I think what I am seeing with a lot of comments on here is 'centrist denial' and this could actually have some betting implications. People are reading the current situation in an essentially 20th century way ie what is happening on the right is 'extremists' 'splitting' and who will become increasingly irrellevant over time. This overlooks what has been happening over the last decade on a global scale with the rise of insurgent political movements that disrupt political norms- Brexit, Trump, Italy, France, Germany, the list goes on.
What seems apparent to me is that we are seeing the final death through incoherance and exhaustion of the 'broad church' conservative party and the creation of a more coherent right wing political movement which can, like everything else that has happened globally, begin as a ridiculed insurgency but end up close to, or achieving power, building on dissatisfaction with the inevitable failings of the 'centrist, managerial status quo'. It is a small jump from 30% to 40% but the latter can win a general election under the FPTP system.
It may not be 'reform' that carries this insurgency forward. It could be a revised version of the Conservative Party having dumped the Hunts, Sunaks and Mordaunts. Or a 'start up' party of the type Cummings suggests. But to just assume all this is irrelevant extremism just seems to be an act of enormous denial given what is happening on a global scale.
Spot on, and reflects my thinking too. I hear plenty of people saying “well, elections are won from the centre in this country”. Generally, yes (though there are exceptions), but that doesn’t mean they always have to be.
Brexit, and to some extent Corbyn 2017, shows a sizeable chunk of the electorate can be persuaded to vote for anti-status-quo options.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
Interesting analysis from Public First (they're a policy tracker / consultancy) which possibly mitigates against our - my - assumptions about a Tory swingback and Reform slide.
Farage will be licking his lips at this kind of analysis.
For example: "On average, Labour voters are expecting their party to fall just shy of a majority with 320 seats, while Conservatives are now on average expecting fewer seats than Labour but roughly a hung parliament (240 seats Conservative, 262 Labour)."
and: " 46% of the public agreed with the slightly excessive statement that the Conservatives “deserve to lose every seat they have”, including around a quarter of their own 2019 voters (24%), and a whole 64% of those who intend to vote Labour."
I think there is a difference between "deserve" and "good thing if". No party in recent times more deserves to be crushed than the current Tories in my view.
Have we taken you to war on a false prospectus, that killed hundreds of thousands?
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
Don't understand people who say this GE campaign is boring.
What do you find interesting about it ?
The possibility of extinction of UK's oldest most successful political party, for starters. The psychology of the party leaders. The utter unpredictability of the effect of the Reform surge. If you don't like this you don't like politics.
If Reform eclipse the Conservatives (and that Eltham result is an important caveat), we’re seeing in this country what we’ve seen in the US, Italy, France and Holland.
I don’t really buy the argument that if the mainstream right simply ignore the views of millions of disgruntled supporters, then the populist right will vanish.
And it's weird seeing Italian army vehicles patrolling the streets of towns every night, doing nothing of any obvious worth. One assumes however that 'operation safe streets' is popular with the locals.
Quick Question, if the election ends up with something like Lib Deb 65 seats, Conservatives 50 and Reform 25, and at some point down the line the tories and Reform merged, would they then be able to take over as the official opposition? Seems quite a carrot to dangle for members of both groups if so?
I believe so, though I believe the predicated result won't come to pass and, even if it did, you wouldn't get CON and REF to work together like that. Both parties would see significant revolts against the idea.
Yes, the parties are quintessentially different. Reform is ideologically driven, against e.g. immigration and net zero as a matter of principle, regardless of the consequences. The Conservatives are, traditionally, pragmatists. They have their aims, e.g. lower taxation and lower immigration, but have generally been driven primarily by practical considerations.
Don't understand people who say this GE campaign is boring.
What do you find interesting about it ?
The possibility of extinction of UK's oldest most successful political party, for starters. The psychology of the party leaders. The utter unpredictability of the effect of the Reform surge. If you don't like this you don't like politics.
If Reform eclipse the Conservatives (and that Eltham result is an important caveat), we’re seeing in this country what we’ve seen in the US, Italy, France and Holland.
I don’t really buy the argument that if the mainstream right simply ignore the views of millions of disgruntled supporters, then the populist right will vanish.
The latter is simply wishful thinking from those who wish such sentiments would simply go away.
Sure. For all the talk of "British exceptionalism" on this thread, the UK is not a uniquely left-wing, pro-immigration, society. Trends that apply in other Western democracies will apply here.
While we look at the polls and marvel or are horrified or delighted, the most important part for me, looking at the Electoral Calculus tracker, is the following. Look at the voteshares vs seat predictions of the LibDems & Reform. How can this be right. As in justified. I appreciate it is all in where the votes are but surely those two stats (LibDems/Reform) are indicative of a bonkers system.
Of course it's bonkers. But we had a referendum in 2011 to change to a less bonkers system, and a large majority voted to keep the more bonkers system. That seems to be the way we like it.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
While we look at the polls and marvel or are horrified or delighted, the most important part for me, looking at the Electoral Calculus tracker, is the following. Look at the voteshares vs seat predictions of the LibDems & Reform. How can this be right. As in justified. I appreciate it is all in where the votes are but surely those two stats (LibDems/Reform) are indicative of a bonkers system.
A large part of the toxicity in britain comes from the winner takes all, domination of the largest minority, divide and conquer systwm we inhabit...... I detest reform for instance, but giving them one seat with that vote will only radicalise them. It isn't right. The irony is that if the shoe were on the other foot they would say "you lost, get over it" or " wipe your tears remaintard"
I think what I am seeing with a lot of comments on here is 'centrist denial' and this could actually have some betting implications. People are reading the current situation in an essentially 20th century way ie what is happening on the right is 'extremists' 'splitting' and who will become increasingly irrellevant over time. This overlooks what has been happening over the last decade on a global scale with the rise of insurgent political movements that disrupt political norms- Brexit, Trump, Italy, France, Germany, the list goes on.
What seems apparent to me is that we are seeing the final death through incoherance and exhaustion of the 'broad church' conservative party and the creation of a more coherent right wing political movement which can, like everything else that has happened globally, begin as a ridiculed insurgency but end up close to, or achieving power, building on dissatisfaction with the inevitable failings of the 'centrist, managerial status quo'. It is a small jump from 30% to 40% but the latter can win a general election under the FPTP system.
It may not be 'reform' that carries this insurgency forward. It could be a revised version of the Conservative Party having dumped the Hunts, Sunaks and Mordaunts. Or a 'start up' party of the type Cummings suggests. But to just assume all this is irrelevant extremism just seems to be an act of enormous denial given what is happening on a global scale.
The analysis on here is fucking pitiful, if I am honest. Really really feeble. For all the reasons you state, it is a bunch of middle aged and frankly geriatric twats looking hopefully at reality through a 20th century prism, and with quite low watt IQ levels to illuminate the view
Idiots
And I speak as a late middle aged twat, but at least I'm not wearing the Goggles of Denial
Don't understand people who say this GE campaign is boring.
The polling is interesting, the election isn’t. I think the last actual interesting election of my lifetime was 1992. The problem with modern campaigns is that the political argument is largely drowned out by an obsession with ephemera.
How often is the standard journalist question “how will this affect the polls?” The whole debate is framed by whether it benefits the narrow strategy of one or other political party. The focus is wrong. The whole political-media complex is engaged in talking amongst themselves the voters don’t get a look in.
The greatest exemplar of this problem is GB News, not for the reasons people think. The problem is it is a cast of people some of whom are confused as to whether they want to be poachers or gamekeepers. It is an outrage that sitting MPs were setting themselves up as quasi journalistic figures. However most of the media are problematic because they want to make the news rather than relay it, hence the gotcha approach and self conscious editorialising.
The political parties have also given up making an argument for election and play into the prevailing architecture of the media ecosystem. Thoroughly depressing, it’s no longer possible to work out whether the campaign drives the polls or the polls drive the campaign but it is probably the latter.
I know this is probably the worst place to take aim at polling but whilst it may be helpful for placing wagers I think it’s pretty corrosive to electoral politics.
You are spot on here. I don't see a lot of conversation about what our place in the world is, which I think is the big question as british exceptionalism goes through its protracted death throes. There are those who have come to terms with a diminished britain and want to plan realistically on that and then there are those who still think britain is a major super power and want national strategy to reflect that. Until there is a national consensus on that issue we will probably have to keep going through dishonest GEs.
Despite polling showing 2/3 now want to rejoin the EU and everybody (even Andy Marr) expecting Labour to actively pursue rejoing the SM (the realist, disenchanted story about britains post exeptionalist strategy), it cannot be mentioned.... it is still taboo.
I don’t think I’ve seen a single poll with rejoin on 66%, not even anything close to that.
I think what I am seeing with a lot of comments on here is 'centrist denial' and this could actually have some betting implications. People are reading the current situation in an essentially 20th century way ie what is happening on the right is 'extremists' 'splitting' and who will become increasingly irrellevant over time. This overlooks what has been happening over the last decade on a global scale with the rise of insurgent political movements that disrupt political norms- Brexit, Trump, Italy, France, Germany, the list goes on.
What seems apparent to me is that we are seeing the final death through incoherance and exhaustion of the 'broad church' conservative party and the creation of a more coherent right wing political movement which can, like everything else that has happened globally, begin as a ridiculed insurgency but end up close to, or achieving power, building on dissatisfaction with the inevitable failings of the 'centrist, managerial status quo'. It is a small jump from 30% to 40% but the latter can win a general election under the FPTP system.
It may not be 'reform' that carries this insurgency forward. It could be a revised version of the Conservative Party having dumped the Hunts, Sunaks and Mordaunts. Or a 'start up' party of the type Cummings suggests. But to just assume all this is irrelevant extremism just seems to be an act of enormous denial given what is happening on a global scale.
Spot on, and reflects my thinking too. I hear plenty of people saying “well, elections are won from the centre in this country”. Generally, yes (though there are exceptions), but that doesn’t mean they always have to be.
Brexit, and to some extent Corbyn 2017, shows a sizeable chunk of the electorate can be persuaded to vote for anti-status-quo options.
How many elections did Ted Heath win vs. Thatch? And the one that he did win was on a right wing prospectus.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
What is the point of this story.
Surely the main takeaway is that even @Heathener found it startling enough to be worth telling
Don't understand people who say this GE campaign is boring.
What do you find interesting about it ?
The possibility of extinction of UK's oldest most successful political party, for starters. The psychology of the party leaders. The utter unpredictability of the effect of the Reform surge. If you don't like this you don't like politics.
If Reform eclipse the Conservatives (and that Eltham result is an important caveat), we’re seeing in this country what we’ve seen in the US, Italy, France and Holland.
I don’t really buy the argument that if the mainstream right simply ignore the views of millions of disgruntled supporters, then the populist right will vanish.
Yes there’s a flawed, probably majority view, on this website that “those awful reform type voters” can and should be ignored and marginalised.
These also appears in “advice” on what the Tory Party should be from those who would never vote Tory - they want a vehicle for controlling “those people” which, when elected, gives them nothing.
People have failed to learn from Brexit that that approach isn’t sustainable. In the end, the public shapes politics, not the other way around. There was/is an opportunity for the Tories to win big by marrying that group of voters with its other tribes of fiscally conservative money men, or socially conservative “village green and village hall”’ voters; but only Boris/Cummings ever tried. And they failed. Nevertheless the gauntlet could be taken up, just many don’t want to.
If the Tories choose not to go for the voters, they have no God given right to exist, or at least no God given right to win. In the end “those awful people” will find a vehicle that wants them, and it will broaden its appeal enough to win an election.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
What is the point of this story.
Surely the main takeaway is that even @Heathener found it startling enough to be worth telling
You mean the old "they're coming over here and taking our mattresses" trope.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
@Leon if only you didn’t ALWAYS exaggerate everything, literally every topic, people might take you more seriously. It’s sad because hidden in amidst the hyperbole there are often some genuinely penetrating insights.
And, of course, you don’t help yourself by lashing out at everyone when you don’t get your way, usually descending to the ‘you’re all thick but I’m super-clever’ line.
After the local results last night, I am beginning to think that The Tories are not looking at an ELE, but an NDE, a Near Death Experience. They will badly, but the combination of having local campaigns and the innate stickiness of FPTP allows them to save at least 100 seats, even if they are third in the popular vote.
Reform, despite their media cheerleaders, cannot run ground campaign to win more than 4 or 5 MPs. Even if they get anywhere close to their current polls (but colour me sceptical on that) they will not be able to concentrate their vote. Even at same votes as the Tories,the seat split would be at least 1; 20, so e.g 5:100. The Tories may face meltdown, even in their core areas, but taken in the round they will most likely cling on in a fair number of seats, even if 20k+ majorities fall to the hundreds. I don´t believe in the system, but even a majority of 1 still gets you the seat.
After that, it rather depends on which MPs survive the cull. I think the Tory Party will turn on the Faragist wing that lead them so close to the abyss, and it is more likely that Tugendhat emerges as the core leader group, rather than Truss, Badenoch and Braverman who have been so equivocal about Farage. Maybe then the Tories re-emerge as an actual Conservative party in 2 or 3 Parliaments.
Meanwhile, the Lib Dems will at least get back above the SNP in number of seats, and could win a large number of targets and even one or two bonuses. A third party of 60+ MPs is much more formidable than one of 20 MPs. Then the Lib Dems get a platform to make a serious challenge, not just to the Tories, but also Labour.
The need for real reform of British politics: PR, an elected House of Lords, major devolution to local governments etc is really cutting through. Then there is Brexit, which the Lib Dems have opposed all along. In the same way as Lib Dem opposition to the Iraq war was treated with derision at the time, but with hindsight now seems obvious, so the Lib Dem position on Europe is also cutting through. The Lib Dems are having a great campaign, and the more people see of Ed Davey, the better they like him. The stunts are well planned and have blown away the boring label that his opponents would have liked to pin on him.
The Tories are in peril, but parties seldom die in a single election. The question for them now, is whether they can survive the NDE and come back stronger, or if they go further down the Faragist, populist rabbit hole and face real oblivion next time.
As for Labour, its all a bit bloodless, but what else can they do? I note that they are planning for a disciplined and efficient administration, with some people like Sue Grey on board. However they will need to hit the ground running, they have only a short window to make the radical change, which the voters clearly want to se. If it is wasted, then SKS is the one who will be boring.
Yet, this is very much not a boring election, indeed it could be an epochal one.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
What is the point of this story.
Surely the main takeaway is that even @Heathener found it startling enough to be worth telling
You mean the old "they're coming over here and taking our mattresses" trope.
'Who's been sleeping in MY bed' with added Nigerian nurses
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
What is the point of this story.
Surely the main takeaway is that even @Heathener found it startling enough to be worth telling
It is startling.
And I don’t think @TOPPING wants to engage with it because it’s uncomfortable. And I’m not referring to the mattress.
Don't understand people who say this GE campaign is boring.
The polling is interesting, the election isn’t. I think the last actual interesting election of my lifetime was 1992. The problem with modern campaigns is that the political argument is largely drowned out by an obsession with ephemera.
How often is the standard journalist question “how will this affect the polls?” The whole debate is framed by whether it benefits the narrow strategy of one or other political party. The focus is wrong. The whole political-media complex is engaged in talking amongst themselves the voters don’t get a look in.
The greatest exemplar of this problem is GB News, not for the reasons people think. The problem is it is a cast of people some of whom are confused as to whether they want to be poachers or gamekeepers. It is an outrage that sitting MPs were setting themselves up as quasi journalistic figures. However most of the media are problematic because they want to make the news rather than relay it, hence the gotcha approach and self conscious editorialising.
The political parties have also given up making an argument for election and play into the prevailing architecture of the media ecosystem. Thoroughly depressing, it’s no longer possible to work out whether the campaign drives the polls or the polls drive the campaign but it is probably the latter.
I know this is probably the worst place to take aim at polling but whilst it may be helpful for placing wagers I think it’s pretty corrosive to electoral politics.
You are spot on here. I don't see a lot of conversation about what our place in the world is, which I think is the big question as british exceptionalism goes through its protracted death throes. There are those who have come to terms with a diminished britain and want to plan realistically on that and then there are those who still think britain is a major super power and want national strategy to reflect that. Until there is a national consensus on that issue we will probably have to keep going through dishonest GEs.
Despite polling showing 2/3 now want to rejoin the EU and everybody (even Andy Marr) expecting Labour to actively pursue rejoing the SM (the realist, disenchanted story about britains post exeptionalist strategy), it cannot be mentioned.... it is still taboo.
I don’t think I’ve seen a single poll with rejoin on 66%, not even anything close to that.
“Fight the last war” residual Remainers tend to represent “regret leaving” (60%) as “want to rejoin” (50%). That are not synonyms.
“Regret leaving” includes some “kick the Gvt”, and “Rejoin” won’t reflect what “join” could get on the terms that would be offered.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
What is the point of this story.
Surely the main takeaway is that even @Heathener found it startling enough to be worth telling
I don't get the story. It says little about immigration that we don't know (the NHS needs foreign labour to function). It does speak to the fact that selling stuff on FB Marketplace is a waste of time, which is also well known.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
What is the point of this story.
Surely the main takeaway is that even @Heathener found it startling enough to be worth telling
It is startling.
And I don’t think @TOPPING wants to engage with it because it’s uncomfortable. And I’m not referring to the mattress.
I don't want to engage? I just asked you what the point of the story was. What was the point of the story.
"One in every 16 pupils at school here is now a ‘newcomer’ according to the Department of Education.
"The term is used to refer to a pupil who is often originally from outside the UK and does not initially speak the same language as their class teacher."
1 in 16 kids in Northern Irish school DOES NOT SPEAK NATIVE ENGLISH
What's the equivalent stat for the rest of the UK? I can't imagine it's so very different. It's certainly more than that at my daughter's primary school. Ten years ago, it was more like 1 in 80.
Once upon a time, my lad was a 'newcomer' at primary school in Germany, from an English-speaking home. It wasn't a big deal. According to the teachers, he was a bit quiet at first, but he quickly picked up the language, made friends and enjoyed himself. As do most kids.
My son had a Brazilian newcomer in his class in about year 4, just for one year. Arrived without a word of English, left speaking pretty fluently. It was impressive. My son took him under his wing, it was nice to see.
Best way to learn a language. Be plunged into it at primary school.
Mrs J first came to England ager six or seven, and was immediately put into a primary school where everyone spoke English. She picked up the language very quickly. As an aside, her university in Turkey taught in English, which meant she was already ahead on that aspect.
(Yes, it feels weird that a top university in a country teaches in a foreign language...)
My son's school has lots of immigrants in it; many recently arrived (it is a new town, after all). According to my son, many are picking up the English language very quickly, and some parents are even getting their kids to teach them English idioms (the Chinese parents mostly seem to know English fairly well already).
I think what I am seeing with a lot of comments on here is 'centrist denial' and this could actually have some betting implications. People are reading the current situation in an essentially 20th century way ie what is happening on the right is 'extremists' 'splitting' and who will become increasingly irrellevant over time. This overlooks what has been happening over the last decade on a global scale with the rise of insurgent political movements that disrupt political norms- Brexit, Trump, Italy, France, Germany, the list goes on.
What seems apparent to me is that we are seeing the final death through incoherance and exhaustion of the 'broad church' conservative party and the creation of a more coherent right wing political movement which can, like everything else that has happened globally, begin as a ridiculed insurgency but end up close to, or achieving power, building on dissatisfaction with the inevitable failings of the 'centrist, managerial status quo'. It is a small jump from 30% to 40% but the latter can win a general election under the FPTP system.
It may not be 'reform' that carries this insurgency forward. It could be a revised version of the Conservative Party having dumped the Hunts, Sunaks and Mordaunts. Or a 'start up' party of the type Cummings suggests. But to just assume all this is irrelevant extremism just seems to be an act of enormous denial given what is happening on a global scale.
Isn’t there a danger though that MPs, such as Sunak, get mislabelled and dumped. Everything I read about Sunak before he was Chancellor etc, and I took interest early from an old boys mag heads-up, was that he was very much a low tax, small gov, pro Brexit person. Even articles he’d written at school were in this vein.
The problem is that when the reality of having to stop everyone’s businesses collapsing and everyone losing their jobs came along with Covid, then having to pay for it, then the crazy cost of living crisis thanks to Russia, the state did what small state people actually do believe in, and acted as a safety net. Unfortunately it was a ridiculously expensive safety net.
So Sunak, a small state low tax politician by instinct had to do something he wouldn’t want to do but added to that government is hemmed in by treasury and market orthodoxies so there are very few “acceptable solutions”.
So Sunak, and Hunt, being dry, sound money politicians are left with a shitshow where they have to regain trust of markets (after the Truss event) and try and restore stability to the economy. These aren’t sexy things to do. You don’t get thanks for it from the public because the public wants you to hose money on their pet projects but want you to take that money from anyone but them.
In the meantime you’ve got immigration soaring, countless policies and tweaks have failed, different wings want different actions, some elements of society will do anything to stop your measures. It’s bearable to a gov if the country is in good shape economically but the absolute focus has been on the economy by Sunak and Hunt and Sunak isn’t a salesman who can say “yeah sorry people, country is in a mess (by the way I did warn it would happen with Truss but was ignored) and as soon as we have sorted the economy we will turn on immigration as diligently.
So back to the beginning if you wrongly identify the problems and problem MPs you will get the wrong solutions. The right needs to be flexible and clear that sometimes there need to be big taxes and big gov in emergencies and yes we’ve raised taxes but our instincts are always to lower when we can where Labour’s are to keep high or raise permanently.
Covid is history, it was years ago.
The reason spending is out of control is not Covid and its not Truss either, its political choices.
The Government is spending a higher proportion of GDP today on welfare than Gordon Brown was. Why?
Its not because of Covid. Its not because of unemployment, that's much lower than it was under Brown. Its not because welfare to the poor is exceptionally generous either.
Saying you are fiscally dry and being fiscally dry are two completely things. Unfortunately, Sunak is not. He is high tax, high spend, but without much of a clue where the money is going or why.
He's also exceptionally weak, buffeted by special interest groups who need to be told "no" sometimes.
“ Covid is history, it was years ago.”
That’s nuts. If the Roberts family house had a big fire and loads of your belongings were lost, rooms burned, parts of the roof needing repaired and windows and carpets and furniture replaced do you stop all other spending to pay for the repairs within a year, no food, new clothes, petrol etc or do you realise you still have spending obligations that you had before the fire so have to spread the cost through a loan over a longer period so you can still afford your prior needs? And then just as you start fixing the damage from the fire the house gets hit by a tornado.
There was Covid and Ukraine - they absolute buggered the backside off the country - do you honestly believe that Sunak, or Hunt, or anyone in the party, really would choose to have those bills and problems and have to raise those taxes? It’s against everything they joined the Tories for.
I know it’s easier to say that Sunak and co are lefty insurgents than recognise they had to make hard decisions to bring out the safety net but that’s the reality.
I don't think there's any great denial about saying the Tories really only have two, straightforward options.
They've increasingly become Farage's party, always, like in their organs such as the Telegraph, always refusing to contemplate his responsibility for any of what might have gone wrong socially or economically over the last ten years. If you're going to do that, it also makes no sense to simultaneously portray him as a threat to "good", competent, establishment, government , or whatever the default Tory understanding is, in the future. The simple answer is assimilate or fight ; otherwise a lot of the current Tories will just be reorganised by him, or other people capitalising on his platform, elsewhere, with little continuity for anybody who want to keep some links with the old party.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
You here lots of these sorts of stories from all sorts of people. It has nothing to do with immigration, because it's not only immigrants who try this on.
It's essentially the defining feature of racism to ascribe an individuals actions to their membership of a group, rather than to themselves as an individual. I'm kinda shocked that you would consider this story as one related to immigration, given the time you've taken with other people on similar topics.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
You obviously told her to get f@#ked?
I did.
For the benefit of Topping the startling part is obviously what she said. It’s sad that I have to spell it out, but for starters it wasn’t just her attitude: that somehow she had come to this country in order to help us out and was doing us a favour, that should mean freebies.
It was that the Government were recruiting Nigerian workers to make up for the (obvious) fact that others had left.
Where was this mentioned by the Leave campaign????
It was one personal encounter with what has clearly for many people become a serious issue: net migration.
And I’m a left-leaning person who loves multi-culturalism here. But there’s clearly a problem. We have totally fed Farage and us centrists ignore that at our grave peril.
I think what I am seeing with a lot of comments on here is 'centrist denial' and this could actually have some betting implications. People are reading the current situation in an essentially 20th century way ie what is happening on the right is 'extremists' 'splitting' and who will become increasingly irrellevant over time. This overlooks what has been happening over the last decade on a global scale with the rise of insurgent political movements that disrupt political norms- Brexit, Trump, Italy, France, Germany, the list goes on.
What seems apparent to me is that we are seeing the final death through incoherance and exhaustion of the 'broad church' conservative party and the creation of a more coherent right wing political movement which can, like everything else that has happened globally, begin as a ridiculed insurgency but end up close to, or achieving power, building on dissatisfaction with the inevitable failings of the 'centrist, managerial status quo'. It is a small jump from 30% to 40% but the latter can win a general election under the FPTP system.
It may not be 'reform' that carries this insurgency forward. It could be a revised version of the Conservative Party having dumped the Hunts, Sunaks and Mordaunts. Or a 'start up' party of the type Cummings suggests. But to just assume all this is irrelevant extremism just seems to be an act of enormous denial given what is happening on a global scale.
OTOH it is arguable that the insurgent right wing movement is not more but less coherent than the traditional centre right. I have yet to see a new right or far right set of proposals which in reality address the next 5-10 years in a coherent way; nor have I seen the exemplars, such as Meloni, act in any way different in substance from the centrist consensus. Words, especially in opposition, are of course cheap.
Where does the new/far/extreme right stand, beyond the populist wish lists we can all dream up, on: health, welfare, Ukraine, protectionism, global trade, social cohesion, unions, tuition fees, climate change, Israel and Gaza, single market, debt, tax, state policy on trade and essential services, ownership, social housing. Etc?
@Leon if only you didn’t ALWAYS exaggerate everything, literally every topic, people might take you more seriously. It’s sad because hidden in amidst the hyperbole there are often some genuinely penetrating insights.
And, of course, you don’t help yourself by lashing out at everyone when you don’t get your way, usually descending to the ‘you’re all thick but I’m super-clever’ line.
You mistake my purpose on here. I keep my more serious opinions and cogent analysis for places WHERE I AM PAID TO WRITE
Unsurprisingly, as I am not paid to write here, I don't pay that much attention to what I write here. I come here for larks and jokes, knockabout and banter, and to be provocative- or to be provoked. I don't REALLY think you are ALL geriatric centrist twats with sub 105 IQs, just five of you. I also come here for company, it is my pub when I go abroad, and we have oft discussed this: it is a pub with history, and stories, and regulars....
I've been on here on and off for many years, so most people know my style. I expect to get kickback and derision, and I enjoy it, I like dispute, it is entertaining. I also enjoy the PB downtimes when we talk about the cricket, or the best way to dunk choccie biscuits, or the world's worst bus journeys that aren't in south America
It's PB. It has long been like this, and long may it continue (and sometimes I do get ideas which I then turn into paiyng journalism, that also happens, and for that I am grateful)
I imagine you too come on here for YOUR reasons. You seem basically interested in pious preaching, weird boasting, and betting. And that's fine. Good luck to you! You also bring variety to the beer garden of debate
in the last thread someone asked the question about value bets in individual seats - so let me give you one:
Plaid to win in new Bangor Aberconwy seat.
The former Aberconwy seat was held by Conservatives with Labour as the main challenger, and most pundits are predicting an easy Labour win as the Conservatives continue their implosion.
But Aberconwy has previously been held by Plaid in the Senedd - the additional Bangor area is a Plaid/Labour battleground - while the additional inland areas formerly in Clwyd West are all held by Plaid at council level.
Plaid's campaign so far has not been very spectacular, but has been steady and generally positive. Meanwhile Welsh Labour are suffering the Vaughan Gething fallout.
I am not predicting a Plaid win here - but I do expect them to challenge well - much more strongly than some predictions. I have not seen any odds quoted for this seat...anyone??
Oddschecker still has it listed as Aberconwy, rather than Bangor Aberconwy. PC are available at 10/1 with bet365 and William Hill.
Interesting analysis from Public First (they're a policy tracker / consultancy) which possibly mitigates against our - my - assumptions about a Tory swingback and Reform slide.
Farage will be licking his lips at this kind of analysis.
For example: "On average, Labour voters are expecting their party to fall just shy of a majority with 320 seats, while Conservatives are now on average expecting fewer seats than Labour but roughly a hung parliament (240 seats Conservative, 262 Labour)."
and: " 46% of the public agreed with the slightly excessive statement that the Conservatives “deserve to lose every seat they have”, including around a quarter of their own 2019 voters (24%), and a whole 64% of those who intend to vote Labour."
I think there is a difference between "deserve" and "good thing if". No party in recent times more deserves to be crushed than the current Tories in my view. But it's not a good thing if it disappears and is unable to come back as a pragmatic party of government.
The result I would want for them is a crushing defeat and they learn the right lessons from where they went wrong. This is possible, but there are plenty of current Conservatives who seem determined to learn the wrong lessons, including on this board.
The Tories will take comfort in the narrative of a divided right, just as Labour did for the left in 1983. It's easier than confronting the reality that if reform disappeared, the Tories would still be defeated, possibly by an even bigger margin, just as was true for Labour and its long suicide note
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
What is the point of this story.
Surely the main takeaway is that even @Heathener found it startling enough to be worth telling
You mean the old "they're coming over here and taking our mattresses" trope.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
Your nurse turned the telly on, watched the news and took some notes, and is now doing her best to fit in...
The only reason I am still on Facebook (other than for popcorn worthy FB groups) is FB marketplace. The place is riddled with people like that and it takes a while to develop an eye for them. Worth it though - nothing more satisfying than some cash (!) in hand and a decluttered flat.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
What is the point of this story.
Surely the main takeaway is that even @Heathener found it startling enough to be worth telling
You mean the old "they're coming over here and taking our mattresses" trope.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
You obviously told her to get f@#ked?
I did.
For the benefit of Topping the startling part is obviously what she said. It’s sad that I have to spell it out, but for starters it wasn’t just her attitude: that somehow she had come to this country in order to help us out and was doing us a favour, that should mean freebies.
It was that the Government were recruiting Nigerian workers to make up for the (obvious) fact that others had left.
Where was this mentioned by the Leave campaign????
It was one personal encounter with what has clearly for many people become a serious issue: net migration.
And I’m a left-leaning person who loves multi-culturalism here. But there’s clearly a problem. We have totally fed Farage and us centrists ignore that at our grave peril.
You do realise we’ve been poaching labour for the NHS from commonwealth countries overseas since well before Brexit? They speak English, often have equivalent training, and will take the wages we offer. We recruit them because it takes a while to recruit and train them locally, so taking someone mid-career is an easy sugar fix. Zero link to Brexit.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
Basic attempted scamming. The sob story varies and is always a lie.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
You obviously told her to get f@#ked?
I did.
For the benefit of Topping the startling part is obviously what she said. It’s sad that I have to spell it out, but for starters it wasn’t just her attitude: that somehow she had come to this country in order to help us out and was doing us a favour, that should mean freebies.
It was that the Government were recruiting Nigerian workers to make up for the (obvious) fact that others had left.
Where was this mentioned by the Leave campaign????
It was one personal encounter with what has clearly for many people become a serious issue: net migration.
And I’m a left-leaning person who loves multi-culturalism here. But there’s clearly a problem. We have totally fed Farage and us centrists ignore that at our grave peril.
I'm not sure recruiting Nigerian nurses is because EU citizens have left (although some might have done). It's because nursing doesn't pay terribly well, and you now have to have a degree to get your SRN and run up three years of debt. When I worked in the NHS you got *paid* (as a nursing assistant) to do your nurse training.
I think what I am seeing with a lot of comments on here is 'centrist denial' and this could actually have some betting implications. People are reading the current situation in an essentially 20th century way ie what is happening on the right is 'extremists' 'splitting' and who will become increasingly irrellevant over time. This overlooks what has been happening over the last decade on a global scale with the rise of insurgent political movements that disrupt political norms- Brexit, Trump, Italy, France, Germany, the list goes on.
What seems apparent to me is that we are seeing the final death through incoherance and exhaustion of the 'broad church' conservative party and the creation of a more coherent right wing political movement which can, like everything else that has happened globally, begin as a ridiculed insurgency but end up close to, or achieving power, building on dissatisfaction with the inevitable failings of the 'centrist, managerial status quo'. It is a small jump from 30% to 40% but the latter can win a general election under the FPTP system.
It may not be 'reform' that carries this insurgency forward. It could be a revised version of the Conservative Party having dumped the Hunts, Sunaks and Mordaunts. Or a 'start up' party of the type Cummings suggests. But to just assume all this is irrelevant extremism just seems to be an act of enormous denial given what is happening on a global scale.
The analysis on here is fucking pitiful, if I am honest. Really really feeble. For all the reasons you state, it is a bunch of middle aged and frankly geriatric twats looking hopefully at reality through a 20th century prism, and with quite low watt IQ levels to illuminate the view
Idiots
And I speak as a late middle aged twat, but at least I'm not wearing the Goggles of Denial
Why do you come here? I don't think you're universally liked on here, and you seem to despise us. So why not fuck off? I think you'd be happier. I know I would be. Go on, do it. Sling your hook. What have you got to lose?
See. That's EXACTLY why I come here. To really wind up people like you. And I REALLY do wind you up, don't I?
If this was actually a pub I reckon you'd have angrily asked me outside at least eight times by now, in a frothing, slightly insane way, as the barman rolls his eyes and tells you to chill out, Farooq, not again, fer fucks sake
After the local results last night, I am beginning to think that The Tories are not looking at an ELE, but an NDE, a Near Death Experience. They will badly, but the combination of having local campaigns and the innate stickiness of FPTP allows them to save at least 100 seats, even if they are third in the popular vote.
Reform, despite their media cheerleaders, cannot run ground campaign to win more than 4 or 5 MPs. Even if they get anywhere close to their current polls (but colour me sceptical on that) they will not be able to concentrate their vote. Even at same votes as the Tories,the seat split would be at least 1; 20, so e.g 5:100. The Tories may face meltdown, even in their core areas, but taken in the round they will most likely cling on in a fair number of seats, even if 20k+ majorities fall to the hundreds. I don´t believe in the system, but even a majority of 1 still gets you the seat.
After that, it rather depends on which MPs survive the cull. I think the Tory Party will turn on the Faragist wing that lead them so close to the abyss, and it is more likely that Tugendhat emerges as the core leader group, rather than Truss, Badenoch and Braverman who have been so equivocal about Farage. Maybe then the Tories re-emerge as an actual Conservative party in 2 or 3 Parliaments.
Meanwhile, the Lib Dems will at least get back above the SNP in number of seats, and could win a large number of targets and even one or two bonuses. A third party of 60+ MPs is much more formidable than one of 20 MPs. Then the Lib Dems get a platform to make a serious challenge, not just to the Tories, but also Labour.
The need for real reform of British politics: PR, an elected House of Lords, major devolution to local governments etc is really cutting through. Then there is Brexit, which the Lib Dems have opposed all along. In the same way as Lib Dem opposition to the Iraq war was treated with derision at the time, but with hindsight now seems obvious, so the Lib Dem position on Europe is also cutting through. The Lib Dems are having a great campaign, and the more people see of Ed Davey, the better they like him. The stunts are well planned and have blown away the boring label that his opponents would have liked to pin on him.
The Tories are in peril, but parties seldom die in a single election. The question for them now, is whether they can survive the NDE and come back stronger, or if they go further down the Faragist, populist rabbit hole and face real oblivion next time.
As for Labour, its all a bit bloodless, but what else can they do? I note that they are planning for a disciplined and efficient administration, with some people like Sue Grey on board. However they will need to hit the ground running, they have only a short window to make the radical change, which the voters clearly want to se. If it is wasted, then SKS is the one who will be boring.
Yet, this is very much not a boring election, indeed it could be an epochal one.
Thanks, Cicero. That's well argued, as usual, but I have my concerns about the New Conservtive Party that would emerge from a NDE.
Truss, Badenoch and Braverman would all likely survive anything but an ELE, and if just one lone Tory were returned I suspect it would be Gavin Williamson.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
You obviously told her to get f@#ked?
It was that the Government were recruiting Nigerian workers to make up for the (obvious) fact that others had left.
This is news to you, is it? When was the last time you were in a hospital (over the past 20 years).
There are some grumpalumps on here this morning so I’m heading out.
The story was startling and is. It’s very uncomfortable for the Conservatives in particular because it’s a microcosm of what has happened: Brexit (and covid) led to massive staff shortages in key sectors of the economy. They responded to this by opening the borders to what, for many people, feels like a floodgate.
So sneer away @TOPPING but for once I agree with @Leon You may think this doesn’t matter, or that it’s a silly anecdote of some pointless middle-aged batty woman in Devon, but you’re wrong. This is precisely why Reform are on the march.
Wake up Topping, twistedfirestopper3 and others. Don’t you see what is happening? Do you not realise WHY Reform have such traction?
Sometimes the myopic complacency of the Centre is it’s downfall
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
Was she a Nigerian princess ?
Many years back, someone penned a marvellous parody of those -
"Dear Sir, I am an Orc of Mordor. Following the fall of our Noble Lord Sauron, I have come into possession of a hoard of mithril...."
I think what I am seeing with a lot of comments on here is 'centrist denial' and this could actually have some betting implications. People are reading the current situation in an essentially 20th century way ie what is happening on the right is 'extremists' 'splitting' and who will become increasingly irrellevant over time. This overlooks what has been happening over the last decade on a global scale with the rise of insurgent political movements that disrupt political norms- Brexit, Trump, Italy, France, Germany, the list goes on.
What seems apparent to me is that we are seeing the final death through incoherance and exhaustion of the 'broad church' conservative party and the creation of a more coherent right wing political movement which can, like everything else that has happened globally, begin as a ridiculed insurgency but end up close to, or achieving power, building on dissatisfaction with the inevitable failings of the 'centrist, managerial status quo'. It is a small jump from 30% to 40% but the latter can win a general election under the FPTP system.
It may not be 'reform' that carries this insurgency forward. It could be a revised version of the Conservative Party having dumped the Hunts, Sunaks and Mordaunts. Or a 'start up' party of the type Cummings suggests. But to just assume all this is irrelevant extremism just seems to be an act of enormous denial given what is happening on a global scale.
The analysis on here is fucking pitiful, if I am honest. Really really feeble. For all the reasons you state, it is a bunch of middle aged and frankly geriatric twats looking hopefully at reality through a 20th century prism, and with quite low watt IQ levels to illuminate the view
Idiots
And I speak as a late middle aged twat, but at least I'm not wearing the Goggles of Denial
Why do you come here? I don't think you're universally liked on here, and you seem to despise us. So why not fuck off? I think you'd be happier. I know I would be. Go on, do it. Sling your hook. What have you got to lose?
He comes here to pick fights he can win. Which is why he doesn't engage with any serious discussion, but picks on the weakest counter argument that he can deride with the least effort. It's the mental equivalent of a blood sport.
What this means is that if you present a good enough argument he will ignore you, and engage with someone else's weaker argument.
Green Party: We have a housing crisis! Voters: So you’ll build lots of houses? Green Party: If you elect us we’ll build even fewer houses. Voters: ?!
Green Party: There’s a climate crisis! We must do something! Voters: So you’ll build lots of green power stations then? Green Party: We’re going to cancel nuclear, onshore wind is bad because ruins people’s views & we’re not going to build the power lines to enable offshore wind for the same reason. Oh, and solar is bad too. Voters: ??!!
Green Party: There’s a climate crisis! We will put a carbon tax on everything. Voters: So you’ll put up the tax on petrol / diesel then? Green Party: Our carbon tax will cut the tax on petrol & diesel. Vote for us! Voters: ?????
Don't understand people who say this GE campaign is boring.
What do you find interesting about it ?
The possibility of extinction of UK's oldest most successful political party, for starters. The psychology of the party leaders. The utter unpredictability of the effect of the Reform surge. If you don't like this you don't like politics.
If Reform eclipse the Conservatives (and that Eltham result is an important caveat), we’re seeing in this country what we’ve seen in the US, Italy, France and Holland.
I don’t really buy the argument that if the mainstream right simply ignore the views of millions of disgruntled supporters, then the populist right will vanish.
The latter is simply wishful thinking from those who wish such sentiments would simply go away.
One thing the Biden administration has done, is to try and change the narrative of perpetual decline and outsourcing of jobs. This tackles, head on, the insecurity which forms a core part of the appeal of the MAGA stuff.
The answer to "Populism" is to find different solutions to the problems they raise. Not scream THERE ARE NO PROBLEMS.
You mean that Hillary calling the Trump supporters a “Basket of Deplorables” isn’t going to go down as the best political slogan of the past decade?
You attack the politician, you don’t attack or disparage the voters.
Yes, populists appear when there are large groups of people who are disaffected with society, rather than the other way round. Farage is a symptom of the problem that large numbers of mostly white and working-class voters don’t think Britain is working for them at the moment.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
What is the point of this story.
Surely the main takeaway is that even @Heathener found it startling enough to be worth telling
You mean the old "they're coming over here and taking our mattresses" trope.
"One in every 16 pupils at school here is now a ‘newcomer’ according to the Department of Education.
"The term is used to refer to a pupil who is often originally from outside the UK and does not initially speak the same language as their class teacher."
1 in 16 kids in Northern Irish school DOES NOT SPEAK NATIVE ENGLISH
What's the equivalent stat for the rest of the UK? I can't imagine it's so very different. It's certainly more than that at my daughter's primary school. Ten years ago, it was more like 1 in 80.
Once upon a time, my lad was a 'newcomer' at primary school in Germany, from an English-speaking home. It wasn't a big deal. According to the teachers, he was a bit quiet at first, but he quickly picked up the language, made friends and enjoyed himself. As do most kids.
My son had a Brazilian newcomer in his class in about year 4, just for one year. Arrived without a word of English, left speaking pretty fluently. It was impressive. My son took him under his wing, it was nice to see.
Best way to learn a language. Be plunged into it at primary school.
My teacher friend saves a lot of the worst cases of language barrier and/or trauma. Looking after some Ukrainian and Afghan refugees and finds that maths is a great leveller and she can draw them out of their shell using it.
Gets paid f*** all to do it and is 10x smarter and harder working than me.
I am beginning to wonder if we will see conservative discipline implode totally and the tory campaign just collapse altogether.... We are certainly looking at a total rewriting of the electoral landscape..... The majority of boomers shuffle off to reform to live out the rest of their lives there as their control over the centre wanes. The younger conservative centrists (wets) go to lib dems and a newly centrist labour.
This is the election where the millienials finally came into their own as a voting power house (I am Gen X btw... nobody gives a rats arse about us). That boomer bastion of conservative and reform vote will never recover...not ever. In 2029 and 2034 support for the culture war, pro brexit agenda will have all but been eradicated by natural demographics and the passing of time. So although it is (intellectually) exciting to see reform pass the conservatives in the polls, I see nothing but more head winds for that political project.
I think it is Gramsci who says that the past has died but the new has not yet been born and so we are haunted by the ghost of yesterday - that has been british politics since 2010 (brexit is part and parcel of that toxic nostalgia, seeking to bring back something that can never return), and especially the zombie government since 2019. I think something entirely different might be on the horison now. We may be going through an exorcism...
Except that almost every single country in the western world is showing surging support for the hard right, or far right, in the young. Other than that, good point
I think there's a considerable amount of cherry-picking going in this narrative, and it serves both those who like the far right to ramp their performance and those who are anxious about it to exaggerate the threat (for clicks or for votes).
I don't share the view that there is something epochal happening here. This is just a coalition of people getting a little overexcited for different reasons.
Part of this can be seen in the identity of the cherry picking. The narrative has moved on from Sweden, who have been the darling/bête noire in recent years, because, well, nothing really changed there this time. See also Hungary. Now people are talking about France and Germany and projecting forwards from the far right's gains as if it's inexorable. But the recent evidence from other countries is that it's not inexorable. Elsewhere, the tide is going back out, which is why the aggregate result aren't dramatic.
If you can't see a populist rightwing shift around the western world then....... there is little hope for you. But that's no change, so we can all relax, there was never any hope for you
I think what I am seeing with a lot of comments on here is 'centrist denial' and this could actually have some betting implications. People are reading the current situation in an essentially 20th century way ie what is happening on the right is 'extremists' 'splitting' and who will become increasingly irrellevant over time. This overlooks what has been happening over the last decade on a global scale with the rise of insurgent political movements that disrupt political norms- Brexit, Trump, Italy, France, Germany, the list goes on.
What seems apparent to me is that we are seeing the final death through incoherance and exhaustion of the 'broad church' conservative party and the creation of a more coherent right wing political movement which can, like everything else that has happened globally, begin as a ridiculed insurgency but end up close to, or achieving power, building on dissatisfaction with the inevitable failings of the 'centrist, managerial status quo'. It is a small jump from 30% to 40% but the latter can win a general election under the FPTP system.
It may not be 'reform' that carries this insurgency forward. It could be a revised version of the Conservative Party having dumped the Hunts, Sunaks and Mordaunts. Or a 'start up' party of the type Cummings suggests. But to just assume all this is irrelevant extremism just seems to be an act of enormous denial given what is happening on a global scale.
OTOH it is arguable that the insurgent right wing movement is not more but less coherent than the traditional centre right. I have yet to see a new right or far right set of proposals which in reality address the next 5-10 years in a coherent way; nor have I seen the exemplars, such as Meloni, act in any way different in substance from the centrist consensus. Words, especially in opposition, are of course cheap.
Where does the new/far/extreme right stand, beyond the populist wish lists we can all dream up, on: health, welfare, Ukraine, protectionism, global trade, social cohesion, unions, tuition fees, climate change, Israel and Gaza, single market, debt, tax, state policy on trade and essential services, ownership, social housing. Etc?
Like every other populist, left or right, they stand for having your cake and eating it. Which you can make stand up for a five second soundbite or a five minute speech, but you can't make work for a five year government.
I think what I am seeing with a lot of comments on here is 'centrist denial' and this could actually have some betting implications. People are reading the current situation in an essentially 20th century way ie what is happening on the right is 'extremists' 'splitting' and who will become increasingly irrellevant over time. This overlooks what has been happening over the last decade on a global scale with the rise of insurgent political movements that disrupt political norms- Brexit, Trump, Italy, France, Germany, the list goes on.
What seems apparent to me is that we are seeing the final death through incoherance and exhaustion of the 'broad church' conservative party and the creation of a more coherent right wing political movement which can, like everything else that has happened globally, begin as a ridiculed insurgency but end up close to, or achieving power, building on dissatisfaction with the inevitable failings of the 'centrist, managerial status quo'. It is a small jump from 30% to 40% but the latter can win a general election under the FPTP system.
It may not be 'reform' that carries this insurgency forward. It could be a revised version of the Conservative Party having dumped the Hunts, Sunaks and Mordaunts. Or a 'start up' party of the type Cummings suggests. But to just assume all this is irrelevant extremism just seems to be an act of enormous denial given what is happening on a global scale.
Who is saying it’s ’irrelevant’? Folk are saying that the right (the hard right to distinguish it from centre right) is fissiparous, angry with each other, lacking in a broad range of talent and with a long way to go to coherence, but those are different things.
There is a fuck of a lot of pontificating on this site from people who are sat at their keyboards and not out knocking on doors, meeting the voters.
So who on here has been pounding the pavements? Own up...
And tell us if your experience matches the polls.
Out of interest MM, a question on that subject (I'm not a door knocker btw). Are your responses primarily from the retired or are you getting working age feedback too? I saw some commentary on X that Tories might be missing the working age vote collapse as 'at work' during canvassing? I have no idea what to make of that so am interested in your opinion.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
You obviously told her to get f@#ked?
I did.
For the benefit of Topping the startling part is obviously what she said. It’s sad that I have to spell it out, but for starters it wasn’t just her attitude: that somehow she had come to this country in order to help us out and was doing us a favour, that should mean freebies.
It was that the Government were recruiting Nigerian workers to make up for the (obvious) fact that others had left.
Where was this mentioned by the Leave campaign????
It was one personal encounter with what has clearly for many people become a serious issue: net migration.
And I’m a left-leaning person who loves multi-culturalism here. But there’s clearly a problem. We have totally fed Farage and us centrists ignore that at our grave peril.
So you're complaining that the Leave suggestion to spend more on the NHS and recruit more nurses has been implemented ?
"One in every 16 pupils at school here is now a ‘newcomer’ according to the Department of Education.
"The term is used to refer to a pupil who is often originally from outside the UK and does not initially speak the same language as their class teacher."
1 in 16 kids in Northern Irish school DOES NOT SPEAK NATIVE ENGLISH
What's the equivalent stat for the rest of the UK? I can't imagine it's so very different. It's certainly more than that at my daughter's primary school. Ten years ago, it was more like 1 in 80.
Once upon a time, my lad was a 'newcomer' at primary school in Germany, from an English-speaking home. It wasn't a big deal. According to the teachers, he was a bit quiet at first, but he quickly picked up the language, made friends and enjoyed himself. As do most kids.
My son had a Brazilian newcomer in his class in about year 4, just for one year. Arrived without a word of English, left speaking pretty fluently. It was impressive. My son took him under his wing, it was nice to see.
Best way to learn a language. Be plunged into it at primary school.
I have a few Ukranian friends who arrived here a couple of years ago with almost no English. Now their kids, who are at primary school, are teaching English to their mums.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
You obviously told her to get f@#ked?
I did.
For the benefit of Topping the startling part is obviously what she said. It’s sad that I have to spell it out, but for starters it wasn’t just her attitude: that somehow she had come to this country in order to help us out and was doing us a favour, that should mean freebies.
It was that the Government were recruiting Nigerian workers to make up for the (obvious) fact that others had left.
Where was this mentioned by the Leave campaign????
It was one personal encounter with what has clearly for many people become a serious issue: net migration.
And I’m a left-leaning person who loves multi-culturalism here. But there’s clearly a problem. We have totally fed Farage and us centrists ignore that at our grave peril.
I'm not sure recruiting Nigerian nurses is because EU citizens have left (although some might have done). It's because nursing doesn't pay terribly well, and you now have to have a degree to get your SRN and run up three years of debt. When I worked in the NHS you got *paid* (as a nursing assistant) to do your nurse training.
NHS nursing has long been recruiting, very actively, from "The Third World". Long before Brexit was dreamed of.
This is because you can "sell" them on lower pay than people from the First World. And because we deliberately train less nurses each year than are required by the NHS.
There is a whole conveyor belt of training and jobs leading from various African countries. Some of whom are not entirely happy by what they see as stripping their health care systems of their best workers.
The comedy when New Labour accidentally switched off the Zimbabwean route was a good one, though.
EDIT: There is no evidence, in the story given, that the buyer was a nurse or even Nigerian. Scammers like this use sob stories as part of their thing.
I see we're throwing words like "left", "right" and "centre" around like confetti today - seriously?
The terms mean nothing these days and are used as cheap short hand usually in a perjorative sense.
Trying to pigeonhole parties in 20th century terms ignores the fact we are in the 21st (even this "middle aged and frankly geriatric twat" can see that).
The technological, environmental and cultural changes of the 21st century will redefine political axes as to make what went before seem unrecognisable. The relationship between the State and the individual is going to evolve just as it did from 19th to 20th. The art is to redefine traditional ideological concepts like conservatism, liberalism and socialism to reflect those changes and set out a possible societal path for the mid 21st century.
In the more immediate, the big question for me (as it is for us all at some point) is how do we want to live as we grow older? In former times, it wasn't a problem but an ageing population forces a redefinition of the relationship between the individual and the State. Who cares for and provides for a growing ageing population? How does this ageing population interact with the rest of society? Do we shut the elderly away in care homes and retirement villages or do we provide the purpose-built accommodation and services older people need - that means strong public services paid for out of general taxation?
There are some grumpalumps on here this morning so I’m heading out.
The story was startling and is. It’s very uncomfortable for the Conservatives in particular because it’s a microcosm of what has happened: Brexit (and covid) led to massive staff shortages in key sectors of the economy. They responded to this by opening the borders to what, for many people, feels like a floodgate.
So sneer away @TOPPING but for once I agree with @Leon You may think this doesn’t matter, or that it’s a silly anecdote of some pointless middle-aged batty woman in Devon, but you’re wrong. This is precisely why Reform are on the march.
Wake up Topping, twistedfirestopper3 and others. Don’t you see what is happening? Do you not realise WHY Reform have such traction?
Sometimes the myopic complacency of the Centre is it’s downfall
LOL
You’re using the worst possible example (Nigerian workers in the NHS) to try and land a point about worker flows, and domestic training, which has some sense to it.
I think what I am seeing with a lot of comments on here is 'centrist denial' and this could actually have some betting implications. People are reading the current situation in an essentially 20th century way ie what is happening on the right is 'extremists' 'splitting' and who will become increasingly irrellevant over time. This overlooks what has been happening over the last decade on a global scale with the rise of insurgent political movements that disrupt political norms- Brexit, Trump, Italy, France, Germany, the list goes on.
What seems apparent to me is that we are seeing the final death through incoherance and exhaustion of the 'broad church' conservative party and the creation of a more coherent right wing political movement which can, like everything else that has happened globally, begin as a ridiculed insurgency but end up close to, or achieving power, building on dissatisfaction with the inevitable failings of the 'centrist, managerial status quo'. It is a small jump from 30% to 40% but the latter can win a general election under the FPTP system.
It may not be 'reform' that carries this insurgency forward. It could be a revised version of the Conservative Party having dumped the Hunts, Sunaks and Mordaunts. Or a 'start up' party of the type Cummings suggests. But to just assume all this is irrelevant extremism just seems to be an act of enormous denial given what is happening on a global scale.
OTOH it is arguable that the insurgent right wing movement is not more but less coherent than the traditional centre right. I have yet to see a new right or far right set of proposals which in reality address the next 5-10 years in a coherent way; nor have I seen the exemplars, such as Meloni, act in any way different in substance from the centrist consensus. Words, especially in opposition, are of course cheap.
Where does the new/far/extreme right stand, beyond the populist wish lists we can all dream up, on: health, welfare, Ukraine, protectionism, global trade, social cohesion, unions, tuition fees, climate change, Israel and Gaza, single market, debt, tax, state policy on trade and essential services, ownership, social housing. Etc?
Like every other populist, left or right, they stand for having your cake and eating it. Which you can make stand up for a five second soundbite or a five minute speech, but you can't make work for a five year government.
The UK has been having its cake and eating it for a generation by living beyond its means.
All the parties have supported that with the only difference being how the extra cake is shared out.
There is a fuck of a lot of pontificating on this site from people who are sat at their keyboards and not out knocking on doors, meeting the voters.
So who on here has been pounding the pavements? Own up...
And tell us if your experience matches the polls.
I have not, and I have f-all idea how my own (new) constituency is going to go, let alone the country.
But my view for a long while has been a stonking Labour majority, and I haven't seen much to go against that view. I hope I'm wrong, because I don't think humongous majorities lead to good government...
I think what I am seeing with a lot of comments on here is 'centrist denial' and this could actually have some betting implications. People are reading the current situation in an essentially 20th century way ie what is happening on the right is 'extremists' 'splitting' and who will become increasingly irrellevant over time. This overlooks what has been happening over the last decade on a global scale with the rise of insurgent political movements that disrupt political norms- Brexit, Trump, Italy, France, Germany, the list goes on.
What seems apparent to me is that we are seeing the final death through incoherance and exhaustion of the 'broad church' conservative party and the creation of a more coherent right wing political movement which can, like everything else that has happened globally, begin as a ridiculed insurgency but end up close to, or achieving power, building on dissatisfaction with the inevitable failings of the 'centrist, managerial status quo'. It is a small jump from 30% to 40% but the latter can win a general election under the FPTP system.
It may not be 'reform' that carries this insurgency forward. It could be a revised version of the Conservative Party having dumped the Hunts, Sunaks and Mordaunts. Or a 'start up' party of the type Cummings suggests. But to just assume all this is irrelevant extremism just seems to be an act of enormous denial given what is happening on a global scale.
The analysis on here is fucking pitiful, if I am honest. Really really feeble. For all the reasons you state, it is a bunch of middle aged and frankly geriatric twats looking hopefully at reality through a 20th century prism, and with quite low watt IQ levels to illuminate the view
Idiots
And I speak as a late middle aged twat, but at least I'm not wearing the Goggles of Denial
Why do you come here? I don't think you're universally liked on here, and you seem to despise us. So why not fuck off? I think you'd be happier. I know I would be. Go on, do it. Sling your hook. What have you got to lose?
He comes here to pick fights he can win. Which is why he doesn't engage with any serious discussion, but picks on the weakest counter argument that he can deride with the least effort. It's the mental equivalent of a blood sport.
What this means is that if you present a good enough argument he will ignore you, and engage with someone else's weaker argument.
That's not actually true. If I am bested in an argument then I absoluely yield
I have been bested in the debate on electoral reform, or persuaded, over several years (this is not a sudden new thing, whatever people think, I've changed my mind since about 2019-2020); now I favour electoral reform, and I was ardently pro-FPTP - ("it's the British way! Firm government!" - what nonsense, in retrospect)
However I tend to argue about things where I really care. Because I care about certain ssues I do a lot of reading, so - in my experience, and from my POV - I tend to win these arguments. It helps that my job gives me tons of spare time to read, it gives me a distinct advantage. Others will have a very different perspective on my performance, and may consider me a pitiful loser like you: whatever, I do not mind, it's trivial
It is all just pub banter! - and it is absolutely not to be taken seriously, no more than the Great Biscuit Dunking Debate
In retrospect as I said at the time the Tories should have kept Boris as PM and leader. He would still likely have lost but kept the Conservatives over 200 seats and Reform polling under 5% not 10-15%+ like now. Boris would then also have owned the defeat and taken the hit for the government's unpopularity.
Rishi however, having an ego the size of Canada, thought that because up to now he had had a brilliant career, 1st class Oxford degree, made lots of money in the city, married a billionaire's daughter in law, he would equally be a brilliant political leader and PM. However clearly his political nous as a campaigner having been given a safe seat in 2015 having never even stood for a local council seat before and having no real history in the party is somewhat lacking. By ousting Boris all he has down is taken ownership of the government's unpopularity after over a decade in power from Johnson while also leaking massively to Reform.
Had Rishi waited though, he would now be in prime position to be Leader of the Opposition after a Johnson heavy defeat where he would have been well placed to exploit the problems a Starmer government likely faces with the economy. Instead he has destroyed much of his reputation and put the Tories on life support to boot!
“We will also update national planning policy to ensure the planning system meets the needs of a modern economy, making it easier to build laboratories, digital infrastructure, and gigafactories.”
Vague from Labour but sounds like some work on phone masts may well be coming.
I think what I am seeing with a lot of comments on here is 'centrist denial' and this could actually have some betting implications. People are reading the current situation in an essentially 20th century way ie what is happening on the right is 'extremists' 'splitting' and who will become increasingly irrellevant over time. This overlooks what has been happening over the last decade on a global scale with the rise of insurgent political movements that disrupt political norms- Brexit, Trump, Italy, France, Germany, the list goes on.
What seems apparent to me is that we are seeing the final death through incoherance and exhaustion of the 'broad church' conservative party and the creation of a more coherent right wing political movement which can, like everything else that has happened globally, begin as a ridiculed insurgency but end up close to, or achieving power, building on dissatisfaction with the inevitable failings of the 'centrist, managerial status quo'. It is a small jump from 30% to 40% but the latter can win a general election under the FPTP system.
It may not be 'reform' that carries this insurgency forward. It could be a revised version of the Conservative Party having dumped the Hunts, Sunaks and Mordaunts. Or a 'start up' party of the type Cummings suggests. But to just assume all this is irrelevant extremism just seems to be an act of enormous denial given what is happening on a global scale.
The analysis on here is fucking pitiful, if I am honest. Really really feeble. For all the reasons you state, it is a bunch of middle aged and frankly geriatric twats looking hopefully at reality through a 20th century prism, and with quite low watt IQ levels to illuminate the view
Idiots
And I speak as a late middle aged twat, but at least I'm not wearing the Goggles of Denial
Why do you come here? I don't think you're universally liked on here, and you seem to despise us. So why not fuck off? I think you'd be happier. I know I would be. Go on, do it. Sling your hook. What have you got to lose?
See. That's EXACTLY why I come here. To really wind up people like you. And I REALLY do wind you up, don't I?
If this was actually a pub I reckon you'd have angrily asked me outside at least eight times by now, in a frothing, slightly insane way, as the barman rolls his eyes and tells you to chill out, Farooq, not again, fer fucks sake
Yes, you do wind me up, but not always the times you're trying to. I think you've got a 10% hit rate. But let's not focus on me, let's think about you. I'm not offering you a fight outside the pub, I'm saying you really don't seem to like the people in here. You seem really quite miserable about how stupid we all are. So go. There's the door. You don't ever have to read a single thing any of us say ever again. You're better than us, go find a more elevated place. You won't miss us.
In retrospect as I said at the time the Tories should have kept Boris as PM and leader. He would still likely have lost but kept the Conservatives over 200 seats and Reform polling under 5% not 10-15%+ like now. Boris would then also have owned the defeat and taken the hit for the government's unpopularity.
Rishi however, having an ego the size of Canada, thought that because up to now he had had a brilliant career, 1st class Oxford degree, made lots of money in the city, married a billionaire's daughter in law, he would equally be a brilliant political leader and PM. However clearly his political nous as a campaigner having been given a safe seat in 2015 having never even stood for a local council seat before and having no real history in the party is somewhat lacking. By ousting Boris all he has down is taken ownership of the government's unpopularity after over a decade in power from Johnson while also leaking massively to Reform.
Had Rishi waited though, he would now be in prime position to be Leader of the Opposition after a Johnson heavy defeat where he would have been well placed to exploit the problems a Starmer government likely faces with the economy. Instead he has destroyed much of his reputation and put the Tories on life support to boot!
Spot on. Except I think Boris could have possibly forced NOM.
I think what I am seeing with a lot of comments on here is 'centrist denial' and this could actually have some betting implications. People are reading the current situation in an essentially 20th century way ie what is happening on the right is 'extremists' 'splitting' and who will become increasingly irrellevant over time. This overlooks what has been happening over the last decade on a global scale with the rise of insurgent political movements that disrupt political norms- Brexit, Trump, Italy, France, Germany, the list goes on.
What seems apparent to me is that we are seeing the final death through incoherance and exhaustion of the 'broad church' conservative party and the creation of a more coherent right wing political movement which can, like everything else that has happened globally, begin as a ridiculed insurgency but end up close to, or achieving power, building on dissatisfaction with the inevitable failings of the 'centrist, managerial status quo'. It is a small jump from 30% to 40% but the latter can win a general election under the FPTP system.
It may not be 'reform' that carries this insurgency forward. It could be a revised version of the Conservative Party having dumped the Hunts, Sunaks and Mordaunts. Or a 'start up' party of the type Cummings suggests. But to just assume all this is irrelevant extremism just seems to be an act of enormous denial given what is happening on a global scale.
The analysis on here is fucking pitiful, if I am honest. Really really feeble. For all the reasons you state, it is a bunch of middle aged and frankly geriatric twats looking hopefully at reality through a 20th century prism, and with quite low watt IQ levels to illuminate the view
Idiots
And I speak as a late middle aged twat, but at least I'm not wearing the Goggles of Denial
Why do you come here? I don't think you're universally liked on here, and you seem to despise us. So why not fuck off? I think you'd be happier. I know I would be. Go on, do it. Sling your hook. What have you got to lose?
See. That's EXACTLY why I come here. To really wind up people like you. And I REALLY do wind you up, don't I?
If this was actually a pub I reckon you'd have angrily asked me outside at least eight times by now, in a frothing, slightly insane way, as the barman rolls his eyes and tells you to chill out, Farooq, not again, fer fucks sake
Yes, you do wind me up, but not always the times you're trying to. I think you've got a 10% hit rate. But let's not focus on me, let's think about you. I'm not offering you a fight outside the pub, I'm saying you really don't seem to like the people in here. You seem really quite miserable about how stupid we all are. So go. There's the door. You don't ever have to read a single thing any of us say ever again. You're better than us, go find a more elevated place. You won't miss us.
lol
When you take over the deeds of the pub, you can bar me
I think what I am seeing with a lot of comments on here is 'centrist denial' and this could actually have some betting implications. People are reading the current situation in an essentially 20th century way ie what is happening on the right is 'extremists' 'splitting' and who will become increasingly irrellevant over time. This overlooks what has been happening over the last decade on a global scale with the rise of insurgent political movements that disrupt political norms- Brexit, Trump, Italy, France, Germany, the list goes on.
What seems apparent to me is that we are seeing the final death through incoherance and exhaustion of the 'broad church' conservative party and the creation of a more coherent right wing political movement which can, like everything else that has happened globally, begin as a ridiculed insurgency but end up close to, or achieving power, building on dissatisfaction with the inevitable failings of the 'centrist, managerial status quo'. It is a small jump from 30% to 40% but the latter can win a general election under the FPTP system.
It may not be 'reform' that carries this insurgency forward. It could be a revised version of the Conservative Party having dumped the Hunts, Sunaks and Mordaunts. Or a 'start up' party of the type Cummings suggests. But to just assume all this is irrelevant extremism just seems to be an act of enormous denial given what is happening on a global scale.
The analysis on here is fucking pitiful, if I am honest. Really really feeble. For all the reasons you state, it is a bunch of middle aged and frankly geriatric twats looking hopefully at reality through a 20th century prism, and with quite low watt IQ levels to illuminate the view
Idiots
And I speak as a late middle aged twat, but at least I'm not wearing the Goggles of Denial
Why do you come here? I don't think you're universally liked on here, and you seem to despise us. So why not fuck off? I think you'd be happier. I know I would be. Go on, do it. Sling your hook. What have you got to lose?
See. That's EXACTLY why I come here. To really wind up people like you. And I REALLY do wind you up, don't I?
If this was actually a pub I reckon you'd have angrily asked me outside at least eight times by now, in a frothing, slightly insane way, as the barman rolls his eyes and tells you to chill out, Farooq, not again, fer fucks sake
Yes, you do wind me up, but not always the times you're trying to. I think you've got a 10% hit rate. But let's not focus on me, let's think about you. I'm not offering you a fight outside the pub, I'm saying you really don't seem to like the people in here. You seem really quite miserable about how stupid we all are. So go. There's the door. You don't ever have to read a single thing any of us say ever again. You're better than us, go find a more elevated place. You won't miss us.
There’s even a song!
Go on and go, walk out the door Turn around now You’re not welcome any more etc
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
You obviously told her to get f@#ked?
I did.
For the benefit of Topping the startling part is obviously what she said. It’s sad that I have to spell it out, but for starters it wasn’t just her attitude: that somehow she had come to this country in order to help us out and was doing us a favour, that should mean freebies.
It was that the Government were recruiting Nigerian workers to make up for the (obvious) fact that others had left.
Where was this mentioned by the Leave campaign????
It was one personal encounter with what has clearly for many people become a serious issue: net migration.
And I’m a left-leaning person who loves multi-culturalism here. But there’s clearly a problem. We have totally fed Farage and us centrists ignore that at our grave peril.
I'm not sure recruiting Nigerian nurses is because EU citizens have left (although some might have done). It's because nursing doesn't pay terribly well, and you now have to have a degree to get your SRN and run up three years of debt. When I worked in the NHS you got *paid* (as a nursing assistant) to do your nurse training.
NHS nursing has long been recruiting, very actively, from "The Third World". Long before Brexit was dreamed of.
This is because you can "sell" them on lower pay than people from the First World. And because we deliberately train less nurses each year than are required by the NHS.
There is a whole conveyor belt of training and jobs leading from various African countries. Some of whom are not entirely happy by what they see as stripping their health care systems of their best workers.
The comedy when New Labour accidentally switched off the Zimbabwean route was a good one, though.
EDIT: There is no evidence, in the story given, that the buyer was a nurse or even Nigerian. Scammers like this use sob stories as part of their thing.
As an occasional user of the health service as well as concerned relative of others, my sense is that there's a big issue with agency nursing, regardless of whether the nurses are British born or foreign. I've had too many experiences of shift nurses seemingly knowing nothing about my or a relatives' conditions from one shift to the next, having no understanding of how the hospital works, making basic errors in treatment, and utterly lacking in bedside manner to the point of "suck it up, loser" rudeness. You really notice it when you occasionally get an actual permanent member of staff, because they know what they're doing, they seem to care, and talk to you like a human being rather than a statistic.
“We will also update national planning policy to ensure the planning system meets the needs of a modern economy, making it easier to build laboratories, digital infrastructure, and gigafactories.”
Vague from Labour but sounds like some work on phone masts may well be coming.
Stuff like gigafactories in the big one. Get the spades in the ground and sod the locals. Only a man with a stinking majority can force that through. Use it for the good of the nation.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
You obviously told her to get f@#ked?
I did.
For the benefit of Topping the startling part is obviously what she said. It’s sad that I have to spell it out, but for starters it wasn’t just her attitude: that somehow she had come to this country in order to help us out and was doing us a favour, that should mean freebies.
It was that the Government were recruiting Nigerian workers to make up for the (obvious) fact that others had left.
Where was this mentioned by the Leave campaign????
It was one personal encounter with what has clearly for many people become a serious issue: net migration.
And I’m a left-leaning person who loves multi-culturalism here. But there’s clearly a problem. We have totally fed Farage and us centrists ignore that at our grave peril.
I'm not sure recruiting Nigerian nurses is because EU citizens have left (although some might have done). It's because nursing doesn't pay terribly well, and you now have to have a degree to get your SRN and run up three years of debt. When I worked in the NHS you got *paid* (as a nursing assistant) to do your nurse training.
NHS nursing has long been recruiting, very actively, from "The Third World". Long before Brexit was dreamed of.
This is because you can "sell" them on lower pay than people from the First World. And because we deliberately train less nurses each year than are required by the NHS.
There is a whole conveyor belt of training and jobs leading from various African countries. Some of whom are not entirely happy by what they see as stripping their health care systems of their best workers.
The comedy when New Labour accidentally switched off the Zimbabwean route was a good one, though.
EDIT: There is no evidence, in the story given, that the buyer was a nurse or even Nigerian. Scammers like this use sob stories as part of their thing.
Yes but obviously not a scammer as such because she paid me via the driver on collection
Green Party: We have a housing crisis! Voters: So you’ll build lots of houses? Green Party: If you elect us we’ll build even fewer houses. Voters: ?!
I note in passing that not only is the green target of 150,000 new social houses /less/ that the current build rate, they’re planning to achieve this at least in part by buying up privately owned housing & bringing it into the social housing sector. So instead of the current 200k newbuilds / year we’re going to get much less than 150k newbuilds / year under a Green government. I guess housing the UK population is un-green or something.
Amazing. The combination of the above with something far closer to an open borders policy is ... certainly something.
It sounds like a 'no bet' to me. I agree it could go in a meltdown but in that case there are better bets elsewhere. You are probably right that the popularity of the incumbent will see him through otherwise.
Good luck on the stump. I know you work hard and report honestly. I hope you see some return for your efforts.
Thank you. We have an excellent candidate who has been a hard-working MP. It would be a real loss to the contituency if he fails to get returned, but an even bigger loss to the Party. He is very much the type of MP they are going to need to rebuild and resell after this election.
I've been looking for bets on Tories who may buck the trend and it sounds like you may have one there.
I've also looked at Alex Chalk in my neighbouring constituency of Cheltenham. It's one of the top LD targets and that's reflected in their odds of 1/7, but he's very highly regarded and another who would be invaluable in the reconstruction work which I hope will follow the GE.
I can't quite bring myself to back him at 4/1 but maybe others might.
John Major’s words to Osborne after the 1997 disaster:
“We will never win while we remain in thrall to the hard right of our party. It took us eight years before we started listening to that advice. How long will it take us this time?”
@TOPPING your complacency about migration as an issue in this election is breathtaking
I very rarely agree with @Leon and he doesn’t help his cause, but this IS a big big issue for a lot of people
@TOPPING has status anxiety on this issue. Caring about immigration is by definition something done by the lower orders, he sees himself as posh but also affects not to care about poshness (did you know his nephews go to Eton? - he told us this, not that it matters of course, as he himself added)
Ergo, he is way out on the left on immigration, so we don't mistake him for a petit bourgeois UKIPPPER
Migration is the biggest issue that feeds Reform, but it’s not the only one. But the reason it does so is very clear to me.
This election campaign is a great example. Mainstream politicians gravely intone we need to reduce migration and stop the boats. Journalists breathlessly report on their every word.
But if you’re a voter where it’s a big concern, you have heard over the past 20 or so years this tale being told again and again. And net migration goes up and up. And whoever you vote for keeps telling you they’ll fix it, next time, next month, next year, next parliament. It’s all so easy look. We’ll send people to Rwanda, or we’ll have a quota, or points system, or we’ll put money in X, Y, Z….
In the meantime you get a media who fail to ask the probing questions on the topic. They might relish unpicking the latest government policy wheeze, but they don’t necessarily focus on the strain on resources and public services that extra migration can cause. Let’s give public services more money and it’ll all be ok, nothing to see here, move along….
So, yes, when opportunists like Farage come along, of course he gets a hearing.
The solution to this? Mainstream parties need to be braver about confronting issues like migration and culture. And instead of speaking in soundbites and policy wonkery, and actually deliver. If you want to reduce net migration, you’re going to have to properly invest in skills and border security, for instance. That’s unflashy, and not very immediate, but it starts to potentially turn the dial. And trust the voters to judge you on results, not just image. Voters are a lot savvier than many think.
In retrospect as I said at the time the Tories should have kept Boris as PM and leader. He would still likely have lost but kept the Conservatives over 200 seats and Reform polling under 5% not 10-15%+ like now. Boris would then also have owned the defeat and taken the hit for the government's unpopularity.
Rishi however, having an ego the size of Canada, thought that because up to now he had had a brilliant career, 1st class Oxford degree, made lots of money in the city, married a billionaire's daughter in law, he would equally be a brilliant political leader and PM. However clearly his political nous as a campaigner having been given a safe seat in 2015 having never even stood for a local council seat before and having no real history in the party is somewhat lacking. By ousting Boris all he has down is taken ownership of the government's unpopularity after over a decade in power from Johnson while also leaking massively to Reform.
Had Rishi waited though, he would now be in prime position to be Leader of the Opposition after a Johnson heavy defeat where he would have been well placed to exploit the problems a Starmer government likely faces with the economy. Instead he has destroyed much of his reputation and put the Tories on life support to boot!
You're forgetting that Boris would have faced a recall petition, that he would have lost, and he'd have lost the by-election if he stood. Thus he'd have had to resign as PM, find another seat, win it, then be re-elected as Tory leader and invited to become PM again. That sequence was never going to happen.
There are some grumpalumps on here this morning so I’m heading out.
The story was startling and is. It’s very uncomfortable for the Conservatives in particular because it’s a microcosm of what has happened: Brexit (and covid) led to massive staff shortages in key sectors of the economy. They responded to this by opening the borders to what, for many people, feels like a floodgate.
So sneer away @TOPPING but for once I agree with @Leon You may think this doesn’t matter, or that it’s a silly anecdote of some pointless middle-aged batty woman in Devon, but you’re wrong. This is precisely why Reform are on the march.
Wake up Topping, twistedfirestopper3 and others. Don’t you see what is happening? Do you not realise WHY Reform have such traction?
Sometimes the myopic complacency of the Centre is it’s downfall
Governments for decades have asked foreigners to come and work in the NHS.
And this is BOMBSHELL NEWS for heathener. And we should all WAKE UP.
Green Party: We have a housing crisis! Voters: So you’ll build lots of houses? Green Party: If you elect us we’ll build even fewer houses. Voters: ?!
I note in passing that not only is the green target of 150,000 new social houses /less/ that the current build rate, they’re planning to achieve this at least in part by buying up privately owned housing & bringing it into the social housing sector. So instead of the current 200k newbuilds / year we’re going to get much less than 150k newbuilds / year under a Green government. I guess housing the UK population is un-green or something.
Amazing.
The Greens are such a disappointment. They're just as populist as Reform. Not as bad as Galloway's crowd but certainly edging that way.
Yet the environment in its broadest sense is so important. Not only on a planetary scale but locally as well. Simple things like cleaner water courses and cleaner air make huge differences to people's lives. But it's the Lib Dems making the running on water and Khan in London doing it for air.
The green party are not a green party, they're scarcely even watermelons, they're a coalition of Corbynites and local NIMBYs.
While we look at the polls and marvel or are horrified or delighted, the most important part for me, looking at the Electoral Calculus tracker, is the following. Look at the voteshares vs seat predictions of the LibDems & Reform. How can this be right. As in justified. I appreciate it is all in where the votes are but surely those two stats (LibDems/Reform) are indicative of a bonkers system.
Ironically had the Tories switched to AV they would now be ideally placed to pick up Reform second preferences in many seats and Reform Tory second preferences, significantly boosting their seat numbers. PR would also give the Tories and Reform over a third of MPs in Parliament, compared to the less than 15% of MPs they are now forecast. The LDs, huge electoral reform fans, are actually now forecast to get almost the same number of MPs with FPTP PR would have given them anyway. Labour however benefit massively from FPTP, forecast to get over 70% of MPs on less than half the vote.
The only thing FPTP does look likely to do for the Tories is keep them ahead of Reform on seats, for now
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
You obviously told her to get f@#ked?
I did.
For the benefit of Topping the startling part is obviously what she said. It’s sad that I have to spell it out, but for starters it wasn’t just her attitude: that somehow she had come to this country in order to help us out and was doing us a favour, that should mean freebies.
It was that the Government were recruiting Nigerian workers to make up for the (obvious) fact that others had left.
Where was this mentioned by the Leave campaign????
It was one personal encounter with what has clearly for many people become a serious issue: net migration.
And I’m a left-leaning person who loves multi-culturalism here. But there’s clearly a problem. We have totally fed Farage and us centrists ignore that at our grave peril.
You do realise we’ve been poaching labour for the NHS from commonwealth countries overseas since well before Brexit? They speak English, often have equivalent training, and will take the wages we offer. We recruit them because it takes a while to recruit and train them locally, so taking someone mid-career is an easy sugar fix. Zero link to Brexit.
Indeed, it’s been going on for decades.
Recruiting from overseas works in the short term to free up capacity, but long term we need more training places in the UK, and not have students in subjects like nursing getting into debt for a ‘degree’.
The BMA have until very recently been utterly opposed to more medical school places, preferring to encourage scarcity of doctors.
One of my pet ideas is to open a “British Hospital” somewhere like Mumbai or Manila, staffed at the top end by retired British doctors and managers doing it for a couple of years, and existing primarily to train up thousands of locals with UK-recognised qualifications that lead to visas. It also provides a service to the local population, and avoids taking mid-career professionals out of the country.
Don't understand people who say this GE campaign is boring.
What do you find interesting about it ?
One wonders, all boring farts lying through their teeth to get their snouts in the trough. Not a cigarette paper between any of them apart from Farage. Worse than watching paint dry.
It is really dull. Last nights debate was anything but. No one could leave that feeling informed.
Last time I tell an anecdote on here. It was an eye-opener for me and it was indicative of something which is clearly a significant driver in this election.
@Leon what you call ‘pub banter’ is often very off-putting, especially for women. This place can be a bear pit. And the pile-ons aren’t cool.
What distinguishes pb.com, or did on Mike Smithson’s watch, was people listening to those from various different perspectives. Sadly that is getting eroded and, with it, any attraction for those outside the ever-narrowing demographic.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
You obviously told her to get f@#ked?
I did.
For the benefit of Topping the startling part is obviously what she said. It’s sad that I have to spell it out, but for starters it wasn’t just her attitude: that somehow she had come to this country in order to help us out and was doing us a favour, that should mean freebies.
It was that the Government were recruiting Nigerian workers to make up for the (obvious) fact that others had left.
Where was this mentioned by the Leave campaign????
It was one personal encounter with what has clearly for many people become a serious issue: net migration.
And I’m a left-leaning person who loves multi-culturalism here. But there’s clearly a problem. We have totally fed Farage and us centrists ignore that at our grave peril.
I'm not sure recruiting Nigerian nurses is because EU citizens have left (although some might have done). It's because nursing doesn't pay terribly well, and you now have to have a degree to get your SRN and run up three years of debt. When I worked in the NHS you got *paid* (as a nursing assistant) to do your nurse training.
NHS nursing has long been recruiting, very actively, from "The Third World". Long before Brexit was dreamed of.
This is because you can "sell" them on lower pay than people from the First World. And because we deliberately train less nurses each year than are required by the NHS.
There is a whole conveyor belt of training and jobs leading from various African countries. Some of whom are not entirely happy by what they see as stripping their health care systems of their best workers.
The comedy when New Labour accidentally switched off the Zimbabwean route was a good one, though.
EDIT: There is no evidence, in the story given, that the buyer was a nurse or even Nigerian. Scammers like this use sob stories as part of their thing.
Yes but obviously not a scammer as such because she paid me via the driver on collection
The driver was quite possibly the person on the other end of the transaction. The scam is trying to get things for free, by demanding money back and keeping the item.
There is a fuck of a lot of pontificating on this site from people who are sat at their keyboards and not out knocking on doors, meeting the voters.
So who on here has been pounding the pavements? Own up...
And tell us if your experience matches the polls.
Well I'm a Labour doorknocker, which is why I haven't posted here since the campaign began - too busy either working or doorknocking. I live in a safe Labour seat in South London. members here have been asked to canvass in our twinned target seat which is Croydon South. I've been to quite a few sessions, they seem well-supported, even on a wet weekday evening yesterday there were about 10 people out and there had been two previous sessions earlier in the afternoon. Weekend sessions are much larger.
This seat has never been Labour and there has not been much activity in the past but the doorstep response is pretty good, disillusionment and anger with the Tories is universal and they are clearly haemorrhaging support in all directions - some to Labour, some to Reform and some to the stay at home party. There is no sign of Tory activity - I have yet to come across one of their leaflets and I have had people tell me on the doorstep that Labour is the only party that has called to ask for their vote. I'd say Labour is in with a pretty good chance of taking the seat - the odds are certainly much shorter than the 2-1 against that was quoted on here a few days ago.
I have avoided this topic entirely because I find it so toxic and this place is not my kind of natural demographic (I’m on here for betting reasons, so no offence meant). And I certainly do not want to light a touch paper.
However, I did encounter something I found very strange c. 18 months ago.
I was moving house and selling a few things which included a fairly new John Lewis mattress. I advertised on FB marketplace and the first person to respond clinched the sale. She sent a driver around with the cash to collect it.
I thought little more about it until 24 hours later she messaged me to say she wasn’t satisfied with the quality and wanted her money back. I was a bit taken aback (JLP aren’t usually rubbish) but I told her that was fine. Return the mattress and I’d refund her. Her reply was this:
’I am a Nigerian nurse who has come over here to work in your Health Service in response to your Government advertising in my country for people to come and help out in Britain. I have no money and I am doing you all a service so please give me the mattress for free.'
I was, and still am, on several levels astonished.
You obviously told her to get f@#ked?
I did.
For the benefit of Topping the startling part is obviously what she said. It’s sad that I have to spell it out, but for starters it wasn’t just her attitude: that somehow she had come to this country in order to help us out and was doing us a favour, that should mean freebies.
It was that the Government were recruiting Nigerian workers to make up for the (obvious) fact that others had left.
Where was this mentioned by the Leave campaign????
It was one personal encounter with what has clearly for many people become a serious issue: net migration.
And I’m a left-leaning person who loves multi-culturalism here. But there’s clearly a problem. We have totally fed Farage and us centrists ignore that at our grave peril.
You do realise we’ve been poaching labour for the NHS from commonwealth countries overseas since well before Brexit? They speak English, often have equivalent training, and will take the wages we offer. We recruit them because it takes a while to recruit and train them locally, so taking someone mid-career is an easy sugar fix. Zero link to Brexit.
It seems that the number of EU nationals employed by the NHS has increased:
For example, in June 2016 there were 58,702 NHS staff with a recorded EU nationality, and in June 2023 there were 74,142 – an apparent rise. But to present this as the full story would be misleading because there are around 60,000 more staff for whom nationality is known now than in 2016. It is very likely that there has been an overall increase in the number of NHS staff with EU nationality since 2016, but we can’t be sure about the scale of the change, and it would be misleading to calculate an increase based solely on the two numbers above.
There are some grumpalumps on here this morning so I’m heading out.
The story was startling and is. It’s very uncomfortable for the Conservatives in particular because it’s a microcosm of what has happened: Brexit (and covid) led to massive staff shortages in key sectors of the economy. They responded to this by opening the borders to what, for many people, feels like a floodgate.
So sneer away @TOPPING but for once I agree with @Leon You may think this doesn’t matter, or that it’s a silly anecdote of some pointless middle-aged batty woman in Devon, but you’re wrong. This is precisely why Reform are on the march.
Wake up Topping, twistedfirestopper3 and others. Don’t you see what is happening? Do you not realise WHY Reform have such traction?
Sometimes the myopic complacency of the Centre is it’s downfall
Governments for decades have asked foreigners to come and work in the NHS.
And this is BOMBSHELL NEWS for heathener. And we should all WAKE UP.
Laugh/cry not at all sure.
UK governments asking foreigners to come to the UK to help out the NHS ?
I think what I am seeing with a lot of comments on here is 'centrist denial' and this could actually have some betting implications. People are reading the current situation in an essentially 20th century way ie what is happening on the right is 'extremists' 'splitting' and who will become increasingly irrellevant over time. This overlooks what has been happening over the last decade on a global scale with the rise of insurgent political movements that disrupt political norms- Brexit, Trump, Italy, France, Germany, the list goes on.
What seems apparent to me is that we are seeing the final death through incoherance and exhaustion of the 'broad church' conservative party and the creation of a more coherent right wing political movement which can, like everything else that has happened globally, begin as a ridiculed insurgency but end up close to, or achieving power, building on dissatisfaction with the inevitable failings of the 'centrist, managerial status quo'. It is a small jump from 30% to 40% but the latter can win a general election under the FPTP system.
It may not be 'reform' that carries this insurgency forward. It could be a revised version of the Conservative Party having dumped the Hunts, Sunaks and Mordaunts. Or a 'start up' party of the type Cummings suggests. But to just assume all this is irrelevant extremism just seems to be an act of enormous denial given what is happening on a global scale.
The analysis on here is fucking pitiful, if I am honest. Really really feeble. For all the reasons you state, it is a bunch of middle aged and frankly geriatric twats looking hopefully at reality through a 20th century prism, and with quite low watt IQ levels to illuminate the view
Idiots
And I speak as a late middle aged twat, but at least I'm not wearing the Goggles of Denial
Why do you come here? I don't think you're universally liked on here, and you seem to despise us. So why not fuck off? I think you'd be happier. I know I would be. Go on, do it. Sling your hook. What have you got to lose?
See. That's EXACTLY why I come here. To really wind up people like you. And I REALLY do wind you up, don't I?
If this was actually a pub I reckon you'd have angrily asked me outside at least eight times by now, in a frothing, slightly insane way, as the barman rolls his eyes and tells you to chill out, Farooq, not again, fer fucks sake
Yes, you do wind me up, but not always the times you're trying to. I think you've got a 10% hit rate. But let's not focus on me, let's think about you. I'm not offering you a fight outside the pub, I'm saying you really don't seem to like the people in here. You seem really quite miserable about how stupid we all are. So go. There's the door. You don't ever have to read a single thing any of us say ever again. You're better than us, go find a more elevated place. You won't miss us.
You're misunderestimating Leon. And PB. It's a big family and you can't tell your co-worker/boss/underling/agent to go fuck themselves so you tell your family. Except, because you are not six years old, you can't tell your actual family either. So you tell PB.
In retrospect as I said at the time the Tories should have kept Boris as PM and leader. He would still likely have lost but kept the Conservatives over 200 seats and Reform polling under 5% not 10-15%+ like now. Boris would then also have owned the defeat and taken the hit for the government's unpopularity.
Rishi however, having an ego the size of Canada, thought that because up to now he had had a brilliant career, 1st class Oxford degree, made lots of money in the city, married a billionaire's daughter in law, he would equally be a brilliant political leader and PM. However clearly his political nous as a campaigner having been given a safe seat in 2015 having never even stood for a local council seat before and having no real history in the party is somewhat lacking. By ousting Boris all he has down is taken ownership of the government's unpopularity after over a decade in power from Johnson while also leaking massively to Reform.
Had Rishi waited though, he would now be in prime position to be Leader of the Opposition after a Johnson heavy defeat where he would have been well placed to exploit the problems a Starmer government likely faces with the economy. Instead he has destroyed much of his reputation and put the Tories on life support to boot!
Isn't the problem there that the lying to Parliament thing would still have happened? OK, it's like Al Capone and tax evasion, in some ways a trivial technicality. But one of the essences of Johnson was "if you can't punish me for it, I can do it, even if it's not cricket". And Johnson could only have survived that by making the party take a mega hit to itsreputaiton.
Rishi is a poor PM and a worse politician. But he's also the one who has been left holding the baby with the poonami. Johnson is the one who fed it senna pods.
Comments
Brexit, and to some extent Corbyn 2017, shows a sizeable chunk of the electorate can be persuaded to vote for anti-status-quo options.
These also appears in “advice” on what the Tory Party should be from those who would never vote Tory - they want a vehicle for controlling “those people” which, when elected, gives them nothing.
People have failed to learn from Brexit that that approach isn’t sustainable. In the end, the public shapes politics, not the other way around. There was/is an opportunity for the Tories to win big by marrying that group of voters with its other tribes of fiscally conservative money men, or socially conservative “village green and village hall”’ voters; but only Boris/Cummings ever tried. And they failed. Nevertheless the gauntlet could be taken up, just many don’t want to.
If the Tories choose not to go for the voters, they have no God given right to exist, or at least no God given right to win. In the end “those awful people” will find a vehicle that wants them, and it will broaden its appeal enough to win an election.
And, of course, you don’t help yourself by lashing out at everyone when you don’t get your way, usually descending to the ‘you’re all thick but I’m super-clever’ line.
Weak, weak, weak
Reform, despite their media cheerleaders, cannot run ground campaign to win more than 4 or 5 MPs. Even if they get anywhere close to their current polls (but colour me sceptical on that) they will not be able to concentrate their vote. Even at same votes as the Tories,the seat split would be at least 1; 20, so e.g 5:100. The Tories may face meltdown, even in their core areas, but taken in the round they will most likely cling on in a fair number of seats, even if 20k+ majorities fall to the hundreds. I don´t believe in the system, but even a majority of 1 still gets you the seat.
After that, it rather depends on which MPs survive the cull. I think the Tory Party will turn on the Faragist wing that lead them so close to the abyss, and it is more likely that Tugendhat emerges as the core leader group, rather than Truss, Badenoch and Braverman who have been so equivocal about Farage. Maybe then the Tories re-emerge as an actual Conservative party in 2 or 3 Parliaments.
Meanwhile, the Lib Dems will at least get back above the SNP in number of seats, and could win a large number of targets and even one or two bonuses. A third party of 60+ MPs is much more formidable than one of 20 MPs. Then the Lib Dems get a platform to make a serious challenge, not just to the Tories, but also Labour.
The need for real reform of British politics: PR, an elected House of Lords, major devolution to local governments etc is really cutting through. Then there is Brexit, which the Lib Dems have opposed all along. In the same way as Lib Dem opposition to the Iraq war was treated with derision at the time, but with hindsight now seems obvious, so the Lib Dem position on Europe is also cutting through. The Lib Dems are having a great campaign, and the more people see of Ed Davey, the better they like him. The stunts are well planned and have blown away the boring label that his opponents would have liked to pin on him.
The Tories are in peril, but parties seldom die in a single election. The question for them now, is whether they can survive the NDE and come back stronger, or if they go further down the Faragist, populist rabbit hole and face real oblivion next time.
As for Labour, its all a bit bloodless, but what else can they do? I note that they are planning for a disciplined and efficient administration, with some people like Sue Grey on board. However they will need to hit the ground running, they have only a short window to make the radical change, which the voters clearly want to se. If it is wasted, then SKS is the one who will be boring.
Yet, this is very much not a boring election, indeed it could be an epochal one.
And I don’t think @TOPPING wants to engage with it because it’s uncomfortable. And I’m not referring to the mattress.
“Regret leaving” includes some “kick the Gvt”, and “Rejoin” won’t reflect what “join” could get on the terms that would be offered.
We are not going back.
Not totally clear what they're offering but seems like a step jn the right direction.
(Yes, it feels weird that a top university in a country teaches in a foreign language...)
My son's school has lots of immigrants in it; many recently arrived (it is a new town, after all). According to my son, many are picking up the English language very quickly, and some parents are even getting their kids to teach them English idioms (the Chinese parents mostly seem to know English fairly well already).
That’s nuts. If the Roberts family house had a big fire and loads of your belongings were lost, rooms burned, parts of the roof needing repaired and windows and carpets and furniture replaced do you stop all other spending to pay for the repairs within a year, no food, new clothes, petrol etc or do you realise you still have spending obligations that you had before the fire so have to spread the cost through a loan over a longer period so you can still afford your prior needs? And then just as you start fixing the damage from the fire the house gets hit by a tornado.
There was Covid and Ukraine - they absolute buggered the backside off the country - do you honestly believe that Sunak, or Hunt, or anyone in the party, really would choose to have those bills and problems and have to raise those taxes? It’s against everything they joined the Tories for.
I know it’s easier to say that Sunak and co are lefty insurgents than recognise they had to make hard decisions to bring out the safety net but that’s the reality.
They've increasingly become Farage's party, always, like in their organs such as the Telegraph, always refusing to contemplate his responsibility for any of what might have gone wrong socially or economically over the last ten years. If you're going to do that, it also makes no sense to simultaneously portray him as a threat to "good", competent, establishment, government , or whatever the default Tory understanding is, in the future. The simple answer is assimilate or fight ; otherwise a lot of the current Tories will just be reorganised by him, or other people capitalising on his platform, elsewhere, with little continuity for anybody who want to keep some links with the old party.
It's essentially the defining feature of racism to ascribe an individuals actions to their membership of a group, rather than to themselves as an individual. I'm kinda shocked that you would consider this story as one related to immigration, given the time you've taken with other people on similar topics.
For the benefit of Topping the startling part is obviously what she said. It’s sad that I have to spell it out, but for starters it wasn’t just her attitude: that somehow she had come to this country in order to help us out and was doing us a favour, that should mean freebies.
It was that the Government were recruiting Nigerian workers to make up for the (obvious) fact that others had left.
Where was this mentioned by the Leave campaign????
It was one personal encounter with what has clearly for many people become a serious issue: net migration.
And I’m a left-leaning person who loves multi-culturalism here. But there’s clearly a problem. We have totally fed Farage and us centrists ignore that at our grave peril.
Where does the new/far/extreme right stand, beyond the populist wish lists we can all dream up, on: health, welfare, Ukraine, protectionism, global trade, social cohesion, unions, tuition fees, climate change, Israel and Gaza, single market, debt, tax, state policy on trade and essential services, ownership, social housing. Etc?
Unsurprisingly, as I am not paid to write here, I don't pay that much attention to what I write here. I come here for larks and jokes, knockabout and banter, and to be provocative- or to be provoked. I don't REALLY think you are ALL geriatric centrist twats with sub 105 IQs, just five of you. I also come here for company, it is my pub when I go abroad, and we have oft discussed this: it is a pub with history, and stories, and regulars....
I've been on here on and off for many years, so most people know my style. I expect to get kickback and derision, and I enjoy it, I like dispute, it is entertaining. I also enjoy the PB downtimes when we talk about the cricket, or the best way to dunk choccie biscuits, or the world's worst bus journeys that aren't in south America
It's PB. It has long been like this, and long may it continue (and sometimes I do get ideas which I then turn into paiyng journalism, that also happens, and for that I am grateful)
I imagine you too come on here for YOUR reasons. You seem basically interested in pious preaching, weird boasting, and betting. And that's fine. Good luck to you! You also bring variety to the beer garden of debate
Chin chin, old girl
So who on here has been pounding the pavements? Own up...
And tell us if your experience matches the polls.
The only reason I am still on Facebook (other than for popcorn worthy FB groups) is FB marketplace. The place is riddled with people like that and it takes a while to develop an eye for them. Worth it though - nothing more satisfying than some cash (!) in hand and a decluttered flat.
If this was actually a pub I reckon you'd have angrily asked me outside at least eight times by now, in a frothing, slightly insane way, as the barman rolls his eyes and tells you to chill out, Farooq, not again, fer fucks sake
Truss, Badenoch and Braverman would all likely survive anything but an ELE, and if just one lone Tory were returned I suspect it would be Gavin Williamson.
The story was startling and is. It’s very uncomfortable for the Conservatives in particular because it’s a microcosm of what has happened: Brexit (and covid) led to massive staff shortages in key sectors of the economy. They responded to this by opening the borders to what, for many people, feels like a floodgate.
So sneer away @TOPPING but for once I agree with @Leon You may think this doesn’t matter, or that it’s a silly anecdote of some pointless middle-aged batty woman in Devon, but you’re wrong. This is precisely why Reform are on the march.
Wake up Topping, twistedfirestopper3 and others. Don’t you see what is happening? Do you not realise WHY Reform have such traction?
Sometimes the myopic complacency of the Centre is it’s downfall
"Dear Sir, I am an Orc of Mordor. Following the fall of our Noble Lord Sauron, I have come into possession of a hoard of mithril...."
What this means is that if you present a good enough argument he will ignore you, and engage with someone else's weaker argument.
Voters: So you’ll build lots of houses?
Green Party: If you elect us we’ll build even fewer houses.
Voters: ?!
Green Party: There’s a climate crisis! We must do something!
Voters: So you’ll build lots of green power stations then?
Green Party: We’re going to cancel nuclear, onshore wind is bad because ruins people’s views & we’re not going to build the power lines to enable offshore wind for the same reason. Oh, and solar is bad too.
Voters: ??!!
Green Party: There’s a climate crisis! We will put a carbon tax on everything.
Voters: So you’ll put up the tax on petrol / diesel then?
Green Party: Our carbon tax will cut the tax on petrol & diesel. Vote for us!
Voters: ?????
These people are not serious.
You attack the politician, you don’t attack or disparage the voters.
Yes, populists appear when there are large groups of people who are disaffected with society, rather than the other way round. Farage is a symptom of the problem that large numbers of mostly white and working-class voters don’t think Britain is working for them at the moment.
Gets paid f*** all to do it and is 10x smarter and harder working than me.
Folk are saying that the right (the hard right to distinguish it from centre right) is fissiparous, angry with each other, lacking in a broad range of talent and with a long way to go to coherence, but those are different things.
I have no idea what to make of that so am interested in your opinion.
I very rarely agree with @Leon and he doesn’t help his cause, but this IS a big big issue for a lot of people
This is because you can "sell" them on lower pay than people from the First World. And because we deliberately train less nurses each year than are required by the NHS.
There is a whole conveyor belt of training and jobs leading from various African countries. Some of whom are not entirely happy by what they see as stripping their health care systems of their best workers.
The comedy when New Labour accidentally switched off the Zimbabwean route was a good one, though.
EDIT: There is no evidence, in the story given, that the buyer was a nurse or even Nigerian. Scammers like this use sob stories as part of their thing.
I see we're throwing words like "left", "right" and "centre" around like confetti today - seriously?
The terms mean nothing these days and are used as cheap short hand usually in a perjorative sense.
Trying to pigeonhole parties in 20th century terms ignores the fact we are in the 21st (even this "middle aged and frankly geriatric twat" can see that).
The technological, environmental and cultural changes of the 21st century will redefine political axes as to make what went before seem unrecognisable. The relationship between the State and the individual is going to evolve just as it did from 19th to 20th. The art is to redefine traditional ideological concepts like conservatism, liberalism and socialism to reflect those changes and set out a possible societal path for the mid 21st century.
In the more immediate, the big question for me (as it is for us all at some point) is how do we want to live as we grow older? In former times, it wasn't a problem but an ageing population forces a redefinition of the relationship between the individual and the State. Who cares for and provides for a growing ageing population? How does this ageing population interact with the rest of society? Do we shut the elderly away in care homes and retirement villages or do we provide the purpose-built accommodation and services older people need - that means strong public services paid for out of general taxation?
You’re using the worst possible example (Nigerian workers in the NHS) to try and land a point about worker flows, and domestic training, which has some sense to it.
All the parties have supported that with the only difference being how the extra cake is shared out.
But my view for a long while has been a stonking Labour majority, and I haven't seen much to go against that view. I hope I'm wrong, because I don't think humongous majorities lead to good government...
I have been bested in the debate on electoral reform, or persuaded, over several years (this is not a sudden new thing, whatever people think, I've changed my mind since about 2019-2020); now I favour electoral reform, and I was ardently pro-FPTP - ("it's the British way! Firm government!" - what nonsense, in retrospect)
However I tend to argue about things where I really care. Because I care about certain ssues I do a lot of reading, so - in my experience, and from my POV - I tend to win these arguments. It helps that my job gives me tons of spare time to read, it gives me a distinct advantage. Others will have a very different perspective on my performance, and may consider me a pitiful loser like you: whatever, I do not mind, it's trivial
It is all just pub banter! - and it is absolutely not to be taken seriously, no more than the Great Biscuit Dunking Debate
Rishi however, having an ego the size of Canada, thought that because up to now he had had a brilliant career, 1st class Oxford degree, made lots of money in the city, married a billionaire's daughter in law, he would equally be a brilliant political leader and PM. However clearly his political nous as a campaigner having been given a safe seat in 2015 having never even stood for a local council seat before and having no real history in the party is somewhat lacking. By ousting Boris all he has down is taken ownership of the government's unpopularity after over a decade in power from Johnson while also leaking massively to Reform.
Had Rishi waited though, he would now be in prime position to be Leader of the Opposition after a Johnson heavy defeat where he would have been well placed to exploit the problems a Starmer government likely faces with the economy. Instead he has destroyed much of his reputation and put the Tories on life support to boot!
Vague from Labour but sounds like some work on phone masts may well be coming.
In case it wasn’t already obvious, Leon is the pig in this particular metaphor.
When you take over the deeds of the pub, you can bar me
Go on and go, walk out the door
Turn around now
You’re not welcome any more
etc
Amazing. The combination of the above with something far closer to an open borders policy is ... certainly something.
I've also looked at Alex Chalk in my neighbouring constituency of Cheltenham. It's one of the top LD targets and that's reflected in their odds of 1/7, but he's very highly regarded and another who would be invaluable in the reconstruction work which I hope will follow the GE.
I can't quite bring myself to back him at 4/1 but maybe others might.
John Major’s words to Osborne after the 1997 disaster:
“We will never win while we remain in thrall to the hard right of our party. It took us eight years before we started listening to that advice. How long will it take us this time?”
Ergo, he is way out on the left on immigration, so we don't mistake him for a petit bourgeois UKIPPPER
A source of frustration is that Scotland 's devolution means we don't get to join in the fun on stuff like this.
This election campaign is a great example. Mainstream politicians gravely intone we need to reduce migration and stop the boats. Journalists breathlessly report on their every word.
But if you’re a voter where it’s a big concern, you have heard over the past 20 or so years this tale being told again and again. And net migration goes up and up. And whoever you vote for keeps telling you they’ll fix it, next time, next month, next year, next parliament. It’s all so easy look. We’ll send people to Rwanda, or we’ll have a quota, or points system, or we’ll put money in X, Y, Z….
In the meantime you get a media who fail to ask the probing questions on the topic. They might relish unpicking the latest government policy wheeze, but they don’t necessarily focus on the strain on resources and public services that extra migration can cause. Let’s give public services more money and it’ll all be ok, nothing to see here, move along….
So, yes, when opportunists like Farage come along, of course he gets a hearing.
The solution to this? Mainstream parties need to be braver about confronting issues like migration and culture. And instead of speaking in soundbites and policy wonkery, and actually deliver. If you want to reduce net migration, you’re going to have to properly invest in skills and border security, for instance. That’s unflashy, and not very immediate, but it starts to potentially turn the dial. And trust the voters to judge you on results, not just image. Voters are a lot savvier than many think.
And this is BOMBSHELL NEWS for heathener. And we should all WAKE UP.
Laugh/cry not at all sure.
Yet the environment in its broadest sense is so important. Not only on a planetary scale but locally as well. Simple things like cleaner water courses and cleaner air make huge differences to people's lives. But it's the Lib Dems making the running on water and Khan in London doing it for air.
The green party are not a green party, they're scarcely even watermelons, they're a coalition of Corbynites and local NIMBYs.
The only thing FPTP does look likely to do for the Tories is keep them ahead of Reform on seats, for now
Recruiting from overseas works in the short term to free up capacity, but long term we need more training places in the UK, and not have students in subjects like nursing getting into debt for a ‘degree’.
The BMA have until very recently been utterly opposed to more medical school places, preferring to encourage scarcity of doctors.
One of my pet ideas is to open a “British Hospital” somewhere like Mumbai or Manila, staffed at the top end by retired British doctors and managers doing it for a couple of years, and existing primarily to train up thousands of locals with UK-recognised qualifications that lead to visas. It also provides a service to the local population, and avoids taking mid-career professionals out of the country.
@Leon what you call ‘pub banter’ is often very off-putting, especially for women. This place can be a bear pit. And the pile-ons aren’t cool.
What distinguishes pb.com, or did on Mike Smithson’s watch, was people listening to those from various different perspectives. Sadly that is getting eroded and, with it, any attraction for those outside the ever-narrowing demographic.
xx
That's quite common.
This seat has never been Labour and there has not been much activity in the past but the doorstep response is pretty good, disillusionment and anger with the Tories is universal and they are clearly haemorrhaging support in all directions - some to Labour, some to Reform and some to the stay at home party. There is no sign of Tory activity - I have yet to come across one of their leaflets and I have had people tell me on the doorstep that Labour is the only party that has called to ask for their vote. I'd say Labour is in with a pretty good chance of taking the seat - the odds are certainly much shorter than the 2-1 against that was quoted on here a few days ago.
For example, in June 2016 there were 58,702 NHS staff with a recorded EU nationality, and in June 2023 there were 74,142 – an apparent rise. But to present this as the full story would be misleading because there are around 60,000 more staff for whom nationality is known now than in 2016. It is very likely that there has been an overall increase in the number of NHS staff with EU nationality since 2016, but we can’t be sure about the scale of the change, and it would be misleading to calculate an increase based solely on the two numbers above.
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7783/CBP-7783.pdf
The number of EU nationals employed by the NHS increased by over three thousand in the year to June 2023.
The reason why there are increased numbers of 'Nigerian nurses' is that NHS employment has increased so much.
This is news to me and my family.
And on that note, I must actually go and do some PAID journalism. Later, PB!
Rishi is a poor PM and a worse politician. But he's also the one who has been left holding the baby with the poonami. Johnson is the one who fed it senna pods.