RN look to be winning 31-32% in France. LREM on 15%, PS on 14%, Les Republicans on 8%, Other Right and Greens just above the 5% threshold.
Le Pen cruising to victory at the next POTFR elex, as things stand
If you add Zemmours 5.5% to Lepen thats 38% of France voting radical right. If thats repeated at a presidential election Lepen is La Presidente.
This doesn't surprise me.
I've felt a much more tangibly tense atmosphere between the ethnic groups whenever I've been France over the last decade, much worse than in the UK. The country may be ahead of us in many other areas, but Britain's more tolerant approach has served it much better in ethnic and cultural relations. Farage, or a solely Faragist Tory Party in the future, isn't going to reach those kind of figures any time soon.
There are some areas which are a bit off in the UK - but nothing like the no-go zones of some of the Districts.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
As long as also accompanied by better rehabilitation inside given the vast majority of prisoners will eventually be released back into society
A liberal lefty has hacked into HY's account.
No not much different to what Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has said
The 20,000 prison places are what the conservatives have planned but not been able to deliver due to problems with the planning system. Labour are saying that they will circumvent this by issuing 'development consent orders' but these still have to go through a year plus long process of examination so not a quick route. The government could just 'call in' the planning applications submitted by the Ministry of Justice and approve them. Apparently the hold ups are something to do with badgers and retained EU rules about protected species.
The 20,000 are not enough, there are 87,000 prisoners in 80,000 places at present. Really they need something like 100,000 more prison places to start to meet public demand for longer sentences. At least having labour in power will hopefully stop the government opportunistically passing laws for longer sentences in the hope that the consequences will be passed on to the next government.
Idea - Train the prisoners in building trades. Then they can build prisons as part of their sentence reduction.
Badgers are thugs. If they were humans, they would be the shaven headed guy at the end of the bar who no one sits next to. With "Love" and "Hate" tattoos on their knuckles. Build the prisons round them.
We have some absurd rules around badgers, largely driven by misty-eyed sentiment.
Many wild life lovers haven't met the wild life in question.
Watching some of them cuddle a badger would be... interesting.
Ye Gods. Someone has Goodwinned the thread AGAIN! One yearns for some sunny day where we aren’t subjected to the deranged ramblings of this prize helmet.
You want to stop deranged ramblings on PB? What does that leave?
The far right is going to have its day in the sun, though lack of internal coordination between the parties makes its administrative impact rather limited.
The other thing that stops them uniting into a powerful bloc is that different versions of them believe different things.
Put simply, there are truly nasty neo-nazis in suits, like the AfD and Sweden democrats, the successors to Hitler and Mussolini, and there are dozens of essentially Falangist parties, the successors to Franco. The current iteration of the RN in France, the PiS in Poland and Meloni in Italy are Falangists. At worst. Arguably just 19th century style authoritarians.
The AfD are the scariest. Worse than Trump, though less powerful.
The other divide is pro-Putinists vs the rest. Another where PiS and Meloni are on one side.
History tends to repeat itself and what happens on a small scale in the UK first (reformation and religious conflict, anti-royalist revolution, the rise of socialism) then manifests itself in a vastly more bloody way in Central Europe next. We did Brexit back in 2016, so they are due.
Is it not a category error to call any democratic politician a fascist/falangist/nazi given that the one thing they had in common was opposition to multi-party democracy?
Hitler came to power via a multiparty democratic system.
Genuine question - the Nazis were fairly contemptuous of democracy during their rise to power. But did they advocate ending democracy? I don't seem to recall that. I believe they advocated banning "communist parties".
Yes, I think the rhetoric in this area was very similar to Mussolini, which is where it was probably inspired from. Saving Germany from communism and chaos, which were made synonymous, etc.
Obviously they became a little bit more explicitly anti-democratic in a public propaganda sort of way once in power, and having passed the Enabling Act. Order, certainties and transcendence above the everyday, that sort of thing.
The far right is going to have its day in the sun, though lack of internal coordination between the parties makes its administrative impact rather limited.
The other thing that stops them uniting into a powerful bloc is that different versions of them believe different things.
Put simply, there are truly nasty neo-nazis in suits, like the AfD and Sweden democrats, the successors to Hitler and Mussolini, and there are dozens of essentially Falangist parties, the successors to Franco. The current iteration of the RN in France, the PiS in Poland and Meloni in Italy are Falangists. At worst. Arguably just 19th century style authoritarians.
The AfD are the scariest. Worse than Trump, though less powerful.
The other divide is pro-Putinists vs the rest. Another where PiS and Meloni are on one side.
History tends to repeat itself and what happens on a small scale in the UK first (reformation and religious conflict, anti-royalist revolution, the rise of socialism) then manifests itself in a vastly more bloody way in Central Europe next. We did Brexit back in 2016, so they are due.
Is it not a category error to call any democratic politician a fascist/falangist/nazi given that the one thing they had in common was opposition to multi-party democracy?
Hitler came to power via a multiparty democratic system.
So did Tony Blair.
Yes, but Blair allowed further elections while Hitler did not.
I was just pointing out that participation in multiparty democracy doesn't prevent a party from being fascist/falangist/nazi.
Though I think those terms far too frequently used. RN isn't fascist or even falangist, just nativity and populist for example. Golden Dawn in Greece could be reasonably described as Facist.
From the Falangist programme:
Our State will be a totalitarian instrument to defend the integrity of the fatherland. All Spaniards will participate in this through their various family, municipal, and syndical roles. There shall be no participation in it by political parties. We shall implacably abolish the system of political parties and all of their consequences- inorganic suffrage, representation of clashing groups, and a Parliament of the type that is all too well known.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
As long as also accompanied by better rehabilitation inside given the vast majority of prisoners will eventually be released back into society
A liberal lefty has hacked into HY's account.
No not much different to what Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has said
The 20,000 prison places are what the conservatives have planned but not been able to deliver due to problems with the planning system. Labour are saying that they will circumvent this by issuing 'development consent orders' but these still have to go through a year plus long process of examination so not a quick route. The government could just 'call in' the planning applications submitted by the Ministry of Justice and approve them. Apparently the hold ups are something to do with badgers and retained EU rules about protected species.
The 20,000 are not enough, there are 87,000 prisoners in 80,000 places at present. Really they need something like 100,000 more prison places to start to meet public demand for longer sentences. At least having labour in power will hopefully stop the government opportunistically passing laws for longer sentences in the hope that the consequences will be passed on to the next government.
If criminal justice were administered according to meet public demand then it would consist principally of tying convicts to poles, handing shotguns to victims or their families, and inviting them to enjoy some target practice.
But in all seriousness, mass scale incarceration does not make for a safer society. Ask an American.
agreed, I am not suggesting that though. What I have observed is over the last 10 years, people demanding longer sentences, and the justice system (and government) responding accordingly. So they need to now get on with building massive new prisons.
The far right is going to have its day in the sun, though lack of internal coordination between the parties makes its administrative impact rather limited.
The other thing that stops them uniting into a powerful bloc is that different versions of them believe different things.
Put simply, there are truly nasty neo-nazis in suits, like the AfD and Sweden democrats, the successors to Hitler and Mussolini, and there are dozens of essentially Falangist parties, the successors to Franco. The current iteration of the RN in France, the PiS in Poland and Meloni in Italy are Falangists. At worst. Arguably just 19th century style authoritarians.
The AfD are the scariest. Worse than Trump, though less powerful.
The other divide is pro-Putinists vs the rest. Another where PiS and Meloni are on one side.
History tends to repeat itself and what happens on a small scale in the UK first (reformation and religious conflict, anti-royalist revolution, the rise of socialism) then manifests itself in a vastly more bloody way in Central Europe next. We did Brexit back in 2016, so they are due.
Is it not a category error to call any democratic politician a fascist/falangist/nazi given that the one thing they had in common was opposition to multi-party democracy?
Hitler came to power via a multiparty democratic system.
So did Tony Blair.
Yes, but Blair allowed further elections while Hitler did not.
I was just pointing out that participation in multiparty democracy doesn't prevent a party from being fascist/falangist/nazi.
Though I think those terms far too frequently used. RN isn't fascist or even falangist, just nativity and populist for example. Golden Dawn in Greece could be reasonably described as Facist.
From the Falangist programme:
Our State will be a totalitarian instrument to defend the integrity of the fatherland. All Spaniards will participate in this through their various family, municipal, and syndical roles. There shall be no participation in it by political parties. We shall implacably abolish the system of political parties and all of their consequences- inorganic suffrage, representation of clashing groups, and a Parliament of the type that is all too well known.
I've just returned from a weekend socialising in Liverpool. I can confirm that in that city: 1. Sunak and the Tories are distinctly unpopular - who'd have thought it; and 2. Nobody, but nobody, has heard of Matt Goodwin.
RN look to be winning 31-32% in France. LREM on 15%, PS on 14%, Les Republicans on 8%, Other Right and Greens just above the 5% threshold.
Le Pen cruising to victory at the next POTFR elex, as things stand
Fancy a bet on that?
Non, far too far away, anything might happen
That said after my highly successful bet with @Sandpit I could be tempted by the correct odds, if you are willing to offer
Shame.
But that’s my point. It’s far too far away, anything might happen.
So stating that Le Pen is ‘cruising to victory at the next POTFR’ is your normal trolling. Tsk.
It’s worth remembering that Nigel Farage was elected as a British Member of the European Parliament from 1991 until 2021 (drawing an EU salary). And he has 7 times failed to be elected as UK Member of Parliament.
Le Pen’s party having some limited success in this election does not translate straight to next time’s Presidential elections.
The problem (according to various French friends who are horrified by the prospect) is that the traditional parties are seen as being out of road. En Marche is a one-man vehicle. And he can't run again.
They think that the "Anyone but Le Pen" thing in French presidential politics will break the next time.
Macron has just dissolved the french Parliament! election to take place around the same time as ours
Bonjour.
June 30th, which is commendably efficient.
Presumably it's an attempt to replay the "you really want the fash? Really?" gambit Sanchez used in Spain. Wonder how the UK and French campaigns interact?
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
As long as also accompanied by better rehabilitation inside given the vast majority of prisoners will eventually be released back into society
A liberal lefty has hacked into HY's account.
No not much different to what Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has said
A true Conservative would have a policy of making the bastards suffer while they are inside so they never want to go back. That's how to stop reoffending. None of this wishy-washy hand-wringing rehabilitation clap-trap.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
As long as also accompanied by better rehabilitation inside given the vast majority of prisoners will eventually be released back into society
A liberal lefty has hacked into HY's account.
No not much different to what Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has said
The 20,000 prison places are what the conservatives have planned but not been able to deliver due to problems with the planning system. Labour are saying that they will circumvent this by issuing 'development consent orders' but these still have to go through a year plus long process of examination so not a quick route. The government could just 'call in' the planning applications submitted by the Ministry of Justice and approve them. Apparently the hold ups are something to do with badgers and retained EU rules about protected species.
The 20,000 are not enough, there are 87,000 prisoners in 80,000 places at present. Really they need something like 100,000 more prison places to start to meet public demand for longer sentences. At least having labour in power will hopefully stop the government opportunistically passing laws for longer sentences in the hope that the consequences will be passed on to the next government.
Idea - Train the prisoners in building trades. Then they can build prisons as part of their sentence reduction.
Badgers are thugs. If they were humans, they would be the shaven headed guy at the end of the bar who no one sits next to. With "Love" and "Hate" tattoos on their knuckles. Build the prisons round them.
We have some absurd rules around badgers, largely driven by misty-eyed sentiment.
I mentioned Norwegian whale hunting yesterday.
Not sure I want to enter this debate here but we are sentimental and inconsistent about animal welfare and protection. Why are we so misty-eyed about whale hunting but routinely hack fins off sharks and dump the rest of the fish back into the sea?
The animals we choose to champion are usually fluffy and cute-looking, even if they are, from a natural selection perspective, patently absurd. Giant Pandas being an excellent example. It’s ridiculous to favour them over other animals which look ‘ugly’ like the long-nosed echidna.
Macron has just dissolved the french Parliament! election to take place around the same time as ours
Bonjour.
June 30th, which is commendably efficient.
Presumably it's an attempt to replay the "you really want the fash? Really?" gambit Sanchez used in Spain. Wonder how the UK and French campaigns interact?
we get six weeks of campaign they get 3. plus two more for the second round of voting
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
What Leon and others miss in their Europe will lurch to the right thesis is that it is authoritarianism they increasingly find attractive, whether of right, left or middle. A strongman to free us from crime and vanquish our enemies and enforce bike lanes.
Someone posted government data on actual incomes pre and post tax. It is quite fascinating. A 50k wage puts you in the top 16% of earners, £100k in the top 4%. What this seems to demonstrate to me is that the salary expectations of graduates as envisaged by the student loan system is completely disconnected from reality. To even service the interest payments on a 70k loan you would need to be in the top 10% of earners.
Are we comparing apples with apples?
How are earners defined? Do they include those on pensions, for example, or only those of working age from 16-65?
Even if the latter in any society like ours you will have vast swathes of people earning 15k-30k in all sorts of semi-skilled/services jobs so I'd expect top-end graduate jobs to be a top segment of 20%.
It does beg the question why we aim for 50% graduates, though.
I don't think it's a coincidence that countries with more successful economies than Britain's have high rates of participation in tertiary education.
I mean, Britain could continue to be a backward second-rate economy with low productivity if you really want, and deciding not to educate British children and instead importing the educated people the economy requires saves you some spending on the education budget, but it's not an approach that any other country with aspirations follows.
Washington Post (via Seattle Times) - One graduate’s quiet protest: Bringing a banned book to commencement
Annabelle Jenkins made sure to keep her plan secret, hiding the item in the sleeve of her gown as she walked across the graduation stage.
The 18-year-old was frustrated by months of what she viewed as school district officials ignoring her pleas not to remove a handful of books from the school library. On the day she graduated from the Idaho Fine Arts Academy late last month, she smuggled something into the May 23 ceremony that she hoped would force them to listen.
She got her diploma and shook the hands of school officials — until she came to West Ada School District Superintendent Derek Bub. That’s when she pulled out a graphic novel adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and showed it to the crowd before trying to hand it to the superintendent. When he refused to take the book, she dropped it at his feet.
“It is an attack on our libraries as spaces that we are restricting what kind of information our communities and our students can access,” Jenkins told The Washington Post. . . .
Macron has just dissolved the french Parliament! election to take place around the same time as ours
Bonjour.
June 30th, which is commendably efficient.
Presumably it's an attempt to replay the "you really want the fash? Really?" gambit Sanchez used in Spain. Wonder how the UK and French campaigns interact?
What a miserable bastard.
This now means the the french side of my son's wedding on the 29th cant get smashed.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
As long as also accompanied by better rehabilitation inside given the vast majority of prisoners will eventually be released back into society
A liberal lefty has hacked into HY's account.
No not much different to what Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has said
The 20,000 prison places are what the conservatives have planned but not been able to deliver due to problems with the planning system. Labour are saying that they will circumvent this by issuing 'development consent orders' but these still have to go through a year plus long process of examination so not a quick route. The government could just 'call in' the planning applications submitted by the Ministry of Justice and approve them. Apparently the hold ups are something to do with badgers and retained EU rules about protected species.
The 20,000 are not enough, there are 87,000 prisoners in 80,000 places at present. Really they need something like 100,000 more prison places to start to meet public demand for longer sentences. At least having labour in power will hopefully stop the government opportunistically passing laws for longer sentences in the hope that the consequences will be passed on to the next government.
Idea - Train the prisoners in building trades. Then they can build prisons as part of their sentence reduction.
Badgers are thugs. If they were humans, they would be the shaven headed guy at the end of the bar who no one sits next to. With "Love" and "Hate" tattoos on their knuckles. Build the prisons round them.
We have some absurd rules around badgers, largely driven by misty-eyed sentiment.
Many wild life lovers haven't met the wild life in question.
Watching some of them cuddle a badger would be... interesting.
Same shit with foxes, and even newts.
Because we're a misanthropic nation we project our stilted emotions onto animals instead.
hard to see Macron getting a majority in Parliament. Is he actually aiming for a FN minority government so as to take the edge off them by the time the next Presidential election rolls around? Risky strategy.
Macron has just dissolved the french Parliament! election to take place around the same time as ours
Bonjour.
June 30th, which is commendably efficient.
Presumably it's an attempt to replay the "you really want the fash? Really?" gambit Sanchez used in Spain. Wonder how the UK and French campaigns interact?
we get six weeks of campaign they get 3. plus two more for the second round of voting
RN look to be winning 31-32% in France. LREM on 15%, PS on 14%, Les Republicans on 8%, Other Right and Greens just above the 5% threshold.
Le Pen cruising to victory at the next POTFR elex, as things stand
Fancy a bet on that?
Non, far too far away, anything might happen
That said after my highly successful bet with @Sandpit I could be tempted by the correct odds, if you are willing to offer
Shame.
But that’s my point. It’s far too far away, anything might happen.
So stating that Le Pen is ‘cruising to victory at the next POTFR’ is your normal trolling. Tsk.
It’s worth remembering that Nigel Farage was elected as a British Member of the European Parliament from 1991 until 2021 (drawing an EU salary). And he has 7 times failed to be elected as UK Member of Parliament.
Le Pen’s party having some limited success in this election does not translate straight to next time’s Presidential elections.
The problem (according to various French friends who are horrified by the prospect) is that the traditional parties are seen as being out of road. En Marche is a one-man vehicle. And he can't run again.
They think that the "Anyone but Le Pen" thing in French presidential politics will break the next time.
It may well do at some point, but RN and Le Pen have gained electoral support not by becoming more right wing, but rather by becoming more centrist. Whether one believes that the leopard has really changed its spots is up to the French voter.
- the next question is, subject to the usual laws around slander and libel and the requirement to have an imprint, are there any restrictions on what you can put in an Election Address? If you wanted to promote your company's business, could you do so?
Didn't Screaming Lord Sutch, late of the MRLP, use by-elections to put on a gig locally and promote it through the freepost provided for election addresses?
I miss His Lordship; none of his successors seem to have had quite the charisma.
His acolyte JohnLoony who used to post here was surprisingly well-informed about politics for someone who'd hitched his political wagon to the epitome of no-hope causes. Years of fighting local and national elections, presumably.
Macron is a canny git. Either Le Pen wins and has to govern. Or loses yet again. Either way, she can't get more popular. Some elan in the timing too. Very French.
How do snap elections in France work because they were aligned with Presidential terms to avoid the cohabitation problem. Is it like Sweden where the newly elected assembly will only serve until the next normal date (ie 2027)?
Off topic. Interesting stuff on old Lowry interviews uncovered.
I’ve reappraised him recently; I’d mentally pigeonholed him as a bit tiresome and amateurish but actually there’s a lot to his work - and I feel the key to it was looking at it from the viewpoint of his having probably quite deep and chronic depression.
Beyond the factory/crowd scenes he is best known for, there is a lot of pretty weird and visionary and even near-abstract (his seascapes). Since experiencing a sustained depressive bout myself I found I could relate to his work so much more.
His studies of girls in chaste but preposterously tight/throttling dress take on a peculiar dimension when considering the absence of romance in his life.
I was fortunate enough to go to an exhibition of his work many years ago and was knocked out by the range, skill and profundity of his work. Anyone who just thinks of him as just a painter of northern industrial landscapes is seriously underating him.
I was in the latter category until recently but have happily reappraised since. Whether he is a genuinely major artist, I’m not sure - but he was certainly much more interesting than the million prints of ‘going to the match’ might leave you thinking.
I don’t think that naff ‘Matchstick Men’ song helped either.
The paintings of northern industrial landscapes are interesting, well executed, and have been adopted by us in the NW as emblems. But I don't think they're a celebration. Lowry seems to me appalled by the landscape and sees little humanity among the crowds. If this genuinely is the impression he's trying tp convey he does it very well. As you say, though, he's a brilliant artist, and a much more rounded one than the paintings he's best known for would suggest.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
As long as also accompanied by better rehabilitation inside given the vast majority of prisoners will eventually be released back into society
A liberal lefty has hacked into HY's account.
No not much different to what Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has said
The 20,000 prison places are what the conservatives have planned but not been able to deliver due to problems with the planning system. Labour are saying that they will circumvent this by issuing 'development consent orders' but these still have to go through a year plus long process of examination so not a quick route. The government could just 'call in' the planning applications submitted by the Ministry of Justice and approve them. Apparently the hold ups are something to do with badgers and retained EU rules about protected species.
The 20,000 are not enough, there are 87,000 prisoners in 80,000 places at present. Really they need something like 100,000 more prison places to start to meet public demand for longer sentences. At least having labour in power will hopefully stop the government opportunistically passing laws for longer sentences in the hope that the consequences will be passed on to the next government.
Idea - Train the prisoners in building trades. Then they can build prisons as part of their sentence reduction.
Badgers are thugs. If they were humans, they would be the shaven headed guy at the end of the bar who no one sits next to. With "Love" and "Hate" tattoos on their knuckles. Build the prisons round them.
We have some absurd rules around badgers, largely driven by misty-eyed sentiment.
I mentioned Norwegian whale hunting yesterday.
Not sure I want to enter this debate here but we are sentimental and inconsistent about animal welfare and protection. Why are we so misty-eyed about whale hunting but routinely hack fins off sharks and dump the rest of the fish back into the sea?
The animals we choose to champion are usually fluffy and cute-looking, even if they are, from a natural selection perspective, patently absurd. Giant Pandas being an excellent example. It’s ridiculous to favour them over other animals which look ‘ugly’ like the long-nosed echidna.
Now I’ll hide!!!
Because we struggle to express our feelings.
The counterversion to this is how much we hate other people's kids, in contrast to Spain and Greece etc, because we see them as still more bastards in creation.
On the general topic of things being reported in the Mail, here's something else of interest:
Jeremy Hunt has vowed to do more to help those on six-figure salaries if the Tories win the general election - and he clings on to his own seat.
The Chancellor suggested, if he remains in charge of the Treasury beyond 4 July, he would be focused on removing 'cliff edges' for high earners in the tax system.
Mr Hunt pointed to how the Government's offer of free childcare for parents is not available if one of them is earning over £100,000.
....
'Around here the childcare reforms have been pretty popular,' the Chancellor said, as he spoke to the newspaper in Bramley, Surrey.
'But people also do raise the fact that one person earning over £100,000 means you don't get access to them and that creates a cliff edge.
'Because it was a big commitment we just couldn't afford to do more when I made the original announcement.
'But those are things I think we definitely want to make progress on, yes.'
He added: 'I've always said that if you want to be economically productive we have to get rid of the cliff edges in the tax system.
'The removal of the personal allowance, the fact that childcare support stops when one person in a household is earning over £100,000.
'If you speak to economists, they will say the most damaging things in the tax system are when you have things with a high marginal rate.
'So it is absolutely on our list as something we would like to do more on.'
Compare this to the incessant foot-dragging over the victimisation of Carer's Allowance claimants who, earning, shall we say, somewhat less than £100,000, have found themselves falling over a cliff edge for earning about 56p too much and being ruthlessly pursued by Government-appointed debt collectors.
A good illustration of where Conservative priorities *appear* to lie - but it'll be fascinating to see which, if either, of these issues is deemed worthy of mention in the forthcoming manifesto.
It's quite hard dealing with the whole nation. Where I live £100k pa is loads and loads. In much of London and the SE it isn't (SFAICS).
£100k is more than double the median London wage, which is about £44k.
£97400 before tax puts someone in the top 4% of those having liability for income tax:
I find Macron to be quite an interesting character, what comes after him in a few years will be hard to gauge.
I note wiki says Macron cannot serve more than two consecutive terms in office, I don't suppose he could go the Putin gambit and try to become PM in a few years?
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
As long as also accompanied by better rehabilitation inside given the vast majority of prisoners will eventually be released back into society
A liberal lefty has hacked into HY's account.
No not much different to what Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has said
The 20,000 prison places are what the conservatives have planned but not been able to deliver due to problems with the planning system. Labour are saying that they will circumvent this by issuing 'development consent orders' but these still have to go through a year plus long process of examination so not a quick route. The government could just 'call in' the planning applications submitted by the Ministry of Justice and approve them. Apparently the hold ups are something to do with badgers and retained EU rules about protected species.
The 20,000 are not enough, there are 87,000 prisoners in 80,000 places at present. Really they need something like 100,000 more prison places to start to meet public demand for longer sentences. At least having labour in power will hopefully stop the government opportunistically passing laws for longer sentences in the hope that the consequences will be passed on to the next government.
Idea - Train the prisoners in building trades. Then they can build prisons as part of their sentence reduction.
Badgers are thugs. If they were humans, they would be the shaven headed guy at the end of the bar who no one sits next to. With "Love" and "Hate" tattoos on their knuckles. Build the prisons round them.
We have some absurd rules around badgers, largely driven by misty-eyed sentiment.
Many wild life lovers haven't met the wild life in question.
Watching some of them cuddle a badger would be... interesting.
Same shit with foxes, and even newts.
Because we're a misanthropic nation we project our stilted emotions onto animals instead.
That email from Cameron wasn't requesting your legendary calmness, empathy and tact to utilise in the next debate, was it?
Macron is a canny git. Either Le Pen wins and has to govern. Or loses yet again. Either way, she can't get more popular. Some elan in the timing too. Very French.
He might go down as a latter-day President Hindenburg.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
As long as also accompanied by better rehabilitation inside given the vast majority of prisoners will eventually be released back into society
A liberal lefty has hacked into HY's account.
No not much different to what Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has said
The 20,000 prison places are what the conservatives have planned but not been able to deliver due to problems with the planning system. Labour are saying that they will circumvent this by issuing 'development consent orders' but these still have to go through a year plus long process of examination so not a quick route. The government could just 'call in' the planning applications submitted by the Ministry of Justice and approve them. Apparently the hold ups are something to do with badgers and retained EU rules about protected species.
The 20,000 are not enough, there are 87,000 prisoners in 80,000 places at present. Really they need something like 100,000 more prison places to start to meet public demand for longer sentences. At least having labour in power will hopefully stop the government opportunistically passing laws for longer sentences in the hope that the consequences will be passed on to the next government.
If criminal justice were administered according to meet public demand then it would consist principally of tying convicts to poles, handing shotguns to victims or their families, and inviting them to enjoy some target practice.
But in all seriousness, mass scale incarceration does not make for a safer society. Ask an American.
agreed, I am not suggesting that though. What I have observed is over the last 10 years, people demanding longer sentences, and the justice system (and government) responding accordingly. So they need to now get on with building massive new prisons.
Is there more demand for long sentences than there was in the past? I can remember Michael Howard's "prison works" schtick. How often do politicians talk about criminal justice nowadays? It's surprising, frankly, that Labour has chosen to make this one of its limited number of commitments.
The public discourse is mainly about the economy, housing, health, pensions and immigration, with schools, defence and water in the second tier. A large number of voters will doubtless favour locking prisoners up and throwing away the keys (or, indeed, simply executing them) if prompted, but it's not a subject that seems to be uppermost in most people's minds.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
What Leon and others miss in their Europe will lurch to the right thesis is that it is authoritarianism they increasingly find attractive, whether of right, left or middle. A strongman to free us from crime and vanquish our enemies and enforce bike lanes.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
As long as also accompanied by better rehabilitation inside given the vast majority of prisoners will eventually be released back into society
A liberal lefty has hacked into HY's account.
No not much different to what Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has said
The 20,000 prison places are what the conservatives have planned but not been able to deliver due to problems with the planning system. Labour are saying that they will circumvent this by issuing 'development consent orders' but these still have to go through a year plus long process of examination so not a quick route. The government could just 'call in' the planning applications submitted by the Ministry of Justice and approve them. Apparently the hold ups are something to do with badgers and retained EU rules about protected species.
The 20,000 are not enough, there are 87,000 prisoners in 80,000 places at present. Really they need something like 100,000 more prison places to start to meet public demand for longer sentences. At least having labour in power will hopefully stop the government opportunistically passing laws for longer sentences in the hope that the consequences will be passed on to the next government.
Idea - Train the prisoners in building trades. Then they can build prisons as part of their sentence reduction.
Badgers are thugs. If they were humans, they would be the shaven headed guy at the end of the bar who no one sits next to. With "Love" and "Hate" tattoos on their knuckles. Build the prisons round them.
We have some absurd rules around badgers, largely driven by misty-eyed sentiment.
Many wild life lovers haven't met the wild life in question.
Watching some of them cuddle a badger would be... interesting.
Same shit with foxes, and even newts.
Because we're a misanthropic nation we project our stilted emotions onto animals instead.
That email from Cameron wasn't requesting your legendary calmness, empathy and tact to utilise in the next debate, was it?
Macron is a canny git. Either Le Pen wins and has to govern. Or loses yet again. Either way, she can't get more popular. Some elan in the timing too. Very French.
It seems too clever by half. LREM could limp back with a smaller seat number.
Someone posted government data on actual incomes pre and post tax. It is quite fascinating. A 50k wage puts you in the top 16% of earners, £100k in the top 4%. What this seems to demonstrate to me is that the salary expectations of graduates as envisaged by the student loan system is completely disconnected from reality. To even service the interest payments on a 70k loan you would need to be in the top 10% of earners.
Are we comparing apples with apples?
How are earners defined? Do they include those on pensions, for example, or only those of working age from 16-65?
Even if the latter in any society like ours you will have vast swathes of people earning 15k-30k in all sorts of semi-skilled/services jobs so I'd expect top-end graduate jobs to be a top segment of 20%.
It does beg the question why we aim for 50% graduates, though.
A lot of the problem is jobs such as I started with didnt need a degree then and they do now. I have met so many people that are now working jobs that once just asked for 5 o levels that now ask for a degree
Thinking 100k is an average salary is no different to the remainer lie that we lost 4% gdp when even where we were in the eu the last time our gdp increased by 4% was in 2000
Is this a riddle?
No its simple statement...our gdp didnt grow by 4% a year while we were in the eu since 2000.....the remainer lie is we lost 4% gdp somehow by leaving even though our gdp has continued rising. If it didnt rise by 4% while we were in the eu claiming it would have done is people like you just talking bollocks or as I would put it being a fucking lying piece of shit
I think you missed your last dose of thorazine
Oh wow ad hominem because you know I am right and you can't argue from facts.....yeah talk to the hand
When was the last year when we were in the eu when our gdp increased by 4% then go on tell me?
Come on dude: the everyone's GDP increased massively in 2021 as Covid receded and economies came back to life.
I'm more positive on Brexit that I've ever been, but that's not a good argument.
I excluded the covid years for the reason you said, for example in 2020 are gdp was -10.4% in 2021 it was +8.7%. The covid effect and I suspect most european countries would reflect the same. My point is though we rarely got an increase of 4% gdp while we were in the eu the last time being 2000. To say brexit cost us 4% gdp is a lie because since brexit our gdp would be negative ever since then. It is a remainer lie.....now if we had stayed in might our gdp be higher well thats a counter factual, maybe yes, maybe no but it irritates me this claimed 4% from remainers when there is no evidence for it
Look, I don't know who's making these claims or frankly why you've suddenly got a bee in your bonnet, but try this form of argument.
If you're going to get twenty-five quid, and someone says hey, I know, let's throw one of those pounds in the lake because if we do that we'll get a magic wish from the Lake People. So the money comes and you pocket £24 and you throw the other pound coin into the water -- plop! -- and you wait for your magic Lake People wish.
And you wait.
And you wait.
And eventually you realise you aren't getting a magic wish. You tell the person that their stupid policy cost you 4%. That would be a fair statement, even though at no point did any money actually leave your pocket.
Just to be clear, I've no idea where this 4% stuff is coming from, I'm just reflecting the number back at you because you used it. I don't have any kind of position on whether Brexit has cost this amount or not. I can tell you though (in case you need it spelling out, which I'm certain you do) that there are no magic-wish-giving Lake People.
It's the ONS's mean of other people's predictions:
Many of those predictions, when you look at the detail, have very dodgy central cases: for example, one of them assumes, as the central case, that we leave with no deal and then make a deal after a couple of years. Almost all assume immigration falls markedly or catastophically.
I used the 4% drop in gdp as it often features in remainer arguments about why brexit isn't working. I am merely pointing out its bollocks because we rarely achieved a 4% increase on gdp while in the eu
The 4% forecasted fall in GDP is measuring the long term effect on the economy relative to the no Brexit counterfactual, it doesn't refer to a drop in GDP from one year to the next.
Against that, Jacob Rees-Mogg forecast Britain will be hundreds of billions of pounds better off outside the EU, and he's been educated at Britain's elite institutions.
Macron has just dissolved the french Parliament! election to take place around the same time as ours
Bonjour.
June 30th, which is commendably efficient.
Presumably it's an attempt to replay the "you really want the fash? Really?" gambit Sanchez used in Spain. Wonder how the UK and French campaigns interact?
What a miserable bastard.
This now means the the french side of my son's wedding on the 29th cant get smashed.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
What Leon and others miss in their Europe will lurch to the right thesis is that it is authoritarianism they increasingly find attractive, whether of right, left or middle. A strongman to free us from crime and vanquish our enemies and enforce bike lanes.
Some of us might grumble that we already have authoritarianism og the centre.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
What Leon and others miss in their Europe will lurch to the right thesis is that it is authoritarianism they increasingly find attractive, whether of right, left or middle. A strongman to free us from crime and vanquish our enemies and enforce bike lanes.
Is it really though? Sure Orban misbehaves, but Tusk deposed the Polish authritarians democratically, which seems to suggest that they aren't really very authoritarian at all.
Reform and Farage spout incoherent right wing populism to the gullible, and I hold them in great contempt, but even I don't think them undemocratic. Indeed about the only policy I agree with them is the need to move to PR.
Any read across of Le Pen doing very well in the first round of voting on 30 June and potential impact on the Reform vote? Or probably not given potential Reform voters aren't that interested in who France has elected to Parliament?
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
What Leon and others miss in their Europe will lurch to the right thesis is that it is authoritarianism they increasingly find attractive, whether of right, left or middle. A strongman to free us from crime and vanquish our enemies and enforce bike lanes.
Some of us might grumble that we already have authoritarianism og the centre.
Macron has just dissolved the french Parliament! election to take place around the same time as ours
Bonjour.
June 30th, which is commendably efficient.
Presumably it's an attempt to replay the "you really want the fash? Really?" gambit Sanchez used in Spain. Wonder how the UK and French campaigns interact?
What a miserable bastard.
This now means the the french side of my son's wedding on the 29th cant get smashed.
Why not? They have most of Sunday to vote.
French weddings pack up about 4 am and then they sleep the next day off.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
What Leon and others miss in their Europe will lurch to the right thesis is that it is authoritarianism they increasingly find attractive, whether of right, left or middle. A strongman to free us from crime and vanquish our enemies and enforce bike lanes.
Is it really though? Sure Orban misbehaves, but Tusk deposed the Polish authritarians democratically, which seems to suggest that they aren't really very authoritarian at all.
Reform and Farage spout incoherent right wing populism to the gullible, and I hold them in great contempt, but even I don't think them undemocratic. Indeed about the only policy I agree with them is the need to move to PR.
The odd thing is that much of what you think of as incoherent right wing populism is actually lifted straight from the New Labour policy book.
Someone posted government data on actual incomes pre and post tax. It is quite fascinating. A 50k wage puts you in the top 16% of earners, £100k in the top 4%. What this seems to demonstrate to me is that the salary expectations of graduates as envisaged by the student loan system is completely disconnected from reality. To even service the interest payments on a 70k loan you would need to be in the top 10% of earners.
Are we comparing apples with apples?
How are earners defined? Do they include those on pensions, for example, or only those of working age from 16-65?
Even if the latter in any society like ours you will have vast swathes of people earning 15k-30k in all sorts of semi-skilled/services jobs so I'd expect top-end graduate jobs to be a top segment of 20%.
It does beg the question why we aim for 50% graduates, though.
I don't think it's a coincidence that countries with more successful economies than Britain's have high rates of participation in tertiary education.
I mean, Britain could continue to be a backward second-rate economy with low productivity if you really want, and deciding not to educate British children and instead importing the educated people the economy requires saves you some spending on the education budget, but it's not an approach that any other country with aspirations follows.
Why is British culture so anti-education?
For whatever reason our society has an intense dislike of the young.
Idea - Train the prisoners in building trades. Then they can build prisons as part of their sentence reduction.
…
In the 1950s and 1960s people convicted of speeding offences in Finland were conscripted into the building of Seutula airport (now Helsinki airport). This has subsequently been seen as a kind of "finishing school" because men from all walks of life mingled together in this and many a life-long friendship was made with job opportunities and preferment. Many "inmates" gained opportunities that would never have arisen in the normal run of their lives.
Macron is a canny git. Either Le Pen wins and has to govern. Or loses yet again. Either way, she can't get more popular. Some elan in the timing too. Very French.
It seems too clever by half. LREM could limp back with a smaller seat number.
LREM/Renaissance was redundant as soon as it lost a presidential majority and power passed to the old parties. So there is no tactical or strategic loss. Macron can look forward to three years of arguments with the far right or far left.
Someone posted government data on actual incomes pre and post tax. It is quite fascinating. A 50k wage puts you in the top 16% of earners, £100k in the top 4%. What this seems to demonstrate to me is that the salary expectations of graduates as envisaged by the student loan system is completely disconnected from reality. To even service the interest payments on a 70k loan you would need to be in the top 10% of earners.
Are we comparing apples with apples?
How are earners defined? Do they include those on pensions, for example, or only those of working age from 16-65?
Even if the latter in any society like ours you will have vast swathes of people earning 15k-30k in all sorts of semi-skilled/services jobs so I'd expect top-end graduate jobs to be a top segment of 20%.
It does beg the question why we aim for 50% graduates, though.
I don't think it's a coincidence that countries with more successful economies than Britain's have high rates of participation in tertiary education.
I mean, Britain could continue to be a backward second-rate economy with low productivity if you really want, and deciding not to educate British children and instead importing the educated people the economy requires saves you some spending on the education budget, but it's not an approach that any other country with aspirations follows.
Why is British culture so anti-education?
I would guess those other countries are educating people in economically valuable subjects. Generally British culture is reasonably pro-education as long as it is FOR something.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
What Leon and others miss in their Europe will lurch to the right thesis is that it is authoritarianism they increasingly find attractive, whether of right, left or middle. A strongman to free us from crime and vanquish our enemies and enforce bike lanes.
Is it really though? Sure Orban misbehaves, but Tusk deposed the Polish authritarians democratically, which seems to suggest that they aren't really very authoritarian at all.
Reform and Farage spout incoherent right wing populism to the gullible, and I hold them in great contempt, but even I don't think them undemocratic. Indeed about the only policy I agree with them is the need to move to PR.
The odd thing is that much of what you think of as incoherent right wing populism is actually lifted straight from the New Labour policy book.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
What Leon and others miss in their Europe will lurch to the right thesis is that it is authoritarianism they increasingly find attractive, whether of right, left or middle. A strongman to free us from crime and vanquish our enemies and enforce bike lanes.
Some of us might grumble that we already have authoritarianism og the centre.
I prefer my authoritarianism to be low key, so I can pretend it is no big deal.
Not very politically correct of The Economist to write this.
"Britain | Ethnicity and politics In search of the white British voter The most important ethnic group in British politics is the one nobody talks about"
Macron is a canny git. Either Le Pen wins and has to govern. Or loses yet again. Either way, she can't get more popular.
It's certainly a spoiler strategy. The risk for him his c0-haitation when tried before was hard work.
it's not like he had a majority in the parliament before this anyway.
No he'll be hoping to get RN as the government and then hit them in 2027 with mid term blues as he advances his house boy Attal. He'll play the overseas card as President on the world stage and leave LePen totake the domestic crap. It remains to be seen how this pans out both sides can shaft each other in a Jovian way.
Any read across of Le Pen doing very well in the first round of voting on 30 June and potential impact on the Reform vote? Or probably not given potential Reform voters aren't that interested in who France has elected to Parliament?
Probably not any impact, but maybe some minor boost if there is a sense of it being a time of 'disruptors' to the general political order?
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
As long as also accompanied by better rehabilitation inside given the vast majority of prisoners will eventually be released back into society
A liberal lefty has hacked into HY's account.
No not much different to what Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has said
The 20,000 prison places are what the conservatives have planned but not been able to deliver due to problems with the planning system. Labour are saying that they will circumvent this by issuing 'development consent orders' but these still have to go through a year plus long process of examination so not a quick route. The government could just 'call in' the planning applications submitted by the Ministry of Justice and approve them. Apparently the hold ups are something to do with badgers and retained EU rules about protected species.
The 20,000 are not enough, there are 87,000 prisoners in 80,000 places at present. Really they need something like 100,000 more prison places to start to meet public demand for longer sentences. At least having labour in power will hopefully stop the government opportunistically passing laws for longer sentences in the hope that the consequences will be passed on to the next government.
Idea - Train the prisoners in building trades. Then they can build prisons as part of their sentence reduction.
Badgers are thugs. If they were humans, they would be the shaven headed guy at the end of the bar who no one sits next to. With "Love" and "Hate" tattoos on their knuckles. Build the prisons round them.
We have some absurd rules around badgers, largely driven by misty-eyed sentiment.
Many wild life lovers haven't met the wild life in question.
Watching some of them cuddle a badger would be... interesting.
Same shit with foxes, and even newts.
Because we're a misanthropic nation we project our stilted emotions onto animals instead.
That email from Cameron wasn't requesting your legendary calmness, empathy and tact to utilise in the next debate, was it?
No, but my phone is very much on the hook.
Expect a call: they look like they're going to need to take the 'spin the wheel' option soon.
Off topic. Interesting stuff on old Lowry interviews uncovered.
I’ve reappraised him recently; I’d mentally pigeonholed him as a bit tiresome and amateurish but actually there’s a lot to his work - and I feel the key to it was looking at it from the viewpoint of his having probably quite deep and chronic depression.
Beyond the factory/crowd scenes he is best known for, there is a lot of pretty weird and visionary and even near-abstract (his seascapes). Since experiencing a sustained depressive bout myself I found I could relate to his work so much more.
His studies of girls in chaste but preposterously tight/throttling dress take on a peculiar dimension when considering the absence of romance in his life.
I was fortunate enough to go to an exhibition of his work many years ago and was knocked out by the range, skill and profundity of his work. Anyone who just thinks of him as just a painter of northern industrial landscapes is seriously underating him.
I was in the latter category until recently but have happily reappraised since. Whether he is a genuinely major artist, I’m not sure - but he was certainly much more interesting than the million prints of ‘going to the match’ might leave you thinking.
I don’t think that naff ‘Matchstick Men’ song helped either.
The paintings of northern industrial landscapes are interesting, well executed, and have been adopted by us in the NW as emblems. But I don't think they're a celebration. Lowry seems to me appalled by the landscape and sees little humanity among the crowds. If this genuinely is the impression he's trying tp convey he does it very well. As you say, though, he's a brilliant artist, and a much more rounded one than the paintings he's best known for would suggest.
The link isn’t working for me, but I know the one you mean.
His seascape here (which I snapped at the eponymous gallery in Salford Quays) is one that really struck me; I stood looking at it for ages. Something about the sea as oblivion, and oblivion itself being a release from the arduous mess of living. I don’t know whether it was me projecting onto the painting (I prefer to believe not) but it utterly held me.
Off topic. Interesting stuff on old Lowry interviews uncovered.
I’ve reappraised him recently; I’d mentally pigeonholed him as a bit tiresome and amateurish but actually there’s a lot to his work - and I feel the key to it was looking at it from the viewpoint of his having probably quite deep and chronic depression.
Beyond the factory/crowd scenes he is best known for, there is a lot of pretty weird and visionary and even near-abstract (his seascapes). Since experiencing a sustained depressive bout myself I found I could relate to his work so much more.
His studies of girls in chaste but preposterously tight/throttling dress take on a peculiar dimension when considering the absence of romance in his life.
The 2013 exhibition at Tate Britain was very good, looking at his work through the theme of industrial alienation and comparing with similarly estranged works by Van Gogh and Utrillo.
The Marxist husband-and-wife art historians, TJ Clark and Anne Wagner did a great job trying to rescue him from the generally received opinion of Lowry as a middle-brow Sunday painter.
The far right is going to have its day in the sun, though lack of internal coordination between the parties makes its administrative impact rather limited.
The other thing that stops them uniting into a powerful bloc is that different versions of them believe different things.
Put simply, there are truly nasty neo-nazis in suits, like the AfD and Sweden democrats, the successors to Hitler and Mussolini, and there are dozens of essentially Falangist parties, the successors to Franco. The current iteration of the RN in France, the PiS in Poland and Meloni in Italy are Falangists. At worst. Arguably just 19th century style authoritarians.
The AfD are the scariest. Worse than Trump, though less powerful.
The other divide is pro-Putinists vs the rest. Another where PiS and Meloni are on one side.
History tends to repeat itself and what happens on a small scale in the UK first (reformation and religious conflict, anti-royalist revolution, the rise of socialism) then manifests itself in a vastly more bloody way in Central Europe next. We did Brexit back in 2016, so they are due.
Is it not a category error to call any democratic politician a fascist/falangist/nazi given that the one thing they had in common was opposition to multi-party democracy?
Hitler came to power via a multiparty democratic system.
So did Tony Blair.
Yes, but Blair allowed further elections while Hitler did not.
I was just pointing out that participation in multiparty democracy doesn't prevent a party from being fascist/falangist/nazi.
Though I think those terms far too frequently used. RN isn't fascist or even falangist, just nativity and populist for example. Golden Dawn in Greece could be reasonably described as Facist.
From the Falangist programme:
Our State will be a totalitarian instrument to defend the integrity of the fatherland. All Spaniards will participate in this through their various family, municipal, and syndical roles. There shall be no participation in it by political parties. We shall implacably abolish the system of political parties and all of their consequences- inorganic suffrage, representation of clashing groups, and a Parliament of the type that is all too well known.
Needs a better translation methinks.
The UK uses representative democracy. We elect MPs to represent us, the monarch appoints the Prime Minister that is supported by a majority of MPs.
It's not the only way to organise society. "Syndicalism" has the means of production owned "socially" (imagine a steel factory owned by the union) and wants and desires fed upwards to the Government via the syndic (right word?).
It doesn't really work: the individual spends too much time on it and the wants and desires are ignored, misinterpreted or deprioritised by those in power, resulting in a de-facto dictatorship, supreme leaders, and suchlike.
Someone posted government data on actual incomes pre and post tax. It is quite fascinating. A 50k wage puts you in the top 16% of earners, £100k in the top 4%. What this seems to demonstrate to me is that the salary expectations of graduates as envisaged by the student loan system is completely disconnected from reality. To even service the interest payments on a 70k loan you would need to be in the top 10% of earners.
Are we comparing apples with apples?
How are earners defined? Do they include those on pensions, for example, or only those of working age from 16-65?
Even if the latter in any society like ours you will have vast swathes of people earning 15k-30k in all sorts of semi-skilled/services jobs so I'd expect top-end graduate jobs to be a top segment of 20%.
It does beg the question why we aim for 50% graduates, though.
I don't think it's a coincidence that countries with more successful economies than Britain's have high rates of participation in tertiary education.
I mean, Britain could continue to be a backward second-rate economy with low productivity if you really want, and deciding not to educate British children and instead importing the educated people the economy requires saves you some spending on the education budget, but it's not an approach that any other country with aspirations follows.
Why is British culture so anti-education?
I heartily agree. All our international competitors have similar rates of tertiary education.
There is a significant problem of cost and quality of that tertiary education, but in terms of numbers we more or less get it right.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
What Leon and others miss in their Europe will lurch to the right thesis is that it is authoritarianism they increasingly find attractive, whether of right, left or middle. A strongman to free us from crime and vanquish our enemies and enforce bike lanes.
Is it really though? Sure Orban misbehaves, but Tusk deposed the Polish authritarians democratically, which seems to suggest that they aren't really very authoritarian at all.
Reform and Farage spout incoherent right wing populism to the gullible, and I hold them in great contempt, but even I don't think them undemocratic. Indeed about the only policy I agree with them is the need to move to PR.
The odd thing is that much of what you think of as incoherent right wing populism is actually lifted straight from the New Labour policy book.
I look forward to your examples of that.
- Stop and search - Benefit cuts to encourage people back into work - Making it harder to claim aslyum because, "Once people get in... then it is very difficult to get them back."
Someone posted government data on actual incomes pre and post tax. It is quite fascinating. A 50k wage puts you in the top 16% of earners, £100k in the top 4%. What this seems to demonstrate to me is that the salary expectations of graduates as envisaged by the student loan system is completely disconnected from reality. To even service the interest payments on a 70k loan you would need to be in the top 10% of earners.
Are we comparing apples with apples?
How are earners defined? Do they include those on pensions, for example, or only those of working age from 16-65?
Even if the latter in any society like ours you will have vast swathes of people earning 15k-30k in all sorts of semi-skilled/services jobs so I'd expect top-end graduate jobs to be a top segment of 20%.
It does beg the question why we aim for 50% graduates, though.
I don't think it's a coincidence that countries with more successful economies than Britain's have high rates of participation in tertiary education.
I mean, Britain could continue to be a backward second-rate economy with low productivity if you really want, and deciding not to educate British children and instead importing the educated people the economy requires saves you some spending on the education budget, but it's not an approach that any other country with aspirations follows.
Why is British culture so anti-education?
I would guess those other countries are educating people in economically valuable subjects. Generally British culture is reasonably pro-education as long as it is FOR something.
Right. But British culture is also about showing off that one was rubbish at Maths, unlike the nerds, and most people categorise mathematical education as not worthwhile.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
What Leon and others miss in their Europe will lurch to the right thesis is that it is authoritarianism they increasingly find attractive, whether of right, left or middle. A strongman to free us from crime and vanquish our enemies and enforce bike lanes.
Is it really though? Sure Orban misbehaves, but Tusk deposed the Polish authritarians democratically, which seems to suggest that they aren't really very authoritarian at all.
Reform and Farage spout incoherent right wing populism to the gullible, and I hold them in great contempt, but even I don't think them undemocratic. Indeed about the only policy I agree with them is the need to move to PR.
The odd thing is that much of what you think of as incoherent right wing populism is actually lifted straight from the New Labour policy book.
I look forward to your examples of that.
New Labour took the existing core of the party’s working-class votes for granted because, according to Mandelson, they had ‘nowhere else to go’,
Washington Post (via Seattle Times) - One graduate’s quiet protest: Bringing a banned book to commencement
Annabelle Jenkins made sure to keep her plan secret, hiding the item in the sleeve of her gown as she walked across the graduation stage.
The 18-year-old was frustrated by months of what she viewed as school district officials ignoring her pleas not to remove a handful of books from the school library. On the day she graduated from the Idaho Fine Arts Academy late last month, she smuggled something into the May 23 ceremony that she hoped would force them to listen.
She got her diploma and shook the hands of school officials — until she came to West Ada School District Superintendent Derek Bub. That’s when she pulled out a graphic novel adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and showed it to the crowd before trying to hand it to the superintendent. When he refused to take the book, she dropped it at his feet.
“It is an attack on our libraries as spaces that we are restricting what kind of information our communities and our students can access,” Jenkins told The Washington Post. . . .
Well done. It might seem only a minor thing but it takes a lot of courage to do these things on your own in front of a crowd on such an important occasion.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
As long as also accompanied by better rehabilitation inside given the vast majority of prisoners will eventually be released back into society
A liberal lefty has hacked into HY's account.
No not much different to what Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has said
The 20,000 prison places are what the conservatives have planned but not been able to deliver due to problems with the planning system. Labour are saying that they will circumvent this by issuing 'development consent orders' but these still have to go through a year plus long process of examination so not a quick route. The government could just 'call in' the planning applications submitted by the Ministry of Justice and approve them. Apparently the hold ups are something to do with badgers and retained EU rules about protected species.
The 20,000 are not enough, there are 87,000 prisoners in 80,000 places at present. Really they need something like 100,000 more prison places to start to meet public demand for longer sentences. At least having labour in power will hopefully stop the government opportunistically passing laws for longer sentences in the hope that the consequences will be passed on to the next government.
Idea - Train the prisoners in building trades. Then they can build prisons as part of their sentence reduction.
Badgers are thugs. If they were humans, they would be the shaven headed guy at the end of the bar who no one sits next to. With "Love" and "Hate" tattoos on their knuckles. Build the prisons round them.
We have some absurd rules around badgers, largely driven by misty-eyed sentiment.
Many wild life lovers haven't met the wild life in question.
Watching some of them cuddle a badger would be... interesting.
Same shit with foxes, and even newts.
Because we're a misanthropic nation we project our stilted emotions onto animals instead.
There is a little old lady near our old flat whose kitten got torn to pieces. At night. In the garden where she feeds the urban foxes. She is adamant that thugs must have thrown a fighting dog over the wall and then retrieved it.
Macron is a canny git. Either Le Pen wins and has to govern. Or loses yet again. Either way, she can't get more popular. Some elan in the timing too. Very French.
Excellent timing from Macron off the back of his big photo op with President Biden and some English aristo off to the side.
Off topic. Interesting stuff on old Lowry interviews uncovered.
I’ve reappraised him recently; I’d mentally pigeonholed him as a bit tiresome and amateurish but actually there’s a lot to his work - and I feel the key to it was looking at it from the viewpoint of his having probably quite deep and chronic depression.
Beyond the factory/crowd scenes he is best known for, there is a lot of pretty weird and visionary and even near-abstract (his seascapes). Since experiencing a sustained depressive bout myself I found I could relate to his work so much more.
His studies of girls in chaste but preposterously tight/throttling dress take on a peculiar dimension when considering the absence of romance in his life.
I was fortunate enough to go to an exhibition of his work many years ago and was knocked out by the range, skill and profundity of his work. Anyone who just thinks of him as just a painter of northern industrial landscapes is seriously underating him.
I was in the latter category until recently but have happily reappraised since. Whether he is a genuinely major artist, I’m not sure - but he was certainly much more interesting than the million prints of ‘going to the match’ might leave you thinking.
I don’t think that naff ‘Matchstick Men’ song helped either.
The paintings of northern industrial landscapes are interesting, well executed, and have been adopted by us in the NW as emblems. But I don't think they're a celebration. Lowry seems to me appalled by the landscape and sees little humanity among the crowds. If this genuinely is the impression he's trying tp convey he does it very well. As you say, though, he's a brilliant artist, and a much more rounded one than the paintings he's best known for would suggest.
The link isn’t working for me, but I know the one you mean.
His seascape here (which I snapped at the eponymous gallery in Salford Quays) is one that really struck me; I stood looking at it for ages. Something about the sea as oblivion, and oblivion itself being a release from the arduous mess of living. I don’t know whether it was me projecting onto the painting (I prefer to believe not) but it utterly held me.
I've had similar feelings about one of Munch's paintings (I've seen it titled as "Young girl on a jetty" and "Young girl at the beach") :
Someone posted government data on actual incomes pre and post tax. It is quite fascinating. A 50k wage puts you in the top 16% of earners, £100k in the top 4%. What this seems to demonstrate to me is that the salary expectations of graduates as envisaged by the student loan system is completely disconnected from reality. To even service the interest payments on a 70k loan you would need to be in the top 10% of earners.
Are we comparing apples with apples?
How are earners defined? Do they include those on pensions, for example, or only those of working age from 16-65?
Even if the latter in any society like ours you will have vast swathes of people earning 15k-30k in all sorts of semi-skilled/services jobs so I'd expect top-end graduate jobs to be a top segment of 20%.
It does beg the question why we aim for 50% graduates, though.
I don't think it's a coincidence that countries with more successful economies than Britain's have high rates of participation in tertiary education.
I mean, Britain could continue to be a backward second-rate economy with low productivity if you really want, and deciding not to educate British children and instead importing the educated people the economy requires saves you some spending on the education budget, but it's not an approach that any other country with aspirations follows.
Why is British culture so anti-education?
I would guess those other countries are educating people in economically valuable subjects. Generally British culture is reasonably pro-education as long as it is FOR something.
Number of decades ago, members of the Indiana legislature railed against the egghead of Indiana University for teaching "Mickey Mouse" courses and majors, for example "Uralic-Altaic studies"
What the hell is a Uralic, they asked
The president of IU had to explain to the irate/skeptical/ignorant legislators that, among other things, graduates of the program were MUCH sought after by CIA and other national security agencies due to their fluency in languages spoken in the Soviet Union.
Someone posted government data on actual incomes pre and post tax. It is quite fascinating. A 50k wage puts you in the top 16% of earners, £100k in the top 4%. What this seems to demonstrate to me is that the salary expectations of graduates as envisaged by the student loan system is completely disconnected from reality. To even service the interest payments on a 70k loan you would need to be in the top 10% of earners.
Are we comparing apples with apples?
How are earners defined? Do they include those on pensions, for example, or only those of working age from 16-65?
Even if the latter in any society like ours you will have vast swathes of people earning 15k-30k in all sorts of semi-skilled/services jobs so I'd expect top-end graduate jobs to be a top segment of 20%.
It does beg the question why we aim for 50% graduates, though.
I don't think it's a coincidence that countries with more successful economies than Britain's have high rates of participation in tertiary education.
I mean, Britain could continue to be a backward second-rate economy with low productivity if you really want, and deciding not to educate British children and instead importing the educated people the economy requires saves you some spending on the education budget, but it's not an approach that any other country with aspirations follows.
Why is British culture so anti-education?
I would guess those other countries are educating people in economically valuable subjects. Generally British culture is reasonably pro-education as long as it is FOR something.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with this. There's a tendency in Britain to confuse scepticism with outright anti-intellectualism, which might date all the way back to the Reformation.
For all France's problems with intolerance, rudeness, and a much poorer climate of ethnic relations than we have in the UK, it still values the world of the intellect.
Turn on main French terrestrial television and you'll see the kind of ambitious, intellectual discussions that were on our television screens 40 years ago, but have gone. Because we haven't valued them enough in our public culture compared to countries like the French ( or indeed the Germans ).
- the next question is, subject to the usual laws around slander and libel and the requirement to have an imprint, are there any restrictions on what you can put in an Election Address? If you wanted to promote your company's business, could you do so?
Didn't Screaming Lord Sutch, late of the MRLP, use by-elections to put on a gig locally and promote it through the freepost provided for election addresses?
I miss His Lordship; none of his successors seem to have had quite the charisma.
His acolyte JohnLoony who used to post here was surprisingly well-informed about politics for someone who'd hitched his political wagon to the epitome of no-hope causes. Years of fighting local and national elections, presumably.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
As long as also accompanied by better rehabilitation inside given the vast majority of prisoners will eventually be released back into society
A liberal lefty has hacked into HY's account.
No not much different to what Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has said
The 20,000 prison places are what the conservatives have planned but not been able to deliver due to problems with the planning system. Labour are saying that they will circumvent this by issuing 'development consent orders' but these still have to go through a year plus long process of examination so not a quick route. The government could just 'call in' the planning applications submitted by the Ministry of Justice and approve them. Apparently the hold ups are something to do with badgers and retained EU rules about protected species.
The 20,000 are not enough, there are 87,000 prisoners in 80,000 places at present. Really they need something like 100,000 more prison places to start to meet public demand for longer sentences. At least having labour in power will hopefully stop the government opportunistically passing laws for longer sentences in the hope that the consequences will be passed on to the next government.
If criminal justice were administered according to meet public demand then it would consist principally of tying convicts to poles, handing shotguns to victims or their families, and inviting them to enjoy some target practice.
But in all seriousness, mass scale incarceration does not make for a safer society. Ask an American.
That's not good logic.
America is a dangerous nation for a plethora of reasons including widespread racism, incredibly poor mental health and health in general, and easy access to guns.
It could be that America is safer with incarceration than it is without it, its just that being safer with incarceration doesn't make up for all its other flaws.
Those who have not hurt anyone else should not be in prison and that is a problem in America. But those who have done so, its a different matter. Most crimes are committed by repeat offenders, if the offenders are behind bars the crimes don't happen.
- the next question is, subject to the usual laws around slander and libel and the requirement to have an imprint, are there any restrictions on what you can put in an Election Address? If you wanted to promote your company's business, could you do so?
Didn't Screaming Lord Sutch, late of the MRLP, use by-elections to put on a gig locally and promote it through the freepost provided for election addresses?
I miss His Lordship; none of his successors seem to have had quite the charisma.
His acolyte JohnLoony who used to post here was surprisingly well-informed about politics for someone who'd hitched his political wagon to the epitome of no-hope causes. Years of fighting local and national elections, presumably.
Macron has just dissolved the french Parliament! election to take place around the same time as ours
Bonjour.
June 30th, which is commendably efficient.
Presumably it's an attempt to replay the "you really want the fash? Really?" gambit Sanchez used in Spain. Wonder how the UK and French campaigns interact?
What a miserable bastard.
This now means the the french side of my son's wedding on the 29th cant get smashed.
Why not? They have most of Sunday to vote.
French weddings pack up about 4 am and then they sleep the next day off.
So you could have a 12-hour kip and still plenty of time to vote.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
What Leon and others miss in their Europe will lurch to the right thesis is that it is authoritarianism they increasingly find attractive, whether of right, left or middle. A strongman to free us from crime and vanquish our enemies and enforce bike lanes.
Is it really though? Sure Orban misbehaves, but Tusk deposed the Polish authritarians democratically, which seems to suggest that they aren't really very authoritarian at all.
Reform and Farage spout incoherent right wing populism to the gullible, and I hold them in great contempt, but even I don't think them undemocratic. Indeed about the only policy I agree with them is the need to move to PR.
The odd thing is that much of what you think of as incoherent right wing populism is actually lifted straight from the New Labour policy book.
I look forward to your examples of that.
New Labour took the existing core of the party’s working-class votes for granted because, according to Mandelson, they had ‘nowhere else to go’,
Nowadays a person like me would be job limited to stacking shelves in tesco's because I don't have a degree
In my time I have however got a patent to my name for a colour space algortithm I invented, I have written sat nav software that includes cars, cycles, pedestrians. I have written medical software and now work on educational software. Focussing everything on degrees now would make an 18 year old me never considered for any of that and you think thats a good thing?
An alternative take on Macron's strategy is that he wants to force the traditional main parties - Socialists and Republicans - to go into coalition with him.
Macron has just dissolved the french Parliament! election to take place around the same time as ours
Bonjour.
June 30th, which is commendably efficient.
Presumably it's an attempt to replay the "you really want the fash? Really?" gambit Sanchez used in Spain. Wonder how the UK and French campaigns interact?
What a miserable bastard.
This now means the the french side of my son's wedding on the 29th cant get smashed.
Why not? They have most of Sunday to vote.
French weddings pack up about 4 am and then they sleep the next day off.
So you could have a 12-hour kip and still plenty of time to vote.
- the next question is, subject to the usual laws around slander and libel and the requirement to have an imprint, are there any restrictions on what you can put in an Election Address? If you wanted to promote your company's business, could you do so?
Didn't Screaming Lord Sutch, late of the MRLP, use by-elections to put on a gig locally and promote it through the freepost provided for election addresses?
I miss His Lordship; none of his successors seem to have had quite the charisma.
His acolyte JohnLoony who used to post here was surprisingly well-informed about politics for someone who'd hitched his political wagon to the epitome of no-hope causes. Years of fighting local and national elections, presumably.
He then joined the Conservative Party.
He had an exhaustive knowledge and background in Trotskyite splinter parties of the Seventies and Eighties. I think he followed a path similar to the Revolutionary Communist Party running Spiked-Online, when policy changes they change with it. Oceana has always been at war with EastAsia.
Someone posted government data on actual incomes pre and post tax. It is quite fascinating. A 50k wage puts you in the top 16% of earners, £100k in the top 4%. What this seems to demonstrate to me is that the salary expectations of graduates as envisaged by the student loan system is completely disconnected from reality. To even service the interest payments on a 70k loan you would need to be in the top 10% of earners.
Are we comparing apples with apples?
How are earners defined? Do they include those on pensions, for example, or only those of working age from 16-65?
Even if the latter in any society like ours you will have vast swathes of people earning 15k-30k in all sorts of semi-skilled/services jobs so I'd expect top-end graduate jobs to be a top segment of 20%.
It does beg the question why we aim for 50% graduates, though.
I don't think it's a coincidence that countries with more successful economies than Britain's have high rates of participation in tertiary education.
I mean, Britain could continue to be a backward second-rate economy with low productivity if you really want, and deciding not to educate British children and instead importing the educated people the economy requires saves you some spending on the education budget, but it's not an approach that any other country with aspirations follows.
Why is British culture so anti-education?
I agree with you, but how do you move the balance of jobs in that direction?
I'm not sure how it works if 50% go to university but only 20% get decent graduate jobs.
These are parliamentary elections not presidential ones, right? After a couple of glasses of wine I'm unable to parse the BBC article. Either my tolerance has gone down, or it's unclear.
Off topic. Interesting stuff on old Lowry interviews uncovered.
I’ve reappraised him recently; I’d mentally pigeonholed him as a bit tiresome and amateurish but actually there’s a lot to his work - and I feel the key to it was looking at it from the viewpoint of his having probably quite deep and chronic depression.
Beyond the factory/crowd scenes he is best known for, there is a lot of pretty weird and visionary and even near-abstract (his seascapes). Since experiencing a sustained depressive bout myself I found I could relate to his work so much more.
His studies of girls in chaste but preposterously tight/throttling dress take on a peculiar dimension when considering the absence of romance in his life.
The 2013 exhibition at Tate Britain was very good, looking at his work through the theme of industrial alienation and comparing with similarly estranged works by Van Gogh and Utrillo.
The Marxist husband-and-wife art historians, TJ Clark and Anne Wagner did a great job trying to rescue him from the generally received opinion of Lowry as a middle-brow Sunday painter.
That sounds like an interesting exhibition. As a side note to this off-topic side note, I visited the TB recently, the first time in a few years. Even aside from the Turners and Pre-Raphaelites for which it is (rightly) famous, it’s such a rewarding gallery to visit. Mostly the pre-C20th stuff for me, but I was also really struck by a solo temporary exhibit of an artist I hadn’t heard of before, Zeinab Saleh. Worth a look if you’re in the area: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/zeinab-saleh
Comments
Watching some of them cuddle a badger would be... interesting.
Obviously they became a little bit more explicitly anti-democratic in a public propaganda sort of way once in power, and having passed the Enabling Act. Order, certainties and transcendence above the everyday, that sort of thing.
Our State will be a totalitarian instrument to defend the integrity of the fatherland. All Spaniards will participate in this through their various family, municipal, and syndical roles. There shall be no participation in it by political parties. We shall implacably abolish the system of political parties and all of their consequences- inorganic suffrage, representation of clashing groups, and a Parliament of the type that is all too well known.
The U.S. is not the U.K.
https://x.com/pinguforest/status/1799826191693844642
Makes as much sense as assuming that you drink orange juice with every meal . . . just because?
(Irony alert - I know you are joking . . . sorta.)
1. Sunak and the Tories are distinctly unpopular - who'd have thought it; and
2. Nobody, but nobody, has heard of Matt Goodwin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2027_French_legislative_election
They think that the "Anyone but Le Pen" thing in French presidential politics will break the next time.
June 30th, which is commendably efficient.
Presumably it's an attempt to replay the "you really want the fash? Really?" gambit Sanchez used in Spain. Wonder how the UK and French campaigns interact?
What do others reckon?
Not sure I want to enter this debate here but we are sentimental and inconsistent about animal welfare and protection. Why are we so misty-eyed about whale hunting but routinely hack fins off sharks and dump the rest of the fish back into the sea?
The animals we choose to champion are usually fluffy and cute-looking, even if they are, from a natural selection perspective, patently absurd. Giant Pandas being an excellent example. It’s ridiculous to favour them over other animals which look ‘ugly’ like the long-nosed echidna.
Now I’ll hide!!!
Just because the belief is sincere doesn't stop it being utterly batso.
I mean, Britain could continue to be a backward second-rate economy with low productivity if you really want, and deciding not to educate British children and instead importing the educated people the economy requires saves you some spending on the education budget, but it's not an approach that any other country with aspirations follows.
Why is British culture so anti-education?
Washington Post (via Seattle Times) - One graduate’s quiet protest: Bringing a banned book to commencement
Annabelle Jenkins made sure to keep her plan secret, hiding the item in the sleeve of her gown as she walked across the graduation stage.
The 18-year-old was frustrated by months of what she viewed as school district officials ignoring her pleas not to remove a handful of books from the school library. On the day she graduated from the Idaho Fine Arts Academy late last month, she smuggled something into the May 23 ceremony that she hoped would force them to listen.
She got her diploma and shook the hands of school officials — until she came to West Ada School District Superintendent Derek Bub. That’s when she pulled out a graphic novel adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and showed it to the crowd before trying to hand it to the superintendent. When he refused to take the book, she dropped it at his feet.
“It is an attack on our libraries as spaces that we are restricting what kind of information our communities and our students can access,” Jenkins told The Washington Post. . . .
This now means the the french side of my son's wedding on the 29th cant get smashed.
Because we're a misanthropic nation we project our stilted emotions onto animals instead.
Either Le Pen wins and has to govern. Or loses yet again.
Either way, she can't get more popular.
Some elan in the timing too.
Very French.
As you say, though, he's a brilliant artist, and a much more rounded one than the paintings he's best known for would suggest.
This is my favoirite Lowry, showing he can do humanity too: https://www.theguardian.com/arts/pictures/image/0,,-1060329418596,00.html
The counterversion to this is how much we hate other people's kids, in contrast to Spain and Greece etc, because we see them as still more bastards in creation.
So, everyone.
I note wiki says Macron cannot serve more than two consecutive terms in office, I don't suppose he could go the Putin gambit and try to become PM in a few years?
The public discourse is mainly about the economy, housing, health, pensions and immigration, with schools, defence and water in the second tier. A large number of voters will doubtless favour locking prisoners up and throwing away the keys (or, indeed, simply executing them) if prompted, but it's not a subject that seems to be uppermost in most people's minds.
How are the bike lanes?
Reform and Farage spout incoherent right wing populism to the gullible, and I hold them in great contempt, but even I don't think them undemocratic. Indeed about the only policy I agree with them is the need to move to PR.
Generally British culture is reasonably pro-education as long as it is FOR something.
"Britain | Ethnicity and politics
In search of the white British voter
The most important ethnic group in British politics is the one nobody talks about"
https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/06/07/in-search-of-the-white-british-voter
It remains to be seen how this pans out both sides can shaft each other in a Jovian way.
Though Macron was more that in some ways.
His seascape here (which I snapped at the eponymous gallery in Salford Quays) is one that really struck me; I stood looking at it for ages. Something about the sea as oblivion, and oblivion itself being a release from the arduous mess of living. I don’t know whether it was me projecting onto the painting (I prefer to believe not) but it utterly held me.
The Marxist husband-and-wife art historians, TJ Clark and Anne Wagner did a great job trying to rescue him from the generally received opinion of Lowry as a middle-brow Sunday painter.
It's not the only way to organise society. "Syndicalism" has the means of production owned "socially" (imagine a steel factory owned by the union) and wants and desires fed upwards to the Government via the syndic (right word?).
It doesn't really work: the individual spends too much time on it and the wants and desires are ignored, misinterpreted or deprioritised by those in power, resulting in a de-facto dictatorship, supreme leaders, and suchlike.
There is a significant problem of cost and quality of that tertiary education, but in terms of numbers we more or less get it right.
- Benefit cuts to encourage people back into work
- Making it harder to claim aslyum because, "Once people get in... then it is very difficult to get them back."
So I'm not sure I accept your take as accurate.
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/05/mandelsons-return-puts-corporate-lobbying-at-the-heart-of-starmers-labour
What the hell is a Uralic, they asked
The president of IU had to explain to the irate/skeptical/ignorant legislators that, among other things, graduates of the program were MUCH sought after by CIA and other national security agencies due to their fluency in languages spoken in the Soviet Union.
For all France's problems with intolerance, rudeness, and a much poorer climate of ethnic relations than we have in the UK, it still values the world of the intellect.
Turn on main French terrestrial television and you'll see the kind of ambitious, intellectual discussions that were on our television screens 40 years ago, but have gone. Because we haven't valued them enough in our public culture compared to countries like the French ( or indeed the Germans ).
America is a dangerous nation for a plethora of reasons including widespread racism, incredibly poor mental health and health in general, and easy access to guns.
It could be that America is safer with incarceration than it is without it, its just that being safer with incarceration doesn't make up for all its other flaws.
Those who have not hurt anyone else should not be in prison and that is a problem in America. But those who have done so, its a different matter. Most crimes are committed by repeat offenders, if the offenders are behind bars the crimes don't happen.
Asylum Choir - Tryin' To Stay 'Live
https://youtu.be/twjySUOPlXw
I've just discovered this album, Asylum Choir II, recorded in 69 but not released until 71. I'm loving most of it
It's Leon Russell and Marc Benno. I don't know anything about Benno, but Leon Russell is one of those names everyone ought to know
He worked with Jerry Lee Lewis, Phil Spector and the Rolling Stones
He arranged the Mad Dogs And Englishmen tour with Joe Cocker, George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Delaney and Bonnie
In my time I have however got a patent to my name for a colour space algortithm I invented, I have written sat nav software that includes cars, cycles, pedestrians. I have written medical software and now work on educational software. Focussing everything on degrees now would make an 18 year old me never considered for any of that and you think thats a good thing?
I'm not sure how it works if 50% go to university but only 20% get decent graduate jobs.