Sunak knows the Rwanda Bill will pass likely today so wants to look tough by coming out and threatening them beforehand so that when it passes it looks like the Lords were terrified of him and his majestic splendour. They backed down because the Great Leader forced them to .
Jeez and we’ve got months of this. Can’t the gimp just call an election and FO back to California.
I hope that someone spells out in excruciating detail just how much this desperate political gimmick is costing us, and how insignificant it is in comparison with the vast numbers of people the government is allowing into the country legally.
It doesn't need that many more anti-immigration votes to decant into the RefUK column for the Tories to drop to third place.
We got fined a fiver for a Christmas card sent by a Rector. I very much doubt he bought dodgy stamps down the pub.
How can you "fine" a recipient ? They are not a party to the postage contract, so cannot be "fined" for breaching its terms.
What they mean is that the Royal Mail is conning recipients out of small amounts of money they make hard - and therefore not worth the effort - to pursue. This is grift in the classic sense of small time swindling.
Are there any circumstances in which you would be willing to vote for someone convicted of a felony who is running for President NET YES
Dem: -61% Ind: -20% Rep: +12%
Yet another silly poll.
Given that the definition of felony is being convicted of a crime of over 12 months then I'd have said 'yes'.
Over here, if one of the wronged postmasters had been sentenced for over 12 months would you deem him or her unsupportable in an election?
Not totally sure what you're saying here. You could make an extremely pedantic argument that someone whose conviction has been overturned was still convicted in the first place, and therefore respondents answering "no" were saying they'd not vote for someone who'd subsequently been entirely exonerated.
But it seems extremely unlikely people were interpreting the question in that way. I mean, it's so obvious that the question isn't about someone wrongfully convicted who had later been exhonorated that the point that they aren't covered is surely implied. I mean, if someone had been exonerated on appeal, you'd just not refer to them as a "convicted criminal" any more (indeed, it'd be libel).
A lot of the postmasters are still waiting for their convictions to be quashed. If one of them stood for parliament in protest I'd certainly consider voting for them.
And the relevance for the US election is a lot of Trump voters would view a convicted Trump as I view a convicted postmaster.
Though those are the voters who will vote for him come what may. Not those whose decision in November will turn the election.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Are there any circumstances in which you would be willing to vote for someone convicted of a felony who is running for President NET YES
Dem: -61% Ind: -20% Rep: +12%
Yet another silly poll.
Given that the definition of felony is being convicted of a crime of over 12 months then I'd have said 'yes'.
Over here, if one of the wronged postmasters had been sentenced for over 12 months would you deem him or her unsupportable in an election?
Not totally sure what you're saying here. You could make an extremely pedantic argument that someone whose conviction has been overturned was still convicted in the first place, and therefore respondents answering "no" were saying they'd not vote for someone who'd subsequently been entirely exonerated.
But it seems extremely unlikely people were interpreting the question in that way. I mean, it's so obvious that the question isn't about someone wrongfully convicted who had later been exhonorated that the point that they aren't covered is surely implied. I mean, if someone had been exonerated on appeal, you'd just not refer to them as a "convicted criminal" any more (indeed, it'd be libel).
A lot of the postmasters are still waiting for their convictions to be quashed. If one of them stood for parliament in protest I'd certainly consider voting for them.
And the relevance for the US election is a lot of Trump voters would view a convicted Trump as I view a convicted postmaster.
Though those are the voters who will vote for him come what may. Not those whose decision in November will turn the election.
I continue to think the real swing voters will be the ones who vote primarily on household finances. The stock market and jobs reports are the key not the court cases. People have made up their minds long ago on both Biden and Trump.
We got fined a fiver for a Christmas card sent by a Rector. I very much doubt he bought dodgy stamps down the pub.
How can you "fine" a recipient ? They are not a party to the postage contract, so cannot be "fined" for breaching its terms.
What they mean is that the Royal Mail is conning recipients out of small amounts of money they make hard - and therefore not worth the effort - to pursue. This is grift in the classic sense of small time swindling.
It is not a fine, it is a charge for delivering the item. Only after you have received the rector's Christmas card or your wife's CT scan results can you decide whether it was worth paying £5.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
At the start of the war, generals were often on the front line. You see the following numbers quoted a fair bit - 76 British, 42 French, 2 Belgian, 2 Italian, and 2 Romanian generals killed on the Allied side.
The big problem was command and control. Without mobile radio, you are in command of those in earshot. Unless you are in a bunker, with wired telephones or telegraph.
And then you need a big space for the maps, whole rooms for the telephone and telegraph operators (who have to be on site). So running the war from the front lines couldn’t work.
Towards the end of the war, aircraft began to carry radio, which allowed a massive cut in the time for events on the battleground (as observed by recon aircraft) to be added to the “picture” on the map tables.
Yes, generals did need to be kept away from the front line but it did not help that they arrived in staff cars and uniforms that enemy snipers could easily identify, just like Nelson at Trafalgar.
I remember that famous painting of Nelson’s staff car parked up on the poop deck. Remarkable.
Sunak knows the Rwanda Bill will pass likely today so wants to look tough by coming out and threatening them beforehand so that when it passes it looks like the Lords were terrified of him and his majestic splendour. They backed down because the Great Leader forced them to .
Jeez and we’ve got months of this. Can’t the gimp just call an election and FO back to California.
I hope that someone spells out in excruciating detail just how much this desperate political gimmick is costing us, and how insignificant it is in comparison with the vast numbers of people the government is allowing into the country legally.
It doesn't need that many more anti-immigration votes to decant into the RefUK column for the Tories to drop to third place.
Increasing the salience, whilst not doing anything effective (this is a half-assed knockoff of one prong of the Aussie approach) is madness.
We got fined a fiver for a Christmas card sent by a Rector. I very much doubt he bought dodgy stamps down the pub.
Bit weird shouldn't they do what they do with insufficient postage and ask you to pay or not receive the item.
But then given the reputation and probably business practices of everything associated with the PO are in the khazi then it's no surprise they are pulling this trick.
They take the unpaid postage and add a fine of a fiver or so (more than if it were just incimplete postage with OK stamps) and you have to pay to get the item.
But the use of old stamps *even when the value is otherwise correct* also attracts a demand for money with menaces ("nice letter ... would be a shame to see it in the shredder"). Very annoying if it is some nonsense circular. Elderly friends/relatives/their carers have been particularly prone to sending this sort of post which falls foul of that rule.
I'm not impressed by the RM happy to sell first and second class stamps with the implicit contract that they're OK even after future price rises, and now this ...
Note the ambiguity contained in the phrase "should be allowed". Clearly it's not constitutionally barred, so what does the question mean ?
It's not the same as asking "would you vote for" a convicted felon.
Why didn't they just ask "if Trump were convicted of a felony before the election, would you vote for him" ?
The real question goes two steps further. If Trump were convicted of a felony before the election, but you believed him innocent, would you vote for him or Biden?
Not only will many think Trump innocent and/or fitted up but a decent subset think Biden is guilty of something or other too. Or should not be allowed because he is old/gaga or whatever.
The second is quite a good reason for not wanting to vote for him.
The snag is the Republicans have picked somebody almost as old and considerably more gaga.
I don't think Biden has dementia, but yes of course he is old and like every old person I know has name recall problems. FWIW I don't think Trump has dementia either, he is just a narcissist with a weird mix of cognitive weaknesses whilst also being very sharp at the skills needed for manipulation.
I agree. One of them is demented but neither has dementia.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications network was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
“Hard won lessons”. Mate; it’s the fucking SOMME
Its like saying Auschwitz wasn’t all bad cause it gave opportunities for first time buyers in Cracow
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Given the technologies available (industrial mass production, and weapons of mass killing like the machine gun), and the lack of means for rapid manoeuvre outside of fixed infrastructure like rail, battles like the Somme and Verdun were pretty well inevitable if neither side was prepared to sue for peace.
The real tragedy was that the war started in the first place.
We got fined a fiver for a Christmas card sent by a Rector. I very much doubt he bought dodgy stamps down the pub.
How can you "fine" a recipient ? They are not a party to the postage contract, so cannot be "fined" for breaching its terms.
What they mean is that the Royal Mail is conning recipients out of small amounts of money they make hard - and therefore not worth the effort - to pursue. This is grift in the classic sense of small time swindling.
It is not a fine, it is a charge for delivering the item. Only after you have received the rector's Christmas card or your wife's CT scan results can you decide whether it was worth paying £5.
Nothing is worth paying £5 for it to be delivered.
Worse it’s been demonstrated that the post office are reporting their own stamps as being counterfeit
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
We got fined a fiver for a Christmas card sent by a Rector. I very much doubt he bought dodgy stamps down the pub.
Bit weird shouldn't they do what they do with insufficient postage and ask you to pay or not receive the item.
But then given the reputation and probably business practices of everything associated with the PO are in the khazi then it's no surprise they are pulling this trick.
They take the unpaid postage and add a fine of a fiver or so (more than if it were just incimplete postage with OK stamps) and you have to pay to get the item. Very annoying if it is some nonsense circular. Elderly friends/relatives/their carers have been particularly prone to doing this.
We need a betting market on which party is most likely to send out leaflets with dodgy stamps first.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications network was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Maybe but victory in the final few months came largely from Australian and Canadian generals, not the French and British ones who'd learned from hard knocks, along with technological developments made back home, the musical coming of the yanks, and a hugely effective naval blockade of Germany.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
We got fined a fiver for a Christmas card sent by a Rector. I very much doubt he bought dodgy stamps down the pub.
Bit weird shouldn't they do what they do with insufficient postage and ask you to pay or not receive the item.
But then given the reputation and probably business practices of everything associated with the PO are in the khazi then it's no surprise they are pulling this trick.
They take the unpaid postage and add a fine of a fiver or so (more than if it were just incimplete postage with OK stamps) and you have to pay to get the item. Very annoying if it is some nonsense circular. Elderly friends/relatives/their carers have been particularly prone to doing this.
We need a betting market on which party is most likely to send out leaflets with dodgy stamps first.
The thought did come to mind. But the parties with bigger pockets and contracts with automated systems will do better - and of course the RM has to deliver a set number of leaflets for free, so those won't have stamps.
Trump is a lying bully with a glass jaw - wrt to Court Orders preventing abuse of persons associated with Court Staff, witnesses etc when confronted on specifics he tends to back down. US Judicial institutions have proven unwilling to tackle the Orange Whale appropriately, which indicates reform will be needed later.
Despite that, today is Day 1 of the actual hearing, and tomorrow is the hearing concerning his many violations of Court Orders.
I do wonder what will happen if the Judge does what would have happened to any other criminal Defendant many months ago, and simply withdraws bail privileges, and sticks Trump in a cell until the end of the trial. I'd say it would have had an impact on Trump's delaying tactics.
("But he's a candidate for POTUS" - sorry, he was a criminal suspect indicted by a Jury of his peers, wtf did you expect to happen?).
As it is, Judge Mershon is the only Judge who has continued to assert strongish control, and Trump faces multiple counts of criminal contempt of Court, each of which can carry 30 day prison sentences, and I am not sure if Appeal is possible. If Trump received 6 consecutive 30 day tariffs, it would imo be delicious.
Plus the NY DA has put in a motion for the $175m surety in the Civil Case to be rejected for multiple seemingly good reasons, which if approved may allow her to start seizing Trump properties.
Except US voters have already elected a President with a felony conviction. George W Bush had a conviction for DUI and was elected in 2000 and re elected in 2004.
Ted Kennedy ran for President in 1980 despite having received a suspended sentence in 1973 for fleeing the scene of an accident after killing his passenger. Although Carter beat him in the primaries he still won a lot of states.
So a conviction alone may not be fatal for Trump, although it would hit him with Independents. Jail time though likely would be beyond his core vote
Surely Bush's DUI was a misdemeanor rather than a felony?
We got fined a fiver for a Christmas card sent by a Rector. I very much doubt he bought dodgy stamps down the pub.
Bit weird shouldn't they do what they do with insufficient postage and ask you to pay or not receive the item.
But then given the reputation and probably business practices of everything associated with the PO are in the khazi then it's no surprise they are pulling this trick.
They take the unpaid postage and add a fine of a fiver or so (more than if it were just incimplete postage with OK stamps) and you have to pay to get the item. Very annoying if it is some nonsense circular. Elderly friends/relatives/their carers have been particularly prone to doing this.
We need a betting market on which party is most likely to send out leaflets with dodgy stamps first.
The thought did come to mind. But the parties with bigger pockets and contracts with automated systems will do better - and of course the RM has to deliver a set number of leaflets for free, so those won't have stamps.
Getting excuses in for the SNP early. I like it.
The bigger parties must be favs purely from standing in most constituencies surely? And they are not known as the cons for nothing.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Well, it wouldn't have happened.
Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is another question.
Sure, the generalship of the Somme was inept, but that's partly because the generals were wrestling with a new type of warfare. And while their errors came at a terrible human cost, the lessons learned in that battle (particularly by the likes of Currie, watching closely from the reserve trenches) ultimately paved the way for the breaking of the German army in 1918.
"Mud, Blood and Poppycock" by Gordon Corrigan is a useful corrective to the Blackadder depiction of British and Imperial Generalship.
The main cheerleader for Haig and the other British WW1 commanders for many years was John Terraine. But he was just as biased in favour of Haig as Clarke had been against him. Indeed he descibed Haig as "the man who led the British Army in its most majestic series of victories", which I would politely suggest marks him as something of a fucking lunatic.
We got fined a fiver for a Christmas card sent by a Rector. I very much doubt he bought dodgy stamps down the pub.
How can you "fine" a recipient ? They are not a party to the postage contract, so cannot be "fined" for breaching its terms.
What they mean is that the Royal Mail is conning recipients out of small amounts of money they make hard - and therefore not worth the effort - to pursue. This is grift in the classic sense of small time swindling.
It is not a fine, it is a charge for delivering the item. Only after you have received the rector's Christmas card or your wife's CT scan results can you decide whether it was worth paying £5.
Nothing is worth paying £5 for it to be delivered.
Worse it’s been demonstrated that the post office are reporting their own stamps as being counterfeit
Yes, number 4 in the list from my earlier post, and of course these false positives make a clear parallel with Horizon where the computer falsely identified fraud in sub-post offices.
Except US voters have already elected a President with a felony conviction. George W Bush had a conviction for DUI and was elected in 2000 and re elected in 2004.
Ted Kennedy ran for President in 1980 despite having received a suspended sentence in 1973 for fleeing the scene of an accident after killing his passenger. Although Carter beat him in the primaries he still won a lot of states.
So a conviction alone may not be fatal for Trump, although it would hit him with Independents. Jail time though likely would be beyond his core vote
Surely Bush's DUI was a misdemeanor rather than a felony?
And Kennedy's suspended sentence was for 2 months, so again a misdemeanor, not a felony.
We got fined a fiver for a Christmas card sent by a Rector. I very much doubt he bought dodgy stamps down the pub.
Bit weird shouldn't they do what they do with insufficient postage and ask you to pay or not receive the item.
But then given the reputation and probably business practices of everything associated with the PO are in the khazi then it's no surprise they are pulling this trick.
Your premise still applies. I paid online not realising it was just a card.
My point was I doubt the stamp was counterfeit.
I had one of those at Xmas, I just put it down to a PO worker ticking one of the "reason" boxes at random.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Given the technologies available (industrial mass production, and weapons of mass killing like the machine gun), and the lack of means for rapid manoeuvre outside of fixed infrastructure like rail, battles like the Somme and Verdun were pretty well inevitable if neither side was prepared to sue for peace.
The real tragedy was that the war started in the first place.
What was that quote - WWI started because no one could be bothered not to go to war.
Or somesuch.
I read my Moltke and Causes of the First World War like everyone else and about all i could get out of it was that everyone expected everyone else to go to war and hence "we" might as well/had better do it now as later.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Given the technologies available (industrial mass production, and weapons of mass killing like the machine gun), and the lack of means for rapid manoeuvre outside of fixed infrastructure like rail, battles like the Somme and Verdun were pretty well inevitable if neither side was prepared to sue for peace.
The real tragedy was that the war started in the first place.
What was that quote - WWI started because no one could be bothered not to go to war.
Or somesuch.
I read my Moltke and Causes of the First World War like everyone else and about all i could get out of it was that everyone expected everyone else to go to war and hence "we" might as well/had better do it now as later.
I know it is probably an oversimplification but I have always like AJP Taylor's Railway Timetables theory for one of the causes of WW1.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
On topic it doesn't seem like Trump will be locked up before the election? It seems like the charges in the business records case wouldn't normally produce a jail sentence even if he's convicted on all charges. Meanwhile the Georgia one isn't yet scheduled, the Florida one is in the hands of a loyal Trump hack and the DC case is stalled until such time as SCOTUS see fit to unstall it.
The banter heuristic would dictate that he win the election, then go to jail shortly afterwards.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications network was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
“Hard won lessons”. Mate; it’s the fucking SOMME
Its like saying Auschwitz wasn’t all bad cause it gave opportunities for first time buyers in Cracow
Oh yeah, I know, it's bonkers.
But you have to remember these were largely inexperienced troops. There hadn't been time to train them properly. The idea was the week long bombardment before the attack would have destroyed the wire and killed the defenders, so our green troops would simply have to walk - not run - across no man's land and occupy empty trenches.
Obviously, that didn't happen. The artillery wasn't effective enough; it wasn't dense enough and they hadn't yet developed fuses which would burst on contact with the wire. Shells buried themselves in the ground before exploding, making them largely useless at destroying the wire. The deep German dugouts weren't destroyed, so as soon as the bombardment stopped the Germans simply set up their machine guns and mowed down the waves of troops ambling towards them. It's insane when you think about it but hindsight's a wonderful thing.
And this was suspected before the attack. Some frontline officers knew the machine guns hadn't been destroyed, and knew they and their men would be killed. And they were.
But the French were on their knees at Verdun. The Germans had to be fought.
It's a debate in WW1 historiography that'll last forever.
But it is ok for me to register in two different constituencies because I have two properties (I haven't done so but could) or my children to do so when they were students (both did) or Brits who have not lived in the UK for up to a decade, and now forever to have a vote, yet it is not ok for Rayner to pick which house she is registered in, in the same constituency (so the impact is zero).
Please explain what the issue is @squareroot2 . The answer isn't because the Times is running the story but actually requires you to use your brain.
A bit early to start insulting people first up.... We shall see. The police are investigation. Neighbours accuse her of lying. The tax man doesn't like being taken for a fool.
We shall see.
I didn't insult you, I asked you to use your brain rather than link to a Times article and you haven't done so.
What I want to know is what you think the issue is re registration for voting and you just keep ignoring the question.
So tell us 'What is the issue?' because it baffles me. I mean use your brain and don't just link to an article. Think for yourself. It isn't a lot to ask
PS I am referring to the electoral registration not CGT so the taxman issue is not relevant to my question.
@squareroot2 fyi I am not a Labour voter and have never voted Labour in my 69 years and I am definitely not a fan of Rayner's politics, but this sort of stuff is damaging to politics. There are enough crooked politicians going around that we don't have to create new issues.
The police get inundated with complaints about politicians that are nonsense (particularly during elections) that they can't see the wood for the trees so real crimes go unpunished and if you make enough noise about it they are forced to investigate. This needs to stop so the police can concentrate on proper stuff. Even if Rayner has registered at the wrong address it is a technical issue as it has zero impact for election purposes.
People bringing frivolous complaints to the police for party political purposes should be prosecuted for wasting police time.
We got fined a fiver for a Christmas card sent by a Rector. I very much doubt he bought dodgy stamps down the pub.
Bit weird shouldn't they do what they do with insufficient postage and ask you to pay or not receive the item.
But then given the reputation and probably business practices of everything associated with the PO are in the khazi then it's no surprise they are pulling this trick.
They take the unpaid postage and add a fine of a fiver or so (more than if it were just incimplete postage with OK stamps) and you have to pay to get the item. Very annoying if it is some nonsense circular. Elderly friends/relatives/their carers have been particularly prone to doing this.
We need a betting market on which party is most likely to send out leaflets with dodgy stamps first.
The thought did come to mind. But the parties with bigger pockets and contracts with automated systems will do better - and of course the RM has to deliver a set number of leaflets for free, so those won't have stamps.
Getting excuses in for the SNP early. I like it.
The bigger parties must be favs purely from standing in most constituencies surely? And they are not known as the cons for nothing.
Wasn't thinking so much of the SNP (who do also have activists to shove leaflets through letterboxes) but the smaller ones especially Reform, which has not shown a great deal of administrative nous so far in things like getting electoral candidates' paperwork sorted out.
Except US voters have already elected a President with a felony conviction. George W Bush had a conviction for DUI and was elected in 2000 and re elected in 2004.
Ted Kennedy ran for President in 1980 despite having received a suspended sentence in 1973 for fleeing the scene of an accident after killing his passenger. Although Carter beat him in the primaries he still won a lot of states.
So a conviction alone may not be fatal for Trump, although it would hit him with Independents. Jail time though likely would be beyond his core vote
Surely Bush's DUI was a misdemeanor rather than a felony?
And Kennedy's suspended sentence was for 2 months, so again a misdemeanor, not a felony.
I don't know the details, but surely leaving the scene of an accident where someone dies IS a felony, even if he got off with a light sentence?
Except US voters have already elected a President with a felony conviction. George W Bush had a conviction for DUI and was elected in 2000 and re elected in 2004.
Ted Kennedy ran for President in 1980 despite having received a suspended sentence in 1973 for fleeing the scene of an accident after killing his passenger. Although Carter beat him in the primaries he still won a lot of states.
So a conviction alone may not be fatal for Trump, although it would hit him with Independents. Jail time though likely would be beyond his core vote
Surely Bush's DUI was a misdemeanor rather than a felony?
There has been at least one candidate who ran for President from a prison cell. Eugene V. Debs was the Socialist party's nominee in 1920 while he was imprisoned under the Sedition Act. He had been convicted because he had opposed US involvement in WW1.
Given the prurience of some of the US media, I guess they would have found any by now.
His companies have repeatedly lost court cases, but I don't think there's a prior personal felony by Trump. But, yes, any vaguely sensible person could see that Trump was not a suitable person to be President years ago.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
Except US voters have already elected a President with a felony conviction. George W Bush had a conviction for DUI and was elected in 2000 and re elected in 2004.
Ted Kennedy ran for President in 1980 despite having received a suspended sentence in 1973 for fleeing the scene of an accident after killing his passenger. Although Carter beat him in the primaries he still won a lot of states.
So a conviction alone may not be fatal for Trump, although it would hit him with Independents. Jail time though likely would be beyond his core vote
Surely Bush's DUI was a misdemeanor rather than a felony?
There has been at least one candidate who ran for President from a prison cell. Eugene V. Debs was the Socialist party's nominee in 1920 while he was imprisoned under the Sedition Act. He had been convicted because he had opposed US involvement in WW1.
If memory serves, one PBer has a badge/button from Debs's campaign
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
Or Coventry or Plymouth. Even Bath has its moments.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications network was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
“Hard won lessons”. Mate; it’s the fucking SOMME
Its like saying Auschwitz wasn’t all bad cause it gave opportunities for first time buyers in Cracow
Oh yeah, I know, it's bonkers.
But you have to remember these were largely inexperienced troops. There hadn't been time to train them properly. The idea was the week long bombardment before the attack would have destroyed the wire and killed the defenders, so our green troops would simply have to walk - not run - across no man's land and occupy empty trenches.
Obviously, that didn't happen. The artillery wasn't effective enough; it wasn't dense enough and they hadn't yet developed fuses which would burst on contact with the wire. Shells buried themselves in the ground before exploding, making them largely useless at destroying the wire. The deep German dugouts weren't destroyed, so as soon as the bombardment stopped the Germans simply set up their machine guns and mowed down the waves of troops ambling towards them. It's insane when you think about it but hindsight's a wonderful thing.
And this was suspected before the attack. Some frontline officers knew the machine guns hadn't been destroyed, and knew they and their men would be killed. And they were.
But the French were on their knees at Verdun. The Germans had to be fought.
It's a debate in WW1 historiography that'll last forever.
Of course I know what you mean, in terms of military strategy and all that
Nevertheless whenever I hear this kind of discourse about World War 1 it does feel like someone saying “on the other hand” about the Holocaust
World War 1 was where it all went wrong for European civilisation and maybe humanity. So many evil things arose therefore - communism and Hitler to start with. We are still living with the aftermath
Plus: the trenches. The piled corpses. Verdun. And THE SOMME
Except US voters have already elected a President with a felony conviction. George W Bush had a conviction for DUI and was elected in 2000 and re elected in 2004.
Ted Kennedy ran for President in 1980 despite having received a suspended sentence in 1973 for fleeing the scene of an accident after killing his passenger. Although Carter beat him in the primaries he still won a lot of states.
So a conviction alone may not be fatal for Trump, although it would hit him with Independents. Jail time though likely would be beyond his core vote
Surely Bush's DUI was a misdemeanor rather than a felony?
And Kennedy's suspended sentence was for 2 months, so again a misdemeanor, not a felony.
I don't know the details, but surely leaving the scene of an accident where someone dies IS a felony, even if he got off with a light sentence?
Anyway he wasn't elected president.
In the US, there is a technical definition of a felony versus a misdemeanor (US spelling appropriate). A felony is a crime that is punishable by death or more than one year in prison. Kennedy got 2 months (suspended), ergo not a felony, AIUI, but IANAL.
EDIT: There is an echo of this in the Representation of the People Act 1981 whereby an MP is removed from office is they get a sentence longer than one year.
Note the ambiguity contained in the phrase "should be allowed". Clearly it's not constitutionally barred, so what does the question mean ?
It's not the same as asking "would you vote for" a convicted felon.
Why didn't they just ask "if Trump were convicted of a felony before the election, would you vote for him" ?
The real question goes two steps further. If Trump were convicted of a felony before the election, but you believed him innocent, would you vote for him or Biden?
Not only will many think Trump innocent and/or fitted up but a decent subset think Biden is guilty of something or other too. Or should not be allowed because he is old/gaga or whatever.
The second is quite a good reason for not wanting to vote for him.
The snag is the Republicans have picked somebody almost as old and considerably more gaga.
I don't think Biden has dementia, but yes of course he is old and like every old person I know has name recall problems. FWIW I don't think Trump has dementia either, he is just a narcissist with a weird mix of cognitive weaknesses whilst also being very sharp at the skills needed for manipulation.
I am 41 and when I'm tired I have problems recalling names. It's not the name recall issues that bothers me about Trump, it's all the complete bullshit he spouts. More than a stand up philosopher after the third amphorae of wine!
Trump has spouted bullshit all his life, and tried to speak knowledgeably about anything and everything even if he knows nothing about it and ends up sounding bizarrely stupid. That is his nature, it is not dementia.
It does make him gaga though, in the sense of 'completely round the twist,' unless you're focusing that on a narrow definition of 'suffers from dementia.'
He is definitely somewhere on the gaga spectrum. Never quite sure how far down.
Note the ambiguity contained in the phrase "should be allowed". Clearly it's not constitutionally barred, so what does the question mean ?
It's not the same as asking "would you vote for" a convicted felon.
Why didn't they just ask "if Trump were convicted of a felony before the election, would you vote for him" ?
The real question goes two steps further. If Trump were convicted of a felony before the election, but you believed him innocent, would you vote for him or Biden?
Not only will many think Trump innocent and/or fitted up but a decent subset think Biden is guilty of something or other too. Or should not be allowed because he is old/gaga or whatever.
The second is quite a good reason for not wanting to vote for him.
The snag is the Republicans have picked somebody almost as old and considerably more gaga.
I don't think Biden has dementia, but yes of course he is old and like every old person I know has name recall problems. FWIW I don't think Trump has dementia either, he is just a narcissist with a weird mix of cognitive weaknesses whilst also being very sharp at the skills needed for manipulation.
I am 41 and when I'm tired I have problems recalling names. It's not the name recall issues that bothers me about Trump, it's all the complete bullshit he spouts. More than a stand up philosopher after the third amphorae of wine!
Trump has spouted bullshit all his life, and tried to speak knowledgeably about anything and everything even if he knows nothing about it and ends up sounding bizarrely stupid. That is his nature, it is not dementia.
It does make him gaga though, in the sense of 'completely round the twist,' unless you're focusing that on a narrow definition of 'suffers from dementia.'
He is definitely somewhere on the gaga spectrum. Never quite sure how far down.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Things must have changed dramatically since last June.
When we arrived last year in late afternoon Paris was heaving which was a pain because people kept walking into the pavement based bike lanes which caused some serious braking not to hit people.
The next morning (can't remember what day) we cycled from near Gare du Nord to Gare Montparnesse and again it was heaving. We were grateful for the number of reverse one way streets to protect cyclists which were safe (it is a great safety idea discussed here before and doesn't impede drivers). Solid traffic and buzzing pavements, van drivers opening their doors onto you and drivers cutting you up and trying to kill you. At the Place de la Concorde there was really only a choice between death and walking.
On the return (an afternoon) Paris was at a stand still with traffic (with the mandatory leaning on horns) so it was quicker to walk on the pavement and pick up bike lanes where we could.
I must say though cycling through the countryside in France, particularly between 12 and 2 you could be forgiven for thinking you were the only humans left.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications network was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
“Hard won lessons”. Mate; it’s the fucking SOMME
It's like saying Auschwitz wasn’t all bad cause it gave opportunities for first time buyers in Cracow
WWI was a hard won lesson for all that it shouldn't have been started in the first place. Which had to be relearned all over again, and again...
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Things must have changed dramatically since last June.
When we arrived last year in late afternoon Paris was heaving which was a pain because people kept walking into the pavement based bike lanes which caused some serious braking not to hit people.
The next morning (can't remember what day) we cycled from near Gare du Nord to Gare Montparnesse and again it was heaving. We were grateful for the number of reverse one way streets to protect cyclists which were safe (it is a great safety idea discussed here before and doesn't impede drivers). Solid traffic and buzzing pavements, van drivers opening their doors onto you and drivers cutting you up and trying to kill you. At the Place de la Concorde there was really only a choice between death and walking.
On the return (an afternoon) Paris was at a stand still with traffic (with the mandatory leaning on horns) so it was quicker to walk on the pavement and pick up bike lanes where we could.
I must say though cycling through the countryside in France, particularly between 12 and 2 you could be forgiven for thinking you were the only humans left.
It is decidedly odd. I noticed it yesterday - away from the absolutely main tourist areas - a peculiar quietness. I ascribed it to Sunday but today it’s the same. Part of it is the replacement of ICE cars with electric. You can hear the same evolution in london. Its good. But in Paris it also a sheer lack of traffic
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Given the technologies available (industrial mass production, and weapons of mass killing like the machine gun), and the lack of means for rapid manoeuvre outside of fixed infrastructure like rail, battles like the Somme and Verdun were pretty well inevitable if neither side was prepared to sue for peace.
The real tragedy was that the war started in the first place.
What was that quote - WWI started because no one could be bothered not to go to war.
Or somesuch.
I read my Moltke and Causes of the First World War like everyone else and about all i could get out of it was that everyone expected everyone else to go to war and hence "we" might as well/had better do it now as later.
I know it is probably an oversimplification but I have always like AJP Taylor's Railway Timetables theory for one of the causes of WW1.
I think there's great merit in the thinking that it was a technological watershed or coming of age. And something had to be done with it all.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Things must have changed dramatically since last June.
When we arrived last year in late afternoon Paris was heaving which was a pain because people kept walking into the pavement based bike lanes which caused some serious braking not to hit people.
The next morning (can't remember what day) we cycled from near Gare du Nord to Gare Montparnesse and again it was heaving. We were grateful for the number of reverse one way streets to protect cyclists which were safe (it is a great safety idea discussed here before and doesn't impede drivers). Solid traffic and buzzing pavements, van drivers opening their doors onto you and drivers cutting you up and trying to kill you. At the Place de la Concorde there was really only a choice between death and walking.
On the return (an afternoon) Paris was at a stand still with traffic (with the mandatory leaning on horns) so it was quicker to walk on the pavement and pick up bike lanes where we could.
I must say though cycling through the countryside in France, particularly between 12 and 2 you could be forgiven for thinking you were the only humans left.
“start the week” on R4 this morning was called “living in Cities” and discussed the development of London and Paris regarding things such as being cycle friendly and urban layout etc. it appears that less than a third of Parisians have a car, which is the lowest proportion in a Western European city, compared to about 50% in London and so has been a lot easier and less resistance for Hidalgo to introduce less car friendly policies.
Also discussed how London 2012 has influenced Paris Olympic planners with the development of St Dennis as and Olympic village and business district.
Gideon Falter really not doing himself any favours on Sky News .
Comes across as obnoxious and really not a very nice character. People need to see what his so called organization has been upto .
It is clear that Gideon Falter has an agenda in calling for dismissal of the Commissioner, and also that he had an agenda when setting out to provoke a reaction from police and protestors. The facts on the ground in London are that weekly pro-Palestinian marches might well be a PITA and expensive to police but they have not been violent or destructive so a pretext is needed to ban them. They've not been effective, either, of course.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Cycling? Some of the main streets in Paris have more cyclists than cars now, and on some metrics the city has overtaken Amsterdam.
This has made it much more pleasant city to drive around with fewer cars clogging up the streets.
According to considerable quantities of publicly available information, politics in the UK *is* populated by the weird and the wealthy.
Politics used to be a part time job, generally done by the upper middle classes. The problem with the change to professional, full time politics is that it isn’t a career - more moderately paid social work and greasy poll climbing. There’s no professional development and after 10 years in Parliament, you have no career to return to - unless you’ve created a lobbying network instead of trying to do the job.
Further, the gao between what an MP does and what we expect a Minister to do is staggering. To go from running a half dozen, very junior direct reports (with direct hire and fire), to running a department. 100ks of people, with all the internal systems and politics. And a weird, rather convoluted definition of responsibility - meaning you can’t fire civil servants if they literally lie to you.
It’s not surprising that many ministers just sign the huge piles of paper they are given. They have no idea how to do anything else.
The only way we are going to fix this is either dramatically devolve some things away from Parliament (eg set up an English Parliament as well as Westminster), or dramatically increase the number of MPs (I'd go with at least 900), or both.
Malmesbury puts his case very eloquently, but in my experience it's not quite as sharp-edged as that. MPs do have a degree of influence in Ministerial decisions, if only in the sense that the Minister has to buy their consent with concessions, and PPSs - the normal route to a Ministerial role - do see things from the inside, if only as bag-carriers. In the two Ministries where I was involved (Energy and Defra), there was the same sort of division of labour with the civil service as you get in a Council executive - the Minister set out the things that most concerned him or her, the civil service delivered a report weith option, and the Minister made choices. There was little to no personnel management.
The Yes, Minister idea that civil servants essentially run the show is true of weak Ministers, but if they come in with a clear agenda the civil service generally take a professional pride in trying to make it work, unless it's Triss-level craziness leading to formal notifications of dissent. I can't see that having another layer of government (e.g. an English Parliament) would help any of this, but separating the social work side might if every constituency had an elected Ombudsman who was expected to do just that, and MPs were banned from any official role in casework.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
At the start of the war, generals were often on the front line. You see the following numbers quoted a fair bit - 76 British, 42 French, 2 Belgian, 2 Italian, and 2 Romanian generals killed on the Allied side.
The big problem was command and control. Without mobile radio, you are in command of those in earshot. Unless you are in a bunker, with wired telephones or telegraph.
And then you need a big space for the maps, whole rooms for the telephone and telegraph operators (who have to be on site). So running the war from the front lines couldn’t work.
Towards the end of the war, aircraft began to carry radio, which allowed a massive cut in the time for events on the battleground (as observed by recon aircraft) to be added to the “picture” on the map tables.
Yes, generals did need to be kept away from the front line but it did not help that they arrived in staff cars and uniforms that enemy snipers could easily identify, just like Nelson at Trafalgar.
I remember that famous painting of Nelson’s staff car parked up on the poop deck. Remarkable.
Feed that prompt to one of Leon's AI machines and the painting can be hanging on your wall.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Cycling? Some of the main streets in Paris have more cyclists than cars now, and on some metrics the city has overtaken Amsterdam.
This has made it much more pleasant city to drive around with fewer cars clogging up the streets.
Could also be road closures as they prep for the Olympics?
BlackRock boss steps up security after anti-woke backlash
Most people won't have heard of this guy or even know who Blackrock are but many people will have money saved with this company one way or another, either via SIPP, ISA or Pension.
"Mr Fink said in his annual Chairman’s letter to investors: “There are many people with opinions about how we should manage our clients’ money. But the money doesn’t belong to these people. It’s not ours either. It belongs to our clients, and our responsibility and our duty is to them.”"
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Cycling? Some of the main streets in Paris have more cyclists than cars now, and on some metrics the city has overtaken Amsterdam.
This has made it much more pleasant city to drive around with fewer cars clogging up the streets.
Yes could be. You certainly notice the profusion of cycles
On the other hand, when married to all the shuttered shops (post covid?) it brings a certain deadness to the streets. Like a perpetual Sunday
Gideon Falter really not doing himself any favours on Sky News .
Comes across as obnoxious and really not a very nice character. People need to see what his so called organization has been upto .
I was defending him on here over the weekend but, it was the same on GMB this morning. He came over as a bit of a prick. Obnoxious, as you say, is also a good word to describe him.
Trump is a lying bully with a glass jaw - wrt to Court Orders preventing abuse of persons associated with Court Staff, witnesses etc when confronted on specifics he tends to back down. US Judicial institutions have proven unwilling to tackle the Orange Whale appropriately, which indicates reform will be needed later.
Despite that, today is Day 1 of the actual hearing, and tomorrow is the hearing concerning his many violations of Court Orders.
I do wonder what will happen if the Judge does what would have happened to any other criminal Defendant many months ago, and simply withdraws bail privileges, and sticks Trump in a cell until the end of the trial. I'd say it would have had an impact on Trump's delaying tactics.
("But he's a candidate for POTUS" - sorry, he was a criminal suspect indicted by a Jury of his peers, wtf did you expect to happen?).
As it is, Judge Mershon is the only Judge who has continued to assert strongish control, and Trump faces multiple counts of criminal contempt of Court, each of which can carry 30 day prison sentences, and I am not sure if Appeal is possible. If Trump received 6 consecutive 30 day tariffs, it would imo be delicious.
Plus the NY DA has put in a motion for the $175m surety in the Civil Case to be rejected for multiple seemingly good reasons, which if approved may allow her to start seizing Trump properties.
Another interesting week coming.
I think the Republican "rebellion" over the Ukraine bill (i.e. all but about 70 decided that siding with Trump/Putin was no longer the 'right' choice) is indicative of the impact this trial is having already. I would suggest that their calculation is that MAGA Republicans no longer represent the threat they once did.
But it is ok for me to register in two different constituencies because I have two properties (I haven't done so but could) or my children to do so when they were students (both did) or Brits who have not lived in the UK for up to a decade, and now forever to have a vote, yet it is not ok for Rayner to pick which house she is registered in, in the same constituency (so the impact is zero).
Please explain what the issue is @squareroot2 . The answer isn't because the Times is running the story but actually requires you to use your brain.
A bit early to start insulting people first up.... We shall see. The police are investigation. Neighbours accuse her of lying. The tax man doesn't like being taken for a fool.
We shall see.
I didn't insult you, I asked you to use your brain rather than link to a Times article and you haven't done so.
What I want to know is what you think the issue is re registration for voting and you just keep ignoring the question.
So tell us 'What is the issue?' because it baffles me. I mean use your brain and don't just link to an article. Think for yourself. It isn't a lot to ask
PS I am referring to the electoral registration not CGT so the taxman issue is not relevant to my question.
But it is ok for me to register in two different constituencies because I have two properties (I haven't done so but could) or my children to do so when they were students (both did) or Brits who have not lived in the UK for up to a decade, and now forever to have a vote, yet it is not ok for Rayner to pick which house she is registered in, in the same constituency (so the impact is zero).
Please explain what the issue is @squareroot2 . The answer isn't because the Times is running the story but actually requires you to use your brain.
A bit early to start insulting people first up.... We shall see. The police are investigation. Neighbours accuse her of lying. The tax man doesn't like being taken for a fool.
We shall see.
I didn't insult you, I asked you to use your brain rather than link to a Times article and you haven't done so.
What I want to know is what you think the issue is re registration for voting and you just keep ignoring the question.
So tell us 'What is the issue?' because it baffles me. I mean use your brain and don't just link to an article. Think for yourself. It isn't a lot to ask
PS I am referring to the electoral registration not CGT so the taxman issue is not relevant to my question.
@squareroot2 fyi I am not a Labour voter and have never voted Labour in my 69 years and I am definitely not a fan of Rayner's politics, but this sort of stuff is damaging to politics. There are enough crooked politicians going around that we don't have to create new issues.
The police get inundated with complaints about politicians that are nonsense (particularly during elections) that they can't see the wood for the trees so real crimes go unpunished and if you make enough noise about it they are forced to investigate. This needs to stop so the police can concentrate on proper stuff. Even if Rayner has registered at the wrong address it is a technical issue as it has zero impact for election purposes.
People bringing frivolous complaints to the police for party political purposes should be prosecuted for wasting police time.
How do you know for certain that its nonsense. You don't so pipe down.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
This is a great summary of Chester. You have to close your eyes for 10 minutes as you walk from the train station to the Cathedral.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Cycling? Some of the main streets in Paris have more cyclists than cars now, and on some metrics the city has overtaken Amsterdam.
This has made it much more pleasant city to drive around with fewer cars clogging up the streets.
Yes could be. You certainly notice the profusion of cycles
Cyclists were a major hazard when I was walking around Paris in March last year. They cycle at huge speeds and don't slow down when they see pedestrians. Walking across a cycle path was a bit dicey. Their attitude seemed to be "We're entitled to be on this cycle path and we don't care about anyone else including pedestrians".
However enough of being mean to the French. I am now on a magnificent TGV hurtling towards Quimper. One of so many high speed lines. And we can’t do a single one from Birmingham to london. It is pathetic
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications network was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
“Hard won lessons”. Mate; it’s the fucking SOMME
Its like saying Auschwitz wasn’t all bad cause it gave opportunities for first time buyers in Cracow
Oh yeah, I know, it's bonkers.
But you have to remember these were largely inexperienced troops. There hadn't been time to train them properly. The idea was the week long bombardment before the attack would have destroyed the wire and killed the defenders, so our green troops would simply have to walk - not run - across no man's land and occupy empty trenches.
Obviously, that didn't happen. The artillery wasn't effective enough; it wasn't dense enough and they hadn't yet developed fuses which would burst on contact with the wire. Shells buried themselves in the ground before exploding, making them largely useless at destroying the wire. The deep German dugouts weren't destroyed, so as soon as the bombardment stopped the Germans simply set up their machine guns and mowed down the waves of troops ambling towards them. It's insane when you think about it but hindsight's a wonderful thing.
And this was suspected before the attack. Some frontline officers knew the machine guns hadn't been destroyed, and knew they and their men would be killed. And they were.
But the French were on their knees at Verdun. The Germans had to be fought.
It's a debate in WW1 historiography that'll last forever.
Of course I know what you mean, in terms of military strategy and all that
Nevertheless whenever I hear this kind of discourse about World War 1 it does feel like someone saying “on the other hand” about the Holocaust
World War 1 was where it all went wrong for European civilisation and maybe humanity. So many evil things arose therefore - communism and Hitler to start with. We are still living with the aftermath
Plus: the trenches. The piled corpses. Verdun. And THE SOMME
Yeah it's hard to get beyond the memorials, the corpses rotting on the wire, the seemingly futile attacks sending men over the top again and again, the ossuary at Verdun, all the horror and the waste. I get it.
But more recent historiography from the Revisionists, as they're called, is very thought-provoking and gives a more nuanced and, though this feels an alien word for such a visceral and emotive conflict, dispassionate and, you would hope, more accurate view of the British and empire experience of the war, how it was fought in the way it was and how tactics and the army developed as the war went on. The army of 1918, and how it fought, was a very different beast to that of 1914, and 1916 too. And some, maybe most modern WW1 historians nowadays, view the Somme as a necessary and crucial part of that development and evolution.
But still, when I read of that first day and the sub-battles that happened as the Somme dragged on, Delville ('Devil') Wood and the rest, and indeed battles later on, most notably Passchendaele, it is emotionally hard to sympathise with the revisionist view even whilst finding it persuasive in many ways.
As for the Holocaust, and I've said this before on here, please watch, and it's a very difficult watch, Claude Lanzmann's 9 hour documentary Shoah. A superb, towering account of the Holocaust, it's beginnings and evolution. Unmissable.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Things must have changed dramatically since last June.
When we arrived last year in late afternoon Paris was heaving which was a pain because people kept walking into the pavement based bike lanes which caused some serious braking not to hit people.
The next morning (can't remember what day) we cycled from near Gare du Nord to Gare Montparnesse and again it was heaving. We were grateful for the number of reverse one way streets to protect cyclists which were safe (it is a great safety idea discussed here before and doesn't impede drivers). Solid traffic and buzzing pavements, van drivers opening their doors onto you and drivers cutting you up and trying to kill you. At the Place de la Concorde there was really only a choice between death and walking.
On the return (an afternoon) Paris was at a stand still with traffic (with the mandatory leaning on horns) so it was quicker to walk on the pavement and pick up bike lanes where we could.
I must say though cycling through the countryside in France, particularly between 12 and 2 you could be forgiven for thinking you were the only humans left.
It is decidedly odd. I noticed it yesterday - away from the absolutely main tourist areas - a peculiar quietness. I ascribed it to Sunday but today it’s the same. Part of it is the replacement of ICE cars with electric. You can hear the same evolution in london. Its good. But in Paris it also a sheer lack of traffic
Maybe nothing
I'll be there in June again so it will be interesting to see. I will be cycling from Gare du Nord to the Latin Qtr for the night and then leaving from Gare d'Austerlitz the next day and returning to Gare Montparnesse and cycling to Gare du Nord a week and a bit later. 3 different workdays.
After your recent posts I was working out how much time I have spent in Paris and France and it is huge. It runs into many years, although never longer than 3 weeks at any one time. I wasn't taught French in school and have never been there long enough to pick it up to my real regret. I have spent the equivalent of a year skiing on French slopes, I have spent the equivalent of a year touring with my family when my children were young. I have worked on and off in Paris and Nice at times. I spent 3 weeks touring with a girlfriend in the 70s and I now cycle all over France every year. I have been to Disneyland 3 times which is 2 times more than I wanted to go, but kids eh.
According to considerable quantities of publicly available information, politics in the UK *is* populated by the weird and the wealthy.
Politics used to be a part time job, generally done by the upper middle classes. The problem with the change to professional, full time politics is that it isn’t a career - more moderately paid social work and greasy poll climbing. There’s no professional development and after 10 years in Parliament, you have no career to return to - unless you’ve created a lobbying network instead of trying to do the job.
Further, the gao between what an MP does and what we expect a Minister to do is staggering. To go from running a half dozen, very junior direct reports (with direct hire and fire), to running a department. 100ks of people, with all the internal systems and politics. And a weird, rather convoluted definition of responsibility - meaning you can’t fire civil servants if they literally lie to you.
It’s not surprising that many ministers just sign the huge piles of paper they are given. They have no idea how to do anything else.
The only way we are going to fix this is either dramatically devolve some things away from Parliament (eg set up an English Parliament as well as Westminster), or dramatically increase the number of MPs (I'd go with at least 900), or both.
Malmesbury puts his case very eloquently, but in my experience it's not quite as sharp-edged as that. MPs do have a degree of influence in Ministerial decisions, if only in the sense that the Minister has to buy their consent with concessions, and PPSs - the normal route to a Ministerial role - do see things from the inside, if only as bag-carriers. In the two Ministries where I was involved (Energy and Defra), there was the same sort of division of labour with the civil service as you get in a Council executive - the Minister set out the things that most concerned him or her, the civil service delivered a report weith option, and the Minister made choices. There was little to no personnel management.
The Yes, Minister idea that civil servants essentially run the show is true of weak Ministers, but if they come in with a clear agenda the civil service generally take a professional pride in trying to make it work, unless it's Triss-level craziness leading to formal notifications of dissent. I can't see that having another layer of government (e.g. an English Parliament) would help any of this, but separating the social work side might if every constituency had an elected Ombudsman who was expected to do just that, and MPs were banned from any official role in casework.
What policy do you find particularly crazy about Truss's time that warranted such a rebellion?
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Cycling? Some of the main streets in Paris have more cyclists than cars now, and on some metrics the city has overtaken Amsterdam.
This has made it much more pleasant city to drive around with fewer cars clogging up the streets.
Yes could be. You certainly notice the profusion of cycles
Cyclists were a major hazard when I was walking around Paris in March last year. They cycle at huge speeds and don't slow down when they see pedestrians. Walking across a cycle path was a bit dicey. Their attitude seemed to be "We're entitled to be on this cycle path and we don't care about anyone else including pedestrians".
Looks like I'm about to explore French road safety stats for the first time...
HUGE SPEEDS = 15 Mph MAJOR HAZARD = Carrying 5% of the kinetic energy of an SUV
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Cycling? Some of the main streets in Paris have more cyclists than cars now, and on some metrics the city has overtaken Amsterdam.
This has made it much more pleasant city to drive around with fewer cars clogging up the streets.
Yes could be. You certainly notice the profusion of cycles
Cyclists were a major hazard when I was walking around Paris in March last year. They cycle at huge speeds and don't slow down when they see pedestrians. Walking across a cycle path was a bit dicey. Their attitude seemed to be "We're entitled to be on this cycle path and we don't care about anyone else including pedestrians".
I mean have you ever driven through the Place de la Concorde. On principle people don't look.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Things must have changed dramatically since last June.
When we arrived last year in late afternoon Paris was heaving which was a pain because people kept walking into the pavement based bike lanes which caused some serious braking not to hit people.
The next morning (can't remember what day) we cycled from near Gare du Nord to Gare Montparnesse and again it was heaving. We were grateful for the number of reverse one way streets to protect cyclists which were safe (it is a great safety idea discussed here before and doesn't impede drivers). Solid traffic and buzzing pavements, van drivers opening their doors onto you and drivers cutting you up and trying to kill you. At the Place de la Concorde there was really only a choice between death and walking.
On the return (an afternoon) Paris was at a stand still with traffic (with the mandatory leaning on horns) so it was quicker to walk on the pavement and pick up bike lanes where we could.
I must say though cycling through the countryside in France, particularly between 12 and 2 you could be forgiven for thinking you were the only humans left.
“start the week” on R4 this morning was called “living in Cities” and discussed the development of London and Paris regarding things such as being cycle friendly and urban layout etc. it appears that less than a third of Parisians have a car, which is the lowest proportion in a Western European city, compared to about 50% in London and so has been a lot easier and less resistance for Hidalgo to introduce less car friendly policies.
Also discussed how London 2012 has influenced Paris Olympic planners with the development of St Dennis as and Olympic village and business district.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Things must have changed dramatically since last June.
When we arrived last year in late afternoon Paris was heaving which was a pain because people kept walking into the pavement based bike lanes which caused some serious braking not to hit people.
The next morning (can't remember what day) we cycled from near Gare du Nord to Gare Montparnesse and again it was heaving. We were grateful for the number of reverse one way streets to protect cyclists which were safe (it is a great safety idea discussed here before and doesn't impede drivers). Solid traffic and buzzing pavements, van drivers opening their doors onto you and drivers cutting you up and trying to kill you. At the Place de la Concorde there was really only a choice between death and walking.
On the return (an afternoon) Paris was at a stand still with traffic (with the mandatory leaning on horns) so it was quicker to walk on the pavement and pick up bike lanes where we could.
I must say though cycling through the countryside in France, particularly between 12 and 2 you could be forgiven for thinking you were the only humans left.
“start the week” on R4 this morning was called “living in Cities” and discussed the development of London and Paris regarding things such as being cycle friendly and urban layout etc. it appears that less than a third of Parisians have a car, which is the lowest proportion in a Western European city, compared to about 50% in London and so has been a lot easier and less resistance for Hidalgo to introduce less car friendly policies.
Also discussed how London 2012 has influenced Paris Olympic planners with the development of St Dennis as and Olympic village and business district.
So is this clear evidence that the BBC ISN'T dominated by Oxbridge graduates? Or that the BBC's over powerful Oxonians are either too lazy to check their assertions with ONS, or so innumerate they don't realise Oxonians are less likely to have a car that Parisians?
Thanks for your reply of a few nights ago @luckyguy1983. I have not been on PB much over the last few days (I have been leading a proper life for a change) and just been dipping in and out occasionally so sorry for the late response to your nice reply. Although our conversation wasn't too heated compared to others I do like to be polite at all times and I definitely fell below my standards the other night and it was entirely my fault. I made what I thought was a witty piece of sarcasm (which it clearly wasn't as I got no likes) and I went a bit downhill from there.
Actually it wasn't a case of Trump Deranged Syndrome on my part (I think you probably know that and were making a general point, with which I agree), but it was a case of me being a logic pedant. I don't know why because although it is an area I specialised in at University I still make as many cockups as the next person. Also I am rubbish at expressing myself in plain English.
Obviously I don't want to revisit that discussion, but I would like to revisit my logic by expressing it in logical terms. I won't use logic notation (mainly because I haven't a clue where the keys are on this damn keyboard).
So: In response to someone else's post you posted
Statement A (An accepted fact) Statement B (A sincerely held and well researched opinion)
I posted
Statement C (Another accepted fact)
My argument was that C showed that A and B were inconsistent (And I only did so because I was being an arse)
You responded that you did not deduce B from A and made that point by saying you used an 'AND' not a 'THEREFORE' to prove that point
I accept that but that wasn't the point I was raising. My logic had more than 1 step.
Here it is:
A and C had a one to one relationship. If you are relying on A in an argument you must also be willing to rely on C.
However if C is true then B is false because they directly contradicted one another.
Hence the same goes for A.
So you can rely on A but if you do so B will not be true.
Or you can have B but then you mustn't rely on A.
I've probably cocked up again somewhere in there, as usual. Anyway I just posted to show my thought processes.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Well, it wouldn't have happened.
Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is another question.
Sure, the generalship of the Somme was inept, but that's partly because the generals were wrestling with a new type of warfare. And while their errors came at a terrible human cost, the lessons learned in that battle (particularly by the likes of Currie, watching closely from the reserve trenches) ultimately paved the way for the breaking of the German army in 1918.
"Mud, Blood and Poppycock" by Gordon Corrigan is a useful corrective to the Blackadder depiction of British and Imperial Generalship.
The main cheerleader for Haig and the other British WW1 commanders for many years was John Terraine. But he was just as biased in favour of Haig as Clarke had been against him. Indeed he descibed Haig as "the man who led the British Army in its most majestic series of victories", which I would politely suggest marks him as something of a fucking lunatic.
The Hundred Days at the end of the war was an impressive achievement.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Things must have changed dramatically since last June.
When we arrived last year in late afternoon Paris was heaving which was a pain because people kept walking into the pavement based bike lanes which caused some serious braking not to hit people.
The next morning (can't remember what day) we cycled from near Gare du Nord to Gare Montparnesse and again it was heaving. We were grateful for the number of reverse one way streets to protect cyclists which were safe (it is a great safety idea discussed here before and doesn't impede drivers). Solid traffic and buzzing pavements, van drivers opening their doors onto you and drivers cutting you up and trying to kill you. At the Place de la Concorde there was really only a choice between death and walking.
On the return (an afternoon) Paris was at a stand still with traffic (with the mandatory leaning on horns) so it was quicker to walk on the pavement and pick up bike lanes where we could.
I must say though cycling through the countryside in France, particularly between 12 and 2 you could be forgiven for thinking you were the only humans left.
It is decidedly odd. I noticed it yesterday - away from the absolutely main tourist areas - a peculiar quietness. I ascribed it to Sunday but today it’s the same. Part of it is the replacement of ICE cars with electric. You can hear the same evolution in london. Its good. But in Paris it also a sheer lack of traffic
Maybe nothing
I'll be there in June again so it will be interesting to see. I will be cycling from Gare du Nord to the Latin Qtr for the night and then leaving from Gare d'Austerlitz the next day and returning to Gare Montparnesse and cycling to Gare du Nord a week and a bit later. 3 different workdays.
After your recent posts I was working out how much time I have spent in Paris and France and it is huge. It runs into many years, although never longer than 3 weeks at any one time. I wasn't taught French in school and have never been there long enough to pick it up to my real regret. I have spent the equivalent of a year skiing on French slopes, I have spent the equivalent of a year touring with my family when my children were young. I have worked on and off in Paris and Nice at times. I spent 3 weeks touring with a girlfriend in the 70s and I now cycle all over France every year. I have been to Disneyland 3 times which is 2 times more than I wanted to go, but kids eh.
You probably know it better than me. Tho I must have been here 20-30 times or so
I know it all pretty well - except a few corners of the east (Alsace) and Brittany/Normandy where I am headed now. I intend to see as much as possible. I’ve never been to mont st Michel. Never seen the bayeux tapestry. Never seen a d day beach
And I’ve never eaten oysters in cancale. This must change! Life is short
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
This is a great summary of Chester. You have to close your eyes for 10 minutes as you walk from the train station to the Cathedral.
That's right! Which is inadvisable as for the first three-quarters of a mile or so of that it's not the most pedestrian-friendly of environments. I've only arrived by train once, but it's one of England's more dispiriting urban arrivals. Not least because the station is about a mile from the city centre. I have just been looking at the map, actually, and wondering whether it might have been possible to site the main station rather closer. Weirdly off-the-beaten-track, Chester, even in the North West. I'm always faintly surprised by its existence when I go there.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Things must have changed dramatically since last June.
When we arrived last year in late afternoon Paris was heaving which was a pain because people kept walking into the pavement based bike lanes which caused some serious braking not to hit people.
The next morning (can't remember what day) we cycled from near Gare du Nord to Gare Montparnesse and again it was heaving. We were grateful for the number of reverse one way streets to protect cyclists which were safe (it is a great safety idea discussed here before and doesn't impede drivers). Solid traffic and buzzing pavements, van drivers opening their doors onto you and drivers cutting you up and trying to kill you. At the Place de la Concorde there was really only a choice between death and walking.
On the return (an afternoon) Paris was at a stand still with traffic (with the mandatory leaning on horns) so it was quicker to walk on the pavement and pick up bike lanes where we could.
I must say though cycling through the countryside in France, particularly between 12 and 2 you could be forgiven for thinking you were the only humans left.
It is decidedly odd. I noticed it yesterday - away from the absolutely main tourist areas - a peculiar quietness. I ascribed it to Sunday but today it’s the same. Part of it is the replacement of ICE cars with electric. You can hear the same evolution in london. Its good. But in Paris it also a sheer lack of traffic
Maybe nothing
I'll be there in June again so it will be interesting to see. I will be cycling from Gare du Nord to the Latin Qtr for the night and then leaving from Gare d'Austerlitz the next day and returning to Gare Montparnesse and cycling to Gare du Nord a week and a bit later. 3 different workdays.
After your recent posts I was working out how much time I have spent in Paris and France and it is huge. It runs into many years, although never longer than 3 weeks at any one time. I wasn't taught French in school and have never been there long enough to pick it up to my real regret. I have spent the equivalent of a year skiing on French slopes, I have spent the equivalent of a year touring with my family when my children were young. I have worked on and off in Paris and Nice at times. I spent 3 weeks touring with a girlfriend in the 70s and I now cycle all over France every year. I have been to Disneyland 3 times which is 2 times more than I wanted to go, but kids eh.
You probably know it better than me. Tho I must have been here 20-30 times or so
I know it all pretty well - except a few corners of the east (Alsace) and Brittany/Normandy where I am headed now. I intend to see as much as possible. I’ve never been to mont st Michel. Never seen the bayeux tapestry. Never seen a d day beach
And I’ve never eaten oysters in cancale. This must change! Life is short
The Bayeux Tapestry exhibition is housed in such a classically dated 1980s era museum that the interiors probably ought to be listed. It's like visiting a public library in Southampton in around 1986.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Cycling? Some of the main streets in Paris have more cyclists than cars now, and on some metrics the city has overtaken Amsterdam.
This has made it much more pleasant city to drive around with fewer cars clogging up the streets.
Yes could be. You certainly notice the profusion of cycles
Cyclists were a major hazard when I was walking around Paris in March last year. They cycle at huge speeds and don't slow down when they see pedestrians. Walking across a cycle path was a bit dicey. Their attitude seemed to be "We're entitled to be on this cycle path and we don't care about anyone else including pedestrians".
I mean have you ever driven through the Place de la Concorde. On principle people don't look.
That really has changed. And - on reflection - it must be the cycle revolution meaning fewer cars (and quieter because electric)
Eg when I arrived my cab approached the arc de triomphe in mid afternoon and I braced for that infernal chaos. Yet not. Just a number of cars politely going in circles - the whirling frenzy is a memory
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Given the technologies available (industrial mass production, and weapons of mass killing like the machine gun), and the lack of means for rapid manoeuvre outside of fixed infrastructure like rail, battles like the Somme and Verdun were pretty well inevitable if neither side was prepared to sue for peace.
The real tragedy was that the war started in the first place.
What was that quote - WWI started because no one could be bothered not to go to war.
Or somesuch.
I read my Moltke and Causes of the First World War like everyone else and about all i could get out of it was that everyone expected everyone else to go to war and hence "we" might as well/had better do it now as later.
I know it is probably an oversimplification but I have always like AJP Taylor's Railway Timetables theory for one of the causes of WW1.
I think there's great merit in the thinking that it was a technological watershed or coming of age. And something had to be done with it all.
I must have another read of my wife's grandfathers WWI diary. He wasn't a general, just an Other Rank, turned down as unfit in 1914 (IIRC), then passed as fit two years later. He wasn't at the Somme but he got involved in some very unpleasant situations. As I recall he felt it was his 'patriotic duty' to try again.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
It was not an accident. The 1960s did this and did so knowingly. If you put together the forgetfulness of brutalism (the name is not an accident) + lack of talent + building on the cheap + the dominance of the car + greed + 'government knows best' you can see the result.
A list of the places not so terribly afflicted is short, but longer than the list of places people love because brutalism worked well. Most were too small to bother with wrecking; some places so large you could not wreck it all. Stamford is my personal favourite.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Given the technologies available (industrial mass production, and weapons of mass killing like the machine gun), and the lack of means for rapid manoeuvre outside of fixed infrastructure like rail, battles like the Somme and Verdun were pretty well inevitable if neither side was prepared to sue for peace.
The real tragedy was that the war started in the first place.
What was that quote - WWI started because no one could be bothered not to go to war.
Or somesuch.
I read my Moltke and Causes of the First World War like everyone else and about all I could get out of it was that everyone expected everyone else to go to war and hence "we" might as well/had better do it now as later.
I know it is probably an oversimplification but I have always like AJP Taylor's Railway Timetables theory for one of the causes of WW1.
I think there's great merit in the thinking that it was a technological watershed or coming of age. And something had to be done with it all.
Or putting it another way, pre-industrial model leaders finding themselves in charge of industrial model economies.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications network was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
“Hard won lessons”. Mate; it’s the fucking SOMME
Its like saying Auschwitz wasn’t all bad cause it gave opportunities for first time buyers in Cracow
Oh yeah, I know, it's bonkers.
But you have to remember these were largely inexperienced troops. There hadn't been time to train them properly. The idea was the week long bombardment before the attack would have destroyed the wire and killed the defenders, so our green troops would simply have to walk - not run - across no man's land and occupy empty trenches.
Obviously, that didn't happen. The artillery wasn't effective enough; it wasn't dense enough and they hadn't yet developed fuses which would burst on contact with the wire. Shells buried themselves in the ground before exploding, making them largely useless at destroying the wire. The deep German dugouts weren't destroyed, so as soon as the bombardment stopped the Germans simply set up their machine guns and mowed down the waves of troops ambling towards them. It's insane when you think about it but hindsight's a wonderful thing.
And this was suspected before the attack. Some frontline officers knew the machine guns hadn't been destroyed, and knew they and their men would be killed. And they were.
But the French were on their knees at Verdun. The Germans had to be fought.
It's a debate in WW1 historiography that'll last forever.
Of course I know what you mean, in terms of military strategy and all that
Nevertheless whenever I hear this kind of discourse about World War 1 it does feel like someone saying “on the other hand” about the Holocaust
World War 1 was where it all went wrong for European civilisation and maybe humanity. So many evil things arose therefore - communism and Hitler to start with. We are still living with the aftermath
Plus: the trenches. The piled corpses. Verdun. And THE SOMME
There is an argument that european civilization actually peaked in 1914.
But it is ok for me to register in two different constituencies because I have two properties (I haven't done so but could) or my children to do so when they were students (both did) or Brits who have not lived in the UK for up to a decade, and now forever to have a vote, yet it is not ok for Rayner to pick which house she is registered in, in the same constituency (so the impact is zero).
Please explain what the issue is @squareroot2 . The answer isn't because the Times is running the story but actually requires you to use your brain.
A bit early to start insulting people first up.... We shall see. The police are investigation. Neighbours accuse her of lying. The tax man doesn't like being taken for a fool.
We shall see.
I didn't insult you, I asked you to use your brain rather than link to a Times article and you haven't done so.
What I want to know is what you think the issue is re registration for voting and you just keep ignoring the question.
So tell us 'What is the issue?' because it baffles me. I mean use your brain and don't just link to an article. Think for yourself. It isn't a lot to ask
PS I am referring to the electoral registration not CGT so the taxman issue is not relevant to my question.
But it is ok for me to register in two different constituencies because I have two properties (I haven't done so but could) or my children to do so when they were students (both did) or Brits who have not lived in the UK for up to a decade, and now forever to have a vote, yet it is not ok for Rayner to pick which house she is registered in, in the same constituency (so the impact is zero).
Please explain what the issue is @squareroot2 . The answer isn't because the Times is running the story but actually requires you to use your brain.
A bit early to start insulting people first up.... We shall see. The police are investigation. Neighbours accuse her of lying. The tax man doesn't like being taken for a fool.
We shall see.
I didn't insult you, I asked you to use your brain rather than link to a Times article and you haven't done so.
What I want to know is what you think the issue is re registration for voting and you just keep ignoring the question.
So tell us 'What is the issue?' because it baffles me. I mean use your brain and don't just link to an article. Think for yourself. It isn't a lot to ask
PS I am referring to the electoral registration not CGT so the taxman issue is not relevant to my question.
@squareroot2 fyi I am not a Labour voter and have never voted Labour in my 69 years and I am definitely not a fan of Rayner's politics, but this sort of stuff is damaging to politics. There are enough crooked politicians going around that we don't have to create new issues.
The police get inundated with complaints about politicians that are nonsense (particularly during elections) that they can't see the wood for the trees so real crimes go unpunished and if you make enough noise about it they are forced to investigate. This needs to stop so the police can concentrate on proper stuff. Even if Rayner has registered at the wrong address it is a technical issue as it has zero impact for election purposes.
People bringing frivolous complaints to the police for party political purposes should be prosecuted for wasting police time.
How do you know for certain that its nonsense. You don't so pipe down.
'So pipe down' - who is being rude now. Talk about Pot and kettle.
Well actually I do know because I know the election law on this subject. It has been explained to you over and over and over again by numerous people here and you consistently failed to explain what election law has been breached and if breached is it a technical breach.
Note I have so far got 9 likes for my post from posters across the political spectrum here. Do you not think that maybe, just maybe, you are wrong?
And not being a Labour supporter don't you think, maybe, just maybe, that if I thought she had done something seriously wrong I would want the police to investigate?
Just use your brain. Just do it and tell us what the issue is re registration because everyone here would love to know.
All this stuff is damaging to both politics and the police who should be investigating proper crimes.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
It was not an accident. The 1960s did this and did so knowingly. If you put together the forgetfulness of brutalism (the name is not an accident) + lack of talent + building on the cheap + the dominance of the car + greed + 'government knows best' you can see the result.
A list of the places not so terribly afflicted is short, but longer than the list of places people love because brutalism worked well. Most were too small to bother with wrecking; some places so large you could not wreck it all. Stamford is my personal favourite.
Brutalism is a French name - it comes from “brute” or raw & generally exposes the raw materials the building is constructed from. You can have a brutalist wooden building just as you can a concrete one.
The problem is not brutalism per se (although it can lead to something of a “one-note” texture to buildings which doesn’t always work) but the god-awful concrete monstrosities that were built & then (crucially) not maintained properly afterwards.
The Barbican is a brutalist building, but remains a well regarded, popular place that people are keen to live in. Other tower blocks built around the same time are ... not as popular as the Barbican.
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Given the technologies available (industrial mass production, and weapons of mass killing like the machine gun), and the lack of means for rapid manoeuvre outside of fixed infrastructure like rail, battles like the Somme and Verdun were pretty well inevitable if neither side was prepared to sue for peace.
The real tragedy was that the war started in the first place.
What was that quote - WWI started because no one could be bothered not to go to war.
Or somesuch.
I read my Moltke and Causes of the First World War like everyone else and about all i could get out of it was that everyone expected everyone else to go to war and hence "we" might as well/had better do it now as later.
I know it is probably an oversimplification but I have always like AJP Taylor's Railway Timetables theory for one of the causes of WW1.
I think there's great merit in the thinking that it was a technological watershed or coming of age. And something had to be done with it all.
I must have another read of my wife's grandfathers WWI diary. He wasn't a general, just an Other Rank, turned down as unfit in 1914 (IIRC), then passed as fit two years later. He wasn't at the Somme but he got involved in some very unpleasant situations. As I recall he felt it was his 'patriotic duty' to try again.
It's such an alien world to us, I think. People's motivations, that love of empire and a deep, almost unthinking, patriotism that, to me at least, seems hard to understand. I had one great-grandad volunteer in 1914 and get sent to Gallipoli and then France (missing his division going over the top in the latter stages of the Somme because he was on leave) before getting his leg shot off in 1917, thus avoiding Passchendaele but having a stump that never properly healed, and another who resisted until being conscripted in 1917 and seemingly never seeing anything too sticky.
According to considerable quantities of publicly available information, politics in the UK *is* populated by the weird and the wealthy.
Politics used to be a part time job, generally done by the upper middle classes. The problem with the change to professional, full time politics is that it isn’t a career - more moderately paid social work and greasy poll climbing. There’s no professional development and after 10 years in Parliament, you have no career to return to - unless you’ve created a lobbying network instead of trying to do the job.
Further, the gao between what an MP does and what we expect a Minister to do is staggering. To go from running a half dozen, very junior direct reports (with direct hire and fire), to running a department. 100ks of people, with all the internal systems and politics. And a weird, rather convoluted definition of responsibility - meaning you can’t fire civil servants if they literally lie to you.
It’s not surprising that many ministers just sign the huge piles of paper they are given. They have no idea how to do anything else.
The only way we are going to fix this is either dramatically devolve some things away from Parliament (eg set up an English Parliament as well as Westminster), or dramatically increase the number of MPs (I'd go with at least 900), or both.
Malmesbury puts his case very eloquently, but in my experience it's not quite as sharp-edged as that. MPs do have a degree of influence in Ministerial decisions, if only in the sense that the Minister has to buy their consent with concessions, and PPSs - the normal route to a Ministerial role - do see things from the inside, if only as bag-carriers. In the two Ministries where I was involved (Energy and Defra), there was the same sort of division of labour with the civil service as you get in a Council executive - the Minister set out the things that most concerned him or her, the civil service delivered a report weith option, and the Minister made choices. There was little to no personnel management.
The Yes, Minister idea that civil servants essentially run the show is true of weak Ministers, but if they come in with a clear agenda the civil service generally take a professional pride in trying to make it work, unless it's Triss-level craziness leading to formal notifications of dissent. I can't see that having another layer of government (e.g. an English Parliament) would help any of this, but separating the social work side might if every constituency had an elected Ombudsman who was expected to do just that, and MPs were banned from any official role in casework.
My point was more that we do not professionally develop MPs. This means that they don’t get training to become ministers and makes them of little use post career, apart from as lobbyists.
It’s a bit like picking random socialites with money as army officers. Every now and then you'd get the Duke of Wellington. But not often.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
Cycling? Some of the main streets in Paris have more cyclists than cars now, and on some metrics the city has overtaken Amsterdam.
This has made it much more pleasant city to drive around with fewer cars clogging up the streets.
Yes could be. You certainly notice the profusion of cycles
Cyclists were a major hazard when I was walking around Paris in March last year. They cycle at huge speeds and don't slow down when they see pedestrians. Walking across a cycle path was a bit dicey. Their attitude seemed to be "We're entitled to be on this cycle path and we don't care about anyone else including pedestrians".
According to considerable quantities of publicly available information, politics in the UK *is* populated by the weird and the wealthy.
Politics used to be a part time job, generally done by the upper middle classes. The problem with the change to professional, full time politics is that it isn’t a career - more moderately paid social work and greasy poll climbing. There’s no professional development and after 10 years in Parliament, you have no career to return to - unless you’ve created a lobbying network instead of trying to do the job.
Further, the gao between what an MP does and what we expect a Minister to do is staggering. To go from running a half dozen, very junior direct reports (with direct hire and fire), to running a department. 100ks of people, with all the internal systems and politics. And a weird, rather convoluted definition of responsibility - meaning you can’t fire civil servants if they literally lie to you.
It’s not surprising that many ministers just sign the huge piles of paper they are given. They have no idea how to do anything else.
The only way we are going to fix this is either dramatically devolve some things away from Parliament (eg set up an English Parliament as well as Westminster), or dramatically increase the number of MPs (I'd go with at least 900), or both.
Malmesbury puts his case very eloquently, but in my experience it's not quite as sharp-edged as that. MPs do have a degree of influence in Ministerial decisions, if only in the sense that the Minister has to buy their consent with concessions, and PPSs - the normal route to a Ministerial role - do see things from the inside, if only as bag-carriers. In the two Ministries where I was involved (Energy and Defra), there was the same sort of division of labour with the civil service as you get in a Council executive - the Minister set out the things that most concerned him or her, the civil service delivered a report weith option, and the Minister made choices. There was little to no personnel management.
The Yes, Minister idea that civil servants essentially run the show is true of weak Ministers, but if they come in with a clear agenda the civil service generally take a professional pride in trying to make it work, unless it's Triss-level craziness leading to formal notifications of dissent. I can't see that having another layer of government (e.g. an English Parliament) would help any of this, but separating the social work side might if every constituency had an elected Ombudsman who was expected to do just that, and MPs were banned from any official role in casework.
What policy do you find particularly crazy about Truss's time that warranted such a rebellion?
Not allowing the OBR to look at the unfunded tax cuts?
Wouldn't the Somme without the Generals been an improvement?
Not my department, but isn't the WW1 trope that the generals generally did a pretty good job of staying away from the front line?
I may just be thinking of Blackadder here.
Current WW1 historians are frustrated by the Blackadder, Lions Led by Donkeys view of WW1 generals that has become the accepted norm amongst the wider population. The picture is nuanced. Some were good, some were bad, like anything.
I am torn in my view of the Battle of the Somme. On one hand it seems that the disaster of the first day and the ensuing campaign threw away lives needlessly for little gain. And it's hard to see beyond that.
The flip side of the coin is that the Somme - originally planned as a huge offensive jointly with the French, but the French contribution was dramatically curtailed due to the German attack at Verdun - was a vital attritional battle, helping the French at Verdun by tying up German manpower and logistics.
It was also vital for the British Army in 1916 - largely the first time the volunteers of 1914 went into action - to actually learn how to fight, though it was certainly a bloody lesson.
It also brought hard-won lessons - the amount and density of artillery needed to properly destroy barbed wire was much greater than that used at the Somme, for example. New tactics, such as bite and hold, developed.
As for staying away from the frontline, the generals were hamstrung by poor communications. They were commanding thousands of men over a wide area and they needed to be at the centre of a vast communications hub to be contactable, receive reports and issue commands accordingly, and this was something like a chateau ten miles behind the frontline. Though the communications hub was rudimentary in the extreme and very ineffective.
Having said all that, I think there was still a willingness by the generals, or maybe too many of them, to stomach gargantuan casualties all through the war. But it was ultimately, brutally, a war of attrition.
I swing from one view to the other. I think the Somme, particularly the first day, was waste. But many argue it was the blood price that had to be paid, the school of hard knocks that had to be endured, that paved the way for eventual victory.
Interesting thanks v much. I also think that people forget/overlook/choose not to appreciate how much much of WWI we were under command of the French.
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Thank you.
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
My first stopover on my road trips is usually near a WWI battlefield, in what look like old farm buildings just north of the Chemin des Dames. On my first visit I made the mistake of asking when the building was constructed, and was told that there isn’t a single building anywhere for miles around that is older than about 1920.
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
Vast areas of our country DO look like Ilford or Hounslow
While we're on about that sort of thing: I was in Chester yesterday. The city of Chester within the walls is an unsung star in our urban firmament. Admittedly it's not quite as brimming with tourist attractions as, say, York, but a beautiful and singular and admirably well-preserved city core nonetheless.
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible. I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification. (But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
It was not an accident. The 1960s did this and did so knowingly. If you put together the forgetfulness of brutalism (the name is not an accident) + lack of talent + building on the cheap + the dominance of the car + greed + 'government knows best' you can see the result.
A list of the places not so terribly afflicted is short, but longer than the list of places people love because brutalism worked well. Most were too small to bother with wrecking; some places so large you could not wreck it all. Stamford is my personal favourite.
There is a small town in N.Essex, Coggeshall, where the 'newest' building in the town centre is, IIRC, 17th Century. Apart, that is, from one RIGHT in the centre which replaced a by then derelict 16th Century town house. From the pictures it was rather nice, and probably just about saveable. Its replacement, in about 1960, was a block of four shops with flats over in 'classical brutalist' style. Local legend has it that architecture students are now brought to the town to be taught what ought NOT to be done.
Comments
It doesn't need that many more anti-immigration votes to decant into the RefUK column for the Tories to drop to third place.
They are not a party to the postage contract, so cannot be "fined" for breaching its terms.
What they mean is that the Royal Mail is conning recipients out of small amounts of money they make hard - and therefore not worth the effort - to pursue.
This is grift in the classic sense of small time swindling.
“If your constituency chair is on the phone telling you that your local association has been wiped out, it’s quite difficult to defend ‘priced in’,” they said. “MPs aren’t on the battlefield this time, it’s like the Somme without the generals.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/21/like-the-somme-without-the-generals-tory-nerves-grow-as-local-elections-loom
Have you been to the Somme, btw? It is fascinating. Horribly so but fascinating. You look out over a vast plain of for all the world pretty normal looking French countryside and have to remind yourself that a million people died there, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
Still freezing here in Paris. Blue skies and bright sun but it’s like early March at best
But the use of old stamps *even when the value is otherwise correct* also attracts a demand for money with menaces ("nice letter ... would be a shame to see it in the shredder"). Very annoying if it is some nonsense circular. Elderly friends/relatives/their carers have been particularly prone to sending this sort of post which falls foul of that rule.
I'm not impressed by the RM happy to sell first and second class stamps with the implicit contract that they're OK even after future price rises, and now this ...
Its like saying Auschwitz wasn’t all bad cause it gave opportunities for first time buyers in Cracow
The real tragedy was that the war started in the first place.
Worse it’s been demonstrated that the post office are reporting their own stamps as being counterfeit
To my chagrin I have never been. But I will be - if not this year, then certainly next year.
I’m now en route to Bretagne
Thiepval Arch is numbingly huge, with all the names of the missing. A landscape haunted by human catastrophe
A timely 2 sentence header !
Trump is a lying bully with a glass jaw - wrt to Court Orders preventing abuse of persons associated with Court Staff, witnesses etc when confronted on specifics he tends to back down. US Judicial institutions have proven unwilling to tackle the Orange Whale appropriately, which indicates reform will be needed later.
Despite that, today is Day 1 of the actual hearing, and tomorrow is the hearing concerning his many violations of Court Orders.
I do wonder what will happen if the Judge does what would have happened to any other criminal Defendant many months ago, and simply withdraws bail privileges, and sticks Trump in a cell until the end of the trial. I'd say it would have had an impact on Trump's delaying tactics.
("But he's a candidate for POTUS" - sorry, he was a criminal suspect indicted by a Jury of his peers, wtf did you expect to happen?).
As it is, Judge Mershon is the only Judge who has continued to assert strongish control, and Trump faces multiple counts of criminal contempt of Court, each of which can carry 30 day prison sentences, and I am not sure if Appeal is possible. If Trump received 6 consecutive 30 day tariffs, it would imo be delicious.
Plus the NY DA has put in a motion for the $175m surety in the Civil Case to be rejected for multiple seemingly good reasons, which if approved may allow her to start seizing Trump properties.
Another interesting week coming.
The bigger parties must be favs purely from standing in most constituencies surely? And they are not known as the cons for nothing.
I have quite enjoyed US media bandying around the famous Churchill quote:
You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.
Or somesuch.
I read my Moltke and Causes of the First World War like everyone else and about all i could get out of it was that everyone expected everyone else to go to war and hence "we" might as well/had better do it now as later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_and_business_legal_affairs_of_Donald_Trump
Given the prurience of some of the US media, I guess they would have found any by now.
This is a sunny Monday morning in late April. I just went from my hotel by the Arc du Triomphe to Gare Montparnasse by Uber. It was a breeze - empty boulevards all the way, barely stopped. That’s great, but also a little strange
The comparison with London on a Monday morning is stark. Traffic wise I certainly prefer the quietness of Paris. But where is everyone?
YVETTE COOPER"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/21/labour-will-stop-the-small-boats/
Had WW1 been in the UK, vast areas of our country would now look like Ilford or Hounslow.
The banter heuristic would dictate that he win the election, then go to jail shortly afterwards.
But you have to remember these were largely inexperienced troops. There hadn't been time to train them properly. The idea was the week long bombardment before the attack would have destroyed the wire and killed the defenders, so our green troops would simply have to walk - not run - across no man's land and occupy empty trenches.
Obviously, that didn't happen. The artillery wasn't effective enough; it wasn't dense enough and they hadn't yet developed fuses which would burst on contact with the wire. Shells buried themselves in the ground before exploding, making them largely useless at destroying the wire. The deep German dugouts weren't destroyed, so as soon as the bombardment stopped the Germans simply set up their machine guns and mowed down the waves of troops ambling towards them. It's insane when you think about it but hindsight's a wonderful thing.
And this was suspected before the attack. Some frontline officers knew the machine guns hadn't been destroyed, and knew they and their men would be killed. And they were.
But the French were on their knees at Verdun. The Germans had to be fought.
It's a debate in WW1 historiography that'll last forever.
The police get inundated with complaints about politicians that are nonsense (particularly during elections) that they can't see the wood for the trees so real crimes go unpunished and if you make enough noise about it they are forced to investigate. This needs to stop so the police can concentrate on proper stuff. Even if Rayner has registered at the wrong address it is a technical issue as it has zero impact for election purposes.
People bringing frivolous complaints to the police for party political purposes should be prosecuted for wasting police time.
Anyway he wasn't elected president.
Nevertheless whenever I hear this kind of discourse about World War 1 it does feel like someone saying “on the other hand” about the Holocaust
World War 1 was where it all went wrong for European civilisation and maybe humanity. So many evil things arose therefore - communism and Hitler to start with. We are still living with the aftermath
Plus: the trenches. The piled corpses. Verdun. And THE SOMME
EDIT: There is an echo of this in the Representation of the People Act 1981 whereby an MP is removed from office is they get a sentence longer than one year.
Comes across as obnoxious and really not a very nice character. People need to see what his so called organization has been upto .
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/514583-trump-denies-mini-strokes-sent-him-to-walter-reed/
When we arrived last year in late afternoon Paris was heaving which was a pain because people kept walking into the pavement based bike lanes which caused some serious braking not to hit people.
The next morning (can't remember what day) we cycled from near Gare du Nord to Gare Montparnesse and again it was heaving. We were grateful for the number of reverse one way streets to protect cyclists which were safe (it is a great safety idea discussed here before and doesn't impede drivers). Solid traffic and buzzing pavements, van drivers opening their doors onto you and drivers cutting you up and trying to kill you. At the Place de la Concorde there was really only a choice between death and walking.
On the return (an afternoon) Paris was at a stand still with traffic (with the mandatory leaning on horns) so it was quicker to walk on the pavement and pick up bike lanes where we could.
I must say though cycling through the countryside in France, particularly between 12 and 2 you could be forgiven for thinking you were the only humans left.
Which had to be relearned all over again, and again...
The GDP estimates for Sweden and Switzerland for 1913 and 1950 give some idea of what might otherwise have been.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Maybe nothing
But good grief the approach from the West is ugly. You come off the motorway, through some very nice outer suburbs, some very nice inner suburbs, and then a 1960s/70s zone of ring roads and tower blocks and utter charmlessness that feels as if its perhaps been designed as a deliberate contrast to the niceness of the city centre itself. (My particular pet hate is council-built tower blocks which deliberately sit at an angle to the streets they should be addressing. It's bad enough that they're ugly; at least try to make them look as if they're a coherent part of the urban landscape.) This ugliness feels too stark to have happened by sheer carelessness; it's as if those responsible for shaping our cities in the 60s and 70s actively wanted to make the environment as unpleasant as possible.
I say this not to single Chester out, but to make the point that not even our loveliest cities have been immune from Hounslowification.
(But that aside, you should still definitely visit Chester.)
Also discussed how London 2012 has influenced Paris Olympic planners with the development of St Dennis as and Olympic village and business district.
Was an interesting programme anyway.
This has made it much more pleasant city to drive around with fewer cars clogging up the streets.
The Yes, Minister idea that civil servants essentially run the show is true of weak Ministers, but if they come in with a clear agenda the civil service generally take a professional pride in trying to make it work, unless it's Triss-level craziness leading to formal notifications of dissent. I can't see that having another layer of government (e.g. an English Parliament) would help any of this, but separating the social work side might if every constituency had an elected Ombudsman who was expected to do just that, and MPs were banned from any official role in casework.
BlackRock boss steps up security after anti-woke backlash
Most people won't have heard of this guy or even know who Blackrock are but many people will have money saved with this company one way or another, either via SIPP, ISA or Pension.
"Mr Fink said in his annual Chairman’s letter to investors: “There are many people with opinions about how we should manage our clients’ money. But the money doesn’t belong to these people. It’s not ours either. It belongs to our clients, and our responsibility and our duty is to them.”"
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/blackrock-boss-steps-up-security-after-anti-woke-backlash/ar-AA1novFN?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=3c0cf4f548d94492d4c77b5233f76002&ei=17
On the other hand, when married to all the shuttered shops (post covid?) it brings a certain deadness to the streets. Like a perpetual Sunday
Yesterday I watched What Jennifer Did on Netflix, a documentary about a murder in Canada ten years ago.
Apparently for some scenes which featured the eponymous Jennifer AI images were used.
And it didn't detract from my enjoyment at all.
But more recent historiography from the Revisionists, as they're called, is very thought-provoking and gives a more nuanced and, though this feels an alien word for such a visceral and emotive conflict, dispassionate and, you would hope, more accurate view of the British and empire experience of the war, how it was fought in the way it was and how tactics and the army developed as the war went on. The army of 1918, and how it fought, was a very different beast to that of 1914, and 1916 too. And some, maybe most modern WW1 historians nowadays, view the Somme as a necessary and crucial part of that development and evolution.
But still, when I read of that first day and the sub-battles that happened as the Somme dragged on, Delville ('Devil') Wood and the rest, and indeed battles later on, most notably Passchendaele, it is emotionally hard to sympathise with the revisionist view even whilst finding it persuasive in many ways.
As for the Holocaust, and I've said this before on here, please watch, and it's a very difficult watch, Claude Lanzmann's 9 hour documentary Shoah. A superb, towering account of the Holocaust, it's beginnings and evolution. Unmissable.
After your recent posts I was working out how much time I have spent in Paris and France and it is huge. It runs into many years, although never longer than 3 weeks at any one time. I wasn't taught French in school and have never been there long enough to pick it up to my real regret. I have spent the equivalent of a year skiing on French slopes, I have spent the equivalent of a year touring with my family when my children were young. I have worked on and off in Paris and Nice at times. I spent 3 weeks touring with a girlfriend in the 70s and I now cycle all over France every year. I have been to Disneyland 3 times which is 2 times more than I wanted to go, but kids eh.
HUGE SPEEDS = 15 Mph
MAJOR HAZARD = Carrying 5% of the kinetic energy of an SUV
So is this clear evidence that the BBC ISN'T dominated by Oxbridge graduates? Or that the BBC's over powerful Oxonians are either too lazy to check their assertions with ONS, or so innumerate they don't realise Oxonians are less likely to have a car that Parisians?
Or that Oxford's a city too?
Actually it wasn't a case of Trump Deranged Syndrome on my part (I think you probably know that and were making a general point, with which I agree), but it was a case of me being a logic pedant. I don't know why because although it is an area I specialised in at University I still make as many cockups as the next person. Also I am rubbish at expressing myself in plain English.
Obviously I don't want to revisit that discussion, but I would like to revisit my logic by expressing it in logical terms. I won't use logic notation (mainly because I haven't a clue where the keys are on this damn keyboard).
So: In response to someone else's post you posted
Statement A (An accepted fact)
Statement B (A sincerely held and well researched opinion)
I posted
Statement C (Another accepted fact)
My argument was that C showed that A and B were inconsistent (And I only did so because I was being an arse)
You responded that you did not deduce B from A and made that point by saying you used an 'AND' not a 'THEREFORE' to prove that point
I accept that but that wasn't the point I was raising. My logic had more than 1 step.
Here it is:
A and C had a one to one relationship. If you are relying on A in an argument you must also be willing to rely on C.
However if C is true then B is false because they directly contradicted one another.
Hence the same goes for A.
So you can rely on A but if you do so B will not be true.
Or you can have B but then you mustn't rely on A.
I've probably cocked up again somewhere in there, as usual. Anyway I just posted to show my thought processes.
I know it all pretty well - except a few corners of the east (Alsace) and Brittany/Normandy where I am headed now. I intend to see as much as possible. I’ve never been to mont st Michel. Never seen the bayeux tapestry. Never seen a d day beach
And I’ve never eaten oysters in cancale. This must change! Life is short
Weirdly off-the-beaten-track, Chester, even in the North West. I'm always faintly surprised by its existence when I go there.
(Unless they've overhauled it since I was there)
Eg when I arrived my cab approached the arc de triomphe in mid afternoon and I braced for that infernal chaos. Yet not. Just a number of cars politely going in circles - the whirling frenzy is a memory
As I recall he felt it was his 'patriotic duty' to try again.
A list of the places not so terribly afflicted is short, but longer than the list of places people love because brutalism worked well. Most were too small to bother with wrecking; some places so large you could not wreck it all. Stamford is my personal favourite.
Well actually I do know because I know the election law on this subject. It has been explained to you over and over and over again by numerous people here and you consistently failed to explain what election law has been breached and if breached is it a technical breach.
Note I have so far got 9 likes for my post from posters across the political spectrum here. Do you not think that maybe, just maybe, you are wrong?
And not being a Labour supporter don't you think, maybe, just maybe, that if I thought she had done something seriously wrong I would want the police to investigate?
Just use your brain. Just do it and tell us what the issue is re registration because everyone here would love to know.
All this stuff is damaging to both politics and the police who should be investigating proper crimes.
The problem is not brutalism per se (although it can lead to something of a “one-note” texture to buildings which doesn’t always work) but the god-awful concrete monstrosities that were built & then (crucially) not maintained properly afterwards.
The Barbican is a brutalist building, but remains a well regarded, popular place that people are keen to live in. Other tower blocks built around the same time are ... not as popular as the Barbican.
It’s a bit like picking random socialites with money as army officers. Every now and then you'd get the Duke of Wellington. But not often.
Apart, that is, from one RIGHT in the centre which replaced a by then derelict 16th Century town house. From the pictures it was rather nice, and probably just about saveable.
Its replacement, in about 1960, was a block of four shops with flats over in 'classical brutalist' style. Local legend has it that architecture students are now brought to the town to be taught what ought NOT to be done.