeds, for example. But it isn’t what most Brexit voters round here anticipated as a result of their Leave vote.
Indeed. Though as I have pointed out endlessly the people who wanted the foreign to go home didn’t actually want to do the jobs the foreigners were doing. That’s why we need migration.
Our society has decided that we all need the ability to click on our phone and have anything we like delivered quickly. That means we need an army of workers doing shitty jobs. So we want people delivering McDonalds but “I’m not getting a job delivering McDonalds”. So we have migrants but “how do we stop all these foreigners coming here and delivering my McDonalds”
We can’t blame Covid for making people stupid. Many people pre-date Covid in that regard
This isn't something unique to Britain.
Britain is fairly average now for percentage of immigrants in the developed world, with about 14% of us born abroad. Canada, Australia, Switzerland are notably higher, as are Saudi and the UAE. We see this politically too, with migration being the hot topic in nearly all our countries. The exceptions are places like South Korea and Japan where the population pyramid is dangerously upside down.
In a globalised world people want to move around, seeking out economic and social opportunity. There are many on here who have benefited from living abroad including posters who still do, and many more have friends or family from abroad. My own ancestors migrated to Australia in the 19th Century and back to England in the 1930's for example.
Why should we deny such opportunity to others?
The failure of migration policy is not so much the numbers but rather the failure to plan for such arrivals, and not just the PB obsession with housing, but also with programmes of integration and cultural assimilation.
Canada and Australia have far more room for more migrants than we do and both have amongst the lowest population density in the world. Doesn't stop Australians voting for rightwing leaders like Abbott from time to time to 'stop the boats' too though
This misunderstanding of population density drives me nuts. It's not as simple as population/area.
For example, Scotland has an intensely urban population, with a large majority of us living in a small area between Edinburgh and Glasgow.
The same goes for Canada and Australia. Absolutely massive amounts of space, but almost everyone lives in a handful of giant conurbations. Like Scotland, large chunks of these countries are either uninhabitable or have limited transport accessibility.
The underlying issue with housing is that economic demand is so intensely concentrated in Melbourne, London, Edinburgh, Auckland, Vancouver... Housing outside these areas is relatively cheap, there is space aplenty for more, but there is no demand for it.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Some real bollocks talked on here about boomers , if only today's cosseted lazy I want everything handed to me on a plate , whinge , whine barstewards had half the gumption , work ethics and principles of the boomers.
Now those are the words of all old man. Problem is it was the boomers driving the 3 day week and winter of discontent. They didnt seem very keen on work then.
Those days were great , I was young , got a pay rise every month, beer was cheap, worked hard then and loved life, good old 70's. You could buy a decent car for under £100 and have a great night out on a pound or two. I am still young at heart for sure, and never whinged about hard work then or now, or someone else getting more than me , etc in my life. Even through hard times my glass was always more than half full.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Some real bollocks talked on here about boomers , if only today's cosseted lazy I want everything handed to me on a plate , whinge , whine barstewards had half the gumption , work ethics and principles of the boomers.
Now those are the words of all old man. Problem is it was the boomers driving the 3 day week and winter of discontent. They didnt seem very keen on work then.
Those days were great , I was young , got a pay rise every month, beer was cheap, worked hard then and loved life, good old 70's. You could buy a decent car for under £100 and have a great night out on a pound or two. I am still young at heart for sure, and never whinged about hard work then or now, or someone else getting more than me , etc in my life. Even through hard times my glass was always more than half full.
Thank you for the heading @Topping. It's an interesting viewpoint and one which I hadn't considered.
Having now considered it, I think the idea that 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control' is too nuanced.
Whenever I hear immigration come up in day-to-day conversation (not that often tbf) it's along the lines of 'there are too many', 'the country's full up', 'we can't take any more', alongside genuinely held concerns about the dilution of our culture and way of life.
So no, I don't think the nation believes 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control'.
One other point: 'In short, when it comes to the huge numbers of people coming to this country, it has been situation: no change.' No, it is not situation no change; the numbers have more than doubled and the nature of that immigration has changed dramatically, fuelling the 'cultural dilution' concern.
Sorry sorry to disagree - still a very thought-provoking thread header though. Thanks!
V much appreciate your comments.
Do you really have conversations where people bemoan high immigration. That is surprising because if nothing else you have to be pretty sure of your company before you start banging on about all the foreigners over here.
And when I say we are evidently fine with high levels of immigration it is because we are an independent, democratic, sovereign nation. If we didn't like it we'd put a stop to it.
And as for "cultural dilution" I'm not sure what that means.
It also depends on social class. In elite circles that you move in Topping high immigration is good as you get cheaper nannies and plumbers. For ordinary people not so much.
Don't working class people also benefit from better access to affordable tradesmen and childcare?
They're more likely to be tradesmen and child carers.
Lowering the cost of labour isn't good if its your income which is being lowered.
Thank you for the heading @Topping. It's an interesting viewpoint and one which I hadn't considered.
Having now considered it, I think the idea that 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control' is too nuanced.
Whenever I hear immigration come up in day-to-day conversation (not that often tbf) it's along the lines of 'there are too many', 'the country's full up', 'we can't take any more', alongside genuinely held concerns about the dilution of our culture and way of life.
So no, I don't think the nation believes 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control'.
One other point: 'In short, when it comes to the huge numbers of people coming to this country, it has been situation: no change.' No, it is not situation no change; the numbers have more than doubled and the nature of that immigration has changed dramatically, fuelling the 'cultural dilution' concern.
Sorry sorry to disagree - still a very thought-provoking thread header though. Thanks!
V much appreciate your comments.
Do you really have conversations where people bemoan high immigration. That is surprising because if nothing else you have to be pretty sure of your company before you start banging on about all the foreigners over here.
And when I say we are evidently fine with high levels of immigration it is because we are an independent, democratic, sovereign nation. If we didn't like it we'd put a stop to it.
And as for "cultural dilution" I'm not sure what that means.
It also depends on social class. In elite circles that you move in Topping high immigration is good as you get cheaper nannies and plumbers. For ordinary people not so much.
Don't working class people also benefit from better access to affordable tradesmen and childcare?
They also have to put up with their communities being transformed and massive extra pressure on local dentists and nhs. However as a doctor foxy you are in a position to spout luxury beliefs.
Thank you for the heading @Topping. It's an interesting viewpoint and one which I hadn't considered.
Having now considered it, I think the idea that 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control' is too nuanced.
Whenever I hear immigration come up in day-to-day conversation (not that often tbf) it's along the lines of 'there are too many', 'the country's full up', 'we can't take any more', alongside genuinely held concerns about the dilution of our culture and way of life.
So no, I don't think the nation believes 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control'.
One other point: 'In short, when it comes to the huge numbers of people coming to this country, it has been situation: no change.' No, it is not situation no change; the numbers have more than doubled and the nature of that immigration has changed dramatically, fuelling the 'cultural dilution' concern.
Sorry sorry to disagree - still a very thought-provoking thread header though. Thanks!
V much appreciate your comments.
Do you really have conversations where people bemoan high immigration. That is surprising because if nothing else you have to be pretty sure of your company before you start banging on about all the foreigners over here.
And when I say we are evidently fine with high levels of immigration it is because we are an independent, democratic, sovereign nation. If we didn't like it we'd put a stop to it.
And as for "cultural dilution" I'm not sure what that means.
It also depends on social class. In elite circles that you move in Topping high immigration is good as you get cheaper nannies and plumbers. For ordinary people not so much.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Some real bollocks talked on here about boomers , if only today's cosseted lazy I want everything handed to me on a plate , whinge , whine barstewards had half the gumption , work ethics and principles of the boomers.
Now those are the words of all old man. Problem is it was the boomers driving the 3 day week and winter of discontent. They didnt seem very keen on work then.
Those days were great , I was young , got a pay rise every month, beer was cheap, worked hard then and loved life, good old 70's. You could buy a decent car for under £100 and have a great night out on a pound or two. I am still young at heart for sure, and never whinged about hard work then or now, or someone else getting more than me , etc in my life. Even through hard times my glass was always more than half full.
The average house price was 5x average salaries, compared with 9x now.
A lot of recent British Prime Ministers seem to share one common and surprising failing. Which is a failure to realise that if you want people to follow you, they have to be persuaded to do so. It's kinda baffling that politicians would make this mistake - what with being reliant on voters voting for them at election - but it seems to be the case.
Sunak's Premiership has been a constant hunt for the gimmick that will overturn the political situation. This hunt has meant that he's failed to articulate, even to his own MPs, what a Conservative government is for, and why his MPs should support him in fighting to preserve it.
Truss failed to realise that the chief role of the OBR was to persuade the financial markets that the British government could be trusted with their money.
Boris Johnson stands out as realising that people have to be persuaded - though his approach to persuasion has a limited shelf-life because of its disregard for reality.
Theresa May provided definitive proof of her inability to persuade not once (GE 2017) but twice (Brexit deal). One of the overlooked mysteries of recent British politics is how someone so incapable of persuasion made it so far.
Cameron's end came in part because he rushed the job of persuading the British public to support his EU settlement, in the hope of getting it out of the way quickly and concentrating on other things. But he should have realised that persuasion is the job of politics.
Is it necessary to detail Brown's failures in the art of persuasion?
With Blair I think you can discern a difference between early-Blair, who put a lot of effort into persuasion, into making his case, and late-Blair, who seemed to disdain the necessity of doing so and was frustrated when people disagreed. Early Blair would seek to understand that disagreement and disarm it, but late Blair was simply exasperated.
Major's signature soap box was a powerful symbol of his recognition of the importance of persuading people.
As to Starmer? At the moment his strategy appears to be to do so little that he hopes persuasion becomes superfluous as a consequence. Will be reveal hitherto unseen powers of persuasion when they do become necessary? Only time will tell.
A very good post. Have you considered entering it as a Header, as there is much to discuss.
I agree that there is a failure to pursuade, and it isn't just a UK phenomenon. It is part of why Populism is a dead end. The end of ideological politics means that our politicians wind up with an incoherent ragbag of policies that contradict each other. Hence the Tories being pledged to cut taxes, and also to redistribute via "levelling up" and to keeping the Triple Lock forever. It just doesn't work.
Mrs T made no pretence of levelling up or making benefits more generous. She believed that allowing old industries and communities to die was part of a free enterprise, deregulated dynamic economy within a European Single Market. I would see it as harsh and setting up a lot of division but it did hang together as a political philosophy.
More than anything she recognised that in a globalised world the UK had no chance at all of competing with the low labour cost economies, mostly in Asia. Her transformation of the UK economy was timely and very necessary.
A transformation was certainly necessary. I'm not now convinced hers was a particularly good one overall.
But I agree with Foxy - this is probably the topic for its own weekend header.
My personal view is that what was bad was the underlying belief that globalisation was an unassailably good thing. Thatcher bought into this idea and I think that has proved very costly for people in the long run.
It's good in the sense that it makes things cheaper and is good economically. It's bad in the sense that it ignores the reason for the nation-state: to preserve and defend the interests of its people. When the people of a country are seen as inefficient or in some way less than optimum they can be cheerfully replaced and the state, instead of being the protector of its people, becomes its overseer. This is the reason why I deprecate the creation of a separate political caste and its consequent disconnect from the people. The Labour Party should be the strong right arm of the working class: is it still? The Conservative Party should represent the interests of the landowners and the military and monarchy: but if the landowners are foreign nationals then what is the point? I could go on but it gets a bit ranty.
Thank you for the heading @Topping. It's an interesting viewpoint and one which I hadn't considered.
Having now considered it, I think the idea that 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control' is too nuanced.
Whenever I hear immigration come up in day-to-day conversation (not that often tbf) it's along the lines of 'there are too many', 'the country's full up', 'we can't take any more', alongside genuinely held concerns about the dilution of our culture and way of life.
So no, I don't think the nation believes 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control'.
One other point: 'In short, when it comes to the huge numbers of people coming to this country, it has been situation: no change.' No, it is not situation no change; the numbers have more than doubled and the nature of that immigration has changed dramatically, fuelling the 'cultural dilution' concern.
Sorry sorry to disagree - still a very thought-provoking thread header though. Thanks!
V much appreciate your comments.
Do you really have conversations where people bemoan high immigration. That is surprising because if nothing else you have to be pretty sure of your company before you start banging on about all the foreigners over here.
And when I say we are evidently fine with high levels of immigration it is because we are an independent, democratic, sovereign nation. If we didn't like it we'd put a stop to it.
And as for "cultural dilution" I'm not sure what that means.
It also depends on social class. In elite circles that you move in Topping high immigration is good as you get cheaper nannies and plumbers. For ordinary people not so much.
Don't working class people also benefit from better access to affordable tradesmen and childcare?
They also have to put up with their communities being transformed and massive extra pressure on local dentists and nhs. However as a doctor foxy you are in a position to spout luxury beliefs.
The reported nationality of NHS staff varies substantially between staff groups. Overall, 18.7% of staff report a nationality other than British. For doctors this figure is 35.0%, and for nurses it is 27.2%.
Which suggests without any foreigners it would be a harder to see a doctor.
As might have been expected, the last card in the Conservative hand will be an economically irresponsible tax bribe/giveaway in the Autumn Statement of which Messrs Truss and Kwarteng would be proud.
Whether the markets get as spooked as they did last time remains to be seen but the notion of throwing money at the voters and leaving the mess for the next Government to sort out is all the Conservatives have left.
One is of course tempted to ask IF the Conservatives were to be re-elected, how long would it be before a new round of tax rises and spending cuts would be implemented - Budget 2025 perhaps?
What about defence spending - 2.5%, 3% or 1.5%? Never mind, we'll all have a nice tax cut so who cares?
The irony is that most of the Truss/Kwarteng money was to be on energy subsidies which turned out not to be needed with energy costs being much lower than predicted at that time.
Thank you for the heading @Topping. It's an interesting viewpoint and one which I hadn't considered.
Having now considered it, I think the idea that 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control' is too nuanced.
Whenever I hear immigration come up in day-to-day conversation (not that often tbf) it's along the lines of 'there are too many', 'the country's full up', 'we can't take any more', alongside genuinely held concerns about the dilution of our culture and way of life.
So no, I don't think the nation believes 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control'.
One other point: 'In short, when it comes to the huge numbers of people coming to this country, it has been situation: no change.' No, it is not situation no change; the numbers have more than doubled and the nature of that immigration has changed dramatically, fuelling the 'cultural dilution' concern.
Sorry sorry to disagree - still a very thought-provoking thread header though. Thanks!
V much appreciate your comments.
Do you really have conversations where people bemoan high immigration. That is surprising because if nothing else you have to be pretty sure of your company before you start banging on about all the foreigners over here.
And when I say we are evidently fine with high levels of immigration it is because we are an independent, democratic, sovereign nation. If we didn't like it we'd put a stop to it.
And as for "cultural dilution" I'm not sure what that means.
It also depends on social class. In elite circles that you move in Topping high immigration is good as you get cheaper nannies and plumbers. For ordinary people not so much.
Don't working class people also benefit from better access to affordable tradesmen and childcare?
They also have to put up with their communities being transformed and massive extra pressure on local dentists and nhs. However as a doctor foxy you are in a position to spout luxury beliefs.
Yet immigration has gone up since Brexit, so are those poor put upon folks better off?
Demand for my services since it was harder for foreign doctors and dentists to move here has increased substantially, yet when my colleagues ask where their pay rise is, they get told to piss off.
It's almost as if the government wasn't sincere in helping the sturdy British yeomanry like myself.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
I don’t think the ages line up for this explanation. I thought the oldest voters, those who remembered WW2, were strongly Remain. Leave voters were baby boomers.
Boomers do though have second hand memories of WWII. It was a huge part of the culture growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Normally agree with you on most things @Nigelb but I was born in 1954 and WWII to us at school growing up was ancient history. Weird of course because it was much closer in time then than the 80s and 90s are to me now, but they seem much more recent. I guess because I lived them, but didn't live WWII.
Interesting. I was born in the early 60s, and it was everywhere.
I'll have to rethink that one. Any other 50s kids want to weigh in ?
I was born in 1950. My father (ex-Military Intelligence) was only mildly chatty about the war, still somewhat constrained by the Official Secrets Act in describing his own experiences, but it was a huge thing for my mother, who worked for UNRRA and knew all about the horrors of the concentration camps, plus was Russian-born and loathed the Nazis (and their Ukrainian and Baltic State collaborators - she'd have been 100% pro-Putin) for their extermination tactics. I don't remember much about the 50s but in 1958 we moved to Vienna, where the bomb damage was still widespread and the added factor of ex-resistance and ex-collaborators was still casting a shadow - "what did you do in the war?" was still something you only asked Austrians if you knew them really well. It was much less of a thing in Denmark, where we moved in 1962 - the Danes surrendered quickly and were allowed a local regime: they had only modest resistance, but smuggled out nearly all the Jews to Sweden when the Germans wanted to take them, so on the whole felt OK about their past. But Britain was still literally loved as the liberators - we encountered taxi-drivers and cafe owners who refused to let us pay, and the building porter had a collection of Churchill's speeches and thought Britain was the most wonderful country in the world.
I stand by my theorem, we may be seeing some Chinese sabotage added to Boeing’s real long-seated problems. The sabotage might be as basic as manipulating social media to worsen Boeing’s plight - so easy to do. Or there is some genuine physical/software sabotage
Remember that this is happening exactly at the moment China is trying to break into the Airbus/Boeing duopoly
Medvedev calling for the Latvian president to be hanged.
I await the tankies' response. "Latvia should be part of Russia!" "Latvia should give in to Russia for peace!", etc, etc....
I was thinking about Medvedev, as compared to Trump.
One is a psychotic bully who randomly incites vengeance against his political enemies, threatens to invade any country he doesn't like, makes huge amounts of money through theft and fraud, was only elevated to power as a shady play by the FSB/Putin, hates Ukrainians more than is healthy and is rather urgently wanted for many crimes which he avoids by playing procedural games with the courts.
The other is the former President of... the USA.
Be honest, that wasn't the punchline you expected, was it?
The Lib Dems are in York today and tomorrow for their Spring conference. What are the odds on any mention in the media?
Are there any surprises being revealed in policy terms? (genuine question) I do think they need some distinctive policies to avoid being squeezed too hard by centrist Starmer. I know lots of people who see no difference bewtween LibDems and Labour whatsoever except for liking PR (and I don't think that similarity is a good thing for either party).
Thank you for the heading @Topping. It's an interesting viewpoint and one which I hadn't considered.
Having now considered it, I think the idea that 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control' is too nuanced.
Whenever I hear immigration come up in day-to-day conversation (not that often tbf) it's along the lines of 'there are too many', 'the country's full up', 'we can't take any more', alongside genuinely held concerns about the dilution of our culture and way of life.
So no, I don't think the nation believes 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control'.
One other point: 'In short, when it comes to the huge numbers of people coming to this country, it has been situation: no change.' No, it is not situation no change; the numbers have more than doubled and the nature of that immigration has changed dramatically, fuelling the 'cultural dilution' concern.
Sorry sorry to disagree - still a very thought-provoking thread header though. Thanks!
V much appreciate your comments.
Do you really have conversations where people bemoan high immigration. That is surprising because if nothing else you have to be pretty sure of your company before you start banging on about all the foreigners over here.
And when I say we are evidently fine with high levels of immigration it is because we are an independent, democratic, sovereign nation. If we didn't like it we'd put a stop to it.
And as for "cultural dilution" I'm not sure what that means.
It also depends on social class. In elite circles that you move in Topping high immigration is good as you get cheaper nannies and plumbers. For ordinary people not so much.
Don't working class people also benefit from better access to affordable tradesmen and childcare?
They also have to put up with their communities being transformed and massive extra pressure on local dentists and nhs. However as a doctor foxy you are in a position to spout luxury beliefs.
Yet immigration has gone up since Brexit, so are those poor put upon folks better off?
Demand for my services since it was harder for foreign doctors and dentists to move here has increased substantially, yet when my colleagues ask where their pay rise is, they get told to piss off.
It's almost as if the government wasn't sincere in helping the sturdy British yeomanry like myself.
Lol you are in the top 5% mate. An average worker you are not.
A lot of recent British Prime Ministers seem to share one common and surprising failing. Which is a failure to realise that if you want people to follow you, they have to be persuaded to do so. It's kinda baffling that politicians would make this mistake - what with being reliant on voters voting for them at election - but it seems to be the case.
Sunak's Premiership has been a constant hunt for the gimmick that will overturn the political situation. This hunt has meant that he's failed to articulate, even to his own MPs, what a Conservative government is for, and why his MPs should support him in fighting to preserve it.
Truss failed to realise that the chief role of the OBR was to persuade the financial markets that the British government could be trusted with their money.
Boris Johnson stands out as realising that people have to be persuaded - though his approach to persuasion has a limited shelf-life because of its disregard for reality.
Theresa May provided definitive proof of her inability to persuade not once (GE 2017) but twice (Brexit deal). One of the overlooked mysteries of recent British politics is how someone so incapable of persuasion made it so far.
Cameron's end came in part because he rushed the job of persuading the British public to support his EU settlement, in the hope of getting it out of the way quickly and concentrating on other things. But he should have realised that persuasion is the job of politics.
Is it necessary to detail Brown's failures in the art of persuasion?
With Blair I think you can discern a difference between early-Blair, who put a lot of effort into persuasion, into making his case, and late-Blair, who seemed to disdain the necessity of doing so and was frustrated when people disagreed. Early Blair would seek to understand that disagreement and disarm it, but late Blair was simply exasperated.
Major's signature soap box was a powerful symbol of his recognition of the importance of persuading people.
As to Starmer? At the moment his strategy appears to be to do so little that he hopes persuasion becomes superfluous as a consequence. Will be reveal hitherto unseen powers of persuasion when they do become necessary? Only time will tell.
A very good post. Have you considered entering it as a Header, as there is much to discuss.
I agree that there is a failure to pursuade, and it isn't just a UK phenomenon. It is part of why Populism is a dead end. The end of ideological politics means that our politicians wind up with an incoherent ragbag of policies that contradict each other. Hence the Tories being pledged to cut taxes, and also to redistribute via "levelling up" and to keeping the Triple Lock forever. It just doesn't work.
Mrs T made no pretence of levelling up or making benefits more generous. She believed that allowing old industries and communities to die was part of a free enterprise, deregulated dynamic economy within a European Single Market. I would see it as harsh and setting up a lot of division but it did hang together as a political philosophy.
More than anything she recognised that in a globalised world the UK had no chance at all of competing with the low labour cost economies, mostly in Asia. Her transformation of the UK economy was timely and very necessary.
A transformation was certainly necessary. I'm not now convinced hers was a particularly good one overall.
But I agree with Foxy - this is probably the topic for its own weekend header.
My personal view is that what was bad was the underlying belief that globalisation was an unassailably good thing. Thatcher bought into this idea and I think that has proved very costly for people in the long run.
It's good in the sense that it makes things cheaper and is good economically. It's bad in the sense that it ignores the reason for the nation-state: to preserve and defend the interests of its people. When the people of a country are seen as inefficient or in some way less than optimum they can be cheerfully replaced and the state, instead of being the protector of its people, becomes its overseer. This is the reason why I deprecate the creation of a separate political caste and its consequent disconnect from the people. The Labour Party should be the strong right arm of the working class: is it still? The Conservative Party should represent the interests of the landowners and the military and monarchy: but if the landowners are foreign nationals then what is the point? I could go on but it gets a bit ranty.
Basically the uk is now an economic zone. Great for the super rich not so good for everyone else.
Thank you for the heading @Topping. It's an interesting viewpoint and one which I hadn't considered.
Having now considered it, I think the idea that 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control' is too nuanced.
Whenever I hear immigration come up in day-to-day conversation (not that often tbf) it's along the lines of 'there are too many', 'the country's full up', 'we can't take any more', alongside genuinely held concerns about the dilution of our culture and way of life.
So no, I don't think the nation believes 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control'.
One other point: 'In short, when it comes to the huge numbers of people coming to this country, it has been situation: no change.' No, it is not situation no change; the numbers have more than doubled and the nature of that immigration has changed dramatically, fuelling the 'cultural dilution' concern.
Sorry sorry to disagree - still a very thought-provoking thread header though. Thanks!
V much appreciate your comments.
Do you really have conversations where people bemoan high immigration. That is surprising because if nothing else you have to be pretty sure of your company before you start banging on about all the foreigners over here.
And when I say we are evidently fine with high levels of immigration it is because we are an independent, democratic, sovereign nation. If we didn't like it we'd put a stop to it.
And as for "cultural dilution" I'm not sure what that means.
It also depends on social class. In elite circles that you move in Topping high immigration is good as you get cheaper nannies and plumbers. For ordinary people not so much.
Don't working class people also benefit from better access to affordable tradesmen and childcare?
They also have to put up with their communities being transformed and massive extra pressure on local dentists and nhs. However as a doctor foxy you are in a position to spout luxury beliefs.
The reported nationality of NHS staff varies substantially between staff groups. Overall, 18.7% of staff report a nationality other than British. For doctors this figure is 35.0%, and for nurses it is 27.2%.
Which suggests without any foreigners it would be a harder to see a doctor.
Its odd as you would expect plenty of home grown people wanting to become doctors. I can only assume its due to the number of doctors working part time or retiring early.
Medvedev calling for the Latvian president to be hanged.
I await the tankies' response. "Latvia should be part of Russia!" "Latvia should give in to Russia for peace!", etc, etc....
I was thinking about Medvedev, as compared to Trump.
One is a psychotic bully who randomly incites vengeance against his political enemies, threatens to invade any country he doesn't like, makes huge amounts of money through theft and fraud, was only elevated to power as a shady play by the FSB/Putin, hates Ukrainians more than is healthy and is rather urgently wanted for many crimes which he avoids by playing procedural games with the courts.
The other is the former President of... the USA.
Be honest, that wasn't the punchline you expected, was it?
Medvedev does seem to have become a nutter. See for example this spew of sarcasm he came out with recently, rather as if he's not taking the war seriously. I can't imagine that plays well in the Russian population. He may not have long left on the Security Council.
Comments
Then Cameron.
Then Brown.
Then May.
Then a pile of poo.
Then Johnson.
Then every person alive.
Then Truss
Entirely rose tinted ones, of course.
Heroic myth V nasty reality.
- Iain dunked-on Smith?
- Voters clear out the deadwood?
- Couldn’t have happened to a nicer schapp?
Redwood felled.
IDS can just fade into obscurity.
I was born in the early 60s, and it was everywhere.
I'll have to rethink that one. Any other 50s kids want to weigh in ?
The choice for the West at this time, I think, is to do nothing and allow the Russians slowly to grind its way to Kyiv destroying everything in its path or to support Ukraine at scale to keep Russia at bay. I know which option I would choose.
In any case Germany was ultimately defeated in 1918, as it needed to be.
Britain carries them out at a far higher rate than any other country, including many at birth. Parliament has called for an apology... covering up until the mid-1970s.
https://committees.parliament.uk/work/1522/the-right-to-family-life-adoption-of-children-of-unmarried-women-19491976/
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt5803/jtselect/jtrights/1180/report.html
The following is a reconstruction of testimony given yesterday in a trial at the Old Bailey:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/constance-marten-mark-gordon-jesus-survived-in-a-barn/id1653090985?i=1000649354111
I agree that there is a failure to pursuade, and it isn't just a UK phenomenon. It is part of why Populism is a dead end. The end of ideological politics means that our politicians wind up with an incoherent ragbag of policies that contradict each other. Hence the Tories being pledged to cut taxes, and also to redistribute via "levelling up" and to keeping the Triple Lock forever. It just doesn't work.
Mrs T made no pretence of levelling up or making benefits more generous. She believed that allowing old industries and communities to die was part of a free enterprise, deregulated dynamic economy within a European Single Market. I would see it as harsh and setting up a lot of division but it did hang together as a political philosophy.
For the public, might be Hunt... whoever heard of a Chancellor losing his seat? But his new seat does look wobbly.
Be funny if it was Braverman. Electoral Calculus currently has Fareham and Waterlooville on a knife edge.
Suella Meets Her Waterloo(ville).
Ukraine's Sergyi Flesh: "Mark my words - in six months to a year, both sides will begin to produce enough FPVs to target every single soldier - all will be detected and destroyed day and night in a zone of up to 5-8 km. All infantry will retreat underground, and all surface activity will belong to ground robots."
https://twitter.com/sambendett/status/1768732323367821657
Many more FPV drones are already used to target soldiers than vehicles.
Where plucky little Britain told itself it had stood alone against the beastly Germans, conveniently forgetting we had an empire to exploit to keep us going.
Leave exploited that masochistic nostalgia of the morons who post stuff on Facebook like ‘Remember when WE were young and we had frost on the inside of the windows every morning, and my bother died of rickets and all we ate was boiled kidneys and we walked through 15 foot snowdrifts to get to schools that didn’t close, and it never did US any harm!’
More and more politicians are acting on the basis of “My policies are self evidently good and moral. There is literally no alternative. Opposition is evil.”
To the Head Count this comes across as “Shut up, scum”
This then creates the popularity of the Optimates in late stage Rome.
https://twitter.com/yarotrof/status/1768539842856575197?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
This is a circle that can't be squared. If Government can't or won't find the extra money then no amount of efficiency initiatives and wishful thinking (often one and the same thing) will prevent us from going further and further backwards, as we can see from the progressive disintegration of the entire public realm that is taking place in real time all around us.
After the thrills of Cheltenham, I struggle to get excited about today's racing which has more than a touch of after the Lord Mayor's Show about it.
Cheltenham highlighted and brought in to sharp focus some serious issues in British jumps racing but that's for other forums and other days.
I was crunching some numbers around what may happen in the May local elections.
In 2021, the Conservatives got a notional 36% of the vote with Labour on 29% and the Liberal Democrats on 17%. That was pretty good for the Conservatives and they were leading in the GE polls by around 8-10 points at the time so the local elections (which were of course two years in one with the 2020 and 2021 seats contested) weren't far off the national polling (you can often add 10 points to the LD number between national and local elections).
Now, we have Labour leads of let's say 20 points and a crude 45-25-10 split betwen the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats. A 8-10 point lead has become a 20 point deficit so the swing is around 14%.
If we assume both Conservative and Labour will underperform their Westminster numbers locally, we're probably looking at notional figures of Labour 42%, Conservatives 22% and Liberal Democrats 20%. In 1995 when the Conservatives lost 2000 councillors in a single night, the notional numbers were Lab 47%, Con 25%, LD 23%. - the shortfall is more Independents who are polling stronger on a "plague on all your houses" platform.
There are over 5,000 seats being contested this time. There are no elections in Scotland apart from local by-elections and only the PCC contests in Wales so it's all about England which is, after all, where the GE is going to be decided.
Eight Conservative controlled Districts have all their councillors up for elections - Basildon, Epping Forest, Fareham, Gloucester, Harlow, Havant, Nuneaton & Bedworth and Redditch. I think if you are looking at a barometer for Labour performance vs the Conservatives that would be the place to start.
For the LDs the obvious target looks to be Dorset.
Lewis Baston has suggested the Conservatives could lose half the seats they are defending - in 2023, they only lost 31% so it would be a further step down to lose half and no one seems clear how many each party is defending.
Attrition warfare is not over, no matter how much our own nations shrink from it.
I'm not now convinced hers was a particularly good one overall.
But I agree with Foxy - this is probably the topic for its own weekend header.
Still, at least it not as hostile as the daily blood curdling threats from Drunken Dimtri Medevedev.
Was it different for fifties kids ? Less in the way of kids' popular culture (comics etc) perhaps ?
That past is gone now, and as far as war is marked now it is as a mawkish Poppymas each autumn seeing soldiers as victims not victors.
Whether the markets get as spooked as they did last time remains to be seen but the notion of throwing money at the voters and leaving the mess for the next Government to sort out is all the Conservatives have left.
One is of course tempted to ask IF the Conservatives were to be re-elected, how long would it be before a new round of tax rises and spending cuts would be implemented - Budget 2025 perhaps?
What about defence spending - 2.5%, 3% or 1.5%? Never mind, we'll all have a nice tax cut so who cares?
The backstory of every famous person, including our political leaders, featured what they did in the War very heavily.
Instead they seem to be using robots.
Being underground with the killer robots coming for you must be an experience similar to being a rabbit with the ferret coming down the warren runs.
There was also the rather unsavoury idea post war that (as a result of a century of militarism) German people were inherently warlike and had to be controlled. I really don't think that post war Germany was either practically or psychologically any sort of war risk at all and it is rather insulting to make that claim the basis for a political idea.
What they missed of course was that what had kept peace in Europe for so many decades was the Cold War. Once that went away things degenerated very quickly.
Do you really have conversations where people bemoan high immigration. That is surprising because if nothing else you have to be pretty sure of your company before you start banging on about all the foreigners over here.
And when I say we are evidently fine with high levels of immigration it is because we are an independent, democratic, sovereign nation. If we didn't like it we'd put a stop to it.
And as for "cultural dilution" I'm not sure what that means.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/08/liz-truss-to-freeze-energy-bills-price-at-2500-a-year-funded-by-borrowing
https://www.electricityprices.org.uk/history-of-the-energy-price-cap/
https://twitter.com/itvnews/status/1768916316746920273?t=0DiJFchKQ91ocEufxhSRYg&s=19
For example, Scotland has an intensely urban population, with a large majority of us living in a small area between Edinburgh and Glasgow.
The same goes for Canada and Australia. Absolutely massive amounts of space, but almost everyone lives in a handful of giant conurbations. Like Scotland, large chunks of these countries are either uninhabitable or have limited transport accessibility.
The underlying issue with housing is that economic demand is so intensely concentrated in Melbourne, London, Edinburgh, Auckland, Vancouver... Housing outside these areas is relatively cheap, there is space aplenty for more, but there is no demand for it.
I am still young at heart for sure, and never whinged about hard work then or now, or someone else getting more than me , etc in my life. Even through hard times my glass was always more than half full.
Lowering the cost of labour isn't good if its your income which is being lowered.
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7783/CBP-7783.pdf
The reported nationality of NHS
staff varies substantially between
staff groups.
Overall, 18.7% of staff report a nationality
other than British. For doctors this figure is
35.0%, and for nurses it is 27.2%.
Which suggests without any foreigners it would be a harder to see a doctor.
2022q4 prediction £3,553
2022q4 actual £3,529 capped £2,500
2023q1 prediction £4,649
2023q1 actual £4,279 capped £2,500
2023q2 prediction £5,341
2023q2 actual £3,280 capped £2,500
2023q3 prediction £4,767
2023q3 actual £2,074
2023q4 prediction £4,807
2023q4 actual £1,834
On a related note I've heard a couple of anecdotes of people who have discovered that they've been heavily overcharged for energy for years.
They only discovered this with the publicity about energy prices and what the capped price should be.
Demand for my services since it was harder for foreign doctors and dentists to move here has increased substantially, yet when my colleagues ask where their pay rise is, they get told to piss off.
It's almost as if the government wasn't sincere in helping the sturdy British yeomanry like myself.
On a completely unrelated note, have you heard of narcissistic personality disorder?
A claim that Boeing are just unlucky. There aren’t any more incidents than normal - they’re simply getting more coverage
https://x.com/pitdesi/status/1768781038229377425?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
Others disagree. Slippery stats
I stand by my theorem, we may be seeing some Chinese sabotage added to Boeing’s real long-seated problems. The sabotage might be as basic as manipulating social media to worsen Boeing’s plight - so easy to do. Or there is some genuine physical/software sabotage
Remember that this is happening exactly at the moment China is trying to break into the Airbus/Boeing duopoly
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3249765/chinas-c919-maker-has-sky-high-ambitions-grab-piece-aviation-pie-boeing-airbus-domestic-demand-soars
And a month after US intel warned of Chinese sabotage of US planes, inter alia
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/08/chinese-hack-us-transportation-infrastructure
And Xi or Putin DEFFO offed that Boeing whistleblower
One is a psychotic bully who randomly incites vengeance against his political enemies, threatens to invade any country he doesn't like, makes huge amounts of money through theft and fraud, was only elevated to power as a shady play by the FSB/Putin, hates Ukrainians more than is healthy and is rather urgently wanted for many crimes which he avoids by playing procedural games with the courts.
The other is the former President of... the USA.
Be honest, that wasn't the punchline you expected, was it?
Edit - also, that doesn't seem to have been the case earlier. No card functions working in Cannock Sainsbury's.
First black leader of a European country/province, apparently.
First non-Welsh speaking FM.
I think Welsh Labour have made the, er, 'courageous' choice. He was the Humza Yousaf (as defined by Kate Forbes) of that contest.
18,000 Welsh Labour (including trade Union) members - turnout of about 57%. So around 10,000 people picked him.
Sunak under pressure to say how many times he has met Tory donor Frank Hester
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/16/sunak-under-pressure-to-say-how-many-times-he-has-met-tory-donor-frank-hester
Putin, though, remains popular.