I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
My personal view, and it is just my view, is that Westminster is significantly nerdier than Winchester (or indeed any of the major English public boarding schools).
It isn't certainly not in terms of Maths and Science
The top A Level maths set at Westminster will all be going to Cambridge. How much nerdier would you like them to be?
The most senior recent Westminster politician is Nick Clegg, who read anthopology at Cambridge. Rishi may be more of a nerd than Clegg but I bet he is better at Maths!
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
These league tables are completely gamed: "Little Johnny isn't going to get an A or A*, so we're not going to enter him into the exams under the school's umbrella. But here's the weblink so you can register him yourself, so he still gets his 'C'"
We had some students that did Maths GCSE a year early (I was in the set just below). I think I remember my teachers mentioning that because they didn't do any other GCSEs in the year it negatively impacted the league tables because they only had 1 GCSE grade A*-C in that year !
Charterhouse and Marlborough will be disappointed with their place on that list.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
St Paul's - like Westminster - was a school designed for the lower ranks. It was where wealthy merchants sent their kids.
But I find it strange that anyone would really suggest the two of them do not draw almost entirely from the same pool of applicants these days.
Personally am keeping ‘em crossed for July, but that’s a hope not a prediction. I don’t know when it will be, but my actual prediction is that the longer he waits the more the public will see him as either frit or a ditherer.
He wants the wedge issue of immigration to be hot so he won't go until he's 100% he can get flights off before or during the campaign. As soon as practicable after that seems likely.
Now, I'm not in the UK. But are there really millions of potential Conservative voters who are desperate to return to the fold just so long as a couple of flights have left for Rwanda?
My gut - and I realize I'm in California - is that voters have now reached that stage where they want a change. Sunak isn't right wing enough to stop defections to Reform. And he isn't centrist enough to avoid losing votes to the LibDems and Labour. He's also screwed by the fact that the Left is likely to vote highly tactically, while the Right will very definitely not.
There's no bogeyman, either. Who - other than @bigjohnowls and @isam - is going to march to the polling station and vote Conservative out of fear of Starmer? (And with Johnson gone, I think bjo will be going green.)
And I don't see an easy way out. There's no popular MP in the wings who can galvanize support and bring the disparate factions together.
It's time for the Conservative Party to accept that the electorate is going to give them a drubbing.
And, if it's any consolation, the problems with the UK economy will still be there in five years time. So you never know, the Conservatives may get another chance sooner rather than later.
I have decided to cast my first ever vote for the Conservatives in this General Election.
The UK has not had a proper Conservative government for too long, and needs one. That certainly won’t be delivered by Labour.
Lol, MoonRabbit has come out, utterly predictably as a proud PBTory. The only surprise is that it took so long.
'When a finger points to the moon only the foolish look at the finger'
True, a finger is not a moon. But it is a way to find the moon.
Havn’t you felt any disenchantment with the progressive politics of the last three decades? Things do not always get better. Human life is dependent upon forces greater than our own selves. There will never be an end to human pain and suffering, but it can be made less. Politics is about hope and great achievements, but it is also about failure and tragedy.
So what I propose is needed is not more of the same as the last three decades, as just about everyone on PB and in UK is blindly walking into. But what matters most to people is their family, relationships, friendships, work as a source of creative value, a cultural inheritance that gives meaning to life, and for some faith. What holds a society together is reciprocity - do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself, the same thing that made ancient tribes work. Go back to remembering about protecting nature and human value from the commodification of capitalism and the transactional culture of the market. The liberalism of the last thirty years has not been progressive, it’s taken us back to the cave man age of cannibalism. To turn the dial back in the right direction needs Conservative hands on the lever.
Labour might win this one, but the future is Conservatism, lots of it.
Question is- are you going to get that sort of conservatism from the Conservative Party? See the old joke about how coming out of a room labelled Gentlemen doesn't make you one. The commodification of capitalism and the transactional culture of the market sounds like a Sunakian mission statement. Doing to others what you should be glad wasn't done to you is the success criterion. The sort of thing from a party who liked the stories they were told of Thatcher, but don't bother with the underpinning that was needed to make it work.
I'm not sure that I like it, but right now the party nearest to that one nation Tory tradition seems to be Starmerite Labour. I'm sure they will get a fair bit of it wrong, but it's likely to be better than all this.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
'At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
The election is going to be the third or fourth Thursday in November, the autumn fiscal event will be in the first or second week of October for a five week campaign. Expect another 2p off NI and maybe a surprise elsewhere as well as a manifesto commitment to abolish employee NI entirely over the next parliament.
On what basis? Is there any evidence for a sliding backwards of public attitudes on equal marriage? Or is this Sturgeon redefining in bad faith any dissent at all to her ill-conceived self-ID plans as “toxicity”? (Either way, Sturgeon herself is an enthusiastic culture warrior)..
The conflation of self-ID (terribly thought through legislation that would compromise women’s access to single sex spaces, sports and services) with equal marriage was a sleight of hand that worked at one point, but which people are increasingly starting to see through...
One thing’s for sure: in misrepresenting any opposition to her policy as bigotry Nicola Sturgeon has probably done more to toxify Scottish politics than anyone else
maybe we would do better as a country if we looked beyond the most privileged schools in the country for our leaders.
Seriously foxy, when the country was exclusively run by the people from the most privileged schools we were top nation. Now when we’ve let everyone else have a go we are an also-ran. This might not be serious but it also might be serious.
Barristers having to treat Lesley Sewell of the PO as though she is a child, such is her fragility and uselessness.
Lesley Sewell former Chief Information Officer of the PO, that is.
Being a senior IT person does not prepare you for this. I am surprised, given it is televised and has been the subject of such scrutiny in recent months, more people have not reacted as she did.
I disagree because I have met these people, they are generally fine when doing the confrontings and have the attitude if people cry they are just being fragile....I really have no sympathy when they get a taste of what they dish out
The election is going to be the third or fourth Thursday in November, the autumn fiscal event will be in the first or second week of October for a five week campaign. Expect another 2p off NI and maybe a surprise elsewhere as well as a manifesto commitment to abolish employee NI entirely over the next parliament.
The latter point would be an absolute gift to Labour.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
These league tables are completely gamed: "Little Johnny isn't going to get an A or A*, so we're not going to enter him into the exams under the school's umbrella. But here's the weblink so you can register him yourself, so he still gets his 'C'"
We had some students that did Maths GCSE a year early (I was in the set just below). I think I remember my teachers mentioning that because they didn't do any other GCSEs in the year it negatively impacted the league tables because they only had 1 GCSE grade A*-C in that year !
I think that's usual these days - Maths is seen as being a bit of a Mickey Mouse subject taken in the first year of GCSE / A-Level, with the 'real' exam being for Additional / Further Maths a year later. Same goes for English Language vs English Lit.
At my school, the one that was most seriously gamed was Religious Studies. For five years we were taught a fairly secular course of ethics / comparative religion, and then were suddenly turfed into a year-long GCSE course that essentially consisted of cramming Sunday School-type topics.
If you came from a non-religious background you were stuffed, and only something like 7 out of 110 people were allowed to sit the exam because it would so badly screw up the league table performance otherwise.
The election is going to be the third or fourth Thursday in November, the autumn fiscal event will be in the first or second week of October for a five week campaign. Expect another 2p off NI and maybe a surprise elsewhere as well as a manifesto commitment to abolish employee NI entirely over the next parliament.
The latter point would be an absolute gift to Labour.
I don't think so, a campaign focussed on a tax cut for working age people and having Labour oppose it would probably do well for the Tories. It may also break the general association that NI has with the NHS and pensions.
The election is going to be the third or fourth Thursday in November, the autumn fiscal event will be in the first or second week of October for a five week campaign. Expect another 2p off NI and maybe a surprise elsewhere as well as a manifesto commitment to abolish employee NI entirely over the next parliament.
The latter point would be an absolute gift to Labour.
I don't think so, a campaign focussed on a tax cut for working age people and having Labour oppose it would probably do well for the Tories. It may also break the general association that NI has with the NHS and pensions.
It would totally and utterly blunt any Tory attack on "uncosted" Labour plans and profligacy.
Wtf? I downloaded the pledge card from the QR code and I'm sure it was 6 first steps. Now it just says 'all animals are equal but some are more equal than others'
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
These league tables are completely gamed: "Little Johnny isn't going to get an A or A*, so we're not going to enter him into the exams under the school's umbrella. But here's the weblink so you can register him yourself, so he still gets his 'C'"
You're right, though a bit out of date - GCSE grades have been 9 - 1 for a while.
The A level league tables are even more gamed, however, as in most private schools you are only admitted to an A level if you've got a top grade GCSE (9/8/7) in that subject, whereas in most state schools and colleges you can do A levels with grades 6/5 and sometimes 4.
The election is going to be the third or fourth Thursday in November, the autumn fiscal event will be in the first or second week of October for a five week campaign. Expect another 2p off NI and maybe a surprise elsewhere as well as a manifesto commitment to abolish employee NI entirely over the next parliament.
The latter point would be an absolute gift to Labour.
I don't think so, a campaign focussed on a tax cut for working age people and having Labour oppose it would probably do well for the Tories. It may also break the general association that NI has with the NHS and pensions.
The pensioners would see it as an attack on them - see Janet Street-Porter asking "why do you hate pensioners?" this morning.
Personally am keeping ‘em crossed for July, but that’s a hope not a prediction. I don’t know when it will be, but my actual prediction is that the longer he waits the more the public will see him as either frit or a ditherer.
He wants the wedge issue of immigration to be hot so he won't go until he's 100% he can get flights off before or during the campaign. As soon as practicable after that seems likely.
Now, I'm not in the UK. But are there really millions of potential Conservative voters who are desperate to return to the fold just so long as a couple of flights have left for Rwanda?
My gut - and I realize I'm in California - is that voters have now reached that stage where they want a change. Sunak isn't right wing enough to stop defections to Reform. And he isn't centrist enough to avoid losing votes to the LibDems and Labour. He's also screwed by the fact that the Left is likely to vote highly tactically, while the Right will very definitely not.
There's no bogeyman, either. Who - other than @bigjohnowls and @isam - is going to march to the polling station and vote Conservative out of fear of Starmer? (And with Johnson gone, I think bjo will be going green.)
And I don't see an easy way out. There's no popular MP in the wings who can galvanize support and bring the disparate factions together.
It's time for the Conservative Party to accept that the electorate is going to give them a drubbing.
And, if it's any consolation, the problems with the UK economy will still be there in five years time. So you never know, the Conservatives may get another chance sooner rather than later.
I have decided to cast my first ever vote for the Conservatives in this General Election.
The UK has not had a proper Conservative government for too long, and needs one. That certainly won’t be delivered by Labour.
Lol, MoonRabbit has come out, utterly predictably as a proud PBTory. The only surprise is that it took so long.
'When a finger points to the moon only the foolish look at the finger'
True, a finger is not a moon. But it is a way to find the moon.
Havn’t you felt any disenchantment with the progressive politics of the last three decades? Things do not always get better. Human life is dependent upon forces greater than our own selves. There will never be an end to human pain and suffering, but it can be made less. Politics is about hope and great achievements, but it is also about failure and tragedy.
So what I propose is needed is not more of the same as the last three decades, as just about everyone on PB and in UK is blindly walking into. But what matters most to people is their family, relationships, friendships, work as a source of creative value, a cultural inheritance that gives meaning to life, and for some faith. What holds a society together is reciprocity - do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself, the same thing that made ancient tribes work. Go back to remembering about protecting nature and human value from the commodification of capitalism and the transactional culture of the market. The liberalism of the last thirty years has not been progressive, it’s taken us back to the cave man age of cannibalism. To turn the dial back in the right direction needs Conservative hands on the lever.
Labour might win this one, but the future is Conservatism, lots of it.
The politics you are described I think will be popular. It may even be Conservative. But I don't think it will be delivered by the Conservative Party, at least not in it's current incarnation. The reason why you want them to remain in Government is the same reason why I want them to leave: they need to go away for a bit, do some self reflection, and work out how to be proper Conservatives again.
Wtf? I downloaded the pledge card from the QR code and I'm sure it was 6 first steps. Now it just says 'all animals are equal but some are more equal than others'
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
'At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
It's quite striking how bullying seems to be hardwired into the English upper classes, and explains a lot about their approach to running the country. I suppose beneath it all they're just scared little boys who miss their mum, but boy have the rest of us had to pay for it.
Looking at wiki's list of PMs by education I'm more surprised to see it claim that Gordon Brown is the only PM to have a PhD. I know they are more common than they used to be, and his thesis was a history of the Labour Party, but I'm still surprised no one else has done one.
The near total lack of science graduates shouldn't surprise me but does.
The election is going to be the third or fourth Thursday in November, the autumn fiscal event will be in the first or second week of October for a five week campaign. Expect another 2p off NI and maybe a surprise elsewhere as well as a manifesto commitment to abolish employee NI entirely over the next parliament.
I disagree. I think another fiscal event is difficult.
For one thing expectations will be very high for a rabbit from the hat. Where are you saying the money is coming from for the somewhat less than a rabbit from the hat 2p off NI in your post? The two previous cuts have come not from growth nor reduced borrowing, but from fictitious headroom found 5 years down the line, that if that headroom proves a fiction in growth and borrowing movements needed, will actually require tax or NI rises to avoid swingeing cuts to government budgets, Home Office in particular.
Defence increase Sunak boasts is at least £70B and Labour won’t match the pledge - wasn’t in last budget maybe because it had to pass through an OBR. Do you think there can be another fiscal event without that defence promise getting through an OBR? If it’s not put through the OBR, it’s not a serious pledge. Ditto any pledge to eliminate NI, not put through OBR then worthless pledge as not backed up by the money.
Both another fiscal event and another conference promises more risks than rewards to the Sunak’s government.
The election is going to be the third or fourth Thursday in November, the autumn fiscal event will be in the first or second week of October for a five week campaign. Expect another 2p off NI and maybe a surprise elsewhere as well as a manifesto commitment to abolish employee NI entirely over the next parliament.
The latter point would be an absolute gift to Labour.
I don't think so, a campaign focussed on a tax cut for working age people and having Labour oppose it would probably do well for the Tories. It may also break the general association that NI has with the NHS and pensions.
NI has been cut twice in the last six months or so, but working age people don't seem to be giving the Tories much credit for that, if local elections and the polls are anything to go by.
The election is going to be the third or fourth Thursday in November, the autumn fiscal event will be in the first or second week of October for a five week campaign. Expect another 2p off NI and maybe a surprise elsewhere as well as a manifesto commitment to abolish employee NI entirely over the next parliament.
The latter point would be an absolute gift to Labour.
I don't think so, a campaign focussed on a tax cut for working age people and having Labour oppose it would probably do well for the Tories. It may also break the general association that NI has with the NHS and pensions.
It would totally and utterly blunt any Tory attack on "uncosted" Labour plans and profligacy.
Besides, the government has already had two goes at big NI cuts funded by borrowing... with no detectable poll bump at all.
Never had so much been owed to so many gilt holders for so few extra votes.
Personally am keeping ‘em crossed for July, but that’s a hope not a prediction. I don’t know when it will be, but my actual prediction is that the longer he waits the more the public will see him as either frit or a ditherer.
He wants the wedge issue of immigration to be hot so he won't go until he's 100% he can get flights off before or during the campaign. As soon as practicable after that seems likely.
Now, I'm not in the UK. But are there really millions of potential Conservative voters who are desperate to return to the fold just so long as a couple of flights have left for Rwanda?
My gut - and I realize I'm in California - is that voters have now reached that stage where they want a change. Sunak isn't right wing enough to stop defections to Reform. And he isn't centrist enough to avoid losing votes to the LibDems and Labour. He's also screwed by the fact that the Left is likely to vote highly tactically, while the Right will very definitely not.
There's no bogeyman, either. Who - other than @bigjohnowls and @isam - is going to march to the polling station and vote Conservative out of fear of Starmer? (And with Johnson gone, I think bjo will be going green.)
And I don't see an easy way out. There's no popular MP in the wings who can galvanize support and bring the disparate factions together.
It's time for the Conservative Party to accept that the electorate is going to give them a drubbing.
And, if it's any consolation, the problems with the UK economy will still be there in five years time. So you never know, the Conservatives may get another chance sooner rather than later.
I have decided to cast my first ever vote for the Conservatives in this General Election.
The UK has not had a proper Conservative government for too long, and needs one. That certainly won’t be delivered by Labour.
Lol, MoonRabbit has come out, utterly predictably as a proud PBTory. The only surprise is that it took so long.
'When a finger points to the moon only the foolish look at the finger'
True, a finger is not a moon. But it is a way to find the moon.
Havn’t you felt any disenchantment with the progressive politics of the last three decades? Things do not always get better. Human life is dependent upon forces greater than our own selves. There will never be an end to human pain and suffering, but it can be made less. Politics is about hope and great achievements, but it is also about failure and tragedy.
So what I propose is needed is not more of the same as the last three decades, as just about everyone on PB and in UK is blindly walking into. But what matters most to people is their family, relationships, friendships, work as a source of creative value, a cultural inheritance that gives meaning to life, and for some faith. What holds a society together is reciprocity - do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself, the same thing that made ancient tribes work. Go back to remembering about protecting nature and human value from the commodification of capitalism and the transactional culture of the market. The liberalism of the last thirty years has not been progressive, it’s taken us back to the cave man age of cannibalism. To turn the dial back in the right direction needs Conservative hands on the lever.
Labour might win this one, but the future is Conservatism, lots of it.
The politics you are described I think will be popular. It may even be Conservative. But I don't think it will be delivered by the Conservative Party, at least not in it's current incarnation. The reason why you want them to remain in Government is the same reason why I want them to leave: they need to go away for a bit, do some self reflection, and work out how to be proper Conservatives again.
None of what Moonrabbit describes is either deliverable by, or the business of, Westminster government. It’s just a boomer Facebook post.
You want government to be involved in social structures and culture? Then you need either to vote for socialists and central planning, or for radical devolution to the town and village level.
Looking at wiki's list of PMs by education I'm more surprised to see it claim that Gordon Brown is the only PM to have a PhD. I know they are more common than they used to be, and his thesis was a history of the Labour Party, but I'm still surprised no one else has done one.
The near total lack of science graduates shouldn't surprise me but does.
Thatcher had a science degree, though most science graduates tend to go into industry, medicine or the City which pay more (or become researchers)
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
St Paul's - like Westminster - was a school designed for the lower ranks. It was where wealthy merchants sent their kids.
But I find it strange that anyone would really suggest the two of them do not draw almost entirely from the same pool of applicants these days.
St Paul's is for oiks.
When I was in London, with hyper ambitious parents, schools were divided roughly as follows:
Top Tier: Girls - St Pauls, North London Collegiate Boys - Westminster, St Pauls
Second Tier: Kings Wimbledon, City of London School, Godolphin, South Hampstead High, UCS, Haberdashers, Eleanor Holles
Looking at wiki's list of PMs by education I'm more surprised to see it claim that Gordon Brown is the only PM to have a PhD. I know they are more common than they used to be, and his thesis was a history of the Labour Party, but I'm still surprised no one else has done one.
The near total lack of science graduates shouldn't surprise me but does.
How did Harold Wilson become an Oxford don without a PhD?!
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Westminster is super bright but also London, cool to a point, go home down the road at weekends. Winchester is a bit let’s get 600 guys on the spectrum and see what happens and for shits and gigs let’s get someone who will be PM. We were better off producing Chancellors of the Exchequer and Archbishops etc. and general weirdos, background people. Westminster and Eton are very driven, Winchester not so.
Have you read much Agatha Christie? The philosophy of Miss Marple was that everyone fitted into a 'type', so if the brassy shop assistant in St Mary Mead had been stealing for her nail polish habit, it was likely that the brassy wife of the murdered millionaire was doing the same. The village parallel. It's an incredibly unfashionable philosophy these days, meaning in today's climate you can't really adapt Miss Marple well for TV any more. But there may be something in it.
Your old boy theory - that the culture of a public school will predict the choices made thereafter, is like that. It's quite eccentric.
What's the point of paying several ten to the power of 5 smackers if the school can't do that?
The election is going to be the third or fourth Thursday in November, the autumn fiscal event will be in the first or second week of October for a five week campaign. Expect another 2p off NI and maybe a surprise elsewhere as well as a manifesto commitment to abolish employee NI entirely over the next parliament.
The latter point would be an absolute gift to Labour.
I don't think so, a campaign focussed on a tax cut for working age people and having Labour oppose it would probably do well for the Tories. It may also break the general association that NI has with the NHS and pensions.
It would totally and utterly blunt any Tory attack on "uncosted" Labour plans and profligacy.
Besides, the government has already had two goes at big NI cuts funded by borrowing... with no detectable poll bump at all.
Never had so much been owed to so many gilt holders for so few extra votes.
And the next government of whichever colour is going to need to hike taxes anyway, unless someone finds the magic key to dropping the fiscal rules.
But if they go up, the big pots of money are in employer NI and VAT. Increasing VAT to the same rate as Ireland would bring in around 500 million per week. Put that on the side of a bus.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
'At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
It's quite striking how bullying seems to be hardwired into the English upper classes, and explains a lot about their approach to running the country. I suppose beneath it all they're just scared little boys who miss their mum, but boy have the rest of us had to pay for it.
The very poshest are often closer to the most roguish of the working classes in their disregard for the rules and membership of gangs than they are to the rule abiding middle classes
Looking at wiki's list of PMs by education I'm more surprised to see it claim that Gordon Brown is the only PM to have a PhD. I know they are more common than they used to be, and his thesis was a history of the Labour Party, but I'm still surprised no one else has done one.
The near total lack of science graduates shouldn't surprise me but does.
Thatcher had a science degree, though most science graduates tend to go into industry, medicine or the City which pay more (or become researchers)
Don't ask me What you know is true Don't have to tell you I love your precious heart I I was standing You were there Two worlds collided And they could never tear us apart
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
'At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
It's quite striking how bullying seems to be hardwired into the English upper classes, and explains a lot about their approach to running the country. I suppose beneath it all they're just scared little boys who miss their mum, but boy have the rest of us had to pay for it.
Plenty of the privately educated run a mile from this preposterous nonsense, but not, apparently, the ones we charge with looking after the core societal instruments of our wellbeing. How utterly fucking stupid are we?
Personally am keeping ‘em crossed for July, but that’s a hope not a prediction. I don’t know when it will be, but my actual prediction is that the longer he waits the more the public will see him as either frit or a ditherer.
He wants the wedge issue of immigration to be hot so he won't go until he's 100% he can get flights off before or during the campaign. As soon as practicable after that seems likely.
Now, I'm not in the UK. But are there really millions of potential Conservative voters who are desperate to return to the fold just so long as a couple of flights have left for Rwanda?
My gut - and I realize I'm in California - is that voters have now reached that stage where they want a change. Sunak isn't right wing enough to stop defections to Reform. And he isn't centrist enough to avoid losing votes to the LibDems and Labour. He's also screwed by the fact that the Left is likely to vote highly tactically, while the Right will very definitely not.
There's no bogeyman, either. Who - other than @bigjohnowls and @isam - is going to march to the polling station and vote Conservative out of fear of Starmer? (And with Johnson gone, I think bjo will be going green.)
And I don't see an easy way out. There's no popular MP in the wings who can galvanize support and bring the disparate factions together.
It's time for the Conservative Party to accept that the electorate is going to give them a drubbing.
And, if it's any consolation, the problems with the UK economy will still be there in five years time. So you never know, the Conservatives may get another chance sooner rather than later.
I have decided to cast my first ever vote for the Conservatives in this General Election.
The UK has not had a proper Conservative government for too long, and needs one. That certainly won’t be delivered by Labour.
Lol, MoonRabbit has come out, utterly predictably as a proud PBTory. The only surprise is that it took so long.
'When a finger points to the moon only the foolish look at the finger'
True, a finger is not a moon. But it is a way to find the moon.
Havn’t you felt any disenchantment with the progressive politics of the last three decades? Things do not always get better. Human life is dependent upon forces greater than our own selves. There will never be an end to human pain and suffering, but it can be made less. Politics is about hope and great achievements, but it is also about failure and tragedy.
So what I propose is needed is not more of the same as the last three decades, as just about everyone on PB and in UK is blindly walking into. But what matters most to people is their family, relationships, friendships, work as a source of creative value, a cultural inheritance that gives meaning to life, and for some faith. What holds a society together is reciprocity - do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself, the same thing that made ancient tribes work. Go back to remembering about protecting nature and human value from the commodification of capitalism and the transactional culture of the market. The liberalism of the last thirty years has not been progressive, it’s taken us back to the cave man age of cannibalism. To turn the dial back in the right direction needs Conservative hands on the lever.
Labour might win this one, but the future is Conservatism, lots of it.
The politics you are described I think will be popular. It may even be Conservative. But I don't think it will be delivered by the Conservative Party, at least not in it's current incarnation. The reason why you want them to remain in Government is the same reason why I want them to leave: they need to go away for a bit, do some self reflection, and work out how to be proper Conservatives again.
None of what Moonrabbit describes is either deliverable by, or the business of, Westminster government. It’s just a boomer Facebook post.
You want government to be involved in social structures and culture? Then you need either to vote for socialists and central planning, or for radical devolution to the town and village level.
Otherwise, render unto Caesar.
and if you want governement to fuck of and not be involved in social structures and culture which is what most sane individuals want because governement intervention rarely improves anything?
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
'At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
It's quite striking how bullying seems to be hardwired into the English upper classes, and explains a lot about their approach to running the country. I suppose beneath it all they're just scared little boys who miss their mum, but boy have the rest of us had to pay for it.
An alternative explanation is that George Osborne is, in fact, a despicable cunt. Although - perhaps ironically - he might be rather less of a despicable cunt than Nat Rothschild.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
'At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
It's quite striking how bullying seems to be hardwired into the English upper classes, and explains a lot about their approach to running the country. I suppose beneath it all they're just scared little boys who miss their mum, but boy have the rest of us had to pay for it.
An alternative explanation is that George Osborne is, in fact, a despicable cunt. Although - perhaps ironically - he might be rather less of a despicable cunt than Nat Rothschild.
Will you be banning yourself temporarily for the use of the c word?
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
'At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
It's quite striking how bullying seems to be hardwired into the English upper classes, and explains a lot about their approach to running the country. I suppose beneath it all they're just scared little boys who miss their mum, but boy have the rest of us had to pay for it.
An alternative explanation is that George Osborne is, in fact, a despicable cunt. Although - perhaps ironically - he might be rather less of a despicable cunt than Nat Rothschild.
Loving the new rules on the C word. Where do I start!! I guess if they are a C it’s ok?
The election is going to be the third or fourth Thursday in November, the autumn fiscal event will be in the first or second week of October for a five week campaign. Expect another 2p off NI and maybe a surprise elsewhere as well as a manifesto commitment to abolish employee NI entirely over the next parliament.
The latter point would be an absolute gift to Labour.
I don't think so, a campaign focussed on a tax cut for working age people and having Labour oppose it would probably do well for the Tories. It may also break the general association that NI has with the NHS and pensions.
The pensioners would see it as an attack on them - see Janet Street-Porter asking "why do you hate pensioners?" this morning.
Guaranteed Labour Landslide.
Triple lock, winter fuel allowance, free bus passes, pension credit, no NI payable at all. No wonder Rishi burst out laughing at the preposterous question/statement from old Mrs Porter.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
'At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
It's quite striking how bullying seems to be hardwired into the English upper classes, and explains a lot about their approach to running the country. I suppose beneath it all they're just scared little boys who miss their mum, but boy have the rest of us had to pay for it.
An alternative explanation is that George Osborne is, in fact, a despicable cunt. Although - perhaps ironically - he might be rather less of a despicable cunt than Nat Rothschild.
Will you be banning yourself temporarily for the use of the c word?
It’s an interesting word, one of those that’s much ruder and more offensive if used in one way than in another.
I was going to say it’s very Anglo Saxon but I understand that’s now offensive to a few American academics so the appropriate expression is “early mediaeval”
The election is going to be the third or fourth Thursday in November, the autumn fiscal event will be in the first or second week of October for a five week campaign. Expect another 2p off NI and maybe a surprise elsewhere as well as a manifesto commitment to abolish employee NI entirely over the next parliament.
The latter point would be an absolute gift to Labour.
I don't think so, a campaign focussed on a tax cut for working age people and having Labour oppose it would probably do well for the Tories. It may also break the general association that NI has with the NHS and pensions.
It would totally and utterly blunt any Tory attack on "uncosted" Labour plans and profligacy.
Besides, the government has already had two goes at big NI cuts funded by borrowing... with no detectable poll bump at all.
Never had so much been owed to so many gilt holders for so few extra votes.
And the next government of whichever colour is going to need to hike taxes anyway, unless someone finds the magic key to dropping the fiscal rules.
But if they go up, the big pots of money are in employer NI and VAT. Increasing VAT to the same rate as Ireland would bring in around 500 million per week. Put that on the side of a bus.
And fiscal drag.
(In the long term, does this create Tory voters?)
Edit: the green mushy part shows higher rate taxpayers as a percentage reaching 10% by 2028.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
'At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
It's quite striking how bullying seems to be hardwired into the English upper classes, and explains a lot about their approach to running the country. I suppose beneath it all they're just scared little boys who miss their mum, but boy have the rest of us had to pay for it.
An alternative explanation is that George Osborne is, in fact, a despicable cunt. Although - perhaps ironically - he might be rather less of a despicable cunt than Nat Rothschild.
Loving the new rules on the C word. Where do I start!! I guess if they are a C it’s ok?
You are allowed to use the c-word about the following individuals:
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
'At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
It's quite striking how bullying seems to be hardwired into the English upper classes, and explains a lot about their approach to running the country. I suppose beneath it all they're just scared little boys who miss their mum, but boy have the rest of us had to pay for it.
An alternative explanation is that George Osborne is, in fact, a despicable cunt. Although - perhaps ironically - he might be rather less of a despicable cunt than Nat Rothschild.
Will you be banning yourself temporarily for the use of the c word?
It’s an interesting word, one of those that’s much ruder and more offensive if used in one way than in another.
I was going to say it’s very Anglo Saxon but I understand that’s now offensive to a few American academics so the appropriate expression is “early mediaeval”
Fully aware of its provenance and i am totally unoffended by it just pointing out people have had a temporary ban from the mods for using it
Until quite recently—I cannot put an exact date on it—I assumed that everything published in scientific journals was, if not true, at least not deliberately untrue. Scientists might make mistakes, but they did not cheat, plagiarise, falsify, or make up their results. For many years as I opened a medical journal, the possibility simply that it contained fraud did not occur to me. Cases such as those of the Piltdown Man, a hoax in which bone fragments found in the Piltdown gravel pit were claimed to be those of the missing link between ape and man, were famous because they were dramatic but above all because they were rare, or assumed to be such."
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
'At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
It's quite striking how bullying seems to be hardwired into the English upper classes, and explains a lot about their approach to running the country. I suppose beneath it all they're just scared little boys who miss their mum, but boy have the rest of us had to pay for it.
An alternative explanation is that George Osborne is, in fact, a despicable cunt. Although - perhaps ironically - he might be rather less of a despicable cunt than Nat Rothschild.
Loving the new rules on the C word. Where do I start!! I guess if they are a C it’s ok?
You are allowed to use the c-word about the following individuals:
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
'At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
It's quite striking how bullying seems to be hardwired into the English upper classes, and explains a lot about their approach to running the country. I suppose beneath it all they're just scared little boys who miss their mum, but boy have the rest of us had to pay for it.
An alternative explanation is that George Osborne is, in fact, a despicable cunt. Although - perhaps ironically - he might be rather less of a despicable cunt than Nat Rothschild.
Loving the new rules on the C word. Where do I start!! I guess if they are a C it’s ok?
You are allowed to use the c-word about the following individuals:
- Nat Rothschild - Zak Goldsmith
And ... errr ... that's about it.
Why would we waste such a wonderful word that I use to greet friends on people who don’t deserve it?
Our friend @CorrectHorseBattery was banned for using the C word, will he now be allowed back on the account of a user above using it with no apparent repercussions?
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
'At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
It's quite striking how bullying seems to be hardwired into the English upper classes, and explains a lot about their approach to running the country. I suppose beneath it all they're just scared little boys who miss their mum, but boy have the rest of us had to pay for it.
An alternative explanation is that George Osborne is, in fact, a despicable cunt. Although - perhaps ironically - he might be rather less of a despicable cunt than Nat Rothschild.
Loving the new rules on the C word. Where do I start!! I guess if they are a C it’s ok?
You are allowed to use the c-word about the following individuals:
Our friend @CorrectHorseBattery was banned for using the C word, will he now be allowed back on the account of a user above using it with no apparent repercussions?
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
'At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
It's quite striking how bullying seems to be hardwired into the English upper classes, and explains a lot about their approach to running the country. I suppose beneath it all they're just scared little boys who miss their mum, but boy have the rest of us had to pay for it.
An alternative explanation is that George Osborne is, in fact, a despicable cunt. Although - perhaps ironically - he might be rather less of a despicable cunt than Nat Rothschild.
Will you be banning yourself temporarily for the use of the c word?
It’s an interesting word, one of those that’s much ruder and more offensive if used in one way than in another.
I was going to say it’s very Anglo Saxon but I understand that’s now offensive to a few American academics so the appropriate expression is “early mediaeval”
It's a wonderful word, it sounds so perfectly suited for what it describes - like an onomatopoeia only more concrete... like 'jut' and 'cock' and 'flange'.
We really should talk about Zac Goldsmith more often so that we can all get to use it on PB...
Until quite recently—I cannot put an exact date on it—I assumed that everything published in scientific journals was, if not true, at least not deliberately untrue. Scientists might make mistakes, but they did not cheat, plagiarise, falsify, or make up their results. For many years as I opened a medical journal, the possibility simply that it contained fraud did not occur to me. Cases such as those of the Piltdown Man, a hoax in which bone fragments found in the Piltdown gravel pit were claimed to be those of the missing link between ape and man, were famous because they were dramatic but above all because they were rare, or assumed to be such."
It's well worth listening to Jon Ronson's Things Fell Apart podcast, which has a whole episode on a paper in a journal that did not stand up to scrutiny:
I would like to be among the first to congratulate @MoonRabbit for reaching voting age. And I would like to share just a single piece of advice:
Use your cross wisely. Crucify a politician.
I reached voting age in October 2015.
I’ve been voting for people with bins on their head, and liberal democrats. I may look back on it as my wild rebellious days.
But you wrote "I have decided to cast my first ever vote...", so you can understand my confusion.
…For the conservatives. As it’s time to rally around conservatism, protect it and promote it. No to yet more lefty liberalism of our culture and social values that leave children proper mixed up and no childhood, and reclaim from the liberal markets for the working people of this country. Like farmers.
As you know from being in USA a lot of thriving towns or cities today all came from pioneers circling the wagons, and surviving to start settlements. And here we are. UK politics 2024. the future of conservatism in UK starts here, with circled wagons.
Our friend @CorrectHorseBattery was banned for using the C word, will he now be allowed back on the account of a user above using it with no apparent repercussions?
maybe we would do better as a country if we looked beyond the most privileged schools in the country for our leaders.
Destroying or undermining our best schools isn't the solution to making the country better.
And yet destroying or undermining our best broadcaster, or our best universities, or our best healthcare, all appear to be Conservative Government policy.
The election is going to be the third or fourth Thursday in November, the autumn fiscal event will be in the first or second week of October for a five week campaign. Expect another 2p off NI and maybe a surprise elsewhere as well as a manifesto commitment to abolish employee NI entirely over the next parliament.
The latter point would be an absolute gift to Labour.
I don't think so, a campaign focussed on a tax cut for working age people and having Labour oppose it would probably do well for the Tories. It may also break the general association that NI has with the NHS and pensions.
The pensioners would see it as an attack on them - see Janet Street-Porter asking "why do you hate pensioners?" this morning.
Guaranteed Labour Landslide.
Triple lock, winter fuel allowance, free bus passes, pension credit, no NI payable at all. No wonder Rishi burst out laughing at the preposterous question/statement from old Mrs Porter.
Green cheesed arsehole rears its ugly head, come back when you have paid NI for 50 years.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
'At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
It's quite striking how bullying seems to be hardwired into the English upper classes, and explains a lot about their approach to running the country. I suppose beneath it all they're just scared little boys who miss their mum, but boy have the rest of us had to pay for it.
The very poshest are often closer to the most roguish of the working classes in their disregard for the rules and membership of gangs than they are to the rule abiding middle classes
I am posher than ALL of them. As we have established.
Only elon musk is posher than me. And maybe the king. Tho I dunno about the latter. He has suspiciously Waitrose opinions
Until quite recently—I cannot put an exact date on it—I assumed that everything published in scientific journals was, if not true, at least not deliberately untrue. Scientists might make mistakes, but they did not cheat, plagiarise, falsify, or make up their results. For many years as I opened a medical journal, the possibility simply that it contained fraud did not occur to me. Cases such as those of the Piltdown Man, a hoax in which bone fragments found in the Piltdown gravel pit were claimed to be those of the missing link between ape and man, were famous because they were dramatic but above all because they were rare, or assumed to be such."
Two brief vignettes cos it’s late. In the late ‘90s a well respected scientist in the polymerisation field (using transition metal catalysts to make polymers) published an article using aluminium as the metal. Seemed odd, but lots of data and it was published etc. Long story, short version - the catalyst was contaminated with a tiny amount of a very active catalyst that was transition metal based… The paper was never withdrawn, but everyone in the field became aware of the truth. It was not a deliberate fraud, and others being unable to replicate meant it just faded away. Secondly I wasted far too long trying to make a compound from an Indian paper about fluorescent detectors. We made the compound but our data didn’t match the reported data. Digging deeper I realised the reported and published data was fraudulent (pm me if you want me to explain how I know). I contacted the journal, who robbed me off to the author. He blamed a previous worker in the group etc. All lies. The journal did not want to know, and refused to do anything about it. I should probably have passed it on to retraction watch.
The point of the two stories is that in the physical sciences we have fewer issues with replication as others can easily repeat the synthesis, or whatever. Replication crisis is more in areas heavily dependent on statistics to see an outcome, and all too often are not well designed experiments.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
'At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
It's quite striking how bullying seems to be hardwired into the English upper classes, and explains a lot about their approach to running the country. I suppose beneath it all they're just scared little boys who miss their mum, but boy have the rest of us had to pay for it.
The very poshest are often closer to the most roguish of the working classes in their disregard for the rules and membership of gangs than they are to the rule abiding middle classes
maybe we would do better as a country if we looked beyond the most privileged schools in the country for our leaders.
Destroying or undermining our best schools isn't the solution to making the country better.
Its not destroying or undermining to suggest that the 99%+ of the rest of our schools might well have some students who better understand the country than the narrow clique of "top" Public Schools.
The point of the two stories is that in the physical sciences we have fewer issues with replication as others can easily repeat the synthesis, or whatever. Replication crisis is more in areas heavily dependent on statistics to see an outcome, and all too often are not well designed experiments.
We had an example of it in a paper shared on here by @148grss purporting to show that biological women may have an advantage against transwomen in sport.
Looking at wiki's list of PMs by education I'm more surprised to see it claim that Gordon Brown is the only PM to have a PhD. I know they are more common than they used to be, and his thesis was a history of the Labour Party, but I'm still surprised no one else has done one.
The near total lack of science graduates shouldn't surprise me but does.
How did Harold Wilson become an Oxford don without a PhD?!
In the good old days, it was said that a Ph.D. was an apology for not having gained a first. So for Wilson, it was irrelevant.
Nowadays when a firsr class degree is more or less routine, a higher degree becomes much more important. Though it does matter which institution awarded it, I suppose.
maybe we would do better as a country if we looked beyond the most privileged schools in the country for our leaders.
Destroying or undermining our best schools isn't the solution to making the country better.
Its not destroying or undermining to suggest that the 99%+ of the rest of our schools might well have some students who better understand the country than the narrow clique of "top" Public Schools.
Like Liz Truss, Gordon Brown or Theresa May, our state school educated PMs this century?
Of course when we had more grammar schools we had not a single public school educated PM from 1964-1997, including state educated PMs Wilson and Thatcher
Sopel and Maitliss have just eviscerated John Woodcock-government advisor on banning demos- who wants to stop Palestinian Action. They pointed out to him that being a member of 'friends of israel ' didn't mke his government report seem very impartial! He was so bad it turned out to be quite funny. Emily Maitliss is a real loss to the BBC!
A disappointing trip to Whitby today (Thursday) by bus, fog-bound for several hours! Oh, well. Went back to Scarborough, where it brightened up by mid-afternoon. Will try Whitby again tomorrow (Friday).
A disappointing trip to Whitby today (Thursday) by bus, fog-bound for several hours! Oh, well. Went back to Scarborough, where it brightened up by mid-afternoon. Will try Whitby again tomorrow (Friday).
The Haar should be gone by late morning tomorrow but you are always risking it a bit with a light easterly off the North Sea.
Do take in Robin Hood's Bay if you can.
Ravenscar is also quite interesting - the town that never was (complete with abandoned railway). Speculative development gone wrong! Too much fog, apparently...
Finally back home. With a dram to unwind. Long week in Lyon meeting big client people and seeing one of the factories. Plus two nights of big group dinners in posh Lyonnais restaurants.
Finally back home. With a dram to unwind. Long week in Lyon meeting big client people and seeing one of the factories. Plus two nights of big group dinners in posh Lyonnais restaurants.
TBH I’m not a huge fan of French cuisine…
Never been to Lyon. Hoping to visit in the next 12 months or so.
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
'At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
Does anybody really doubt that Sir Guy of Gosborne bought his own furniture?
Sopel and Maitliss have just eviscerated John Woodcock-government advisor on banning demos- who wants to stop Palestinian Action. They pointed out to him that being a member of 'friends of israel ' didn't mke his government report seem very impartial! He was so bad it turned out to be quite funny. Emily Maitliss is a real loss to the BBC!
Until quite recently—I cannot put an exact date on it—I assumed that everything published in scientific journals was, if not true, at least not deliberately untrue. Scientists might make mistakes, but they did not cheat, plagiarise, falsify, or make up their results. For many years as I opened a medical journal, the possibility simply that it contained fraud did not occur to me. Cases such as those of the Piltdown Man, a hoax in which bone fragments found in the Piltdown gravel pit were claimed to be those of the missing link between ape and man, were famous because they were dramatic but above all because they were rare, or assumed to be such."
It's well worth listening to Jon Ronson's Things Fell Apart podcast, which has a whole episode on a paper in a journal that did not stand up to scrutiny:
Sopel and Maitliss have just eviscerated John Woodcock-government advisor on banning demos- who wants to stop Palestinian Action. They pointed out to him that being a member of 'friends of israel ' didn't mke his government report seem very impartial! He was so bad it turned out to be quite funny. Emily Maitliss is a real loss to the BBC!
Until quite recently—I cannot put an exact date on it—I assumed that everything published in scientific journals was, if not true, at least not deliberately untrue. Scientists might make mistakes, but they did not cheat, plagiarise, falsify, or make up their results. For many years as I opened a medical journal, the possibility simply that it contained fraud did not occur to me. Cases such as those of the Piltdown Man, a hoax in which bone fragments found in the Piltdown gravel pit were claimed to be those of the missing link between ape and man, were famous because they were dramatic but above all because they were rare, or assumed to be such."
It's well worth listening to Jon Ronson's Things Fell Apart podcast, which has a whole episode on a paper in a journal that did not stand up to scrutiny:
Finally back home. With a dram to unwind. Long week in Lyon meeting big client people and seeing one of the factories. Plus two nights of big group dinners in posh Lyonnais restaurants.
TBH I’m not a huge fan of French cuisine…
Never been to Lyon. Hoping to visit in the next 12 months or so.
Lyon is beautiful, perhaps my favourite French city.
Here's an interesting question imo: would someone who was quite recently the 4th most important person in, say, the US, (or for that matter the French), government walk around a college campus, attempting to talk to pro-Palestinian protestors, without any bodyguards? Well, here's Suella Braverman doing just that.
That's an uncomfortable read, and possibly correct. There are plenty of other scenarios, though.
Note that it also argues against the appeasers' view that Putin wants peace.
To some extent this is Hamas's biggest success.
Together with the Israeli response Gaza has totally distracted the West, which seems to have the capacity to only get exercised by one major foreign policy subject at a time in the public mind - and Ukraine is so very 2022.
That's an uncomfortable read, and possibly correct. There are plenty of other scenarios, though.
Note that it also argues against the appeasers' view that Putin wants peace.
To some extent this is Hamas's biggest success.
Together with the Israeli response Gaza has totally distracted the West, which seems to have the capacity to only get exercised by one major foreign policy subject at a time in the public mind - and Ukraine is so very 2022.
You only have to look here. The obsessive Ukraine Ultras like Bart now rarely mention it.
That's an uncomfortable read, and possibly correct. There are plenty of other scenarios, though.
Note that it also argues against the appeasers' view that Putin wants peace.
Indeed. I know he’s a political opponent of Putin so some people would say ‘well he would say that’ but actions speak louder than words. The west are being continually wrong footed here.
I am suspicious about cost-based arguments: a shell costs x, they have y rubles, they win. There is more to war than that. Unfortunately, the "more" is in Russia's favour, as they (I think) have switched to mass production of crude drones (think shells with wings and a prop). The Russians call artillery "the king of battle" and they've found a way to make it better. Instead of driving tanks thru a minefield, they can just pound cities to dust over time. So now the war switches to attriting the Ukrainians, which Ukraine will eventually lose. So the Ukrainians need to switch to another form of attack whilst they are still alive enough to do so. Any ideas? ☹️
I find it very bizarre how Sunak ended up in politics. He’s a young guy who has made a fortune, he’s married extremely well, he’s ridiculously well educated. He could have skipped politics and possibly had more influence on the world than being UKPM.
He’s, purely on an insider view, the sort of wykehamist who was ragged at school mercilessly, shiort for sports maths geek, would have likely never played major team sports, not a Royal Marine CCF chap but done RAF geekery, a bit of a nice meh person who must have been a genuinely caring person to be made his Head of House - because he couldn’t have been joint head boy otherwise - because you had to be a bastard like I was to be a Co Prae or just seriously great. I’d been done at school for drugs and girls in rooms and so - unless Rishi is a dark horse - he’s a really caring, nice, intelligent, cooperative, organised chap.
He’s not ideological because most ideological Wykehamists are left wing so I would love to talk to him to understand what he wanted to do with being PM.
Winchester generally has the reputation as the most intellectual and least aggressive and macho of the top rank public schools, comprising Harrow, Eton and Westminster as well. So he sounds pretty standard to me and of course he played cricket. Seems you would match the stereotype of a public school like Rugby however rather more than your fellow Wykehamists.
Rishi has cut inflation and interest rates and stabilised the public finances and will go down in history as the first British Asian PM even if he achieves nothing else and loses the election
Is Westminster not nerdier than Winchester?
Though he'd probably have ended up as a Liberal if he'd gone there, so maybe not...
No, Winchester is for Maths and stats nerds like Geoffrey Howe and Rishi, Westminster is for arty types like Giles Coren and slick metropolitans like Nick Clegg and rebels like Tony Benn
Not actually the case. I was at one of those schools. Were you?
HYUFD went to the Other Place
I appreciate this is a desperately south-east centric conversation, but only Westminster of those three seems to be in the top ten by GCSE results.
Still, you're probably better off in life if you're off to Eton because you won't have two doctors for parents as per I'm guessing many of the schools on that list; your Dad going to be in the top 0.01% so it won't matter too much if you're thick as pigshit.
If you went solely on GCSE results you might even get some state grammar schools near the top (and most of those top 10 are day schools with the odd girls school and schools for the lower ranks like George Osborne eg St Paul's)
the lower ranks like George Osborne
the lower ranks like George Osborne ????
What bizarro world have I stumbled into ?
'At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
It's quite striking how bullying seems to be hardwired into the English upper classes, and explains a lot about their approach to running the country. I suppose beneath it all they're just scared little boys who miss their mum, but boy have the rest of us had to pay for it.
The very poshest are often closer to the most roguish of the working classes in their disregard for the rules and membership of gangs than they are to the rule abiding middle classes
I am posher than ALL of them. As we have established.
Only elon musk is posher than me. And maybe the king. Tho I dunno about the latter. He has suspiciously Waitrose opinions
maybe we would do better as a country if we looked beyond the most privileged schools in the country for our leaders.
Destroying or undermining our best schools isn't the solution to making the country better.
Its not destroying or undermining to suggest that the 99%+ of the rest of our schools might well have some students who better understand the country than the narrow clique of "top" Public Schools.
There's nothing to stop that happening at the moment.
The biggest determinant of whether someone has a successful career in politics us whether they studied PPE at Oxford or not.
That's where politics is networked into, and it's totally non-discriminating between public and state schools, whilst still filtering out anyone who isn't interested in a such an Oxbridge degree.
I am suspicious about cost-based arguments: a shell costs x, they have y rubles, they win. There is more to war than that. Unfortunately, the "more" is in Russia's favour, as they (I think) have switched to mass production of crude drones (think shells with wings and a prop). The Russians call artillery "the king of battle" and they've found a way to make it better. Instead of driving tanks thru a minefield, they can just pound cities to dust over time. So now the war switches to attriting the Ukrainians, which Ukraine will eventually lose. So the Ukrainians need to switch to another form of attack whilst they are still alive enough to do so. Any ideas? ☹️
My view is that both sides are about equal in the drone war. The thing that is hurting the Ukrainian are glide bombs: pretty standard 500KG (explosive payload) bomb with wings and guidance fitted. These can glide fifty or more kilometres to Ukrainian positions, and are very hard to intercept.
These payloads are much bigger than can usually be delivered by a drone, and are quite easy to make. The bombers that release them can also do so fairly safely.
The Ukrainians need a way if hitting those buggers reliably.
That's an uncomfortable read, and possibly correct. There are plenty of other scenarios, though.
Note that it also argues against the appeasers' view that Putin wants peace.
To some extent this is Hamas's biggest success.
Together with the Israeli response Gaza has totally distracted the West, which seems to have the capacity to only get exercised by one major foreign policy subject at a time in the public mind - and Ukraine is so very 2022.
You only have to look here. The obsessive Ukraine Ultras like Bart now rarely mention it.
I am suspicious about cost-based arguments: a shell costs x, they have y rubles, they win. There is more to war than that. Unfortunately, the "more" is in Russia's favour, as they (I think) have switched to mass production of crude drones (think shells with wings and a prop). The Russians call artillery "the king of battle" and they've found a way to make it better. Instead of driving tanks thru a minefield, they can just pound cities to dust over time. So now the war switches to attriting the Ukrainians, which Ukraine will eventually lose. So the Ukrainians need to switch to another form of attack whilst they are still alive enough to do so. Any ideas? ☹️
Sadly not. My expertise extends to old British tv and home brewing.
The Ukraine Ultras here seemed to think it would be a case of western aid, Ukraine steamrollers Russia. Putin in The Hague.
The likes of Dura Ace, who knows what he is talking about were regularly shouted down for not being happy clappy about Ukraines progress.
He was right, be interested in his view.
All the time China waits and watches. Taiwan next ?
That's an uncomfortable read, and possibly correct. There are plenty of other scenarios, though.
Note that it also argues against the appeasers' view that Putin wants peace.
To some extent this is Hamas's biggest success.
Together with the Israeli response Gaza has totally distracted the West, which seems to have the capacity to only get exercised by one major foreign policy subject at a time in the public mind - and Ukraine is so very 2022.
You only have to look here. The obsessive Ukraine Ultras like Bart now rarely mention it.
Comments
I'm not sure that I like it, but right now the party nearest to that one nation Tory tradition seems to be Starmerite Labour. I'm sure they will get a fair bit of it wrong, but it's likely to be better than all this.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/osborne-rothschild-deripaska-corfu
The former first minister said politics is now more toxic and polarised than in the past.
https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/nicola-sturgeon-not-convinced-equal-marriage-would-pass-in-scotland-today-4632017
On what basis? Is there any evidence for a sliding backwards of public attitudes on equal marriage? Or is this Sturgeon redefining in bad faith any dissent at all to her ill-conceived self-ID plans as “toxicity”? (Either way, Sturgeon herself is an enthusiastic culture warrior)..
The conflation of self-ID (terribly thought through legislation that would compromise women’s access to single sex spaces, sports and services) with equal marriage was a sleight of hand that worked at one point, but which people are increasingly starting to see through...
One thing’s for sure: in misrepresenting any opposition to her policy as bigotry Nicola Sturgeon has probably done more to toxify Scottish politics than anyone else
https://x.com/soniasodha/status/1791207746475356469
Apropos etc - teddy swims, what a voice.
He must have gone to an old school
https://youtu.be/_QWZQh0YYWA?si=oKVIL8bzW86zHNrv
Talk about the narcissism of small differences.
At my school, the one that was most seriously gamed was Religious Studies. For five years we were taught a fairly secular course of ethics / comparative religion, and then were suddenly turfed into a year-long GCSE course that essentially consisted of cramming Sunday School-type topics.
If you came from a non-religious background you were stuffed, and only something like 7 out of 110 people were allowed to sit the exam because it would so badly screw up the league table performance otherwise.
The A level league tables are even more gamed, however, as in most private schools you are only admitted to an A level if you've got a top grade GCSE (9/8/7) in that subject, whereas in most state schools and colleges you can do A levels with grades 6/5 and sometimes 4.
Guaranteed Labour Landslide.
The previous season NONE of the promoted teams were relegated.
(Leicester will have points deducted next year so will struggle admittedly)
The near total lack of science graduates shouldn't surprise me but does.
For one thing expectations will be very high for a rabbit from the hat. Where are you saying the money is coming from for the somewhat less than a rabbit from the hat 2p off NI in your post? The two previous cuts have come not from growth nor reduced borrowing, but from fictitious headroom found 5 years down the line, that if that headroom proves a fiction in growth and borrowing movements needed, will actually require tax or NI rises to avoid swingeing cuts to government budgets, Home Office in particular.
Defence increase Sunak boasts is at least £70B and Labour won’t match the pledge - wasn’t in last budget maybe because it had to pass through an OBR. Do you think there can be another fiscal event without that defence promise getting through an OBR? If it’s not put through the OBR, it’s not a serious pledge. Ditto any pledge to eliminate NI, not put through OBR then worthless pledge as not backed up by the money.
Both another fiscal event and another conference promises more risks than rewards to the Sunak’s government.
Never had so much been owed to so many gilt holders for so few extra votes.
You want government to be involved in social structures and culture? Then you need either to vote for socialists and central planning, or for radical devolution to the town and village level.
Otherwise, render unto Caesar.
Top Tier:
Girls - St Pauls, North London Collegiate
Boys - Westminster, St Pauls
Second Tier:
Kings Wimbledon, City of London School, Godolphin, South Hampstead High, UCS, Haberdashers, Eleanor Holles
Third Tier:
Highgate, Frances Holland, Dulwich
Fourth Tier:
Anywhere else
I've probably missed a few Third Tier schools.
Note: this was just parental perception.
But if they go up, the big pots of money are in employer NI and VAT. Increasing VAT to the same rate as Ireland would bring in around 500 million per week. Put that on the side of a bus.
What you know is true
Don't have to tell you
I love your precious heart
I
I was standing
You were there
Two worlds collided
And they could never tear us apart
Margaret would have been an INXS fan.
I’ve been voting for people with bins on their head, and liberal democrats. I may look back on it as my wild rebellious days.
TRUSS.
I was going to say it’s very Anglo Saxon but I understand that’s now offensive to a few American academics so the appropriate expression is “early mediaeval”
(In the long term, does this create Tory voters?)
Edit: the green mushy part shows higher rate taxpayers as a percentage reaching 10% by 2028.
- Nat Rothschild
- Zak Goldsmith
And ... errr ... that's about it.
https://lawliberty.org/in-science-we-trust-2/
"The Replication Conundrum
Until quite recently—I cannot put an exact date on it—I assumed that everything published in scientific journals was, if not true, at least not deliberately untrue. Scientists might make mistakes, but they did not cheat, plagiarise, falsify, or make up their results. For many years as I opened a medical journal, the possibility simply that it contained fraud did not occur to me. Cases such as those of the Piltdown Man, a hoax in which bone fragments found in the Piltdown gravel pit were claimed to be those of the missing link between ape and man, were famous because they were dramatic but above all because they were rare, or assumed to be such."
BBC News - Hospital mortuaries left bodies to decompose, inspectors find - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crgyg0g6d1yo
We really should talk about Zac Goldsmith more often so that we can all get to use it on PB...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001vccn
As you know from being in USA a lot of thriving towns or cities today all came from pioneers circling the wagons, and surviving to start settlements. And here we are. UK politics 2024. the future of conservatism in UK starts here, with circled wagons.
Only elon musk is posher than me. And maybe the king. Tho I dunno about the latter. He has suspiciously Waitrose opinions
Secondly I wasted far too long trying to make a compound from an Indian paper about fluorescent detectors. We made the compound but our data didn’t match the reported data. Digging deeper I realised the reported and published data was fraudulent (pm me if you want me to explain how I know). I contacted the journal, who robbed me off to the author. He blamed a previous worker in the group etc. All lies. The journal did not want to know, and refused to do anything about it. I should probably have passed it on to retraction watch.
The point of the two stories is that in the physical sciences we have fewer issues with replication as others can easily repeat the synthesis, or whatever. Replication crisis is more in areas heavily dependent on statistics to see an outcome, and all too often are not well designed experiments.
Nowadays when a firsr class degree is more or less routine, a higher degree becomes much more important. Though it does matter which institution awarded it, I suppose.
Of course when we had more grammar schools we had not a single public school educated PM from 1964-1997, including state educated PMs Wilson and Thatcher
https://www.globalplayer.com/podcasts/episodes/7DriTxo/
Do take in Robin Hood's Bay if you can.
Ravenscar is also quite interesting - the town that never was (complete with abandoned railway). Speculative development gone wrong! Too much fog, apparently...
TBH I’m not a huge fan of French cuisine…
And - out of a tax break - his own vineyard.
60% of Labour MPs - currently 120 - are members of Labour Friends of Israel.
https://archive.ph/4S3W9
Con 372 (actual 2019 result = 365)
Lab 201 (203)
LD 8 (11)
SNP 48 (48)
PC 2 (4)
Grn 1 (1)
https://interactive.news.sky.com/2024/doc/estimates-2019-general-election-result-new-constituencies-explainer.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTgCPEH5RwY
https://x.com/khodorkovsky_en/status/1791156058641006733?s=61
Note that it also argues against the appeasers' view that Putin wants peace.
Together with the Israeli response Gaza has totally distracted the West, which seems to have the capacity to only get exercised by one major foreign policy subject at a time in the public mind - and Ukraine is so very 2022.
Few people care now. They’ve moved on to Gaza
https://x.com/khodorkovsky_en/status/1791156076567543839?s=61
😎
The biggest determinant of whether someone has a successful career in politics us whether they studied PPE at Oxford or not.
That's where politics is networked into, and it's totally non-discriminating between public and state schools, whilst still filtering out anyone who isn't interested in a such an Oxbridge degree.
That's the real problem.
These payloads are much bigger than can usually be delivered by a drone, and are quite easy to make. The bombers that release them can also do so fairly safely.
The Ukrainians need a way if hitting those buggers reliably.
The Ukraine Ultras here seemed to think it would be a case of western aid, Ukraine steamrollers Russia. Putin in The Hague.
The likes of Dura Ace, who knows what he is talking about were regularly shouted down for not being happy clappy about Ukraines progress.
He was right, be interested in his view.
All the time China waits and watches. Taiwan next ?