... the Conservative offer of low taxes, low immigration, fiscal responsibility, stable government and strong defence..
Reproduced without comment for hopefully obvious reasons.
Some very good news today for the Tories. After last years much reduced boat crossings, The SKY News data and forensics team latest on stop the boats pledge, is lower now compared with last years totals.
If they are feeling pressure from Reform, this fact check on stopping boats IS excellent soundbite to keep using everywhere in April campaigning, leaflets, doorsteps, media ads, HoC, interviews.
I still think Rishi will call the general Election campaign for 2nd May, any day this week. Who’s 100% sure he won’t?
... the Conservative offer of low taxes, low immigration, fiscal responsibility, stable government and strong defence..
Reproduced without comment for hopefully obvious reasons.
Some very good news today for the Tories. After last years much reduced boat crossings, The SKY News data and forensics team latest on stop the boats pledge, is lower now compared with last years totals.
If they are feeling pressure from Reform, this fact check on stopping boats IS excellent soundbite to keep using everywhere in April campaigning, leaflets, doorsteps, media ads, HoC, interviews.
I still think Rishi will call the general Election campaign for 2nd May, any day this week. Who’s 100% sure he won’t?
Slightly lower than 2023, but still historically high, does not make for a good soundbite when you pledged to stop the boats.
Yes, my SiL sent this image from her Reykjavik Hotel last night.
And it'll be releasing more carbon the the UK population does in a year probably.
Probably best that we ameliorate carbon output in the areas we do have control over then.
Yes, let's delete the economy and give up the idea of a national defence so we can eliminate a really socking portion of the 1% of manmade global CO2 emissions that we're responsible for, as part of the 2% of total global CO2 emissions that mankind is responsible for. Great plan.
*And hope no more volcanoes go off.
Could I have a source for the 2% number please? Because most of the numbers I've seen have been in the 40-70% range.
... the Conservative offer of low taxes, low immigration, fiscal responsibility, stable government and strong defence..
Reproduced without comment for hopefully obvious reasons.
Some very good news today for the Tories. After last years much reduced boat crossings, The SKY News data and forensics team latest on stop the boats pledge, is lower now compared with last years totals.
If they are feeling pressure from Reform, this fact check on stopping boats IS excellent soundbite to keep using everywhere in April campaigning, leaflets, doorsteps, media ads, HoC, interviews.
I still think Rishi will call the general Election campaign for 2nd May, any day this week. Who’s 100% sure he won’t?
Slightly lower than 2023, but still historically high, does not make for a good soundbite when you pledged to stop the boats.
Also I believe the weather has been less favourable than last year so as a statistic it's probably utterly meaningless..
Edit to add - and if you look at the chart you will see the peak time for crossings is from June onwards so while it's not much of a story now - it's got the potential for Farage to take a camera crew around the south east coast and make it a big story again anytime from early May onwards...
I'm actually currently involved in trying to import stock from the UK to Australia for a small business.I have no useful insights other than the Houthis are a pain in the arse. Our stuff is floating about in the Med.
Generally, it does seem a bit mad to import beef (bad for emissions) around the world (bad for emissions) from Australia (very bad for emissions). From a UK perspective, cattle can be quite good for the local environment, chewing up the ground, eating a variety of veg, better than sheep for wetland development. The RSPB use them on their reserves for this reason, IIRC.
It's not like the UK sustains itself on beef though, so there isn't much of a national security angle on this.
The cost, in terms of greenhouse gases, of shifting shit around the world is remarkably low, especially relative to all the other emissions that come from farming cattle. I would be staggered if Australian beef generated more than a couple of percent more than British ones. And, indeed, if they require less feed (because they can eat grass all year round), then they might generate less.
... the Conservative offer of low taxes, low immigration, fiscal responsibility, stable government and strong defence..
Reproduced without comment for hopefully obvious reasons.
Some very good news today for the Tories. After last years much reduced boat crossings, The SKY News data and forensics team latest on stop the boats pledge, is lower now compared with last years totals.
If they are feeling pressure from Reform, this fact check on stopping boats IS excellent soundbite to keep using everywhere in April campaigning, leaflets, doorsteps, media ads, HoC, interviews.
I still think Rishi will call the general Election campaign for 2nd May, any day this week. Who’s 100% sure he won’t?
Slightly lower than 2023, but still historically high, does not make for a good soundbite when you pledged to stop the boats.
Also I believe the weather has been less favourable than last year so as a statistic it's probably utterly meaningless..
Last year, various posters explained that all the fall in crossings was due to the weather.
Presumably the weather in the channel is getting worse every week.
I’ve been challenged to come up with a photo more striking than the volcano photo by @Foxy’s sister in law. I could just show you better volcano photos - right by the lava - that I took in Erta Ale, Ethiopia, but that’s too easy
So here’s a truly weird photo, enclosing a mystery I have never unravelled. Perhaps PB can
Picture it. A decade ago I find myself with some spare days during a stone toy research trip in the Atacama desert, Chile. So I decide to visit the deathliest place on earth: ie the place with the least life, even less than Greenland, or the Antarctic, or anywhere in the Sahara, Gobi, and so on.
The reason this place, Yungay, is so deathly – no microbial life, no tiny bugs, nothing - is that it sits in a ‘double rain shadow’– surrounded on all sides by mountains, so it has only rained a few times in the last 200,000 years.When I get there it turns out to be a predictably desolate patch of nothing with a long road running through, which sees one or two trucks a day. But there is one more thing: the relics of an old mine, which closed in the 1950s. Alongside the crumbling ruin of the mine is a cemetery for the miners, with names and sometimes photos. Preserved by the dry heat.
Some of the miners died terribly young. What I cannot explain are the additions since the 1950s. Alongside every grave, sometimes piled on top of them, there are plastic toys and trinkets, Chinese toy Ferraris, little water pistols, plastic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, foreign coins, miniature Thomas the Tank Engines, green plastic toy soldiers. Who has been coming here, for decades, to the deathliest place on earth, to leave a Snoopy?
Might be an idea to eat our own beef, and support British farming, rather than ship meat from the other side of the world.
Just an idea.
And, as a consumer, you absolutely have that choice. Buy British.
Unfortunately, meat-shaming is a massive thing in Met circles now. It's probably the thing, alongside "Diversity™", that comes up most often.
What a weird part of London I must live in where people talk about work, family, holidays, football, dating, hobbies rather than meat shaming and diversity. Fortunately we have people who don't live in cities to keep us up to date about how terrible our lives are, otherwise we might never have realised.
Mamchester City Council last year hung banners from its lampposts urging people to eat less meat. Seemed an odd use of public funds.
How disgusting.
Yet we see vegan food companies going bust, because few people want what they offer.
But, we also see such things endlessly promoted.
I am a member of a committee that goes on about vegetarian and vegan food for its catering at events every time we meet. I gently object but get a mixture of smiles and awkward moments back, and am then ignored.
You do have to cater for vegans (and by definition vegetarians) but if that's the only food there few people are going to rush to attend.
One problem with vegan food is that good vegan food isn't cheap
... the Conservative offer of low taxes, low immigration, fiscal responsibility, stable government and strong defence..
Reproduced without comment for hopefully obvious reasons.
Some very good news today for the Tories. After last years much reduced boat crossings, The SKY News data and forensics team latest on stop the boats pledge, is lower now compared with last years totals.
If they are feeling pressure from Reform, this fact check on stopping boats IS excellent soundbite to keep using everywhere in April campaigning, leaflets, doorsteps, media ads, HoC, interviews.
I still think Rishi will call the general Election campaign for 2nd May, any day this week. Who’s 100% sure he won’t?
Slightly lower than 2023, but still historically high, does not make for a good soundbite when you pledged to stop the boats.
“How weak flip flopper Starmer will be on those boat crossings! Will throw away all the progress we made, and Labour throwing away our nations deterrent, Rwanda the only policy to stop the boats that’s on the table. And not to forget why Stop The Boats is important, the country is full, one trillion pounds on public services and you can’t see a dentist, doctor, and the schools and hospitals literally falling down.”
... the Conservative offer of low taxes, low immigration, fiscal responsibility, stable government and strong defence..
Reproduced without comment for hopefully obvious reasons.
Some very good news today for the Tories. After last years much reduced boat crossings, The SKY News data and forensics team latest on stop the boats pledge, is lower now compared with last years totals.
If they are feeling pressure from Reform, this fact check on stopping boats IS excellent soundbite to keep using everywhere in April campaigning, leaflets, doorsteps, media ads, HoC, interviews.
I still think Rishi will call the general Election campaign for 2nd May, any day this week. Who’s 100% sure he won’t?
Slightly lower than 2023, but still historically high, does not make for a good soundbite when you pledged to stop the boats.
“How weak flip flopper Starmer will be on those boat crossings! Will throw away all the progress we made, and Labour throwing away our nations deterrent, Rwanda the only policy to stop the boats that’s on the table. And not to forget why Stop The Boats is important, the country is full, one trillion pounds on public services and you can’t see a dentist, doctor, and the schools and hospitals literally falling down.”
Starmer is going to be weak on immigration in a lot of places:
- Weak on the boats - Weak on student dependents - Weak on family income threshold
I’ve been challenged to come up with a photo more striking than the volcano photo by @Foxy’s sister in law. I could just show you better volcano photos - right by the lava - that I took in Erta Ale, Ethiopia, but that’s too easy
So here’s a truly weird photo, enclosing a mystery I have never unravelled. Perhaps PB can
Picture it. A decade ago I find myself with some spare days during a stone toy research trip in the Atacama desert, Chile. So I decide to visit the deathliest place on earth: ie the place with the least life, even less than Greenland, or the Antarctic, or anywhere in the Sahara, Gobi, and so on.
The reason this place, Yungay, is so deathly – no microbial life, no tiny bugs, nothing - is that it sits in a ‘double rain shadow’– surrounded on all sides by mountains, so it has only rained a few times in the last 200,000 years.When I get there it turns out to be a predictably desolate patch of nothing with a long road running through, which sees one or two trucks a day. But there is one more thing: the relics of an old mine, which closed in the 1950s. Alongside the crumbling ruin of the mine is a cemetery for the miners, with names and sometimes photos. Preserved by the dry heat.
Some of the miners died terribly young. What I cannot explain are the additions since the 1950s. Alongside every grave, sometimes piled on top of them, there are plastic toys and trinkets, Chinese toy Ferraris, little water pistols, plastic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, foreign coins, miniature Thomas the Tank Engines, green plastic toy soldiers. Who has been coming here, for decades, to the deathliest place on earth, to leave a Snoopy?
Looks like an album cover from some 1970s prog rock band to me. Pink Floyd?
I’ve been challenged to come up with a photo more striking than the volcano photo by @Foxy’s sister in law. I could just show you better volcano photos - right by the lava - that I took in Erta Ale, Ethiopia, but that’s too easy
So here’s a truly weird photo, enclosing a mystery I have never unravelled. Perhaps PB can
Picture it. A decade ago I find myself with some spare days during a stone toy research trip in the Atacama desert, Chile. So I decide to visit the deathliest place on earth: ie the place with the least life, even less than Greenland, or the Antarctic, or anywhere in the Sahara, Gobi, and so on.
The reason this place, Yungay, is so deathly – no microbial life, no tiny bugs, nothing - is that it sits in a ‘double rain shadow’– surrounded on all sides by mountains, so it has only rained a few times in the last 200,000 years.When I get there it turns out to be a predictably desolate patch of nothing with a long road running through, which sees one or two trucks a day. But there is one more thing: the relics of an old mine, which closed in the 1950s. Alongside the crumbling ruin of the mine is a cemetery for the miners, with names and sometimes photos. Preserved by the dry heat.
Some of the miners died terribly young. What I cannot explain are the additions since the 1950s. Alongside every grave, sometimes piled on top of them, there are plastic toys and trinkets, Chinese toy Ferraris, little water pistols, plastic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, foreign coins, miniature Thomas the Tank Engines, green plastic toy soldiers. Who has been coming here, for decades, to the deathliest place on earth, to leave a Snoopy?
Looks like an album cover from some 1970s prog rock band to me. Pink Floyd?
Looks more like the avatar of a poster called @SeanT
I’ve been challenged to come up with a photo more striking than the volcano photo by @Foxy’s sister in law. I could just show you better volcano photos - right by the lava - that I took in Erta Ale, Ethiopia, but that’s too easy
So here’s a truly weird photo, enclosing a mystery I have never unravelled. Perhaps PB can
Picture it. A decade ago I find myself with some spare days during a stone toy research trip in the Atacama desert, Chile. So I decide to visit the deathliest place on earth: ie the place with the least life, even less than Greenland, or the Antarctic, or anywhere in the Sahara, Gobi, and so on.
The reason this place, Yungay, is so deathly – no microbial life, no tiny bugs, nothing - is that it sits in a ‘double rain shadow’– surrounded on all sides by mountains, so it has only rained a few times in the last 200,000 years.When I get there it turns out to be a predictably desolate patch of nothing with a long road running through, which sees one or two trucks a day. But there is one more thing: the relics of an old mine, which closed in the 1950s. Alongside the crumbling ruin of the mine is a cemetery for the miners, with names and sometimes photos. Preserved by the dry heat.
Some of the miners died terribly young. What I cannot explain are the additions since the 1950s. Alongside every grave, sometimes piled on top of them, there are plastic toys and trinkets, Chinese toy Ferraris, little water pistols, plastic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, foreign coins, miniature Thomas the Tank Engines, green plastic toy soldiers. Who has been coming here, for decades, to the deathliest place on earth, to leave a Snoopy?
Looks like an album cover from some 1970s prog rock band to me. Pink Floyd?
Looks more like the avatar of a poster called @SeanT
... the Conservative offer of low taxes, low immigration, fiscal responsibility, stable government and strong defence..
Reproduced without comment for hopefully obvious reasons.
Some very good news today for the Tories. After last years much reduced boat crossings, The SKY News data and forensics team latest on stop the boats pledge, is lower now compared with last years totals.
If they are feeling pressure from Reform, this fact check on stopping boats IS excellent soundbite to keep using everywhere in April campaigning, leaflets, doorsteps, media ads, HoC, interviews.
I still think Rishi will call the general Election campaign for 2nd May, any day this week. Who’s 100% sure he won’t?
Slightly lower than 2023, but still historically high, does not make for a good soundbite when you pledged to stop the boats.
“How weak flip flopper Starmer will be on those boat crossings! Will throw away all the progress we made, and Labour throwing away our nations deterrent, Rwanda the only policy to stop the boats that’s on the table. And not to forget why Stop The Boats is important, the country is full, one trillion pounds on public services and you can’t see a dentist, doctor, and the schools and hospitals literally falling down.”
Starmer is going to be weak on immigration in a lot of places:
- Weak on the boats - Weak on student dependents - Weak on family income threshold
... the Conservative offer of low taxes, low immigration, fiscal responsibility, stable government and strong defence..
Reproduced without comment for hopefully obvious reasons.
Some very good news today for the Tories. After last years much reduced boat crossings, The SKY News data and forensics team latest on stop the boats pledge, is lower now compared with last years totals.
If they are feeling pressure from Reform, this fact check on stopping boats IS excellent soundbite to keep using everywhere in April campaigning, leaflets, doorsteps, media ads, HoC, interviews.
I still think Rishi will call the general Election campaign for 2nd May, any day this week. Who’s 100% sure he won’t?
Slightly lower than 2023, but still historically high, does not make for a good soundbite when you pledged to stop the boats.
Also I believe the weather has been less favourable than last year so as a statistic it's probably utterly meaningless..
Last year, various posters explained that all the fall in crossings was due to the weather.
Presumably the weather in the channel is getting worse every week.
It’s been pretty poor this month, as the wind power generation stats show.
But, I don’t think reduced boats are particularly great news for the government. Immigration is one topic where the public distrust Labour. It tends to rise and fall in salience with the numbers, and particularly the news coverage.
If small boats are a damp squib this year (and even if unchanged from 2023, they’re old news) then other topics will bubble up to the surface. Those might include crumbling infrastructure and public services, or - if we get the weather for it - climate worries or polluted water. None of those bode well for the Tories.
Falling perceptions of illegal immigration would however puncture Reform’s bubble, something I’m expecting to start happening soon. I think their non-Farage popularity is peaking now. They’d get a bump if Nigel takes over, but even then I’d expect unwind closer to the election.
... the Conservative offer of low taxes, low immigration, fiscal responsibility, stable government and strong defence..
Reproduced without comment for hopefully obvious reasons.
Some very good news today for the Tories. After last years much reduced boat crossings, The SKY News data and forensics team latest on stop the boats pledge, is lower now compared with last years totals.
If they are feeling pressure from Reform, this fact check on stopping boats IS excellent soundbite to keep using everywhere in April campaigning, leaflets, doorsteps, media ads, HoC, interviews.
I still think Rishi will call the general Election campaign for 2nd May, any day this week. Who’s 100% sure he won’t?
Slightly lower than 2023, but still historically high, does not make for a good soundbite when you pledged to stop the boats.
“How weak flip flopper Starmer will be on those boat crossings! Will throw away all the progress we made, and Labour throwing away our nations deterrent, Rwanda the only policy to stop the boats that’s on the table. And not to forget why Stop The Boats is important, the country is full, one trillion pounds on public services and you can’t see a dentist, doctor, and the schools and hospitals literally falling down.”
Starmer is going to be weak on immigration in a lot of places:
- Weak on the boats - Weak on student dependents - Weak on family income threshold
I will be very surprised if immigration in Starmer’s first year as PM isn’t down on current levels.
Yes, my SiL sent this image from her Reykjavik Hotel last night.
And it'll be releasing more carbon the the UK population does in a year probably.
Probably best that we ameliorate carbon output in the areas we do have control over then.
Yes, let's delete the economy and give up the idea of a national defence so we can eliminate a really socking portion of the 1% of manmade global CO2 emissions that we're responsible for, as part of the 2% of total global CO2 emissions that mankind is responsible for. Great plan.
*And hope no more volcanoes go off.
Could I have a source for the 2% number please? Because most of the numbers I've seen have been in the 40-70% range.
Luckyguy is just saying that the atmosphere is very big, so he can't understand how a small net input over a long period of time can make a large difference.
@Sean_F I don't see any reason why Blue Wall and Red Wall can't politically unite.
Firstly, there's been a convergence in attitudes there, not a divergence - the Red Wall represents rural/semi-rural seats that'd be reliably Tory in the South were it not for the coal-mining legacy - and, secondly, the Conservative offer of low taxes, low immigration, fiscal responsibility, stable government and strong defence has been one that, nominally, has been consistent since 2010 and before.
It's just they haven't delivered.
Some of that is bad luck. Much more is poor quality candidates, flawed leaders and terrible behaviour.
Rubbish. Rural seats even in the north are reliably tory. The red wall is basically a succession of crap towns like wigan and rotherham.
I’ve been challenged to come up with a photo more striking than the volcano photo by @Foxy’s sister in law. I could just show you better volcano photos - right by the lava - that I took in Erta Ale, Ethiopia, but that’s too easy
So here’s a truly weird photo, enclosing a mystery I have never unravelled. Perhaps PB can
Picture it. A decade ago I find myself with some spare days during a stone toy research trip in the Atacama desert, Chile. So I decide to visit the deathliest place on earth: ie the place with the least life, even less than Greenland, or the Antarctic, or anywhere in the Sahara, Gobi, and so on.
The reason this place, Yungay, is so deathly – no microbial life, no tiny bugs, nothing - is that it sits in a ‘double rain shadow’– surrounded on all sides by mountains, so it has only rained a few times in the last 200,000 years.When I get there it turns out to be a predictably desolate patch of nothing with a long road running through, which sees one or two trucks a day. But there is one more thing: the relics of an old mine, which closed in the 1950s. Alongside the crumbling ruin of the mine is a cemetery for the miners, with names and sometimes photos. Preserved by the dry heat.
Some of the miners died terribly young. What I cannot explain are the additions since the 1950s. Alongside every grave, sometimes piled on top of them, there are plastic toys and trinkets, Chinese toy Ferraris, little water pistols, plastic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, foreign coins, miniature Thomas the Tank Engines, green plastic toy soldiers. Who has been coming here, for decades, to the deathliest place on earth, to leave a Snoopy?
Looks like an album cover from some 1970s prog rock band to me. Pink Floyd?
If you have any explanation I’d welcome it
The last miners died in the 1950s. This place is wildly remote. The nearest town is Antofagasta - 75km of hard driving away
Who the fuck is leaving these trinkets, in their thousands, to this day, and why??
... the Conservative offer of low taxes, low immigration, fiscal responsibility, stable government and strong defence..
Reproduced without comment for hopefully obvious reasons.
Some very good news today for the Tories. After last years much reduced boat crossings, The SKY News data and forensics team latest on stop the boats pledge, is lower now compared with last years totals.
If they are feeling pressure from Reform, this fact check on stopping boats IS excellent soundbite to keep using everywhere in April campaigning, leaflets, doorsteps, media ads, HoC, interviews.
I still think Rishi will call the general Election campaign for 2nd May, any day this week. Who’s 100% sure he won’t?
Slightly lower than 2023, but still historically high, does not make for a good soundbite when you pledged to stop the boats.
“How weak flip flopper Starmer will be on those boat crossings! Will throw away all the progress we made, and Labour throwing away our nations deterrent, Rwanda the only policy to stop the boats that’s on the table. And not to forget why Stop The Boats is important, the country is full, one trillion pounds on public services and you can’t see a dentist, doctor, and the schools and hospitals literally falling down.”
“You pledged to stop the boats. The boats are still coming.” <- is the obvious response.
The Tories would do better never talking about boats or immigration at all. When they do, they boost only Reform UK.
... the Conservative offer of low taxes, low immigration, fiscal responsibility, stable government and strong defence..
Reproduced without comment for hopefully obvious reasons.
Some very good news today for the Tories. After last years much reduced boat crossings, The SKY News data and forensics team latest on stop the boats pledge, is lower now compared with last years totals.
If they are feeling pressure from Reform, this fact check on stopping boats IS excellent soundbite to keep using everywhere in April campaigning, leaflets, doorsteps, media ads, HoC, interviews.
I still think Rishi will call the general Election campaign for 2nd May, any day this week. Who’s 100% sure he won’t?
Slightly lower than 2023, but still historically high, does not make for a good soundbite when you pledged to stop the boats.
Also I believe the weather has been less favourable than last year so as a statistic it's probably utterly meaningless..
Last year, various posters explained that all the fall in crossings was due to the weather.
Presumably the weather in the channel is getting worse every week.
Probably a mixture of things? The deal with Albania had a big impact. Weather less so. Money given to France, and cooperation with them must have played a big part too.
But most of all, it was less last year for same reasons the governments own modelling shows more this year - it’s tie in with continental Europe “filling up” from sea and land the year before. 2021 continental tank up led to 2022 channels record crossings, and the 2023 continental fill up points, as I said predicted by Sunaks governments modelling, to another near record year. This is a known known they are running with an Autumn election - properly 100% convinced in their own minds let it happen , Rwanda flights Trumps boat crossings happening at same time as flights as it brings the voters back.
I’m pretty sure they won’t put hundreds on one flight, as their thinking is each flight and it’s media coverage each brings dollops of voters home and burns down the Reform polling. So about 30 each flight?
One thing that hadn’t played much, but might have more affect if Farage mentions it in interview after interview when he comes back, is, considering it’s an illegal invasion of economic migrants carrying a security risk, vast amounts of them this government grants asylum to. Pick the bones out of that.
I think it's a bit strange that people should be so quick to say the red and blue walls cannot ever be reconciled, when this was achieved just over four years ago at GE 2019. If the polls are anywhere like accurate, then Labour are poised to reconcile three major groups in the electorate - metropolitan liberals, blue labour and conservative swing voters.
These groups are not reconciled due to the oratorical brilliance of Keir-Ends-In-R Starmer, but due to Starmer's success in blandifying the Labour party so as not to put any of the groups off, and the categorical imperative of finding a means for these groups to punish the Tories.
Achieving something in reverse for the Tories requires only a bit of experience of Labour in government, and a Tory leader who isn't trying to actively alienate one part of the voter coalition.
I like your counter to this, with the 2019 evidence to back up your point.
However … those cracks were in the Party for a long time and we kid ourselves to think otherwise. That divide is really what brought down John Major and it didn’t do Margaret Thatcher much good in the end either. It all boiled to the surface when @TSE ’s beloved Davey boy idiotically called the Brexit referendum, thinking in his Old Etonian arrogance that he would pull off the same stunt as indyref.
(If you want to see what a shit Cameron really is then DO read the finale to Suzanne Heywood’s What Does Jeremy Think?)
I still maintain that 2019 was unique. Even I, a remainer, was utterly exasperated at the antics of that Remainer Parliament and at just the right moment along came Boris, someone uniquely gifted at deception to hoodwink the British people. With mellifluous honey-coated lies he pulled in blue and red wall voters. My Surrey tory friend, totally disillusioned now with the Party, STILL ADORES Boris and would vote for him like a shot.
Assuming Boris doesn’t make a Lazarite comeback, there’s no one else of his ilk. Once in a century.
Yes, it's true to say that the splits had been in the Tory party for a long time - but then that is true of any governing party in Britain. There is no single cohesive group of voters that is large enough to win a majority on its own. So it's normal for a governing party to be sustained by a coalition of voters divided amongst itself, and those divisions will obviously come to the fore when the party is generally unpopular.
I don't see anything unusual with what is happening to the Tories now, and so I don't think it requires anything extraordinary to fix the situation.
Indeed, what seems to be a more volatile electorate means that there is potential for the fractured Tory coalition to come back together (very temporarily) more quickly than currently appears possible. The situation facing an incoming Labour government is much more difficult than that encountered in 1997.
Although the Tories have been in government for nearly 14 years now, I think that is misleading. They have had several reinventions in that time, and so the last 14 years have been a lot more like the 1970s, than the long periods of Thatcherite/Blairite rule in the 80s/90s/00s.
Whatever Starmerism turns out to be I would not bet on it lasting that long. It's quite likely to be overturned by something very different, either from within the Labour party, or without, by the end of the decade.
A good response but your last paragraph is a fig leaf I’ve noticed some Conservatives clinging onto i.e. the assumption that Starmer is going to fail.
Whilst I don’t underestimate the magnitude of problems facing this country, and I’m no longer convinced Labour will fix them, I suspect many people will look back on the last 5 years as a horror show they never want to go near again in their lifetime.
I’m beginning to think Labour will be in power for 20 years.
I'm not a Conservative.
We'll see what Starmerism turns out to be - it's really hard to predict because he's shown so little indication of what his approach will be - but I included the possibility of Starmerism being overturned from within the Labour party. Whether Labour is in office for two decades, or not, I do not think Britain is in for a period of stable politics. There are large problems, that are difficult to solve, and a lot of rootless discontent sloshing about the political system as a result.
It could be that the Tory brand, and all the politicians associated with it, is so damaged that the voters won't go near it for a long time, but in that case the voter's discontent will manifest itself through other parties, or through factions within the Labour party. Cameron was PM for 6 years and 64 days. He wasn't brought down because the voters were ready to give Labour another go. I doubt very much that Starmer will have so long, but I don't see the Tories returning so soon either (thank God).
I'm instructing my financial advisor to advise me on protecting my assets against a potential confiscatory very left-wing Labour government.
It's perfectly possible Starmer gets dethroned, in office, for a Left-wing alternative like you say, and they utterly abuse the MP base they have in Parliament.
Well don't put it under your mattress, there appear to a lot of Reds under your bed.
Seriously, I wonder what legal options your financial adviser might suggest? Whatever they are, I'll warrant said IFA will be the only one to profit.
Who knows. One idea is to send some out the country and/or put it in a trusted relatives name.
But that holds risks in itself.
I could see (would vote for) a wealth tax of say 1-2% per annum on assets over say £1m. If that's what you class as 'confiscatory' it would likely cost you a larger percentage to avoid that.
I am genuinely intrigued that you fear such a threat.
No, much worse than that.
Go on - what does 'much worse than that' look like? What do you think is really a possibility at shall we say a >5% chance?
In West London, this level of property tax would push out anyone who wasn’t poor or on over £100k. Including those renting.
There are huge numbers of people who live there from the times before property went mad. Hence the interesting patch work of the redone houses with the expensive cars next to the down at heel looking places with the hatchback.
Increasing people’s bills by £1k a month would make the poll tax riots look tame.
I should have said, as I did in my next post, 'the exclusion of a principal private residence would be sensible.'
The problem then is that putting money into property becomes, even more, the way to store wealth.
And round we go.
That won't drive up house prices though - lack of supply does that.
Build more houses and it won't matter if people want to put more money into their private residence, the value will be dictated by supply and demand.
I’ve begun to despair about house building. Nimbyism appears to unite the country in a way little else does. Rich and poor, Brexit and remain, left and right. All have this same muscle reflex to object to any proposed development. Even the relatively young are at it round here.
The thing is so all pervading that I hide my quiet yimbyism from the neighbours for fear of being considered a traitor.
I think the NIMBYism is exacerbated by the lack of public services. It's hard to argue for more housing when you can't even provide an NHS dentist for the existing population.
Even LTNs are a reaction to more housing, as previously quiet neighbourhoods become ratruns for new ones.
Around here it’s not that. It’s pure aesthetics. People not wanting their nice view across the rooftops spoiled by a new building.
A large part is the shit that will be built. Densification means that in rural towns and villages, planners want houses with gardens so small that fence fires from BBQs are a serious issue. We are talking about patio squares - the width of the house and barely as long.
The mean, pinched things that they are building look horrible.
I’ve been challenged to come up with a photo more striking than the volcano photo by @Foxy’s sister in law. I could just show you better volcano photos - right by the lava - that I took in Erta Ale, Ethiopia, but that’s too easy
So here’s a truly weird photo, enclosing a mystery I have never unravelled. Perhaps PB can
Picture it. A decade ago I find myself with some spare days during a stone toy research trip in the Atacama desert, Chile. So I decide to visit the deathliest place on earth: ie the place with the least life, even less than Greenland, or the Antarctic, or anywhere in the Sahara, Gobi, and so on.
The reason this place, Yungay, is so deathly – no microbial life, no tiny bugs, nothing - is that it sits in a ‘double rain shadow’– surrounded on all sides by mountains, so it has only rained a few times in the last 200,000 years.When I get there it turns out to be a predictably desolate patch of nothing with a long road running through, which sees one or two trucks a day. But there is one more thing: the relics of an old mine, which closed in the 1950s. Alongside the crumbling ruin of the mine is a cemetery for the miners, with names and sometimes photos. Preserved by the dry heat.
Some of the miners died terribly young. What I cannot explain are the additions since the 1950s. Alongside every grave, sometimes piled on top of them, there are plastic toys and trinkets, Chinese toy Ferraris, little water pistols, plastic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, foreign coins, miniature Thomas the Tank Engines, green plastic toy soldiers. Who has been coming here, for decades, to the deathliest place on earth, to leave a Snoopy?
Looks like an album cover from some 1970s prog rock band to me. Pink Floyd?
Looks more like the avatar of a poster called @SeanT
He stole this AS WELL?
I may have to get legal on him
If you do, I hope his solicitors are more efficient than the ones employed by British Gas. The court had to extend the filing deadline just so they could put in a notice of acting.
... the Conservative offer of low taxes, low immigration, fiscal responsibility, stable government and strong defence..
Reproduced without comment for hopefully obvious reasons.
Some very good news today for the Tories. After last years much reduced boat crossings, The SKY News data and forensics team latest on stop the boats pledge, is lower now compared with last years totals.
If they are feeling pressure from Reform, this fact check on stopping boats IS excellent soundbite to keep using everywhere in April campaigning, leaflets, doorsteps, media ads, HoC, interviews.
I still think Rishi will call the general Election campaign for 2nd May, any day this week. Who’s 100% sure he won’t?
Slightly lower than 2023, but still historically high, does not make for a good soundbite when you pledged to stop the boats.
“How weak flip flopper Starmer will be on those boat crossings! Will throw away all the progress we made, and Labour throwing away our nations deterrent, Rwanda the only policy to stop the boats that’s on the table. And not to forget why Stop The Boats is important, the country is full, one trillion pounds on public services and you can’t see a dentist, doctor, and the schools and hospitals literally falling down.”
Starmer is going to be weak on immigration in a lot of places:
- Weak on the boats - Weak on student dependents - Weak on family income threshold
I will be very surprised if immigration in Starmer’s first year as PM isn’t down on current levels.
Legal net migration is almost mathematically certain to be, as we see the pick up in post-course emigration as the Covid student dip unwinds. Plus Hong Kong and Ukraine falling out of the stats.
Asylum seekers are harder to predict. Syria and Yemen are less of a source now but Sudan is in chaos. The Sahel is currently doing well for rainfall so no big drought-based exodus. Indeed long term the Sahel could well see greening and more rainfall. Just need to make fertilisers much more widely available.
Royal Family major announcement is imminent according to some news sources. Speculation continues to mount over Princess of Wales Kate Middleton and her health. #KateMiddleton #RoyalFamily https://x.com/JimFergusonUK/status/1769321663374426485?s=20
Harsh words from Dominic Cummings here. Perfect example of how the old media is now totally fake - the actual context is clear, he's talking about bloodbath for *the car industry* - but the ENTIRE OLD MEDIA are pretending he was threatening violence. BBC, Guardian, CNN, NYT - all of them.
The old media, Democrat establishment, Whitehall, UK lobby - none of them believe in facts any more, everything is about spinning fake news and gaslighting you that you're a victim of 'misinformation' if you don't believe them - UKR, Trump, child abuse sold as 'trans rights', pandemics/lab leak, Hunter's laptop ... everything they care about they lie about.
Dan Neidle has some very interesting polling (and thread / report) on increasing Tax to pay for a better NHS - end result is that while in 2019 or so people were happy to do so now they aren't
I suspect the reality is that people think they are being taxed too much already and so they don't want it spent on anything.
Which probably comes down to the fact that we seem to being taxed an awful lot but it's not at all obvious where the money is actually going and being spent...
The majority of it is going on pensions & elderly care (both in & out of the NHS). IIRC more than half my local authority budget goes on social care.
People just don’t want to accept how much this stuff costs.
I see a levy in my council tax bill for Adult Social Care.
(Sarcasm here) you are telling me that £174 per house isn't enough to pay all the costs...
But there is a wider point here - the visible things that councils / Government are known to be responsible for seem to be falling apart yet the amount we spend on tax is continually going up yet papers talk about further cuts...
At the heart of the decline spiral is a reluctance to spend on anything unless forced to do so. Problems are left to fester, or the Government deploys sticking plaster solutions - and the more the situation deteriorates, so the harder and more expensive it becomes to rectify. Health and social care are prime examples: the more the NHS deteriorates, the more people end up queuing for treatment for longer, and thus the more costly it becomes (both directly through the worsening of medical conditions, and indirectly through more and more sick people moving from work onto benefits.) And the worse the social care situation becomes, the more the healthcare system struggles with elderly bed blockers bunging up already scarce hospital capacity.
In the long run, this will end one of two ways: with eye watering levels of taxation to finally stamp on all these problems, or in systemic collapse. My money's on the latter - indeed, it's already well underway. Just ask the many millions of people without deep pockets who have no solution to rotten teeth but a pair of pliers.
Doesn’t look much. A wine bottle on a window ledge
Except this is my view from my room at Villa Mangiacane, an extremely beautiful Italian villa in Tuscany (it’s their wine on the ledge) boasting a redesign by Michelangelo
Yes
Even better. Look closer. See the notch in the trees between wine and glass. That notch was cut on the orders of Niccolo Machiavelli - his family owned the estate. Why was it cut? So the author of The Prince could stare at the cathedral, the Duomo, in faraway Florence
Brexit is nothing like as big a deal as both sides wanted to pretend for different reasons. It is done now and unlikely to be a sticking point going forward.
What we really need is a government that is willing to address our underlying problems
Brexit is not nearly "done", and it solved exactly none of our underlying problems, while exacerbating many of them.
Apart from that...
Indeed. They're still sorting out UK customs after many, many postponements.
That is not a state in control of its destiny, though this time it's the Brexiteers who are the government.
Let me give you a specific example - meat imports. We delayed repeatedly the introduction of our post-Brexit border model. At one point the minister for Brexit Opportunities described the implementation of our demanded model as an act of "national self-harm"
So at the end of January we belatedly imposed checks on imports, albeit not checks where we actually check either the paperwork or the goods. We still do not have the physical infrastructure or the staff or the computer systems to do so.
Our EU neighbours though, they are treaty-bound to implement our deal. And they have. In full. Where the French were struggling to get enough paperwork generated quickly enough, their own government started paying to clear them. The Spanish government are very clear on export to UK rules and have simply and completely implemented it.
We remain functionally incompetent when it comes to the border. Never mind Take Back Control, despite years of delay we still have to wave stuff through because we haven't bothered to invest in the set-up to do our own checks.
My conclusion is that for mist Tory Brexiteers the gains were all slogan and no detail. they didn't actually want the act of "national self-harm", they just wanted to pretend that we could tell the foreign what to do.
What other explanation is there?
Alternative explanation: Not being aligned with the EU allows us to make agreements with other countries like Australia which we can import meat from.
Implementing checks on EU meat is not necessary to achieve that gain.
The world is a bigger place than Europe. If you only look at France and Spain, of course it won't make sense.
If only Australia was close enough to make that possible.
Can I refer you back to the word "slogan"
We have a HUGELY competitive market. We already import some meat and fish from all kinds of places. Chicken from Brazil and Thailand as an example. If you want cheapo crap meat. But replace our closest most aligned marketplace with ones on the other side of the globe? If it was viable it would have been done already.
Australia is close enough to make that possible. Its on Planet Earth, everywhere on Planet Earth is close enough to make that possible.
For fresh veg you may have a point, but for meat? You can ship meat all over the planet. I have beef right now in my freezer from Argentina, what bloody difference does the country of origin make?
The alignment with the EU put tariff and non-tariff barriers against non-European meat. Barriers we can and absolutely should remove, but no reason for us to replace those with new barriers against European meat. All we need to do to look after consumers is remove the barriers, if the Europeans want to put barriers against us, that's their consumers problem, not ours.
"freezer"
Yes, what's wrong with that?
Most meat is frozen in transportation, are you not aware of that?
No wonder you were so ignorant that you thought country of origin matters.
I can talk you through the process of blast freezing, frozen import, uptemper, datecode, pack and ship if you like. And how to make a profit doing it.
Can you?
"Most meat is frozen" / "so ignorant that you thought country of origin matters"
Go round the chilled section of any supermarket. Look at the products. What they are called. How prominent the country of origin is.
Then try again.
Many chilled products in the supermarket were previously frozen. They're labelled so too.
Prominently displaying country of origin is protectionist bullshit, but if people want to pay attention to that they're free to do so.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with freezing meat. Or importing frozen meat.
“Displaying country of origin is protectionist bullshit”.
Er, what? You don’t think people should be interested in the provenance of their food?
No. Why should they?
Other than protectionist bullshit?
In a free market, companies should be able to display whatever they want on their packaging as long as it's factually correct, surely?
Yes, that was precisely my argument.
If people want to label that their product is from one country or another that should be their choice.
If other people don't want to label where its come from, they should be able to put whatever else they want on their labelling as long as its accurate.
Banning country of origin marketing would be as ridiculous as mandatory labelling is.
Harsh words from Dominic Cummings here. Perfect example of how the old media is now totally fake - the actual context is clear, he's talking about bloodbath for *the car industry* - but the ENTIRE OLD MEDIA are pretending he was threatening violence. BBC, Guardian, CNN, NYT - all of them.
The old media, Democrat establishment, Whitehall, UK lobby - none of them believe in facts any more, everything is about spinning fake news and gaslighting you that you're a victim of 'misinformation' if you don't believe them - UKR, Trump, child abuse sold as 'trans rights', pandemics/lab leak, Hunter's laptop ... everything they care about they lie about.
Dan Neidle has some very interesting polling (and thread / report) on increasing Tax to pay for a better NHS - end result is that while in 2019 or so people were happy to do so now they aren't
I suspect the reality is that people think they are being taxed too much already and so they don't want it spent on anything.
Which probably comes down to the fact that we seem to being taxed an awful lot but it's not at all obvious where the money is actually going and being spent...
The majority of it is going on pensions & elderly care (both in & out of the NHS). IIRC more than half my local authority budget goes on social care.
People just don’t want to accept how much this stuff costs.
I see a levy in my council tax bill for Adult Social Care.
(Sarcasm here) you are telling me that £174 per house isn't enough to pay all the costs...
But there is a wider point here - the visible things that councils / Government are known to be responsible for seem to be falling apart yet the amount we spend on tax is continually going up yet papers talk about further cuts...
At the heart of the decline spiral is a reluctance to spend on anything unless forced to do so. Problems are left to fester, or the Government deploys sticking plaster solutions - and the more the situation deteriorates, so the harder and more expensive it becomes to rectify. Health and social care are prime examples: the more the NHS deteriorates, the more people end up queuing for treatment for longer, and thus the more costly it becomes (both directly through the worsening of medical conditions, and indirectly through more and more sick people moving from work onto benefits.) And the worse the social care situation becomes, the more the healthcare system struggles with elderly bed blockers bunging up already scarce hospital capacity.
In the long run, this will end one of two ways: with eye watering levels of taxation to finally stamp on all these problems, or in systemic collapse. My money's on the latter - indeed, it's already well underway. Just ask the many millions of people without deep pockets who have no solution to rotten teeth but a pair of pliers.
Agreed collapse is most likely. Many people are now refusing to pay their council tax.
Yes, my SiL sent this image from her Reykjavik Hotel last night.
And it'll be releasing more carbon the the UK population does in a year probably.
Probably best that we ameliorate carbon output in the areas we do have control over then.
Yes, let's delete the economy and give up the idea of a national defence so we can eliminate a really socking portion of the 1% of manmade global CO2 emissions that we're responsible for, as part of the 2% of total global CO2 emissions that mankind is responsible for. Great plan.
*And hope no more volcanoes go off.
Could I have a source for the 2% number please? Because most of the numbers I've seen have been in the 40-70% range.
Luckyguy is just saying that the atmosphere is very big, so he can't understand how a small net input over a long period of time can make a large difference.
Which is why he doesn't do climate science.
It’s slightly different, this particular (very popular) sceptic meme.
It takes the human addition of CO2 each year and compares with total CO2 in the atmosphere. Which of course is very small as a percentage.
But the whole point is that our additions are incremental. All the other carbon mechanisms are in net balance. The system manages to take out about half of our additions each year but the rest remains. So it’s like adding 2% to the contents of a bucket each year and hoping because 2% sounds small that it won’t ever overflow.
I'm actually currently involved in trying to import stock from the UK to Australia for a small business.I have no useful insights other than the Houthis are a pain in the arse. Our stuff is floating about in the Med.
Generally, it does seem a bit mad to import beef (bad for emissions) around the world (bad for emissions) from Australia (very bad for emissions). From a UK perspective, cattle can be quite good for the local environment, chewing up the ground, eating a variety of veg, better than sheep for wetland development. The RSPB use them on their reserves for this reason, IIRC.
It's not like the UK sustains itself on beef though, so there isn't much of a national security angle on this.
The cost, in terms of greenhouse gases, of shifting shit around the world is remarkably low, especially relative to all the other emissions that come from farming cattle. I would be staggered if Australian beef generated more than a couple of percent more than British ones. And, indeed, if they require less feed (because they can eat grass all year round), then they might generate less.
Absolutely!
People getting bent all out of shape that stuff is shipped around don't realise just how inconsequential the cost (environmental and economic) of shipping stuff is.
Using extra electricity to grow stuff out of season in the UK is worse for the environment than getting it in season from the other side of the planet.
I think it's a bit strange that people should be so quick to say the red and blue walls cannot ever be reconciled, when this was achieved just over four years ago at GE 2019. If the polls are anywhere like accurate, then Labour are poised to reconcile three major groups in the electorate - metropolitan liberals, blue labour and conservative swing voters.
These groups are not reconciled due to the oratorical brilliance of Keir-Ends-In-R Starmer, but due to Starmer's success in blandifying the Labour party so as not to put any of the groups off, and the categorical imperative of finding a means for these groups to punish the Tories.
Achieving something in reverse for the Tories requires only a bit of experience of Labour in government, and a Tory leader who isn't trying to actively alienate one part of the voter coalition.
I like your counter to this, with the 2019 evidence to back up your point.
However … those cracks were in the Party for a long time and we kid ourselves to think otherwise. That divide is really what brought down John Major and it didn’t do Margaret Thatcher much good in the end either. It all boiled to the surface when @TSE ’s beloved Davey boy idiotically called the Brexit referendum, thinking in his Old Etonian arrogance that he would pull off the same stunt as indyref.
(If you want to see what a shit Cameron really is then DO read the finale to Suzanne Heywood’s What Does Jeremy Think?)
I still maintain that 2019 was unique. Even I, a remainer, was utterly exasperated at the antics of that Remainer Parliament and at just the right moment along came Boris, someone uniquely gifted at deception to hoodwink the British people. With mellifluous honey-coated lies he pulled in blue and red wall voters. My Surrey tory friend, totally disillusioned now with the Party, STILL ADORES Boris and would vote for him like a shot.
Assuming Boris doesn’t make a Lazarite comeback, there’s no one else of his ilk. Once in a century.
Yes, it's true to say that the splits had been in the Tory party for a long time - but then that is true of any governing party in Britain. There is no single cohesive group of voters that is large enough to win a majority on its own. So it's normal for a governing party to be sustained by a coalition of voters divided amongst itself, and those divisions will obviously come to the fore when the party is generally unpopular.
I don't see anything unusual with what is happening to the Tories now, and so I don't think it requires anything extraordinary to fix the situation.
Indeed, what seems to be a more volatile electorate means that there is potential for the fractured Tory coalition to come back together (very temporarily) more quickly than currently appears possible. The situation facing an incoming Labour government is much more difficult than that encountered in 1997.
Although the Tories have been in government for nearly 14 years now, I think that is misleading. They have had several reinventions in that time, and so the last 14 years have been a lot more like the 1970s, than the long periods of Thatcherite/Blairite rule in the 80s/90s/00s.
Whatever Starmerism turns out to be I would not bet on it lasting that long. It's quite likely to be overturned by something very different, either from within the Labour party, or without, by the end of the decade.
A good response but your last paragraph is a fig leaf I’ve noticed some Conservatives clinging onto i.e. the assumption that Starmer is going to fail.
Whilst I don’t underestimate the magnitude of problems facing this country, and I’m no longer convinced Labour will fix them, I suspect many people will look back on the last 5 years as a horror show they never want to go near again in their lifetime.
I’m beginning to think Labour will be in power for 20 years.
I'm not a Conservative.
We'll see what Starmerism turns out to be - it's really hard to predict because he's shown so little indication of what his approach will be - but I included the possibility of Starmerism being overturned from within the Labour party. Whether Labour is in office for two decades, or not, I do not think Britain is in for a period of stable politics. There are large problems, that are difficult to solve, and a lot of rootless discontent sloshing about the political system as a result.
It could be that the Tory brand, and all the politicians associated with it, is so damaged that the voters won't go near it for a long time, but in that case the voter's discontent will manifest itself through other parties, or through factions within the Labour party. Cameron was PM for 6 years and 64 days. He wasn't brought down because the voters were ready to give Labour another go. I doubt very much that Starmer will have so long, but I don't see the Tories returning so soon either (thank God).
I'm instructing my financial advisor to advise me on protecting my assets against a potential confiscatory very left-wing Labour government.
It's perfectly possible Starmer gets dethroned, in office, for a Left-wing alternative like you say, and they utterly abuse the MP base they have in Parliament.
Well don't put it under your mattress, there appear to a lot of Reds under your bed.
Seriously, I wonder what legal options your financial adviser might suggest? Whatever they are, I'll warrant said IFA will be the only one to profit.
Who knows. One idea is to send some out the country and/or put it in a trusted relatives name.
But that holds risks in itself.
I could see (would vote for) a wealth tax of say 1-2% per annum on assets over say £1m. If that's what you class as 'confiscatory' it would likely cost you a larger percentage to avoid that.
I am genuinely intrigued that you fear such a threat.
No, much worse than that.
Go on - what does 'much worse than that' look like? What do you think is really a possibility at shall we say a >5% chance?
In West London, this level of property tax would push out anyone who wasn’t poor or on over £100k. Including those renting.
There are huge numbers of people who live there from the times before property went mad. Hence the interesting patch work of the redone houses with the expensive cars next to the down at heel looking places with the hatchback.
Increasing people’s bills by £1k a month would make the poll tax riots look tame.
I should have said, as I did in my next post, 'the exclusion of a principal private residence would be sensible.'
The problem then is that putting money into property becomes, even more, the way to store wealth.
And round we go.
That won't drive up house prices though - lack of supply does that.
Build more houses and it won't matter if people want to put more money into their private residence, the value will be dictated by supply and demand.
I’ve begun to despair about house building. Nimbyism appears to unite the country in a way little else does. Rich and poor, Brexit and remain, left and right. All have this same muscle reflex to object to any proposed development. Even the relatively young are at it round here.
The thing is so all pervading that I hide my quiet yimbyism from the neighbours for fear of being considered a traitor.
I think the NIMBYism is exacerbated by the lack of public services. It's hard to argue for more housing when you can't even provide an NHS dentist for the existing population.
Even LTNs are a reaction to more housing, as previously quiet neighbourhoods become ratruns for new ones.
Around here it’s not that. It’s pure aesthetics. People not wanting their nice view across the rooftops spoiled by a new building.
A large part is the shit that will be built. Densification means that in rural towns and villages, planners want houses with gardens so small that fence fires from BBQs are a serious issue. We are talking about patio squares - the width of the house and barely as long.
The mean, pinched things that they are building look horrible.
Part of that is the fault of a clunky expensive planning system that means the only ones with the deep pockets to be able to get through it are large developers.
Yes, my SiL sent this image from her Reykjavik Hotel last night.
And it'll be releasing more carbon the the UK population does in a year probably.
Probably best that we ameliorate carbon output in the areas we do have control over then.
Yes, let's delete the economy and give up the idea of a national defence so we can eliminate a really socking portion of the 1% of manmade global CO2 emissions that we're responsible for, as part of the 2% of total global CO2 emissions that mankind is responsible for. Great plan.
*And hope no more volcanoes go off.
Could I have a source for the 2% number please? Because most of the numbers I've seen have been in the 40-70% range.
Luckyguy is just saying that the atmosphere is very big, so he can't understand how a small net input over a long period of time can make a large difference.
Which is why he doesn't do climate science.
It’s slightly different, this particular (very popular) sceptic meme.
It takes the human addition of CO2 each year and compares with total CO2 in the atmosphere. Which of course is very small as a percentage.
But the whole point is that our additions are incremental. All the other carbon mechanisms are in net balance. The system manages to take out about half of our additions each year but the rest remains. So it’s like adding 2% to the contents of a bucket each year and hoping because 2% sounds small that it won’t ever overflow.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six , result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery
Small changes can make a world of difference. Especially when changes are cumulative.
Yes, my SiL sent this image from her Reykjavik Hotel last night.
And it'll be releasing more carbon the the UK population does in a year probably.
Probably best that we ameliorate carbon output in the areas we do have control over then.
Yes, let's delete the economy and give up the idea of a national defence so we can eliminate a really socking portion of the 1% of manmade global CO2 emissions that we're responsible for, as part of the 2% of total global CO2 emissions that mankind is responsible for. Great plan.
*And hope no more volcanoes go off.
Could I have a source for the 2% number please? Because most of the numbers I've seen have been in the 40-70% range.
Luckyguy is just saying that the atmosphere is very big, so he can't understand how a small net input over a long period of time can make a large difference.
Which is why he doesn't do climate science.
It’s slightly different, this particular (very popular) sceptic meme.
It takes the human addition of CO2 each year and compares with total CO2 in the atmosphere. Which of course is very small as a percentage.
But the whole point is that our additions are incremental. All the other carbon mechanisms are in net balance. The system manages to take out about half of our additions each year but the rest remains. So it’s like adding 2% to the contents of a bucket each year and hoping because 2% sounds small that it won’t ever overflow.
That's why I said 'small net input'.
It's a similar point to the one about volcanic eruptions - which with the exception of the infrequent large outliers - are just part of the cycle in balance. (And have a cooling, not warming effect.)
Same thing with the ocean heat transfers - massive movements of heat energy, far larger than any warming inputs - but again previously in balance.
Harsh words from Dominic Cummings here. Perfect example of how the old media is now totally fake - the actual context is clear, he's talking about bloodbath for *the car industry* - but the ENTIRE OLD MEDIA are pretending he was threatening violence. BBC, Guardian, CNN, NYT - all of them.
The old media, Democrat establishment, Whitehall, UK lobby - none of them believe in facts any more, everything is about spinning fake news and gaslighting you that you're a victim of 'misinformation' if you don't believe them - UKR, Trump, child abuse sold as 'trans rights', pandemics/lab leak, Hunter's laptop ... everything they care about they lie about.
Harsh words from Dominic Cummings here. Perfect example of how the old media is now totally fake - the actual context is clear, he's talking about bloodbath for *the car industry* - but the ENTIRE OLD MEDIA are pretending he was threatening violence. BBC, Guardian, CNN, NYT - all of them.
The old media, Democrat establishment, Whitehall, UK lobby - none of them believe in facts any more, everything is about spinning fake news and gaslighting you that you're a victim of 'misinformation' if you don't believe them - UKR, Trump, child abuse sold as 'trans rights', pandemics/lab leak, Hunter's laptop ... everything they care about they lie about.
Harsh words from Dominic Cummings here. Perfect example of how the old media is now totally fake - the actual context is clear, he's talking about bloodbath for *the car industry* - but the ENTIRE OLD MEDIA are pretending he was threatening violence. BBC, Guardian, CNN, NYT - all of them.
The old media, Democrat establishment, Whitehall, UK lobby - none of them believe in facts any more, everything is about spinning fake news and gaslighting you that you're a victim of 'misinformation' if you don't believe them - UKR, Trump, child abuse sold as 'trans rights', pandemics/lab leak, Hunter's laptop ... everything they care about they lie about.
... the Conservative offer of low taxes, low immigration, fiscal responsibility, stable government and strong defence..
Reproduced without comment for hopefully obvious reasons.
Some very good news today for the Tories. After last years much reduced boat crossings, The SKY News data and forensics team latest on stop the boats pledge, is lower now compared with last years totals.
If they are feeling pressure from Reform, this fact check on stopping boats IS excellent soundbite to keep using everywhere in April campaigning, leaflets, doorsteps, media ads, HoC, interviews.
I still think Rishi will call the general Election campaign for 2nd May, any day this week. Who’s 100% sure he won’t?
Slightly lower than 2023, but still historically high, does not make for a good soundbite when you pledged to stop the boats.
“How weak flip flopper Starmer will be on those boat crossings! Will throw away all the progress we made, and Labour throwing away our nations deterrent, Rwanda the only policy to stop the boats that’s on the table. And not to forget why Stop The Boats is important, the country is full, one trillion pounds on public services and you can’t see a dentist, doctor, and the schools and hospitals literally falling down.”
Starmer is going to be weak on immigration in a lot of places:
- Weak on the boats - Weak on student dependents - Weak on family income threshold
I will be very surprised if immigration in Starmer’s first year as PM isn’t down on current levels.
Legal net migration is almost mathematically certain to be, as we see the pick up in post-course emigration as the Covid student dip unwinds. Plus Hong Kong and Ukraine falling out of the stats.
Asylum seekers are harder to predict. Syria and Yemen are less of a source now but Sudan is in chaos. The Sahel is currently doing well for rainfall so no big drought-based exodus. Indeed long term the Sahel could well see greening and more rainfall. Just need to make fertilisers much more widely available.
... the Conservative offer of low taxes, low immigration, fiscal responsibility, stable government and strong defence..
Reproduced without comment for hopefully obvious reasons.
Some very good news today for the Tories. After last years much reduced boat crossings, The SKY News data and forensics team latest on stop the boats pledge, is lower now compared with last years totals.
If they are feeling pressure from Reform, this fact check on stopping boats IS excellent soundbite to keep using everywhere in April campaigning, leaflets, doorsteps, media ads, HoC, interviews.
I still think Rishi will call the general Election campaign for 2nd May, any day this week. Who’s 100% sure he won’t?
Me. And Rishi.
I said to my dad - do you want this May general election - and he answered absolutely not, we are too far behind to call one - and what politics history teaches us, economy is improving and with it voters and the don’t knows come back now. But I said you are only 11 behind right now, and can close a bit more in April election period, that I am really sure will be difficult to do come Autumn. And he said, just 11 behind now and harder work later in year? that’s not true at all - and that his dear daughter don’t understand these things.
But I’m absolutely sure I am right, I’ve more than proved I’m a brilliant armchair psephologist so I do know how this works, it’s about forced choice polling and first past the post constituency’s General Elections, that’s being different than all weekly polling these days giving people choice from a menu, such a big menu wasn’t always the case historically, and when it comes to a FPTP GE many menu items arn’t really in play anymore. Also does history teach us some marginal gains in economic reporting bring voters back and saves seats?
If this analysis of mine is right or wrong, it can’t properly be measured if Rishi calls it for May 2nd - but if does wait till autumn, we can scientifically measure using “forced choice”polling in April month with those in Autumn campaign month, to prove i was right or wrong. Once an election called, in campaign the forced choice polls should be best of all year for Conservatives.
And don’t use the “should have listened to your father” quote from Last Crusade. 😤
Harsh words from Dominic Cummings here. Perfect example of how the old media is now totally fake - the actual context is clear, he's talking about bloodbath for *the car industry* - but the ENTIRE OLD MEDIA are pretending he was threatening violence. BBC, Guardian, CNN, NYT - all of them.
The old media, Democrat establishment, Whitehall, UK lobby - none of them believe in facts any more, everything is about spinning fake news and gaslighting you that you're a victim of 'misinformation' if you don't believe them - UKR, Trump, child abuse sold as 'trans rights', pandemics/lab leak, Hunter's laptop ... everything they care about they lie about.
A remarkable level of projection, even by his standards.
On this particular point, however, he is correct. Trump is clearly talking about the auto industry
Hmmm.
'Now if I don't get elected, It'll be a bloodbath for the country, that'll be the least of it, It'll be a bloodbath for the country, that'll be the least of it, but...'
I think there's reason to assume he was talking about something *other* than the auto industry in that weird rambling aside, before going back to the auto industry.
It is of course possible he just didn't know what he was saying.
I'm actually currently involved in trying to import stock from the UK to Australia for a small business.I have no useful insights other than the Houthis are a pain in the arse. Our stuff is floating about in the Med.
Generally, it does seem a bit mad to import beef (bad for emissions) around the world (bad for emissions) from Australia (very bad for emissions). From a UK perspective, cattle can be quite good for the local environment, chewing up the ground, eating a variety of veg, better than sheep for wetland development. The RSPB use them on their reserves for this reason, IIRC.
It's not like the UK sustains itself on beef though, so there isn't much of a national security angle on this.
The cost, in terms of greenhouse gases, of shifting shit around the world is remarkably low, especially relative to all the other emissions that come from farming cattle. I would be staggered if Australian beef generated more than a couple of percent more than British ones. And, indeed, if they require less feed (because they can eat grass all year round), then they might generate less.
Absolutely!
People getting bent all out of shape that stuff is shipped around don't realise just how inconsequential the cost (environmental and economic) of shipping stuff is.
Using extra electricity to grow stuff out of season in the UK is worse for the environment than getting it in season from the other side of the planet.
But a great potential use of surplus renewable energy production in the winter. And fantastic for our future balance of payments.
I think it's a bit strange that people should be so quick to say the red and blue walls cannot ever be reconciled, when this was achieved just over four years ago at GE 2019. If the polls are anywhere like accurate, then Labour are poised to reconcile three major groups in the electorate - metropolitan liberals, blue labour and conservative swing voters.
These groups are not reconciled due to the oratorical brilliance of Keir-Ends-In-R Starmer, but due to Starmer's success in blandifying the Labour party so as not to put any of the groups off, and the categorical imperative of finding a means for these groups to punish the Tories.
Achieving something in reverse for the Tories requires only a bit of experience of Labour in government, and a Tory leader who isn't trying to actively alienate one part of the voter coalition.
I like your counter to this, with the 2019 evidence to back up your point.
However … those cracks were in the Party for a long time and we kid ourselves to think otherwise. That divide is really what brought down John Major and it didn’t do Margaret Thatcher much good in the end either. It all boiled to the surface when @TSE ’s beloved Davey boy idiotically called the Brexit referendum, thinking in his Old Etonian arrogance that he would pull off the same stunt as indyref.
(If you want to see what a shit Cameron really is then DO read the finale to Suzanne Heywood’s What Does Jeremy Think?)
I still maintain that 2019 was unique. Even I, a remainer, was utterly exasperated at the antics of that Remainer Parliament and at just the right moment along came Boris, someone uniquely gifted at deception to hoodwink the British people. With mellifluous honey-coated lies he pulled in blue and red wall voters. My Surrey tory friend, totally disillusioned now with the Party, STILL ADORES Boris and would vote for him like a shot.
Assuming Boris doesn’t make a Lazarite comeback, there’s no one else of his ilk. Once in a century.
Yes, it's true to say that the splits had been in the Tory party for a long time - but then that is true of any governing party in Britain. There is no single cohesive group of voters that is large enough to win a majority on its own. So it's normal for a governing party to be sustained by a coalition of voters divided amongst itself, and those divisions will obviously come to the fore when the party is generally unpopular.
I don't see anything unusual with what is happening to the Tories now, and so I don't think it requires anything extraordinary to fix the situation.
Indeed, what seems to be a more volatile electorate means that there is potential for the fractured Tory coalition to come back together (very temporarily) more quickly than currently appears possible. The situation facing an incoming Labour government is much more difficult than that encountered in 1997.
Although the Tories have been in government for nearly 14 years now, I think that is misleading. They have had several reinventions in that time, and so the last 14 years have been a lot more like the 1970s, than the long periods of Thatcherite/Blairite rule in the 80s/90s/00s.
Whatever Starmerism turns out to be I would not bet on it lasting that long. It's quite likely to be overturned by something very different, either from within the Labour party, or without, by the end of the decade.
A good response but your last paragraph is a fig leaf I’ve noticed some Conservatives clinging onto i.e. the assumption that Starmer is going to fail.
Whilst I don’t underestimate the magnitude of problems facing this country, and I’m no longer convinced Labour will fix them, I suspect many people will look back on the last 5 years as a horror show they never want to go near again in their lifetime.
I’m beginning to think Labour will be in power for 20 years.
I'm not a Conservative.
We'll see what Starmerism turns out to be - it's really hard to predict because he's shown so little indication of what his approach will be - but I included the possibility of Starmerism being overturned from within the Labour party. Whether Labour is in office for two decades, or not, I do not think Britain is in for a period of stable politics. There are large problems, that are difficult to solve, and a lot of rootless discontent sloshing about the political system as a result.
It could be that the Tory brand, and all the politicians associated with it, is so damaged that the voters won't go near it for a long time, but in that case the voter's discontent will manifest itself through other parties, or through factions within the Labour party. Cameron was PM for 6 years and 64 days. He wasn't brought down because the voters were ready to give Labour another go. I doubt very much that Starmer will have so long, but I don't see the Tories returning so soon either (thank God).
I'm instructing my financial advisor to advise me on protecting my assets against a potential confiscatory very left-wing Labour government.
It's perfectly possible Starmer gets dethroned, in office, for a Left-wing alternative like you say, and they utterly abuse the MP base they have in Parliament.
Well don't put it under your mattress, there appear to a lot of Reds under your bed.
Seriously, I wonder what legal options your financial adviser might suggest? Whatever they are, I'll warrant said IFA will be the only one to profit.
Who knows. One idea is to send some out the country and/or put it in a trusted relatives name.
But that holds risks in itself.
I could see (would vote for) a wealth tax of say 1-2% per annum on assets over say £1m. If that's what you class as 'confiscatory' it would likely cost you a larger percentage to avoid that.
I am genuinely intrigued that you fear such a threat.
No, much worse than that.
Go on - what does 'much worse than that' look like? What do you think is really a possibility at shall we say a >5% chance?
In West London, this level of property tax would push out anyone who wasn’t poor or on over £100k. Including those renting.
There are huge numbers of people who live there from the times before property went mad. Hence the interesting patch work of the redone houses with the expensive cars next to the down at heel looking places with the hatchback.
Increasing people’s bills by £1k a month would make the poll tax riots look tame.
I should have said, as I did in my next post, 'the exclusion of a principal private residence would be sensible.'
The problem then is that putting money into property becomes, even more, the way to store wealth.
And round we go.
That won't drive up house prices though - lack of supply does that.
Build more houses and it won't matter if people want to put more money into their private residence, the value will be dictated by supply and demand.
I’ve begun to despair about house building. Nimbyism appears to unite the country in a way little else does. Rich and poor, Brexit and remain, left and right. All have this same muscle reflex to object to any proposed development. Even the relatively young are at it round here.
The thing is so all pervading that I hide my quiet yimbyism from the neighbours for fear of being considered a traitor.
I think the NIMBYism is exacerbated by the lack of public services. It's hard to argue for more housing when you can't even provide an NHS dentist for the existing population.
Even LTNs are a reaction to more housing, as previously quiet neighbourhoods become ratruns for new ones.
Around here it’s not that. It’s pure aesthetics. People not wanting their nice view across the rooftops spoiled by a new building.
A large part is the shit that will be built. Densification means that in rural towns and villages, planners want houses with gardens so small that fence fires from BBQs are a serious issue. We are talking about patio squares - the width of the house and barely as long.
The mean, pinched things that they are building look horrible.
This, of course, is yet another aspect of the housing crisis: we desperately need the homes, but the developments that the volume housebuilders throw up are usually unfit for purpose: ludicrously expensive rabbit hutches with tiny rooms, postage stamp gardens at the back, and ugly car parking at the front. Developments are completely dominated by two priorities: maximising profit by squeezing as many dwellings onto the site as possible, and creating as many car parking spaces as possible. Indeed, given how bad the build quality of new homes frequently is, these estates are often better for the cars that inhabit them than the humans.
Thus we don't just have the legions of nimbies to contend with, we have an ecosystem of virtually unregulated cowboy developers to boot. You can understand why some of us are really pessimistic about the future. There is no real will to deal with big problems like this.
Harsh words from Dominic Cummings here. Perfect example of how the old media is now totally fake - the actual context is clear, he's talking about bloodbath for *the car industry* - but the ENTIRE OLD MEDIA are pretending he was threatening violence. BBC, Guardian, CNN, NYT - all of them.
The old media, Democrat establishment, Whitehall, UK lobby - none of them believe in facts any more, everything is about spinning fake news and gaslighting you that you're a victim of 'misinformation' if you don't believe them - UKR, Trump, child abuse sold as 'trans rights', pandemics/lab leak, Hunter's laptop ... everything they care about they lie about.
I think it's a bit strange that people should be so quick to say the red and blue walls cannot ever be reconciled, when this was achieved just over four years ago at GE 2019. If the polls are anywhere like accurate, then Labour are poised to reconcile three major groups in the electorate - metropolitan liberals, blue labour and conservative swing voters.
These groups are not reconciled due to the oratorical brilliance of Keir-Ends-In-R Starmer, but due to Starmer's success in blandifying the Labour party so as not to put any of the groups off, and the categorical imperative of finding a means for these groups to punish the Tories.
Achieving something in reverse for the Tories requires only a bit of experience of Labour in government, and a Tory leader who isn't trying to actively alienate one part of the voter coalition.
I like your counter to this, with the 2019 evidence to back up your point.
However … those cracks were in the Party for a long time and we kid ourselves to think otherwise. That divide is really what brought down John Major and it didn’t do Margaret Thatcher much good in the end either. It all boiled to the surface when @TSE ’s beloved Davey boy idiotically called the Brexit referendum, thinking in his Old Etonian arrogance that he would pull off the same stunt as indyref.
(If you want to see what a shit Cameron really is then DO read the finale to Suzanne Heywood’s What Does Jeremy Think?)
I still maintain that 2019 was unique. Even I, a remainer, was utterly exasperated at the antics of that Remainer Parliament and at just the right moment along came Boris, someone uniquely gifted at deception to hoodwink the British people. With mellifluous honey-coated lies he pulled in blue and red wall voters. My Surrey tory friend, totally disillusioned now with the Party, STILL ADORES Boris and would vote for him like a shot.
Assuming Boris doesn’t make a Lazarite comeback, there’s no one else of his ilk. Once in a century.
Yes, it's true to say that the splits had been in the Tory party for a long time - but then that is true of any governing party in Britain. There is no single cohesive group of voters that is large enough to win a majority on its own. So it's normal for a governing party to be sustained by a coalition of voters divided amongst itself, and those divisions will obviously come to the fore when the party is generally unpopular.
I don't see anything unusual with what is happening to the Tories now, and so I don't think it requires anything extraordinary to fix the situation.
Indeed, what seems to be a more volatile electorate means that there is potential for the fractured Tory coalition to come back together (very temporarily) more quickly than currently appears possible. The situation facing an incoming Labour government is much more difficult than that encountered in 1997.
Although the Tories have been in government for nearly 14 years now, I think that is misleading. They have had several reinventions in that time, and so the last 14 years have been a lot more like the 1970s, than the long periods of Thatcherite/Blairite rule in the 80s/90s/00s.
Whatever Starmerism turns out to be I would not bet on it lasting that long. It's quite likely to be overturned by something very different, either from within the Labour party, or without, by the end of the decade.
A good response but your last paragraph is a fig leaf I’ve noticed some Conservatives clinging onto i.e. the assumption that Starmer is going to fail.
Whilst I don’t underestimate the magnitude of problems facing this country, and I’m no longer convinced Labour will fix them, I suspect many people will look back on the last 5 years as a horror show they never want to go near again in their lifetime.
I’m beginning to think Labour will be in power for 20 years.
I'm not a Conservative.
We'll see what Starmerism turns out to be - it's really hard to predict because he's shown so little indication of what his approach will be - but I included the possibility of Starmerism being overturned from within the Labour party. Whether Labour is in office for two decades, or not, I do not think Britain is in for a period of stable politics. There are large problems, that are difficult to solve, and a lot of rootless discontent sloshing about the political system as a result.
It could be that the Tory brand, and all the politicians associated with it, is so damaged that the voters won't go near it for a long time, but in that case the voter's discontent will manifest itself through other parties, or through factions within the Labour party. Cameron was PM for 6 years and 64 days. He wasn't brought down because the voters were ready to give Labour another go. I doubt very much that Starmer will have so long, but I don't see the Tories returning so soon either (thank God).
I'm instructing my financial advisor to advise me on protecting my assets against a potential confiscatory very left-wing Labour government.
It's perfectly possible Starmer gets dethroned, in office, for a Left-wing alternative like you say, and they utterly abuse the MP base they have in Parliament.
Well don't put it under your mattress, there appear to a lot of Reds under your bed.
Seriously, I wonder what legal options your financial adviser might suggest? Whatever they are, I'll warrant said IFA will be the only one to profit.
Who knows. One idea is to send some out the country and/or put it in a trusted relatives name.
But that holds risks in itself.
I could see (would vote for) a wealth tax of say 1-2% per annum on assets over say £1m. If that's what you class as 'confiscatory' it would likely cost you a larger percentage to avoid that.
I am genuinely intrigued that you fear such a threat.
No, much worse than that.
Go on - what does 'much worse than that' look like? What do you think is really a possibility at shall we say a >5% chance?
In West London, this level of property tax would push out anyone who wasn’t poor or on over £100k. Including those renting.
There are huge numbers of people who live there from the times before property went mad. Hence the interesting patch work of the redone houses with the expensive cars next to the down at heel looking places with the hatchback.
Increasing people’s bills by £1k a month would make the poll tax riots look tame.
I should have said, as I did in my next post, 'the exclusion of a principal private residence would be sensible.'
The problem then is that putting money into property becomes, even more, the way to store wealth.
And round we go.
That won't drive up house prices though - lack of supply does that.
Build more houses and it won't matter if people want to put more money into their private residence, the value will be dictated by supply and demand.
I’ve begun to despair about house building. Nimbyism appears to unite the country in a way little else does. Rich and poor, Brexit and remain, left and right. All have this same muscle reflex to object to any proposed development. Even the relatively young are at it round here.
The thing is so all pervading that I hide my quiet yimbyism from the neighbours for fear of being considered a traitor.
I think the NIMBYism is exacerbated by the lack of public services. It's hard to argue for more housing when you can't even provide an NHS dentist for the existing population.
Even LTNs are a reaction to more housing, as previously quiet neighbourhoods become ratruns for new ones.
Around here it’s not that. It’s pure aesthetics. People not wanting their nice view across the rooftops spoiled by a new building.
A large part is the shit that will be built. Densification means that in rural towns and villages, planners want houses with gardens so small that fence fires from BBQs are a serious issue. We are talking about patio squares - the width of the house and barely as long.
The mean, pinched things that they are building look horrible.
This, of course, is yet another aspect of the housing crisis: we desperately need the homes, but the developments that the volume housebuilders throw up are usually unfit for purpose: ludicrously expensive rabbit hutches with tiny rooms, postage stamp gardens at the back, and ugly car parking at the front. Developments are completely dominated by two priorities: maximising profit by squeezing as many dwellings onto the site as possible, and creating as many car parking spaces as possible. Indeed, given how bad the build quality of new homes frequently is, these estates are often better for the cars that inhabit them than the humans.
Thus we don't just have the legions of nimbies to contend with, we have an ecosystem of virtually unregulated cowboy developers to boot. You can understand why some of us are really pessimistic about the future. There is no real will to deal with big problems like this.
Agreed. Whilst the median wage in the uk is still higher than asia once you take into account housing costs we are falling behind and you can argue now it is better to be a young person in bangkok or shanghai or hell even moscow than london
Harsh words from Dominic Cummings here. Perfect example of how the old media is now totally fake - the actual context is clear, he's talking about bloodbath for *the car industry* - but the ENTIRE OLD MEDIA are pretending he was threatening violence. BBC, Guardian, CNN, NYT - all of them.
The old media, Democrat establishment, Whitehall, UK lobby - none of them believe in facts any more, everything is about spinning fake news and gaslighting you that you're a victim of 'misinformation' if you don't believe them - UKR, Trump, child abuse sold as 'trans rights', pandemics/lab leak, Hunter's laptop ... everything they care about they lie about.
A remarkable level of projection, even by his standards.
On this particular point, however, he is correct. Trump is clearly talking about the auto industry
Hmmm.
'Now if I don't get elected, It'll be a bloodbath for the country, that'll be the least of it, It'll be a bloodbath for the country, that'll be the least of it, but...'
I think there's reason to assume he was talking about something *other* than the auto industry in that weird rambling aside, before going back to the auto industry.
It is of course possible he just didn't know what he was saying.
Why are we trying to construct a coherent argument from what is quite clearly semi-random word salad garbage ? (Which also applies to Dom C.)
And in any event, plausibly deniable threats are just part of his shtick.
Harsh words from Dominic Cummings here. Perfect example of how the old media is now totally fake - the actual context is clear, he's talking about bloodbath for *the car industry* - but the ENTIRE OLD MEDIA are pretending he was threatening violence. BBC, Guardian, CNN, NYT - all of them.
The old media, Democrat establishment, Whitehall, UK lobby - none of them believe in facts any more, everything is about spinning fake news and gaslighting you that you're a victim of 'misinformation' if you don't believe them - UKR, Trump, child abuse sold as 'trans rights', pandemics/lab leak, Hunter's laptop ... everything they care about they lie about.
A remarkable level of projection, even by his standards.
On this particular point, however, he is correct. Trump is clearly talking about the auto industry
Hmmm.
'Now if I don't get elected, It'll be a bloodbath for the country, that'll be the least of it, It'll be a bloodbath for the country, that'll be the least of it, but...'
I think there's reason to assume he was talking about something *other* than the auto industry in that weird rambling aside, before going back to the auto industry.
It is of course possible he just didn't know what he was saying.
Why are we trying to construct a coherent argument from what is quite clearly semi-random word salad garbage ? (Which also applies to Dom C.)
And in any event, plausibly deniable threats are just part of his shtick.
Another thing with Dominic Cummings is the strange Russia connection. He used to live in russia.
After graduating, Cummings moved to Russia and lived there until 1997.[12] He shared a flat with the later brexit-supporting economist Liam Halligan.[13]
He worked for a group attempting to set up an airline connecting Samara in southern Russia to Vienna in Austria which George Parker of the Financial Times said was "spectacularly unsuccessful".[
When you think of the chaos Cummings has caused in this country its all very strange.
Harsh words from Dominic Cummings here. Perfect example of how the old media is now totally fake - the actual context is clear, he's talking about bloodbath for *the car industry* - but the ENTIRE OLD MEDIA are pretending he was threatening violence. BBC, Guardian, CNN, NYT - all of them.
The old media, Democrat establishment, Whitehall, UK lobby - none of them believe in facts any more, everything is about spinning fake news and gaslighting you that you're a victim of 'misinformation' if you don't believe them - UKR, Trump, child abuse sold as 'trans rights', pandemics/lab leak, Hunter's laptop ... everything they care about they lie about.
A remarkable level of projection, even by his standards.
Cummings is right on the Trump quote though, it’s been taken way out of context by the media.
Every time this happens, a few more votes move into Trump’s column. The media are going to make the same mistakes they all made in 2016, and give him a billion dollars of free publicity.
But it’s all OK coz Biden has created 300,000 car washing jobs for Haitians
Expensive city now too. Gone are the weekend breaks in nyc for most. Hotel prices exorbitant nothing decent for less than 300 quid and food and drink prices exorbitant.
But it’s all OK coz Biden has created 300,000 car washing jobs for Haitians
And, of course, violent crime is down 15% from where it was in the last year of the Trump administration and has been lower every year that Biden has been in power than it was in any year when Trump was. And the crime rate in NY is, per capita, less than a third of what it is in the southern red states.
Harsh words from Dominic Cummings here. Perfect example of how the old media is now totally fake - the actual context is clear, he's talking about bloodbath for *the car industry* - but the ENTIRE OLD MEDIA are pretending he was threatening violence. BBC, Guardian, CNN, NYT - all of them.
The old media, Democrat establishment, Whitehall, UK lobby - none of them believe in facts any more, everything is about spinning fake news and gaslighting you that you're a victim of 'misinformation' if you don't believe them - UKR, Trump, child abuse sold as 'trans rights', pandemics/lab leak, Hunter's laptop ... everything they care about they lie about.
A remarkable level of projection, even by his standards.
Cummings is right on the Trump quote though, it’s been taken way out of context by the media.
Every time this happens, a few more votes move into Trump’s column. The media are going to make the same mistakes they all made in 2016, and give him a billion dollars of free publicity.
As in Goldwater, whose despairing aides begged reporters 'don't quote what he says, quote what he means?'
Has anyone else stayed for free in a villa redesigned by Michelangelo and Vasari and slept in the suite of rooms once occupied by Nicollo Machiavelli with a magnificent loggia overlooking the rolling Tuscan hills and a notch cut in nearby woods, on the orders of Niccolo Machiavelli, allowing anyone on the loggia to see Brunelleschi’s Duomo of Firenze 30km away?
@Sean_F I don't see any reason why Blue Wall and Red Wall can't politically unite.
Firstly, there's been a convergence in attitudes there, not a divergence - the Red Wall represents rural/semi-rural seats that'd be reliably Tory in the South were it not for the coal-mining legacy - and, secondly, the Conservative offer of low taxes, low immigration, fiscal responsibility, stable government and strong defence has been one that, nominally, has been consistent since 2010 and before.
It's just they haven't delivered.
Some of that is bad luck. Much more is poor quality candidates, flawed leaders and terrible behaviour.
Rubbish. Rural seats even in the north are reliably tory. The red wall is basically a succession of crap towns like wigan and rotherham.
I've lived in Godalming (Surrey) and next to Ashfield, Notts, which are archetypal blue and red wall. They are not remotely convergent in prosperity or social attitudes.
But it’s all OK coz Biden has created 300,000 car washing jobs for Haitians
And, of course, violent crime is down 15% from where it was in the last year of the Trump administration and has been lower every year that Biden has been in power than it was in any year when Trump was. And the crime rate in NY is, per capita, less than a third of what it is in the southern red states.
But hey, facts eh?
I was pointing more to the narrative than the facts (and I should have said that, apologies)
One reason Trump is doing well is the PERCEPTION the country is going to shit in multiple ways. Now from some angles it is true: Biden really has lost control of the border (with help from treacherous republicans)
In other ways it is not true at all. Biden’s economic record is excellent - and yet he doesn’t get credit for it
In other fields - law and order - the picture is mixed. Ditto foreign policy. Sure Biden is strong in Ukraine but the bald fact is: there weren’t any of these wars when Trump was in power
I think it's a bit strange that people should be so quick to say the red and blue walls cannot ever be reconciled, when this was achieved just over four years ago at GE 2019. If the polls are anywhere like accurate, then Labour are poised to reconcile three major groups in the electorate - metropolitan liberals, blue labour and conservative swing voters.
These groups are not reconciled due to the oratorical brilliance of Keir-Ends-In-R Starmer, but due to Starmer's success in blandifying the Labour party so as not to put any of the groups off, and the categorical imperative of finding a means for these groups to punish the Tories.
Achieving something in reverse for the Tories requires only a bit of experience of Labour in government, and a Tory leader who isn't trying to actively alienate one part of the voter coalition.
I like your counter to this, with the 2019 evidence to back up your point.
However … those cracks were in the Party for a long time and we kid ourselves to think otherwise. That divide is really what brought down John Major and it didn’t do Margaret Thatcher much good in the end either. It all boiled to the surface when @TSE ’s beloved Davey boy idiotically called the Brexit referendum, thinking in his Old Etonian arrogance that he would pull off the same stunt as indyref.
(If you want to see what a shit Cameron really is then DO read the finale to Suzanne Heywood’s What Does Jeremy Think?)
I still maintain that 2019 was unique. Even I, a remainer, was utterly exasperated at the antics of that Remainer Parliament and at just the right moment along came Boris, someone uniquely gifted at deception to hoodwink the British people. With mellifluous honey-coated lies he pulled in blue and red wall voters. My Surrey tory friend, totally disillusioned now with the Party, STILL ADORES Boris and would vote for him like a shot.
Assuming Boris doesn’t make a Lazarite comeback, there’s no one else of his ilk. Once in a century.
Yes, it's true to say that the splits had been in the Tory party for a long time - but then that is true of any governing party in Britain. There is no single cohesive group of voters that is large enough to win a majority on its own. So it's normal for a governing party to be sustained by a coalition of voters divided amongst itself, and those divisions will obviously come to the fore when the party is generally unpopular.
I don't see anything unusual with what is happening to the Tories now, and so I don't think it requires anything extraordinary to fix the situation.
Indeed, what seems to be a more volatile electorate means that there is potential for the fractured Tory coalition to come back together (very temporarily) more quickly than currently appears possible. The situation facing an incoming Labour government is much more difficult than that encountered in 1997.
Although the Tories have been in government for nearly 14 years now, I think that is misleading. They have had several reinventions in that time, and so the last 14 years have been a lot more like the 1970s, than the long periods of Thatcherite/Blairite rule in the 80s/90s/00s.
Whatever Starmerism turns out to be I would not bet on it lasting that long. It's quite likely to be overturned by something very different, either from within the Labour party, or without, by the end of the decade.
A good response but your last paragraph is a fig leaf I’ve noticed some Conservatives clinging onto i.e. the assumption that Starmer is going to fail.
Whilst I don’t underestimate the magnitude of problems facing this country, and I’m no longer convinced Labour will fix them, I suspect many people will look back on the last 5 years as a horror show they never want to go near again in their lifetime.
I’m beginning to think Labour will be in power for 20 years.
I'm not a Conservative.
We'll see what Starmerism turns out to be - it's really hard to predict because he's shown so little indication of what his approach will be - but I included the possibility of Starmerism being overturned from within the Labour party. Whether Labour is in office for two decades, or not, I do not think Britain is in for a period of stable politics. There are large problems, that are difficult to solve, and a lot of rootless discontent sloshing about the political system as a result.
It could be that the Tory brand, and all the politicians associated with it, is so damaged that the voters won't go near it for a long time, but in that case the voter's discontent will manifest itself through other parties, or through factions within the Labour party. Cameron was PM for 6 years and 64 days. He wasn't brought down because the voters were ready to give Labour another go. I doubt very much that Starmer will have so long, but I don't see the Tories returning so soon either (thank God).
I'm instructing my financial advisor to advise me on protecting my assets against a potential confiscatory very left-wing Labour government.
It's perfectly possible Starmer gets dethroned, in office, for a Left-wing alternative like you say, and they utterly abuse the MP base they have in Parliament.
Well don't put it under your mattress, there appear to a lot of Reds under your bed.
Seriously, I wonder what legal options your financial adviser might suggest? Whatever they are, I'll warrant said IFA will be the only one to profit.
Who knows. One idea is to send some out the country and/or put it in a trusted relatives name.
But that holds risks in itself.
I could see (would vote for) a wealth tax of say 1-2% per annum on assets over say £1m. If that's what you class as 'confiscatory' it would likely cost you a larger percentage to avoid that.
I am genuinely intrigued that you fear such a threat.
No, much worse than that.
Go on - what does 'much worse than that' look like? What do you think is really a possibility at shall we say a >5% chance?
In West London, this level of property tax would push out anyone who wasn’t poor or on over £100k. Including those renting.
There are huge numbers of people who live there from the times before property went mad. Hence the interesting patch work of the redone houses with the expensive cars next to the down at heel looking places with the hatchback.
Increasing people’s bills by £1k a month would make the poll tax riots look tame.
I should have said, as I did in my next post, 'the exclusion of a principal private residence would be sensible.'
The problem then is that putting money into property becomes, even more, the way to store wealth.
And round we go.
That won't drive up house prices though - lack of supply does that.
Build more houses and it won't matter if people want to put more money into their private residence, the value will be dictated by supply and demand.
I’ve begun to despair about house building. Nimbyism appears to unite the country in a way little else does. Rich and poor, Brexit and remain, left and right. All have this same muscle reflex to object to any proposed development. Even the relatively young are at it round here.
The thing is so all pervading that I hide my quiet yimbyism from the neighbours for fear of being considered a traitor.
I think the NIMBYism is exacerbated by the lack of public services. It's hard to argue for more housing when you can't even provide an NHS dentist for the existing population.
Even LTNs are a reaction to more housing, as previously quiet neighbourhoods become ratruns for new ones.
Around here it’s not that. It’s pure aesthetics. People not wanting their nice view across the rooftops spoiled by a new building.
A large part is the shit that will be built. Densification means that in rural towns and villages, planners want houses with gardens so small that fence fires from BBQs are a serious issue. We are talking about patio squares - the width of the house and barely as long.
The mean, pinched things that they are building look horrible.
This, of course, is yet another aspect of the housing crisis: we desperately need the homes, but the developments that the volume housebuilders throw up are usually unfit for purpose: ludicrously expensive rabbit hutches with tiny rooms, postage stamp gardens at the back, and ugly car parking at the front. Developments are completely dominated by two priorities: maximising profit by squeezing as many dwellings onto the site as possible, and creating as many car parking spaces as possible. Indeed, given how bad the build quality of new homes frequently is, these estates are often better for the cars that inhabit them than the humans.
Thus we don't just have the legions of nimbies to contend with, we have an ecosystem of virtually unregulated cowboy developers to boot. You can understand why some of us are really pessimistic about the future. There is no real will to deal with big problems like this.
Agreed. Whilst the median wage in the uk is still higher than asia once you take into account housing costs we are falling behind and you can argue now it is better to be a young person in bangkok or shanghai or hell even moscow than london
The problem with being a young person in Moscow is that you are highly likely to be sent to fight an illegal and pointless war in Ukraine where you will be sent to test the theory that Russia has more men than Ukraine has bullets and get shot by your own side if you don't fancy it. Which is why so many of them left.
I’ve been challenged to come up with a photo more striking than the volcano photo by @Foxy’s sister in law. I could just show you better volcano photos - right by the lava - that I took in Erta Ale, Ethiopia, but that’s too easy
So here’s a truly weird photo, enclosing a mystery I have never unravelled. Perhaps PB can
Picture it. A decade ago I find myself with some spare days during a stone toy research trip in the Atacama desert, Chile. So I decide to visit the deathliest place on earth: ie the place with the least life, even less than Greenland, or the Antarctic, or anywhere in the Sahara, Gobi, and so on.
The reason this place, Yungay, is so deathly – no microbial life, no tiny bugs, nothing - is that it sits in a ‘double rain shadow’– surrounded on all sides by mountains, so it has only rained a few times in the last 200,000 years.When I get there it turns out to be a predictably desolate patch of nothing with a long road running through, which sees one or two trucks a day. But there is one more thing: the relics of an old mine, which closed in the 1950s. Alongside the crumbling ruin of the mine is a cemetery for the miners, with names and sometimes photos. Preserved by the dry heat.
Some of the miners died terribly young. What I cannot explain are the additions since the 1950s. Alongside every grave, sometimes piled on top of them, there are plastic toys and trinkets, Chinese toy Ferraris, little water pistols, plastic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, foreign coins, miniature Thomas the Tank Engines, green plastic toy soldiers. Who has been coming here, for decades, to the deathliest place on earth, to leave a Snoopy?
Looks like an album cover from some 1970s prog rock band to me. Pink Floyd?
If you have any explanation I’d welcome it
The last miners died in the 1950s. This place is wildly remote. The nearest town is Antofagasta - 75km of hard driving away
Who the fuck is leaving these trinkets, in their thousands, to this day, and why??
You’ve encouraged me to imagine a wrinkled, sun burnished vieja tottering out there to leave a small toy for their son who died tragically barely out of childhood so many years ago.
But it’s all OK coz Biden has created 300,000 car washing jobs for Haitians
Expensive city now too. Gone are the weekend breaks in nyc for most. Hotel prices exorbitant nothing decent for less than 300 quid and food and drink prices exorbitant.
New York probably has worse problems than London
And yes America is now insanely expensive - even for average Americans. This also plays badly for Biden
But it’s all OK coz Biden has created 300,000 car washing jobs for Haitians
Expensive city now too. Gone are the weekend breaks in nyc for most. Hotel prices exorbitant nothing decent for less than 300 quid and food and drink prices exorbitant.
It's almost like the place is in high demand and that is pushing up prices relative to other parts of the US.
It's astonishing how readily people can view five videos on Twitter and believe they are representative. Especially when it is clear those videos have been picked and amplified by those with an agenda. Just ridiculous levels of gullibility.
But it’s all OK coz Biden has created 300,000 car washing jobs for Haitians
And, of course, violent crime is down 15% from where it was in the last year of the Trump administration and has been lower every year that Biden has been in power than it was in any year when Trump was. And the crime rate in NY is, per capita, less than a third of what it is in the southern red states.
But hey, facts eh?
I was pointing more to the narrative than the facts (and I should have said that, apologies)
One reason Trump is doing well is the PERCEPTION the country is going to shit in multiple ways. Now from some angles it is true: Biden really has lost control of the border (with help from treacherous republicans)
In other ways it is not true at all. Biden’s economic record is excellent - and yet he doesn’t get credit for it
In other fields - law and order - the picture is mixed. Ditto foreign policy. Sure Biden is strong in Ukraine but the bald fact is: there weren’t any of these wars when Trump was in power
I agree with the perception point. Trump, of course, does a lot to build these perceptions but they are false.
It was Biden that bit the bullet and got America out of there, not Trump. And the Ukraine war is expensive but it is not producing a lot of US body bags (there have been some due to volunteers, not regular army).
The border is a major problem for Biden, probably his biggest, but the sinking of a cross party bill on Trump's instructions has hopefully defused it somewhat.
The next time someone criticises me for how I describe the appearance of women in public life, or we get a news report about how, ooh, I dunno, police officers or others, describe women and everyone gets outraged, I am going to remind them of this thread and how people on here talked about Penny Mordaunt.
But it’s all OK coz Biden has created 300,000 car washing jobs for Haitians
Expensive city now too. Gone are the weekend breaks in nyc for most. Hotel prices exorbitant nothing decent for less than 300 quid and food and drink prices exorbitant.
It's almost like the place is in high demand and that is pushing up prices relative to other parts of the US.
It's astonishing how readily people can view five videos on Twitter and believe they are representative. Especially when it is clear those videos have been picked and amplified by those with an agenda. Just ridiculous levels of gullibility.
I don’t think there is any dispute that New York public transport is a bit sketchy at the moment. The mayor has just deployed 1000 National Guard to control it, but now this video appears, despite that
But it’s all OK coz Biden has created 300,000 car washing jobs for Haitians
And, of course, violent crime is down 15% from where it was in the last year of the Trump administration and has been lower every year that Biden has been in power than it was in any year when Trump was. And the crime rate in NY is, per capita, less than a third of what it is in the southern red states.
But hey, facts eh?
hmmm
if the police has started ignoring and not recording crimes, then crime rates are going to drop.
I think it's a bit strange that people should be so quick to say the red and blue walls cannot ever be reconciled, when this was achieved just over four years ago at GE 2019. If the polls are anywhere like accurate, then Labour are poised to reconcile three major groups in the electorate - metropolitan liberals, blue labour and conservative swing voters.
These groups are not reconciled due to the oratorical brilliance of Keir-Ends-In-R Starmer, but due to Starmer's success in blandifying the Labour party so as not to put any of the groups off, and the categorical imperative of finding a means for these groups to punish the Tories.
Achieving something in reverse for the Tories requires only a bit of experience of Labour in government, and a Tory leader who isn't trying to actively alienate one part of the voter coalition.
I like your counter to this, with the 2019 evidence to back up your point.
However … those cracks were in the Party for a long time and we kid ourselves to think otherwise. That divide is really what brought down John Major and it didn’t do Margaret Thatcher much good in the end either. It all boiled to the surface when @TSE ’s beloved Davey boy idiotically called the Brexit referendum, thinking in his Old Etonian arrogance that he would pull off the same stunt as indyref.
(If you want to see what a shit Cameron really is then DO read the finale to Suzanne Heywood’s What Does Jeremy Think?)
I still maintain that 2019 was unique. Even I, a remainer, was utterly exasperated at the antics of that Remainer Parliament and at just the right moment along came Boris, someone uniquely gifted at deception to hoodwink the British people. With mellifluous honey-coated lies he pulled in blue and red wall voters. My Surrey tory friend, totally disillusioned now with the Party, STILL ADORES Boris and would vote for him like a shot.
Assuming Boris doesn’t make a Lazarite comeback, there’s no one else of his ilk. Once in a century.
Yes, it's true to say that the splits had been in the Tory party for a long time - but then that is true of any governing party in Britain. There is no single cohesive group of voters that is large enough to win a majority on its own. So it's normal for a governing party to be sustained by a coalition of voters divided amongst itself, and those divisions will obviously come to the fore when the party is generally unpopular.
I don't see anything unusual with what is happening to the Tories now, and so I don't think it requires anything extraordinary to fix the situation.
Indeed, what seems to be a more volatile electorate means that there is potential for the fractured Tory coalition to come back together (very temporarily) more quickly than currently appears possible. The situation facing an incoming Labour government is much more difficult than that encountered in 1997.
Although the Tories have been in government for nearly 14 years now, I think that is misleading. They have had several reinventions in that time, and so the last 14 years have been a lot more like the 1970s, than the long periods of Thatcherite/Blairite rule in the 80s/90s/00s.
Whatever Starmerism turns out to be I would not bet on it lasting that long. It's quite likely to be overturned by something very different, either from within the Labour party, or without, by the end of the decade.
A good response but your last paragraph is a fig leaf I’ve noticed some Conservatives clinging onto i.e. the assumption that Starmer is going to fail.
Whilst I don’t underestimate the magnitude of problems facing this country, and I’m no longer convinced Labour will fix them, I suspect many people will look back on the last 5 years as a horror show they never want to go near again in their lifetime.
I’m beginning to think Labour will be in power for 20 years.
I'm not a Conservative.
We'll see what Starmerism turns out to be - it's really hard to predict because he's shown so little indication of what his approach will be - but I included the possibility of Starmerism being overturned from within the Labour party. Whether Labour is in office for two decades, or not, I do not think Britain is in for a period of stable politics. There are large problems, that are difficult to solve, and a lot of rootless discontent sloshing about the political system as a result.
It could be that the Tory brand, and all the politicians associated with it, is so damaged that the voters won't go near it for a long time, but in that case the voter's discontent will manifest itself through other parties, or through factions within the Labour party. Cameron was PM for 6 years and 64 days. He wasn't brought down because the voters were ready to give Labour another go. I doubt very much that Starmer will have so long, but I don't see the Tories returning so soon either (thank God).
I'm instructing my financial advisor to advise me on protecting my assets against a potential confiscatory very left-wing Labour government.
It's perfectly possible Starmer gets dethroned, in office, for a Left-wing alternative like you say, and they utterly abuse the MP base they have in Parliament.
Well don't put it under your mattress, there appear to a lot of Reds under your bed.
Seriously, I wonder what legal options your financial adviser might suggest? Whatever they are, I'll warrant said IFA will be the only one to profit.
Who knows. One idea is to send some out the country and/or put it in a trusted relatives name.
But that holds risks in itself.
I could see (would vote for) a wealth tax of say 1-2% per annum on assets over say £1m. If that's what you class as 'confiscatory' it would likely cost you a larger percentage to avoid that.
I am genuinely intrigued that you fear such a threat.
No, much worse than that.
Go on - what does 'much worse than that' look like? What do you think is really a possibility at shall we say a >5% chance?
In West London, this level of property tax would push out anyone who wasn’t poor or on over £100k. Including those renting.
There are huge numbers of people who live there from the times before property went mad. Hence the interesting patch work of the redone houses with the expensive cars next to the down at heel looking places with the hatchback.
Increasing people’s bills by £1k a month would make the poll tax riots look tame.
I should have said, as I did in my next post, 'the exclusion of a principal private residence would be sensible.'
The problem then is that putting money into property becomes, even more, the way to store wealth.
And round we go.
That won't drive up house prices though - lack of supply does that.
Build more houses and it won't matter if people want to put more money into their private residence, the value will be dictated by supply and demand.
I’ve begun to despair about house building. Nimbyism appears to unite the country in a way little else does. Rich and poor, Brexit and remain, left and right. All have this same muscle reflex to object to any proposed development. Even the relatively young are at it round here.
The thing is so all pervading that I hide my quiet yimbyism from the neighbours for fear of being considered a traitor.
I think the NIMBYism is exacerbated by the lack of public services. It's hard to argue for more housing when you can't even provide an NHS dentist for the existing population.
Even LTNs are a reaction to more housing, as previously quiet neighbourhoods become ratruns for new ones.
Around here it’s not that. It’s pure aesthetics. People not wanting their nice view across the rooftops spoiled by a new building.
A large part is the shit that will be built. Densification means that in rural towns and villages, planners want houses with gardens so small that fence fires from BBQs are a serious issue. We are talking about patio squares - the width of the house and barely as long.
The mean, pinched things that they are building look horrible.
This, of course, is yet another aspect of the housing crisis: we desperately need the homes, but the developments that the volume housebuilders throw up are usually unfit for purpose: ludicrously expensive rabbit hutches with tiny rooms, postage stamp gardens at the back, and ugly car parking at the front. Developments are completely dominated by two priorities: maximising profit by squeezing as many dwellings onto the site as possible, and creating as many car parking spaces as possible. Indeed, given how bad the build quality of new homes frequently is, these estates are often better for the cars that inhabit them than the humans.
Thus we don't just have the legions of nimbies to contend with, we have an ecosystem of virtually unregulated cowboy developers to boot. You can understand why some of us are really pessimistic about the future. There is no real will to deal with big problems like this.
Agreed. Whilst the median wage in the uk is still higher than asia once you take into account housing costs we are falling behind and you can argue now it is better to be a young person in bangkok or shanghai or hell even moscow than london
The problem with being a young person in Moscow is that you are highly likely to be sent to fight an illegal and pointless war in Ukraine where you will be sent to test the theory that Russia has more men than Ukraine has bullets and get shot by your own side if you don't fancy it. Which is why so many of them left.
Not in the Third Rome. Less than 1% of those eligible have been mobilised in Moscow.
The SMO mobilisation effort focuses on dirt poor shit holes like Dagestan and the ex-Ukrainian oblasts like Donetsk.
I’ve been challenged to come up with a photo more striking than the volcano photo by @Foxy’s sister in law. I could just show you better volcano photos - right by the lava - that I took in Erta Ale, Ethiopia, but that’s too easy
So here’s a truly weird photo, enclosing a mystery I have never unravelled. Perhaps PB can
Picture it. A decade ago I find myself with some spare days during a stone toy research trip in the Atacama desert, Chile. So I decide to visit the deathliest place on earth: ie the place with the least life, even less than Greenland, or the Antarctic, or anywhere in the Sahara, Gobi, and so on.
The reason this place, Yungay, is so deathly – no microbial life, no tiny bugs, nothing - is that it sits in a ‘double rain shadow’– surrounded on all sides by mountains, so it has only rained a few times in the last 200,000 years.When I get there it turns out to be a predictably desolate patch of nothing with a long road running through, which sees one or two trucks a day. But there is one more thing: the relics of an old mine, which closed in the 1950s. Alongside the crumbling ruin of the mine is a cemetery for the miners, with names and sometimes photos. Preserved by the dry heat.
Some of the miners died terribly young. What I cannot explain are the additions since the 1950s. Alongside every grave, sometimes piled on top of them, there are plastic toys and trinkets, Chinese toy Ferraris, little water pistols, plastic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, foreign coins, miniature Thomas the Tank Engines, green plastic toy soldiers. Who has been coming here, for decades, to the deathliest place on earth, to leave a Snoopy?
Looks like an album cover from some 1970s prog rock band to me. Pink Floyd?
If you have any explanation I’d welcome it
The last miners died in the 1950s. This place is wildly remote. The nearest town is Antofagasta - 75km of hard driving away
Who the fuck is leaving these trinkets, in their thousands, to this day, and why??
You’ve encouraged me to imagine a wrinkled, sun burnished vieja tottering out there to leave a small toy for their son who died tragically barely out of childhood so many years ago.
It must be something like that. Some weird pilgrimage tradition that endures in the miners’ families
Even weirder some of the toys were obviously new additions. I took that photo in 2011 I think the newest grave in the cemetery was about 1952 - so sixty years later the families are STILL making the trek to Yungay to remember some great great uncle who died in a mine in the most desolate spot on the planet
@Sean_F I don't see any reason why Blue Wall and Red Wall can't politically unite.
Firstly, there's been a convergence in attitudes there, not a divergence - the Red Wall represents rural/semi-rural seats that'd be reliably Tory in the South were it not for the coal-mining legacy - and, secondly, the Conservative offer of low taxes, low immigration, fiscal responsibility, stable government and strong defence has been one that, nominally, has been consistent since 2010 and before.
It's just they haven't delivered.
Some of that is bad luck. Much more is poor quality candidates, flawed leaders and terrible behaviour.
Rubbish. Rural seats even in the north are reliably tory. The red wall is basically a succession of crap towns like wigan and rotherham.
Wigan isn't a "crap town" in any way shape or form. It has full employment, affordable housing, decent schools and is a highly desirable location for commuting to Manchester and Liverpool. And the World Champion in RL. It was in the 80's.
I think it's a bit strange that people should be so quick to say the red and blue walls cannot ever be reconciled, when this was achieved just over four years ago at GE 2019. If the polls are anywhere like accurate, then Labour are poised to reconcile three major groups in the electorate - metropolitan liberals, blue labour and conservative swing voters.
These groups are not reconciled due to the oratorical brilliance of Keir-Ends-In-R Starmer, but due to Starmer's success in blandifying the Labour party so as not to put any of the groups off, and the categorical imperative of finding a means for these groups to punish the Tories.
Achieving something in reverse for the Tories requires only a bit of experience of Labour in government, and a Tory leader who isn't trying to actively alienate one part of the voter coalition.
I like your counter to this, with the 2019 evidence to back up your point.
However … those cracks were in the Party for a long time and we kid ourselves to think otherwise. That divide is really what brought down John Major and it didn’t do Margaret Thatcher much good in the end either. It all boiled to the surface when @TSE ’s beloved Davey boy idiotically called the Brexit referendum, thinking in his Old Etonian arrogance that he would pull off the same stunt as indyref.
(If you want to see what a shit Cameron really is then DO read the finale to Suzanne Heywood’s What Does Jeremy Think?)
I still maintain that 2019 was unique. Even I, a remainer, was utterly exasperated at the antics of that Remainer Parliament and at just the right moment along came Boris, someone uniquely gifted at deception to hoodwink the British people. With mellifluous honey-coated lies he pulled in blue and red wall voters. My Surrey tory friend, totally disillusioned now with the Party, STILL ADORES Boris and would vote for him like a shot.
Assuming Boris doesn’t make a Lazarite comeback, there’s no one else of his ilk. Once in a century.
Yes, it's true to say that the splits had been in the Tory party for a long time - but then that is true of any governing party in Britain. There is no single cohesive group of voters that is large enough to win a majority on its own. So it's normal for a governing party to be sustained by a coalition of voters divided amongst itself, and those divisions will obviously come to the fore when the party is generally unpopular.
I don't see anything unusual with what is happening to the Tories now, and so I don't think it requires anything extraordinary to fix the situation.
Indeed, what seems to be a more volatile electorate means that there is potential for the fractured Tory coalition to come back together (very temporarily) more quickly than currently appears possible. The situation facing an incoming Labour government is much more difficult than that encountered in 1997.
Although the Tories have been in government for nearly 14 years now, I think that is misleading. They have had several reinventions in that time, and so the last 14 years have been a lot more like the 1970s, than the long periods of Thatcherite/Blairite rule in the 80s/90s/00s.
Whatever Starmerism turns out to be I would not bet on it lasting that long. It's quite likely to be overturned by something very different, either from within the Labour party, or without, by the end of the decade.
A good response but your last paragraph is a fig leaf I’ve noticed some Conservatives clinging onto i.e. the assumption that Starmer is going to fail.
Whilst I don’t underestimate the magnitude of problems facing this country, and I’m no longer convinced Labour will fix them, I suspect many people will look back on the last 5 years as a horror show they never want to go near again in their lifetime.
I’m beginning to think Labour will be in power for 20 years.
I'm not a Conservative.
We'll see what Starmerism turns out to be - it's really hard to predict because he's shown so little indication of what his approach will be - but I included the possibility of Starmerism being overturned from within the Labour party. Whether Labour is in office for two decades, or not, I do not think Britain is in for a period of stable politics. There are large problems, that are difficult to solve, and a lot of rootless discontent sloshing about the political system as a result.
It could be that the Tory brand, and all the politicians associated with it, is so damaged that the voters won't go near it for a long time, but in that case the voter's discontent will manifest itself through other parties, or through factions within the Labour party. Cameron was PM for 6 years and 64 days. He wasn't brought down because the voters were ready to give Labour another go. I doubt very much that Starmer will have so long, but I don't see the Tories returning so soon either (thank God).
I'm instructing my financial advisor to advise me on protecting my assets against a potential confiscatory very left-wing Labour government.
It's perfectly possible Starmer gets dethroned, in office, for a Left-wing alternative like you say, and they utterly abuse the MP base they have in Parliament.
Well don't put it under your mattress, there appear to a lot of Reds under your bed.
Seriously, I wonder what legal options your financial adviser might suggest? Whatever they are, I'll warrant said IFA will be the only one to profit.
Who knows. One idea is to send some out the country and/or put it in a trusted relatives name.
But that holds risks in itself.
I could see (would vote for) a wealth tax of say 1-2% per annum on assets over say £1m. If that's what you class as 'confiscatory' it would likely cost you a larger percentage to avoid that.
I am genuinely intrigued that you fear such a threat.
The problem is that taxation is 'progressive' - and not in the way you or I normally mean. What starts with a tax just on assets over 1 million quickly becomes a tax on 500K, then 200K and then on all assets over a nominal value including your family home. This is what we see in many places which do have wealth taxes and is sure to be the way things progress here. Much like authoritarian laws, once you have put them in place not only is it very difficult toget rid of them but they are pernicious and spread to areas you never intended.
Can you give some specific examples of this happening “in many places which do have wealth taxes”? Name five.
There are only 5 countries that have wealth taxes these days.That is because it is such a shit idea.
The next time someone criticises me for how I describe the appearance of women in public life, or we get a news report about how, ooh, I dunno, police officers or others, describe women and everyone gets outraged, I am going to remind them of this thread and how people on here talked about Penny Mordaunt.
I think it's a bit strange that people should be so quick to say the red and blue walls cannot ever be reconciled, when this was achieved just over four years ago at GE 2019. If the polls are anywhere like accurate, then Labour are poised to reconcile three major groups in the electorate - metropolitan liberals, blue labour and conservative swing voters.
These groups are not reconciled due to the oratorical brilliance of Keir-Ends-In-R Starmer, but due to Starmer's success in blandifying the Labour party so as not to put any of the groups off, and the categorical imperative of finding a means for these groups to punish the Tories.
Achieving something in reverse for the Tories requires only a bit of experience of Labour in government, and a Tory leader who isn't trying to actively alienate one part of the voter coalition.
I like your counter to this, with the 2019 evidence to back up your point.
However … those cracks were in the Party for a long time and we kid ourselves to think otherwise. That divide is really what brought down John Major and it didn’t do Margaret Thatcher much good in the end either. It all boiled to the surface when @TSE ’s beloved Davey boy idiotically called the Brexit referendum, thinking in his Old Etonian arrogance that he would pull off the same stunt as indyref.
(If you want to see what a shit Cameron really is then DO read the finale to Suzanne Heywood’s What Does Jeremy Think?)
I still maintain that 2019 was unique. Even I, a remainer, was utterly exasperated at the antics of that Remainer Parliament and at just the right moment along came Boris, someone uniquely gifted at deception to hoodwink the British people. With mellifluous honey-coated lies he pulled in blue and red wall voters. My Surrey tory friend, totally disillusioned now with the Party, STILL ADORES Boris and would vote for him like a shot.
Assuming Boris doesn’t make a Lazarite comeback, there’s no one else of his ilk. Once in a century.
Yes, it's true to say that the splits had been in the Tory party for a long time - but then that is true of any governing party in Britain. There is no single cohesive group of voters that is large enough to win a majority on its own. So it's normal for a governing party to be sustained by a coalition of voters divided amongst itself, and those divisions will obviously come to the fore when the party is generally unpopular.
I don't see anything unusual with what is happening to the Tories now, and so I don't think it requires anything extraordinary to fix the situation.
Indeed, what seems to be a more volatile electorate means that there is potential for the fractured Tory coalition to come back together (very temporarily) more quickly than currently appears possible. The situation facing an incoming Labour government is much more difficult than that encountered in 1997.
Although the Tories have been in government for nearly 14 years now, I think that is misleading. They have had several reinventions in that time, and so the last 14 years have been a lot more like the 1970s, than the long periods of Thatcherite/Blairite rule in the 80s/90s/00s.
Whatever Starmerism turns out to be I would not bet on it lasting that long. It's quite likely to be overturned by something very different, either from within the Labour party, or without, by the end of the decade.
A good response but your last paragraph is a fig leaf I’ve noticed some Conservatives clinging onto i.e. the assumption that Starmer is going to fail.
Whilst I don’t underestimate the magnitude of problems facing this country, and I’m no longer convinced Labour will fix them, I suspect many people will look back on the last 5 years as a horror show they never want to go near again in their lifetime.
I’m beginning to think Labour will be in power for 20 years.
I'm not a Conservative.
We'll see what Starmerism turns out to be - it's really hard to predict because he's shown so little indication of what his approach will be - but I included the possibility of Starmerism being overturned from within the Labour party. Whether Labour is in office for two decades, or not, I do not think Britain is in for a period of stable politics. There are large problems, that are difficult to solve, and a lot of rootless discontent sloshing about the political system as a result.
It could be that the Tory brand, and all the politicians associated with it, is so damaged that the voters won't go near it for a long time, but in that case the voter's discontent will manifest itself through other parties, or through factions within the Labour party. Cameron was PM for 6 years and 64 days. He wasn't brought down because the voters were ready to give Labour another go. I doubt very much that Starmer will have so long, but I don't see the Tories returning so soon either (thank God).
I'm instructing my financial advisor to advise me on protecting my assets against a potential confiscatory very left-wing Labour government.
It's perfectly possible Starmer gets dethroned, in office, for a Left-wing alternative like you say, and they utterly abuse the MP base they have in Parliament.
Well don't put it under your mattress, there appear to a lot of Reds under your bed.
Seriously, I wonder what legal options your financial adviser might suggest? Whatever they are, I'll warrant said IFA will be the only one to profit.
Who knows. One idea is to send some out the country and/or put it in a trusted relatives name.
But that holds risks in itself.
I could see (would vote for) a wealth tax of say 1-2% per annum on assets over say £1m. If that's what you class as 'confiscatory' it would likely cost you a larger percentage to avoid that.
I am genuinely intrigued that you fear such a threat.
No, much worse than that.
Go on - what does 'much worse than that' look like? What do you think is really a possibility at shall we say a >5% chance?
In West London, this level of property tax would push out anyone who wasn’t poor or on over £100k. Including those renting.
There are huge numbers of people who live there from the times before property went mad. Hence the interesting patch work of the redone houses with the expensive cars next to the down at heel looking places with the hatchback.
Increasing people’s bills by £1k a month would make the poll tax riots look tame.
I should have said, as I did in my next post, 'the exclusion of a principal private residence would be sensible.'
The problem then is that putting money into property becomes, even more, the way to store wealth.
And round we go.
That won't drive up house prices though - lack of supply does that.
Build more houses and it won't matter if people want to put more money into their private residence, the value will be dictated by supply and demand.
I’ve begun to despair about house building. Nimbyism appears to unite the country in a way little else does. Rich and poor, Brexit and remain, left and right. All have this same muscle reflex to object to any proposed development. Even the relatively young are at it round here.
The thing is so all pervading that I hide my quiet yimbyism from the neighbours for fear of being considered a traitor.
I think the NIMBYism is exacerbated by the lack of public services. It's hard to argue for more housing when you can't even provide an NHS dentist for the existing population.
Even LTNs are a reaction to more housing, as previously quiet neighbourhoods become ratruns for new ones.
Around here it’s not that. It’s pure aesthetics. People not wanting their nice view across the rooftops spoiled by a new building.
A large part is the shit that will be built. Densification means that in rural towns and villages, planners want houses with gardens so small that fence fires from BBQs are a serious issue. We are talking about patio squares - the width of the house and barely as long.
The mean, pinched things that they are building look horrible.
This, of course, is yet another aspect of the housing crisis: we desperately need the homes, but the developments that the volume housebuilders throw up are usually unfit for purpose: ludicrously expensive rabbit hutches with tiny rooms, postage stamp gardens at the back, and ugly car parking at the front. Developments are completely dominated by two priorities: maximising profit by squeezing as many dwellings onto the site as possible, and creating as many car parking spaces as possible. Indeed, given how bad the build quality of new homes frequently is, these estates are often better for the cars that inhabit them than the humans.
Thus we don't just have the legions of nimbies to contend with, we have an ecosystem of virtually unregulated cowboy developers to boot. You can understand why some of us are really pessimistic about the future. There is no real will to deal with big problems like this.
Agreed. Whilst the median wage in the uk is still higher than asia once you take into account housing costs we are falling behind and you can argue now it is better to be a young person in bangkok or shanghai or hell even moscow than london
The problem with being a young person in Moscow is that you are highly likely to be sent to fight an illegal and pointless war in Ukraine where you will be sent to test the theory that Russia has more men than Ukraine has bullets and get shot by your own side if you don't fancy it. Which is why so many of them left.
Not in the Third Rome. Less than 1% of those eligible have been mobilised in Moscow.
The SMO mobilisation effort focuses on dirt poor shit holes like Dagestan and the ex-Ukrainian oblasts like Donetsk.
That doesn’t stop them running, shit scared. My stepmothers nephews (and other young relatives) recreated the Anabasis to get out of Russia.
They believe that any day now they could get swept up.
I think it's a bit strange that people should be so quick to say the red and blue walls cannot ever be reconciled, when this was achieved just over four years ago at GE 2019. If the polls are anywhere like accurate, then Labour are poised to reconcile three major groups in the electorate - metropolitan liberals, blue labour and conservative swing voters.
These groups are not reconciled due to the oratorical brilliance of Keir-Ends-In-R Starmer, but due to Starmer's success in blandifying the Labour party so as not to put any of the groups off, and the categorical imperative of finding a means for these groups to punish the Tories.
Achieving something in reverse for the Tories requires only a bit of experience of Labour in government, and a Tory leader who isn't trying to actively alienate one part of the voter coalition.
I like your counter to this, with the 2019 evidence to back up your point.
However … those cracks were in the Party for a long time and we kid ourselves to think otherwise. That divide is really what brought down John Major and it didn’t do Margaret Thatcher much good in the end either. It all boiled to the surface when @TSE ’s beloved Davey boy idiotically called the Brexit referendum, thinking in his Old Etonian arrogance that he would pull off the same stunt as indyref.
(If you want to see what a shit Cameron really is then DO read the finale to Suzanne Heywood’s What Does Jeremy Think?)
I still maintain that 2019 was unique. Even I, a remainer, was utterly exasperated at the antics of that Remainer Parliament and at just the right moment along came Boris, someone uniquely gifted at deception to hoodwink the British people. With mellifluous honey-coated lies he pulled in blue and red wall voters. My Surrey tory friend, totally disillusioned now with the Party, STILL ADORES Boris and would vote for him like a shot.
Assuming Boris doesn’t make a Lazarite comeback, there’s no one else of his ilk. Once in a century.
Yes, it's true to say that the splits had been in the Tory party for a long time - but then that is true of any governing party in Britain. There is no single cohesive group of voters that is large enough to win a majority on its own. So it's normal for a governing party to be sustained by a coalition of voters divided amongst itself, and those divisions will obviously come to the fore when the party is generally unpopular.
I don't see anything unusual with what is happening to the Tories now, and so I don't think it requires anything extraordinary to fix the situation.
Indeed, what seems to be a more volatile electorate means that there is potential for the fractured Tory coalition to come back together (very temporarily) more quickly than currently appears possible. The situation facing an incoming Labour government is much more difficult than that encountered in 1997.
Although the Tories have been in government for nearly 14 years now, I think that is misleading. They have had several reinventions in that time, and so the last 14 years have been a lot more like the 1970s, than the long periods of Thatcherite/Blairite rule in the 80s/90s/00s.
Whatever Starmerism turns out to be I would not bet on it lasting that long. It's quite likely to be overturned by something very different, either from within the Labour party, or without, by the end of the decade.
A good response but your last paragraph is a fig leaf I’ve noticed some Conservatives clinging onto i.e. the assumption that Starmer is going to fail.
Whilst I don’t underestimate the magnitude of problems facing this country, and I’m no longer convinced Labour will fix them, I suspect many people will look back on the last 5 years as a horror show they never want to go near again in their lifetime.
I’m beginning to think Labour will be in power for 20 years.
I'm not a Conservative.
We'll see what Starmerism turns out to be - it's really hard to predict because he's shown so little indication of what his approach will be - but I included the possibility of Starmerism being overturned from within the Labour party. Whether Labour is in office for two decades, or not, I do not think Britain is in for a period of stable politics. There are large problems, that are difficult to solve, and a lot of rootless discontent sloshing about the political system as a result.
It could be that the Tory brand, and all the politicians associated with it, is so damaged that the voters won't go near it for a long time, but in that case the voter's discontent will manifest itself through other parties, or through factions within the Labour party. Cameron was PM for 6 years and 64 days. He wasn't brought down because the voters were ready to give Labour another go. I doubt very much that Starmer will have so long, but I don't see the Tories returning so soon either (thank God).
I'm instructing my financial advisor to advise me on protecting my assets against a potential confiscatory very left-wing Labour government.
It's perfectly possible Starmer gets dethroned, in office, for a Left-wing alternative like you say, and they utterly abuse the MP base they have in Parliament.
Well don't put it under your mattress, there appear to a lot of Reds under your bed.
Seriously, I wonder what legal options your financial adviser might suggest? Whatever they are, I'll warrant said IFA will be the only one to profit.
Who knows. One idea is to send some out the country and/or put it in a trusted relatives name.
But that holds risks in itself.
I could see (would vote for) a wealth tax of say 1-2% per annum on assets over say £1m. If that's what you class as 'confiscatory' it would likely cost you a larger percentage to avoid that.
I am genuinely intrigued that you fear such a threat.
No, much worse than that.
Go on - what does 'much worse than that' look like? What do you think is really a possibility at shall we say a >5% chance?
In West London, this level of property tax would push out anyone who wasn’t poor or on over £100k. Including those renting.
There are huge numbers of people who live there from the times before property went mad. Hence the interesting patch work of the redone houses with the expensive cars next to the down at heel looking places with the hatchback.
Increasing people’s bills by £1k a month would make the poll tax riots look tame.
I should have said, as I did in my next post, 'the exclusion of a principal private residence would be sensible.'
The problem then is that putting money into property becomes, even more, the way to store wealth.
And round we go.
That won't drive up house prices though - lack of supply does that.
Build more houses and it won't matter if people want to put more money into their private residence, the value will be dictated by supply and demand.
I’ve begun to despair about house building. Nimbyism appears to unite the country in a way little else does. Rich and poor, Brexit and remain, left and right. All have this same muscle reflex to object to any proposed development. Even the relatively young are at it round here.
The thing is so all pervading that I hide my quiet yimbyism from the neighbours for fear of being considered a traitor.
I think the NIMBYism is exacerbated by the lack of public services. It's hard to argue for more housing when you can't even provide an NHS dentist for the existing population.
Even LTNs are a reaction to more housing, as previously quiet neighbourhoods become ratruns for new ones.
Around here it’s not that. It’s pure aesthetics. People not wanting their nice view across the rooftops spoiled by a new building.
A large part is the shit that will be built. Densification means that in rural towns and villages, planners want houses with gardens so small that fence fires from BBQs are a serious issue. We are talking about patio squares - the width of the house and barely as long.
The mean, pinched things that they are building look horrible.
This, of course, is yet another aspect of the housing crisis: we desperately need the homes, but the developments that the volume housebuilders throw up are usually unfit for purpose: ludicrously expensive rabbit hutches with tiny rooms, postage stamp gardens at the back, and ugly car parking at the front. Developments are completely dominated by two priorities: maximising profit by squeezing as many dwellings onto the site as possible, and creating as many car parking spaces as possible. Indeed, given how bad the build quality of new homes frequently is, these estates are often better for the cars that inhabit them than the humans.
Thus we don't just have the legions of nimbies to contend with, we have an ecosystem of virtually unregulated cowboy developers to boot. You can understand why some of us are really pessimistic about the future. There is no real will to deal with big problems like this.
Agreed. Whilst the median wage in the uk is still higher than asia once you take into account housing costs we are falling behind and you can argue now it is better to be a young person in bangkok or shanghai or hell even moscow than london
The problem with being a young person in Moscow is that you are highly likely to be sent to fight an illegal and pointless war in Ukraine where you will be sent to test the theory that Russia has more men than Ukraine has bullets and get shot by your own side if you don't fancy it. Which is why so many of them left.
Not in the Third Rome. Less than 1% of those eligible have been mobilised in Moscow.
The SMO mobilisation effort focuses on dirt poor shit holes like Dagestan and the ex-Ukrainian oblasts like Donetsk.
That doesn’t stop them running, shit scared. My stepmothers nephews (and other young relatives) recreated the Anabasis to get out of Russia.
They believe that any day now they could get swept up.
In my part of the world there’s a lot of new Russians, in the hundreds of thousands across the region. Anyone with the means to do so has left the place and won’t be coming back until there’s political change. Some extraordinary efforts to convert money into anything with value - gold and bitcoin being the favourites - to get them out of the country once the hard currency became impossible to get hold of at decent rates.
I think it's a bit strange that people should be so quick to say the red and blue walls cannot ever be reconciled, when this was achieved just over four years ago at GE 2019. If the polls are anywhere like accurate, then Labour are poised to reconcile three major groups in the electorate - metropolitan liberals, blue labour and conservative swing voters.
These groups are not reconciled due to the oratorical brilliance of Keir-Ends-In-R Starmer, but due to Starmer's success in blandifying the Labour party so as not to put any of the groups off, and the categorical imperative of finding a means for these groups to punish the Tories.
Achieving something in reverse for the Tories requires only a bit of experience of Labour in government, and a Tory leader who isn't trying to actively alienate one part of the voter coalition.
I like your counter to this, with the 2019 evidence to back up your point.
However … those cracks were in the Party for a long time and we kid ourselves to think otherwise. That divide is really what brought down John Major and it didn’t do Margaret Thatcher much good in the end either. It all boiled to the surface when @TSE ’s beloved Davey boy idiotically called the Brexit referendum, thinking in his Old Etonian arrogance that he would pull off the same stunt as indyref.
(If you want to see what a shit Cameron really is then DO read the finale to Suzanne Heywood’s What Does Jeremy Think?)
I still maintain that 2019 was unique. Even I, a remainer, was utterly exasperated at the antics of that Remainer Parliament and at just the right moment along came Boris, someone uniquely gifted at deception to hoodwink the British people. With mellifluous honey-coated lies he pulled in blue and red wall voters. My Surrey tory friend, totally disillusioned now with the Party, STILL ADORES Boris and would vote for him like a shot.
Assuming Boris doesn’t make a Lazarite comeback, there’s no one else of his ilk. Once in a century.
Yes, it's true to say that the splits had been in the Tory party for a long time - but then that is true of any governing party in Britain. There is no single cohesive group of voters that is large enough to win a majority on its own. So it's normal for a governing party to be sustained by a coalition of voters divided amongst itself, and those divisions will obviously come to the fore when the party is generally unpopular.
I don't see anything unusual with what is happening to the Tories now, and so I don't think it requires anything extraordinary to fix the situation.
Indeed, what seems to be a more volatile electorate means that there is potential for the fractured Tory coalition to come back together (very temporarily) more quickly than currently appears possible. The situation facing an incoming Labour government is much more difficult than that encountered in 1997.
Although the Tories have been in government for nearly 14 years now, I think that is misleading. They have had several reinventions in that time, and so the last 14 years have been a lot more like the 1970s, than the long periods of Thatcherite/Blairite rule in the 80s/90s/00s.
Whatever Starmerism turns out to be I would not bet on it lasting that long. It's quite likely to be overturned by something very different, either from within the Labour party, or without, by the end of the decade.
A good response but your last paragraph is a fig leaf I’ve noticed some Conservatives clinging onto i.e. the assumption that Starmer is going to fail.
Whilst I don’t underestimate the magnitude of problems facing this country, and I’m no longer convinced Labour will fix them, I suspect many people will look back on the last 5 years as a horror show they never want to go near again in their lifetime.
I’m beginning to think Labour will be in power for 20 years.
I'm not a Conservative.
We'll see what Starmerism turns out to be - it's really hard to predict because he's shown so little indication of what his approach will be - but I included the possibility of Starmerism being overturned from within the Labour party. Whether Labour is in office for two decades, or not, I do not think Britain is in for a period of stable politics. There are large problems, that are difficult to solve, and a lot of rootless discontent sloshing about the political system as a result.
It could be that the Tory brand, and all the politicians associated with it, is so damaged that the voters won't go near it for a long time, but in that case the voter's discontent will manifest itself through other parties, or through factions within the Labour party. Cameron was PM for 6 years and 64 days. He wasn't brought down because the voters were ready to give Labour another go. I doubt very much that Starmer will have so long, but I don't see the Tories returning so soon either (thank God).
I'm instructing my financial advisor to advise me on protecting my assets against a potential confiscatory very left-wing Labour government.
It's perfectly possible Starmer gets dethroned, in office, for a Left-wing alternative like you say, and they utterly abuse the MP base they have in Parliament.
Well don't put it under your mattress, there appear to a lot of Reds under your bed.
Seriously, I wonder what legal options your financial adviser might suggest? Whatever they are, I'll warrant said IFA will be the only one to profit.
Who knows. One idea is to send some out the country and/or put it in a trusted relatives name.
But that holds risks in itself.
I could see (would vote for) a wealth tax of say 1-2% per annum on assets over say £1m. If that's what you class as 'confiscatory' it would likely cost you a larger percentage to avoid that.
I am genuinely intrigued that you fear such a threat.
No, much worse than that.
Go on - what does 'much worse than that' look like? What do you think is really a possibility at shall we say a >5% chance?
In West London, this level of property tax would push out anyone who wasn’t poor or on over £100k. Including those renting.
There are huge numbers of people who live there from the times before property went mad. Hence the interesting patch work of the redone houses with the expensive cars next to the down at heel looking places with the hatchback.
Increasing people’s bills by £1k a month would make the poll tax riots look tame.
I should have said, as I did in my next post, 'the exclusion of a principal private residence would be sensible.'
The problem then is that putting money into property becomes, even more, the way to store wealth.
And round we go.
That won't drive up house prices though - lack of supply does that.
Build more houses and it won't matter if people want to put more money into their private residence, the value will be dictated by supply and demand.
I’ve begun to despair about house building. Nimbyism appears to unite the country in a way little else does. Rich and poor, Brexit and remain, left and right. All have this same muscle reflex to object to any proposed development. Even the relatively young are at it round here.
The thing is so all pervading that I hide my quiet yimbyism from the neighbours for fear of being considered a traitor.
I think the NIMBYism is exacerbated by the lack of public services. It's hard to argue for more housing when you can't even provide an NHS dentist for the existing population.
Even LTNs are a reaction to more housing, as previously quiet neighbourhoods become ratruns for new ones.
Around here it’s not that. It’s pure aesthetics. People not wanting their nice view across the rooftops spoiled by a new building.
A large part is the shit that will be built. Densification means that in rural towns and villages, planners want houses with gardens so small that fence fires from BBQs are a serious issue. We are talking about patio squares - the width of the house and barely as long.
The mean, pinched things that they are building look horrible.
This, of course, is yet another aspect of the housing crisis: we desperately need the homes, but the developments that the volume housebuilders throw up are usually unfit for purpose: ludicrously expensive rabbit hutches with tiny rooms, postage stamp gardens at the back, and ugly car parking at the front. Developments are completely dominated by two priorities: maximising profit by squeezing as many dwellings onto the site as possible, and creating as many car parking spaces as possible. Indeed, given how bad the build quality of new homes frequently is, these estates are often better for the cars that inhabit them than the humans.
Thus we don't just have the legions of nimbies to contend with, we have an ecosystem of virtually unregulated cowboy developers to boot. You can understand why some of us are really pessimistic about the future. There is no real will to deal with big problems like this.
Agreed. Whilst the median wage in the uk is still higher than asia once you take into account housing costs we are falling behind and you can argue now it is better to be a young person in bangkok or shanghai or hell even moscow than london
The problem with being a young person in Moscow is that you are highly likely to be sent to fight an illegal and pointless war in Ukraine where you will be sent to test the theory that Russia has more men than Ukraine has bullets and get shot by your own side if you don't fancy it. Which is why so many of them left.
Not in the Third Rome. Less than 1% of those eligible have been mobilised in Moscow.
The SMO mobilisation effort focuses on dirt poor shit holes like Dagestan and the ex-Ukrainian oblasts like Donetsk.
That doesn’t stop them running, shit scared. My stepmothers nephews (and other young relatives) recreated the Anabasis to get out of Russia.
They believe that any day now they could get swept up.
In my part of the world there’s a lot of new Russians, in the hundreds of thousands across the region. Anyone with the means to do so has left the place and won’t be coming back until there’s political change. Some extraordinary efforts to convert money into anything with value - gold and bitcoin being the favourites - to get them out of the country once the hard currency became impossible to get hold of at decent rates.
When I said Anabasis I was barely joking. They figured out that heading to the Finnish border was what everyone was trying to do, so they went south. Went through a number of countries.
The next time someone criticises me for how I describe the appearance of women in public life, or we get a news report about how, ooh, I dunno, police officers or others, describe women and everyone gets outraged, I am going to remind them of this thread and how people on here talked about Penny Mordaunt.
I think it's a bit strange that people should be so quick to say the red and blue walls cannot ever be reconciled, when this was achieved just over four years ago at GE 2019. If the polls are anywhere like accurate, then Labour are poised to reconcile three major groups in the electorate - metropolitan liberals, blue labour and conservative swing voters.
These groups are not reconciled due to the oratorical brilliance of Keir-Ends-In-R Starmer, but due to Starmer's success in blandifying the Labour party so as not to put any of the groups off, and the categorical imperative of finding a means for these groups to punish the Tories.
Achieving something in reverse for the Tories requires only a bit of experience of Labour in government, and a Tory leader who isn't trying to actively alienate one part of the voter coalition.
I like your counter to this, with the 2019 evidence to back up your point.
However … those cracks were in the Party for a long time and we kid ourselves to think otherwise. That divide is really what brought down John Major and it didn’t do Margaret Thatcher much good in the end either. It all boiled to the surface when @TSE ’s beloved Davey boy idiotically called the Brexit referendum, thinking in his Old Etonian arrogance that he would pull off the same stunt as indyref.
(If you want to see what a shit Cameron really is then DO read the finale to Suzanne Heywood’s What Does Jeremy Think?)
I still maintain that 2019 was unique. Even I, a remainer, was utterly exasperated at the antics of that Remainer Parliament and at just the right moment along came Boris, someone uniquely gifted at deception to hoodwink the British people. With mellifluous honey-coated lies he pulled in blue and red wall voters. My Surrey tory friend, totally disillusioned now with the Party, STILL ADORES Boris and would vote for him like a shot.
Assuming Boris doesn’t make a Lazarite comeback, there’s no one else of his ilk. Once in a century.
Yes, it's true to say that the splits had been in the Tory party for a long time - but then that is true of any governing party in Britain. There is no single cohesive group of voters that is large enough to win a majority on its own. So it's normal for a governing party to be sustained by a coalition of voters divided amongst itself, and those divisions will obviously come to the fore when the party is generally unpopular.
I don't see anything unusual with what is happening to the Tories now, and so I don't think it requires anything extraordinary to fix the situation.
Indeed, what seems to be a more volatile electorate means that there is potential for the fractured Tory coalition to come back together (very temporarily) more quickly than currently appears possible. The situation facing an incoming Labour government is much more difficult than that encountered in 1997.
Although the Tories have been in government for nearly 14 years now, I think that is misleading. They have had several reinventions in that time, and so the last 14 years have been a lot more like the 1970s, than the long periods of Thatcherite/Blairite rule in the 80s/90s/00s.
Whatever Starmerism turns out to be I would not bet on it lasting that long. It's quite likely to be overturned by something very different, either from within the Labour party, or without, by the end of the decade.
A good response but your last paragraph is a fig leaf I’ve noticed some Conservatives clinging onto i.e. the assumption that Starmer is going to fail.
Whilst I don’t underestimate the magnitude of problems facing this country, and I’m no longer convinced Labour will fix them, I suspect many people will look back on the last 5 years as a horror show they never want to go near again in their lifetime.
I’m beginning to think Labour will be in power for 20 years.
I'm not a Conservative.
We'll see what Starmerism turns out to be - it's really hard to predict because he's shown so little indication of what his approach will be - but I included the possibility of Starmerism being overturned from within the Labour party. Whether Labour is in office for two decades, or not, I do not think Britain is in for a period of stable politics. There are large problems, that are difficult to solve, and a lot of rootless discontent sloshing about the political system as a result.
It could be that the Tory brand, and all the politicians associated with it, is so damaged that the voters won't go near it for a long time, but in that case the voter's discontent will manifest itself through other parties, or through factions within the Labour party. Cameron was PM for 6 years and 64 days. He wasn't brought down because the voters were ready to give Labour another go. I doubt very much that Starmer will have so long, but I don't see the Tories returning so soon either (thank God).
I'm instructing my financial advisor to advise me on protecting my assets against a potential confiscatory very left-wing Labour government.
It's perfectly possible Starmer gets dethroned, in office, for a Left-wing alternative like you say, and they utterly abuse the MP base they have in Parliament.
Well don't put it under your mattress, there appear to a lot of Reds under your bed.
Seriously, I wonder what legal options your financial adviser might suggest? Whatever they are, I'll warrant said IFA will be the only one to profit.
Who knows. One idea is to send some out the country and/or put it in a trusted relatives name.
But that holds risks in itself.
I could see (would vote for) a wealth tax of say 1-2% per annum on assets over say £1m. If that's what you class as 'confiscatory' it would likely cost you a larger percentage to avoid that.
I am genuinely intrigued that you fear such a threat.
I fear such a threat because it would mean rich people would move elsewhere, thereby leaving the rest of us to pick up the bill.
I’m amused to hear that rich people are not a societal cost. And surprised. I thought it was their greed and control that meant our public services from potholes to waiting for a new hip are all sorts of horrific.
Comments
Edit to add - and if you look at the chart you will see the peak time for crossings is from June onwards so while it's not much of a story now - it's got the potential for Farage to take a camera crew around the south east coast and make it a big story again anytime from early May onwards...
Presumably the weather in the channel is getting worse every week.
So here’s a truly weird photo, enclosing a mystery I have never unravelled. Perhaps PB can
Picture it. A decade ago I find myself with some spare days during a stone toy research trip in the Atacama desert, Chile. So I decide to visit the deathliest place on earth: ie the place with the least life, even less than Greenland, or the Antarctic, or anywhere in the Sahara, Gobi, and so on.
The reason this place, Yungay, is so deathly – no
microbial life, no tiny bugs, nothing - is that it sits in a ‘double rain shadow’– surrounded on all sides by mountains, so it has only rained a few times in
the last 200,000 years.When I get there it turns out to be a predictably desolate patch of nothing with a long road running through, which sees one or two trucks a day. But there is one more thing: the relics of an old mine, which closed in the 1950s. Alongside the crumbling ruin of the mine is a cemetery for the miners, with names and sometimes photos. Preserved by the dry heat.
Some of the miners died terribly young.
What I cannot explain are the additions since the 1950s. Alongside every grave, sometimes piled on top of them, there are plastic toys and trinkets, Chinese toy Ferraris, little water pistols, plastic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, foreign coins, miniature Thomas the Tank Engines, green
plastic toy soldiers. Who has been coming here, for decades, to the deathliest place on earth, to leave a Snoopy?
- Weak on the boats
- Weak on student dependents
- Weak on family income threshold
I may have to get legal on him
And Chelsea have just scored
But, I don’t think reduced boats are particularly great news for the government. Immigration is one topic where the public distrust Labour. It tends to rise and fall in salience with the numbers, and particularly the news coverage.
If small boats are a damp squib this year (and even if unchanged from 2023, they’re old news) then other topics will bubble up to the surface. Those might include crumbling infrastructure and public services, or - if we get the weather for it - climate worries or polluted water. None of those bode well for the Tories.
Falling perceptions of illegal immigration would however puncture Reform’s bubble, something I’m expecting to start happening soon. I think their non-Farage popularity is peaking now. They’d get a bump if Nigel takes over, but even then I’d expect unwind closer to the election.
Which is why he doesn't do climate science.
The last miners died in the 1950s. This place is wildly remote. The nearest town is Antofagasta - 75km of hard driving away
Who the fuck is leaving these trinkets, in their thousands, to this day, and why??
The Tories would do better never talking about boats or immigration at all. When they do, they boost only Reform UK.
But most of all, it was less last year for same reasons the governments own modelling shows more this year - it’s tie in with continental Europe “filling up” from sea and land the year before. 2021 continental tank up led to 2022 channels record crossings, and the 2023 continental fill up points, as I said predicted by Sunaks governments modelling, to another near record year. This is a known known they are running with an Autumn election - properly 100% convinced in their own minds let it happen , Rwanda flights Trumps boat crossings happening at same time as flights as it brings the voters back.
I’m pretty sure they won’t put hundreds on one flight, as their thinking is each flight and it’s media coverage each brings dollops of voters home and burns down the Reform polling. So about 30 each flight?
One thing that hadn’t played much, but might have more affect if Farage mentions it in interview after interview when he comes back, is, considering it’s an illegal invasion of economic migrants carrying a security risk, vast amounts of them this government grants asylum to. Pick the bones out of that.
The mean, pinched things that they are building look horrible.
Asylum seekers are harder to predict. Syria and Yemen are less of a source now but Sudan is in chaos. The Sahel is currently doing well for rainfall so no big drought-based exodus. Indeed long term the Sahel could well see greening and more rainfall. Just need to make fertilisers much more widely available.
#KateMiddleton #RoyalFamily
https://x.com/JimFergusonUK/status/1769321663374426485?s=20
Perfect example of how the old media is now totally fake - the actual context is clear, he's talking about bloodbath for *the car industry* - but the ENTIRE OLD MEDIA are pretending he was threatening violence. BBC, Guardian, CNN, NYT - all of them.
The old media, Democrat establishment, Whitehall, UK lobby - none of them believe in facts any more, everything is about spinning fake news and gaslighting you that you're a victim of 'misinformation' if you don't believe them - UKR, Trump, child abuse sold as 'trans rights', pandemics/lab leak, Hunter's laptop ... everything they care about they lie about.
https://x.com/Dominic2306/status/1769315530001776914?s=20
In the long run, this will end one of two ways: with eye watering levels of taxation to finally stamp on all these problems, or in systemic collapse. My money's on the latter - indeed, it's already well underway. Just ask the many millions of people without deep pockets who have no solution to rotten teeth but a pair of pliers.
Doesn’t look much. A wine bottle on a window ledge
Except this is my view from my room at Villa Mangiacane, an extremely beautiful Italian villa in Tuscany (it’s their wine on the ledge) boasting a redesign by Michelangelo
Yes
Even better. Look closer. See the notch in the trees between wine and glass. That notch was cut on the orders of Niccolo Machiavelli - his family owned the estate. Why was it cut? So the author of The Prince could stare at the cathedral, the Duomo, in faraway Florence
And it’s true. You can see it, through the notch
If people want to label that their product is from one country or another that should be their choice.
If other people don't want to label where its come from, they should be able to put whatever else they want on their labelling as long as its accurate.
Banning country of origin marketing would be as ridiculous as mandatory labelling is.
It takes the human addition of CO2 each year and compares with total CO2 in the atmosphere. Which of course is very small as a percentage.
But the whole point is that our additions are incremental. All the other carbon mechanisms are in net balance. The system manages to take out about half of our additions each year but the rest remains. So it’s like adding 2% to the contents of a bucket each year and hoping because 2% sounds small that it won’t ever overflow.
People getting bent all out of shape that stuff is shipped around don't realise just how inconsequential the cost (environmental and economic) of shipping stuff is.
Using extra electricity to grow stuff out of season in the UK is worse for the environment than getting it in season from the other side of the planet.
Have now cancelled my DD for my council tax.
They won’t be getting another penny from me.
Just been checking their accounts. The amount they spend on ‘paying back investors’ is criminal.
No more. #TaxStrike
https://x.com/TheBeanEyesOpen/status/1769320000941064208?s=20
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery
Small changes can make a world of difference. Especially when changes are cumulative.
It's a similar point to the one about volcanic eruptions - which with the exception of the infrequent large outliers - are just part of the cycle in balance.
(And have a cooling, not warming effect.)
Same thing with the ocean heat transfers - massive movements of heat energy, far larger than any warming inputs - but again previously in balance.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4719565#Comment_4719565
This one has lasted longer than most.
https://public.tableau.com/views/Netmigration-December2023/3?:language=en-GB&:embed=y&:sid=&:embed_code_version=3&:loadOrderID=2&:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link
But trust scumbag politicians to demonise those less fortunate than themselves, to try to save their own worthless skins.
But I’m absolutely sure I am right, I’ve more than proved I’m a brilliant armchair psephologist so I do know how this works, it’s about forced choice polling and first past the post constituency’s General Elections, that’s being different than all weekly polling these days giving people choice from a menu, such a big menu wasn’t always the case historically, and when it comes to a FPTP GE many menu items arn’t really in play anymore. Also does history teach us some marginal gains in economic reporting bring voters back and saves seats?
If this analysis of mine is right or wrong, it can’t properly be measured if Rishi calls it for May 2nd - but if does wait till autumn, we can scientifically measure using “forced choice”polling in April month with those in Autumn campaign month, to prove i was right or wrong. Once an election called, in campaign the forced choice polls should be best of all year for Conservatives.
And don’t use the “should have listened to your father” quote from Last Crusade. 😤
'Now if I don't get elected, It'll be a bloodbath for the country, that'll be the least of it, It'll be a bloodbath for the country, that'll be the least of it, but...'
I think there's reason to assume he was talking about something *other* than the auto industry in that weird rambling aside, before going back to the auto industry.
It is of course possible he just didn't know what he was saying.
And fantastic for our future balance of payments.
But you don't believe in planning.
Thus we don't just have the legions of nimbies to contend with, we have an ecosystem of virtually unregulated cowboy developers to boot. You can understand why some of us are really pessimistic about the future. There is no real will to deal with big problems like this.
Saw the picture and scrolled down a little.....
Think I'll log off again.
And the way it's posed, you can almost see his balls too.
(Which also applies to Dom C.)
And in any event, plausibly deniable threats are just part of his shtick.
After graduating, Cummings moved to Russia and lived there until 1997.[12] He shared a flat with the later brexit-supporting economist Liam Halligan.[13]
He worked for a group attempting to set up an airline connecting Samara in southern Russia to Vienna in Austria which George Parker of the Financial Times said was "spectacularly unsuccessful".[
When you think of the chaos Cummings has caused in this country its all very strange.
Every time this happens, a few more votes move into Trump’s column. The media are going to make the same mistakes they all made in 2016, and give him a billion dollars of free publicity.
Argument on the subway… turns into fight, which turns into a stabbing, which turns into a shooting, with everyone running for their lives
https://x.com/nyshittynews/status/1768443351093690844?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
But it’s all OK coz Biden has created 300,000 car washing jobs for Haitians
But hey, facts eh?
If you haven’t, I recommend it. Try the vongole
One reason Trump is doing well is the PERCEPTION the country is going to shit in multiple ways. Now from some angles it is true: Biden really has lost control of the border (with help from treacherous republicans)
In other ways it is not true at all. Biden’s economic record is excellent - and yet he doesn’t get credit for it
In other fields - law and order - the picture is mixed. Ditto foreign policy. Sure Biden is strong in Ukraine but the bald fact is: there weren’t any of these wars when Trump was in power
And yes America is now insanely expensive - even for average Americans. This also plays badly for Biden
AND IT WAS SHIT. In a plastic glass. Incredible
It's astonishing how readily people can view five videos on Twitter and believe they are representative. Especially when it is clear those videos have been picked and amplified by those with an agenda. Just ridiculous levels of gullibility.
They serve shits in plastic glasses?
I thought they used coffee mugs.
https://youtu.be/79TriCpMKfs?si=yErZQu2ZhMJomH_z
Whilst Trump was in power wars were still going on in Afghanistan. Casualties there is something else he lied about:https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-trump-afghanistan-troops-killed-659053265479
It was Biden that bit the bullet and got America out of there, not Trump. And the Ukraine war is expensive but it is not producing a lot of US body bags (there have been some due to volunteers, not regular army).
The border is a major problem for Biden, probably his biggest, but the sinking of a cross party bill on Trump's instructions has hopefully defused it somewhat.
Meanwhile maybe this is a good time to post the recent Parliamentary Select Committee Report on Sexism in the City - https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5804/cmselect/cmtreasy/240/report.html#heading-5.
Section 5 on Sexual Harassment and office "banter" may be of interest.
if the police has started ignoring and not recording crimes, then crime rates are going to drop.
The SMO mobilisation effort focuses on dirt poor shit holes like Dagestan and the ex-Ukrainian oblasts like Donetsk.
Even weirder some of the toys were obviously new additions. I took that photo in 2011 I think the newest grave in the cemetery was about 1952 - so sixty years later the families are STILL making the trek to Yungay to remember some great great uncle who died in a mine in the most desolate spot on the planet
I hope they have fun and make a party out of it
It was in the 80's.
New Thread
You’ll only need one guess at who was suspended from their job as a result.
https://www.bbc.com/sport/formula1/68501426
They believe that any day now they could get swept up.
2) Disillusionment
3) Panic
4) Search for the guilty
5) Punishment of the innocent
6) Praise and honours for the non-participants
They are on 5.5 now….
But I repeat myself.